Seventeen hundred miles north northwest of Mar-a-Lago, it was only about 5 degrees yesterday, and instead of golfing I read around on the Internet about the Montgomery bus boycott that first made Martin Luther King, Jr., a national figure. Though I knew about Jim Crow laws requiring that African-Americans sit at the back of the bus, the somewhat elaborate rules connected with Montgomery's segregated public transportation were to me a revelation. I had thought that perhaps African-Americans simply sat from the back forward and whites from the front back, and if the bus got crowded, so that the races met, African-American riders were required to stand so that whites could take the seats they had formerly occupied in the middle area of the bus. Anyway, it couldn't be that there was a back section for blacks and a forward one for whites, since in that case there would never be cause for an African-American to surrender her seat to a white person, which is what on Thursday, December 1, 1955 Rosa Parks refused to do and was as a consequence arrested--the picture is of her being fingerprinted at the police station after she was removed from the bus.
Actually, however, there was a black section at the back of the bus and a white section at the front. But there was also a middle section that riders of either race might occupy when there were too many riders to fit in the racially restricted sections at the front and back. The rule for this middle section was that blacks could sit from the back forward and whites from the front back, but all blacks had to be behind all whites. A row had four seats, two on each side of the aisle. In a crowded bus, then, you might have only a single unoccupied seat. Suppose the three occupied seats in the row with the open one were held by African-Americans and a white person then boarded. All three African-Americans would have to give up their seats, because if they didn't, they'd be sitting in the same row as a white person--and, worse, one would be sitting right next to the white person. This is exactly what happened on that fateful Thursday. The other African-Americans sitting in Mrs Parks' row got to their feet to make way for the white person, but she remained in her seat and was therefore arrested.
I remember hearing or reading that, asked why she that day refused to do something she had done many times before, Mrs Parks said it was hard to say, that she hadn't planned it, and maybe she was just unusually tired and didn't want to stand next to an empty seat. Another detail from the Wikipedia article suggests an alternate theory. The buses had a front and rear entry. The fare box was in the front, which of course was reserved for whites. Black riders therefore would ascend the front steps, pay their fare, then descend the steps and re-board toward the rear. The drivers, who were all white, would sometimes just drive off while an African-American was headed for the back entry after having paid the fare. This had happened to Mrs Parks, according to Wikipedia, and on this particular day she realized, while sitting in her seat, that the driver of the bus was one who had done this to her.
Martin Luther King, Jr., was at the time the new pastor at Montgomery's Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. He was 26 years old. The bus boycott was originally conceived, on the weekend immediately following Mrs Parks' arrest, as a 1-day event set for Monday. The idea was that African-Americans, who were less apt to own cars, made at least 75 percent of the bus ridership, and that if half of them stayed away from the buses for one day it would inflict a wound that the bus company would notice. Flyers were posted, an article was published in the black paper, announcements made in the churches on Sunday morning, some car pools organized. When Monday morning arrived, it soon became clear that the boycott was being observed by essentially all African-Americans--around 40,000 regular customers stayed away from the buses. Encouraged, organizers extended the boycott indefinitely, and the quite sudden prospect of a long struggle is what caused them to select a leader. King was chosen--it seems mainly because he was new in town, relatively unknown, and had no enemies, though it was also true that he was interested in nonviolent resistance and had studied, besides the Bible, Thoreau's "Resistance to Civil Government" and the tactics of the Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi. It was an instance of the right man being in the right place at the right time. The membership of Montgomery's White Citizens' Council doubled over the 381-day course of the boycott, and King soon found himself standing outside his bombed home calmly urging those who had gathered to persist with the boycott, abjure violence, and "return evil with good." The Montgomery Improvement Association, the organization King had been chosen to lead, made what seem to me now very modest demands. Instead of asking for fully integrated buses, they asked only for two sections, one for each race, which would mean that no African-American would ever be required to give up their seat for a white person. And they also asked that African-Americans be hired as drivers. That was about it, but the city and its bus company would not budge, and the fight moved to the courts. In June of 1956, about a half year into the boycott, a federal district court held that Montgomery's segregated transit service was unconstitutional and ordered that the buses be fully integrated. The boycott continued during the appeal process and did not end until December, 1956, when the lower court decision was affirmed by the Supreme Court and the integration order implemented. It had been a year and two weeks since Mrs Parks declined to give up her seat. King had turned 27 and become a national figure. Though he deserves a holiday, what one might notice most, reading up on the event that first elevated his profile, is the degree to which the boycott arose, bottom to top, and the almost mysterious way in which Montgomery's population of forgotten and anonymous African-Americans took three days to achieve a nearly unanimous boycott of the city's buses after a seamstress riding home during the rush hour suffered an everyday indignity. By the Monday morning after the Thursday evening that Rosa Parks was arrested, the buses in town had lost at least two-thirds of their riders, and it's hard to see that King had yet exerted himself more than any other African-American in town. He was educated, had a good job, and owned a car.
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