The year 1955 saw a range of events that brought attention to the civil rights movement. Nonviolent protest became a cornerstone of the movement as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. inspired more people to take up the cause. In August, Emmett Till, a Black teenager, was brutally murdered in Mississippi. In December, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man while riding on a bus in Alabama. Parks’s segregation challenge resulted in the Montgomery bus boycott, which lasted throughout 1956 and brought transformational change to the city. These events and more sparked a movement that in the following years would bring Black youth to the forefront of much needed reform in the nation. This detailed account explains why 1955 was such a critical year in the civil rights movement.