Today in 1955: Rosa Parks was arrested by police in Montgomery, Alabama, after refusing to give up her seat on the bus to a white person.  She faced a fine for breaking the segregation laws which said black Americans must vacate their seats if there are white passengers left standing.

It was not the first time Mrs Parks, who is a seamstress, has defied the law on segregation.  In 1943 she was thrown off a bus for refusing to get on via the back door, which was reserved for black passengers.  She became known to other drivers who sometimes refused to let her on.  Five days later, thousands of black citizens boycotted the buses in Alabama to mark the day Mrs Parks was due in court.  She was fined $10, plus $4 costs.  She challenged the verdict and the NAACP decided to use her case as a test against city and state segregation laws.

Later that same evening, the young preacher Martin Luther King addressed a crowd of several thousand at Holt Street Baptist Church and called for the boycott to continue.  Nearly all Montgomery's 40,000 black citizens took part in the bus boycott, which lasted for 381 days.  On 20 December, the Supreme court upheld the decision of a lower court to end segregation on Alabama's buses.  Mrs Parks was sacked from her job and in 1957 left Montgomery for Detroit following harassment. She later became a special assistant to Democratic congressman John Conyers until her retirement in 1988.  She died in October 2005 - an icon for the civil rights movement - almost exactly 50 years after her famous bus boycott began.