1.5 Rosa Parks, a slight, softly spoken black woman changed the course of American history and earned the title "mother of the modern civil rights movement". On December 1st 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, she broke the law by refusing to give her seat on the bus to a white man. Her quiet rebellion sparked off a city-wide bus boycott that lasted 381 days and propelled the cause of civil rights and the protest's leader, a young minister named Martin Luther King, to national attention. Her legal case challenged and eventually broke Montgomery's segregation laws. Parks was a seamstress on her way home from a long day's work in a department store when she made her defiant gesture. She held her ground out of moral outrage rather than physical exhaustion. "People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired," she said, "but that isn't true. I was no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in." Nevertheless, she displayed extraordinary courage and gave focus to the African American struggle against injustice and oppression. But she was always modest about her own contribution to the movement, and continued to live her life with quiet dignity. In 1957 she moved to Detroit, where for twenty years she worked for the Democratic Representative John Conyers. Thirty-five years after Montgomery, Ron Brown, Democratic national committee chairman, had this to say about the political struggle of black leaders: "We have to understand that those victories were built on the shoulders of others. And Rosa Parks is certainly one of those pioneers." @ 2.2 Ten Negro ministers and 105 other persons involved in the Negro boycott of buses in Montgomery, Alabama, have, been indicted by a local grand jury on charges of illegal action, and a large but orderly crowd of Negroes has watched them to-day being transported under arrest to the county gaol. By early afternoon 40 Negroes had been arrested, including the ministers and Mrs. Rosa Parks, the woman whose refusal to occupy the "coloured" section of a bus three months ago led to the boycott. Mrs. Parks was convicted then of violating local segregation laws and fined $14: her appeal has now been rejected by Judge Eugene Carter, who said he would uphold both city and State segregation laws and directed Mrs. Parks to pay the fine and costs. She has appeal to the State Supreme Court. All those arrested to-day have been finger-printed, photographed, and released under a standard $300 bond. The grand jury, of 17 white men and one Negro, said the boycott had begun with 18 members of the "inter- denominational alliance," composed mostly of Negro ministers, which had set up the "Montgomery Improvement Association" and had spent so far about $18,000 on the boycott. "Distrust, dislike, and hatred," the jury's report continued, "are being taught in a community which for more than a generation has enjoyed exemplary race relations." Small incidents have been magnified, it was said, and ugly rumours were being spread among both races. If this trend continued, violence was inevitable. @ 2.3 The Negroes of Montgomery, Alabama, who have been boycotting their city's buses for 11 months in protest against "Jim Crow" regulations, appeared to have won their point to-day when the Supreme Court reaffirmed a lower court's ruling that racial segregation of bus services in Alabama is unconstitutional. The Montgomery bus company attempted to end segregation in its vehicles last May, but the Alabama government ordered it to continue its segregated service under state law; four Negroes took the matter to a federal court which ruled that racial segregation was unconstitutional, and the state then appealed to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court cited its 1954 ruling on racial segregation in the schools, in which it discarded the "separate but equal" doctrine which had until then been accepted as a justification for segregation laws. To-day's ruling will ultimately affect similar state laws in other southern states - and in Tallahassee, Florida, the Negro population is still continuing its boycott of the segregated city buses. A case against one of the ringleaders of the Montgomery boycott is still under appeal; he was convicted in a state court of conspiring to injure trade.