United States
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white passenger. Her quiet refusal broke a local segregation ordinance that required Black riders to move when buses became crowded. Parks had long been active in the NAACP, and her action was deliberate rather than accidental.
The arrest sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which began a few days later and lasted more than a year. The boycott brought national attention to segregation and elevated leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. It became one of the early turning points of the modern civil rights movement in the United States.