Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott Non-fiction Reading Center
Directions:
Researchers often read secondary sources to gain some insight into various aspects of the time period or documents they are studying. Below are some questions to consider as you are working in this center.
1. Pick one reading to examine closely.
2. Read the piece 2 times if time permits.
3. Study the text features (headings, pictures, captions, text boxes). How do these help you better understand what you are reading?
3. Ask yourself:
4, Respond in your notebook, answering one of the questions above.
1. Pick one reading to examine closely.
2. Read the piece 2 times if time permits.
3. Study the text features (headings, pictures, captions, text boxes). How do these help you better understand what you are reading?
3. Ask yourself:
- What are the main ideas and supporting details?
- What does this piece teach us about the time period?
- Why do you think the author wrote this piece?
4, Respond in your notebook, answering one of the questions above.
Chapter in Freedom Flix: Civil Rights Movement, p. 16-19
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Article: Mrs. Parks Gets Arrested, Cobblestone Magazine |
by Leslie Anderson Morales
African Americans had been protesting segregated public transportation for decades. By the late 1800s, black Americans had boycotted streetcars in almost 30 cities, and resistance continued into the 1900s. Then, in the 1950s, events in Montgomery, Alabama, led to historic action. In 1951, the Rev. Vernon Johns stood up on a Montgomery bus and challenged other black riders to leave in protest of poor treatment. In March 1955, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin refused to give up her seat on a bus. She was found guilty of violating the state segregation law, disorderly conduct, and resisting arrest. In October 1955, 18-year-old Mary Louise Smith was arrested on a city bus, jailed, and fined for failing to obey an officer. Less than two months later, on December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger. Parks was a respected member of the community. She worked as seamstress and was an active member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Leaders of local Montgomery organizations believed the time was right to take a stand for black rights. Among those people was E.D. Nixon, a longtime leader in the NAACP and the local branch of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Rufus D. Lewis, the president of the Citizens’ Steering Committee, and Jo Ann Robinson, the head of the Women’s Political Council, also quickly got involved. The leaders realized that the support of black ministers would be key to the success of any mass protest effort. Churches provided a built-in organizational structure and offered large meeting places. In addition, black church organizations had a long tradition of social engagement. On December 2, 1955, the day after Parks was arrested, more than 50 community leaders met and drew up a list of demands to present to city officials. They called themselves the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA). They unanimously elected the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. president. King was new to the community, having been appointed the year before to become the minister of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. Robinson had more than 30,000 leaflets printed and ready to distribute. They asked “every Negro to stay off the buses Monday in protest of the arrest and trial. Don’t ride the buses to work, to town, to school, or anywhere on Monday. . . . If you work, take a cab, or walk.” The black community listened and the buses were empty that day. But not only for that one day. For more than a year, Montgomery’s black citizens boycotted the city’s buses. They either walked, shared cabs, or carpooled in black-owned and –operated automobiles. Despite violent attacks on homes and churches and threats to their personal safety, the African American community refused to be intimidated. Meanwhile, the bus company lost $3,000 a day in fares. White businesses also suffered. On February 2, 1956, Fred Gray, the lawyer for the MIA, had filed a lawsuit against Montgomery’s mayor and its bus company. It challenged the constitutionality of segregation. The NAACP pursued the case, known as Browder v. Gayle, all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. On November 13, the Supreme Court handed down its decision: segregated public buses were unconstitutional. A federal order forced Montgomery to obey the law and integrate its buses. And the boycott’s success revealed the power of peaceful protest. |
The Story Behind the Bus
The Henry Ford Museum in Michigan has the Rosa Parks Bus on display. This article is from the Museum's website.
http://www.thehenryford.org/exhibits/rosaparks/story.asp
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a 42-year-old African American woman who worked as a seamstress, boarded this Montgomery City bus to go home from work. On this bus on that day, Rosa Parks initiated a new era in the American quest for freedom and equality.She sat near the middle of the bus, just behind the 10 seats reserved for whites. Soon all of the seats in the bus were filled. When a white man entered the bus, the driver (following the standard practice of segregation) insisted that all four blacks sitting just behind the white section give up their seats so that the man could sit there. Mrs. Parks, who was an active member of the local NAACP, quietly refused to give up her seat.
Her action was spontaneous and not pre-meditated, although her previous civil rights involvement and strong sense of justice were obvious influences. "When I made that decision," she said later, “I knew that I had the strength of my ancestors with me.”
She was arrested and convicted of violating the laws of segregation, known as “Jim Crow laws.” Mrs. Parks appealed her conviction and thus formally challenged the legality of segregation.
At the same time, local civil rights activists initiated a boycott of the Montgomery bus system. In cities across the South, segregated bus companies were daily reminders of the inequities of American society. Since African Americans made up about 75 percent of the riders in Montgomery, the boycott posed a serious economic threat to the company and a social threat to white rule in the city.
A group named the Montgomery Improvement Association, composed of local activists and ministers, organized the boycott. As their leader, they chose a young Baptist minister who was new to Montgomery: Martin Luther King, Jr. Sparked by Mrs. Parks’ action, the boycott lasted 381 days, into December 1956 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the segregation law was unconstitutional and the Montgomery buses were integrated. The Montgomery Bus Boycott was the beginning of a revolutionary era of non-violent mass protests in support of civil rights in the United States.
It was not just an accident that the civil rights movement began on a city bus. In a famous 1896 case involving a black man on a train, Plessy v. Ferguson, the U.S. Supreme Court enunciated the “separate but equal” rationale for Jim Crow. Of course, facilities and treatment were never equal.
Under Jim Crow customs and laws, it was relatively easy to separate the races in every area of life except transportation. Bus and train companies couldn’t afford separate cars and so blacks and whites had to occupy the same space.
Thus, transportation was one the most volatile arenas for race relations in the South. Mrs. Parks remembers going to elementary school in Pine Level, Alabama, where buses took white kids to the new school but black kids had to walk to their school.
“I'd see the bus pass every day,” she said. “But to me, that was a way of life; we had no choice but to accept what was the custom. The bus was among the first ways I realized there was a black world and a white world” (emphasis added).
Montgomery’s Jim Crow customs were particularly harsh and gave bus drivers great latitude in making decisions on where people could sit. The law even gave bus drivers the authority to carry guns to enforce their edicts. Mrs. Parks’ attorney Fred Gray remembered, “Virtually every African-American person in Montgomery had some negative experience with the buses. But we had no choice. We had to use the buses for transportation.”
Civil rights advocates had outlawed Jim Crow in interstate train travel, and blacks in several Southern cities attacked the practice of segregated bus systems. There had been a bus boycott in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1953, but black leaders compromised before making real gains. Joann Robinson, a black university professor and activist in Montgomery, had suggested the idea of a bus boycott months before the Parks arrest.
Two other women had been arrested on buses in Montgomery before Parks and were considered by black leaders as potential clients for challenging the law. However, both were rejected because black leaders felt they would not gain white support. When she heard that the well-respected Rosa Parks had been arrested, one Montgomery African American woman exclaimed, “They’ve messed with the wrong one now.”
In the South, city buses were lightning rods for civil rights activists. It took someone with the courage and character of Rosa Parks to strike with lightning. And it required the commitment of the entire African American community to fan the flames ignited by that lightning into the fires of the civil rights revolution.