Rosa Parks bus

Rosa Parks made history when she refused to surrender her seat to a white passenger on this bus operated National City Lines. It is now a museum exhibit at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich. (Wikimedia Commons)

MONTGOMERY, Alabama -- An observance will mark the 59th anniversary of the Montgomery bus boycott.

A celebration will be held Monday night at the city's historically black First Baptist Church, which was the site of mass meetings around the time of the boycott in 1955.

The event is being hosted by the Montgomery Improvement Association and the National Center for the Study of Civil Rights and African-American Culture at Alabama State University.

The boycott began days after Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery city bus on Dec. 1, 1955. It's often cited as the start of the modern civil rights movement.

The boycott also helped launch the career of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who was a pastor in Montgomery at the time.