﻿Hi I’m Clint Smith and this is Crash Course Black American History.
The Montgomery Bus Boycott, which took place from December 5th, 1955 to December 20th,
1956, was one of the most successful examples of mass nonviolent resistance in US history.
This boycott is regarded as the first large-scale U.S. demonstration against segregation
with an estimated 40,000 participants. It came on the heels of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954,
which deemed "separate but equal" a violation of the 14th Amendment,
and therefore unconstitutional. But Brown v Board, only integrated public
/schools/ in the United States. Segregation ran rampant in all other
areas of society including department stores, movie theaters, restaurants,
and…public transportation. As historian Jeanne Theoharris put it,
"The arbitrariness of segregation, the power and place it granted white people,
was perhaps nowhere more evident than on the bus."
Let’s start the show. INTRO
Before the boycott, transportation laws in Montgomery
upheld white supremacy. The Montgomery City Code mandated that Black and white people
were required to sit in separate sections on public transportation. Furthermore,
bus drivers were legally allowed to arrest passengers who violated the mandate,
and many of the drivers carried guns. Black patrons were assaulted, abused,
arrested, ejected and sometimes even killed for refusing to give up their seats, talking back,
or even asking questions. Rosa Parks, whose refusal to give up her seat was the catalyst
for the Montgomery bus boycott, was but one of a long line of Black Americans who resisted the
inequality of the public transportation system. In Montgomery, eleven years before the boycott,
in 1944, a woman named Viola White was beaten and arrested for refusing to give up her seat.
Thurgood Marshall recounted one case of two members of the Women's Army Corps
in 1945, and described it as "one of the worst cases” he had ever seen. The two women in uniform
refused to give up their seats and pointed out to the driver that there were seats available
and they shouldn't have to move. The driver then physically and verbally assaulted the women.
In 1950, authorities took it a step further in the case of a man named Hilliard Brooks.
Black passengers were supposed to pay at the front of the bus, then exit the bus
and board from the back door straight into the /colored/ section. And sometimes
bus drivers would drive off before passengers could make it to the back door. A World War II
veteran, Brooks refused to exit after paying his money. When the police arrived, officer M.E. Mills
beat Brooks with a club, then shot and killed him as he tried to escape.
Episodes of violence and humiliation like these were pervasive amongst Black Americans.
And because many Black people did not own their own cars,
many felt like they had nowhere else to turn. But sometimes, there is only so much that a person
can take, and talks of a bus boycott danced around barbershops, cookouts, and churches. Then in 1953,
the Women's Political Council, or WPC, collected a formal list of
around 30 complaints of abuse on Montgomery buses in efforts to petition the mayor.
The WPC was a league of 300 Black women in Montgomery founded in 1946 to develop strategies
to combat community challenges in the face of Jim Crow laws. And in 1954, under the leadership of
President Jo Ann Robinson, the WPC wrote a letter to the Mayor warning him that if the violence did
not stop, the Black bus passengers would boycott. In the years before the boycott, Robinson worked
arduously with the members of the WPC to create a plan. They strategized how they would notify the
city's Black population if and when the time came. They didn’t know when it would come, but they knew
they needed to be ready when it did. The December 1st arrest of Parks
provided the perfect opportunity. As soon as word of the arrest reached Robinson, it was time to
go to work. Let's go to the thought bubble. It was a dark and stormy night--just kidding,
it was a normal - very typical - Thursday evening as Rosa Parks boarded the bus home from work
for her usual 15 minute commute. And as always, she boarded in the colored
section and sat in her designated area. Then the whites-only section began to fill up.
When there were no more seats available, the driver instructed the four Black people who
took up the next two rows (including Parks) to get up so a white man could have a seat.
Everyone got up...except her. See, this is how it usually worked:
about ten front seats were always reserved for white people, and then
ten back seats were reserved for black people. The middle section wasn’t reserved for either,
but white people had priority. If more white people got on the bus
and all the middle seats were filled, then Black people in the middle seats
would have to get up and stand. Contrary to the way the story is often told, Rosa
Parks was not asked to directly give up her seat for a white passenger. Instead, her entire row was
cleared so one white passenger could sit down. Parks thought about the racial injustices her
family had faced, and about the tragic murder of Emmett Till one year earlier,
and she had had enough. She later wrote in her autobiography My Story, "People always say that
I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true...the only tired I was,
was tired of giving in.” Thanks, thought bubble.
After Parks was arrested and word spread, Jo Ann Robinson
and the Women’s Political Council immediately went to work. Partnering with community leaders
had proved ineffective in the past, so they decided to call a one-day boycott by themselves.
Instead of going home that night, Robinson went to work at Alabama State where she taught English.
She stayed there all night using a mimeograph machine to make leaflets announcing the boycott.
Roughly twenty women assembled to deliver them, and over the next four days, they distributed tens
of thousands of leaflets through as many salons, barbershops, bars, or places of work they could.
Robinson was determined to get this show on the road
because, like many other members of the community, she felt that Parks' arrest was the
moment where a boycott could finally take hold. But here, we also have to stop and ask ourselves,
why Rosa Parks became the person that many civil right leaders wanted to rally around. I mean,
she wasn’t the first. That same year, two other women, in Montgomery, had already been arrested
after refusing to give up their bus seats. One of those people was Claudette Colvin,
detained in March of 1955, who was a 15-year-old high school student at the time of her arrest.
Even though her arrest happened /before/ Parks’, many believed that ED Nixon and
other civil rights leaders did not feel compelled to publicize her arrest because she was young,
poor, and dark-skinned. Furthermore, after the arrest she got pregnant, and with that
any chance she had of becoming the public face of the boycott was gone.
But Rosa Parks, these leaders believed had the right background and the right look.
Her history of activism within the NAACP helped too. She fit the profile of the type of person the
civil rights movement wanted as its face. Born Rosa McCauley in 1913
and raised on her grandparents' farm in Alabama, Parks had to walk to school because, at the time,
Jim Crow laws prevented her from riding the school bus. Initially aspiring to be a nurse,
Parks had to drop out of school in the eleventh grade to take care of her ill grandmother.
It wasn’t until she married Raymond Parks in 1932 that she was ultimately
able to go back and finish school. With Raymond, she began a life of activism.
Parks eventually came to work for the NAACP and was appointed the secretary in Montgomery.
Decades of work in activist circles had given Parks all the connections she needed for the
community to come together at the time of her arrest, and agree that this was the moment.
At first, the WPC held a one day boycott, and it was a success. Feeling the momentum, they decided
to keep it going. Those with cars carpooled or contributed to what was virtually an Uber system
without the surge pricing. Those who walked rotated in groups so no one had to walk alone
and be subjected to violence. It was a community effort, and the community was all in.
Local leaders elected a young, 26-year-old preacher named Martin Luther King, Jr.
to serve as the public face of the movement. With King as President, they established the Montgomery
Improvement Association (MIA) to oversee the organization and maintenance of the boycott.
Jo Ann Robinson, from the Women’s Political Council, chose not to take an official
position within the MIA, but she was part of the Executive Board and edited the weekly newsletter.
Together, the WPC and MIA created and maintained a mean lean boycotting machine.
One of the main reasons the boycott was so successful is that Black Americans made up
most passengers on the busses, 75% in fact. And without black riders or black dollars,
the city suffered financially. On June 5th, 1956, a Montgomery federal court ruled bus segregation
a violation of the 14th Amendment. The town still tried to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court,
but it upheld the lower court's decision on December 20th, 1956. On December 21st,
1956, the buses were integrated and the boycott came to an end-- lasting a total of 381 days.
This movement was a culmination of a long struggle against discrimination in the public sphere.
It also served as a gateway to the extensive activism
of the civil rights movement. However, as successful as the boycott was,
it was not all sunshine and rainbows. Like many Black Americans
who have stood for equality at any point in time, boycotters faced violence and intimidation tactics
from the surrounding white community. Boycotters faced the threat of losing their jobs,
having to walk to work increased their chances of being late, and some faced
heckling and torment by white citizens. Others had more trying experiences.
Dr. King and ED Nixon’s homes were bombed just days apart in 1956. In February of that year
89 members of the MIA were arrested under an old ordinance designed to prevent people from
boycotting. King was tried and found guilty and made to pay a $500 fine and $500 in court fees.
By December the KKK had taken to burning crosses in the yards of protesters and the bus yards.
This type of violence would become characteristic of the Civil Rights Movement.
Still, the bus boycott set a new precedent for nonviolent civil disobedience
dedicated to upending Jim Crow. And as we’ll soon see, these activists were only getting started.
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