what was the montgomery bus boycott essay

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Course: US history   >   Unit 8

• Introduction to the Civil Rights Movement
• African American veterans and the Civil Rights Movement
• Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka
• Emmett Till

The Montgomery Bus Boycott

• "Massive Resistance" and the Little Rock Nine
• The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom
• The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965
• SNCC and CORE
• Black Power
• The Civil Rights Movement
• On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks , a black seamstress, was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama for refusing to give up her bus seat so that white passengers could sit in it.
• Rosa Parks’s arrest sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott , during which the black citizens of Montgomery refused to ride the city’s buses in protest over the bus system’s policy of racial segregation. It was the first mass-action of the modern civil rights era, and served as an inspiration to other civil rights activists across the nation.
• Martin Luther King, Jr. , a Baptist minister who endorsed nonviolent civil disobedience, emerged as leader of the Boycott.
• Following a November 1956 ruling by the Supreme Court that segregation on public buses was unconstitutional, the bus boycott ended successfully. It had lasted 381 days.

Rosa Parks’s arrest

Origins of the bus boycott, the boycott succeeds, what do you think.

• William H. Chafe, The Unfinished Journey: America Since World War II , eighth edition (New York: Oxford U.P., 2015), 153-154. For the details of her arrest see, “Police Department, City of Montgomery—Rosa Parks Arrest Report,” December 1, 1955.
• See James Patterson, *Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 400; Davis Houck, and Matthew Grindy, Emmett Till and the Mississippi Press (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2008), x.
• See Patterson, Grand Expectations , 400-401.
• Patterson, Grand Expectations , 405.
• Quoted in Chafe, The Unfinished Journey , 156.

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By: History.com Editors

Updated: February 20, 2024 | Original: November 9, 2009

Rosa Parks (1913—2005) helped initiate the civil rights movement in the United States when she refused to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, Alabama bus in 1955. Her actions inspired the leaders of the local Black community to organize the Montgomery Bus Boycott . Led by a young Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. , the boycott lasted more than a year—during which Parks not coincidentally lost her job—and ended only when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that bus segregation was unconstitutional. Over the next half-century, Parks became a nationally recognized symbol of dignity and strength in the struggle to end entrenched racial segregation .

Rosa Parks’ Early Life

Rosa Louise McCauley was born in Tuskegee, Alabama , on February 4, 1913. She moved with her parents, James and Leona McCauley, to Pine Level, Alabama, at age 2 to reside with Leona’s parents. Her brother, Sylvester, was born in 1915, and shortly after that her parents separated.

Did you know? When Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat in 1955, it wasn’t the first time she’d clashed with driver James Blake. Parks stepped onto his very crowded bus on a chilly day 12 years earlier, paid her fare at the front, then resisted the rule in place for Black people to disembark and re-enter through the back door. She stood her ground until Blake pulled her coat sleeve, enraged, to demand her cooperation. Parks left the bus rather than give in.

Rosa’s mother was a teacher, and the family valued education. Rosa moved to Montgomery, Alabama, at age 11 and eventually attended high school there, a laboratory school at the Alabama State Teachers’ College for Negroes. She left at 16, early in 11th grade, because she needed to care for her dying grandmother and, shortly thereafter, her chronically ill mother. In 1932, at 19, she married Raymond Parks, a self-educated man 10 years her senior who worked as a barber and was a long-time member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( NAACP ). He supported Rosa in her efforts to earn her high-school diploma, which she ultimately did the following year.

Rosa Parks: Roots of Activism

Raymond and Rosa, who worked as a seamstress, became respected members of Montgomery’s large African American community. Co-existing with white people in a city governed by “ Jim Crow ” (segregation) laws, however, was fraught with daily frustrations: Black people could attend only certain (inferior) schools, could drink only from specified water fountains and could borrow books only from the “Black” library, among other restrictions.

Although Raymond had previously discouraged her out of fear for her safety, in December 1943, Rosa also joined the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP and became chapter secretary . She worked closely with chapter president Edgar Daniel (E.D.) Nixon. Nixon was a railroad porter known in the city as an advocate for Black people who wanted to register to vote, and also as president of the local branch of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters union .

December 1, 1955: Rosa Parks Is Arrested

On Thursday, December 1, 1955, the 42-year-old Rosa Parks was commuting home from a long day of work at the Montgomery Fair department store by bus. Black residents of Montgomery often avoided municipal buses if possible because they found the Negroes-in-back policy so demeaning. Nonetheless, 70 percent or more riders on a typical day were Black, and on this day Rosa Parks was one of them.

Segregation was written into law; the front of a Montgomery bus was reserved for white citizens, and the seats behind them for Black citizens. However, it was only by custom that bus drivers had the authority to ask a Black person to give up a seat for a white rider. There were contradictory Montgomery laws on the books: One said segregation must be enforced, but another, largely ignored, said no person (white or Black) could be asked to give up a seat even if there were no other seat on the bus available.

Nonetheless, at one point on the route, a white man had no seat because all the seats in the designated “white” section were taken. So the driver told the riders in the four seats of the first row of the “colored” section to stand, in effect adding another row to the “white” section. The three others obeyed. Parks did not.

“People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired,” wrote Parks in her autobiography, “but that isn’t true. I was not tired physically… No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”

Eventually, two police officers approached the stopped bus, assessed the situation and placed Parks in custody.

Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott

Although Parks used her one phone call to contact her husband, word of her arrest had spread quickly and E.D. Nixon was there when Parks was released on bail later that evening. Nixon had hoped for years to find a courageous Black person of unquestioned honesty and integrity to become the plaintiff in a case that might become the test of the validity of segregation laws. Sitting in Parks’ home, Nixon convinced Parks—and her husband and mother—that Parks was that plaintiff. Another idea arose as well: The Black population of Montgomery would boycott the buses on the day of Parks’ trial, Monday, December 5. By midnight, 35,000 flyers were being mimeographed to be sent home with Black schoolchildren, informing their parents of the planned boycott.

On December 5, Parks was found guilty of violating segregation laws, given a suspended sentence and fined $10 plus $4 in court costs. Meanwhile, Black participation in the boycott was much larger than even optimists in the community had anticipated. Nixon and some ministers decided to take advantage of the momentum, forming the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) to manage the boycott, and they elected Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.–new to Montgomery and just 26 years old—as the MIA’s president.

As appeals and related lawsuits wended their way through the courts, all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court , the Montgomery Bus Boycott engendered anger in much of Montgomery’s white population as well as some violence, and Nixon’s and Dr. King’s homes were bombed . The violence didn’t deter the boycotters or their leaders, however, and the drama in Montgomery continued to gain attention from the national and international press.

On November 13, 1956, the Supreme Court ruled that bus segregation was unconstitutional; the boycott ended December 20, a day after the Court’s written order arrived in Montgomery. Parks—who had lost her job and experienced harassment all year—became known as “the mother of the civil rights movement.”

Rosa Parks's Life After the Boycott

Facing continued harassment and threats in the wake of the boycott, Parks, along with her husband and mother, eventually decided to move to Detroit, where Parks’ brother resided. Parks became an administrative aide in the Detroit office of Congressman John Conyers Jr. in 1965, a post she held until her 1988 retirement. Her husband, brother and mother all died of cancer between 1977 and 1979. In 1987, she co-founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development, to serve Detroit’s youth.

In the years following her retirement, she traveled to lend her support to civil-rights events and causes and wrote an autobiography, Rosa Parks: My Story . In 1999, Parks was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest honor the United States bestows on a civilian. (Other recipients have included George Washington , Thomas Edison , Betty Ford and Mother Teresa.) When she died at age 92 on October 24, 2005, she became the first woman in the nation’s history to lie in honor at the U.S. Capitol.

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The montgomery bus boycott.

Years before the boycott, Dexter Avenue minister Vernon Johns sat down in the "whites-only" section of a city bus. When the driver ordered him off the bus, Johns urged other passengers to join him. On March 2, 1955, a black teenager named Claudette Colvin dared to defy bus segregation laws and was forcibly removed from another Montgomery bus.

Nine months later, Rosa Parks - a 42-year-old seamstress and NAACP member- wanted a guaranteed seat on the bus for her ride home after working as a seamstress in a Montgomery department store. After work, she saw a crowded bus stop. Knowing that she would not be able to sit, Parks went to a local drugstore to buy an electric heating pad. After shopping, Parks entered the less crowded Cleveland Avenue bus and was able to find an open seat in the 'colored' section of the bus for her ride home.

Despite having segregated seating arrangements on public buses, it was routine in Montgomery for bus drivers to force African Americans out of their seats for a white passenger. There was very little African Americans could do to stop the practice because bus drivers in Montgomery had the legal ability to arrest passengers for refusing to obey their orders. After a few stops on Parks’ ride home, the white seating section of the bus became full. The driver demanded that Parks give up her seat on the bus so a white passenger could sit down. Parks refused to surrender her seat and was arrested for violating the bus driver’s orders.

Organizing the Boycott

Montgomery's black citizens reacted decisively to the incident. By December 2, schoolteacher Jo Ann Robinson had mimeographed and delivered 50,000 protest leaflets around town. E.D. Nixon, a local labor leader, organized a December 4 meeting at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church , where local black leaders formed the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA)to spearhead a boycott and negotiate with the bus company.

Over 70% of the cities bus patrons were African American and the one-day boycott was 90% effective. The MIA elected as their president a new but charismatic preacher, Martin Luther King Jr. Under his leadership, the boycott continued with astonishing success. The MIA established a carpool for African Americans. Over 200 people volunteered their car for a car pool and roughly 100 pickup stations operated within the city. To help fund the car pool, the MIA held mass gatherings at various African American churches where donations were collected and members heard news about the success of the boycott.

Roots in Brown v Board

Fred Gray, member and lawyer of the MIA, organized a legal challenge to the city ordinances requiring segregation on Montgomery buses. Before 1954, the Plessy v. Ferguson decision ruled that segregation was constitutional as long as it was equal. Yet, the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education U.S. Supreme Court decision outlawed segregation in public schools. Therefore, it opened the door to challenge segregation in other areas as well, such as city busing. Gray gathered Aurelia Browder, Susie McDonald, Claudette Colvin and Mary Louise Smith to challenge the constitutionality of the city busing laws. All four of the women had been previously mistreated on the city buses because of their race. The case took the name Browder v. Gayle. Gray argued their 14th Amendment right to equal protection of the law was violated, the same argument made in the Brown v. Board of Education case.

On June 5, 1956, a three-judge U.S. District Court ruled 2-1 that segregation on public buses was unconstitutional. The majority cited Brown v. Board of Education as a legal precedent for desegregation and concluded, “In fact, we think that Plessy v. Ferguson has been impliedly, though not explicitly, overruled,…there is now no rational basis upon which the separate but equal doctrine can be validly applied to public carrier transportation...”

The city of Montgomery appealed the U.S. District Court decision to the U.S. Supreme Court and continued to practice segregation on city busing.

For nearly a year, buses were virtually empty in Montgomery. Boycott supporters walked to work--as many as eight miles a day--or they used a sophisticated system of carpools with volunteer drivers and dispatchers. Some took station-wagon "rolling taxis" donated by local churches.

Montgomery City Lines lost between 30,000 and 40,000 bus fares each day during the boycott. The bus company that operated the city busing had suffered financially from the seven month long boycott and the city became desperate to end the boycott. Local police began to harass King and other MIA leaders. Car pool drivers were arrested and taken to court for petty traffic violations. Despite all the harassment, the boycott remained over 90% successful. African Americans took pride in the inconveniences caused by limited transportation. One elderly African American woman replied that, “My soul has been tired for a long time. Now my feet are tired, and my soul is resting.” The promise of equality declared in Brown v. Board of Education for Montgomery African Americans helped motivate them to continue the boycott.

The company reluctantly desegregated its buses only after November 13, 1956, when the Supreme Court ruled Alabama's bus segregation laws unconstitutional.

Beginning a Movement

The Montgomery bus boycott began the modern Civil Rights Movement and established Martin Luther King Jr. as its leader. King instituted the practice of massive non-violent civil disobedience to injustice, which he learned from studying Gandhi. Montgomery, Alabama became the model of massive non-violent civil disobedience that was practiced in such places as Birmingham, Selma, and Memphis. Even though the Civil Rights Movement was a social and political movement, it was influenced by the legal foundation established from Brown v. Board of Education.

Brown overturned the long held practice of the “separate but equal” doctrine established by Plessy. From then on, any legal challenge on segregation cited Brown as a precedent for desegregation. Without Brown, it is impossible to know what would have happened in Montgomery during the boycott.

The boycott would have been difficult to continue because the city would have won its challenge to shut down the car pool. Without the car pool and without any legal precedent to end segregation, the legal process could have lasted years. Those involved in the boycott might have lost hope and given up with the lack of progress. However, the precedent established by Brown gave boycotters hope that a legal challenge would successfully end segregation on city buses. Therefore, the influence of Brown on the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Civil Rights Movement is undeniable. King described Brown’s influence as, “To all men of good will, this decision came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of human captivity. It came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of colored people throughout the world who had had a dim vision of the promised land of freedom and justice . . . this decision came as a legal and sociological deathblow to an evil that had occupied the throne of American life for several decades.”

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Last updated: September 21, 2022

Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Montgomery Bus Boycott

Written by: Stewart Burns, Union Institute & University

By the end of this section, you will:.

• Explain how and why various groups responded to calls for the expansion of civil rights from 1960 to 1980

Suggested Sequencing

Use this narrative with the Jackie Robinson Narrative, The Little Rock Nine Narrative, The Murder of Emmett Till Narrative, and the Rosa Parks’s Account of the Montgomery Bus Boycott (Radio Interview), April 1956 Primary Source to discuss the rise of the African American civil rights movement pre-1960.

Rosa Parks launched the Montgomery bus boycott when she refused to give up her bus seat to a white man. The boycott proved to be one of the pivotal moments of the emerging civil rights movement. For 13 months, starting in December 1955, the black citizens of Montgomery protested nonviolently with the goal of desegregating the city’s public buses. By November 1956, the Supreme Court had banned the segregated transportation legalized in 1896 by the Plessy v. Ferguson ruling. Montgomery’s boycott was not entirely spontaneous, and Rosa Parks and other activists had prepared to challenge segregation long in advance.

On December 1, 1955, a tired Rosa L. Parks left the department store where she worked as a tailor’s assistant and boarded a crowded city bus for the ride home. She sat down between the “whites only” section in the front and the “colored” section in the back. Black riders were to sit in this middle area only if the back was filled. When a white man boarded, the bus driver ordered four African American passengers to stand so the white passenger could sit. The other riders reluctantly got up, but Parks refused. She knew she was not violating the segregation law, because there were no vacant seats. The police nevertheless arrived and took her to jail.

Parks had not planned her protest, but she was a civil rights activist well trained in civil disobedience so she remained calm and resolute. Other African American women had challenged the community’s segregation statutes in the past several months, but her cup of forbearance had run over. “I had almost a life history of being rebellious against being mistreated because of my color,” Parks recalled. On this occasion more than others “I felt that I was not being treated right and that I had a right to retain the seat that I had taken.” She was fighting for her natural and constitutional rights when she protested against the treatment that stripped away her dignity. “When I had been pushed as far as I could stand to be pushed. I had decided that I would have to know once and for all what rights I had as a human being and a citizen.” She was attempting to “bring about freedom from this kind of thing.”

Perhaps the incident was not as spontaneous as it appeared, however. Parks was an active participant in the civil rights movement for several years and had served as secretary of both the Montgomery and Alabama state NAACP. She founded the youth council of the local NAACP and trained the young people in civil rights activism. She had even discussed challenging the segregated bus system with the youth council before 15-year-old Claudette Colvin was arrested for refusing to give up her seat the previous March. Ill treatment on segregated city buses had festered into the most acute problem in the black community in Montgomery. Segregated buses were part of a system that inflicted Jim Crow segregation upon African Americans.

In 1949, a group of professional black women and men had formed the Women’s Political Council (WPC) of Montgomery. They were dedicated to organizing African Americans to demand equality and civil rights by seeking to change Jim Crow segregation in public transportation. In May 1954, WPC president Jo Ann Robinson informed the mayor that African Americans in the city were considering launching a boycott.

The WPC converted abuse on buses into a glaring public issue, and the group collaborated with the NAACP and other civil rights organizations to challenge segregation there. Parks was bailed out of jail by local NAACP leader, E. D. Nixon, who was accompanied by two liberal whites, attorney Clifford Durr and his wife Virginia Foster Durr, leader of the anti-segregation Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF). Virginia Durr had become close friends with Parks. In fact, she helped fund Parks’s attendance at a workshop for two weeks on desegregating schools only a few months before.

The Durrs and Nixon had worked with Parks to plot a strategy for challenging the constitutionality of segregation on Montgomery buses. After Parks’s arrest, Robinson agreed with them and thought the time was ripe for the planned boycott. She worked with two of her students, staying up all night mimeographing flyers announcing a one-day bus boycott for Monday, December 5.

Because of ministers’ leadership in the vibrant African American churches in the city, Nixon called on the ministers to win their support for the boycott. Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., a young and relatively unknown minister of the middle-class Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, was unsure about the timing but offered assistance. Baptist minister Ralph Abernathy eagerly supported the boycott.

On December 5, African Americans boycotted the buses. They walked to work, carpooled, and took taxis as a measure of solidarity. Parks was convicted of violating the segregation law and charged a $14 fine. Because of the success of the boycott, black leaders formed the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) to continue the protest and surprisingly elected Reverend King president.

Rosa Parks, with Martin Luther King Jr. in the background, is pictured here soon after the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

After earning his PhD at Boston University’s School of Theology, King had returned to the Deep South with his new bride, Coretta Scott, a college-educated, rural Alabama native. On the night of December 5, 1955, the 26-year-old pastor presided over the first MIA mass meeting, in a supercharged atmosphere of black spirituality. Participants felt the Holy Spirit was alive that night with a palpable power that transfixed. When King rose to speak, unscripted words burst out of him, a Lincoln-like synthesis of the rational and emotional, the secular and sacred. The congregants must protest, he said, because both their divinity and their democracy required it. They would be honored by future generations for their moral courage.

The participants wanted to continue the protest until their demands for fairer treatment were met as well as establishment of a first-come, first-served seating system that kept reserved sections. White leaders predicted that the boycott would soon come to an end because blacks would lose enthusiasm and accept the status quo. When blacks persisted, some of the whites in the community formed the White Citizens’ Council, an opposition movement committed to preserving white supremacy.

The bus boycott continued and was supported by almost all of Montgomery’s 42,000 black residents. The women of the MIA created a complex carpool system that got black citizens to work and school. By late December, city commissioners were concerned about the effects of the boycott on business and initiated talks to try to resolve the dispute. The bus company (which now supported integrated seating) feared it might go bankrupt and urged compromise. However, the commissioners refused to grant any concessions and the negotiations broke down over the next few weeks. The commissioners adopted a “get tough” policy when it became clear that the boycott would continue. Police harassed carpool drivers. They arrested and jailed King on a petty speeding charge when he was helping out one day. Angry whites tried to terrorize him and bombed his house with his wife and infant daughter inside, but no one was injured. Drawing from the Sermon on the Mount, the pastor persuaded an angry crowd to put their guns away and go home, preventing a bloody riot. Nixon’s home and Abernathy’s church were also bombed.

On January 30, MIA leaders challenged the constitutionality of bus segregation because the city refused their moderate demands. Civil rights attorney Fred Gray knew that a state case would be unproductive and filed a federal lawsuit. Meanwhile, city leaders went on the offensive and indicted nearly 100 boycott leaders, including King, on conspiracy charges. King’s trial and conviction in March 1956 elicited negative national publicity for the city on television and in newspapers. Sympathetic observers sent funds to Montgomery to support the movement.

In June 1956, the Montgomery federal court ruled in Browder v. Gayle that Alabama’s bus segregation laws violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equality and were unconstitutional. The Supreme Court upheld the decision in November. In the wake of the court victories, MIA members voted to end the boycott. Black citizens triumphantly rode desegregated Montgomery’s buses on December 21, 1956.

A diagram of the Montgomery bus where Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat was used in court to ultimately strike down segregation on the city’s buses.

The Montgomery bus boycott made King a national civil rights leader and charismatic symbol of black equality. Other black ministers and activists like Abernathy, Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, Bayard Rustin, and Ella Baker also became prominent figures in the civil rights movement. The ministers formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to protest white supremacy and work for voting rights throughout the South, testifying to the importance of black churches and ministers as a vital element of the civil rights movement.

The Montgomery bus boycott paved the way for the civil rights movement to demand freedom and equality for African Americans and transformed American politics, culture, and society by helping create the strategies, support networks, leadership, vision, and spiritual direction of the movement. It demonstrated that ordinary African American citizens could band together at the local level to demand and win in their struggle for equal rights and dignity. The Montgomery experience laid the foundations for the next decade of a nonviolent direct-action movement for equal civil rights for African Americans.

Review Questions

1. All of the following are true of Rosa Parks except

• she served as secretary of the Montgomery NAACP
• she trained young people in civil rights activism
• she unintentionally challenged the bus segregation laws of Montgomery
• she was well-trained in civil disobedience

2. The initial demand of those who boycotted the Montgomery Bus System was for the city to

• hire more black bus drivers in Montgomery
• arrest abusive bus drivers
• remove the city commissioners
• modify Jim Crow laws in public transportation

3. The Montgomery Improvement Association was formed in 1955 primarily to

• bring a quick end to the bus boycott
• maintain segregationist policies on public buses
• provide carpool assistance to the boycotters
• organize the bus protest

4. As a result of the successful Montgomery Bus Boycott, Martin Luther King Jr. was

• elected mayor of Montgomery
• targeted as a terrorist and held in jail for the duration of the boycott
• recognized as a new national voice for African American civil rights
• made head pastor of his church

5. The Federal court case Browder v. Gayle established that

• the principles in Brown v. Board of Education were also relevant in the Montgomery Bus Boycott
• the Montgomery bus segregation laws were a violation of the constitutional guarantee of equality
• the principles of Plessy v. Ferguson were similar to those in the Montgomery bus company
• the conviction of Martin Luther King Jr. was unconstitutional

6. All the following resulted from the Montgomery bus boycott except

• the formation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)
• the emergence of Martin Luther King Jr. as a national leader
• the immediate end of Jim Crow laws in Alabama
• negative national publicity for the city of Montgomery

Free Response Questions

• Explain how the Montgomery Bus Boycott affected the civil rights movement.
• Describe how the Montgomery Bus Boycott propelled Martin Luther King Jr. to national notice.

AP Practice Questions

Rosa Parks being fingerprinted by Deputy Sheriff D. H. Lackey after her arrest in December 1955.

1. Which of the following had the most immediate impact on events in the photograph?

• The integration of the U.S. military
• The Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson
• The Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education
• The integration of Little Rock (AR) Central High School

2. The actions leading to the provided photograph were similar to those associated with

• the labor movement in the 1920s
• the women’s suffrage movement in the early twentieth century
• the work of abolitionists in the 1850s
• the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s

3. The situation depicted in the provided photograph contributed most directly to the

• economic development of the South
• growth of the suburbs
• growth of the civil right movement
• evolution of the anti-war movement

Primary Sources

Burns, Steward, ed. Daybreak of Freedom: The Montgomery Bus Boycott. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

Garrow, David J, ed. Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It: The Memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson . Nashville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1987.

Greenlee, Marcia M. “Interview with Rosa McCauley Parks.” August 22-23, 1978, Detroit. Cambridge, MA: Black Women Oral History Project, Harvard University. https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/drs:45175350$14i

Suggested Resources

Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63 . New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988.

Brinkley, Douglas. Rosa Parks . New York: Penguin, 2000.

Rosa Parks Museum, Montgomery, AL. www.troy.edu/rosaparks

Williams, Juan. Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965 . New York: Penguin, 2013.

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Montgomery Bus Boycott

In March 1955, Claudette Colvin , a 15-year-old high school junior, refused to give up her bus seat to a white person. She was arrested for violating the segregated seating ordinances and mistreated by police. This angered the black community and sparked a brief, informal boycott of buses by many black residents. In August, Montgomery’s black community was shaken by the brutal lynching of 14-year-old Chicago native Emmett Till in Mississippi. Two months later, 18-year-old Mary Louise Smith, a house maid, was arrested for refusing to give up her seat. African Americans in Montgomery felt beleaguered.

Although Parks did not plan her calm, determined protest, she recalled that she had a life history of rebelling against racial mistreatment. She believed that she had been “pushed as far as [she] could stand to be pushed.” Parks was arrested and then bailed out that night by friend E. D. Nixon , a Pullman car porter who had headed the local and Alabama state branches of the NAACP, and by two white friends, attorney Clifford Durr and his activist wife, Virginia Durr . The Durrs and Nixon persuaded Parks to allow her arrest to be used as a test case for the constitutionality of bus segregation.

At the outset white officials and opinion leaders believed that the bus boycott would collapse quickly and that blacks were not capable of a long-term protest campaign. The white community solidified in opposition, spurred by growth of the local White Citizens’ Council , but a few brave white citizens, such as Virginia and Clifford Durr and city librarian Juliette Hampton Morgan , supported the civil rights effort.

In June 1956, halfway through the boycott, the federal court in Montgomery ruled in Browder v. Gayle that Alabama’s bus segregation laws, both city and state, violated the Fourteenth Amendment and were thus unconstitutional. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld that decision in November, and MIA members voted to end the boycott. At the same moment, the city’s belated injunction shut down the carpool system by making it illegal, but those who had driven joined those who had been walking all along. After the city government lost its final appeal in the Supreme Court, black citizens desegregated Montgomery’s buses on December 21, 1956. White extremists fired on buses and bombed churches, but the year-long bus protest ended in victory over the city’s Jim Crow laws.

Additional Resources

Boycott. DVD, directed by Clark Johnson. Los Angeles: Home Box Office, Inc., 2001.

Burns, Stewart, ed. Daybreak of Freedom: The Montgomery Bus Boycott . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

Eyes on the Prize: Awakenings (1954-1956). DVD, directed by Henry Hampton. Boston: Blackside, 1987.

Gray, Fred D. Bus Ride to Justice . Montgomery: Black Belt Press, 1994.

King, Martin Luther, Jr. Stride Toward Freedom . New York: Harper, 1958.

Robinson, Jo Ann Gibson. The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It . Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987.

Thornton, J. Mills III. Dividing Lines . Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002.

External Links

• Civil Rights Digital Library
• Troy University Rosa Parks Museum
• Justice Without Violence – Alabama Public Television

Stewart Burns Williams College

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Why was the Montgomery Bus Boycott so successful?

On December 1, 1955, a single act of defiance by Rosa Parks against racial segregation on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus ignited a year-long boycott that would become a pivotal moment in the Civil Rights Movement.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott, led by a young Martin Luther King Jr., mobilized the African American community in a collective stand against injustice, challenging the deeply entrenched laws of segregation in the South.

This historic protest signaled the power of nonviolent resistance and grassroots activism in the fight for racial equality.

Here is how it happened.

What were the causes of the boycott?

Before the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the city of Montgomery, Alabama, like much of the American South, enforced strict racial segregation laws, known as Jim Crow laws, which mandated separate public facilities for white and black citizens.

Public transportation was no exception, with buses segregated by race and black passengers often subjected to humiliating treatment.

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks , a seamstress and a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery bus, as was required by law.

Her arrest for this act of civil disobedience sparked outrage within the African American community.

In response, black leaders in Montgomery, including a young pastor named Martin Luther King Jr. , organized a meeting at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church to discuss a course of action.

They formed the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) to oversee the boycott and chose King as its president, recognizing his leadership potential and oratorical skills.

How did the Montgomery Bus Boycott work?

The Montgomery Bus Boycott officially began on December 5, 1955, the day of Rosa Parks' trial.

In preparation, flyers were distributed and announcements were made in black churches throughout the city, calling for African Americans to avoid using the buses on that day.

The response was overwhelming, with an estimated 90% of Montgomery's black residents participating in the boycott on the first day.

The boycotters' demands were simple: courteous treatment by bus drivers, first-come-first-served seating with blacks filling seats from the back and whites from the front, and the employment of black bus drivers on predominantly black routes. 

The success of the initial boycott led to a meeting at the Holt Street Baptist Church, where more than 5,000 black residents gathered to discuss the possibility of extending the protest.

With Martin Luther King Jr. emerging as a leading voice, the community decided to continue the boycott until their demands for fair treatment on the buses were met.

The boycott, initially planned to last for just one day, stretched on for 381 days, severely impacting the city's transit system and drawing international attention.

How did the authorities respond?

The city's response was initially dismissive, and the boycotters' resolve was met with resistance from white officials and citizens.

The city government and the bus company refused to negotiate, and legal and economic pressure was applied to try to break the boycott.

Despite these challenges, the black community's commitment to the boycott remained strong. 

They organized carpool systems, and many walked long distances to work, school, and church. 

The city's legal system targeted the boycott with injunctions and lawsuits, aiming to cripple the movement by arresting its leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr., on charges related to the boycott.

Economic pressure was also applied, as many black workers, who were participating in the boycott, faced threats of job loss or actual termination. 

King's eloquence and conviction were evident in his speeches and sermons, which he used to articulate the goals of the boycott and to call for unity and perseverance.

His home and the churches where he spoke became targets for segregationist violence, with his house being bombed in January 1956. 

Why did the boycott end?

The successful conclusion of the boycott, with the Supreme Court ruling in Browder v. Gayle that segregation on public buses was unconstitutional, was a testament to the effectiveness of coordinated, nonviolent protest. 

This Supreme Court ruling not only desegregated buses in Montgomery but also set a legal precedent that would be used to challenge other forms of segregation.

The boycott also propelled Martin Luther King Jr. into the national spotlight, establishing him as a prominent leader of the Civil Rights Movement. 

The Montgomery Bus Boycott had a profound impact on the Civil Rights Movement, setting a precedent for nonviolent protest and serving as a catalyst for future civil rights actions.

The successful boycott demonstrated the power of collective action and the effectiveness of nonviolent resistance, inspiring similar protests and boycotts across the South.

It also brought national and international attention to the struggle for civil rights in the United States, highlighting the injustices of segregation and racial discrimination.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott is often seen as the beginning of a new phase in the Civil Rights Movement, one that focused on direct action and mass mobilization.

It laid the groundwork for future campaigns, such as the sit-ins , Freedom Rides , and the March on Washington, which further advanced the cause of civil rights and social justice in America. 

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From Rosa Parks to Martin Luther King: the boycott that inspired the dream

A simple act of defiance by Rosa Parks in 1955 triggered one of the most celebrated civil rights campaigns in history. John Kirk examines how the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 launched the career of Martin Luther King Jr and changed the face of modern America

• Dr John A Kirk
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Rosa Louise Parks , a 42-year-old seamstress in a department store in downtown Montgomery, Alabama, boarded her bus home as usual after work on 1 December 1955. As the bus became crowded, white driver J Fred Blake told Parks and other black passengers to vacate their seats. Segregation laws dictated that white passengers had priority. The blacks duly moved. Except for Parks. She sat silently still. “If you don’t stand up, I’m going to call the police and have you arrested,” Blake shouted at her. “You may do that,” Parks calmly replied. Blake left the bus and returned with two policemen. “Why don’t you stand up?” one of the officers asked Parks. “Why do you push us around?” Parks answered. “I do not know,” said the officer, “but the law is the law and you are under arrest”. She was taken off to the city jail.

Parks’s arrest would have major ramifications. It led to a 13-month boycott of city buses in one of the longest mass mobilisations of a black population ever witnessed in the United States. The boycott’s church-based community activism and ministerial leadership, together with its spirit of non-violence, would become hallmarks of the civil rights movement over the next decade. Moreover, by thrusting 26-year-old Rev Dr Martin Luther King, Jr into the national spotlight, it provided a new leader for a new era of black activism.

Parks’s act of defiance and the bus boycott were not without historical precedent. When segregation ordinances were passed in southern cities in the late 19th and early 20th century, a number of southern black populations, including Montgomery’s, had organised short-lived boycotts of public transport. Since the 1940s, the growing population of southern cities had increased the amount of inter-racial contact and conflict on city buses. In 1953, blacks in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, boycotted buses for about a week until whites agreed to modify existing segregation practices. But the Parks case was different. It unfolded in the aftermath of a lawsuit brought by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1954, in which the US Supreme Court had handed down a landmark ruling.

In Brown v Board of Education, the court outlawed segregation in schools and thereby undermined its legal legitimacy in other areas. The initiative swung decisively towards blacks. Yet southern whites were determined not to give in. Many vowed a campaign of massive resistance to desegregation through legal and even extra-legal measures. In August 1955, a 14-year-old black boy, Emmett Till , was brutally murdered by whites in Mississippi for allegedly answering back to a white woman. Till’s murder was indicative of the charged post-Brown racial climate and caused national outrage by graphically illustrating the terror and violence that underpinned segregation.

Brown polarised southern race relations. In the past, there had been limited room for manoeuvre and negotiation over segregation practices at a local level. Brown largely put an end to that by raising the stakes. To blacks, it signalled that the time was right to press their case for racial reform. To whites, it signalled the need not to concede one inch of the segregated order. It was within this changing context of race relations that the Montgomery bus boycott unfolded.

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Two people in Montgomery’s black community were responsible for the bus boycott. One was Edgar Daniel (ED) Nixon, a train porter, union leader, and social and political activist. He had been a friend of Parks’s for a number of years and he was the one who arranged to bail her out of jail. The other was Jo Ann Robinson, a college teacher and head of the city’s Women’s Political Council. Nixon and Robinson agreed to organise a one-day bus boycott to protest Parks’s treatment. Robinson took charge of publicising the boycott and Nixon arranged a mass meeting to rally support.

A reluctant host

Martin Luther King was drawn into developments when Nixon requested the use of his Dexter Avenue Baptist Church for the meeting. Yet, initially, the man who was to become arguably the most celebrated civil rights leader of the 20th century, was reluctant to become involved. He had been pastor at Dexter for little over a year, his wife Coretta had just had their first child, Yolanda Denise, and becoming embroiled in a controversial protest risked putting his family in harm’s way. So, at first, he told Nixon he would think it over. Soon after, Rev Ralph Abernathy, another young black pastor, called King to seek his help. When Nixon phoned back, King agreed to host the meeting.

King’s involvement quickly snowballed. When black leaders in the city sought a leader for the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) – an organisation they had established to orchestrate the bus boycott – King quickly became their first choice. Some candidates feared incurring the wrath of angry whites and drew back; others were willing to serve, but existing black leaders did not want to see any of their rivals take such an important position. King’s relative youth, inexperience, and newcomer status, made him the perfect man for the position. Under pressure of nomination, he agreed to take the job.

King’s position as a church minister played a vital role in his choice. Ministers were among the few blacks whose jobs were not financially dependent on whites. They were therefore economically less vulnerable to reprisals. Black churches provided crucial community focal points and information networks as they were among the few institutions entirely owned and controlled by blacks. Black churches formed bases for mass meetings and added religious sanction and resolve to collective action.

With the NAACP increasingly becoming the focus of a white backlash after the Brown decision and branch membership declining under sustained white harassment, the emergence of black church leadership in Montgomery was a timely new development. Just as the momentum was moving its way, local NAACP branches were at their weakest, and so the responsibility of sustaining the movement now fell to the clergy. Following the bus boycott, King became president of a new civil rights organisation, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), whose aim it was to combine and co-ordinate black church networks across the South.

The rift grows

When King and MIA leaders met with white officials they were disappointed. The MIA issued only three modest demands: a modified system of segregation on buses, which meant that black passengers would not be forced to stand; better treatment from white bus drivers; and the hiring of black bus drivers on predominantly black routes. White officials rejected their proposals outright. From that point the boycott spiralled. As blacks became more determined not to concede their demands, whites became even more determined not to give in to them.

King increasingly became the focus of attention. On 26 January 1956, he was arrested by city police for allegedly driving 30 miles per hour in a 25 miles per hour speed zone. Although he only spent a short time in jail before making bail, the arrest shook him. He had become a marked man. “Almost every day,” King recalled, “someone warned me that he had overheard white men making plans to get rid of me”. Later that night, unable to sleep, King went to his kitchen to make coffee. He prayed for the strength to continue. Then, he heard a voice telling him to, “Stand up for truth; and God will be at your side forever”. The moment had a profound impact on King. His leadership was no longer just a matter of civic responsibility; it had become a religious calling.

King’s faith was tested a few nights later when segregationists bombed his home with his wife and baby daughter inside it. He rushed to the scene to find that no-one had been seriously injured. A growing crowd of angry blacks surveyed the scene, yet King eased tensions by telling them, “I want you to love your enemies… what we are doing is just. And God is with us”. Most observers agreed that only King’s words prevented a riot.

The day after the bombing the MIA filed a lawsuit demanding the desegregation of city buses in Montgomery. Withlittle sign of compromise the dispute had escalated from modest demands for reform to an all-out strike on segregation. As the dispute was played out in the courts, the boycott continued. Blacks were determined not to return to the buses until the courts ruled in their favour, and their stance began to attract national attention. The country’s newspapers and television stations were particularly intrigued with King and his championing of non-violent protest.

It’s true that, from an early stage, King insisted that the bus boycott would be a peaceful protest. However, his account of the “pilgrimage to non-violence” in his 1958 book, Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story , was wildly exaggerated. To be sure, King had encountered the idea of non-violence in his academic studies prior to the boycott, yet as a representative from a national civil rights organisation reported at the time, King admitted to knowing “very little” about non-violent tactics. Another visitor to his home was shocked to find armed men standing guard and loaded weapons lying around.

United they sat

In truth, the Montgomery bus boycott was just the beginning of King’s understanding of non-violence. Historian David Garrow has argued that this understanding evolved in two stages. After Montgomery and up until 1963, King’s focus was mainly on “non-violent persuasion” and trying to convince whites of the righteousness of the civil rights cause. However, beginning in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963, King started to adopt a tactic of “non-violent coercion”. This placed pressure on segregation through direct action tactics such as sit-ins and demonstrations. King would continually develop the idea of non-violence and its practical uses throughout his life.

The legal process in the Montgomery case took almost a year to reach its conclusion. The US Supreme Court finally ruled an end to segregation on city buses in November 1956. After white city officials had exhausted the appeals process, they were served with papers to desegregate on 20 December.

The next morning, King was one of the first passengers to board an integrated bus. “I believe you are Reverend King, aren’t you?” asked the white bus driver. King said that he was. “We are very glad to have you this morning,” came the reply.

The story did not end there. Whites waged a campaign of violence to try to dissuade black passengers from travelling on integrated buses. But blacks held firm. There was no going back. As one black janitor told a white northern reporter, “We got our heads up now and we won’t ever bow down again!”.

The end of the bus boycott was only the beginning of an embryonic civil rights movement. King may be remembered as an inspirational figurehead, but he looked upon his role with some trepidation. “People will be expecting me to pull rabbits out of the hat for the rest of my life,” he wrote to a family friend. Indeed, it would take time for King to become an experienced leader. It would take other leaders, other organisations, and the efforts of thousands of black people working for change in their own localities, to transform the segregated South.

But Montgomery was an important start. With its church-based mass mobilisation, its black ministerial leadership, its cultivation of the idea of non-violence, and its projection of Martin Luther King, Jr, onto the national stage, the Montgomery bus boycott provided the blueprint for what would follow. Not least, it proved that segregation could be overcome by black action, a fact that inspired many others. “Somewhere in the universe,” Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver later wrote, “a gear in the machinery had shifted”.

Martin Luther King, Jr (1929–68)

Born 15 January 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia, King attended Atlanta’s Morehouse College before studying at two predominantly white northern institutions: Crozer Seminary in Pennsylvania for his divinity degree and Boston University for his PhD. At Boston, King met his wife Coretta Scott.

After the Montgomery bus boycott, King helped to found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and became its president. It was in Birmingham in 1963 that King and the SCLC made their distinctive contribution to the movement – the short-term mass mobilisation of a black population in non-violent direct action demonstrations. Such tactics soon became their hallmark.

King and the civil rights movement were most successful between 1963 and 1965. Mass demonstrations in various localities helped to forge a national consensus for racial change. This crystallised in the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.

From 1965 until his 1968 assassination, King’s attention moved from civil rights to human rights. He criticised US foreign policy in Vietnam and campaigned against poverty.

In the US, the third Monday in January is now recognised as the Martin Luther King, Jr National Holiday in his honour.

Rosa Louise Parks (1913–2005)

She was born Rosa Louise McCauley in Alabama in 1913 and her parents separated when she was a child. She moved to Montgomery with her mother. She married Raymond Parks and both became active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In August 1955, Parks attended classes at Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, including one on “Racial Desegregation: Implementing the Supreme Court Decision”. Because of her role in the bus boycott, Parks was fired from her job and suffered death threats from whites in Montgomery. She moved to Detroit in 1957, working for black congressman John Conyers. Awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 1999, the highest civilian award in the US, she lived in Detroit until her death on 24 October 2005. Parks will always be remembered as the mother of the civil rights movement. This article was first published in the December 2005 issue of BBC History Magazine

Dr John A Kirk is senior lecturer in US history at Royal Holloway

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"Montgomery Bus Boycott at a Glance"

Author:  Alabama Council on Human Relations (ACHR)

Date:  December 1, 1955 to December 31, 1955

Location:  Montgomery, Ala.

Genre:  Report

Topic:  Montgomery Bus Boycott

Source: ACHRP, Alabama Council on Human Relations Papers.

©  Copyright Information

Primary Sources: Civil Rights in America - Events: Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955)

• Alcatraz Occupation (1969)
• Brown v. Board of Ed. (1954)
• Central High (Little Rock, AK) [1957]
• Chicago Race Riot (1919)
• Dakota Access Pipeline/Standing Rock (2016)
• Emmett Tilll Murder (1955)
• ERA: Equal Rights Amendment
• Freedom Riders (1961)
• Freedom Summer (1964)
• Jackson State College Shooting (1970)
• Japanese Internment (1942)
• Loving v. Virginia (1967)
• March on Washington (1963)
• March on Washington Movement (1940s)
• Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike (1968)
• Mendez v. Westminster School District (1947)
• Miss America Protests (1968)
• "Mississippi Burning" Case (1964)
• Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955)
• Orangeburg Massacre (1968)
• Osage Indian Murders (1920s)
• 16th St. Church Bombing (1963)
• Selma to Montgomery March (1965)
• Scottsboro (1931)
• Sleepy Lagoon & Zoot Suit Riots (1943)
• Slavery & Abolition This link opens in a new window
• The Southern Manifesto (1956)
• Suffrage - Women
• Tulsa Race Massacre (1921)
• University of Alabama (1963)
• University of Mississippi (1962)
• Wounded Knee Occupation (1973)

Online Sources: Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955)

• An Act of Courage, The Arrest Records of Rosa Parks
• An African-American Woman Describes Segregated Buses in Montgomery, Alabama more... less... "During the Montgomery bus boycott, researchers from Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee visited Montgomery to learn more about the boycott and document it. Researcher Willie Lee interviewed an African-American woman who worked as a domestic, who described how black riders had been treated on the buses. She was interviewed at one of the several car pool stations established to transport the boycotters."
• African-American Women Threaten a Bus Boycott in Montgomery more... less... "This letter from the Women's Political Council to the Mayor of Montgomery, Alabama, threatens a bus boycott by the city's African Americans if demands for fair treatment are not met."
• Bayard Rustin Explains Car Pools in the Montgomery Bus Boycott more... less... "African-American civil rights activist Bayard Rustin advised Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., on the Montgomery bus boycott. In this excerpt from his diary, Rustin describes how the city's black residents found ways to get to and from work without using the buses."
• Browder v. Gayle, 142 F. Supp. 707 (M.D. Ala. 1956)
• Documents From the Montgomery Bus Boycott 1955-1956 (CRMV)
• Interview with Rosa Parks (video) more... less... "Interview with Rosa Parks conducted for Eyes on the Prize I. Discussion centers on life in Montgomery, her decision to refuse to comply with segregation on the bus line, and the bus boycott."
• INVESTIGATE: Why did the boycott of Montgomery's buses succeed? more... less... Provides a selection of related primary sources.
• Local Activists Call for a Bus Boycott in Montgomery more... less... "This leaflet, produced by Jo Ann Robinson and others in response to Rosa Parks' arrest on December 1, 1955, called for all African Americans to stay off city buses on Monday, December 5. Robinson was president of the Women's Political Council, an organization of African-American professional women who worked for greater political influence from the Black community. She was later arrested for her role in the boycott."
• Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955-1956) [King Encyclopedia]
• Montgomery Bus Boycott (Civil Rights Digital Library)
• The Montgomery Bus Boycott: They Changed the World more... less... A website from the Montgomery Advertiser newspaper that includes photos, interviews, etc.
• Montgomery Improvement Association Advises on Integrated Bus Patronage more... less... "The U.S. Supreme Court decision that ended the Montgomery bus boycott introduced integrated public transportation to the city in December 1956. Anticipating mixed reactions to the boycott's success, the Montgomery Improvement Association distributed this pamphlet as an advisory guide to passengers reboarding the buses after a year of protest."
• The Other Rosa Parks: Now 73, Claudette Colvin Was First to Refuse Giving Up Seat on Montgomery Bus
• The Power of African American Women Disc 1 more... less... Part 1: "Commentary of a Black Souther Busrider" by Rosa Parks (April 1956 interview) Part 2: "We Want To Be Free" by Dorothy Dandridge (speaking at a Freedom Rally at Wrigley Field, 26 May 1963) Part 3: "The Negro In American Culture" by Lorraine Hansberry (From a panel on Black perceptions of the American setting in art. WBAI, 10 january 1961)
• The Power of African American Women Disc 8 more... less... "The Power Of African-American Women" Four part program which examines the work and impact of several African-American women: Sweet Honey in the Rock, Shirley Chisholm, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Rosa Parks.
• Rare 1956 Interview with Parks During the Montgomery Bus Boycott more... less... "Rosa Parks, interviewed in April 1956 by Pacifica radio station KPFA. The interview comes from the “”:In Pacifica Radio Archives."
• Reverend Abernathy Recalls the Montgomery Improvement Association's First Meeting more... less... "In the following excerpt, Reverend Ralph Abernathy remembers the first mass meeting of the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) at a local Baptist church on the first day of the boycott. After this, the MIA held regular weekly meetings until the boycott ended."
• Rosa Parks Papers (Library of Congress) more... less... "The papers of Rosa Parks (1913-2005) span the years 1866-2006, with the bulk of the material dating from 1955 to 2000. The collection contains approximately 7,500 items in the Manuscript Division, as well as 2,500 photographs in the Prints and Photographs Division. The collection documents many aspects of Parks's private life and public activism on behalf of civil rights for African Americans." Library of Congress

Book Sources: Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955)

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• Last Updated: Apr 23, 2024 2:58 PM
• URL: https://cnu.libguides.com/civilrightsevents

The Early Years of Rosa Parks: a Portrait of Courage and Resilience

This essay about the early life of Rosa Parks sheds light on the formative experiences and influences that shaped her into a symbol of courage and resilience. It explores Parks’ upbringing in the racially segregated South, highlighting her determination to challenge injustice from a young age. From her involvement in the civil rights movement to her pivotal role in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Parks’ unwavering commitment to equality and justice continues to inspire generations. This summary encapsulates how Parks’ upbringing and experiences laid the foundation for her historic act of defiance and her enduring legacy as a champion of civil rights.

How it works

In the annals of American history, few figures stand as tall as Rosa Parks. Known as the “Mother of the Civil Rights Movement,” Parks’ defiance of racial segregation on a Montgomery, Alabama bus in 1955 sparked a wave of activism that would forever change the course of the nation. However, the roots of Parks’ courage and resilience can be traced back to her humble beginnings in the racially segregated South.

Rosa Louise McCauley was born on February 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Alabama. Growing up in the midst of Jim Crow laws, which enforced racial segregation in the Southern United States, Parks experienced firsthand the injustices of discrimination.

Despite these challenges, she was instilled with a strong sense of dignity and self-worth by her family, particularly her mother, Leona.

Parks’ early life was marked by both hardship and determination. After her parents separated when she was young, she moved with her mother and younger brother to her grandparents’ farm in Pine Level, Alabama. There, she attended a one-room schoolhouse for African American children, where she excelled academically despite the limited resources available to her.

As a young woman, Parks became actively involved in the civil rights movement, joining the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) in 1943. She served as the chapter’s secretary and youth advisor, working alongside other activists to challenge racial inequality in the city.

Despite her contributions to the civil rights cause, Parks’ name would not become synonymous with resistance until December 1, 1955. On that fateful day, she boarded a city bus after a long day of work as a seamstress and took a seat in the “colored” section. When the bus driver demanded that she give up her seat to a white passenger, Parks refused, setting off a chain of events that would lead to her arrest and the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Parks’ arrest galvanized the African American community in Montgomery, sparking a 381-day boycott of the city’s bus system led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The boycott ultimately resulted in a Supreme Court ruling that declared segregation on public buses unconstitutional, marking a significant victory for the civil rights movement.

Throughout her life, Rosa Parks remained committed to fighting for equality and justice for all Americans. She continued to be involved in activism until her death in 2005, receiving numerous awards and honors for her contributions to the advancement of civil rights.

In conclusion, Rosa Parks’ early life shaped her into the courageous and resilient figure that she became. From her upbringing in the segregated South to her pivotal role in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Parks’ journey serves as a powerful reminder of the enduring impact of one individual’s determination to stand up for what is right.

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Home — Essay Samples — Social Issues — Montgomery Bus Boycott — How the Montgomery Bus Boycott Impacted the Civil Rights of the African-american

How The Montgomery Bus Boycott Impacted The Civil Rights of The African-american

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Martin Luther King and the Montgomery bus boycott for Leaving Cert History #625Lab

What was the contribution of martin luther king to the montgomery bus boycott and to other aspects of us life.

#625Lab – History , marked 85/100, detailed feedback at the very bottom. You may also like:  Leaving Cert History Guide  (€).

Martin Luther King, Jr. was a well-known civil rights leader and activist who had a great deal of influence on American society in the 1950s and 1960s. He contributed greatly to the events of the Montgomery bus boycott and to other aspects of US life through his non-violent actions. In 1954 in America, the US Supreme Court removed the legal basis for segregation in education. However, in the southern states Jim Crow laws continued to enforce segregation and discrimination in housing, transport and various public facilities.

In Montgomery, Alabama, a southern city with a long history of racial tension, segregated seating was present on buses. African American people could only sit at the back for the bus and had to stand up for a white people if the front seats were occupied. On the evening of 1 December 1955, an African American seamstress Rosa Parks got on a bus in downtown Montgomery. When asked to move to let a white person sit down, she refused. The police were called and minutes later, Rosa Parks was arrested. Parks was well known and respected in the African American community in Montgomery, and she has been secretary of the Montgomery NAACP. From jail she phoned Daniel Nixon, leader of the NAACP in Alabama. He agreed to pay her bail and decided that they could go the Supreme Court with this case, and boycott the bus. Nixon knew that challenging racism in the supreme courts would require the support of other African American leaders. He contacted the reverend Ralph Abernathy and the reverend Martin Luther King, a popular young baptist minister. King’s popularity in the community gave this case credibility.

A one day bus boycott for December 5, 1955 was organised by the women’s political committee, the day parks was due in court. Meanwhile, threats of violence against bus drivers were present in the African American community. In order to prevent violence, on 2 December Nixon , Abernathy and King called a meeting in King’s church. Over 40 religious and civic leaders from the African American community agreed to support the boycott. Their message was one of non co-operation. Organisers hoped that 60% of the community would back the boycott but it turned out to be almost 100%. King attended Rosa Parks’ trial that day where she was found guilty, and fined $14. Nixon called for an appeal.

The elders of the boycott met up and set up a permanent organisation for the boycott as they had already decided that it should last more than one day. They called it the Montgomery improvement association. Martin Luther King was unanimously elected leader of the group. That evening he addressed a huge crowd at a meeting held by the MIA. He urged them to follow non-violent Christian principles, to use persuasion, not coercion. The MIA wanted segregation on buses to end, black people to be treated with courtesy by bus drivers and for black drivers to be employed on the buses. King closed the meeting by calling on all those in favour to stand. Everybody stood. This was the grinning of King’s important contribution to the Montgomery bus boycott.

King was a dedicated and popular minister at the Dexter Anne Baptist church in Montgomery and was active in the local branch of the NAACP. He was young, energetic and a brilliant public speaker. King and the other leaders held meetings to plan strategy and set up a transportation committee to raise funds and organise alternative transport for African Americans. After Christmas 1955, when it became clear that the African American community were determined it continue the boycott, some white people began to use measures aimed at forcing them to give up. On 22 January the city announced that the boycott was over and that a settlement had been reached. King shut down these rumours by responding quickly and telling the African Americans to ignore these reports. It was quick thinking like this by King that ensured that the bus boycott was a success. He was also arrested for breaking an old law which prohibited boycotts. His arrest and trial made headlines and international news, bringing more publicity to the movement.

On 13 December, the US Supreme Court declared that segregated seating on public buses was unconstitutional. The Supreme court’s decision was to come into operation on 20 December 1956. On 21 December , in a symbolic gesture, King and a white minister, Glenn Smiley, sat together in what was previously a whites-only section on a bus. King and his associates had successfully made segregation on public transport illegal. He had successfully contributed to both the Montgomery bus boycott and to the Black Civil rights movement in America.

In 1957, King helped to set up the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Its aim was to continue working for change, using non-violent tactics. In 1958 the SCLC began its crusade to double the number of African- American voters in the South by 1960. In 1960, some African-American students began ‘sit-ins’ at segregated lunch counters. King supported them and was arrested in October 1960. This brought publicity to the protest. By the end of the year the peaceful sit-in campaign by over 50,000 young people had succeeded in desegregating public facilities in more than 100 cities in the south.

In April 1963, King organised a protest march in Birmingham, Alabama – a big industrial city known for its racial prejudice. The marchers filled the streets day after day, singing ‘We shall Overcome’. King was arrested, and his ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ was one of the most effective documents of the civil rights movements. On 8 May, six thousand African-American children marched through Birmingham. On the following day the police chief, Eugene O’Connor, ordered is men to use water houses, electric cattle prods and dogs against the protesters. Crucially, these events were broadcast live on national television and shocked audiences, winning widespread white support for King. The president sent officials to negotiate with he city authorities. The violence ended and the protestors were granted most of their demands. Kennedy brought in a civil Rights Bill providing for an end to all discrimination and an extension of voting rights for African Americans. This bill was delayed by congress, but King still contributed greatly to the progression of civil rights for African Americans with this protest march.

One of Martin Luther’s most famous contributions to the Black civil rights movement occurred in August of 1963, when King led a march on Washington, D.C to demonstrate for ‘jobs and freedom’. Over 200,00 protestors joined the march and he made his famous ‘I have a dream speech’ . Kennedy feared that the march would make it difficult to get his civil rights bill passed but it was peaceful and orderly, and helped to get the bill passed a year later. The bill was passed in 1964, and it banned discrimination in all public accommodation, outlawed job discrimination and reduced the power of local voter registration boards to disqualify African Americans from voting. This was yet another victory for King and the movement. Martin Luther King condemned the Vietnam war. King said that the war wastes lives and misuses American resources. The Vietnam war went against hi non-violent agenda. This public condemnation contributed to public outcry concerning the war.

In 1964, small-scale violence erupted in Harlem. In August 1965, five days after the civil rights bill was signed by the President, a huge riot broke out in Watts, an African-American ghetto in Los Angeles. For six days, looting and fighting between African-American youths and police raged. The riot greatly upset King and he moved the SCLC headquarters to Chicago, determined to shift his focus from the south to the northern ghettos and the problems of jobs and housing. During the summers of 1966 and 1967, further rioting took place in the north . In 1967, 83 people were killed in 164 different riots, causing over $100 million in damages to property. The civil rights movement became divided as king appealed for calm and denounced the violence and insisted that militants only represented a minority of African Americans. In April 1968, King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. His death seemed to destroy any hope of resolving the race problem.

Martin Luther King made enormous contributions to both the Montgomery bus boycott and to US life by progressing the Civil rights movement through non-violent means. He started a progression towards equality that ultimately resulted in the legal equality between black and white people in America in today’s society. He is remembered to this day as an iconic figure in the civil rights movement , both in America and internationally.

Feedback : This essay is a really good length and answers the question well. Your paragraphs are detailed and full of relevant historical fact, with lots of statistics. You use a few short quotations, but it would be better to incorporate a few more. Your introduction does its job well and the conclusion is good as it doesn’t just summarise, it also ties the topic into the present day. The way you use the order of importance in some of your key sentences, like “ One of Martin Luther’s most famous contributions ”, is good as it adds an extra layer to your judgement.

Cumulative Mark: For your cumulative mark, this would definitely achieve the maximum 60 out of 60 marks, as there are enough well-written paragraphs to accumulate this mark.

Overall Evaluation Mark: For Overall Evaluation, I’d give this about 25 marks out of 40. This is a really good mark, but you can improve it if you want by including some more quotation, doing some extra reading or by providing some more detailed analysis of the facts you present.

Total Mark: 85/100

Why did the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1956) take place, how was it carried out, and to what extent was it successful? (2015)

#625Lab – History , marked 90/100, detailed feedback at the very bottom. You may also like:  Leaving Cert History Guide  (€).

Although the American Constitution of 1791 declared that “all men were created equal… they are endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights”, this was a far cry from the reality reflected in society in the first half of the twentieth century. This was particularly true for states like Alabama in the Deep South where Jim Crow laws were enforced, which promoted a “separate but equal” treatment of the races. Alabama’s capital was Montgomery, a city with 50,000 blacks and 70,000 whites. The city’s bus company followed the pattern of segregation and harsh penalties were enforced on anyone who dared to question the status quo. In the middle of the twentieth century, however, this would change as a result of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a tremendous statement of defiance which would change the face of America.

It could be argued that the origins of the boycott have their roots in 1943, when a black seamstress named Rosa Parks paid for her bus fare and then watched the bus drive off as she tried to enter the bus through the blacks-only rear door. Like many black women at the time, Parks was working in a low-paid job and was now starting to question the treatment her race was receiving. The seed had been sown for the next episode in her career as an activist.

On Thursday 1st December 1955, she boarded a city bus on the way home from work and when the bus became full with white passengers and the driver demanded that four black passengers move back one row to make room, Parks refused. She iconically said “I don’t think I should have to” before being promptly arrested. Parks was a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, so naturally E.D. Nixon, the organisation’s leader, took an interest in her case. He had been looking for somebody to test out his boundaries in the courts in the hope of getting Jim Crow laws declared as constitutional. He had been curious about the similar case of fifteen year-old Claudette Colvin months before, but when it was revealed that she was pregnant he lost interest as he needed to be certain that he “had somebody [he] could win with”. On the other hand, Parks was respectable, had been educated at the Laboratory School in Alabama State College and attended church regularly. After discussing the risks with her husband and mother, Rosa Parks agreed to be the figurehead of the campaign. This episode catalysed the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

The boycott was organised by the MIA (Montgomery Improvement Association) with the aid of the Womens’ Political Council of Montgomery, led by Jo Ann Robinson, and the black ministers of Montgomery such as Martin Luther King. King was a great orator, and it was written that “as King spoke in a singsong cadence, his followers would cry and clap and sway, carried away by the magic of his oratory. With his help, 35,000 leaflets advertising the boycott were distributed at services the next Sunday.

In court on Monday the 5th of December Rosa Parks was fined $10 for civil disobedience and this coincided with the start of the boycott. It was met with great success, with most of the city’s black population complying. It was decided that the boycott would continue for as long as the City Council kept withholding the following: employment of black drivers on the buses, allocation of seats on a first come, first served basis, and the right to courteous treatment by drivers for all passengers, regardless of colour.

The leaders of the boycott collected money to buy station wagons for a private taxi service. Some of the money came from local black workers, the NAACP, the United Auto Workers’ Union and the Montgomery Jewish community, among other minorities. A carpool system was organised whereby people gathered at churches and waited to be collected by others to get to work in order to undermine the attitude of the boycott’s critics, who were adamant that the buses would be full again the next rainy morning. However, the boycotters’ tenacity was clearly underestimated and the boycott continued for a total of 381 days, until December 21st 1956, This was thanks to public donations, dedication and $30,000 being raised by the church.

The boycotters met fierce resistance. The Ku Klux Klan became active and the likes of burning crosses were planted in King’s garden. Acid was poured on the cars of the boycotters and the homes of King and other leaders were bombed. King was arrested for doing thirty miles per hour in a twenty five miles per hour zone and in February 1956, eighty nine blacks including King were arrested under an old law banning boycotting. Twenty four ministers were also arrested throughout the year for cooperation.

At the same time the NAACP’s lawsuit was advancing through the courts, and on the 13th of November 1956 the Supreme Court in Washington DC ruled that the segregation laws were unconstitutional. The boycott was eventually called off and on the 21st of December 1956, King and his supporters boarded a Greyhound bus for the first time in 381 days. For the first time ever they sat at the front. Their tenacity had earned them victory.

The boycott was classified as a roaring success, not only because the boycotters achieved their aims with regard to Rosa Parks’ specific case, but also because the boycott ended segregation on Montgomery’s buses completely. It also introduced the idea of non-violent protest, an approach take that would later be used by King and others in order to progress the civil rights movement even further. The episode paved the way for the likes of the freedom riders and the lunch counter sit-ins. It also gave rise to institutions like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference which would be instrumental in the next steps toward an egalitarian society. Overall it was a massive success that changed the face of American society in a new and unprecedented way. In the words of Joseph Lowery, “the Montgomery Bus Boycott was an era of self-determination”.

Feedback : This is a really great essay in that it answers the question without being repetitive. It shows a good understanding of the material, and you provide good commentary as well, such as making comments on the tenacity of the boycotters. You also make good use of quotations. Your introduction is good as it gives some background as well as laying out the topic of the essay, and your conclusion is strong too as it is more than just a summary of the essay. For future essays that require you to answer several parts, maybe watch out to be clear in what part you’re answering with each paragraph and try to ensure that all sections are given somewhat equal attention. 

Cumulative Mark : while this is a really well-written essay, the fact that there are only 9 paragraphs means that you might not hit the maximum of 60 cumulative marks – you would need at least 6 marks on each paragraph, and while you could achieve this, it would be safest to add an extra paragraph or two just to be certain that you can hit 60. It is possible that this particular essay could achieve 60/60.

Overall Evaluation : for Overall Evaluation, I’d give this around 30/40 as your treatment of the question is very good.

Total : 90/100

• Post author: Martina
• Post published: December 21, 2018
• Post category: #625Lab History / History

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Highlander Folk School

November 1, 1932 to November 30, 1932

On 2 September 1957, Martin Luther King joined with the staff and the participants of a leadership training conference at Highlander Folk School to celebrate its 25th anniversary. In his closing address to the conference, King praised Highlander for its “noble purpose and creative work,” and contribution to the South of “some of its most responsible leaders in this great period of transition” ( Papers  4:270 ).

In 1932, Myles Horton, a former student of Reinhold  Niebuhr , established the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee.  The school, situated in the Tennessee hills, initially focused on labor and adult education. By the early 1950s, however, it shifted its attention to race relations. Highlander was one of the few places in the South where integrated meetings could take place, and served as a site of leadership training for southern civil rights activists. Rosa  Parks  attended a 1955 workshop at Highlander four months before refusing to give up her bus seat, an act that ignited the  Montgomery bus boycott .

Lead by Septima  Clark , Esau Jenkins, and Bernice Robinson, Highlander developed a citizenship program in the mid-1950s that taught African Americans their rights as citizens while promoting basic literacy skills. Reflecting on his experiences with the Citizenship Schools and the emergence of new leaders from “noncharismatic people” who attended the training, Horton concluded that “educational work during social movement periods provides the best opportunity for multiplying democratic leadership” (Horton,  Long Haul , 127).

Horton, who claimed he had first met King during the civil right leader’s junior year at  Morehouse College , invited King to participate in Highlander’s anniversary celebration in 1957. While attending the celebration, an undercover agent sent by the Georgia Commission on Education took a photograph of King. The photo was sent throughout the South and used as a propaganda tool against King, with claims that it showed him attending a Communist training school.

Highlander continued to be a center for developing future leaders of the movement such as Marion  Barry , Diane  Nash , and James  Bevel . It was closed in 1961 when the Tennessee government revoked its charter on falsified charges that the school was being run for profit and that it did not fulfill its nonprofit requirements. The  Southern Christian Leadership Conference  (SCLC) took over the citizenship program that year, feeling that it offered, according to King, a plus for SCLC and the movement “in filling the need for developing new leadership as teachers and supervisors and providing the broad educational base for the population at large through the establishment of Citizenship Schools conducted by these new leaders throughout the South” (King, January 1961). Under the leadership of SCLC and the supervision of Clark, Dorothy  Cotton , and Andrew  Young , the schools eventually trained approximately 100,000 adults. In August 1961, Horton opened another school in Knoxville, Tennessee, called the Highlander Research and Education Center. He and the Center participated in the 1968  Poor People’s Campaign  and, after King’s  assassination , erected a tent complex at Resurrection City in Washington, D.C., holding workshops until police closed the encampment in June 1968.

Adams with Horton,  Unearthing Seeds of Fire , 1975.

Anne Braden to King, 23 September 1959, in  Papers  5:290–293 .

Glen,  Highlander , 1988.

Horton with Judith Kohl and Herbert Kohl,  Long Haul , 1990.

King, Memo, “Leadership Training Program and Citizenship Schools,” December 1960–January 1961,  SCLCR-GAMK .

King, “A Look to the Future,” Address Delivered at Highlander Folk School’s Twenty-fifth Anniversary Meeting, 2 September 1957, in  Papers  4:269–276 .

King to Braden, 7 October 1959, in  Papers  5:306–307 .