The Civil Rights Movement is sometimes defined as a struggle against racial segregation that began in 1955 when Rosa Parks, the "seamstress with tired feet," refused to give up her seat to a white man on a bus in Alabama. Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court case that attacked the notion of "separate but equal," has also been identified as the catalyst for this extraordinary period of organized boycotts, student protests, and mass marches.
These legendary events, however, did not cause the modern Civil Rights Movement, but were instead important moments in a campaign of direct action that began two decades before the first sit-in demonstration.