NewSouth

The Montgomery Bus Boycott

The Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-56 is widely regarded as the event which began the modern civil rights movement. That may overstate the case, but the 381-day boycott was the first sustained mass protest against Jim Crow segregation, it did launch the civil rights careers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph David Abernathy, and Fred D. Gray, and it made a worldwide hero of a small, quiet woman named Rosa Parks.

African American citizens in many cities had for years complained bitterly about treatment on segregated city buses. Earlier in 1955, Sarah Mae Flemming had sued the city of Columbia, S.C., over its segregated bus seating, and in July 1955 the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in the case that segregated seating was unconstitutional. In July 1955, James M. Ritter had refused a driver's order to move to the rear of a Richmond, Va., bus and was fined $10. In Montgomery, bus-related disputes were common.

On March 2, 1955, teenager Claudette Colvin was arrested for violating the same segregation law that Mrs. Parks ran afoul of on December 1, 1955. Colvin was the first person to plead not guilty to such a charge. Her attorney, Fred Gray, raised constitutional issues in her defense but she was convicted.

The Women's Political Council (WPC), headed by JoAnn Robinson and Mary Fair Burks, had written letters to city officials protesting the lack of black bus drivers, rudeness on the part of white drivers, and the seating policies in general. But the arrest of Parks, the secretary of the local NAACP, galvanized local black leaders, including E. D. Nixon, who bailed her out of jail, and the members of the WPC, who on December 2 wrote and disseminated a flyer calling for a boycott for December 5, the day Parks was to be tried in municipal court.

As the news spread, other leaders joined in and a meeting was held to plan a one-day boycott. Ministers announced the boycott on Sunday, December 4, and on the morning of December 5, the boycott was almost completely observed by Montgomery's black citizens. When Mrs. Parks was convicted and fined $10, the leaders met that afternoon to form the Montgomery Improvement Association, elected King, then 26, as president, and held a meeting that evening at the Holt Street Baptist Church attended by more than 5,000 people who proclaimed their willingness to stay off the buses as long as necessary.

The initial demands of the boycott leaders did not include changing the segregation law itself, but sought courtesy, hiring of at least some black drivers, and a first-come, first-seated policy with whites filling the buses from the front and blacks from the rear. Bus company officials, facing mounting losses, were eager to compromise, but intransigence on the part of city officials and rising violence against black citizens--included bombings, beatings, and petty harassment--led attorney Gray, then 25, to attack the segregation ordinance itself.

This strategy ultimately succeeded. Meanwhile, the nation was focused on the philosophy and strategy of non-violence being articulated through King's powerful oratory, and the quiet perseverence of the black citizens of the city which a hundred years earlier had been the birthplace of the Confederacy.--Horace Randall Williams

Bibliography for Montgomery Bus Boycott

Gray, Fred.   Bus Ride to Justice. 1995.
Sikora, Frank.   The Judge. 1992.
Burns, Stewart, ed.   Daybreak of Freedom. 1997.
Raines, Howell.   My Soul Is Rested. 1977.
Branch, Taylor.   Parting the Waters. 1988.
Thornton, J. Mills.  "Challenge and Response in the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-56", in the Alabama Review, July 1980.