60 years ago today, 42-year-old Rosa Parks, a tailor’s assistant in Montgomery, Alabama, refused to give up her seat and move to the back of a bus. 

A Montgomery ordinance required that blacks give up their seats when whites needed seats. In many cases, blacks — especially women — were told to pay their fare at the front of the bus, then leave the bus and re-enter at the back door, only to see the bus drive away.

When bus driver J.F. Blake told Parks to get to the back of the bus, Parks, tired after a long day at work, refused to budge. Blake stopped the bus, went to a telephone, and called the police, who summarily escorted Parks to jail.

That one act of civil disobedience was the spark that lit a national fire for much-needed racial equality & civil rights reforms.

A woman on the bus got word to E.D. Nixon of the NAACP who, accompanied by white attorney Clifford Dorr, signed bond papers and secured the release of Ms. Parks. 

Parks’ act of civil disobedience spurred the creation of the Montgomery Improvement Association, with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as its first president, as well as the famous Montgomery Bus Boycott. Despite violence targeted at them by pro-segregation activists and threats of arrest for drivers who charged bus boycotters less than the government-mandated minimum 45-cent taxi fare, the Montgomery Improvement Association set up a volunteer carpool for getting boycotters to work. 

Their efforts were successful: In June 1956, a federal court voted 2-1 to strike down the Montgomery bus segregation ordinance, and later that year the U.S. Supreme Court upheld this decision.

“We are not advocating violence…the great glory of American democracy is the right to protest for right,” explained Dr. King.

Parks is not the only brave individual whose refusal to comply with unjust laws helped make our world a freer place. 

On June 28, 1969, members of New York’s gay community took an unprecedented stand against the New York Police Department’s Morals Division, refusing to silently submit to arrest. 

“This time they said, ‘We’re not going,’” said Police Officer Seymour Pine. 

The Stonewall riots that resulted are generally regarded as the beginning of the gay rights movement in the United States.

To these, of course, one could add many others: the American farmers who fired the shot heard round the world at Concord Bridge, the Gdansk shipyard workers who launched Solidarity in 1980, the Leipzig peace marchers in 1989, Mohammed Bouazizi, a vegetable seller in Tunisia, whom Time magazine dubbed “The Man Who Set Himself and Tunisia on Fire”….

Sometimes all it takes is one person or a few people saying, “We’re not going” to light the spark of a movement or a revolution.