What was bus boycott

During the boycott, volunteer drivers gave rides to would-be bus passengers. Photo taken in by Dan Weiner; copyright John Broderick. Ula Taylor: People know about Rosa Parks. And they know that it was the Montgomery bus boycott that ignited a certain kind of Southern civil rights movement. In one of her classes, she teaches students about the citywide bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama.

Fair use photo via Wikimedia Commons. Narration: The bus boycott was officially called on Dec. Martin Luther King Jr. And that was the day when we decided that we were not going to take segregated buses any longer. Ula Taylor: They kept a critique of all of the horrific ways that Black people were forced to ride the bus.

They wrote letters to the bus company. They wrote letters to the mayor, basically saying that there needed to be a more humane way of riding the bus. Many of them worked at the historically Black colleges. Robert Hughes and others from the Alabama Council for Human Relations organized meetings between the MIA and city officials, but no agreements were reached. In early , the homes of King and E. Nixon were bombed. City officials obtained injunctions against the boycott in February , and indicted over 80 boycott leaders under a law prohibiting conspiracies that interfered with lawful business.

King, Jr. Despite this resistance, the boycott continued. Although most of the publicity about the protest was centered on the actions of black ministers, women played crucial roles in the success of the boycott. In his memoir, King quotes an elderly woman who proclaimed that she had joined the boycott not for her own benefit but for the good of her children and grandchildren King, In early veteran pacifists Bayard Rustin and Glenn E.

Smiley visited Montgomery and offered King advice on the application of Gandhian techniques and nonviolence to American race relations. Rustin, Ella Baker , and Stanley Levison founded In Friendship to raise funds in the North for southern civil rights efforts, including the bus boycott. King absorbed ideas from these proponents of nonviolent direct action and crafted his own syntheses of Gandhian principles of nonviolence.

On 5 June , the federal district court ruled in Browder v. Gayle that bus segregation was unconstitutional, and in November the U.

Supreme Court affirmed Browder v. Gayle and struck down laws requiring segregated seating on public buses. Resolved not to end the boycott until the order to desegregate the buses actually arrived in Montgomery, the MIA operated without the carpool system for a month.

The next morning, he boarded an integrated bus with Ralph Abernathy, E. Nixon, and Glenn Smiley. Baker to King, 24 February , in Papers Crawford et al. Gregg to King, 2 April , in Papers — Indictment, State of Alabama v. District Court, seeking to have the busing segregation laws totally invalidated. Many Black residents chose simply to walk to work or other destinations. Black leaders organized regular mass meetings to keep African American residents mobilized around the boycott.

On June 5, , a Montgomery federal court ruled that any law requiring racially segregated seating on buses violated the 14th Amendment to the U.

That amendment, adopted in following the U. Civil War , guarantees all citizens—regardless of race—equal rights and equal protection under state and federal laws. The city appealed to the U. It had lasted days. Integration, however, met with significant resistance and even violence. While the buses themselves were integrated, Montgomery maintained segregated bus stops.

Snipers began firing into buses, and one shooter shattered both legs of a pregnant African American passenger. On January 30, , the Montgomery police arrested seven bombers; all were members of the Ku Klux Klan , a white supremacist group.

The arrests largely brought an end to the busing-related violence. The Montgomery Bus Boycott was significant on several fronts.

First, it is widely regarded as the earliest mass protest on behalf of civil rights in the United States, setting the stage for additional large-scale actions outside the court system to bring about fair treatment for African Americans.

Second, in his leadership of the MIA, Martin Luther King emerged as a prominent national leader of the civil rights movement while also solidifying his commitment to nonviolent resistance. 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. 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. 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. Explore This Park.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott. Beginnings Years before the boycott, Dexter Avenue minister Vernon Johns sat down in the "whites-only" section of a city bus. You Might Also Like. Loading results