The Montgomery Bus Boycott

The Montgomery Bus Boycott

The Montgomery bus boycott was a mass protest held by the African-American community of Montgomery , Alabama against the segregation law in public buses . The boycott , which lasted 381 days was ignited by the arrest , on December 1 , 1955 , of Rosa Parks after she refused to yield her seat in a Cleveland Avenue bus to a white man . It officially ended on December 21 , 1956 , with a Supreme Court ruling declaring the bus segregation law unconstitutional . It is believed that the success of this protest action inspired the modern

civil rights movement (Hamilton 2003

The African-American community of Montgomery , Alabama , had long been suffering from the humiliation brought about by the policy of segregation in Montgomery buses . The segregation worked this way Negro passengers should first board the bus through the front door just to pay their fare . After paying the fare , they were required to go back down and re-enter the bus via the door located at the back so that they can occupy the seats at the back of the bus , because the first four rows at the front were reserved for white passengers . Regarding the question of cross-seating , the law was explicit : blacks should never occupy the seats in the first four rows reserved for whites even if those seats were empty . However , the driver could a black passenger to vacate his or her seat in favor of a white passenger when the section reserved for whites were already filled up . Many a black passenger had been left behind by the bus under that system of paying by the front door and re-entering through the back door (King

On the night of December 1 , 1955 , Rosa Parks , who was a seamstress , just left her work at the Montgomery Fair department store . But Mrs . Parks was not only a seamstress - she was also a worker with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP . In fact , the evening in question , she had a scheduled late-night meeting with the youth group of the NAACP to discuss the segregation laws of Montgomery However , her decision to refuse to surrender her seat to a white man that day was later , she said that when she declined to give up [her] seat , it was not that day or bus in particular .[that she] just wanted to be free like everybody else (Hamilton 2003 ) What happened that night was not the first humiliation experienced by an African-American , neither was it the first for Rosa Parks , because sometime in 1943 , she already had her first sad experience with a Montgomery public bus . There were two conflicting accounts of that day , however . The first was that the bus left her behind as she was trying to board it by way of the back door as the driver wanted her to , after paying her fare by the front door (Cozzens 1998 ) According to the second account , Mrs . Parks boarded the bus through the front door , paid her fare and then...