Nov 30, 2015 4 min read

Though few people realized it at the time, America was changed irrevocably Dec. 1, 1955, by a disorderly conduct arrest during rush hour in Montgomery, Ala.

That’s when Rosa Parks, a 42-year-old African-American seamstress for one of the city’s department stores, quietly declined to give up her seat on one of the city’s buses for a white passenger. After Parks stood firm in her refusal, the bus driver summoned the police and had Parks arrested for violating municipal codes that demanded African-Americans surrender their seats for white riders even though African-Americans constituted more than 75 percent of the transit system’s patrons.

A myth grew that Parks wouldn’t move from her seat on the bus 60 years ago today because she was weary after a day on the job. But Parks later denied that in her autobiography: “People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me being old then. I was 42. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”

Parks was found guilty of violating local ordinances a few days later, and fined $10, along with $4 in court costs, an amount that would come to $124 in 2015 when adjusted for inflation. Parks’ refusal to give in led to the yearlong Montgomery Bus Boycott, where African-American residents refused to get on the city’s buses. It catapulted the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., then a 26-year-old Montgomery pastor transplanted from Atlanta, into national prominence, and led to a U.S. Supreme Court decision one year later that ended the segregation of Montgomery’s buses.

The decision struck at the foundation of Jim Crow laws that scrupulously separated the races in the South and led to a the birth of the civil rights movement that put Gandhi-style nonviolent resistence at its heart. A succession of events happened over the next decade that are now so deeply woven into legend Americans from all regions and all walks of life are familiar with them: the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas; the sit-ins at segregated lunch counters in Greensboro, N.C.; Gov. George Wallace standing in the schoolhouse door in order to block the integration of the University of Alabama; and the March on Washington in 1963, which culiminated in King’s timeless “I Have a Dream” speech.

Indeed, the spot where Parks caught the bus in downtown Montgomery is now commemorated by a historical marker, and the bus itself is on permanent display at the Henry Ford Museum in suburban Detroit, not far from where Parks resided before her death in 2005. The accolades that came Parks’ way in the course of her long life, from a Presidential Medal of Freedom to streets, libraries and schools bearing her name, are a lasting testament to her courage.

But we must also acknowledge the struggle for African-Americans to attain full equality remains unfinished. Too many continue to live in poverty, an abiding inheritance from decades of discrimination and substandard schools. Too many are subject to mistreatment by police officers, as the “Black Lives Matter” movement has highlighted, and voter ID laws are a thinly veiled attempt to keep them, and other minorities, from exercising their right to vote.

Parks later said, “I would like to be remembered as a person who wanted to be free … so other people would also be free.” She accomplished her mission, and we are all the better for it.