Essay On The Montgomery Bus Boycott

Approximately 100 years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation by President Abraham Lincoln many African Americans were still being treated unequally through segregation, and various forms of oppression, including race-inspired crimes. Segregation was a very common practice that was legal due to the separate but equal doctrine. This doctrine allowed local governments to segregate colored people from the whites. This segregation was seen in many aspects of an urban city such as drinking fountains, restrooms, restaurants, schools, and city busses. In December of 1955, the process of equality for colored people would begin with Rosa Parks not giving up her seat for a white man. This event would go on to ignite the Montgomery bus boycott.
The organizer of the boycott is a fairly popular minister in southern United States at the time, he is known as Martin Luther King Jr. and his colleague Ralph Abernathy. The organizers called for all African Americans to no ride the city busses until further notice. According to Felicia Mcghee’s article The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Fall of the Montgomery City Lines, bus service was a core method of transportation for Montgomery’s black residents, as about half of the city’s 44,000 black residents regularly paid to use the service. Many blacks lived on Montgomery’s west side and would take the buses to the courtyard square in downtown Montgomery, then transfer buses to get to the city’s eastside. Many black domestic workers used buses to get to and from the white homes where they worked. So to get around town to get to their normal daily functions such as going to work/school, and other things they needed to get done many African Americans would walk, carpool, and take taxis. African Americans created taxi services that ran the same exact routes as the public transit and charged the same amount as they would pay to ride the