launched in Montgomery, Ala., after an African-American woman, Rosa Parks, is arrested December 1 for refusing to give up her seat to a white person. December 21. After more than a year of boycotting the buses and a legal fight, the Montgomery buses desegregate. Rosa Parks sits in the front of a city bus in Montgomery, Ala. on Dec. 21, 1956, the day a Supreme Court ruling banning segregation of the city's public transit vehicles went into effect. A year earlier, she had been arrested and jailed for refusing to give up her seat in a crowded bus.