Rosa Parks had her famous confrontation with a Montgomery bus driver named James Blake 59 years ago on December 1, 1955…but it wasn’t their first run-in. As she later recalled, "My resisting being mistreated on the bus did not begin with that particular arrest...I did a lot of walking in Montgomery."

One of her walking days had come in 1943, 12 years before her famous arrest. She had already paid the fare and sat down on the bus, but she violated bus rules by walking through the white section to reach her seat. Blake, the driver, told her to leave the bus and board again through the rear entrance. When she stepped off to comply, he drove off with her fare and left her to walk home in the rain. It wasn’t long after that when Parks got a job at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery. As a federal installation, it was not segregated, and Parks rode on an integrated trolley. She later said "You might just say Maxwell opened my eyes up."

Finally came the day that made Rosa Parks an icon. She was already sitting in the “colored” section of the bus when Blake walked back and demanded that she and three other black patrons move to make way for white customers in the aisle. This was a common practice among Montgomery’s bus drivers. If the white section filled up and more whites needed seats, the “colored” section would just magically shrink. Parks slid toward the window, but she never stood up. As she said, “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 as being old then. I was 42. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”

She was arrested for violating Montgomery segregation law, although she had actually been complying with segregation law when she sat down. She wasn’t the first person to challenge the bus drivers in Montgomery (a similar case was already working its way through the courts), but her calm demeanor and respected position in Montgomery made her the perfect public face for civil rights. Organized by the local NAACP chapter and Martin Luther King, Jr., black customers started boycotting the Montgomery buses as they carpooled, used black-owned cabs that charged the same fare, or in many cases just walked for miles. Most of Montgomery’s bus riders were black, and the city lost 65% of its bus revenue during the 381-day boycott.

Montgomery integrated its buses a year later after the Supreme Court struck down its bus laws in a case that didn’t involve Rosa Parks on December 20, 1956. The very next day (pictured), she sat down on a bus that had no assigned seating by race. She had helped bring down a system, by refusing to budge.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/80/Rosaparks_bus.jpg