,

Jo Ann Robinson boarded a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in December 1949, paid her fare and saw just two other passengers – a white woman seated in the third row and a Black man sitting near the back.

Well aware of the segregation laws that prohibited Black patrons from sitting in the whites-only section in the front of the bus, Robinson chose a seat in the middle. The driver pulled over, walked back to where she was seated and yelled at her, telling her that she was sitting too close to the white section.

Fearing that he would hit her, Robinson fled the bus.

Humiliated, embarrassed and angered, Robinson began to mobilize against bus segregation. When the Montgomery mayor and city council refused her demand to bring an end to the separation of races on city buses, she conceived the idea of a boycott.

But activists in the Black community felt the timing wasn’t right. They feared harsh reprisals – arrests, violence and job losses for people who challenged the Jim Crow laws.

In the meantime, more Black bus riders began to experience similar abuse. Among the indignities, they were forced to pay at the front of the bus, then exit and re-enter through a separate door leading to the Black section in the back. Occasionally, drivers would pull away before they could re-enter, even though they had paid their fare.

Some riders became increasingly defiant. Claudette Colvin was one.

At 15 and still in high school, she was arrested on March 2, 1955, after refusing to obey a driver’s order to relinquish her seat to a white person, even though she was already sitting in the back.

Aurelia Browder, a seamstress and the owner of several businesses, was another. She was arrested on April 19, 1955, after declining to give up her seat to a white person.

It was later that year, on Dec. 1, when Montgomery NAACP Secretary Rosa Parks, who was already well-known in the community for fighting to achieve racial justice, did the same and was taken to the Montgomery jail. Robinson – who had been patiently waiting for the right time to put her boycott plans into place – seized the moment.

With the help of others at Alabama State College (now Alabama State University), where she was an English professor, Robinson prepared and mimeographed more than 50,000 flyers and distributed them to Black city residents, asking them to stay off the buses for one day to protest Parks’ arrest. After receiving one of the flyers, the Montgomery Advertiser published a story about the boycott on its front page, helping to spread the word.

Few, if anyone, imagined the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which began 65 years ago on Dec. 5, 1955, would last nearly 13 months and bring about such historic change. 

Read more here.

In solidarity,

Your friends at the SPLC