At the end of the workshop, each participant shared what they planned to do upon returning home. She offered this bleak assessment at the conclusion of a two-week workshop at the Highlander Folk School, a small, racially integrated institution perched in the hills of Tennessee. Given the hostility of the White community and the divisions within the African American community, she saw little hope for a direct challenge to Jim Crow. Only four months earlier, Parks had predicted that Montgomery was not ready for a major protest. Despite her years of activism, she had no way of knowing that her solitary act would inspire some fifty thousand African American residents of Montgomery to boycott the buses, a protest that would become one of the defining episodes of the civil rights movement. By the time she was arrested on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, on December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks had spent more than a decade fighting racism and injustice.
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