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Monday, June 6, 2016
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Montgomery Bus Boycott Documents
Montgomery Bus
Boycott Timeline
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1941 - 1945
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U.S. involvement in WWII.
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1949
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Women’s Political Council in Montgomery,
Alabama created.
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June 1950 - July 1953
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-U.S. involvement in the Korean War.
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June 1953
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African-Americans in Baton-Rouge,
Louisiana boycott segregated city buses.
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May 1954
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Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka,
Kansas
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Aug. 1955
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Murder of Emmett Till.
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Dec. 1, 1955
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Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat
and is arrested.
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Dec. 5, 1955
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Montgomery Improvement Council formed,
Martin Luther King, Jr. named President.
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Nov. 1956
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Supreme Court affirms decision in Browder
v. Gayle which found bus segregation unconstitutional.
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Dec. 1956
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Supreme Court rejects city and state
appeals on its decision. Buses are desegregated in Montgomery.
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1984 American
Textbook
In 1955, just after the school desegregation decision, a
black woman helped change American history. Like most southern cities (and many
northern ones), Montgomery had a law that blacks had to sit in the back rows of
the bus. One day, Rosa Parks boarded a city bus and sat down in the closest
seat. It was one of the first rows of the section where blacks were not
supposed to sit. The bus filled up and some white people were standing. The bus
driver told Rosa Parks that she would have to give up her seat to a white
person. She refused and was arrested. The next evening, black leaders, many of
them church ministers, met to decide if they should protest. A young minister
who just moved to Montgomery from Atlanta, Martin Luther King Jr., soon became
the leader of the group. King and the others called for a black boycott of the
Montgomery bus system. The boycott meant blacks refused to ride the buses. For
months, the buses were almost empty because most of the riders had been black.
Then, the boycott spread to white businesses in downtown Montgomery. King was
arrested and jailed, but he continued to urge his followers to use a path of
“non-violent resistance.” This meant that they would break laws that
discriminated against blacks, but that they would not use violence… By 1960,
black Americans had made some progress toward equality. The Supreme Court and
other government actions had opened the door. But most blacks still were forced
to live a second-class type of life.
May 21, 1954.
Montgomery, Alabama. In this letter, Jo Ann Robinson writes the Mayor of
Montgomery asking for fair treatment on the buses. Jo Ann Robinson was the
president of the Women’s Political Council (“WPC”), an organization of African
American professional women in Montgomery, founded in 1949.
Dear Sir:
The Women’s Political Council is very grateful to
you and the City Commissioners for the hearing you allowed our representative
during the month of March, 1954, when the "city-bus-fare-increase
case" was being reviewed. There were several things the Council asked for:
1. A city law that would make it possible for Negroes to sit
from back toward front, and whites from front toward back until all the seats
are taken.
2. That Negroes not be asked or forced to pay fare at front
and go to the rear of the bus to enter.
3. That busses stop at every corner in residential sections
occupied by Negroes as they do in communities where whites reside.
We are happy to report that busses have begun stopping at
more corners now in some sections where Negroes live than previously. However,
the same practices in seating and boarding the bus continue. Mayor Gayle,
three-fourths of the riders of these public conveyances are Negroes. If Negroes
did not patronize them, they could not possibly operate.
More and more of our people are already arranging with
neighbors and friends to ride to keep from being insulted and humiliated
by bus drivers. There has been talk from twenty-five or more local
organizations of planning a city-wide boycott of busses. We, sir, do not
feel that forceful measures are necessary in bargaining for a convenience which
is right for all bus passengers....
Please consider this plea, and if possible, act favorably
upon it, for even now plans are being made to ride less, or not at all, on our
busses. We do not want this.
Respectfully yours,
The Women’s Political Council
Jo Ann Robinson, President
Bayard Rustin’s
Diary
Bayard Rustin, an African American civil rights activist,
traveled to Montgomery to advise Dr. King and support the bus boycott. Though
he was eventually asked to leave Montgomery because leaders feared his
reputation as a gay Communist would hurt the movement, he kept a diary of what
he found.
February 24
42,000 Negroes have not ridden the busses since December 5.
On December 6, the police began to harass, intimidate, and arrest Negro taxi
drivers who were helping get these people to work. It thus became necessary for
the Negro leaders to find an alternative—the car pool. This morning Rufus
Lewis, director of the pool…explained that there are three methods in addition
to the car pool, for moving the Negro population:
1. Hitch-hiking.
2. The transportation of servants by white housewives.
3. Walking.
Later he introduced me to two men, one of whom has walked 7
miles and the other 14 miles, every day since December 5. “The success of the
car pool is at the heart of the movement,” Lewis said at the meeting. “It must
not be stopped.”
I wondered what the response of the drivers would be, since
28 of them had just been arrested on charges of conspiring to destroy the bus
company. One by one, they pledged that, if necessary, they would be arrested
again and again.
Source: Excerpt from
Bayard Rustin’s Montgomery Diary, February 24, 1956. Montgomery, Alabama.
Virginia Foster Durr
was a white woman who supported civil rights for African Americans in
Montgomery. Here, Durr writes the director of the Highlander Folk School and
his wife. Highlander was a center for training civil rights activists and labor
organizers.
January 30, 1956
Dear Myles and Zilphia:
I
just received a newsletter from Highlander giving a summary of the past year’s
activities. I think you should add how much you had to do with the Montgomery
Bus Boycott which is really making history. LIFE, TIME, CBS, NBC, and countless
other papers have been down here covering it. I think it is the first time that
a whole Negro community has ever stuck together this way and for so long and I
think they are going to win it. But how your part comes in is through the
effect the school had on Mrs. Rosa Parks. When she came back she was so happy
and felt so liberated. She said the discrimination got worse and worse to bear
AFTER having, for the first time in her life, been free of it at Highlander. I
am sure that had a lot to do with her daring to risk arrest as she is naturally
a very quiet person although she has a strong sense of pride and is, in my
opinion, a really noble woman. But you and Zilphia should take pride in what
you did for her and what she is doing.
Lots of love to all, come and see for yourself.
VA Source: Excerpt
from a letter written by Virginia Foster Durr to Myles and Zilphia Horton,
January 30, 1956. Montgomery, Alabama.
MLK
At this Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) weekly
meeting, King speaks to the crowd. Democracy gives us this right to protest and
that is all we are doing. We can say honestly that we have not advocated
[promoted] violence, have not practiced it, and have gone courageously on with
a Christian movement. Ours is a spiritual movement depending on moral and
spiritual fortitude. The protest is still going on. (Great deal of applause
here)
Freedom doesn’t come on a silver platter. With every great
movement toward freedom there will inevitably be trials. Somebody will have to
have the courage to sacrifice. You don’t get to the Promised Land without going
through the Wilderness. You don’t get there without crossing over hills and
mountains, but if you keep on keeping on, you can’t help but reach it. We won’t
all see it, but it’s coming and it’s because God is for it.
We won’t back down. We are going on with our movement.
Let us continue with the same spirit, with the same
orderliness, with the same discipline, with the same Christian approach. I
believe that God is using Montgomery as his proving ground.
God be praised for you, for your loyalty, for your
determination. God bless you and keep you, and may
God be with us as we go on.
Source: Excerpts from
a speech by Martin Luther King, Jr., as reported by Anna Holden, a teacher at
Fisk University. March 22, 1956. Montgomery, Alabama
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