|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
The Montgomery Bus Boycott |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
Although blacks and whites were permitted to ride the same city buses in Montgomery, Alabama, seating on the buses was racially segregated. Whites were to sit at the front of the bus and fill seats toward the rear. Blacks were to sit in the back of the bus and fill seats toward the front. If the bus was so crowded that a white person had to stand, a black bus rider was required by Montgomery city law to give up his or her seat to the white person.
Riding the bus home after a tiring day at work, Mrs. Rosa Parks, a black seamstress, refused to give up her seat on a city bus to a white man. The date was December 1, 1955, now regarded by many observers as the beginning of the modern civil rights movement. Mrs. Parks was arrested and subsequently bailed out of jail by E. D. Nixon, the Montgomery representative of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and a local leader of the NAACP. Later that evening Nixon was struck with the idea of having Montgomery's black citizens boycott the city's segregated bus system.
Other groups, including an organization of black women known as the Women's Political Council, also decided a bus boycott was the best way to respond to the arrest of Rosa Parks. An organizational meeting was held at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, and subsequently the minister at that church, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., was elected to lead the bus boycott. Montgomery's 40,000 blacks stayed off the city buses for more than a year, vowing not to return until the buses were totally desegregated. Many of the boycotters walked to their destinations. Others rode in car pools or received free automobile rides from volunteer drivers supporting the bus boycott.
"The major accomplishment of the Montgomery bus boycott was that it turned a nonviolent demonstration for racial integration into a national news story. Because of the large number of boycotters involved, and because boycotters carpooling and walking made good television film, the national television networks covered the bus boycott extensively. When the white community in Montgomery reacted with random acts of violence (buildings bombed, buses fired upon, physical harm to boycotters, etc.), there was even more national coverage. It was this news attention that made Martin Luther King, Jr., a national symbol of the new black resistance to segregation and enabled him to present to the American people his ideas on the nonviolent demonstration as a means of producing political and social change."
The bus boycott failed to convince the white political and governmental leadership in Montgomery to desegregate the city's buses. In November of 1956, almost one year after the bus boycott had begun, the United States Supreme Court ordered the city bus system in Montgomery to integrate racially. The court proved willing to act when the local white leadership would not. On December 21, 1956, with every word and move recorded by national and international television news, Martin Luther King and his supporters boarded a Montgomery city bus and were able to sit in any empty seat they wanted.
The most important result of the Montgomery bus boycott was that "it made nonviolent forms of protest against racial segregation big news items, both in the national and the local press. After Montgomery, no longer would demonstrators work in relative obscurity. Race relations, civil rights demonstrations, and violent white reactions to demonstrations henceforth were big news and played accordingly."
The emergence of Martin Luther King, Jr., in the mid-1950s was a key event in the escalating fight for civil rights. Through the experience gained during the Montgomery bus boycott, King learned that the northern and western United States were most likely to press for civil rights reform when a dramatic instance of racial segregation was presented on the news media, particularly television. King quickly became adept at organizing racial protests in southern cities, specifically choosing as his opponents racist public officials who would react against the demonstrators with violent means such as police clubs, police dogs, high pressure fire hoses, etc.
Two of these massive racial protests in the 1960s produced major civil rights bills. The impetus for Congress to enact the Civil Rights Act of 1964(which banned racial discrimination in public places) occurred following brutal white suppression of racial demonstrations led by Dr. King in Birmingham, Alabama, in the spring of 1963. An equally brutal reaction to a voting rights marchled by King in Selma, Alabama, in 1965 produced the Voting Rights Act of 1965(which gave the U.S. Government the power to register blacks to vote in southern states).
The Montgomery Advertiser article (December 4, 1955) reporting the start of the Boycott:
|
|
|
|
|
|
Home
