rosa parks and the montgomery bus boycott essay

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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 .

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Montgomery Bus Boycott

For 382 days, almost the entire African American population of Montgomery, Alabama, including leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, refused to ride on segregated buses. The protests marked a turning point in the American civil rights movement.

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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54b. Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott

On a cold December evening in 1955, Rosa Parks quietly incited a revolution — by just sitting down.

She was tired after spending the day at work as a department store seamstress. She stepped onto the bus for the ride home and sat in the fifth row — the first row of the " Colored Section ."

In Montgomery, Alabama, when a bus became full, the seats nearer the front were given to white passengers.

Montgomery bus driver James Blake ordered Parks and three other African Americans seated nearby to move ("Move y'all, I want those two seats,") to the back of the bus.

Three riders complied; Parks did not.

The following excerpt of what happened next is from Douglas Brinkley's 2000 Rosa Park's biography.

After Parks refused to move, she was arrested and fined $10. The chain of events triggered by her arrest changed the United States.

King, Abernathy, Boycott, and the SCLC

In 1955, a little-known minister named Martin Luther King Jr. led the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery.

King studied the writings and practices of Henry David Thoreau and Mohandas Gandhi . Their teaching advocated civil disobedience and nonviolent resistance to social injustice.

A staunch devotee of nonviolence, King and his colleague Ralph Abernathy were a part of a community organization, the MONTGOMERY IMPROVEMENT ASSOCIATION (MIA), which organized a boycott of Montgomery's buses .

The demands they made were simple: Black passengers should be treated with courtesy. Seating should be allotted on a first-come-first-serve basis, with white passengers sitting from front to back and black passengers sitting from back to front. And African American drivers should drive routes that primarily serviced African Americans. On Monday, December 5, 1955 the boycott went into effect.

Don't Ride the Bus

In 1955, the Women's Political Council issued a leaflet calling for a boycott of Montgomery buses.

Don't ride the bus to work, to town, to school, or any place Monday, December 5.

Another Negro Woman has been arrested and put in jail because she refused to give up her bus seat.

Don't ride the buses to work to town, to school, or any where on Monday. If you work, take a cab, or share a ride, or walk.

Come to a mass meeting, Monday at 7:00 P.M. at the Holt Street Baptist Church for further instruction.

Montgomery officials stopped at nothing in attempting to sabotage the boycott. King and Abernathy were arrested. Violence began during the action and continued after its conclusion. Four churches — as well as the homes of King and Abernathy — were bombed. But the boycott continued.

The MIA had hoped for a 50 percent support rate among African Americans. To their surprise and delight, 99 percent of the city's African Americans refused to ride the buses. People walked to work or rode their bikes, and carpools were established to help the elderly. The bus company suffered thousands of dollars in lost revenue.

Finally, on November 23, 1956, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the MIA. Segregated busing was declared unconstitutional. City officials reluctantly agreed to comply with the Court Ruling. The black community of Montgomery had held firm in their resolve.

The Montgomery bus boycott triggered a firestorm in the South. Across the region, blacks resisted "moving to the back of the bus." Similar actions flared up in other cities. The boycott put Martin Luther King Jr. in the national spotlight. He became the acknowledged leader of the nascent Civil Rights Movement .

With Ralph Abernathy, King formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).

This organization was dedicated to fighting Jim Crow segregation. African Americans boldly declared to the rest of the country that their movement would be peaceful, organized, and determined.

To modern eyes, getting a seat on a bus may not seem like a great feat. But in 1955, sitting down marked the first step in a revolution.

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Parks, Rosa

February 4, 1913 to October 24, 2005

On 1 December 1955 local  National Association for the Advancement of Colored People  (NAACP) leader Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama. This single act of nonviolent resistance helped spark the  Montgomery bus boycott , a 13-month struggle to desegregate the city’s buses. Under the leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr., the boycott resulted in the enforcement of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that public bus segregation is unconstitutional, and catapulted both King and Parks into the national spotlight.

Born in Tuskegee, Alabama, on 4 February 1913, Rosa Louise McCauley Parks grew up in Montgomery and was educated at the laboratory school of Alabama State College. In 1932 she married Raymond Parks, a barber and member of the NAACP. At that time, Raymond Parks was active in the Scottsboro case. In 1943 Rosa Parks joined the local chapter of the NAACP and was elected secretary. Two years later, she registered to vote, after twice being denied.

By 1949 Parks was advisor to the local NAACP Youth Council. Under her guidance, youth members challenged the Jim Crow system by checking books out of whites-only libraries. The summer before Parks’ arrest, Virginia  Durr  arranged for Parks to travel to Tennessee’s  Highlander Folk School  to attend a workshop entitled “Racial Desegregation: Implementing the Supreme Court Decision.” It was there that Parks received encouragement from fellow participant Septima  Clark , who later joined Highlander’s staff in mid-1956.

When Parks was arrested on 1 December 1955, she was not the first African American to defy Montgomery’s bus segregation law. Nine months earlier, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin had been arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger. In October 1955, 18-year-old Mary Louise Smith had been arrested under similar circumstances, but both cases failed to stir Montgomery’s black leadership to help launch a mass protest. King wrote of Parks’ unique local stature in his memoir,  Stride Toward Freedom , where he talked of how her character and dedication made her widely respected in the African American community.

Although many news accounts depicted Parks as a tired seamstress, Parks explained the deep roots of her act of resistance in her autobiography: “I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in” (Parks, 116).

Parks inspired tens of thousands of black citizens to boycott the Montgomery city buses for over a year. During that period she served as a dispatcher to coordinate rides for protesters and was indicted, along with King and over 80 others, for participation in the boycott. Parks also made appearances in churches and other organizations, including some in the North, to raise funds and publicize the  Montgomery Improvement Association  (MIA).

Parks continued to face harassment following the boycott’s successful conclusion and decided to move to Detroit to seek better employment opportunities. Shortly before her departure, the MIA declared 5 August 1957 “Rosa Parks Day.” A celebration was held at Mt. Zion AME Zion Church, and $800 was presented to Parks. Despite the fanfare, Parks found it hard to believe that her actions launched an entire movement: “I had no idea when I refused to give up my seat on that Montgomery bus that my small action would help put an end to the segregation laws in the South” (Parks, 2).

In 1964 John Conyers, an African American lawyer, received Parks’ endorsement of his campaign to represent Detroit in the U.S. House of Representatives. After he won, he hired Parks as an office assistant. She remained with him until her retirement in 1988.

In 1987 she founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development, which provides learning and leadership opportunities for youth and seniors. She was an active supporter of civil rights causes in her elder years. She died in October 2005, at the age of 92. 

Introduction, in  Papers  3:3, 5 .

King,  Stride Toward Freedom , 1958.

Parks,  Rosa Parks , 1992.

Robinson,  Montgomery Bus Boycott , 1987.

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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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Civil rights activist Rosa Parks refused to surrender her seat to a white passenger on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama, sparking the Montgomery Bus Boycott that eventually ended racial segregation on public transportation.

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Quick Facts

Childhood, family, and education, montgomery bus boycott, life after the bus boycott, outkast song controversy, awards, tributes, and movie, who was rosa parks.

Born in February 1913, Rosa Parks was a civil rights activist whose refusal to give up her seat to a white passenger on a segregated bus in 1955 led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Her bravery led to nationwide efforts to end racial segregation on public transportation and elsewhere. Parks was awarded the Martin Luther King Jr. Award by the NAACP, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the Congressional Gold Medal. She has been described as the “Mother of the Civil Rights Movement.” She died in October 2005 at age 92.

FULL NAME: Rosa Louise McCauley Parks BORN: February 4, 1913 DIED: October 24, 2005 BIRTHPLACE: Tuskegee, Alabama SPOUSE: Raymond Parks (1932-1977) ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Aquarius

Rosa Parks was born Rosa Louise McCauley on February 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Alabama. Her parents, James and Leona McCauley, separated when Parks was 2. Parks’ mother moved the family to Pine Level, Alabama, to live with her parents, Rose and Sylvester Edwards. Both of Rosa’s grandparents were formerly enslaved people and strong advocates for racial equality.

The family lived on the Edwards’ farm, and this is where Rosa spent her youth. She experienced chronic tonsillitis as a child that often left her bedridden. After undergoing a tonsillectomy in the fifth grade, she experienced temporary blindness, but her health improved soon afterward, according to Rosa Parks: A Life in American History by Darryl Mace.

Early in life, Rosa experienced racial discrimination and activism for racial equality. Once, her grandfather Sylvester stood in front of their house with a shotgun while Ku Klux Klan members marched down the street.

Young Rosa often fought back physically against bullying from white children, noting: “As far back as I remember, I could never think in terms of accepting physical abuse without some form of retaliation if possible,” according to The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks by Jeanne Theoharis.

Taught to read by her mother at a young age, Rosa attended segregated schools throughout her education. The one-room school in Pine Level where she went often lacked adequate school supplies such as desks. Black students were forced to walk to the first through sixth-grade schoolhouse, while the city provided bus transportation as well as a new school building for white students.

At age 11, Rosa began at the Industrial School for Girls in Montgomery, Alabama. She moved onto a laboratory school for secondary education led by the Alabama State Teachers College for Negroes. In 1929, Rosa left the school in the 11 th grade to help both her sick grandmother and mother back in Pine Level.

For a time, she worked at a shirt factory in Montgomery, but Rosa did eventually earn her high school degree in 1933. This was a significant accomplishment for a young Black woman in the mid-1930s, during a time when eight out every 10 Black children of high school age in southern states weren’t even enrolled in secondary schools, according to Rosa Parks: A Biography by Joyce A. Hanson.

In 1932, at age 19, Rosa met and married Raymond Parks, a barber and an active member of the NAACP as well as the League of Women Voters. The couple never had children, and their marriage lasted until his death in 1977.

Raymond was involved with the Montgomery labor rights movement and led a national pledge drive to support the legal defense of the Scottsboro Boys, nine Black teenagers falsely accused in Alabama of raping two white women in 1931. As Rosa’s own interest in civil activism rose, Raymond discouraged her from actively participating in the Scottsboro Boys defense efforts due to the dangers involved. Rosa said her husband believed, “It was hard enough if he had to run... He couldn’t leave me, and I couldn’t run as fast,” according to The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks . She didn’t let that stop her.

After graduating high school with Raymond’s support, Rosa became actively involved in civil rights issues by joining the NAACP’s Montgomery chapter in 1943, serving as its youth leader as well as secretary to NAACP President E.D. Nixon . She held the post until 1957.

During her time at the NAACP, she was involved in investigating the gang rape of Recy Taylor , a Black woman in Henry County, Alabama. Parks also attended meetings to discuss the murder of Emmett Till , a Black teenage who was tortured and lynched after being accused of offending a white woman in Mississippi in 1955.

After a long day’s work at a Montgomery department store, where she worked as a seamstress, Parks boarded the Cleveland Avenue bus for home on December 1, 1955. She took a seat in the first of several rows designated for “colored” passengers.

The Montgomery City Code required that all public transportation be segregated and that bus drivers had the “powers of a police officer of the city while in actual charge of any bus for the purposes of carrying out the provisions” of the code. That meant drivers were required to provide separate but equal accommodations for white and Black passengers by assigning seats. A line roughly in the middle of a bus separated white passengers in the front from Black passengers in the back. When an African American passenger boarded the bus, they had to get on at the front to pay their fare, then get off and reboard the bus at the back door.

As the bus Parks was riding continued on its route, it began to fill with white passengers. Eventually, the bus was full, and driver James F. Blake noticed that several white passengers were standing in the aisle. Blake stopped the bus and moved the sign separating the two sections back one row, asking four Black passengers to give up their seats. The city’s bus ordinance didn’t specifically give drivers the authority to demand a passenger to give up a seat to anyone, regardless of color. However, Montgomery bus drivers had adopted the custom of moving back the sign separating Black and white passengers and, if necessary, asking Black passengers to give up their seats to white passengers. If the Black passenger protested, the bus driver had the authority to refuse service and could call the police to have them removed.

Three of the other Black passengers on the bus complied with the driver, but Parks refused and remained seated. Blake demanded, “Why don’t you stand up?” to which Parks replied, “I don’t think I should have to stand up.” He called the police and had her arrested. Parks later said of the incident : “When that white driver stepped back toward us, when he waved his hand and ordered us up and out of our seats, I felt a determination cover my body like a quilt on a winter night.”

The police arrested Parks at the scene and charged her with violation of Chapter 6, Section 11, of the Montgomery City Code. She was taken to police headquarters, where, later that night, she was released on bail.

Parks’ protest made her the public face of what later became known as the Montgomery Bus Boycott . The evening that Parks was arrested, E.D. Nixon began forming plans to organize a boycott of Montgomery’s city buses. Members of the Black community were asked to stay off city buses on Monday, December 5, 1955—the day of Parks’ trial—in protest of her arrest. People were encouraged to stay home from work or school, take a cab, or walk to work. Ads were placed in local papers, and handbills were printed and distributed in Black neighborhoods.

In fact, Parks wasn’t the first to push back against segregated busing practices. A 15-year-old nurse aid and activist named Claudette Colvin had similarly refused to surrender her bus seat to a white passenger nine months before Parks had done so, but the NAACP felt Parks was the better candidate to highlight for the public, and so Colvin’s actions remained relatively little-known. Colvin later said she wasn’t publicized because she was a pregnant teen and because Parks was more fair-skinned and had the look that “that people associate with the middle class.”

On the morning of December 5, a group of leaders from the Black community gathered at the Mt. Zion Church in Montgomery to discuss strategies and determined that their boycott effort required a new organization and strong leadership. They formed the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), electing Montgomery newcomer Martin Luther King Jr. as minister of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. The MIA believed that Parks’ case provided an excellent opportunity to take further action to create real change.

When Parks arrived at the courthouse for trial that morning with her attorney, Fred Gray, she was greeted by a bustling crowd of around 500 local supporters, who rooted her on. Following a 30-minute hearing, Parks was found guilty of violating a local ordinance and was fined $10, as well as a $4 court fee.

Inarguably the biggest event of the day, however, was what Parks’ trial had triggered. The city’s buses were, by and large, empty. Some people carpooled and others rode in Black-operated cabs, but most of the estimated 40,000 African American commuters living in the city at the time had opted to walk to work that day—some as far as 20 miles.

Due to the size and scope of, and loyalty to, the boycott, the effort continued for several months. The city of Montgomery had become a victorious eyesore, with dozens of public buses sitting idle, ultimately severely crippling finances for its transit company. With the boycott’s progress, however, came strong resistance.

Some segregationists retaliated with violence. Black churches were burned, and both King and Nixon’s homes were destroyed by bombings. Still, further attempts were made to end the boycott. The insurance was canceled for the city taxi system that African Americans used. Black citizens were also arrested for violating an antiquated law prohibiting boycotts.

In response, members of the Black community took legal action. Armed with the Brown v. Board of Education decision, which stated that separate but equal policies had no place in public education , a Black legal team took the issue of segregation on public transit systems to the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama, Northern Division. Parks’ attorney, Fred Gray, filed the suit.

In June 1956, the district court declared racial segregation laws, also known as “Jim Crow laws,” unconstitutional. The city of Montgomery appealed the court’s decision shortly thereafter, but on November 13, 1956, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the lower court’s ruling, declaring segregation on public transport to be unconstitutional.

With the transit company and downtown businesses suffering financial loss and the legal system ruling against them, the city of Montgomery had no choice but to lift its enforcement of segregation on public buses, and the boycott officially ended on December 20, 1956, after 381 days. The combination of legal action, backed by the unrelenting determination of the Black community, made the Montgomery Bus Boycott one of the largest and most successful mass movements against racial segregation in history.

Although she had become a symbol of the Civil Rights Movement , Parks suffered hardship in the months following her arrest in Montgomery and the subsequent boycott. She lost her department store job, and her husband was fired from his barber job at Maxwell Air Force Base after his boss forbade him to talk about his wife or their legal case. The couple began receiving constant death threats, and Raymond started sleeping with his gun for protection as a result, according to The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks .

Unable to find work, they eventually left Montgomery and moved to Detroit with Parks’ mother. There, Parks made a new life for herself, working as a secretary and receptionist in U.S. Representative John Conyer’s congressional office. She also served on the board of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Parks remained involved in activism throughout her life, speaking out against housing discrimination and police abuse. She also befriended Malcolm X , considering him her “personal hero.”

In 1987, a decade after her husband’s death, Parks founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development with longtime friend Elaine Eason Steele. The organization runs “Pathways to Freedom” bus tours, introducing young people to important civil rights and Underground Railroad sites throughout the country.

In 1992, Parks published Rosa Parks: My Story , an autobiography recounting her life in the segregated South. In 1995, she published Quiet Strength , which focuses on the role that religious faith played throughout her life.

In 1998, the hip-hop group Outkast released a song, “Rosa Parks,” which peaked at No. 55 on the Billboard Hot 100 music chart the following year. The song featured the chorus: “Ah-ha, hush that fuss. Everybody move to the back of the bus.”

In 1999, Parks filed a lawsuit against the group and its label alleging defamation and false advertising because Outkast used Parks’ name without her permission. Outkast said the song was protected by the First Amendment and didn’t violate Parks’ publicity rights. In 2003, a judge dismissed the defamation claims. Parks’ lawyer soon refiled based on the false advertising claims for using her name without permission, seeking over $5 billion.

On April 14, 2005, the case was settled. Outkast and co-defendants SONY BMG Music Entertainment, Arista Records LLC, and LaFace Records admitted no wrongdoing but agreed to work with the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute to develop educational programs that “enlighten today’s youth about the significant role Rosa Parks played in making America a better place for all races,” according to a statement released at the time.

On October 24, 2005, Parks quietly died in her apartment in Detroit at the age of 92. She had been diagnosed the previous year with progressive dementia, which she had been suffering from since at least 2002.

Parks’ death was marked by several memorial services, among them, lying in honor at the U.S. Capitol Rotunda in Washington, where an estimated 50,000 people viewed her casket.

Parks was the first woman and only the second Black person—after Jacob Joseph Chestnut, a U.S. Capitol police officer killed in 1998—to lie in the Capitol , which is considered the “most suitable place for the nation to pay final tribute to its most eminent citizens.” City officials in Montgomery and Detroit reserved the front seats of their buses with black ribbons in honor of Parks.

Parks was interred between her husband and mother at Detroit’s Woodlawn Cemetery, in the chapel’s mausoleum. Shortly after her death, the chapel was renamed the Rosa L. Parks Freedom Chapel. Speaking during her funeral, then–Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said, “I can honestly say that without Mrs. Parks, I probably would not be standing here today as secretary of state.”

Parks received many accolades during her lifetime, including the Spingarn Medal, the NAACP’s highest award, and the prestigious Martin Luther King Jr. Award. On September 15, 1996, President Bill Clinton awarded Parks the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor given by the United States’ executive branch. The following year, she was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest award given by the U.S. legislative branch. Time magazine named Parks on its 1999 list of “The 20 Most Influential People of the 20 th Century.”

In 2000, Troy University created the Rosa Parks Museum , located at the site of her arrest in downtown Montgomery, Alabama. In 2001, the city of Grand Rapids, Michigan, consecrated Rosa Parks Circle, a 3.5-acre park designed by architect Maya Lin , who is best known for designing the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington.

A biographical movie starring Angela Bassett and directed by Julie Dash, The Rosa Parks Story , was released in 2002. The movie won the 2003 NAACP Image Award, Christopher Award, and Black Reel Award.

On February 4, 2013—which would have been Parks’ 100th birthday—a commemorative U.S. Postal Service stamp was released called the Rosa Parks Forever stamp, featuring a rendition of the famed activist.

Also in February 2013, President Barack Obama unveiled a statue, designed by Robert Firmin and sculpted by Eugene Daub, honoring Parks in the nation’s Capitol building. He remembered Parks by saying: “In a single moment, with the simplest of gestures, she helped change America and change the world,” Obama said during the dedication ceremony . “And today, she takes her rightful place among those who shaped this nation’s course.”

Watch “Rosa Parks: Mother Of A Movement” on History Vault

• At the time I was arrested, I had no idea it would turn into this. It was just a day like any other day. The only thing that made it significant was that the masses of the people joined in.
• I have learned over the years that when one’s mind is made up, this diminishes fear; knowing what must be done does away with fear.
• People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired... the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.
• Each person must live their life as a model for others.
• I would like to be remembered as a person who wanted to be free... so other people would be also free.
• I’d see the bus pass every day... the bus was among the first ways I realized there was a black and white world.
• When I thought about Emmett Till, I could not go to the back of the bus.
• My only concern was to get home after a hard day’s work.
• The time had just come 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, even in Montgomery, Alabama.
• My resisting being mistreated on the bus did not begin with that particular arrest. I did a lot of walking in Montgomery.
• My desires were to be free as soon as I learned that there had been slavery of human beings.
• As I look back on those days, it’ s just like a dream, and the only thing that bothered me was that we waited so long to make this protest and to let it be known, wherever we go, that all of us should be free and equal and have all opportunities that others should have.
• God has always given me the strength to say what is right.
• There were times when it would have been easy to fall apart or to go in the opposite direction, but somehow, I felt that if I took one more step, someone would come along to join me.
• When I made that decision [to refuse to surrender my seat] , I knew I had the strength of my ancestors behind me.
• I am always very respectful and very much in awe of the presence of Septima Clark , because her life story makes the effort that I have made very minute. I only hope that there is a possible chance that some of her great courage and dignity and wisdom has rubbed off on me.

Fact Check: We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn’t look right, contact us !

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Civil Rights Activists

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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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• When did the American civil rights movement start?
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• Was Rosa Parks the first Black woman to refuse to give up her seat on a segregated bus?
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Montgomery bus boycott

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• BlackPast - Montgomery Bus Boycott
• Bill of Rights Institute - Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Montgomery Bus Boycott
• National Park Service - The Montgomery Bus Boycott
• Academia - The Social-Psychological Origins of the Montgomery Bus Boycott: Social Interaction and Humiliation in the Emergence of Social Movements
• Encyclopedia of Alabama - Montgomery Bus Boycott
• Black History in America - Rosa Parks Bus Boycott
• NPR - The Women Behind the Montgomery Bus Boycott
• Stanford University - The Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute - Montgomery bus boycott
• Montgomery bus boycott - Children's Encyclopedia (Ages 8-11)
• Montgomery bus boycott - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)

Montgomery bus boycott , mass protest against the bus system of Montgomery , Alabama , by civil rights activists and their supporters that led to a 1956 U.S. Supreme Court decision declaring that Montgomery’s segregation laws on buses were unconstitutional. The 381-day bus boycott also brought the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., into the spotlight as one of the most important leaders of the American civil rights movement .

The event that triggered the boycott took place in Montgomery on December 1, 1955, after seamstress Rosa Parks refused to give her seat to a white passenger on a city bus. Local laws dictated that African American passengers sat at the back of the bus while whites sat in front. If the white section became full, African Americans had to give up their seats in the back. When Parks refused to move to give her seat to a white rider, she was taken to jail; she was later bailed out by a local civil rights leader.

Many of Montgomery’s African American residents were politically organized long before Parks was arrested. For example, the Women’s Political Council (WPC) was founded in 1946, and it had been lobbying the city for improved conditions on the buses for a decade before the bus boycott began. In addition, Montgomery had an active branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), where Parks also worked as a secretary.

Although Parks was not the first resident of Montgomery to refuse to give up her seat to a white passenger, local civil rights leaders decided to capitalize on her arrest as a chance to challenge local segregation laws. Shortly after Parks’s arrest, Jo Ann Robinson, a leader of the WPC, and E.D. Nixon, president of the local NAACP , printed and distributed leaflets describing Parks’s arrest and called for a one-day boycott of the city buses on December 5. They believed that the boycott could be effective because the Montgomery bus system was heavily dependent on African American riders, who made up about 75 percent of the ridership. Some 90 percent of the African American residents stayed off the buses that day.

The boycott was so successful that local civil rights leaders decided to extend it indefinitely. A group of local ministers formed the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) to support and sustain the boycott and the legal challenge to the segregation laws. Martin Luther King, the charismatic young pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, was elected president of the MIA. A powerful orator, he was new to the area and had few enemies, and, thus, local leaders believed he could rally the various factions of the African American community to the cause.

The MIA initially asked for first-come, first-served seating, with African Americans starting in the rear and white passengers beginning in the front of the bus. They also asked that African American bus drivers be hired for routes primarily made up of African American riders. The bus companies and Montgomery officials refused to meet those demands. Many white citizens retaliated against the African American community: King’s home was bombed, and many boycotters were threatened or fired from their jobs. Several times the police arrested protesters and took them to jail, once charging 80 leaders of the boycott with violating a 1921 law that barred conspiracies to interfere with lawful business without just cause.

Despite such intimidation, the boycott continued for more than a year. The MIA filed a federal suit against bus segregation, and on June 5, 1956, a federal district court declared segregated seating on buses to be unconstitutional. The Supreme Court upheld that ruling in mid-November. The federal decision went into effect on December 20, 1956.

The boycott garnered a great deal of publicity in the national press, and King became well known throughout the country. The success in Montgomery inspired other African American communities in the South to protest racial discrimination and galvanized the direct nonviolent resistance phase of the civil rights movement.

• Modern History

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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Home / Essay Samples / Social Issues / Montgomery Bus Boycott / Rosa Parks And The Montgomery Bus Boycott

Rosa Parks And The Montgomery Bus Boycott

• Category: Social Issues , History
• Topic: Civil Rights , Montgomery Bus Boycott , Rosa Parks

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