#HST3107

On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks rejected bus driver James F. Blake's order to vacate a row of four seats in the "colored" section in favor of a white passenger, once the "white" section was filled. A police officer arrested her.

Parks later said about being asked to move to the rear of the bus, "I thought of Emmett Till—a 14-year-old African American who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955, after being accused of offending a white woman in her family's grocery store, whose killers were tried and acquitted—and I just couldn't go back."