Video Segment

Eyes on the Prize, Volume 162, Chapter 3

Table of Contents

Summary
Questions for Discussion
Activities
Keywords
Profiles
Organizations
Maps
Graphs
Primary Documents

Summary

In December 1955, organizers in Montgomery, Alabama, began a boycott aimed at ending segregated seating on the city buses. The campaign was built around the arrest of Rosa Parks when she refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger. Her case prompted Jo Ann Robinson and the Women's Political Council, along with other local Black leaders, to call for a boycott of Montgomery's segregated bus system. The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., then just twenty-six years old, became a leader of the 381-day boycott organized by the Montgomery Improvement Association. In November 1956, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Montgomery's segregated bus system was unconstitutional.

Questions for Discussion

1. How did segregation on city buses operate in Montgomery? Was Rosa Parks sitting in the "white" or "colored" section of the bus when she was arrested? Why was she arrested?
   
2. Two-thirds of the bus riders in Montgomery were African Americans. Was this important to the success of the boycott? Why?
   
3. Why was the African American community in Montgomery able to respond so quickly to the arrest of Rosa Parks?
   
4. What did the boycotters do for transportation during their bus boycott?

Activities

Role-play the Rosa Parks incident, including the way the bus driver moves back the "line" between the "white" and "colored" sections to accommodate the increasing number of white passengers. Have students research other incidents of African American resistance to segregated facilities, including the one-week bus boycott mounted in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1953 (two years before the Montgomery boycott).

Have students explore segregation in their own communities through interviews, observation, newspaper accounts of the racial or ethnic makeup of different neighborhoods. Have them also examine the extent of segregation in the schools, fire department, and police department. Discuss segregation and how it affects a community, the damage that is done by segregation. Ask students for suggestions as to how they might address the harm that is done and how they might desegregate those arenas of their community life where segregation causes the most damage.

Keywords

• segregated buses
  
• boycott
  
• mass meeting
  
• nonviolence
  
• unconstitutional

Online Profiles

• Martin Luther King Jr.
  
• E.D. Nixon
  
• Rosa Parks
  
• Jo Ann Robinson
  
• Bayard Rustin
  

Note: Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells also refused, in earlier times, to surrender to segregated seating.

Organization Descriptions

• Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters
  
• Fellowship of Reconciliation
  
• Highlander Folk School
  
• Southern Christian Leadership Conference
  
• Women's Political Council

Maps

• United States. In 1950, the population of the United States was 134,941,622 White and 15,042,692 Black approximately 9.5 percent of the population).
  
• Alabama (three frames). Capital: Montgomery. Population in 1950: 2,079,591 White, 979,617 Black. Principal Goods and Crops: iron, steel and saw mill materials; cotton, peanuts and soybeans.

Graphs

• School Desegregation
  
• Family Income
  
• Employed Professionals and Managers
  
• 1950 Gallup Poll
  
• "Cycle of Inequality"

Primary Documents

• Plessy decision
• Montgomery Advertiser headlines
• The Montgomery Story

Bibliography

See Eyes on the Prize Bibliography

 

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