and she had been active in organizing for civil rights
in a reform in her community for quite some time.
She had been frustrated with the treatment African Americans
experienced at the hand of white supremacists.
And so she had organized to
protest over such outrages in the past.
And this led to her involvement in the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
So she was an activist before the Montgomery Bus Boycott occurred.
She had a job as a seamstress, working in a local department store.
Her activities and her sewing brought her into
contact with a white woman in Montgomery named Virginia Foster Durr.
Virginia Durr had been involved in the New Deal, and as a result of their friendship,
Virginia Durr encouraged Mrs. Parks to attend the Highlander Folk School.
And so Rosa Parks went to Highlander,
and it was there at Highlander she met other people like herself—
black and white southern liberals—trying to promote social reform
in their native region, and it inspired her.
She came back to Montgomery and was interested in trying to work for reform.
Then came the fateful day in December 1955,
when Rosa Parks sat on the bus.
And she sat in the section of
the bus that African Americans were entitled to sit in, but the bus driver
when he pulled up to the side of the Empire Theatre, which had just let out
from showing a movie and whites were crowding out and getting on the bus for
their rides home, there were white people left standing in the aisle.
Rosa Parks knew the driver,
and here he was now coming down the aisle demanding that she
surrendered her seat to these white patrons.
She was under no obligation to do so by law,
and so she refused.
She stayed in her seat.
The driver said, "If you don't give me that seat I'll have you arrested."
And Mrs. Parks said, "You may do that."
Police came, took her to jail, booked her, put her in.
Black Montgomery had all experienced that kind of treatment on the buses and
rallied around Rosa Parks. She was a highly respected member of the community.
E. D. Nixon was quick to be involved in the support for Rosa Parks to try to
organize a bigger protest over the arrest of this woman.
What Nixon did who was call up the pastors of the leading black churches,
including the Reverend Ralph D. Abernathy, who was the pastor of the First Baptist Church of Montgomery.
Ralph Abernathy encouraged E. D. Nixon to call up Martin Luther King Jr.,
who was at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.
They created a group called the Montgomery Improvement Association, known as the MIA.
The MIA, with Dr. King as its head,
then promotes a boycott of the city buses.
Joanne Robinson stays up all night printing these leaflets.
They're handed out in the African-American churches in the city,
and the leaflets call for a one-day boycott of the city buses.
Martin King gets up that morning.
He looks out the window, and he watches a city bus go by,
and there wasn't a soul riding on the bus.
And he said to his wife, "Cory, this is going to be a success."
After that first success of no one riding the buses from
the black community, it encouraged African Americans to prolong the protest.
A mass meeting was held, and there the congregation unanimously approved the
idea of continuing the boycott, and they would continue it for over a year with
principally black women but a number of African Americans no longer riding
public transit but instead walking to work.
Through the spring rains to the summer heat, through the chill of fall and the cold of winter,
they walked to work.
And in the end, basically broke the bus company.
Now the white community responded, and it responded viciously.
People were fired for not coming to work if they were walking to work or late, on the one hand.
But then on the other hand, some white women who were committed to
their African-American domestic help, their maids, would drive into the
black neighborhoods to pick the maids up to take them to their houses.
So the maids were now being chauffeured around by their white employers.
The city of Montgomery, when after the leaders of the Montgomery Bus Boycott
accused them of libel, the Ku Klux Klan got involved and vigilantes dynamited,
threw bombs at the parsonage where Dr. King lived with his wife and young daughter,
dynamited the home of the Reverend Ralph D. Abernathy and his
wife Juanita, to try to kill King and kill Abernathy and kill the movement.
So you find all kinds of responses, but the worst efforts of the white
community was unable to prevent African Americans from maintaining this boycott.
Meanwhile, the black movement filed a new court case. The court case
works its way through the system and then reaches the United States Supreme Court.
By December of 1956, the ruling is handed down, building on the decision of
the Brown versus Board of Education decision of 1954 which has said schools
could not be separate because they were unequal. Now the Supreme Court was
extending that logic to the issue of public accommodations in transportation.
You could not have separate seating on public buses.
It was unconstitutional because it was unequal.
And with the implementation of that decision,
Montgomery's buses were desegregated.