GLENN ESKEW, PhD:
Then came the fateful day in December 1955 when Rosa Parks sat on the bus. And she sat in the section of the bus that African Americans were entitled to sit in. But the bus driver, when he pulled up to the site of the Empire Theatre, which had just let out from showing a movie, and whites were crowding out and getting on the bus for their rides home, there were white people left standing in the aisle. Rosa Parks knew the driver, and here he was now coming down the aisle demanding that she surrender her seat to these white patrons. She was under no obligation to do so by law, and so she refused. She stayed in her seat. The driver said, "If you don't give me that seat, I'll have you arrested." 

And Ms. Parks said, "You may do that." 

Police came, took her to jail, booked her, put her in. 

Black Montgomery had all experienced that kind of treatment on the buses, and rallied behind Ms. Parks. She was a highly respected member of the community. 

E. D. Nixon was quick to be involved in the support for Rosa Parks, to try to organize a bigger protest over the arrest of this woman. What Nixon did was call up the pastors of the leading black churches, including the Rev. Ralph D. Abernathy. He was the pastor of the First Baptist Church of Montgomery. Ralph Abernathy encouraged E. D. Nixon to call up Martin Luther King Jr. who was at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. They created a group called the Montgomery improvement association, known as the MIA.

The MIA, with Dr. King as its head, then promotes a boycott of the city buses. Joanne Robinson stays up all night printing these leaflets. They're handed out in the African-American churches in the city, and the leaflets call for a one-day boycott of the city buses. Martin King gets up that morning, he looks out the window, and he watches a city bus go by. And there was't a soul riding on the bus. And he said to his wife, "Cory, this is going to be a success."

And after that first success of no one riding the bus from the black community, it encouraged African Americans to prolong the protest. 

A mass meeting was held, and there the congregation unanimously approved the idea of continuing the boycott. And they would continue it for over a year with principally black women, but a number of African Americans no longer riding public transit but instead walking to work. 

And in the end, basically it broke the bus company. Now the white community responded, and it responded viciously. But the worst efforts of the white community was unable to prevent African Americans from maintaining this boycott. Meanwhile, the black movement filed a new court case. The court case worked its way through the system and reaches the United States Supreme Court. 

By December of 1956, the ruling is handed down, building on the decision of the Brown v. The Board of Education of 1954, which says that schools cannot be separate because they were unequal, and now the Supreme Court was extending that logic to the issue of public accommodations in public transportation. You could not have separate seating on public buses. It was unconstitutional because it was unequal. And with the implementation of that decision, Montgomery's buses were desegregated.