The civil rights phase: Montgomery bus boycott

If students know little else about the Movement, they have generally heard the name Rosa Parks.  On December 1, 1955, this 43-year-old seamstress boarded a Cleveland Avenue bus and sat in the first seat just behind the white section. 

At that time, in Montgomery , it was illegal for African Americans to ride in the front of the bus.  They had to pay their fare at the front, but then had to leave the bus and re-board it at the back.  Sometimes bus drivers would speed off when they were walking around to the back. And if white people were standing, Black people, as second-class citizens, had to give up their own seats. 

The bus Rosa Parks was on soon filled with white people.  A man was left standing.  The bus driver ordered the Black riders to give their seats up.  All but Parks obeyed.  The police were called in and she was arrested.

Rosa Parks is often portrayed as a tired woman, too exhausted after a long day's work to move.  The reality is that Parks was well aware of what she was doing.  She had been the first Secretary for the Alabama State Conference of NAACP branches.  The summer before her refusal to move on the bus, she had attended a workshop at the Highlander Center in Tennessee , a training center for organizing to bring about social change.

There was also a history in Montgomery of such individual acts of resistance.  Claudette Colvin, for example, a 15-year-old high-school sophomore, had seven months earlier refused to give her seat up for a white person.  She too was arrested, but she was not made the focus of a boycott because she soon became pregnant, and it was felt she was not the right role model.  Colvin was a member of the NAACP's youth branch in Montgomery , which Rosa Parks had founded.

The Black community quickly mobilized in support of Parks.  The NAACP saw in her case an opportunity to attack segregation on the streets and in the courts.   The one-day boycott organized by Jo Ann Robinson and the Women's Political Council grew to become a 381-day boycott.  The strategy was direct economic action.  The Black community refused to ride the buses. Their commitment to civil rights outweighed the difficulties they had to endure. 

Black churches became centers for organizing and renewal.  A group of ministers organized the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) to carry out the boycott.  The minister of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church , 26-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr., was nominated president of the MIA.  The organizing in Montgomery crossed class lines, and brought the entire African-American community together.

The white power structure reacted sharply against this affront to their power.  The Black community in Montgomery was, in effect, demanding equal treatment.  Whites feared that if they let Blacks sit in the front of the bus, they would soon demand more rights.  They might even want a share of the economic and political power.

The mayor of Montgomery soon began a "get-tough" policy, which really meant an official policy of harassment.  Many Black people who participated in the boycott were fired from their jobs.  Police targeted car-poolers with trumped-up tickets, some African Americans were physically attacked, and the home of Dr. King was bombed.  Despite this, the boycotters prevailed.

Movement veteran Hollis Watkins has said that one of the hardest obstacles Movement activists had to face was their own fear.  But once fear was overcome, activists could focus on their aims.  During the boycott, a Montgomery jury indicted 89 ministers, including King, with a rarely-used law.  Rather than await arrest, the boycotters immediately went to the courthouse and asked to be charged.  This was an example of how protestors not only faced fear, but claimed their own power.

Today, Montgomery is the site of a beautiful Civil Rights Memorial, which commemorates those who lost their lives in the struggle.