August 28, 1963 March on Washington, where Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his “I Have a Dream” speech.

September 15, 1963Four girls are killed in the bombing of the SixteenthStreet Baptist Church in Birmingham, AL, a centerfor civil rights meetings.

But the city recognized the boycott

for the threat it really was: an organized

assault on racial segregation and white

supremacy, an opening salvo targeting

their way of life. They refused to negotiate.

What they are after is the destruction

of our social order.

— Montgomery Mayor William A. Gayle

Change Gonna ComeIt would take 13 months; 381 days.

Montgomery’s black community refused

to board city buses. “My feets is weary but

my soul is rested,” is the way one elderly

Harassment and attempts at intimidation

intensified. Ninety MIA leaders and supporters

were indicted by a grand jury. City lawsuits

targeted cab drivers. King’s home was

bombed. A bomb was thrown into E.D.

Nixon’s yard.

Early in 1956, the NAACP filed a suit

challenging Montgomery bus segregation.

On June 19 a three-judge district court

ruled that bus segregation violated the 14th

Amendment. Still the city resisted until

November 13 when the U.S. Supreme Court

upheld the district court’s decision.

It was a great victory but not a complete

victory. Racial segregation still defined the

city as it did the entire South. While black

boycotter put it. Carpools that enlisted taxi

cabs and personal vehicles were organized

for transportation. Some white women even

smuggled their maids to work. In March

1956, the MIA bought 15 station wagons

for transport; each car had the name of its

sponsoring church on the side doors —

“rolling churches” they were called. But

thousands walked, their every step an effort

to stamp out the old subservient relationship

between black and white in the city. More

important than the logistics of transportation

was the moral support that church “mass

meetings” offered. Here the community

recognized its strength, and confirmed its

faith that in the end there would be victory.

people could now sit in the front of the

bus, Montgomery maintained segregated

bus stops.

Still, the echo of Montgomery reverberated

and midwifed a new idea that was soon to

grow into a movement all across the South:

The real source of power to make change

lay with ordinary people.

Did we have a leader?

Our leaders is we ourself.

— Claudette Colvin,

Browder v. Gayle testimony, 1956

Essay by Charles E. Cobb Jr., senior writer

for AllAfrica.com and Student Nonviolent

Coordinating Committee (SNCC) field

secretary in Mississippi from 1962-67.

June 21, 1964 Activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, andMichael Schwerner are killed in Philadelphia, MS,during “Freedom Summer,” a program to registerblack Southern voters.

July 2, 1964 The Civil Rights Act of 1964, prohibiting discrimina-tion, is signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson.

March 7, 1965Voting rights marchers from Selma to Montgomery,AL, are violently stopped by state and local lawenforcers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Theauthorities’ actions on “Bloody Sunday” promptedthousands of people to join a subsequent, success-ful march under federal protection.

August 6, 1965The Voting Rights Act of 1965 establishing uniform standards for the right to vote is signedinto law by President Johnson.

This exhibition is dedicated

to the memory of Mrs. Rosa L. Parks

1913–2005

Indicted MIA leaders march to the courthouse to be fingerprinted and photographed for violating a seldom-used law prohibiting boycotts.

Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

MIA mass meeting attendees unanimously vote to end the bus boycott when the U.S. Supreme Court decision is implemented.

Photo by Dan Weiner | Courtesy Sandra Weiner

E.D. Nixon (in light hat), Martin LutherKing Jr., and other MIA leaders awaitthe first desegregated bus.

For the first time, black passengers board through the front of the bus and, like Rosa Parks (below right), sit where they please.

The bus company lost money every day the boycott continued.

Photo by Dan Weiner | Courtesy Sandra Weiner

381 Days: The Montgomery Bus Boycott Story was developed and organized

by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service in collaboration

with the Troy University Rosa Parks Library and Museum. The exhibition has

been made possible through the generous support of AARP.

Cover: During the boycott, most African Americans walked,

arranged carpools, or found other means of transportation.

Unless otherwise noted, photos by Don Cravens | Time Life

Pictures/Getty Images

© 2005 Smithsonian Institution

Design: Studio A

King’s arrest photo.

Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

History was closing in,

riding waves that were already

changing the landscape:

desegregation of the military in 1948,

the 1954 Supreme Court decision ending

segregated schools, growing militancy

around the idea of freedom. Nonetheless

Montgomery was unexpected.

She was just one woman on one seat

in one bus, but after Rosa Parks said “no”

when ordered to surrender her seat to

a white man, nothing remained the same.

We invite you to take a deeper look

at this Montgomery movement—of

women, of community, of organization—

that seems to have sprung into action so

quickly and so bravely from one defiant act.

Like all human stories of challenge and

victory, it is complex.

The WomenThe women had long suffered insult and

humiliation, especially on the buses that so

many rode to jobs in white homes. In 1943,

Rosa Parks paid her fare in the front, stepped

off the bus, and watched helplessly as the

bus pulled away before she could reach the

back door that segregation laws required her

to enter. In 1949, Alabama State College

(now University) English professor Jo Ann

Robinson broke down in tears when she

was cursed at and chased off a bus for

unthinkingly sitting in the front of the nearly

empty vehicle. And just nine months before

Rosa Parks’ arrest in 1955, 15-year-old

Claudette Colvin had insisted on keeping

her bus seat and was arrested. All of this

was about more than segregated buses.

When I refused to get out of that bus

seat, I knew that I was going to be

arrested. The bus driver and the police-

men thought it was just about a bus

seat. It wasn’t just about a bus seat . . .

I felt that discrimination was unfair,

and it wasn't just segregation on the

buses, it was a whole lot of other things

too — the atmosphere and the way life

was back then.

— Claudette Colvin

And Rosa Parks said much the same thing:

We were all tired of being mistreated

for no other reason than because we

were black.

The CommunitySo it was not Rosa Parks’ boycott, and, in

fact, more than a bus boycott that was about

to be launched. Rosa Parks’ arrest was the

match that finally lit the black community’s

long fuse of dissatisfaction.

There comes a time when people get

tired of being trampled over by the

iron feet of oppression. There comes

a time, my friends, when people get

tired of being plunged across the abyss

of humiliation.

— Martin Luther King Jr.

Partly because it was in a city, Montgomery’s

black community already had a degree of

political organization. There were leaders of

significant influence like NAACP head E.D.

Nixon, a Pullman porter and union man;

and Martin Luther King’s predecessor,

Vernon Johns, the forceful pastor of Dexter

Avenue Baptist Church which stood, and

still stands, in the shadow of the state capitol

building. Mortician and Dexter Avenue

church member Rufus Lewis had been

conducting a voter registration campaign.

Nor was Rosa Parks simply a weary

seamstress too tired to rise from her seat.

She was also secretary of the local NAACP

chapter, one of the strongest in the South.

In the 1940s, Rosa Parks and her husband,

Raymond, had organized Montgomery’s

NAACP youth chapter. She was still its

advisor in the 1950s when that chapter,

foreshadowing the student sit-ins of the

1960s, unsuccessfully attempted to borrow

books from the “white” library. Jo Ann

Robinson may have been in tears in 1949,

but on December 1, 1955, she was president

of the Women's Political Council, which had

been planning a bus boycott for months.

Throughout the black community, almost

a century of simmering post-slavery dissatis-

faction over a “freedom” that did not mean

freedom was coming to a boil. On hearing

of Rosa Parks’ arrest, Jo Ann Robinson and

a few of her students mimeographed leaflets

calling for a bus boycott. Within days, the

Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA)

was formed, an “umbrella” organization

embracing a variety of groups. A young

minister, a newcomer to Montgomery,

26-year-old Martin Luther King Jr. was

chosen to head it.

I felt the Negroes in Montgomery

were at last anxious to move,

prepared to sacrifice and ready to

endure whatever came.

— E.D. Nixon

And so the boycott began. Its organizers

thought it would be over quickly. Their

demands were modest: courtesy, first-

come, first-served seating, and black

drivers in black areas.

Notable Dates inCivil Rights History

May 17, 1954 The U.S. Supreme Court outlaws public school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education.

August 28, 1955 Emmett Till, 14, is brutally murdered in Money, MS,for allegedly whistling at a white woman.

December 1, 1955 NAACP member Rosa Parks refuses to give up herseat to a white man on a Montgomery, AL, bus.

January 10-11, 1957Martin Luther King Jr. and other black southernministers meet in Atlanta, GA, and form theSouthern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to coordinate civil rights protests across the South.

September 23, 1957 Nine black students, escorted by the NationalGuard, desegregate Central High School in LittleRock, AR.

February 1, 1960 Four black college students hold a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth lunch counter inGreensboro, NC.

April 15, 1960 The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee(SNCC) is founded.

May 4, 1961 The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) sendsyoung “freedom riders” South to test compliancewith a Presidential executive order forbiddingracial segregation in interstate travel.

October 1, 1962James Meredith becomes the first black to regis-ter as a student at the University of Mississippi.

June 12, 1963 NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers is murderedin Jackson, MS.

Rosa Parks was riding the bus home fromwork when she refused to give up her seat.

The segregationist White Citizens Council advocated violence against the boycotters.

Photo by Dan Weiner | Courtesy Sandra Weiner

MIA leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and Rev. Ralph Abernathy (foreground)plan for a prolonged boycott.

Photo by Dan Weiner | CourtesySandra Weiner

Church mass meetings helped sustain the boycott.

Photo by Grey Villet/Stringer | Time LifePictures/Getty Images

Boycott supporterswere often harassed.

And still they walked.Waiting for carpool rides.

Photo by Dan Weiner | CourtesySandra Weiner

Sympathetic white riders also stayed off the buses.

No one knew how long the boycott would last.