Transcription
Rosa Parks is a local civil rights activist who boards a city bus and is arrested when she refuses to obey the rules of segregation. You got to remember how humiliating that was. You put money in the front, your little nickel or dime, whatever we had to pay, and you go to the back, to the side door, and you're sitting in your seat that's assigned to you. Even if I'm sitting back there, the bus driver and the whites in Alabama had the power to tell me to get up, because dare not sit while a white man is standing.
When Rosa Parks, that December evening, is asked to get up out of her seat, she says she thinks about Emma Till. Till was the young man from Chicago who'd come to Mississippi to visit his uncle and was lynched for making a comment to a white woman. The two who murdered Till have just been acquitted, causing outrage in Black communities across the Deep South. Activists in Montgomery, Alabama, organized an anti-segregation protest, a one-day boycott of the city bus system to begin after Rosa Parks' arrest.
It elicits an immediate response. "We expect the city bus lines of Montgomery and the people of Montgomery to continue to obey all segregation laws as written, and as long as I am police commissioner of the city of Montgomery, I intend to follow this."
Initially, the boycott was scheduled to last one day, and it was only after they saw the success of it that they began thinking about, "Well, we can sustain this." And I don't think they realized how difficult that would be. What they were doing was almost doing a power map and looking at sort of what tools do we have at our disposal, how is the structure and the system set up, um, in a way that needs us. 75% of the bus riders are black. A total boycott is an economic threat that cannot be ignored.
There's a huge mass meeting at Hold Street Baptist Church, and it's at that meeting where the community makes the decision to go forward and turn this one-day boycott into a kind of extended boycott. The movement also chooses its leader, a 26-year-old minister who's determined to keep the protest going: Dr. Martin Luther King.
Part of how Montgomery's black community sustains a boycott is because they organized this massive, incredibly impressive carpool system. They set up 40 pickup stations around town. They organize thousands and thousands of rides a day. Taxi cabs and carpools are pressed into service as blacks in Montgomery continue to boycott the buses week after week, month after month. These are people who have been engaged both in kind of grassroots resistance and and politics around civil rights for decades, but also they had a very astute understanding of what it would take in order for change to happen. Power conceives nothing lightly. The carpool and all we have done in this struggle [Applause] continues.
The boycott continues over a year, costing Montgomery city bus lines $3,000 a day in lost revenue. White segregationists react with violence. "I remember doing the Montgomery Bus boycott, moved out the plans, will get on their horses and ride through, you know, uh, ride through and and and and try to intimidate people." Yet King and the leaders of the movement stay committed to face any intimidation with nonviolence. Part of his commitment to nonviolence is a commitment to not letting white people determine the terms of their interaction. And the power in that, we often focus when we talk about nonviolent direct action on just the peacefulness of it, but part of it is not wanting your opponent to get to set the terms of your engagement. There's nothing passive about it. We must get in our hearts that it is possible to be courageous and yet nonviolent.
While the boycott keeps up public pressure in the streets, in the courts, civil rights organizers are pushing for change at the national level. When Rosa Parks is arrested, she is represented by a young lawyer in Alabama named Fred Gray. Gray takes the case all the way to the US Supreme Court. In 381 days after it began, the bus boycott ends in victory when the court rules that segregation on public transportation is unconstitutional.