Teaching About the Montgomery Bus Boycott

The Montgomery Bus Boycott began 68 years ago today, on December 5, 1955. This pivotal campaign of nonviolent resistance would last for more than a year and forever change the future of the Civil Rights Movement and of our country. Yet despite how widely celebrated the boycott has been as part of our national story, the popular narrative of the boycott is often oversimplified, reductive and insufficient. The boycott did not come about because Rosa Parks was “tired”; she and other civil rights activists were strategically challenging a system of Jim Crow laws and segregation policies that restricted Black Americans’ rights and relegated them to second-class citizenship.

This new Learning for Justice article provides a collection of resources to support learning about the true and full history of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, pushing beyond simplistic narratives and taking a deeper look at the ingenuity and perseverance of the boycott’s organizers and participants. Many of these resources are excerpted and adapted from LFJ’s newest curriculum framework, Teaching the Civil Rights Movement, which similarly seeks to broaden our understanding of the movement for equality that continues into the present day.