Furthermore, lynching, the inhumane hanging of a person from a tree branch, was a very common means of punishment, primarily among blacks and their allies, throughout the eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and the first half of the twentieth-century. In 1909, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was formed to help fight the battle for the humanity and equality for African Americans.
While the aforementioned events set the foreground for the modern Civil Rights Movement, the catalyst of the Movement involved two events, which both took place in 1955: the murder of Emmett Till in August, and Rosa Parks" arrest in December. These events raised public awareness of the need for the African American community to ban together and demand equal rights. Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old boy from Chicago, went to visit his uncle in Mississippi. He made a comment that, in the South, was considered disrespectful to a white woman. The boy was physically taken from his uncle's home, and three days later his lifeless body was found brutally beaten in the Tallahachie River. The two white men who kidnapped him were indicted and later found not guilty of the murder. Black organizations such as the NAACP worked to keep the case in the news to make an example of Southern racism. Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Committee (SCLC), said that the not guilty verdict "set in concrete the determination of people to move forward [with the Civil Rights Movement]." .
Rosa Parks" refusal to surrender, to a white person, her paid seat on a public Montgomery bus caused her to be arrested for defying municipal law, and her arrest led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which was the beginning of the modern Civil Rights Movement. Because of the grounds on which Rosa Parks was arrested, several prominent leaders of the black community organized a boycott of the Montgomery public transportation system as a means of protesting the city's segregation laws.