There are 955 streets in the US (and another 50 or so in the rest of the world) named after the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and only three people have a US national holiday observed in their honor: Christopher Columbus, George Washington, and the iconic civil rights icon, whose birthday was celebrated this past week. It is even marked in the Japanese city of Hiroshima. But before MLK reluctantly agreed to become the face of the civil rights movement, there was the Montgomery bus boycott.

PICTURE THIS: It’s Thursday, December 1st, 1955. Commuters are riding home on a bus from work. A white male hops on at a bus stop. It would be another ordinary day if he had gotten in and sat right away. But today, the bus is overcrowded and all the seats are taken. The bus driver scowls from behind the wheel, ordering four colored people to leave their seats and go to the back of the bus. Small problem: According to the law, only the first 4 rows were exclusively reserved for white people. The back was for negroes. These four were in the 5th row where either race could sit.

Three black men quickly jump up from their seats and shove to the back. But the fourth seat is still occupied. And the white man is still standing. The bus driver scowls again, and is talked back to. He screeches to a halt at the next bus stage and walks over to the adamant woman, still perched on her seat. “Nah. “Am tired.” “You people can’t push us around all the time.” she continued. The bus driver, James F. Blake, tells her he will fetch the police. “You may do that,” she says as she gazes through the window into the far distance.

The arrest of Rosa Parks sparked the Montgomery Bus boycott that lasted 381 days and had the buses running on empty. Who would have thought that negroes could financially cripple a bus line! The boycott would later spread like wild fire through the former Antebellum-turned-Jim Crow South, all the way to Congress, drawing tens of thousands of protestors to rallies and ultimately introducing the country to the 26-year old Martin Luther King Jr.

One single act of defiance can change the world. Rosa Louise McCauley Parks, the 42-year old seamstress then (and wife to a Montgomery barber) is the ultimate heroine in this emancipation story. #Sunday