Rosa Parks Takes a Stand Against Segregation

Rosa Parks gained international fame in 1955 for refusing to give up her seat in the "whites-only" section on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Parks, an employee of the Montgomery Fair department store and secretary for the NAACP, later said of the event, "It was just time... there was opportunity for me to take a stand to express the way I felt about being treated in that manner." This record from the Montgomery Police Department details Parks' subsequent arrest and fingerprinting. Although others had previously challenged segregation laws on buses and elsewhere, Parks' act of civil disobedience launched the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955/1956, the event which catapulted Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. into fame and sparked the modern Civil Rights Movement.

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