The Montgomery bus boycott, which began 70 years ago on 5 December 1955, is now understood as one of the most successful American social movements. And yet, much of how it is remembered is romanticized, inaccurate and even dangerous – distorting how we imagine social change happens.

In the fable, Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat, Black Montgomery residents rise up, a young Martin Luther King Jr is introduced to the world, and injustice is vanquished. The right action is all it takes – furthering a mythology that, without deep preparation or sacrifice, Americans can make great change with a single act. Today, in the face of rising injustice, many criticize young activists for being too disruptive, too disorganized, too impractical. But, in fact, the Montgomery movement began much earlier and took much longer than we imagine and entailed tremendous sacrifice. It required hard choice after hard choice without evidence these actions would matter, and was considered too disruptive by many at the time – all of which gives us important lessons for how to challenge injustice today.

First, Rosa Parks. She was neither old nor tired, as some have claimed, but she also wasn’t planned or planted. By the time Parks was 42 years old, she had been an activist for two decades, helping to turn Montgomery’s NAACP into a more activist branch alongside the union stalwart ED Nixon. “Over the years I have been rebelling against second-class citizenship,” Parks said in a 1956 interview with the Los Angeles Sentinel. “It didn’t begin when I was arrested.” This work was demoralizing, as organizers defended the wrongfully accused, fought for voter registration, tried to find justice for Black women who had been raped: “It was very difficult to keep going when all our efforts seemed in vain,” she said of their work in the 1940s and early 1950s.

A trickle of Montgomery residents had resisted mistreatment on the bus in the decade before Parks’s arrest. Then, eight months before Parks’s act, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin refused to give up her seat and was arrested. When she struggled against the police manhandling her, they also charged her with assaulting an officer. Colvin’s arrest outraged Montgomery’s Black community and many stopped riding the buses temporarily. Parks fundraised for Colvin’s case and encouraged the teenager to take a leadership role in her NAACP Youth Council.

But a mass movement did not result, in part because the judge threw out the segregation charge and only found Colvin guilty of assaulting an officer and in part because many adults saw Colvin as too young, poor and feisty to rally behind. But had Colvin not done what she did, it is unlikely Parks’s arrest would have galvanized people the way it did. Movements do not result from the first or second outrage but from an accumulation of injustice that brings........

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