Montgomery: The Walking City, 1955–6

Abstract

The nonviolent civil rights movement that overthrew legal segregation in the South of the United States originated in Montgomery, Alabama, the cradle of the Confederacy. On Thursday, 1 December 1955, Mrs Rosa Parks, a 42-year-old black seamstress at a down-town Montgomery department store, and a respected member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), was arrested for violating the city’s segregated transportation ordinance by refusing to relinquish her bus seat to a white man. Her arrest galvanized the black community. That evening, Jo Ann Robinson, president of the local black Women’s Political Council, telephoned Mr E. D. Nixon — a Pullman porter who was a veteran civil rights activist and former president of the local NAACP — to discuss what action should be taken to protest the arrest of Mrs Parks. The Women’s Political Council had been pressuring the city to reform its segregated transportation system since 1953. Robinson and Nixon decided to call for a boycott of the Montgomery City Lines. On Friday morning, after posting bond for the release of Mrs Parks, pending a trial, Nixon telephoned the city’s black clergymen to enlist their support. Reverend Ralph Abernathy, pastor of the First Baptist Church, received the initial call.