Montgomery Bus Boycott

Montgomery’s buses forced Black riders to pay at the front, enter at the rear, and give up seats to white passengers. The Women’s Political Council, a group of Black professional women founded in 1946, had pressed the mayor for changes since 1954 and warned that a boycott was possible. In 1955 two teenagers, Claudette Colvin and Mary Louise Smith, were arrested for refusing to give up their seats, but neither arrest mobilized the community.

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a respected NAACP leader, was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger. Jo Ann Robinson and the WPC printed leaflets calling for a one-day boycott on December 5, and E. D. Nixon gathered local ministers to support it.

On December 5, about 90 percent of Montgomery’s Black citizens stayed off the buses. That afternoon leaders formed the Montgomery Improvement Association and elected King, a 26-year-old pastor new to the city, as president. That night, at Holt Street Baptist Church, King told thousands, “If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong.”

The city refused the MIA’s modest demands. Boycotters walked or used an intricate carpool system of about 300 cars. Women such as Robinson and Johnnie Carr kept the committees running, and, as one organizer put it, “nameless cooks and maids” walked for a year. In early 1956 the homes of King and Nixon were bombed. Officials indicted more than 80 boycott leaders under a 1921 law against conspiracies that interfered with lawful business, and King was convicted. Bayard Rustin and others advised King on Gandhian nonviolence.

On June 5, 1956, a federal court ruled in Browder v. Gayle that bus segregation was unconstitutional; the Supreme Court affirmed in November. On December 20, 1956, when the order arrived, King called off the boycott, and the next morning he rode an integrated bus. King summed up its meaning: “it is more honorable to walk in dignity than ride in humiliation.”

The boycott’s combination of mass nonviolent protest and Christian ethics became the model for challenging segregation across the South. In 1957 King and other ministers founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to spread it.