The Montgomery Bus Boycott

The Situation

Segregation in Alabama

The first enslaved Africans in what is now the United States were transported to a British North American settlement, Jamestown, in 1619, beginning a period of almost 250 years of slavery. By the 1800s, the scale was very large. States in the deep South became dependent on enslaved people to produce cotton and other crops on large plantations, while states in the North relied on the products of enslaved labor for industry and trade. By the time of the Civil War, 45 percent of the people of Alabama were enslaved African Americans.¹

From 1865–1874, the period of Reconstruction in Alabama, slavery was abolished and African Americans won legal rights under the U.S. Constitution as a result of the 13th–15th Amendments.

However, once Reconstruction ended, a system of explicit and pervasive white supremacy was firmly established. (The image shows the official logo of the Alabama Democratic Party from 1904–1966, during which time every governor of the state was a Democrat.) Citizens were officially categorized by race. Laws prevented whites and African Americans from using the same schools, railroad cars, and most other facilities. Although the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that segregated facilities had to be equal, this principle was not enforced, and in practice, opportunities for whites and Blacks were starkly different. For example, “Alabama spent $37 on [schooling for] each white child in 1930 and just $7 on those who were black.”²

“Segregation” (which means enforced separation) was in some ways a misleading term, since African American and white people worked together closely. Black women cleaned and cooked in many white homes and raised many white children. However, all human interactions were structured by race under the system known as Jim Crow. For example, African American men of any age were routinely referred to as “boy” but expected to address white men as “sir.” Such distinctions were enforced violently. In Alabama alone, at least 340 African Americans were murdered in public by mobs—an act known as lynching—and many Black women were raped by gangs of whites.³ Often the purpose of such crimes was to enforce white supremacy.

Under segregation, African Americans in Alabama and across the United States built their own institutions, including churches, schools, colleges and universities, businesses, associations, and at least one important labor union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.

Meanwhile, more than one million African Americans moved from the rural South to cities, mostly in the North. About one third of Alabama’s African Americans participated in this “Great Migration,” creating pervasive links between Black Alabamans and their family members in the North or West.⁴

The modern civil rights movement was already stirring before the Montgomery bus boycott began. Starting around 1940, the U.S. Supreme Court had issued important rulings against segre- gation, usually as a result of successful litigation by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF) and its brilliant founder and legal strategist, Thurgood Marshall. As early as 1942, the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) had organized “sit-ins” and other forms of nonviolent civil disobedience. In Baton Rouge, Louisiana, African Americans had even conducted a bus boycott similar to the Montgomery bus boycott in 1953. In 1953, the Women’s Political Council (WPC), a Black organization in Montgomery, had collected about 30 complaints about mistreatment of Black riders on the Montgomery buses and had taken preliminary actions to respond, such as meeting with the city’s mayor.⁵

It is worth discussing these questions: To what degree has the system of white supremacy changed since 1955? To what degree were African Americans better off in the North at that time? And have all the changes since the 1950s been desirable? (For example, 38,000 African American teachers lost their jobs when historically Black and white schools were merged as a result of deseg- regation.6) Nevertheless, it is essential to understand the specific injustices that confronted Blacks in Alabama in 1955, because those were very much on the minds of the activists.

Rosa Parks’ Arrest

When she was arrested, Rosa Parks was already a seasoned activist. She had served as a professional staff member of the Alabama NAACP and had been an active participant in the League of Women Voters. When a young African American woman, Recy Taylor, was gang-raped by white men, Parks had helped to form the Committee for Equal Justice for Mrs. Recy Taylor, a significant effort to combat both white supremacy and violence against women.⁷ Parks was employed as a domestic worker by one of the most progressive white families in Montgomery, Clifford and Virginia Durr, who helped her to participate in trainings in nonviolent civil disobedience at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee. One of her mentors at Highlander was Septima Clark, often called the “Queen Mother” or “Grandmother” of the civil rights movement.

On December 1, 1955, Parks boarded a Montgomery bus, operated by Montgomery City Lines Inc,. that was racially segregated by law, with whites seated at the front and Blacks seated at the back. Black female domestic workers predominated as passengers on Montgomery’s buses and were often sexually harassed as they interacted with the white male drivers. Parks sat in the “colored” section but was ordered (with several others) to renounce her seat to a white rider. She refused and was arrested. The charge was refusing to give up a seat in the “colored” section. Much later, she recalled:

People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.⁸

The Core Activists and their Assets

When Rosa Parks was arrested, she called her mother, who called E.D. Nixon, the president of both the Montgomery branch of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (a Black union) and the state’s NAACP chapter. Nixon had considerable influence as a seasoned union organizer and had registered 2,000 Black voters.9 Nixon called Clifford Durr, mentioned above. After Nixon and Durr posted bail for Parks and she agreed to contest her arrest, Nixon made a list of people he would call the next morning. We know that he actually “called 284 people whom he felt had some influence in community affairs.”¹⁰ Among them were two young Black pastors, Ralph Abernathy and Martin Luther King Jr. Meanwhile, someone else called Fred Grey, a Black attorney in town, who, in turn, called Jo Ann Robinson, who was a professor at the local Black university, Alabama State, and the president of the WPC.

Launched by women professors at Alabama State, the WPC combined direct service with political action. It had grown so popular that it had formed three different chapters in the city, each with 100 members, elected officers, and “telephone coordinators” who could spread information quickly. Robinson later recalled that the WPC “had been planning the boycott of the Montgomery City Lines for months [before Parks was arrested], and the idea itself had been entertained for years.”¹¹ Late on the night of Parks’ arrest, Robinson assembled some of her allies on the Alabama State campus and used the college mimeograph machine (a forerunner of a photocopier) to make flyers announcing a public meeting in support of Parks.

It was Grey who called Robinson, but she had also worked with Nixon and had served as a leader in King’s church. These connections are examples of the ties among a network of African American leaders (plus a few supportive whites) in Montgomery. Robinson later estimated that there were 68 Black organizations in Montgomery: “men’s groups, women’s groups, and political, religious, social, economic, educational, fraternal, and labor organizations.”¹² Her estimate excluded churches and Black-owned businesses. Put together, they formed a powerful network in a city of only about 50,000 Black residents (out of a total population of 130,000).

The day after Parks’ arrest, about 50 local Black leaders gathered in the basement of King’s church to decide what to do next.¹³ Most of them probably knew each other already.

It is valuable to brainstorm the assets that the network collectively possessed. For example, activists could make copies on the Alabama State mimeograph machine and meet undisturbed in several Black churches or a union hall. They had connections with about 18 separate Black-owned taxi companies that could ferry commuters to work if there was a bus boycott.14 They had legal expertise and some money. They could turn Montgomery’s main white-owned newspaper into an asset by persuading it to report on their activities, thereby spreading information within the Black community. (Nixon did this by meeting in secret with a white reporter.) They also knew who was active in their various congregations, the Porters’ union, several associations, and the campus of Alabama State University.

Martin Luther King Jr. might be one of the network’s assets. A young pastor who had recently taken over a leading Black church in town, he seemed to have a gift for words and was well con- nected as the son of one of Atlanta’s most prominent African American pastors. Also, he was a newcomer, and Montgomerians felt that he could always leave town again if things went badly. That made him a promising candidate to be the movement’s main spokesperson.

What other assets did the movement have?

The Organizational Structure

When a network of leaders first gathered after Parks’ arrest to decide what to do, their natural leader appeared to be Rev. L. Roy Bennett, who was president of the Black minister’s group in Montgomery. This group, the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance, also looked like the right organization to coordinate any activism.

However, Bennett exasperated most of the other activists by lecturing at length and refusing to share the floor.¹⁵ The other existing Black organizations in Montgomery either had narrow memberships or were vulnerable if they took a prominent role. (For example, Jo Ann Robinson could be fired from Alabama State if the WPC was seen as too political.) A group of activists decided to create a brand-new association, the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA). They persuaded a somewhat reluctant King to be its first president and elected Bennett as the vice president.¹⁶

The MIA’s elected officers then met regularly and made key decisions throughout the Montgomery campaign. Thousands of individuals from Montgomery’s African American community joined and contributed to the MIA. At mass meetings held in churches, everyone would vote by calling out “aye” or “nay” on such matters as whether to start (or, later, to stop) the bus boycott. About five thousand people attended and voted at the first such meeting.¹⁷ However, the board had already decided on a course of action, and the unanimous public votes merely ratified their decisions.

Of course, the organizational structure of the MIA was only one possible form that the organizers could have chosen. Imagine it is the evening after Parks’ arrest, and you are meeting in the base- ment of King’s church, where Rev. Bennett is dominating the meeting and people are beginning to leave in quiet protest.

What organizational structure would you create to make decisions for the movement? Table 1 presents some choices, but others might be possible, and these could be combined in various ways. What do you imagine would be pros and cons of each?

Obstacles

Social change is hard, and all movements face obstacles, including their opponents. In this case, the following obstacles faced by organizers in 1955 may require special attention:

1. 1. The difficulty of coordinating: Before Rosa Parks, other individuals had refused to give up their seats on segregated buses (including a young woman named Claudette Colvin in Montgomery in 1955). Individuals had protested segregation in many other ways as well. However, if one or a few people resisted at a time, they would not make much positive difference, and they would risk violent reprisals. On the other hand, if thousands of people resisted at the same time, they would be safer and they could have a major impact. For example, when thousands of Black Montgomerians boycotted the city’s buses, they did so safely and defeated the bus company. The obstacle was the difficulty of coordination.

2. 2. Fear and pessimism: By 1955, Black Americans had experienced 336 years of slavery and then segregation. And, as noted earlier, more than 340 Black Alabamans were publicly executed without trials for allegedly defying segregation. Understandable fear (including fear of death) and doubt were also obstacles to a movement. Closer to home, in 1952, a Black man who had “exchanged words” with a Montgomery bus driver had been killed by city police as he disembarked from the same journey, and the coroner had ruled the killing justifiable.¹⁸

What other obstacles would the movement face?

Choices

The leaders of the Montgomery bus boycott had to make fundamental choices to overcome these obstacles and change their society. Five major choices are described in this section. You can consider choices different from theirs.

1. Objectives

What a movement strives to achieve can be defined as its “objectives.” Various members of a movement may have different objectives, their objectives may change over time, and the movement may not explicitly express all of its goals. Nevertheless, at any given time, a movement typically strives for something, and it has the power to choose that objective.

In the case of the Montgomery bus boycott, the objective sometimes seemed very narrow. The MIA originally wanted to prevent Black bus passengers from having to give up their seats to white passengers when the white section of the bus was full. In other words, they did not originally contest segregation on city buses, just the additional injustice of having to give up seats in the Black section at the back. The NAACP was critical of this objective because it sought to abolish segregation on all transportation and did not want to concede that separate but equal buses could ever be acceptable. Reflecting in the late 1980s, Robinson felt that the Men of Montgomery, a Black leadership group, had been careful to call for equal but separate seating on the city’s buses, because to demand integration might have caused “bloodshed.” However, the WPC, which she led, “knew all the time that black Americans were working for integration, pure and simple.”¹⁹

On the night when the MIA voted to boycott buses, Martin Luther King depicted their objective as much deeper and broader than changing who could sit where on buses. He told the mass meeting of the MIA, “We, the disinherited of this land, we who have been oppressed so long, are tired of going through the long night of captivity. And now we are reaching out for the daybreak of freedom and justice and equality.”²⁰

His peers expected King to define the movement’s objective in broad terms and were motivated by similar values.

But what should the precise objectives of the movement have been at the time? Table 2 offers some possible choices, but others could certainly be generated. These could be combined, although trying to accomplish many objectives at once can sometimes set up a movement for failure. Which ones of these would you choose?

2. Targets

A movement chooses one or more organizations, agencies, or people as its targets and tries to create costs or difficulties for them in order to advance its objectives.

The MIA targeted the Montgomery City Lines Inc. (the city’s bus company) by organizing a boycott that would cost the company thousands of fares each day.

The MIA chose the bus company because they saw a particular vulnerability that they could exploit: the city’s buses depended on Black riders who could refuse to ride and find other ways to work. For individual Black commuters, boycotting the buses was highly inconvenient, but it imposed a high price on the target.

Other potential targets could have been chosen. For example, during the boycott, Montgomery’s police commissioner joined the White Citizens Council, an organization explicitly committed to preserving white supremacy. The commissioner, the police department, or the White Citizens Council could have been chosen as the main target, as could downtown stores or the Democratic Party (which dominated Alabama).

Which targets would you choose? Table 3 offers some options. Again, it is possible to choose several of these, but it can be a mistake to select too many at once or to select targets that you cannot affect or that cannot do what you want them to do.

3. Demands

Whereas the objectives of a movement are what it really wants to accomplish, its demands are what it presents to a specific decision-maker. For example, the MIA told the bus company and the City of Montgomery that Black commuters would go back to riding the city’s buses if: 1) Black riders did not have to give up their seats to whites, 2) drivers treated Black passengers courteously, and 3) some Blacks were hired as drivers. These three points were their initial demands.

Meanwhile, Fred Grey and others involved with the MIA sued the city and the bus lines to end all segregation in public transportation. They ultimately won their case.²¹ They made different demands in court because a federal lawsuit was a different context from a boycott.

What demands would you place before which targets? Table 4 presents options. It looks similar to Table 2 (“Objectives”), but there is an important difference in how to think about these two decisions. Objectives are what you want. Demands are what you ask some specific target to do. For instance, if the movement’s objective were to build Black political power, the movement could not demand that the bus company do that. But it could demand that the company hire Black drivers, which might ultimately lead to more power for the Black community.

4. Strategies

The MIA’s main strategy was to organize and sustain a boycott of the city’s buses for many months. This required not only persuading thousands of commuters not to ride buses to work but also or- ganizing carpools, van services, and other transportation alternatives that consistently served large numbers of people. King later recalled that many Black car owners immediately volunteered to drive people to work, but “they started out simply cruising the streets of Montgomery with no particular system.” At that point, “the real job was just beginning—that of working out some system for these three hundred-odd automobiles, to replace their haphazard movement around the city.”²² The MIA succeeded in creating such a system.

Meanwhile, the MIA sued to end segregation in federal court. When the police indicted 88 leaders of the boycott (including King), these leaders turned themselves in voluntarily and made their imprisonment into an act of nonviolent resistance that brought international media attention to their cause. They also presented their case to reporters and raised money from supporters across the country and overseas.

These were their strategies, but they could have taken other actions instead or as well. Later, the civil rights movement would often violate police or court orders against marching so that the police would arrest them and they would fill jails with thousands of supporters. They used sit-ins, they regis- tered voters, and they held large funeral ceremonies for martyrs. In Memphis in 1968, they organized a major strike. The civil rights movement could also have employed violence against people or property, although it chose not to.

What strategies or combinations of strategies would be best? Table 5 provides some of the options that were intentionally pursued at one time or another during the Civil Rights Movement.

5. Rhetoric

The MIA made Martin Luther King Jr. into its main spokesperson, and he gave speeches that are still widely read, as well as many interviews to reporters. Soon after the movement’s success in Montgomery, he published a book, Stride Toward Freedom, that presented his early views more fully to a global audience.

During the mass meeting that launched the boycott, King described Rosa Parks’ recent arrest this way:

Mrs. Rosa Parks is a fine person. And, since it had to happen, I’m happy that it happened to a person like Mrs. Parks, for nobody can doubt the boundless outreach of her integrity. Nobody can doubt the height of her character. Nobody can doubt the depth of her Christian commitment and devotion to the teachings of Jesus. And I’m happy since it had to happen, it happened to a person that nobody can call a disturbing factor in the community. Mrs. Parks is a fine Christian person, unassuming, and yet there is integrity and character there. And just because she refused to get up, she was arrested.²³

Like any exercise in public communication, this passage reflects choices. The MIA did not have to choose Martin Luther King as its leader. Rosa Parks could have spoken in addition to King or instead of him. Or King could have spoken about Parks’ experience as a militant activist and her long record of fighting sexual violence against Black women. Instead, he chose to emphasize the involuntary nature of her arrest and her Christian faith.

There was much more to King’s rhetoric and that of his fellow leaders. During the boycott, King invoked American history, democracy, law, Christianity, and racial justice in very specific ways.

How would you frame the issues for public audiences? Although you could combine these approaches or use different ones in different contexts and with different audiences, they can be in some tension. Making one of these arguments can prevent you from making a different one credibly.