On Dec. 1, 1955, in a basement room in Councill Hall at Alabama State College, now Alabama State University, the Montgomery Bus Boycott was planned and publicized after Rosa Parks was arrested that day for refusing to give up her seat to a white person on a segregated city bus. Following her arrest, faculty member Jo Ann Robinson wrote the text of a flyer calling for blacks to boycott segregated city buses and, with others, mimeographed thousands of flyers there urging a one-day boycott beginning the following Monday, Dec. 5. Assisted by members of the Women's Political Council, they distributed the flyers throughout Montgomery's black community in hopes of ending segregation on city buses. Robinson had proposed the idea to the Women's Political Council more than a year before it was carried out and was perhaps the person most instrumental in planning and publicizing the 1955 boycott. She was assisted by Women's Political Council members including Thelma Glass, Irene West, Mary Fair Burks, and others, and advised by activist E.D. Nixon and attorney Fred Gray, an Alabama State University alumnus, who was also eager to challenge the segregated bus law. The planned protest received widespread publicity, and on Dec. 5 more than 90% of the city's black citizens stayed off the buses. Black leaders then extended it into a long-term campaign that lasted from Dec. 5, 1955, to Dec. 20, 1956, with widespread black support. It succeeded when the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed Browder v. Gayle, which struck down laws requiring segregated seating on public buses, and this became the seminal birth of the modern American Civil Rights Movement.

Photo: Fair use

Photo: Mark Hilton

Photo: Mark Hilton

Photo: Mark Hilton

Photo: Mark Hilton

Photo: Mark Hilton

Montgomery, Alabama · USA