Martin Luther King Jr. and the Montgomery Bus Boycott

The King family had been living in Montgomery for less than a year when the highly segregated city became the epicenter of the burgeoning struggle for civil rights in America, galvanized by the landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision of 1954.

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, secretary of the local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People chapter, refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery bus and was arrested. Activists coordinated a bus boycott that continued for 381 days, placing a severe economic strain on the public transit system and downtown business owners.

They chose Martin Luther King Jnr. as the protest’s leader and official spokesman. By the time the Supreme Court ruled segregated seating on public buses unconstitutional in November 1956, King, had been heavily influenced by Mahatma Gandhi and the activist Bayard Rustin, and had entered the national spotlight as an inspirational proponent of organized, nonviolent resistance. He had also become a target for white supremacists, who firebombed his family home. Emboldened by the boycott’s success, in 1957 he and other civil rights activists–most of them fellow ministers–founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (S.C.L.C.), a group committed to achieving full equality for African Americans through nonviolence.

The S.C.L.C. motto was “Not one hair of one head of one person should be harmed.” Martin Luther King Jnr. remained at the helm of this influential organization until his death.