Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955-1956): Rosa Parks and a City's Buses

The Montgomery bus boycott was a mass protest in which Black residents of Montgomery, Alabama, refused to ride the city’s segregated buses for 381 days, from 5 December 1955 to 20 December 1956. It began after Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger, and it ended when federal courts declared bus segregation unconstitutional. The boycott made Martin Luther King Jr. a national leader and showed that sustained nonviolent action could defeat Jim Crow laws.

Background: segregation on Montgomery’s buses

Montgomery, the state capital of Alabama and the first capital of the Confederacy, enforced segregation in almost every area of public life. On the city buses, run by the private Montgomery City Lines company, the first rows of seats were reserved for white passengers. Black passengers sat from the back. In the middle section, drivers could order Black riders to give up their seats if white passengers were standing, and a whole row had to be cleared because Black and white passengers could not sit side by side.

Black passengers made up roughly three-quarters of the bus system’s riders. They were often required to pay at the front door, then get off and re-board through the back door, and drivers sometimes pulled away before they could do so. All the drivers were white, and many were abusive.

Black organisations had been campaigning for change for years. The Women’s Political Council (WPC), an organisation of Black professional women led by Jo Ann Robinson, an English professor at Alabama State College, had complained to city officials and in May 1954, days after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, wrote to the mayor suggesting that a boycott might follow if conditions did not improve.

Several women had already been arrested for defying bus segregation. On 2 March 1955, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin refused to give up her seat and was dragged off the bus. In October 1955, 18-year-old Mary Louise Smith was also arrested. Community leaders considered both cases but decided to wait for a stronger one. The murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi that summer had added to the anger in Black communities across the South.

Rosa Parks’s arrest and the first day

On the evening of Thursday 1 December 1955 Rosa Parks, aged 42, boarded a Cleveland Avenue bus after work as a seamstress at the Montgomery Fair department store. She sat in the first row of the section open to Black passengers. When the white section filled, the driver, James F. Blake, ordered her row to stand up. Three passengers moved; Parks refused. Blake called the police, and she was arrested for violating the city’s segregation ordinance.

Parks was far from an accidental protester. She had been secretary of the Montgomery branch of the NAACP since 1943, worked on voter registration and cases of racial violence, and that summer had attended a workshop on desegregation at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee. She was widely respected, which made her an ideal person around whom to rally.

E. D. Nixon, a railway porters’ union leader and former NAACP branch president, bailed her out with the white liberal lawyer Clifford Durr and his wife Virginia. Parks agreed to let her case be used to challenge segregation.

Jo Ann Robinson and WPC members worked through the night at Alabama State College, using a duplicating machine to produce tens of thousands of leaflets calling on Black residents to stay off the buses on Monday 5 December, the day of Parks’s trial. Black ministers announced the boycott from their pulpits on Sunday, and the local newspaper reported it.

On 5 December the buses ran almost empty of Black passengers. People walked, shared rides or used Black-owned taxis, which charged the bus fare of 10 cents. That morning Parks was convicted and fined $10 plus $4 in court costs; her lawyer, Fred Gray, filed an appeal.

That afternoon local leaders formed the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) and elected as president Martin Luther King Jr., the 26-year-old pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, who had arrived in the city only the previous year. In the evening several thousand people packed the Holt Street Baptist Church and the streets outside. King spoke without a written text, and the meeting voted to continue the boycott.

Organising the boycott

The MIA’s first demands were moderate: courteous treatment by drivers; first-come, first-served seating within the segregated system, with Black passengers filling the bus from the back and white passengers from the front; and the hiring of Black drivers on mainly Black routes. The city and the bus company refused.

When the city threatened taxi drivers who charged reduced fares, the MIA set up a carpool system. Volunteers drove some 300 private cars between dozens of dispatch and pick-up points, and churches later bought station wagons. Many people, especially domestic workers, simply walked long distances to work each day. Money came from mass meetings, churches and supporters in the North and abroad.

The boycott depended on ordinary people, above all Black women, who formed the majority of bus riders and organised much of the work. Some white employers drove their domestic workers to and from work, whether from sympathy or necessity.

Resistance and violence

City officials tried to break the boycott. Police issued tickets to carpool drivers for minor offences, and King himself was arrested in January 1956 for driving at 30 miles per hour in a 25 zone. On 30 January 1956 a bomb exploded on the porch of King’s house while his wife Coretta and their baby daughter were inside; no one was hurt. King urged an angry crowd to stay nonviolent. E. D. Nixon’s house was bombed two days later.

In February 1956 a county grand jury indicted 89 people, including King, Parks and many ministers, under an old state law against boycotts. The photograph of Parks being fingerprinted dates from this second arrest. King was tried first, convicted in March and fined $500; the other cases were held pending his appeal. The prosecutions brought national and international press attention, increasing support for the boycott.

Browder v. Gayle

Because Parks’s appeal could be held up in state courts, Fred Gray filed a federal lawsuit on 1 February 1956 challenging the constitutionality of bus segregation. The plaintiffs were four women who had been mistreated on the buses: Aurelia Browder, Susie McDonald, Claudette Colvin and Mary Louise Smith. W. A. Gayle was the mayor of Montgomery.

On 5 June 1956 a three-judge federal court ruled 2–1 that Alabama’s and Montgomery’s bus segregation laws violated the Fourteenth Amendment, relying on the reasoning of Brown v. Board of Education. The city appealed, and on 13 November 1956 the Supreme Court affirmed the ruling. The written order reached Montgomery on 20 December, and the MIA ended the boycott. On the morning of 21 December King, Ralph Abernathy, E. D. Nixon and the white minister Glenn Smiley rode one of the first integrated buses.

Aftermath and legacy

Integration was followed by violence. Snipers fired on buses, and in January 1957 bombs damaged several Black churches and the homes of Ralph Abernathy and the white Lutheran pastor Robert Graetz, who had supported the boycott. The city briefly suspended night bus services.

Parks and her husband lost their jobs and faced continued threats. In 1957 they moved to Detroit, where she later worked for many years for Congressman John Conyers. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1996 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 1999. When she died in 2005, she became the first woman to lie in honour in the United States Capitol Rotunda.

The boycott showed that a whole Black community could organise and sustain mass nonviolent protest. In January 1957 King, Abernathy and other ministers founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to extend this approach across the South. The movement’s later campaigns, from the Freedom Rides to the March on Washington, built on the methods and leaders that emerged in Montgomery.

The bus on which Parks was arrested is preserved at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. The Rosa Parks Museum in Montgomery stands near the spot where she was arrested.

Key people

• Rosa Parks (1913–2005), seamstress and civil rights activist whose arrest sparked the boycott.
• Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968), Baptist minister and president of the MIA, later the most prominent leader of the civil rights movement.
• E. D. Nixon (1899–1987), union organiser and civil rights leader who bailed out Parks and helped launch the boycott.
• Jo Ann Robinson (1912–1992), president of the Women’s Political Council, who produced the first boycott leaflets.
• Fred Gray (born 1930), lawyer for Parks and the Browder v. Gayle plaintiffs, and later a prominent civil rights attorney.
• Ralph Abernathy (1926–1990), pastor of First Baptist Church and King’s closest ally.

Myths and facts

Myth: Rosa Parks sat in the white section. She was sitting in the first row of the section where Black passengers could sit, which drivers could order cleared for white riders.

Myth: She refused because her feet hurt. In her autobiography Parks wrote that the only tiredness she felt was being tired of giving in.

Myth: The boycott alone ended segregation on the buses. It sustained the pressure and the publicity, but the legal victory came through the federal courts in Browder v. Gayle.

Timeline

• 1955, 2 March: Claudette Colvin is arrested for refusing to give up her seat.
• 1955, 1 December: Rosa Parks is arrested on a Cleveland Avenue bus.
• 1955, 5 December: The boycott begins; Parks is convicted; the MIA is formed with King as president.
• 1956, 30 January: King’s house is bombed.
• 1956, 1 February: Fred Gray files Browder v. Gayle.
• 1956, 21–22 February: Indicted boycott leaders, including Parks, are arrested.
• 1956, 5 June: A federal court rules bus segregation unconstitutional.
• 1956, 13 November: The Supreme Court affirms the ruling.
• 1956, 20 December: The court order arrives and the boycott ends.
• 1956, 21 December: Montgomery’s buses are integrated.

Why it matters

The Montgomery bus boycott turned a local protest into a turning point for the American civil rights movement. It produced its most famous leader, proved the power of nonviolent mass action and, through the courts, ended legal segregation on Montgomery’s buses.