Montgomery bus boycott

For 382 days, from 5 December 1955 to 20 December 1956, most Black residents of Montgomery, Alabama, refused to ride the city's segregated buses. Triggered by the arrest of Rosa Parks, the protest held together through carpools, walking and mass meetings until a federal court case, Browder v. Gayle, ended bus segregation in the city. The boycott became a landmark of the civil rights movement in the United States and brought a young minister, Martin Luther King Jr., to national prominence.

Under Alabama's Jim Crow laws, Montgomery's buses were strictly divided. The first ten seats were kept for white passengers and the rear ones for Black passengers, with a middle section where Black riders had to give up a whole row if a single white person needed it. Black passengers often paid at the front and then had to re-board through the back door, and drivers sometimes pulled away before they could. Yet Black riders made up about three-quarters of the system's passengers. Earlier in 1955, teenagers Claudette Colvin and Mary Louise Smith had been arrested for refusing to give up their seats.

Rosa Parks, a seamstress and secretary of the local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), was sitting in the first row of the middle section on 1 December 1955. When a white man boarded, the driver, James F. Blake, ordered her row to move back. She refused and was arrested. Local activists had been looking for a test case, and E. D. Nixon, head of the local NAACP, saw Parks, respected and well known, as the right person to challenge the law.

That night the Women's Political Council, led by Jo Ann Robinson, circulated leaflets calling on Black residents to stay off the buses on Monday 5 December, the day of Parks's trial. She was convicted and fined $10 plus $4 costs. The one-day protest was so complete that a mass meeting that evening at Holt Street Baptist Church voted to continue. A new body, the Montgomery Improvement Association, chose King, a young minister recently arrived in the city at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, as its leader; Nixon believed the city's leaders had not yet had time to intimidate him. Its first demands were modest: courtesy from drivers, first-come seating within a segregated system and the hiring of Black drivers.

Boycotters organised a large carpool network and Black taxi drivers charged only the bus fare of ten cents until the city threatened them with fines. Many people walked everywhere, while churches across the country sent money and shoes. Membership of the segregationist White Citizens' Council grew, and the homes of King and Ralph Abernathy were bombed, along with Black churches. King and 88 other leaders and drivers were indicted under a 1921 ordinance against interfering with a business. King was fined $500, and the prosecution backfired by drawing national attention to the protest.

Meanwhile a civil suit against bus segregation, Browder v. Gayle, went to federal court. On 5 June 1956 a federal district court ruled that bus segregation in Alabama and Montgomery was unconstitutional, and on 13 November the Supreme Court upheld the ruling. The order took effect on 20 December 1956, and the boycott ended.

Integration of the buses was followed by shootings at buses, an attack on King's house and, in January 1957, the bombing of five Black churches and a white pastor's home; Klansmen charged later were acquitted. Parks, facing threats and unable to find work, eventually left Montgomery. Still, the boycott showed the power of mass nonviolent protest, encouraged similar campaigns elsewhere and led to the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Montgomery would again be at the centre of the movement during the Selma to Montgomery marches, and King led the wider movement until his assassination.

Our 1960 map shows the United States a few years after the boycott; Alabama lies in the Deep South.