On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a 42-year old African American woman who worked as a seamstress, boarded a Montgomery City Bus year old to go home from work. On that bus on that day, Herbrave, spontaneous act of defiance sparked a flame of rebellion.that initiated a new era in the American quest for freedom, equality and justice.
She was arrested and convicted of violating the laws of segregation, known as 'Jim Crow Laws' Mrs Parks appealed her conviction and thus formally challenged the legality of segregation. In cities across the South, segregated bus companies were daily reminders of the inequalities of American society.
The next day Dr Martin Luther King, Jr., proposed a city wide boycott of public transportation at a church meeting. The Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) coordinated the boycott, and its president, Dr Martin Luther King, Jr., became a prominent civil rights leader as international attention focused on Montgomery. The bus boycott demonstrated the potential for nonviolent mass protest to successfully challenge racial segregation and served as an example for other southern campaigns that followed.
The roots of the bus boycott began years before the arrest of Rosa Parks. The Women’s Political Council (WPC), a group of black professionals founded in 1946, had already turned their attention to Jim Crow practices on the Montgomery city buses. In a meeting with Mayor W. A. Gayle in March 1954, the council's members outlined the changes they sought for Montgomery’s bus system: no one standing over empty seats; a decree that black individuals not be made to pay at the front of the bus and enter from the rear; and a policy that would require buses to stop at every corner in black residential areas, as they did in white communities. When the meeting failed to produce any meaningful change, WPC president Jo Ann Robinson reiterated the council’s requests in a 21 May letter to Mayor Gayle, telling him, “There has been talk from twenty-five or more local organizations of planning a city-wide boycott of buses” (“A Letter from the Women’s Political Council”).
A year after the WPC’s meeting with Mayor Gayle, a 15-year-old named Claudette Colvin was arrested for challenging segregation on a Montgomery bus. Seven months later, 18-year-old Mary Louise Smith was arrested for refusing to yield her seat to a white passenger. Neither arrest, however, mobilized Montgomery’s black community like that of Rosa Parks later that year.
King recalled in his memoir that “Mrs. Parks was ideal for the role assigned to her by history,” and because “her character was impeccable and her dedication deep-rooted” she was “one of the most respected people in the Negro community”
Robinson and the WPC responded to Parks’ arrest by calling for a one-day protest of the city’s buses on 5 December 1955. Robinson prepared a series of leaflets at Alabama State College and organized groups to distribute them throughout the black community. Meanwhile, after securing bail for Parks with Clifford and Virginia Durr, E. D. Nixon, past leader of the Montgomery chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), began to call local black leaders, including Ralph Abernathy and King, to organize a planning meeting. On 2 December, black ministers and leaders met at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church and agreed to publicize the 5 December boycott. The planned protest received unexpected publicity in the weekend newspapers and in radio and television reports.
On December 5th, 1955, the Montgomery Bus Boycott began. organized by the local chapter of the NAACP led by Pullman porter E. D. Edgar Nixon. “We’re going to work with grim and bold determination to gain justice on the buses in this city. And we are not wrong,” new minister Martin Luther King Jr. declared. “If we are wrong, the Supreme Court is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong.”
Since African Americans made up about 75 percent of the riders in Montgomery, the boycott posed a serious economic threat to the company and a social threat to white rule in the city. Out of Montgomery's 50,000 African American residents, 30,000 to 40,000 participated. They walked or bicycled or car pooled, depriving the bus company of a substantial portion of its revenue.
The boycott lasted 381 days, and proved to be effective, causing the transit system to run a huge deficit.After all Montgomery's black residents were not only the principal boycotters, but also the bulk of the transit system's paying customers. The situation became very tense, with members of the White Citizens Council, a group that opposed racial integration firebombed the homes of King and Nixon were bombed, and when that didn’t stop the boycott, authorities arrested King and ordered him to pay $500 and serve more than a year in jail. Despite this, the boycott continued.
In June 1956, a federal court found that the laws in Alabama and Montgomery requiring segregated buses were unconstitutional. However an appeal kept segregation intact until Dec 20, 1956 when the US Supreme Court upheld the district court's rulings.ruled that bus segregation was unconstitutional..
“We came to see that, in the long run, it is more honorable to walk in dignity than ride in humiliation,” King said. “We decided to substitute tired feet for tired souls and walk the streets of Montgomery.’’The boycott's official end signalled one of the civil rights movements first victories and made King one of its central figures.
Time life/Getty images
With new self respect and a new sense of dignity , it was part of the beginning of a call for revolutionary change, the oppressed were determined to stand up and struggle until the walls of injustice had crumbled. It would be a long and hard journey, which would see them take on and triumph against the dominant repressive forces of evil.
The bus boycott demonstrated the potential for nonviolent mass protest to successfully challenge racial segregation and served as an example for other southern campaigns that followed. In Stride Toward Freedom, King’s 1958 memoir of the boycott, he declared the real meaning of the Montgomery bus boycott to be the power of a growing self-respect to animate the struggle for civil rights.
This movement has echoes with the divestment movement and the campaign of boycott against apartheid South Africa, and currently again against the policies of apartheid Israel.
Montgomery Bus Protest
This movement has echoes with the divestment movement and the campaign of boycott against apartheid South Africa, and currently again against the policies of apartheid Israel.
Montgomery Bus Protest
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