December 1, 1955, was a cool, drizzly night in Montgomery. James F. Blake, a veteran of World War II and a veteran bus driver, was maneuvering the bus he normally took on the Montgomery Avenue route through downtown toward Cleveland Avenue on the city’s west side.

On Montgomery buses the front 10 seats were reserved for whites. If there were no whites on board, the seats remained empty. The last 10 seats were for blacks, and the middle 16 could be occupied by either race, except a white person was never asked to sit next to or behind an African-American. The driver was given the responsibility and the authority to maintain the separation of the races by adjusting the seating as needed.

Rosa Parks had finished her day’s work as a seamstress at a local department store, done a little shopping, and waited to catch the bus home at the Court Square stop. She took a seat on the aisle opposite the driver’s side in the first row behind the “whites only” seats. Three stops later, in front of the Empire Theater, at the corner of Montgomery and Moulton, several whites boarded and filled all the remaining “whites only” seats, leaving one white man standing. He asked Blake to get him a seat.

Blake turned and demanded that the four blacks sitting in the first row of the “colored section” stand to make a place for one white man. As they had probably done all their lives, three of the black riders grudgingly but resignedly got up and moved back into the already crowded aisle.

Spontaneously, Mrs. Parks simply moved to the window seat and stayed there. A life lived under the laws of Jim Crow and 20 years of civil rights activism collided in an instant. “When I made that decision,” she said later, “I knew that I had the strength of my ancestors with me.”

Blake walked back to her seat and, standing over her, demanded that she move, telling her he could have her arrested. She quietly acknowledged that he “may do that.” She later said she was simply “tired of giving in.” The Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver noted that at that moment “somewhere in the universe, a gear in the machinery shifted.”

Blake radioed his supervisor at the bus company and then the police. Two officers responded and took Parks off the bus and to the police station. She was charged with violating the city ordinance requiring passengers to obey the orders of drivers in maintaining racial separation on the buses. At her trial on Monday, December 5, the charge was shifted to violating a similar state ordinance rather than the city ordinance. She was convicted and fined $10 and $4 in court costs. Her conviction was upheld by the Alabama Court of Appeals in February 1956.

After spending a couple of hours in a jail cell on the night of her arrest, Parks called her mother and husband