TIME MAGAZINE

 Montgomery Bus Boycott

(January 16, 1956)

 On December 1, 1955, Mrs. Rosa Parks, a 42-year-old Negro seamstress, was ordered by a Montgomery City Lines bus driver to get up and make way for some white passengers. She refused, was arrested and fined $10 under an Alabama law making it a misdemeanor for any person to disobey a bus driver's seating instructions. But that was not the last of the Rosa Parks case; it has since been used to prove that economic reprisal, as advocated against Negroes by the white Citizens Councils of the South, is a double-edged blade.

 Within 48 hours after Rosa Parks had been arrested, mimeographed leaflets were being circulated in Montgomery's Negro sections, calling for a one-day boycott of the city buses. The strike was so successful that Negro leaders decided to continue it until their demands were met. The demands: that Negroes be seated on a first-come, first-served basis without having to vacate their places for white passengers; that white bus drivers show more courtesy toward Negro passengers; that Negro drivers be employed on buses traveling mostly through Negro districts. The bus company agreed only to instruct its drivers to treat Negroes more politely.

 The boycott continued, and last week, as it entered its second month, was still 95% effective.

 The boycott's economic punch has been staggering, because the 25,000 Negroes who ordinarily ride Montgomery's buses make up some 75% of the company's patronage. Company officials refuse to reveal the size of their losses, because "that's exactly what they want to know."

 Last week the city commission granted the desperate company's request for a fare increase; adult prices went up from 10 cents to 15 cents, school fares from 5 cents to 8 cents, and transfers, which had been free, were priced at 5 cents. The strike spirit showed no signs of flagging. A Negro minister, working for the car pool, stopped to pick up an old woman who had obviously walked a long way. "Sister," said he, "aren't you getting tired?" Her reply: "My soul has been tired for a long time. Now my feet are tired, and my soul is resting."

 (April 2, 1956)

 For 100 years Negroes walked soft and spoke low around Alabama's Montgomery County courthouse. Then, for four days last week, the tramp of Negro feet sounded heavy in the dingy downstairs corridors, on the creaking steps and in the second-floor hallway (with its sign reading, "Gentlemen will not and others must not spit on the floor"). In the drab courtroom, decorated by an American Flag and five advertising calendars, Negro voices were raised in pain and anger. And outside the old courthouse, shabby for all its pretensions of Greek revival elegance, a Negro crowd roared hope.

 On trial in Montgomery was the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., 27, pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church and leader of the Negro boycott against the Montgomery bus company. King was the first of 90 defendants (including 24 ministers) to be tried under the Alabama law (enacted in 1921 as an antilabor measure) making it a misdemeanor to conspire "without a just cause or legal excuse" to hinder any company in its conduct of business. The persecution concentrated on proving that the Montgomery Improvement Association, with Pastor King as president, was organized last Dec. 5, the day the bus boycott began, for the specific purpose of supporting the boycott and forcing Negro demands on the bus company. The defense aim was to prove, within the meaning of the stature, that the Negro protest against Jim Crow practices on the buses was just.

 As a witness, Defendant King argued that the boycott began spontaneously, that he had not instigated it but had become its spokesman after it had already developed. It did not take Judge Carter long to hand down his verdict (King had waived a jury trial: King was found guilty, fined $500, assessed $500 in court costs, and released on bond pending appeal.

 November 26, 1956)

 To the 50,000 Negroes of Montgomery, Ala., the week dawned (as one of them put it) "darker than a thousand midnights." For more than eleven months, in a mass movement combining Christian fervor with Ghandi-like passive resistance, they had mounted and sustained in the "Cradle of the Confederacy" an almost total boycott of the city's segregated buses. Led by a handful of well-educated and young Negro leaders--notably by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., 27, pastor of a local Baptist church--they had efficiently put together and operated a car pool of some 200 vehicles to ferry themselves to and from work. Now the leaders and lawyers sat glumly in the Montgomery County courthouse waiting for the state circuit court to outlaw the Negro car pool on the charge--made by the city commission--that it was actually a business enterprise operating without a franchise.

 In the middle of the proceedings they saw an A.P. reporter hand a piece of paper to their white opponents, who promptly hustled outside. Minutes later the news was out: the Supreme Court, ruling on the Montgomery case, had unanimously upheld a district court's ruling that the "separate but equal" doctrine was now as legally dead for segregated public transportation as it had already been declared dead of public schools and public recreational facilities. The effect of the decision: to invalidate Alabama's intrastate Jim Crow bus laws and to set the grounds for invalidating similar laws in eleven other Southern states.