While Marshall and the NAACP were dismantling the legal superstructure of segregation, its institutional foundations remained. Blacks increasingly took action on their own.
This change first came to national attention during the Eisenhower administration in the rigidly segregated city of Montgomery, Alabama. On Friday, December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a seamstress at the Montgomery Fair department store, boarded a bus on her way home from her job. She dutifully took a seat toward the rear as custom and law required. As white workers and shoppers filled the forward section, the driver ordered her to give up her place to a white passenger. Parks, who was also secretary of the
Montgomery NAACP chapter, refused. She had decided, she later recalled, that “I would have to know once and for all what rights I had as a human being and a citizen.”
She was arrested. Over the weekend, Montgomery’s black leaders organized a boycott. “Don’t ride the bus. . . Monday,” their mimeographed notice ran. “If you work, take a cab, or share a ride, or walk.” Monday dawned bitterly cold, but the boycott was a total success.
Most Montgomery blacks could not afford to miss a single day’s wages, so the protracted struggle to get to work was difficult to maintain. Black-owned taxis reduced their rates sharply, and when the city declared this illegal, car pools were quickly organized. Few African Americans owned cars. Although nearly everyone who did volunteered, there were never more than 350 cars available to the more than 10,000 people who needed rides to their jobs and back every day. Nevertheless, the boycott went on.
Late in February the Montgomery authorities obtained indictments of 115 leaders of the boycott, but this move backfired because it focused national attention on the situation. A young clergyman, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., was emerging as the leader of the boycott. A gifted speaker, he became an overnight celebrity. (See American Lives, “Martin Luther King, Jr.,” p. 759.) Money poured in from all over the country to support the movement. The boycott lasted for over a year. Finally the Supreme Court declared the local law enforcing racial separation unconstitutional: Montgomery had to desegregate its public transportation system.
This success encouraged blacks elsewhere in the South to band together against segregation. A new organization founded in 1957, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), headed by King, moved to the forefront of the civil rights movement. Other organizations joined the struggle, notably the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), which had been founded in 1942. The direct action movement was becoming a broad-based nationwide civil rights movement.
World History
