The American civil rights movement can be said to have begun in Montgomery, Alabama, on December 1, 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a city bus to a white man. A Montgomery regulation banned blacks from sitting near the front and required them to give their seats in the middle to any white left standing. But the 43-year-old seamstress (and volunteer at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) quietly defied the driver’s order and was promptly arrested. Local black leaders planned a big campaign around Parks’ case. Blacks accounted for 75 percent of Montgomery’s bus passengers, and they hoped that a bus boycott on the day of her trial would send a message to the white officials and businessmen.

The boycott ended up lasting a year, despite police harassment, conspiracy trials, and the firebombing of the leaders’ houses. Almost all of Montgomery’s 48,000 blacks participated. Thousands gathered in churches, modifying hymns into "freedom songs". However, the authorities refused to give in to their simple demands: courtesy to black passengers, the hiring of black drivers, and the right of blacks to remain seated even if there were whites standing. They did not even challenge the requirement that black stay at the back of the bus. The Supreme Court finally broke the deadlock, banning all bus segregation. Although white supremacists began shouting at black riders, they’d lost the battle.

Montgomery’s spawned one of history’s greatest nonviolent revolutions – and the boycott leader became that revolution’s spiritual chief. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., 26, drew inspiration from Mahatma Gandhi. He told his fellow blacks "If you will protest courageously and yet with dignity and Christian love," he promised his followers, "in future generations the historians will pause and say, ‘There lived a great people – a black people – who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization.’"