The city of Montgomery, Ala., like many Southern cities, had laws enforcing racial segregation in many public places. The Montgomery bus system forced blacks to sit at the back of the bus and, if all the seats were taken, give up their seats to whites.

Rosa Louise Parks was nationally recognized as the "mother of the modern day civil rights movement" in America. Her refusal to surrender her seat to a white male passenger on a Montgomery, Alabama bus, December 1, 1955, triggered a wave of protest December 5, 1955 that reverberated throughout the United States.

Welcome to the University of Michigan Library's Brown v. Board of Education Digital Archive. This archive contains documents and images which chronicle events surrounding this historically significant case up to the present.