to give up her seat on a city bus to a white person. When Parks refused to move, she was arrested. This incident began the Montgomery Bus Boycott. It was an immediate success, with virtually unanimous support from the 50,000 blacks in Montgomery. It lasted for more than a year and dramatized to the American public the determination of blacks in the South to end segregation. A federal court ordered Montgomery's buses desegregated in November 1956, and the boycott ended in triumph. There were also sit-ins. On February 1,1960, four black college students at North Carolina A&T University began protesting racial segregation in restaurants by sitting at "white-only" lunch counters and waiting to be served. This was not a new form of protest, but the response to the sit-ins in North Carolina was unique. Within days, sit-ins had spread throughout North Carolina, ad within weeks they were taking place in cities across the south. Many restaurants were desegregated. The sit-in movement also demonstrated clearly to whites and blacks alike that young blacks were determined to reject segregation openly. After the sit-ins, some SNCC members participated in the 1961 Freedom Rides organized by CORE. The freedom riders, both black and white, traveled around the south in buses to test the effectiveness of a 1960 Supreme Court decision. The decision had declared that segregation was still illegal in bus stations that were open to interstate travel. The Freedom Rides began in Washington, D.C. Except for some violence in Rock Hill, South Carolina, the trip southward was peaceful until they reached Alabama, where violence erupted. At Anniston, one bus was burned and some riders were beaten. The Freedom Rides did result in the desegregation of some bus stations, but more importantly, they demonstrated to the American public how far civil rights workers would go to achieve their goals. In 1962, a black man from Mississippi, James Meredith, app...
