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The Montgomery bus boycott, which began 70 years ago on 5 December 1955, is now understood as one of the most successful American social movements. And yet, much of how it is remembered is romanticized, inaccurate and even dangerous – distorting how we imagine social change happens.
In the fable, Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat, Black Montgomery residents rise up, a young Martin Luther King Jr is introduced to the world, and injustice is vanquished. The right action is all it takes – furthering a mythology that, without deep preparation or sacrifice, Americans can make great change with a single act. Today, in the face of rising injustice, many criticize young activists for being too disruptive, too disorganized, too impractical. But, in fact, the Montgomery movement began much earlier and took much longer than we imagine and entailed tremendous sacrifice. It required hard choice after hard choice without evidence these actions would matter, and was considered too disruptive by many at the time – all of which gives us important lessons for how to challenge injustice today.
First, Rosa Parks. She was neither old nor tired, as some have claimed, but she also wasn’t planned or planted. By the time Parks was 42 years old, she had been an activist for two decades, helping to turn Montgomery’s NAACP into a more activist branch alongside the union stalwart ED Nixon. “Over the years I have been rebelling against second-class citizenship,” Parks said in a 1956 interview with the Los Angeles Sentinel. “It didn’t begin when I was arrested.” This work was demoralizing, as organizers defended the wrongfully accused, fought for voter registration, tried to find justice for Black women who had been raped: “It was very difficult to keep going when all our efforts seemed in vain,” she said of their work in the 1940s and early 1950s.
A trickle of Montgomery residents had resisted mistreatment on the bus in the decade before Parks’s arrest. Then, eight months before Parks’s act, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin refused to give up her seat and was arrested. When she struggled against the police manhandling her, they also charged her with assaulting an officer. Colvin’s arrest outraged Montgomery’s Black community and many stopped riding the buses temporarily. Parks fundraised for Colvin’s case and encouraged the teenager to take a leadership role in her NAACP Youth Council.
But a mass movement did not result, in part because the judge threw out the segregation charge and only found Colvin guilty of assaulting an officer and in part because many adults saw Colvin as too young, poor and feisty to rally behind. But had Colvin not done what she did, it is unlikely Parks’s arrest would have galvanized people the way it did. Movements do not result from the first or second outrage but from an accumulation of injustice that brings people to a breaking point.
Indeed, part of what made Parks’s bus stand so courageous was that there was nothing to suggest that taking a stand on that day would change anything. For two decades, Parks had taken stands, other people she knew had taken stands, and by and large nothing had changed – except that people had been ostracized, hurt or killed for these actions. By that December evening, she had grown quite pessimistic about the possibility of change. “There will never be a mass movement in Montgomery,” she told the other participants at the end of a two-week organizing workshop she attended at Highlander Folk School that summer.
But when the driver asked her to get up, Parks saw the line. If she got up, she “approved of this treatment – and I did not approve”. No one on the bus joined her – worried for their safety, wanting to get home, seeing the action as fruitless. She knew what could happen to a Black woman getting arrested – that she might not get off the bus alive – but still when the officers asked why she didn’t move, she spoke back: “Why do you push us around?” There’s an aphorism that the mark of insanity is doing things over and over and expecting a different result. But that is also the definition of courage.
Late that night, she called Fred Gray, a young Black attorney she knew from the NAACP, to represent her. Gray then called Jo Ann Robinson, head of the Women’s Political Council (WPC), to let her know. And it was the WPC, who had been organizing against bus segregation for years, that decided to call a boycott for Monday, the day Parks would be arraigned. In the middle of the night, Robinson snuck into Alabama State College, where she was a professor, and with the help of two students, ran off 35,000 leaflets. (Robinson would get in trouble for doing this.) The leaflet began: “Another woman has been arrested on the bus.” The accumulation of injustice was clear.
Martin Luther King Jr and Coretta Scott King had moved to Montgomery the year before and, just two weeks before Parks’s arrest, had their first baby. The next morning at about 6am, ED Nixon woke King up; he wanted to use King’s church for a meeting that night to organize for Monday’s boycott. The then 26-year-old new father hesitated: “Let me think about it awhile and call me back.” There was no lightning bolt, no clear sign of destiny. When Nixon called back in a few hours, King agreed. In the days and months ahead, King would assume an important leadership role. But there was nothing easy about it. Like Parks, part of King’s gift was the ability to act despite fear and uncertainty. This decision would have significant consequences for their family – and by the end of the boycott, he had gained national notice. But the roles he and Coretta would come to play were complex and difficult. The movement made him as much as he made the movement.
That weekend, many of Montgomery’s Black activists worried. Would people stay off the bus? The Kings were up by 5.30am. A bus rolled by nearly empty of Black passengers; another bus passed empty. They were elated – “a miracle”, King called it. Parks found it “unbelievable” but also wondered why “we had waited so long to make this protest”, she said in later interviews. Buoyed by the power of the one-day effort, at an overflowing mass meeting that evening, the community voted to continue on with the boycott. The power of collective protest changed the participants – from a one-day boycott to a long-term one, from the initial demand for courteous, first-come, first-served seating to ultimately full desegregation of the bus. Their sense of possibility grew.
But it also entailed great sacrifice. The boycott cost many people, including Rosa Parks and her husband, Raymond Parks, their jobs. The Parks never found steady work in Montgomery again. Then, seven weeks into the boycott, the Kings’ house was bombed. Coretta and 10-week-old baby Yolanda were home, but she managed to get them out uninjured. Terrified by this violence, both Martin and Coretta’s fathers traveled to Montgomery to pressure the family – or at least Coretta and the baby – to leave. She refused. “I realized how important it was for me to stand with Martin,” she said in a 1966 interview with New Lady magazine. Had Coretta flinched in this moment, the trajectory of the bus boycott and the emerging civil rights movement might have been very different.
While in the popular imagination the Montgomery bus boycott has become all about walking, what actually enabled a community-wide boycott for more than a year was a massively well-organized carpool system. The newly created Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) set up 40 pickup stations across town and at its peak was giving 15,000 to 20,000 rides per day. To make this possible, Black women fundraised. Two groups – the Club from Nowhere, led by the cook and midwife Georgia Gilmore, and the Friendly Club, headed by Inez Ricks – competed to see who could raise more. None of the women in these groups had much money, but they knew how to make sandwiches, dinners, pies, and cakes to raise money each week. At the weekly mass meeting, they would present their fundraising accomplishments to a standing ovation. When it still wasn’t enough, the MIA sent King and Parks across the country to raise money and attention for the movement at home.
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The boycott was meant to disrupt city life and use Black consumer power to force the bus company and the city to address Black demands. It drastically hurt the bus company’s revenues but drew criticism as well. The MIA was accused of being just like the segregationist White Citizens’ Council in using economic means to advance racial issues. The city massively harassed the carpool, giving hundreds of tickets. When that harassment didn’t work, the city dredged up an old anti-boycott law and indicted 110 “Boycott leaders”. The Montgomery Advertiser called the boycott “dangerous” and public officials worried about communist influence. Even the national NAACP kept the boycott at arm’s length, not agreeing with its disruptive tactics. But Black Montgomery residents kept at it.
With the city trying to break the protest, Gray decided to file a proactive federal case, Browder v Gayle, to challenge Montgomery’s bus segregation, worried that the state would prevent Parks’s appeal after her arrest on the bus. Two adult women, Aurelia Browder and Susie McDonald, and two teenagers, Colvin and Mary Louise Smith, stepped forward. (Parks was not on the case because Gray didn’t want to risk having it thrown out on a technicality, since Parks’s case was already in state court.) Browder v Gayle went to the supreme court and on 21 December 1956, Montgomery’s buses were desegregated. The success of the Montgomery bus boycott was accomplished through a combination of tactics: years of spadework that laid a foundation for the movement to emerge; Rosa Parks’s courageous stand; a year-long consumer boycott; enormous grassroots organization and fundraising; four courageous female plaintiffs and the federal legal case; the Kings’ steadfastness; and a campaign to get the word out across the country. All were necessary to bring decisive change in Montgomery.
Today, as people see rising injustice, many get mired in the question: What will work? We search for the right legal case, the right tactic, the right leader. But the greatest lesson of the Montgomery bus boycott is that is the wrong question. If Rosa Parks had asked what will work on 1 December, she wouldn’t have refused to give up her seat. If Black Montgomery residents had worried about being too disruptive, if the Kings had listened to their parents, if Georgia Gilmore had thought about how much money they needed, they wouldn’t have acted. What worked was the ability to keep going, amid fear and uncertainty, amid job loss and police harassment, amid years of stands that produced nothing, amid the need to organize and maintain a massive carpool system no one had ever built before. “We can learn to play on locked pianos,” King’s friend Vincent Harding observed, “and to dream of worlds that do not yet exist.”
What’s giving me hope now
Part of what is giving me hope is that amid an onslaught of moves to ban the teaching of a full and accurate American history, many educators across the country are refusing to bend. They are bringing this history to students across the country, even in the states with the most restrictive laws. And what this history shows us is the power of persistence, of taking action after action, of saying no and no again. We won’t know how and when the moment will come, but it will; much like water on the rock, as it runs over and over, the rock breaks down.
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Jeanne Theoharis is a distinguished professor of political science at Brooklyn College and the author of King of the North: Martin Luther King Jr’s Life of Struggle Outside the South and The Rebellious Life of Mrs Rosa Parks.
