Montgomery Bus Boycott

A strong case can be made that this protest action, which started in the Deep South state of Alabama, is the best-known and most influential consumer boycott in America's history. This boycott [Page 1483]initiated the modern civil rights movement in the United States and introduced to the world the man who became the movement's leader, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. The Montgomery bus boycott was triggered on December 1, 1955, by the refusal of Rosa Parks to give up her seat on a city bus to a white man.

Despite the many books and articles written about this boycott, some misunderstandings persist. To illustrate, Rosa Parks is sometimes portrayed as a retiring apolitical woman who, because of fatigue from a long day's work, finally decided that she had had enough and stepped out of character to defy the local authorities. In fact, Parks was anything but retiring and apolitical; she had long been involved in local and state black political activities, having served, for example, as secretary for the local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) chapter from 1943 to 1955. Moreover, she had refused several times in the 1940s to comply with the bus segregation laws and in the early 1940s was once ejected by a bus driver for her refusal to comply.

A second common misunderstanding concerns the organization of the boycott plan and its initial implementation. The leadership for this mammoth effort is often wrongly ascribed to King, but he asked to take charge only after the boycott began. The early planners and initiators were two longtime Montgomery residents with a history of leadership in the black community. One was E. D. Nixon, a local leader in union matters and black political pursuits. Known by many as a local militant, he was the man to whom local blacks would go if they experienced trouble with whites and needed help. The second principal was Jo Ann Robinson, a professor of English at the local black college, Alabama State College. Robinson headed the Women's Political Council, a group of local, middle-class black women considered to be one of the most active and assertive black civic organizations in Montgomery.