Читать книгу Freedom Facts and Firsts - Jessie Carney Smith - Страница 84

The Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 marked the beginnings of mass protest among African Americans when Rosa McCully Parks refused to render her seat to a white man on the Cleveland Avenue bus driven by James F. Blake. Arrested and sent to jail, Parks inspired African Americans, under the leadership of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., to boycott Montgomery’s public transportation system. A 13month boycott ensued after Parks’s arrest and ended when the U.S. Supreme Court agreed that Montgomery’s racial bus seating requirements were unconstitutional in the Browder v. Gayle case.

Before Parks’s arrest, though, African American women, through the Women’s Political Council (WPC), had focused their attention on the Jim Crow bus rules a year earlier. In 1954 Jo Ann Robinson, president of the WPC, met with W. A. Gayle, the mayor of Montgomery, and enumerated desired changes to the Montgomery bus laws. The sought-after changes included: no one should have to stand next to empty seats; a decree that African Americans not be made to pay at the front of the bus and then enter from the rear; and a directive that required buses to stop at every corner in African American neighborhoods, just as they did in white neighborhoods. The March 1954 meeting yielded no changes, however, and Robinson followed up by sending Gayle a letter restating the WPC’s requests and communicating the possibility of a citywide bus boycott.

The bus where Rosa Parks staged her famous protest that sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott is proudly preserved at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan (AP Photo/Paul Warner).

A year later, buses remained segregated. On March 2, 1955, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin was arrested nine months before Parks, when she openly refused to surrender her seat to a white passenger. Seven months later, on October 21, 18-year-old Mary Louise Smith was arrested for the same violation. Neither of these cases galvanized the African American community like that of Rosa Parks. Following the December 1, 1955, arrest of Rosa Parks, Robinson printed flyers asking African Americans in Montgomery to stay off the city’s buses on December 5, the day of Parks’s trial. On that day, African American citizens of Montgomery complied with the request. Later in the day, the African American clergy and leaders decided to launch a long-term boycott. This meeting gave birth to the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) and brought the young Martin Luther King Jr. into the national spotlight.

Functionaries of the MIA met with city commissioners and bus company officials on December 8, 1955, and they issued a list of formal demands similar to those issued earlier by Robinson and the WPC. Both the city and the bus company refused to relinquish the Jim Crow seating rule on Montgomery buses. Black Montgomery continued the boycott. Following the paradigm set by the Reverend T. J. Jemison and the 1953 bus boycott in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the MIA developed a carpool system to aid in the transportation needs of African Americans in Montgomery. Women played a critical role in sustaining the boycott, especially the anonymous cooks and maids who made long walks to and from home for a year to sustain the efforts of desegregation. After the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear appeals in the Browder v. Gayle case, the MIA voted to end Montgomery’s 381-day bus boycott. On December 21, 1956, blacks returned to riding a now-desegregated Montgomery public system of transportation.

Linda T. Wynn