It might not have been so, had it not been for the efforts of one Rosa Louise McCauley.

Born February 4, 1913 in Tuskegee, Alabama, Rosa McCauley was home schooled by her mother until she was eleven. Later she attended the Industrial School for Girls in Montgomery, before going on to Booker T. Washington High School.

In 1929, while a junior in the eleventh grade, she left school to attend to her sick grandmother in Pine Level and never returned. Instead she took a job at a shirt factory in Montgomery. In 1932, Rosa married a barber named Raymond Parks an active member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). With Raymond’s support, Rosa Parks finished her high school in 1933. She soon became actively involved in civil rights issues by joining the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP in 1943, serving as the voluntary secretary to the president, E.D. Nixon until 1957. Of that position, she later said, “I was the only woman there, and they needed a secretary, and I was too timid to say no.”

A brief job soon after 1944 at Maxwell Air Base, a federally owned area where racial segregation was not allowed, opened her eyes to absurdity of segregation.

Once of the base however, she found a hostile Montgomery. The city code required that all public transportation be segregated and that bus drivers enforce this code. While operating a bus, drivers assigned different seats to white and black passengers. A line roughly in the middle of the bus demarcated the border between white passengers, who sat in the front of the bus and African American passengers, who sat in the back. An African American passenger boarding the bus had to get on at the front to pay their fare and then get off and re-board the bus at the back door. When the seats in the front of the bus filled up and more white passengers got on, the bus driver would move back the sign separating black and white passengers and, if necessary, ask black passengers give up their seat. These humiliations were compounded by the fact that two-thirds of the passengers in Montgomery were black.

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks boarded a bus for home. She took a seat in the first of several rows designated for “colored” passengers. On its route, that bus began to fill with white passengers until the driver noticed that several white passengers were standing in the aisle. He stopped the bus and moved the sign separating the two sections back one row and asked four black passengers to give up their seats. Three complied, but Rosa refused and remained seated. The driver demanded, “Why don’t you stand up?” to which Rosa replied, “I don’t think I should have to stand up.” The driver called the police and had her arrested. She had refused to stand because she was tired of giving in.

She was charged with violation of sections of the segregationist City code and later that night she was released on bail. On December 8, Rosa faced trial and in a thirty-minute hearing was found guilty of violating a local ordinance. She was fined ten dollars, plus a four-dollar court fee.

On the evening Rosa Parks was arrested, E.D. Nixon, head of the local chapter of the NAACP, began plans to organize a boycott of Montgomery’s city buses. Ads were placed in local papers and handbills were printed and distributed in black neighbourhoods. Members of the African American community were asked to stay off the buses Monday, December 5th in protest of Rosa’s arrest. People were encouraged to stay home from work or school, take a cab or walk to work. With most of the African American community not riding the bus, organizers believed a longer boycott might be successful. That day African-American community leaders gathered at Mt. Zion Church determined that the effort required a new organization and strong leadership. The “Montgomery Improvement Association” (MIA) was formed with newcomer, Dr. Martin Luther King, a church as its leader.

The one day boycott morphed into a longer one, even as vicious attempts were made to break it. Armed with the Brown v. Board of Education decision that said separate but equal policies had no place in public education the battle moved to the courts where the Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s ruling after an unfavorable high court decision.