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’ …show more content…
arrest, dated from Dec. 5, 1955 to Dec. 20, 1956. The boycott was a non-violent protest. Signs were put up at bus stops reading, “Don’t ride the bus today, Don’t ride it for freedom!”
People rode took taxis, walked, and even rode horses to places instead of riding the bus. 66% of the people that rode the bus were colored and most of the income came from them. When they stopped riding the buses, they rode in cabs, so the cab fare went from ¢10 to ¢45 according the law.
One woman, now deceased, Thelma Glass had stated, “Many people did many things, but it was the people who walked made the boycott successful, an nothing would have changed on the buses if they hadn’t decided to stop riding them. It just goes to show you the power of economics.”
Although Rosa Parks’ arrest had started the boycott, she wasn’t the first colored person the refuse to give up her seat. 15-year-old Claudette Colvin, was arrested 9 months before Parks for refusing to give up her seat on the public bus for a white person. She was known as one of the four plaintiffs in Browder v. Gayle, this case had ruled that the segregated bus system was unconstitutional. Aurelia Browder, Susie McDonald, Claudette Colvin and Mary Louise Smith were the plaintiffs of the legal action challenging Montgomery's segregated public transportation system.
On September 30, 1956, angry segregationists bombed Martin Luther King Jr.’s house due to the fact that he was a leader and was successful in the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
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
Association). In the end, the breach only extended to buses. In every other setting, segregation in Montgomery remained. Mayor Gayle had stated in response to the decision bearing of his name:
‘The recent Supreme Court decisions… have seriously lowered the dignified relations which did exist between the races in our city and state… The difficulties meant to prevent and the dignities, which they guard, are not changed here in Alabama by decisions… To insure public safety, to protect the peoples of both races, and to promote order, we shall continue to enforce segregation.’