The Montgomery Bus Boycott
Under Montgomery's segregation laws, the forward rows of city buses were reserved for white passengers only, while blacks were only allowed to sit in seats at the rear. Blacks were not even allowed to walk down the aisle next to white-only rows.In early December 1955, members of the black community in Montgomery, Alabama, began a boycott that lasted over 381 days on the city's segregated bus system. The incident that sparked the boycott was the arrest on December 1,1995 of Rosa Parks, who while riding a city bus home from work that evening, refused to give up her seat to a white passenger. During this year-long boycott, Martin Luther King Jr. utilized the leadership abilities he had gained from his religious background and academic training to forge a distinctive protest strategy that involved the mobilization of African American churches and the gathering of white support. On December 21, 1956, the U.S. Supreme Court constructed a court ruling that Alabama's bus segregation laws were unconstitutional.