The Montgomery bus boycott helped spark the grassroots civil rights movement in the American South, and, over the course of the next fifteen years, the civil rights movement literally transformed a nation that historically had relegated African Americans to — at best — a second-class citizenship. But although the Montgomery movement produced a leader, Martin Luther King Jr., who went on to become the public face of African American civil rights activism until his assassination in 1968, the movement sprang from the work of ordinary citizens who expressed a range of grievances over the way the Montgomery city government treated them as second-class citizens. Recent memoirs, documentary histories, and scholarship have demonstrated that the remarkable solidarity shown during this turning point of twentieth-century American history depended not only on charismatic leaders such as King and Ralph Abernathy, but at least as much on women’s organization and participation. Rosa Parks emerged from a long background of quiet but determined activism to begin the boycott after her arrest on December 1, 1955. Thereafter, the Montgomery Women’s Political Council organized the boycott, kept it going on a day-to-day basis, filled the mass meetings that inspired those who trudged the streets, and through their sheer persistence often dragged along ministers and other male community leaders. This is not to underestimate the ministerial eloquence of King and his comrades; the women involved certainly did not. But it is to recognize that this leadership depended to a large degree on savvy and persistent organizers such as Montgomery labor leader E. D. Nixon, college professor Jo Ann Gibson Robinson, and local activists Mary Fair Burks and Rosa Parks. Besides them, thousands of ordinary maids and laborers kept each other informed and, consequently, the boycott effective through phone trees, women’s missionary society meetings, labor organizations, and social gatherings. The evidence presented here seeks to demonstrate the interplay between the movement’s leaders and the ordinary people who took to the street to demonstrate their opposition to segregation and second-class citizenship.

The boycott lasted more than a year and eventually was successful in repealing the city code that required segregation on city buses. There would be more struggles to come, but this one launched many of the organizing tactics used over the next decade during the freedom struggle carried on by masses of African Americans. The “story” of the boycott, moreover, became an emblem for what nonviolent protest could accomplish. Told in a memorable (if historically oversimplified) form in a comic book published by a pacifist religious group the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the story of Montgomery reached an international audience, and it continues to inspire freedom movement from eastern Europe to South Africa and Egypt to this day.