Montgomery Bus Boycott
Victory
On December 5 approximately 40,000 African-American bus
riders—the majority of the city’s bus riders—boycotted city transportation. The Montgomery
Improvement Association [MIA] had hoped
for a 50 percent support rate among African Americans. To their surprise and
delight, 99 percent of the city's African Americans refused to ride the buses.
People walked to work or rode their bikes, and carpools were established to
help the elderly. The demands that the MIA had announced were simple: Black passengers should be
treated with courtesy. Seating should be allotted on a first-come-first-serve
basis, with white passengers sitting from front to back and black passengers
sitting from back to front. And African American drivers should drive routes
that primarily serviced African Americans (King 1-3).
At a mass meeting that evening, MIA leaders decided to continue the boycott. Thousands
walked or found other means of travel for work, school and shopping, and a
system of carpools was created. The
city’s African-American taxi drivers charged only 10 cents for African-American
riders – the same price they paid to ride the bus. Drivers
and passengers were often ticketed or arrested, and many boycott supporters
were threatened with the loss of their jobs and harassed by local government
officials (Rosa 1).
Earlier in the year the Federal Interstate Commerce
Commission had banned segregation on interstate trains and buses. On February 1, 1956, the MIA filed suit in
the U.S. District Court
challenging the constitutionality of bus segregation in Montgomery
Later that month, over
100 protestors, including Dr. King, were arrested for “hindering” a bus (Rosa 1-2).
On June 5, 1956, a Montgomery federal court ruled that any law requiring
racially segregated seating on buses violated the 14th Amendment to the U.S. U.S.
The city appealed to
the U.S. Montgomery
Integration, however,
met with significant resistance and even violence. While the buses themselves
were integrated, Montgomery
In January 1957, four
black churches and the homes of prominent black leaders were bombed; a bomb at
King’s house was defused. On January 30, 1957, the Montgomery
The Montgomery Bus Boycott victory is viewed by many today
as a feel-good story. Indeed the boycott
was significant on several fronts. First,
it is widely regarded as the earliest mass protest on behalf of civil rights in
the United States
Second, in his
leadership of the MIA, Martin Luther King emerged as a prominent national
leader of the civil rights movement while also solidifying his commitment to
nonviolent resistance. King’s approach remained a hallmark of the civil rights
movement throughout the 1960s.
Shortly after the
boycott’s end, he helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
(SCLC), a highly influential civil rights organization that worked to end
segregation throughout the South. The SCLC was instrumental in the civil rights
campaign in Birmingham , Alabama ,
in the spring of 1963, and the March on Washington
The boycott also
brought national and international attention to the civil rights struggles
occurring in the United States ,
as more than 100 reporters visited Montgomery
Participants in the boycott paid a substantial economic and
psychological price. Rosa Parks was red-baited and received death threats and
hate mail for years in Montgomery and in Detroit for her movement work. Though
the righteousness of her actions may seem self-evident today, at the time,
those who challenged segregation — like those who challenge racial injustice
today — were often treated as unstable, unruly and potentially dangerous by
many white people and some black people. Her writings show how she struggled
with feeling isolated and crazy, before and even during the boycott. In one
piece of writing, she explained how she felt “completely alone and desolate as
if I was descending in a black and bottomless chasm.”
Despite the boycott’s
successful end, the Parks family still faced death threats and could not find
steady work. In August 1957, they left Montgomery
for Detroit Detroit
The few that remain
tell us that her radicalism never weakened. “Freedom fighters never retire,”
she noted in a testimonial for a fellow activist. As she had for decades, Parks
drew sustenance from the militancy and spirit of young people, working in and
alongside the growing Black Power movement. Understanding the impact that years
of activism with limited results can have on a person, she continued calling
for rapid and radical change. In a 1973 letter posted at the Afro-American Museum
in Detroit
The attempt to solve
our racial problems nonviolently was discredited in the eyes of many by the
hard core segregationists who met peaceful demonstrations with countless acts
of violence and bloodshed. …
Writing this after what many mark as the
successful end of the modern civil rights movement, Parks clearly believed that
the struggle was not over. In the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, she continued to press
for change in the criminal justice system, in school and housing inequality, in
jobs and welfare policy and in foreign policy. She worked in U.S. Rep. John
Conyers’s office and spoke out against Clarence Thomas’s nomination to the
Supreme Court, dismayed by his poor record on civil rights. Sometime in the
1990s, an older Parks doodled on a paper bag (preserved in the collection):
“The Struggle Continues…. The Struggle Continues…. The Struggle Continues”
(Theoharis 3-4).
Works cited:
“King, Abernathy, Boycott, and the SCLC.” U.S.
“Montgomery
“Rosa Parks and The Montgomery Wesleyan University
Theoharis,
Jeanne. “How history got the Rosa Parks
story wrong.” The Washington
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