Historic Montgomery Bus Boycott Echoes Through COC’s Present
By Liz Courquet Lesaunier
What would you give up for 381 days in pursuit of justice?
Sixty-seven years ago this month, nearly 40,000 Black residents of Montgomery, Alabama, gave up the comfort and convenience of mass transportation to demand equality. For more than a year, they turned their backs on the city bus system in one of the most significant nonviolent mass protests in American history.
The Montgomery bus boycott, which lasted from Dec. 5, 1955, to Dec. 20, 1956, jump-started the modern Civil Rights Movement and launched Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to prominence as its leader. It was a powerful example of a community uniting in pursuit of a common goal: Ending segregated seating on the Montgomery Bus Line.
Now more than six decades later, that example of forcing change through collective action echoes through the work of Color Of Change, the nation’s largest online civil rights organization.
Color Of Change has made a difference in the lives of people and their communities through direct action for the past 17 years. This year alone, our wins include providing water to people in Jackson, Mississippi, during the monthslong failure of the public water system and inadequate measures by officials to make repairs.
COC has taken on corporations to protect housing access for low-income families; held district attorneys to account in winning justice for the wrongfully prosecuted; pressured racially biased government officials to resign from office; and facilitated programs to serve children in foster care and women re-entering the community after incarceration.
And, much like Rosa Parks, the civil rights legend, and the movement she inspired, Color Of Change has a singular goal: Respond to injustice and use collective action, through our millions of members, to create a more human and less hostile America for Black people.
You know the legend: On Dec. 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white man. Her arrest triggered a wave of anger throughout Montgomery’s Black community, launched a citywide organizing campaign and elevated a young preacher, Martin Luther King Jr., as leader of a movement that changed American history.
The truth is less well known — that far from being a seamstress who wanted to get off her feet, Parks was a fierce civil rights activist. For nearly 15 years, she’d served as recording secretary for the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP, documenting racial terrorism against Black people in the Jim Crow South.
On that December day in Montgomery, Parks’ mind was on Emmett Till, the 14-year-old who had been lynched in neighboring Mississippi just a few months earlier, according to reports of conversations Parks had later with Emmett’s mother and the Rev. Jesse Jackson. When the bus driver demanded that Parks stand up, she refused. After Parks’ arrest, the Black community swiftly rallied behind her.
“People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true. I was not tired physically. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in,” Parks wrote in her 1992 autobiography, “Rosa Parks: My Story.”
Ula Y. Taylor, an African American studies professor at the University of California-Berkeley, explained in a 2020 interview that the Women’s Political Council (WPC), a civil rights organization for Black women, provided the initial muscle behind the Montgomery bus boycott. It distributed tens of thousands of flyers across the city just hours after Parks’ arrest.
“We’re talking about at least 200-plus Black women in the Women’s Political Council in Montgomery, Alabama,” Taylor said. “And these were ‘professional’ Black women. Many of them worked at the historically Black colleges. Many of them were local teachers.”
That included Jo Ann Robinson, a professor at Alabama State College and WPC president. She organized a one-day boycott — Monday, Dec. 5, the day of Parks’ court hearing. But sensing an opportunity to break the stranglehold of racism in the city, Black community leaders formed the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) that afternoon and chose Dr. King, a promising, 26-year-old pastor, as its president.
King gave his first civil rights address that afternoon at Holt Street Baptist Church. Thousands of people packed the pews to hear his call to action; thousands more listened outside on loudspeakers.
“There comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression,” King told the crowd. “There comes a time, my friends, when people get tired of being plunged across the abyss of humiliation, where they experience the bleakness of nagging despair.”
Later in the speech, he delivered what seems like a premonition: “I’ve come to see now that as we struggle for our rights, maybe some [people] will have to die. But somebody said, ‘If a man doesn’t have something that he’ll die for, he isn’t fit to live.’”
King became the public face of the movement, amplified it and, with the MIA, organized a carpool system to help Black people get around. The WPC wrote letters to prominent individuals and elected officials, and attorneys filed lawsuits challenging the Jim Crow system of segregation
Finally, on Dec. 20, 1956, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a lower court decision and declared the racially segregated seating on buses was unconstitutional.
Rosa Parks, the women of the WPC, Dr. King and the thousands of brave Black folks in Montgomery risked their lives by speaking out against racism and taking action. And 381 days later, victory was won.