| Article ID: | 151226 |
|---|
Rosa Parks
was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white man.
The Montgomery Bus Boycott was a political protest campaign in 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama , intended to oppose the city's policy of racial segregation on its public transit system. The ensuing struggle eventually led to a United States Supreme Court decision on November 13 , 1956 , that declared illegal the Alabama and Montgomery laws requiring segregated bus es.
The boycott was precipitated by black citizens' outrage at Rosa Parks 's arrest on Thursday , December 1 , 1955 for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white passenger. In Montgomery, the dividing line between the front seats reserved for white passengers and the back ones reserved for black passengers was not fixed. When the front of the bus was full, the driver could order black passengers sitting towards the front of the bus to surrender their seat. Rosa Parks's seat was in that border area. (Sometimes it is reported by oral legend and by grade-level education packages that Parks was simply too tired to move from her seat after a long day of work. Rosa Parks says, "People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. 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." ) When found guilty later, she was fined $10 plus a court cost of $4, but she appealed.
The bus on which Rosa Parks rode is now a museum exhibit
On Friday , December 2 , 1955 , Jo Ann Robinson (president of the Women's Political Council) would receive a call from Fred Gray , one of the city's two black lawyer s, informing her that Rosa Parks had been arrested. That entire night Robinson worked tirelessly mimeographing over 35,000 handbills reading:
"Another Negro woman has been arrested and thrown in jail because she refused to get up out of her seat on the bus for a white person to sit down. It is the second time since the Claudette Colvin case that a Negro woman has been arrested for the same thing. This has to be stopped. Negroes have rights, too, for if Negroes did not ride the buses, they could not operate. Three-fourths of the riders are Negroes, yet we are arrested, or have to stand over empty seats. If we do not do something to stop these arrests, they will continue. The next time it may be you, or your daughter, or mother. This woman's case will come up on Monday. We are, therefore, asking every Negro to stay off the buses Monday in protest of the arrest and trial. Don't ride the buses to work, to town, to school, or anywhere on Monday. You can afford to stay out of school for one day if you have no other way to go except by bus. You can also afford to stay out of town for one day. If you work, take a cab, or walk. But please, children and grown-ups, don't ride the bus at all on Monday. Please stay off all buses Monday."The next morning at a church meeting with the new minister in the city, Martin Luther King, Jr. , a citywide boycott of public transit as a protest for a fixed dividing line for the segregated sections of the buses was proposed and passed.
The boycott proved extremely effective, with enough riders lost to the city transit system to cause serious economic distress. Instead of riding buses, boycotters organized a system of carpool s, with car owners volunteering their vehicles or themselves driving people to various destinations. Some white housewives also drove their black domestic servants to work, although it is unclear to what extent this was based on sympathy with the boycott, versus the simple desire to have their staff present and working. When the city pressured local insurance companies to stop insuring cars used in the carpools, the boycott leaders arranged policies with Lloyd's of London .
Black taxi drivers charged ten cents per ride, a fare equal to the cost to ride the bus, in support of the boycott. When word of this reached city officials, the order went out to fine any cab driver who charged a rider less than 45 cents. In addition to using private motor vehicles , some people used non-motorized means to get around, such as bicycling , walking, or even riding mules or driving horse-drawn buggies. Some people also hitchhiked around. During rush hours, sidewalks were often crowded, but buses received extremely few, if any, passengers. Across the nation, black churches raised money to support the boycott and collected new and slightly used shoes to replace the tattered footwear of Montgomery's black citizens, many of whom walked everywhere rather than ride the buses and submit to Jim Crow laws .
In response, opposing whites swelled the ranks of the White Citizens' Council , the membership of which doubled during the course of the boycott. Like the Ku Klux Klan , the Councils sometimes resorted to violence: Martin Luther King's and Ralph Abernathy's houses were firebombed, and boycotters were physically attacked.
Under a 1921 ordinance, 156 protestors were arrested for "hindering" a bus, including King. He was ordered to pay a $1,000 fine or serve 386 days in jail . The move backfired by bringing national attention to the protest.
Eventually, the United States Supreme Court affirmed a lower court decision that Alabama's racial segregation laws for buses were unconstitutional, handing the protesters a clear victory. This victory led to a city ordinance that allowed black bus passengers to sit virtually anywhere they wanted. Martin Luther King capped off the victory with a magnanimous speech to encourage acceptance of the decision.
The boycott resulted in the U.S. civil rights movement receiving one of its first victories, and gave Martin Luther King the national attention that would make him one of the prime leaders of the cause.
On 2 December 2004 , the United States Postal Service announced a pane of 10 postage stamp s including the Montgomery Bus Boycott in its 2005 Commemorative Stamp Program.