Board of Education which said, "separate but equal" schools violated the Constitution. From the earliest slave revolts in this country over 400 years ago, African Americans strove to gain full participation in every aspect of political, economic and social life in the United States. Slavery in the United States ended in 1865, but the practice of segregation, an attempt mostly by white Southerners to separate the races in every sphere of life, continued.
Although blacks were free, they still had to live with the continuing prejudice attitudes prevalent in the south. In 1896 the Supreme Court upheld segregation, but declared that whites and blacks should have separate but equal living standards. In reality blacks had to make due with cast off school supplies, and literally nowhere were black accommodations anywhere near that of what the white population enjoyed. From 1955 to 1965, boycotts, sit-ins, demonstrations, marches, and neighborhood-organized protests drew the colored community together and raised their expectations for the future. One of the first and most successful demonstrations started on December 1, 1955 by a single weary woman simply trying to get home from work at the end of a long day. Protest was the last thing on her mind as she entered the bus that evening.
It is questionable when the Montgomery Bus Boycott actually started. It was indeed launched on a day when the blacks of Montgomery decided that they would no longer sit in segregated seats, however, that was not the day that the seeds of the movement to desegregate took root. Perhaps the movement started on the day in 1943 when a black seamstress named Rosa Parks paid her bus fare and then watched the bus drive off as she tried to re-enter through the rear door, as the driver had told her to do. Or maybe on the day in 1949 when a black college professor absentmindedly sat at the front of a nearly empty bus, then ran off in tears when the bus driver screamed at her for doing so.