In Montgomery there was a local law that African Americans had to sit at the back of the bus and give up their seats if white people wanted them.
1 December 1955 Rosa Parks, an NAACP activist, refused to give up her seat and was arrested and convicted of breaking the bus laws.
Local civil rights activists set up the MIA, led by Dr MLK,a young baptist minister. The group organised a boycott where they stopped using the buses, arranging private transport instead.
Civil rights lawyers fought the case in court and in December 1956 the Supreme Court declared Montgomery's bus laws illegal and the bus company gave in.
This was the beginning of non-violent mass protests by the civil rights movement.
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Sit-ins
Sit-in: a form of protest in which demonstrators sit in a public place and refuse to move.
Winter of 1959-60 civil rights groups stepped up their non-violent campaigns.
They organised marches,demonstrations and boycotts to end segregation in public places.
February 1960 in Greensboro, North Carolina, the sit-in protests began at the lunch counter in the F. W. Woolwarth store.
By August 1961 The sit-ins in restaurants,libraries and movie theatres had attracted over 70,000 participants and resulted in over 3000 arrests
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