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Montgomery Bus Boycott

This is Rosa Parks, an African American woman who refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery Alabama for a white passenger as the law demanded.

The Montgomery Bus

Rosa Parks was more than just a commuter. She was an activist who had planned to be arrested. Question: (Easy) Why did she want to be arrested? Boycott started in December 1955. What happened in Montgomery is seen as a pivotal point in the whole civil rights story and brought to prominence a seamstress called Rosa Parks.

The story behind the bus

boycott seems simple yet, as always, there is more to the story than

rst appears. After a full days work, Rosa Parks got a bus home. The bus was full in the sense that all the seats for white Americans were in use. Parks was seated in a seat for black Americans. A white man got on board and found that all the white seats were full. The bus driver told four black Americans to move further down the bus.

Three complied but Parks refused to give up her seat and was arrested.

In protest, a boycott of
the buses by black Americans in Montgomery began. It was probably the rst example of the economic clout that the community had because eventually, the bus company had to desegregate their buses or face serious nancial difculties as very many black Americans used the buses. Without their economic input via fares, the bus company of Montgomery faced probable bankruptcy.

W A Gayle, that a citywide boycott of the citys buses was being planned. The citys Womens Political Council was planning a boycott in 1955. To give their movement more impetus, they needed a respected member of the community to be arrested for violating city bus law.

Though some wanted to end the boycott after just one day, the vote taken that night showed that the majority wanted the boycott to continue.

City ofcials in
Montgomery tried to undermine the boycott. Black cab drivers had charged the same as the buses in an effort to get black people to work in lieu of there being no buses. However, city ofcials declared that the minimum fare that a cab driver could charge was 45 cents so the 10 cents being paid was effectively made illegal. To get around this, MIA introduced a private taxi plan whereby those blacks who owned their car picked up and dropped off people at designated points. This overcame the 45 cents fare issue.

A one-day boycott of the

citys buses was organised for Monday 5th December. It proved to be highly successful. A 26 year old minister at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church saw empty bus after empty bus drive down his road. He was Martin Luther King. He would later write that

However, there is more to

the story. Many believe that the act by Rosa Parks was a reaction after a hard days work and that it was not pre-planned. The evidence possibly suggests that the whole issue of a bus boycott had been some while in the planning. As early as 1954, twenty-ve local associations in Montgomery had informed the citys mayor,

the once dormant and

quiescent Negro community was now fully awake.

Those who had organised

the one-day boycott created an organisation called the Montgomery Improvement Association. King was elected its president. MIA had to decide whether to continue with the boycott or to bask in the success of the one-day boycott.

When MIA met with

ofcials from the bus company, they got nothing.

The white community of

Montgomery tried to use local newspapers to convince the black community that the boycott had been resolved

by printing a story that stated this. MIA had to do a lot of work in a short space of time to convince as many as was possible that the story was a hoax. On January 30th 1956, Kings home was bombed. Men driving the private taxi cabs were frequently arrested for the most minor of trafc violations. Insurance rms withdrew their insurance for the vehicles. King only got round this by getting insurance underwritten by Lloyds of London. On February 21st, King along with 88 other people was arrested for organising a boycott which violated an obscure law. He was ordered to pay $500 as a ne with $500 costs.

court deemed segregation on buses to be unconstitutional. The city authorities had argued that integration would lead to violence an argument rejected by two of the judges.

The black community of

Montgomery started using the buses again on December 21st 1956. However, the argument used by the citys leaders in court came true. Buses were shot at, four churches were bombed, and a bomb was found on the porch of Martin Luther Kings home. Seven white men were arrested for these but noone was ever found guilty a deal was done whereby those blacks arrested under the antiboycott laws had their charges dropped while the seven men had their charges dropped (though King still had to pay his $500 ne).

other ministers who worked in the south. The result of this meeting was the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Martin Luther King was elected its president. It wanted to build on the success on the civil rights movement in areas such as transport and education but in a nonviolent way.

Question(Meduim): Why
do you think this represented such a victory to the civil rights movement? Did something more important than desegregated buses come out of it?

Question (Advanced)
violence against Blacks in the South intensied after the end of the boycott. What potential explanations are there for this?

The boycott badly hit

shops in Montgomery as far fewer blacks were coming into the city centre. While shop keepers were opposed to integration, they faced losing their livelihood if the boycott continued.

The violence did end and

the integration of the buses in Montgomery went ahead with relative success. On January 10th and 11th 1956, ministers in MIA met in Atlanta

MIA also used the courts

to ght their case for an end to desegregation. By a 2 to 1 majority a federal