The differences between American ideals and American realities lent special significance to the civil rights conflict of the 1960s. The conflict is often said to have begun in Montgomery, Alabama, on December 1, 1955, when Rosa Parks, an African American department store worker in her 50s, was arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man. Out of that single act of protest emerged a previously unthinkable act – a bus boycott by African Americans. At the center of the boycott was a loosely knit group called the Montgomery Improvement Association, which chose as its leader a young minister who was in town, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.