On 1st December, 1955, Rosa Parks, a middle-aged tailor's assistant from Montgomery, Alabama, who was tired after a hard day's work, refused to give up her seat to a white man.

Rosa Parks refusal was the spark that lit the fire that was to become the American Civil Rights Movement.

Photo: Rosa Parks having her fingerprints taken after her arrest on 1st December, 1955.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott officially started on December 1, 1955. That was the day when the blacks of Montgomery, Alabama, decided that they would boycott the city buses until they could sit anywhere they wanted, instead of being relegated to the back when a white boarded. It was not, however, the day that the movement to desegregate the buses started. Perhaps the movement started on the day in 1943 when a black seamstress named Rosa Parks paid her bus fare and then watched the bus drive off as she tried to re-enter through the rear door, as the driver had told her to do. Perhaps the movement started on the day in 1949 when a black professor Jo Ann Robinson absentmindedly sat at the front of a nearly empty bus, then ran off in tears when the bus driver screamed at her for doing so. Perhaps the movement started on the day in the early 1950s when a black pastor named Vernon Johns tried to get other blacks to leave a bus in protest after he was forced to give up his seat to a white man, only to have them tell him, "You ought to knowed better." The story of the Montgomery Bus Boycott is often told as a simple, happy tale of the "little people" triumphing over the seemingly insurmountable forces of evil. The truth is a little less romantic and a little more complex.

The simple version of the story leaves out some very important people, such as Jo Ann Robinson, of whom Martin Luther King, Jr., would later write, "Apparently indefatigable, she, perhaps more than any other person, was active on every level of the protest." She was an educated woman, a professor at the all-black Alabama State College, and a member of the Women's Political Council in Montgomery. After her traumatic experience on the bus in 1949, she tried to start a protest but was shocked when other Women's Political Council members brushed off the incident as "a fact of life in Montgomery." After the Supreme Court's Brown decision in 1954, she wrote a letter to the mayor of Montgomery

Jo Ann Robinson, Women's Political Council, letter to the Mayor of Montgomery (21st May, 1954)

The Women's Political Council is very grateful to you and the City Commissioners for the hearing you allowed our representatives during the month of March, 1954, when the "city-bus-fare-increase case" was being reviewed. There were several things the Council asked for:

1. A city law that would make it possible for Negroes to sit from back toward front, and whites from front toward back until all the seats are taken;
2. That Negroes not be asked or forced to pay fare at front and go to the rear of the bus to enter;
3. That busses stop at every corner in residential sections occupied by Negroes as they do in communities where whites reside.

We are happy to report that busses have been stopping at more corners now in some sections where Negroes live than previously. However, the same practices in seating and boarding the bus continue.

Mayor W. A. Gayle, three-fourths of the riders of these public conveyances are Negroes. If Negroes did not patronize them, they could not possibly operate.

More and more of our people are already arranging with neighbors and friends to ride to keep from being insulted and humiliated by bus drivers.

There has been talk from twenty-five or more local organizations of planning a city-wide boycott of busses. We, sir, do not feel that forceful measures are necessary in bargaining for a convenience which is right for all bus passengers. We, the Council, believe that when this matter has been put before you and the Commissioners, that agreeable terms can be met in a quiet and unostensible manner to the satisfaction of all concerned.

Many of our Southern cities in neighboring states have practiced the policies we seek without incident whatsoever. Atlanta, Macon and Savannah in Georgia have done this for years. Even Mobile, in our own state, does this and all the passengers are satisfied.

Please consider this plea, and if possible, act favorably upon it, for even now plans are being made to ride less, or not at all, on our busses. We do not want this.

By 1955, the Women's Political Council had plans for just such a boycott. Community leaders were just waiting for the right person to be arrested, a person who would anger the black community into action, who would agree to test the segregation laws in court, and who, most importantly, was "above reproach." When fifteen year old Claudette Colvin was arrested early in 1955 for refusing to give up her seat, E.D. Nixon of the NAACP thought he had found the perfect person, but Colvin turned out to be pregnant. Nixon later explained, "I had to be sure that I had somebody I could win with." Enter Rosa Parks.

Rosa Parks is probably the most romanticized personage in the Montgomery cast of characters. She is often portrayed as a simple seamstress who, exhausted after a long day at work, refused to give up her seat to a white person. While this is not untrue, there is more to the story. Parks was educated; she had attended the laboratory school at Alabama State College because there was no high school for blacks in Montgomery at that time, but had decided to become a seamstress because she could not find a job to suit her skills. She was also a long-time NAACP worker who had taken a special interest in Claudette Colvin's case. When she was arrested in December 1955, she had recently completed a workshop on race relations at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee. And she was a well-respected woman with a spotless record.

In his book, Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, Martin Luther King described how racial segregation was organised on buses in Alabama.

Frequently Negroes paid their fare at the front door, and then were forced to get off and reboard at the rear. An even more humiliating practice was the custom of forcing Negroes to stand over empty seats reserved for "whites only". Even if the bus had no white passengers, and Negroes were packed throughout, they were prohibited from sitting in the front four seats (which held ten persons). But the practice went further. If white persons were already occupying all of their reserved seats and additional white people boarded the bus. Negroes sitting in the unreserved section immediately behind the whites were asked to stand so that the whites could be seated. If the Negroes refused to stand and move back, they were arrested.

Excerpt from an interview with Rosa L. Parks in My Soul Is Rested: Movement Days in the Deep South Remembered, by Howell Raines (1977)

I had left my work at the men's alteration shop, a tailor shop in the Montgomery Fair department store, and as I left work, I crossed the street to a drugstore to pick up a few items instead of trying to go directly to the bus stop. And when I had finished this, I came across the street and looked for a Cleveland Avenue bus that apparently had some seats on it. At that time it was a little hard to get a seat on the bus. But when I did get to the entrance of the bus, I got in line with a number of other people who were getting on the same bus.

As I got up on the bus and walked to the seat I saw there was only one vacancy that was just back of where it was considered the white section. So this was the seat that I took, next to the aisle, and a man was sitting next to me. Across the aisle there were two women, and there were a few seats at this point in the very front of the bus that was called the white section. I went on to one stop and I didn't particularly notice who was getting on the bus, didn't particularly notice the other people getting on. And on the third stop there were some people getting on, and at this point all of the front seats were taken. Now in the beginning, at the very first stop I had got on the bus, the back of the bus was filled up with people standing in the aisle and I don't know why this one vacancy that I took was left, because there were quite a few people already standing toward the back of the bus. The third stop is when all the front seats were taken, and this one man was standing and when the driver looked around and saw he was standing, he asked the four of us, the man in the seat with me and the two women across the aisle, to let him have those front seats.

At his first request, didn't any of us move. Then he spoke again and said, "You'd better make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats." At this point, of course, the passenger who would have taken the seat hadn't said anything. In fact, he never did speak to my knowledge. When the three people, the man who was in the seat with me and the two women, stood up and moved into the aisle, I remained where I was. When the driver saw that I was still sitting there, he asked if I was going to stand up. I told him, no, I wasn't. He said, "Well, if you don't stand up, I'm going to have you arrested." I told him to go on and have me arrested.

He got off the bus and came back shortly. A few minutes later, two policemen got on the bus, and they approached me and asked if the driver had asked me to stand up, and I said yes, and they wanted to know why I didn't. I told them I didn't think I should have to stand up. . . . They placed me under arrest then and had me to get in the police car, and I was taken to jail.

When E.D. Nixon (then leader of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP) heard that Parks had been arrested, he called the police to find out why. He was told that it was "none of your damn business." He asked Clifford Durr, a sympathetic white lawyer, to call. Durr easily found out that Parks had been arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus. Nixon went to the jail and posted bond for Parks. Then he told her, "Mrs. Parks, with your permission we can break down segregation on the bus with your case." She talked it over with her husband and her mother, then agreed.

The WPC went into action. Its members reproduced 50,000 fliers that read: "The Women's Political Council will not wait for Mrs. Parks' consent to call for a boycott of city buses. On Dec. 2, 1955, the women of Montgomery will call for a boycott to take place on Monday, Dec. 5."

Jo Ann Robinson and her students distributed the anonymous fliers throughout Montgomery on Friday morning. That evening, a group of ministers and civil rights leaders had a meeting to discuss the boycott. It did not go well. Many ministers were put off by the way Rev. L. Roy Bennett took control of the meeting. Some left and others were about to leave. Those remaining, however, agreed to spread word of the boycott through their sermons on Sunday, then meet again on Monday night if the boycott went well to decide whether or not to continue it.

Martin Luther King, Jr., minister at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, thought that "if we could get 60 percent cooperation the protest would be a success." He was pleasantly surprised when bus after empty bus rolled past his house that morning. "A miracle had taken place," King would later write. "The once dormant and quiescent Negro community was now fully awake." The group from Friday night met again that afternoon and decided to call themselves the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA). They elected Dr. Martin Luther King as president. The next decision was whether or not to end the boycott. Some ministers wanted to end it as a one-day success. Then E.D. Nixon rose to speak:

What's the matter with you people? Here you have been living off the sweat of these washerwomen all these years and you have never done anything for them. Now you have a chance to pay them back, and you're too damn scared to stand on your feet and be counted! The time has come when you men is going to have to learn to be grown men or scared boys.

The MIA decided to let the people vote on whether or not to continue the boycott at the mass meeting that night. There, the decision was unanimous. The boycott would continue.

Parks recalls, "The advantage of having Dr. King as president was that he was so new to Montgomery and to civil rights work that he hadn't been there long enough to make any strong friends or enemies." The MIA voted to continue the boycott and issued a formal list of demands: courteous treatment by the bus operator; first-come, first-serve seating for all, with blacks seating from the rear and whites from the front; and black bus operators on predominately black routes.

The MIA transportation committee organized one of the most effective volunteer campaigns in U.S. history. An estimated 325 private vehicles picked up thousands of passengers daily from 43 dispatch stations and 42 pick-up sites.

Passengers were picked up as early as 5 a.m. and taken home as late as 8 p.m. Thousands of dollars poured in from all over the country for the transportation efforts.

A great majority of these passengers were domestic workers forced to work for privileged white families. These Black women were a source of cheap labor, very similar to those in South Africa.

Domestic workers in Montgomery received as little as $2 a day and worked from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Many of these women worked for the boycott in the evenings after returning from work and taking care of their families. They had depended heavily on taking the bus before the boycott.

The racist White Citizens Council made many attempts to sabotage the boycott. One effort was to enforce a policy of having the police arrest any group of Black people waiting at pick-up stations along with those who volunteered to drive people to their destinations.

Another terrorist tactic was for racist whites to randomly telephone Black people and threaten them. The callers could distinguish Black people in the phone books because, unlike whites, it was the local phone company's policy not to use "Miss" or "Mrs." before the names of Black women.

After negotiations between representatives of the Black community and the WCC broke down, the MIA brought a lawsuit against the City of Montgomery including the mayor, city commissioner, police chief and other officials in order to integrate mass transportation.

Up until late January 1955, Black people were not trying to abolish the segregationist policy but to modify it in order to come up with a more satisfactory seating arrangement on the buses. They also wanted the city to hire Black bus drivers.

But when the WCC refused to meet their demands and at the same time tried to undermine the boycott, the Black community became more angry--and more determined to sweep away Jim Crow in the area of mass transit.

On Feb. 21, 1956, a grand jury of 17 whites and one Black declared the boycott illegal. One hundred fifteen boycott leaders--including Robinson--were arrested. None of the white officials was arrested.

On Jan. 31, Dr. King's home was firebombed.

The arrests were appealed, and on June 5 a three-judge federal court ruled by a two-to-one vote to strike down the segregationist transportation laws in Montgomery.

The WCC refused to abide by the ruling until Dec. 20. U.S. marshals served the Supreme Court's orders on the WCC.

After 13 months of tremendous organizing and self- sacrifice, the Black community had won a historic victory that laid the basis for many years of civil rights struggles.