In mid-1950s Montgomery, Black riders made up about 75 percent of bus passengers yet had to pay at the front, reboard at the rear and surrender whole rows in the middle section to a single white passenger. NAACP chapter president and Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters organizer E.D. Nixon wanted a test case with an unimpeachable plaintiff, and passed over teenager Claudette Colvin. Rosa Parks was his chapter secretary, had investigated the gang rape of Recy Taylor in Abbeville, and had trained at the Highlander Folk School. On December 1, 1955 she refused to give up her seat on a bus driven by James F. Blake, the same driver who had put her off a bus in the rain twelve years earlier, and later said Emmett Till was on her mind. She was arrested and fined $14.
Jo Ann Robinson and the Women’s Political Council cranked out about 35,000 leaflets overnight on Alabama State College mimeographs for a one-day boycott on December 5. The new Montgomery Improvement Association chose 26-year-old Martin Luther King Jr. as leader, partly because the city had no hold over him, and its first demands were modest. When the city forced up taxi fares, the MIA ran a carpool network funded in part by Georgia Gilmore’s Club From Nowhere. King’s home was bombed with his wife and child inside, and he told an armed crowd to put away its weapons. In June 1956 Browder v. Gayle declared bus segregation unconstitutional, the Supreme Court upheld it, and buses integrated on December 20, 1956 after 382 days.
- When local agents canceled insurance on carpool vehicles, the movement obtained coverage from Lloyd’s of London.
- King and 88 others indicted under a 1921 anti-boycott law turned themselves in wearing their Sunday best.
- In January 1957 bombers struck five Black churches and the home of white minister Robert Graetz.
- Klansmen forced Willie Edwards to jump to his death from a bridge, and the city banned interracial games, even checkers.
- Blacklisted and threatened, Rosa Parks and her family left Montgomery for Detroit.
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