*My style and indentation, etcetera, was lost during the paste* (name removed)
6th Period
11-2-15

The laws of segregation back in 1955 were as strict as they could get. There were, however, a few people who rebelled against this type of treatment.
On December 1st, 1995, a woman of forty-two years of age, by the name of Rosa Parks, boarded a bus after her usual day. At one of the stops, a white male boarded, and with the bus being full, went to the back of the bus, telling Rosa to move. She refused, stating she was tired, and was later arrested for refusing to relinquish her seat. This incident sparked the thirteen-month Montgomery Bus Boycott.
She wasn’t the first to do this. A fifteen year-old by the name of Claudette Colvin also did this, but did not receive as much publicity as Rosa Parks did in 1955.
This demonstrated non-violent protest against racial segregation, and started a chain of events that would eventually lead to consolidation of races, and end the front of discrimination.

The Womens` Political Council (WPC), founded in 1946, had already begun to work for the cause Rosa later displayed. In 1954, Mayor W. Gayle discussed the changes they, as a community wanted to see. The members outlined that the changes they wanted, were no one standing over empty seats, a decree that black individuals would not board the bus and pay, then get off and re-enter through the back. Many times, the drivers would not open the doors or would drive off after they paid as a joke upon them. They also wanted buses to regularly stop in black neighborhoods, as they did in white community areas.

When the meeting went on without change, WPC President Jo Ann Robinson retried the council’s requests in a May 21st letter to Mayor Gayle, telling him of the rumor that twenty-five plus local organizations planning to boycott Montgomery busses.
Around this time the arrest of Claudette Colvin took place after one of the WPC’s meetings. Seven months later, eighteen year-old Mary Louise Smith was also arrested for refusing to yield her seat on a bus.
After securing bail for Parks, Clifford Durr and Virginia Durr, a white civil rights activist, and Edgar D. Nixon, past leader of the Montgomery chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), began calling local black leaders, including Ralph D. Abernathy and King Jr., to organize a planning meeting. On December 2nd, black ministers and leaders met at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church and agreed to publicize the December 5th boycott.
On the 5th of December, the protest received much unexpected attention in newspapers and on television and radio reports.
That afternoon, ninety percent of Montgomery’s black citizens did not ride. Later that afternoon, the city’s ministers and leader met to discuss extending the boycott in a long-term campaign, during this meeting, King was elected President of the Montgomery Improvement Association started at that meeting.
Parks commented “The advantage of having Dr. King as president was that he was so new to Montgomery and civil right acts, that he hadn’t been there long enough to make any strong friends or enemies”(Parks; 136)
Later that evening at Holt Street Baptist Church, the MIA voted to prolong the boycott. Speaking to thousands at the meeting, King stated “I want it to be known that were going to work with grim and bold determination to gain justice on the buses in this city. And we are not wrong… If we are wrong, the Supreme Court is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of The United States is wrong. If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong.” (Papers 3:73)


On December 8th, After unsuccessful talk with city commissioners and bus company officials, the MIA issued a formal list of demands: courteous treatment by bus operators, first-come, first-serve seating for all, with blacks seating from the rear and whites from the front, and to have black bus operators on predominately black routes or neighborhoods.
These demands went un-granted, and Montgomery’s black citizens stayed off buses through 1956, despite efforts by city officials and the white community to thwart the boycott. After the city began penalizing black taxi drivers for aiding the boycotters, an intricate carpool was formed by the MIA.
Following the advice lead of Theodore J. Jemison, who organized a carpool during a 1953 in Baton Rouge LA, the MIA developed a system of approximately three hundred vehicles.
In early 1956, the homes of E. D. Nixon and King were bombed. After King had managed to calm the crowd gathered outside his home, he declared: “Be calm as I and my family are. We are not hurt and remember that if anything happens to me, there will be others to take my place.”(Papers 3:115)
On June 1956 the federal district court ruled in Browder V. Gayle that bus segregation was unconstitutional and in November 1956 the U.S Supreme Court affirmed Browder and struck down laws requiring segregated seating on public buses. On that same day, King and the MIA were in a circuit court challenging an injunction against the MIA Carpools. Having resolved not to end the boycott until the order to desegregate the bused actually arrived in Montgomery, the Mia operated without the carpool system for a month.
Upholding the lower court’s ruling, on December 20th, 1956, King called for the boycott to be ended. The next morning, he, Ralph Abernathy, and E. D. Nixon boarded an integrated bus.

King played a major role in gathering attention for the cruel treatment of African American citizens in Montgomery, and the MIA’s nonviolent protest pushed this to the end of segregated buses.