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Rosa Parks’s official arrest report

Here’s a piece of history: the arrest report from Montgomery, Ala., police for Rosa Parks on Dec. 1, 1955, the day she rode a  Montgomery city bus and refused to get up and move to the back of the bus so a white man could take her seat, as she was expected to in that era of segregation. She was arrested, and in the process, helped launch a new era in the American civil rights movement.

Parks was a seamstress in Alabama and a civil rights activist, but she said after the incident that she had not pre-planned it. She was convicted of violating a law mandating segregation on city buses and fined. She appealed as civil rights activists organized a boycott of Montgomery buses — coordinated by the Montgomery Improvement Association of which a 26-year-old minister named Martin Luther King Jr. was president — that lasted 13 months. It ended when the Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional to require segregation on public buses....

Read entire article at Washington Post