After the city began to penalize black taxi drivers for aiding the boycotters, the MIA organized a carpool. The demands were not met, and Montgomery’s black residents stayed off the buses through 1956, despite efforts by city officials and white citizens to defeat the boycott. After unsuccessful talks with city commissioners and bus company officials, on 8 December the MIA issued a formal list of demands: courteous treatment by bus operators first-come, first-served seating for all, with blacks seating from the rear and whites from the front and black bus operators on predominately black routes. If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong” ( Papers 3:73). If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. And we are not wrong.… If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. King spoke to several thousand people at the meeting: “I want it to be known that we’re going to work with grim and bold determination to gain justice on the buses in this city. That evening, at a mass meeting at Holt Street Baptist Church, the MIA voted to continue the boycott. King as president was that he was so new to Montgomery and to civil rights work that he hadn’t been there long enough to make any strong friends or enemies” (Parks, 136). Parks recalled: “The advantage of having Dr. During this meeting the MIA was formed, and King was elected president. That afternoon, the city’s ministers and leaders met to discuss the possibility of extending the boycott into a long-term campaign. On 5 December, 90 percent of Montgomery’s black citizens stayed off the buses. The planned protest received unexpected publicity in the weekend newspapers and in radio and television reports. On 2 December, black ministers and leaders met at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church and agreed to publicize the 5 December boycott. Nixon, past leader of the Montgomery chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), began to call local black leaders, including Ralph Abernathy and King, to organize a planning meeting. Meanwhile, after securing bail for Parks with Clifford and Virginia Durr, E.
Robinson prepared a series of leaflets at Alabama State College and organized groups to distribute them throughout the black community. Robinson and the WPC responded to Parks’ arrest by calling for a one-day protest of the city’s buses on 5 December 1955. Parks was ideal for the role assigned to her by history,” and because “her character was impeccable and her dedication deep-rooted” she was “one of the most respected people in the Negro community” (King, 44). Neither arrest, however, mobilized Montgomery’s black community like that of Rosa Parks later that year. Seven months later, 18-year-old Mary Louise Smith was arrested for refusing to yield her seat to a white passenger. When the meeting failed to produce any meaningful change, WPC president Jo Ann Robinson reiterated the council’s requests in a 21 May letter to Mayor Gayle, telling him, “There has been talk from twenty-five or more local organizations of planning a city-wide boycott of buses” (“A Letter from the Women’s Political Council”).Ī year after the WPC’s meeting with Mayor Gayle, a 15-year-old named Claudette Colvin was arrested for challenging segregation on a Montgomery bus. Gayle in March 1954, the council's members outlined the changes they sought for Montgomery’s bus system: no one standing over empty seats a decree that black individuals not be made to pay at the front of the bus and enter from the rear and a policy that would require buses to stop at every corner in black residential areas, as they did in white communities.
The Women’s Political Council (WPC), a group of black professionals founded in 1946, had already turned their attention to Jim Crow practices on the Montgomery city buses. The roots of the bus boycott began years before the arrest of Rosa Parks. In Stride Toward Freedom, King’s 1958 memoir of the boycott, he declared the real meaning of the Montgomery bus boycott to be the power of a growing self-respect to animate the struggle for civil rights. The bus boycott demonstrated the potential for nonviolent mass protest to successfully challenge racial segregation and served as an example for other southern campaigns that followed. The Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) coordinated the boycott, and its president, Martin Luther King, Jr., became a prominent civil rights leader as international attention focused on Montgomery. Supreme Court ruling that segregation on public buses is unconstitutional. Sparked by the arrest of Rosa Parks on 1 December 1955, the Montgomery bus boycott was a 13-month mass protest that ended with the U.S.