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Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott: December, 1955 Alabama’s segregation laws continued despite Supreme Court rulings. One December evening, Rosa Parks was riding a crowded Montgomery City Lines bus home from work. The driver of the bus ordered her to move to the back so that a white man could have her seat. Parks, who was a well-known activist and former secretary for the NAACP, refused. She was arrested and put in jail. Her arrest triggered an outcry from the black community of Montgomery. Several women of the NAACP proposed that all blacks in the city boycott the buses. To support this protest, black leaders formed the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) and chose Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as its head. The boycott lasted over a year – from December 5, 1955 to December 20, 1956 – where blacks either walked or carpooled to get to and from work. This cost the bus company roughly 65 percent of its income. Downtown merchants in Montgomery even reported losses of close to $1 million. The boycott met with backlash from whites. Police harassed black protesters, King was arrested and jailed for several days, and even his house was bombed. Still, King encouraged the protesters to limit their actions to civil disobedience, or nonviolent protest against unjust laws. Eventually, in 1956, the MIA filed a federal lawsuit to end bus segregation in Montgomery. Nearly a year after Rosa Parks’ arrest, the Supreme Court ruled that segregation on Alabama buses was unconstitutional.