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Montgomery Bus Boycott: Civil Rights Movement

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Before any of the boycott had started, all over the south, segregation between the two races was extremely common. Public areas like restaurants, rest rooms, churches, movie theatres, etc. had separated blacks from whites. Colored people could not sit where whites could. Blacks could not go to white churches, schools or rest rooms.
One black woman named Rosa Parks had refused to give up her seat to a white person, on the public bus. She was arrested and fined. E.D. Nixon had used Parks’ arrest as a symbol to start the boycott. Four days after Mrs. Parks’ arrest, the day of her trial, December 5th, the Montgomery Bus Boycott had started. This boycott is known today as a Civil Rights Movement. . The boycott had lasted 381 days after Mrs. Parks’
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King wasn’t the only leader bombed, E.D. Nixon’s house was bombed also. He was president of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). When the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Browder in the Browder v. Gayle segregation case, Ku Klux Klansmen of forty carloads went through colored neighborhoods, honking horns and shining lights into homes and disturbing the peace. Whites who had supported the boycott were called ‘traitors’ and were targeted as well. A cross was burned on Judge Johnson’s lawn and the gravesite Judge Rive’s son was violated and desecrated. Judge Johnson and Rives were voters in overturning segregation on public transportation in the Browder v. Gayle and segregated public education in Lee v. Macon County Board of Education. After the induction of desegregated seating, a shotgun had fired through the front door of Kings home. A day later, Christmas Eve, white men attacked a black teenager as she exited the public bus. Snipers, hitting a pregnant black woman in both legs with serious injury, fired upon buses. January 10, 1956, bombs destroyed five black churches and the reverend of one church’s home, Reverend Robert S. Graetz, one of the few who had publicly sided with the MIA (Montgomery Improvement

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