When Rosa Parks was arrested in 1955 for refusing to sit at the back of the bus, Thelma McWilliams Glass went to work organizing a boycott of the bus system in Montgomery, Alabama. Without her work, Parks would have been just another African-American arrested for breaking a segregationist law.

Glass died last week in Montgomery, Alabama at 96 years old, she was the last surviving member of the Women’s Political Council, the organization that called for the the boycott.

Glass said a few years ago “When the first bus came by with nobody on it, I couldn’t believe it. It’s a feeling of such happiness that you just can’t quite explain.”

After the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr joined the boycott, eleven months later, the Supreme court ruled that it was unconstitutional to segregate the bus system.

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