Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"The rule was flouted in December 1955 by a respectable, middle-aged, black woman named Rosa Parks, who was active in the civil rights movement. . . . Montgomery's black leaders appointed an obscure Baptist minister, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., to lead a boycott of the city's buses and secure the maximum publicity. . . . More than 90% of Montgomery's blacks joined the boycott and organized other ways of getting to work. In April 1956, the US Supreme Court ruled against bus segregation, but the local bus company, which wanted to comply, was overruled by the Montgomery police chief . . . . The city gave way and announced its compliance, and Rosa Parks posed for photographers near the front of a city bus." [Furtado: 1001 Days]