The Seat on the Bus

In 1955, in the city of Montgomery, Alabama, in the southern United States, the buses had rules.

They were the rules of segregation, known as "Jim Crow" laws. Black people and white people were kept apart, by law, in schools, restaurants, cinemas, drinking fountains and buses.

On Montgomery's buses, the first rows of seats were reserved for white passengers. Black passengers, who made up most of the people who rode the buses, had to sit at the back. In the middle was a section where Black passengers could sit, but only until a white passenger needed the seat. Then the driver could order the whole row of Black passengers to stand up and move back.

Black passengers often had to pay their fare at the front, then get off and walk round to the back door to board. Sometimes, drivers drove off before they could get on.

Rosa Parks

Rosa Parks was forty-two years old. She worked as a seamstress in a department store in downtown Montgomery.

She was also a dedicated activist. For more than ten years she had been secretary of the Montgomery branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the NAACP, which worked for civil rights. She had investigated cases of injustice and violence against Black people, and she had tried, again and again, to register to vote, which officials made extremely difficult for Black citizens.

She had attended a training workshop on civil rights and community organising only a few months earlier.

1 December 1955

After work on Thursday 1 December, Rosa Parks boarded the Cleveland Avenue bus to go home. She sat in the first row of the middle section.

At a later stop, more white passengers got on, and the white section filled up. One white man was left standing.

The driver, James Blake, told the four Black passengers in Rosa Parks's row to stand up and move back. Three of them did.

Rosa Parks did not.

The driver asked her if she was going to stand up. She said no. He said he would have her arrested. She told him he could do that.

Not tired

Later, many people said that Rosa Parks refused because her feet were tired after a long day at work.

She said that was not true. In her autobiography, she explained that she was not physically tired, or no more than usual at the end of a working day. She was not old, though some people imagined she was. The only kind of tired she was, she wrote, was tired of giving in.

Police officers came and arrested her. She was taken to the police station, fingerprinted and put in a cell. Later that evening, she was released on bail.

The boycott

Black leaders in Montgomery had been waiting for a case like this. Rosa Parks was widely respected, calm and dignified, and her arrest made people angry.

That night, Jo Ann Robinson, a college teacher and leader of the Women's Political Council, stayed up with colleagues and students to make tens of thousands of copies of a leaflet. It asked every Black person in Montgomery to stay off the buses on Monday 5 December, the day of Rosa Parks's trial.

On Monday morning, the buses were almost empty.

That evening, at a packed church meeting, the community voted to continue the boycott until they were treated fairly. They formed a new group to lead it, the Montgomery Improvement Association, and chose as its president a young minister who had only recently arrived in the city. He was twenty-six years old, and his name was Martin Luther King Jr.

381 days

The boycott went on for more than a year.

Black people in Montgomery walked to work, sometimes many miles, in the heat and the rain. They organised a huge carpool system, with hundreds of cars. Black taxi drivers charged the same price as a bus fare. Churches bought station wagons to carry people.

It was not easy. Many people lost their jobs. Leaders were arrested. Dr King's house was bombed. Rosa Parks lost her job at the department store and received threats.

But they kept going.

Meanwhile, lawyers challenged the bus segregation laws in court. In the case of Browder v. Gayle, a federal court ruled that segregation on Montgomery's buses was unconstitutional. In November 1956, the US Supreme Court upheld that ruling.

On 20 December 1956, the order arrived in Montgomery. The next morning, after 381 days, Black citizens of Montgomery boarded the buses again and sat wherever they wanted.

Afterwards

The Montgomery bus boycott was one of the first great victories of the civil rights movement, and it made Martin Luther King Jr a national leader. Over the next decade, millions of Americans campaigned to end segregation, leading to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Rosa Parks and her husband moved to Detroit, where she continued to work for civil rights for the rest of her life. She died in 2005, at the age of ninety-two. She became the first woman to lie in honour in the United States Capitol.

The bus she rode that day is now in the Henry Ford Museum in Michigan.

Want to read more?

Rosa Parks told her story in Rosa Parks: My Story. Jeanne Theoharis's The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks shows that she was a lifelong activist, not simply a tired seamstress. Dr King's Stride Toward Freedom describes the boycott from the inside.