Half a century ago, in parts of the United States, drinking fountains and cafeterias were segregated, bathrooms were divided by race as well as gender, and seats in the front of the bus were reserved for white people.

On Dec. 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, an Alabama seamstress, lit a fuse to an idea that would change those notions forever. She refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery city bus for a white man who, by law, was entitled to claim it.

Her courage — and subsequent arrest — sparked a 13-month bus strike and fueled a movement that would challenge Jim Crow laws and improve the lives of Americans for generations to come.

Parks died in October at age 92.

To celebrate the advancements of the civil-rights movement and to commemorate Parks, the Montgomery bus boycott and Human Rights Day, a gathering will be held tomorrow at Church of the Crossroads.

The evening, sponsored by the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Coalition-Hawai'i and the United Nations Association, Hawai'i Division, will begin at 6:30 p.m. with a showing of the movie, "The Rosa Parks Story," with Angela Bassett, Cicely Tyson, Peter Francis and Dexter King Jr.

It will continue with a panel of civil-rights movement participants who will share stories of their experiences with the audience, said Marsha Joyner, event organizer and moderator of the panel discussion.

Joyner, like some of the panelists and people expected to be in the audience, was in school in the mid-1950s. Frustrations over Jim Crow laws were brewing in the South, but the tool of social change to first touch Joyner's life would be a 1954 Supreme Court decision that upheld Brown v. Board of Education, a case out of Topeka, Kansas, that ruled segregation of public schools to be illegal.

Joyner was one of the first five African-American girls to attend a previously all-white public girls school in Baltimore.

"On the day of the Supreme Court decision, the principal announced that she would never see a colored girl graduate from her school," Joyner said. "That was in May. In September, she welcomed us into the school, nice as could be."

The five girls were put into separate classes and kept away from each other. Joyner was surrounded by white classmates. No one was overtly cruel. No one was kind.

"From September 1954 through June 1956," Joyner said, "no one would talk to me, share a note, sit next to me at lunch."

A week before graduation, the principal kept her promise of never seeing a colored girl graduate from her school.

"She just turned her face toward the wall and died," Joyner said.

Reach Karen Blakeman at kblakeman@honoluluadvertiser.com.