Context-1955-1956

For African Americans across the South in the 1940s and 1950s, the everyday act of riding the bus to work meant sometimes risking harassment but always accepting the code of racial segregation. City laws separated white and Black riders and, in many cases, granted white passengers the power to take seats already claimed by Blacks. In Montgomery, Alabama, Blacks could never sit in the first 10 rows of the bus. If the Black section was filled to capacity, Black passengers had to stand, even if the white section remained empty. Bus drivers carried guns, and they often verbally and physically tormented Black passengers.

On March 2, 1955, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin was arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to whites. Another, more famous arrest occurred on December 1, after a white passenger attempted to take the seat occupied by Rosa Parks, who was sitting in the Black section and refused to move. The bus driver called the police, who took Parks to jail. While Parks projected a docile image, she had a long record of activism and served as secretary of the local branch of the NAACP. Her refusal to submit to Jim Crow regulations was a deliberate act of protest. News of her arrest sent shock waves through the city’s Black and white neighborhoods.

E.D. Nixon, a Pullman porter and local president of the NAACP, bailed Parks out of jail. Together, they hatched a plan to stage a one-day boycott that they hoped would force the city to modify segregated seating on city buses; they never expected the system to be dismantled entirely. The boycott was not the first such dramatic step taken by Blacks in Montgomery, but this effort would end differently.

The weekend following the arrest, hundreds tirelessly publicized the boycott. That Monday, December 5, nearly every African American stayed off of the buses. The streets flooded with thousands of Black residents walking to work. At a mass meeting that evening, locals voted to continue the boycott indefinitely, forming the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) to coordinate the protest. A newcomer to town, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., was chosen to head the organization.

After developing slowly, the boycott captured the attention of the country, and increasingly confident protestors expanded their goals. As talks with the city produced no results, the MIA decided in January 1956 to challenge segregation head-on, filing a class-action lawsuit that would compel the federal courts to rule on the constitutionality of bus segregation. The boycott ran through the summer. On December 13, the Supreme Court, in Browder v Gayle, decided in favor of the protestors, declaring segregation on intrastate travel unconstitutional. After 381 days of walking, carpooling, and waiting, Montgomery Blacks had won the right to sit wherever they chose.

Sources

Bending the Arc Project – The Bus Boycott 

Henry Lous Gates Jr., Life Upon These Shores: Looking At African American History 1513-2008, 1st ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 329-330.