On 1 December 1955 a black woman named Rosa Parks refused
to give up her seat on a full Montgomery bus. Bus company policy
dictated that black passengers fill seats from the back and white
passengers fill seats from the front. Where the sections met,
blacks were expected to yield to whites. The racist atmosphere
on buses was strengthened by the attitude of the all-white driving
staff, which was known to harass black passengers verbally, and
sometimes physically.
Parks was a seamstress for the Montgomery Fair department store
and a member of the local chapter of the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), having served as its
secretary in the 1940s. By her single unplanned act of defiance, she
caused a chain of events that concluded with a United States Supreme
Court decision prohibiting bus segregation and King's rise to national
prominence.
The driver whom Parks defied had her arrested, and she
was released on $100 bond. Her connections to the NAACP and the black
community in general meant that the case attracted instant city-wide
attention. She was arrested on a Thursday, and a group of community
leaders met immediately and planned a boycott for the following
Monday. Meanwhile, the NAACP lawyers took on her court case, optimistic
that they could ride the issue to the Supreme Court, in light of
their recent victory in the case of Brown v. Board of Education
of Topeka, Kansas.
The organizers of the boycott, who hailed from other black groups,
such as the NAACP and the Women's Political Council, met in the
basement of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, which King had offered
for that purpose. The group drafted three demands for the bus
company: that seating be available on a strictly first-come, first-served
basis; that drivers conduct themselves with greater civility to
black passengers; and that black drivers be hired for predominately
black routes. There was no call to integrate seating. To secure
these demands, no African Americans would ride the buses on Monday,
5 December.
And hardly any did; indeed, nearly 20,000 blacks supported
the action, and because blacks constituted the majority of the
bus system's customers, many buses drove around empty. Because
of the black community's eagerness to comply with the boycott–and because
of the bus company's refusal to capitulate- community leaders held
a second meeting on the afternoon of the boycott to plan an extended
protest. The group named itself the Montgomery Improvement Association,
or MIA, and elected King its president. Though only twenty-six,
he showed great promise as a leader, and was enough of a newcomer
to stand outside old local political rivalries. From the beginning,
and throughout the most trying, violent events of the lengthy boycott,
King never failed to emphasize the protest's rootedness in Christian
principles. Though they might be the victims of violence, black
protestors would engage in no acts of violence themselves; they
would "turn the other cheek." This set the tone for all of King's
subsequent campaigns.
The boycott lasted a year, and changed the character of
both King's life and the city of Montgomery. King became the target
of numerous telephoned threats and a few actual acts of violence.
His house was bombed; he was arrested under false pretenses; he
was sued for various reasons; he became very well known.
