Civil rights movement hero, Martin Luther King, Jr. is honored with a holiday on the third Monday in January. He would have been 90 years old this month but was murdered in 1968 at the age of 39. King led a movement of non-violent, peaceful protests to fight racial injustice in the United States. The first example of this movement began in December of 1955. It was the Montgomery Bus Boycott in the southern state of Alabama. Many southern cities, including Montgomery practiced racial segregation, or the separation of black and white Americans in public places. When using public transportation such as buses, the law in Montgomery stated that blacks must enter from the back door and the first ten rows of seats were for whites only. On December first in 1955, a black woman, Rosa Parks, was riding a bus on her way home from work. She refused to give her seat to a white man and was arrested.