They wrote letters to the mayor, basically saying that there needed to be a more humane way of riding the bus. Many of them worked at the historically Black colleges. Many of them were local teachers.
Many of them had been formally educated at historically Black colleges. Yes, Martin Luther King Jr. During the boycott, many buses on the road had few passengers. Narration: Taylor says that in almost every political movement in history, there have been women in the background, doing the work that has positioned them outside of the limelight.
And that there were different reasons for this throughout time. Ula Taylor: So, for example, during the s, we have a certain kind of call for a Black nationalist representation of manhood and womanhood. UC Berkeley photo.
Ula Taylor: And so, there was this whole idea that Black men and women have been taken outside of their gender-specific norms because of slavery. And we see this largely with Black men being the visual leadership of movements. Eventually, this is going to crack when we see Black women resisting certain kinds of masculine notions of leadership and patriarchy, but it does help to understand why certain organizations were committed to patriarchal ideas about leadership.
And so, all of these things shape how there is a certain kind of masculine and feminine leadership. Narration: Ella Baker was one woman who resisted patriarchal notions of leadership. A civil rights and human rights activist whose career spanned more than five decades, Baker was among the founders of Martin Luther King Jr. Narration: Taylor says that Baker advocated for group leadership instead of relying on just one person to carry an entire cause.
Ula Taylor: She was an amazing activist who understood that if you put all of your hopes on a messiah, when that person is gone, then what happens to the movement?
The bus boycott demonstrated the potential for nonviolent mass protest to successfully challenge racial segregation and served as an example for other southern campaigns that followed.
The roots of the bus boycott began years before the arrest of Rosa Parks. In a meeting with Mayor W. Seven months later, year-old Mary Louise Smith was arrested for refusing to yield her seat to a white passenger.
Robinson prepared a series of leaflets at Alabama State College and organized groups to distribute them throughout the black community. On 2 December, black ministers and leaders met at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church and agreed to publicize the 5 December boycott.
The planned protest received unexpected publicity in the weekend newspapers and in radio and television reports. During this meeting the MIA was formed, and King was elected president. And we are not wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong.
After unsuccessful talks with city commissioners and bus company officials, on 8 December the MIA issued a formal list of demands: courteous treatment by bus operators; first-come, first-served seating for all, with blacks seating from the rear and whites from the front; and black bus operators on predominately black routes. After the city began to penalize black taxi drivers for aiding the boycotters, the MIA organized a carpool. Following the advice of T.
Jemison , who had organized a carpool during a bus boycott in Baton Rouge, the MIA developed an intricate carpool system of about cars. Robert Hughes and others from the Alabama Council for Human Relations organized meetings between the MIA and city officials, but no agreements were reached.
In early , the homes of King and E. Nixon were bombed. City officials obtained injunctions against the boycott in February , and indicted over 80 boycott leaders under a law prohibiting conspiracies that interfered with lawful business. King, Jr. Despite this resistance, the boycott continued. Although most of the publicity about the protest was centered on the actions of black ministers, women played crucial roles in the success of the boycott.
In his memoir, King quotes an elderly woman who proclaimed that she had joined the boycott not for her own benefit but for the good of her children and grandchildren King, In early veteran pacifists Bayard Rustin and Glenn E. Smiley visited Montgomery and offered King advice on the application of Gandhian techniques and nonviolence to American race relations.
Rustin, Ella Baker , and Stanley Levison founded In Friendship to raise funds in the North for southern civil rights efforts, including the bus boycott. King absorbed ideas from these proponents of nonviolent direct action and crafted his own syntheses of Gandhian principles of nonviolence.
On 5 June , the federal district court ruled in Browder v. Gayle that bus segregation was unconstitutional, and in November the U. Supreme Court affirmed Browder v. Gayle and struck down laws requiring segregated seating on public buses. Resolved not to end the boycott until the order to desegregate the buses actually arrived in Montgomery, the MIA operated without the carpool system for a month. Supreme Court decision outlawed segregation in public schools.
Therefore, it opened the door to challenge segregation in other areas as well, such as city busing. All four of the women had been previously mistreated on the city buses because of their race. The case took the name Browder v. Gray argued their 14th Amendment right to equal protection of the law was violated, the same argument made in the Brown v. Board of Education case. On June 5, , a three-judge U.
District Court ruled that segregation on public buses was unconstitutional. The majority cited Brown v. Ferguson has been impliedly, though not explicitly, overruled,…there is now no rational basis upon which the separate but equal doctrine can be validly applied to public carrier transportation The city of Montgomery appealed the U. District Court decision to the U. Supreme Court and continued to practice segregation on city busing.
For nearly a year, buses were virtually empty in Montgomery. Boycott supporters walked to work--as many as eight miles a day--or they used a sophisticated system of carpools with volunteer drivers and dispatchers. Some took station-wagon "rolling taxis" donated by local churches. Montgomery City Lines lost between 30, and 40, bus fares each day during the boycott.
The bus company that operated the city busing had suffered financially from the seven month long boycott and the city became desperate to end the boycott. Local police began to harass King and other MIA leaders. Car pool drivers were arrested and taken to court for petty traffic violations. African Americans took pride in the inconveniences caused by limited transportation. Now my feet are tired, and my soul is resting.
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