Rosa Parks Being Fingerprinted, Montgomery, Alabama

When she courageously refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery bus on December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks secured her place in history. Her arrest ignited a mass boycott of city buses and brought the civil rights movement to national prominence. Parks was secretary of the Montgomery branch of the NAACP, and just months before her arrest had attended the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, a training center for labor and civil rights leadership. This photograph was made at the time of Parks’s second arrest, and was widely reproduced in newspapers and magazines. Civil rights leaders quickly understood the power of photography to help stimulate awareness of their cause and raise funds for their effort to overthrow segregation laws.