Caused by: Racial segregation on public transportation; Successful 6-day Baton Rouge bus boycott

When King was made SCLC president in 1960, he became more and more involved in the use of non-violent civil disobedience as a way of campaigning for civil rights.

In the early 1960s, King led many demonstrations in the South aimed at ending segregation and allowing black Americans to vote freely.

King worked with another church minister called Ralph Abernathy to organise the year-long Montgomery Bus Boycott. The bus boycott success made King into a well-known national leader of the civil rights movement.

Rosa Parks was sitting on a bus on her way home (in the back seats), more whites were getting on the bus that backs so the bus driver moves the sign further back meaning there was more whites seats than black. This meant that Rosa was sitting on a now white seat. The driver asked her to move back however she refused, she was later arrested.

1955 - This was just one year after the US Supreme Court had declared that segregation was wrong in schools. The NAACP wanted to argue that if segregation was wrong in schools, was it not also wrong in everyday life, such as on buses?

When news spread of the arrest of Rosa Parks, 50 respected leaders of the black community met in a Montgomery church to discuss their plans. They agreed to boycott the city bus system. In the group was a young Baptist minister in his first job at that church: Martin Luther King Jr.

His first job was as pastor at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama.

Rosa Parks rode at the front of a Montgomery, Alabama, bus on the day the Supreme Court's ban on segregation of the city's buses took effect. A year earlier, she had been arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus.