What Caused The Montgomery Bus Boycott

Have you ever heard about the Montgomery Bus Boycott? Have you ever heard about Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King Jr? If you have, you probably know these people as the faces of the bus boycott that took place in Montgomery, Alabama in 1956. If someone were to ask you what you know about this movement, you would probably tell them what you were taught in elementary school. You would say that she and Martin Luther King Jr. are responsible for the success of the boycott. This, however, is not necessarily true. You might also mention something about how Rosa Parks sparked the boycott by refusing to give up her seat to a white man because she had just left work and was too tired to move. Yes, this is part of what caused the boycott in 1956, but
In fact, a fifteen-year old girl named Claudette Colvin was arrested nine months earlier for the same offense as it is stated in a flyer that was sent out on December 5, 1955, “Another Negro woman has been arrested and thrown into jail because she refused to get up out of her seat on the bus for a white person to sit down. It is the second time since the Claudette Colvin case that a Negro woman has been arrested for the same thing. This has to be stopped.” This incident is what sparked the Browder vs. Gayle case. The article “Browder v. Gayle: The Women Before Rosa Parks” says, “It was four women in particular — Aurelia Browder, Susie McDonald, Claudette Colvin and Mary Louise Smith — who served as plaintiffs in the legal action challenging Montgomery's segregated public transportation system.It was their case — Browder v. Gayle — that a district court and, eventually, the U.S. Supreme Court would use to strike down segregation on buses.” The resistance shown by these four women is what caused the desegregation of buses. However, they were not responsible for the success of the Montgomery Bus
A flyer that was sent out December of 1955 it asks that African-Americans stay off city buses, “We are, therefore, asking every Negro to stay off the busses Monday in protest of the arrest and trial. Don't ride the bus to work, to town, to school, or anywhere on Monday.” This is telling the African-American community to stay off the busses they ride daily in order to get to where they need to be. If African-Americans stopped riding the buses all together, the bus companies would struggle because most of them provide the major income. This is pointed out in the letter Jo Ann Robinson wrote to the mayor where it states, “Mayor Gayle, three-fourths of the riders of these public conveyances are Negroes. If Negroes did not patronize them, they could not possibly operate.” If only a few people had boycotted city busses, then the boycott would not have been successful. Without the entire community sticking together, they would not have been able to reach their ultimate goal. “More and more of our people are already arranging with neighbors and friends to ride to keep from being insulted and humiliated by bus drivers,” this statement from Robinson’s letter to Mayor Gayle shows that the community was working with each other for over year before the boycott started and had already began planning