Transcription
In Montgomery, Alabama, people looked at how they were being impacted negatively by their society, and they assumed responsibility for change. Joan Robinson was an English professor at Alabama State University, and she headed up an organization called the Women's Political Council.
Joanne Robinson had an episode on the Montgomery bus where she is accosted by a bus driver, and she leaves the bus, you know, in terror. Um, she thought the bus driver was going to, was going to hit her as he demanded she sit in a black-only section in an almost empty bus. When she talked to other women in the Women's Political Council about this episode, she found out that they had similar experiences. There were a number of arrests in 1955 of black women who were violating the segregation ordinance on the buses.
And on the night of December 1st, when Rosa Parks is arrested, Joan Robinson brings into action, and they actually execute this plan to, to initiate a bus boycott. At the time, most people rode the bus to kind of get around. There weren't as many cars on the road, so you begin to realize that if we don't ride the buses, you know, we're able to kind of break the system to a great degree.
Joanne Robinson comes on campus late that night with a couple of students, runs off 50,000 flyers. The next morning, between classes, they pass out these flyers. She calls the civil rights attorney Fred Gray. She calls Ed Nixon, labor organizer, really the recognized leader of black Montgomery, and they decide to endorse the boycott. They organized the Montgomery Improvement Association to execute and to coordinate the activities surrounding the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and they select this newcomer, Martin Luther King, to head up the Montgomery Improvement Association.
Martin Luther King gives to Montgomery ideas about love and civil disobedience, overcoming adversity, and the people of Montgomery were willing not only to listen but to act on this. I was the NAACP Youth Council president, and I participated in the boycott. I walked to school, and we just saw the empty buses go by because there were no black people on them.
At the time that this movement began, here we had about 50,000 African-Americans living in Montgomery, and there were pretty close to 50,000 black people who worked together during this bus boycott. We stayed off the buses and found other ways to get to where we needed to go. So they bought station wagons, and they had an actual route, just like buses have routes. For several weeks, I was a volunteer driver, every day going out and just hauling people to work or school. So people just didn't walk, they rode, but they rode in a system that they created.
382 days. That's a long time. Can you imagine how empowered people felt? It's like we did what the Montgomery Bus Boycott says to the nation, that segregation is no longer the law of the land, and that the formula for attacking segregation and all of its facets is going to be nonviolence, civil disobedience on one hand, and litigation on the other. The boycott was one of the greatest examples of civic engagement of the 20th century.