Early in 1954, King accepted his first pastorate at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. King had been a resident in Montgomery less than one year when Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white man. Her arrest sparked direct action from the African-American community and King was elected President of the Montgomery Improvement Association, the organization that was responsible for the successful Montgomery Bus Boycott, which lasted 381 days. On December 21, 1956, after the Supreme Court of the United States had declared unconstitutional the laws requiring segregation on buses, blacks and whites rode the buses as equals. King emerged from these historic events in Montgomery as the central leader in the struggle for civil and human rights.
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