The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do and How to Change

by Charles Duhigg

Rosa Parks wasn’t the first Black passenger jailed for breaking Montgomery’s bus segregation laws. She wasn’t even the first that year. In 1946, Geneva Johnson had been arrested for arguing with a Montgomery bus driver over seating.5 In 1949, Viola White, Katie Wingfield, and two Black children were arrested for sitting in the white section and refusing to move.6 That same year, two Black teenagers visiting from New Jersey—where buses were integrated—were arrested and jailed after breaking the law by sitting next to a white man and a boy.7 In 1952, a Montgomery policeman shot and killed a Black man when he argued with a bus driver. In 1955, just months before Parks was taken to jail, Claudette Colvin and Mary Louise Smith were arrested in separate incidents for refusing to give their seats to white passengers.