1 Dez 1955 Jahr - Montgomery Bus Boycott

Beschreibung:

Montgomery Bus Boycott: Yearlong boycott of Montgomery’s segregated bus system in 1955–1956 by the city’s African American population. The boycott brought Martin Luther King Jr. to national prominence and ended in victory when the Supreme Court declared segregated seating on public transportation unconstitutional.


On December 1, 1955, less than three months after the searing Till verdict, a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama, became a crucial civil rights battleground. A black woman named Rosa Parks refused to surrender her seat on the bus to a white man. She was arrested and charged with violating a local segregation ordinance. Parks’s defiance was not as spontaneous as it seemed. A longtime NAACP member familiar with protest tactics, she and other local activists, all of them women, had been contemplating such an act for some time — segregated buses were a powerful symbol of the city’s racial hierarchy.

Soon after Parks’s arrest, Montgomery’s black community turned for leadership to the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., the recently appointed pastor of Montgomery’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. The son of a prominent Atlanta minister, King embraced the thinking of Mahatma Gandhi. Drawing on Gandhi’s teachings, and the practical experience of Bayard Rustin, King and his fellow black ministers fashioned a response based on nonviolent direct action, which Rustin and others in the Fellowship of Reconciliation had first used in the 1940s. The Montgomery Bus Boycott followed a plan laid out by a local black women’s organization, inspired by bus boycotts in Harlem in 1941 and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1953.

For the next 381 days, Montgomery’s African Americans formed car pools or walked to work. As a bus normally filled with black riders rolled by the Kings’ living room window on the first day of the boycott, Coretta Scott King exclaimed to her husband, “Darling, it’s empty!” The transit company neared bankruptcy, and downtown stores lost business, but city authorities refused to give in. The Supreme Court ruled that segregation on public transportation is unconstitutional in November 1956, and the city finally relented. “My feets is tired, but my soul is rested,” declared one woman boycotter.

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