The most often cited account of the beginning of the boycott is when Mrs. Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white passenger and that her arrest sparked the planning and execution of the boycott. The memoirs of Mrs. Jo Ann Robinson, Mrs. Parks, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. refute these accounts.

Also it is widely believed that the Montgomery movement was the first effort to end unequal treatment on inner city transportation by African-American women, however, history records show that women fought those battles as early as 1850. Elizabeth Jennings Graham in New York in1854, and Ida Wells Barnett, in Memphis, Tennessee in 1884.

It is also believed that the boycott ended segregated seating. Attorneys, historians, and historical records point to the class action law suit filed by the plaintiffs in Browder vs. Gayle is what ended segregated seating and signaled the end of all segregation ordinances in America.