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.
One night early in the boycott he had a religious epiphany,
which he described later: he had come home from a meeting and his
wife was asleep; the phone rang, and when he answered, another
anonymous caller threatened his life. After that he could not
sleep. He made some coffee and sat in his kitchen. For a moment
the path before him seemed aabsolutely impossible. Then, while
praying aloud, he felt the presence of God, very suddenly and very
intensely, as he never had before. King explained that this experience
reconciled him to the danger of the boycott and the protest actions
that followed.
Montgomery changed more slowly. To survive the boycott,
the black community formed a network of carpools and informal taxi services.
Some white employers were forced to transport their black employees
themselves. Many blacks walked long distances to work each day.
The boycott quickly began to hurt the businesses of city storeowners,
not to mention that of the bus company itself, which was losing
65% of its income.
But instead of considering the demands of the MIA, whites attempted
to end the boycott by other means, both unofficially, though a
series of bombings of churches and private homes, and officially,
through the courts. Because the MIA compensated drivers who transported
boycotters, the city sued it for running an illegal transit system.
King was in court defending the MIA against the injunction when
news arrived that the Supreme Court had ruled in favor of Rosa
Parks, and had made illegal the kind of bus segregation enforced
in Montgomery.
This ended the boycott, and on 21 December 1956, over
a year after Parks had refused to relinquish her seat, King joined
Ralph Abernathy and other boycott leaders for a ride on the first
desegregated bus. Violence continued in the wake of the boycott:
more homes and churches were bombed, and some white people threw stones
and shot bullets at buses. But however tenuous the victory was
at the local level, it marked a national success for King and for the
cause of African Americans as a whole.
