b. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Between 1954 and 1957, it fell to Black Americans to enforce the law and desegregate the South, literally using their own bodies. In December 1955, Rosa Parks, a longtime member of the NAACP and resident of Montgomery, Alabama, refused to give up her seat to a white rider on a city bus, thereby breaking a local ordinance. Parks was immediately arrested and jailed, whereupon the Black community mounted a boycott of the bus service. Rather than patronize the segregated service, members of the community walked miles to work or formed car pools. Led by twenty-six-year-old Baptist pastor Martin Luther King, Jr., the boycott caused the bus company to fail and the town's white-owned business district to suffer. Nonetheless, the white townspeople stood firm, until the U.S. Supreme Court struck down segregation on all forms of public transportation (in Browder v. Gayle, 1956).