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Montgomery Bus Boycott: Rosa Parks
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Sparked by the arrest of Rosa Parks on 1 December 1955, the Montgomery bus boycott was an eleven-month mass protest that ended with the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that public bus segregation is unconstitutional. The Montgomery Improvement Association coordinated the boycott, and its president, 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.
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This demand was a compromise the leaders of the boycott believed the city of Montgomery would be more likely to accept rather than a demand for full integration of the buses. In this respect, the MIA leadership followed the pattern of earlier boycott campaigns in the Deep South during the 1950s. A prime example was the successful boycott a few years earlier of service stations in Mississippi for refusing to provide restrooms for blacks. The organizer of that campaign, T.R.M. Howard of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership, had spoken in Montgomery as King's guest at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church only days before Parks's arrest. This demand was to be supplemented by a requirement that all bus passengers receive courteous treatment by bus operators, be seated on a first-come, first-served basis, and blacks be employed as bus drivers.
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HBO has produced a film named Boycott which tells the story of the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama led by Dr. King after Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a public bus. The film is now showing on HBO and will be available on DVD on January 8, 2002 from Amazon.com for $18.74.
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About two months after the bus boycott began, Claudette Colvin, a 15-year old's case was re-considered by black legal leaders. Attorneys Fred Gray, E.D. Nixon and Clifford Durr (a white lawyer and his wife, Virginia, who were activists in the civil rights movement) searched for the ideal case law to challenge the constitutional legitimacy of Montgomery and Alabama bus segregation laws. Durr believed that an appeal of Mrs. Rosa Parks' case would just get tied up in the Alabama state courts. Gray researched for the law suit, consulting with NAACP legal counsels Robert Carter and Thurgood Marshall (who would later become United States solicitor general and a United States Supreme Court justice). Gray approached Aurelia Browder, Susie McDonald, Claudette Colvin and Mary Louise Smith, all women who had been mistreated by the Montgomery bus system.
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On December 5, 1955, four days after her arrest, Mrs. Parks was found guilty and the Montgomery Bus Boycott began. In response to her conviction, the African-American community in Montgomery boycotted the city bus line. Instead they walked or banded together to organize alternate transportation. The boycott continued strong until 381 days later when the United States Supreme Court ruled the segregation of bus service to be unconstitutional.
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Washington -- The successful African American boycott of segregated Montgomery, Alabama, buses, which began with the arrest of Rosa Parks on December 1, 1955, transformed the civil rights cause into a mass political movement. It demonstrated that African Americans could unite and engage in disciplined political action, and marked the emergence of Martin Luther King Jr.—the indispensable leader who inspired millions, held them to the high moral standard of nonviolent resistance, and built bridges between Americans of all races, creeds and colors.
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Rosa Parks