Martin Luther King The Montgomery Bus Boycott “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” Martin Luther King, Jr.

On 1 December 1955 a black woman named Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a full Montgomery bus. Bus company policy dictated that black passengers fill seats from the back and white passengers fill seats from the front. Where the sections met, blacks were expected to yield to whites. The racist atmosphere on buses was strengthened by the attitude of the all-white driving staff, which was known to harass black passengers verbally, and sometimes physically. The boycott lasted a year, and changed the character of both King's life and the city of Montgomery. King became the target of numerous telephoned threats and a few actual acts of violence. His house was bombed; he was arrested under false pretences; he was sued for various reasons; he became very well known. Montgomery changed more slowly. To survive the boycott, the black community formed a network of carpools and informal taxi services. Some white employers were forced to transport their black employees themselves. Many blacks walked long distances to work each day.

The boycott quickly began to hurt the businesses of city storeowners, not to mention that of the bus company itself, which was losing 65% of its income. But instead of considering the demands of the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), whites attempted to end the boycott by other means, both unofficially, though a series of bombings of churches and private homes, and officially, through the courts. Because the MIA compensated drivers who transported boycotters, the city sued it for running an illegal transit system. King was in court defending the MIA against the injunction when news arrived that the Supreme Court had ruled in favour of Rosa Parks, and had made illegal the kind of bus segregation enforced in Montgomery. This ended the boycott, and on 21 December 1956, over a year after Parks had refused to relinquish her seat, King joined Ralph Abernathy and other boycott leaders for a ride on the first desegregated bus. Violence continued in the wake of the boycott: more homes and churches were bombed, and some white people threw stones and shot bullets at buses. But however tenuous the victory was at the local level, it marked a national success for Martin Luther King and for the cause of African Americans as a whole.

rights-movement/videos/montgomery-bus-boycott For 382 days, almost the entire African-American population of Montgomery, Alabama, including leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, refused to ride on segregated buses, a turning point in the American civil rights movement.

1.What was the Montgomery Bus Boycott about? 2.What effect did the Boycott have on the economy of Montgomery, Alabama? 3.In what ways does our everyday economic decisions influence positively or negatively issues that go on in our society? 4.‘Todays society is just as segregated as back in Martin Luther King’s day’ Discuss