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Paul O'Neill
Rosa Parks was a seamstress and activist who famously helped launch the Montgomery bus boycott and the civil rights movement when she refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus in 1955. Duhigg argues that the boycott was successful because Parks had a wide range of friends and acquaintances across Montgomery’s Black community. He uses Parks’s protest as an example of how social habits—like defending friends and succumbing to peer pressure—can spur social change.
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Rosa Parks Character Timeline in The Power of Habit
The timeline below shows where the character Rosa Parks appears in The Power of Habit. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 8: Saddleback Church and the Montgomery Bus Boycott: How Movements Happen
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama and got...
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Rosa Parks was far from the first Black passenger to resist Montgomery’s segregated bus system. But unlike...
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When Parks was arrested, her mother called the local NAACP leader, E.D. Nixon, who bailed her out....
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After Rosa Parks’s arrest, E.D. Nixon called a young local minister, Martin Luther King Jr., to explain what...
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