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Home , Eyes on the Prize, Jo Ann Robinson

Active Viewing: "Awakenings" In this activity you analyze the reasons why the Montgomery Bus lasted so long and was successful. You watch a short clip from the PBS documentary Eyes on the Prize about the . Then you analyze primary sources to determine who participated in the boycott, who organized it, and what challenges boycott supporters faced. Objectives 1. You will be able to identify who organized the Montgomery Bus Boycott and who participated in it. 2. You will analyze the reasons why the bus boycott was lasted so long and why it was successful. 3. You will evaluate the importance of political organization and participation by ordinary people to effect social change. Instructions 1. Step 1: You will be looking at how the black community of Montgomery, supported and organized a year- long boycott to protest unfair treatment of black riders in the Jim Crow south. This is what happened in the film before the clip:  From Brown vs. Board of Education to the case of , African Americans across the South grew outwardly discontented with segregation and the hostile (sometimes violent) attacks imposed upon them by white Americans.  Acts of personal courage had taken place on public transportation (i.e., , 15-year-old student at Booker T. Washington High School, refused to give up her seat 9 months before , a secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP).  Organizing groups like the Women's Political Council of Montgomery had documented unfair treatment of blacks on busses.  Activists had determined that a boycott of a city transportation system was a good opportunity to launch a campaign for fair and equal treatment in public spaces. 2. Step 2: Here are preview questions to listen for/think about as you watch the clip:  Who participated in the Montgomery bus boycott? And how did they organize to meet the challenges of the boycott? We will view clip (Chapter 6; 32:16-42:01). After viewing, we will share our responses to the preview questions and follow up by asking:  In what ways did group solidarity play a role in sustaining the bus boycott? 3. Step 3: Work in groups, and please locate the packet of the five primary sources and graphic organizer. You should analyze each source for evidence that helps us understand why the bus boycott lasts so long. You should categorize your evidence according to the graphic organizer: evidence of intolerable conditions on the busses, strong organization by activist leaders, and/or community support. After you have gathered evidence from all the documents, you should independently respond to the writing prompt, citing evidence from the graphic organizer to support your answers.

4. Step 4: (Optional) Have students share responses from their essays. Conclude with discussion of the following:

 What does the Montgomery Bus Boycott tell us about the ability of ordinary people to affect the political process? What are the opportunities and limitations for ordinary people to influence the political process?

Jo Ann Robinson Describes the Montgomery Bus Boycott

Here, explains how she and others produced and distributed the leaflet calling for a boycott in time for thousands of African Americans to stay off the buses on Monday morning, December 5, 1955. Just before she began this work, Robinson and E.D. Nixon had decided over the phone to call for a boycott.

I sat down and quickly drafted a message and then called a good friend and colleague... who had access to the college’s mimeograph equipment. When I told him that the WPC was staging a boycott and needed to run off the notices, he told me that he too had suffered embarrassment on the city buses.... Along with two of my most trusted senior students, we quickly agreed to meet almost immediately, in the middle of the night, at the college’s duplicating room. We were able to get three messages to a page... in order to produce the tens of thousands of leaflets we knew would be needed. By 4 a.m. Friday, the sheets had been duplicated, cut in thirds, and bundled....

Between 4 and 7 a.m., the two students and I mapped out distribution routes for the notices. Some of the WPC officers previously had discussed how and where to deliver thousands of leaflets announcing a boycott, and those plans now stood me in good stead....

After class my two students and I quickly finalized our plans for distributing the thousands of leaflets so that one would reach every black home in Montgomery. I took out the WPC membership roster and called [them].... I alerted all of them to the forthcoming distribution of the leaflets, and enlisted their aid in speeding and organizing the distribution network....

Throughout the late morning and early afternoon hours we dropped off tens of thousands of leaflets. Some of our bundles were dropped off at schools.... Leaflets were also dropped off at business places, storefronts, beauty parlors, beer halls, factories, barber shops, and every other available place. Workers would pass along notices both to other employees as well as to customers....

By 2 o’clock thousands of the mimeographed handbills had changed hands many times. Practically every black man, woman, and child in Montgomery knew the plan and was passing the word along....

SOURCE | Excerpt from Jo Ann Robinson’s memoir, The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It, pp. 45-47, 1987. Knoxville, ./21/ CREATOR | Jo Ann Robinson ITEM TYPE | Memoir

An African-American Woman Describes Segregated Buses in Montgomery, Alabama

During the Montgomery bus boycott, researchers from Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee visited Montgomery to learn more about the boycott and document it. Researcher Willie Lee interviewed an African-American woman who worked as a domestic, who described how black riders had been treated on the buses. She was interviewed at one of the several car pool stations established to transport the boycotters.

This stuff has been going on for a long time. To tell you the truth, it's been happening ever since I came here before [World War II]. But here in the last few years they've been getting worse and worse. When you get on the bus they yell: "Get on back there"... and half of the time they wouldn't take your transfer, then they make you get up so white men could sit down [when] there were no seats in the back. And you know about a year ago they put one of the high school girls in jail 'cause she wouldn't move. They should have boycotted the buses then. But we are sure fixing 'em now and I hope we don't ever start back riding.... They shouldn't make me get up for some white person when I paid the same fare and I got on first. And they should stop being so nasty... We pay just like the white folks... [The bus companies] are the ones losing the money and our preachers say we will not ride unless they give us what we want...

SOURCE | Excerpt from an interview conducted by Willie Lee (researcher, Fisk University), January 1956; from George Mason University Center for History and New Media and Stanford University School of Education, Historical Thinking Matters, http://historicalthinkingmatters.org/rosaparks/0/inquiry/main/resources/26 INTERVIEWER | Willie Lee INTERVIEWEE | Anonymous ITEM TYPE | Oral History

Bayard Rustin Explains Car Pools in the Montgomery Bus Boycott

African-American civil rights activist advised Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., on the Montgomery bus boycott. In this excerpt from his diary, Rustin describes how the city's black residents found ways to get to and from work without using the buses.

February 24

42,000 Negroes have not ridden the busses since December 5. On December 6, the police began to harass, intimidate, and arrest Negro taxi drivers who were helping get these people to work. It thus became necessary for the Negro leaders to find an alternative--the car pool.

They set up 23 dispatch centers where people gather to wait for free transportation. This morning , director of the pool, invited me to attend the meeting of the drivers. On the way, he explained that there are three methods in addition to the car pool, for moving the Negro population:

1) Hitch-hiking. 2) The transportation of servants by white housewives. 3) Walking.

Later he introduced me to two men, one of whom has walked 7 miles and the other 14 miles, every day since December 5. "The success of the car pool is at the heart of the movement," Lewis said at the meeting." It must not be stopped." I wondered what the response of the drivers would be, since 28 of them had just been arrested on charges of conspiring to destroy the bus company. One by one, they pledged that, if necessary, they would be arrested again and again.

SOURCE | Bayard Rustin, "Montgomery Diary," in Stewart Burns, ed., Daybreak of Freedom: The Montgomery Bus Boycott (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 166-167. CREATOR | Bayard Rustin ITEM TYPE | Diary/Letter

Martin Luther King Jr., “The Montgomery Bus Boycott” (1955)

The Montgomery Bus Boycott speech reprinted below is one of the first major addresses of Dr. Martin Luther King. Dr. King spoke to nearly 5,000 people at the Holt Street Baptist Church in Montgomery on December 5, 1955, just four days after Mrs. Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to relinquish her seat on a Montgomery city bus. That arrest led to the first major civil rights campaign in the Deep South in half a century. In this speech King urges the audience which has just voted to boycott the buses to continue that campaign until they achieve their goal of ending the humiliation and intimation of black citizens there and elsewhere in Montgomery or to use his words, "..to gain justice on the buses in the city."

My FRIENDS, we are certainly very happy to see each of you out this evening. We are here this evening for serious business. We are here in a general sense because first and foremost we are American citizens and we are determined to apply our citizenship to the fullness of its meaning. We are here also because of our love for democracy, because of our deep-seated belief that democracy transformed from thin paper to thick action is the greatest form of government on earth.

But we are here in a specific sense, because of the bus situation in Montgomery. We are here because we are determined to get the situation corrected. This situation is not at all new. The problem has existed over endless years. For many years now Negroes in Montgomery and so many other areas have been inflicted with the paralysis of crippling fears on buses in our community. On so many occasions, Negroes have been intimidated and humiliated and impressed-oppressed-because of the sheer fact that they were Negroes. I don't have time this evening to go into the history of these numerous cases. Many of them now are lost in the thick fog of oblivion but at least one stands before us now with glaring dimensions.

Just the other day, just last Thursday to be exact, one of the finest citizens in Montgomery not one of the finest Negro citizens, but one of the finest citizens in Montgomery-was taken from a bus and carried to jail and because she refused to get up to give her seat to a white person. Now the press would have us believe that she refused to leave a reserved section for Negroes but I want you to know this evening that there is no reserved section. The law has never been clarified at that point. Now I think I speak with, with legal authority-not that I have any legal authority, but I think I speak with legal authority behind me -that the law, the ordinance, the city ordinance has never been totally clarified.

Mrs. Rosa Parks is a fine person. And, since it had to happen, I'm happy that it happened to a person like Mrs. Parks, for nobody can doubt the boundless outreach of her integrity. Nobody can doubt the height of her character nobody can doubt the depth of her Christian commitment and devotion to the teachings of Jesus. And I'm happy since it had to happen, it happened to a person that nobody can call a disturbing factor in the community. Mrs. Parks is a fine Christian person, unassuming, and yet there is integrity and character there. And just because she refused to get up, she was arrested.

And you know, my friends, 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, where they experience the bleakness of nagging despair. There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life's July and left standing amid the piercing chill of an alpine November. There comes a time.

We are here, we are here this evening because we're tired now. And I want to say that we are not here advocating violence. We have never done that. I want it to be known throughout Montgomery and throughout this nation that we are Christian people. We believe in the Christian religion. We believe in the teachings of Jesus. The only weapon that we have in our hands this evening is the weapon of protest. That's all. And certainly, certainly, this is the glory of America, with all of its faults. This is the glory of our democracy. If we were incarcerated behind the iron curtains of a Communistic nation we couldn't do this. If we were dropped in the dungeon of a totalitarian regime we couldn't do this. But the great glory of American democracy is the right to protest for right. My friends, don't let anybody make us feel that we are to be compared in our actions with the Ku Klux Klan or with the White Citizens Council. There will be no crosses burned at any bus stops in Montgomery. There will be no white persons pulled out of their homes and taken out on some distant road and lynched for not cooperating. There will be nobody amid, among us who will stand up and defy the Constitution of this nation. We only assemble here because of our desire to see right exist. My friends, I want it to be known that we're going to work with grim and bold determination to gain justice on the buses in this city.

And we are not wrong, we are not wrong in what we are doing. If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong. If we are wrong, Jesus of Nazareth was merely a utopian dreamer that never came down to earth. If we are wrong, justice is a lie. Love has no meaning. And we are determined here in Montgomery to work and fight until justice runs down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream.

I want to say that in all of our actions we must stick together. Unity is the great need of the hour, and if we are united we can get many of the things that we not only desire but which we justly deserve. And don't let anybody frighten you. We are not afraid of what we are doing because we are doing it within the law. There is never a time in our American democracy that we must ever think we're wrong when we protest. We reserve that right. When labor all over this nation came to see that it would be trampled over by capitalistic power, it was nothing wrong with labor getting together and organizing and protesting for its rights.

We, the disinherited of this land, we who have been oppressed so long, are tired of going through the long night of captivity. And now we are reaching out for the daybreak of freedom and justice and equality. May I say to you my friends, as I come to a close, and just giving some idea of why we are assembled here, that we must keep-and I want to stress this, in all of our doings, in all of our deliberations here this evening and all of the week and while—whatever we do, we must keep God in the forefront. Let us be Christian in all of our actions. But I want to tell you this evening that it is not enough for us to talk about love, love is one of the pivotal points of the Christian face, faith. There is another side called justice. And justice is really love in calculation. Justice is love correcting that which revolts against love.

The Almighty God himself is not the only, not the, not the God just standing out saying through Hosea, "I love you, Israel." He's also the God that stands up before the nations and said: "Be still and know that I'm God, that if you don't obey me I will break the backbone of your power and slap you out of the orbits of your international and national relationships." Standing beside love is always justice, and we are only using the tools of justice. Not only are we using the tools of persuasion, but we've come to see that we've got to use the tools of coercion. Not only is this thing a process of education, but it is also a process of legislation.

As we stand and sit here this evening and as we prepare ourselves for what lies ahead, let us go out with a grim and bold determination that we are going to stick together. We are going to work together. Right here in Montgomery, when the history books are written in the future somebody will have to say, "There lived a race of people a black people, 'fleecy locks and black complexion’, a people who had the moral courage to stand up for their rights. And thereby they injected a new meaning into the veins of history and of civilization." And we're gonna do that. God grant that we will do it before it is too late. As we proceed with our program let us think of these things.

But just before leaving I want to say this. I want to urge you. You have voted [for this boycott], and you have done it with a great deal of enthusiasm, and I want to express my appreciation to you, on behalf of everybody here. Now let us go out to stick together and stay with this thing until the end. Now it means sacrificing, yes, it means sacrificing at points. But there are some things that we've got to learn to sacrifice for. And we've got to come to the point that we are determined not to accept a lot of things that we have been accepting in the past.

So I'm urging you now. We have the facilities for you to get to your jobs, and we are putting, we have the cabs there at your service. Automobiles will be at your service, and don't be afraid to use up any of the gas. If you have it, if you are fortunate enough to have a little money, use it for a good cause. Now my automobile is gonna be in it, it has been in it, and I'm not concerned about how much gas I'm gonna use. I want to see this thing work. And we will not be content until oppression is wiped out of Montgomery, and really out of America. We won't be content until that is done. We are merely insisting on the dignity and worth of every human personality. And I don't stand here, I'm not arguing for any selfish person. I've never been on a bus in Montgomery. But I would be less than a Christian if I stood back and said, because I don't ride the bus, I don't have to ride a bus, that it doesn't concern me. I will not be content. I can hear a voice saying, "If you do it unto the least of these, my brother, you do it unto me."

And I won't rest; I will face intimidation, and everything else, along with these other stalwart fighters for democracy and for citizenship. We don't mind it, so long as justice comes out of it. And I've come to see now that as we struggle for our rights, maybe some of them will have to die. But somebody said, if a man doesn't have something that he'll die for, he isn't fit to live.

SOURCE: Josh Gottheimer ed., Ripples of Hope Great American Civil Rights Speeches (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2003).

Reverend Abernathy Recalls the Montgomery Improvement Association's First Meeting

In the following excerpt, Reverend remembers the first mass meeting of the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) at a local Baptist church on the first day of the boycott. After this, the MIA held regular weekly meetings until the boycott ended.

We, [Martin Luther] King and I, went to the meeting together. It was drizzling; I had been working up until the last minute on the resolutions. I was given instructions: one, to call off the protest, or two, if indicated, to continue the protest until the grievances were granted. We had had a successful "one-day protest," but we feared that if we extended it beyond the first day, we might fail; it might be better after all to call the protest off, and then we could hold this "one-day boycott" as a threat for future negotiations. However, we were to determine whether to continue the protest by the size of the crowds....

When we got about twenty blocks from the church we saw cars parked solid... as we got closer to the church we saw a great mass of people. The Montgomery Advertiser estimated the crowd at approximately 7,000 persons all trying to get in a church that will accommodate less than 1,000. It took us about fifteen minutes to work our way through the crowd by pleading: "Please let us through—-we are Reverend King and Reverend Abernathy. Please permit us to get through...."

Those inside applauded for at least ten minutes.

It was apparent that the people were with us. It was then that all of the ministers who had previously refused to take part in the program came up to Reverend King and me to offer their services. This expression of togetherness on the part of the masses was obviously an inspiration to the leadership and helped to rid it of the cowardly, submissive, over timidity. We began the meeting by singing Onward Christian Soldiers, Marching as to War ....

Mrs. Rosa Parks was presented to the mass meeting because we wanted her to become symbolic of our protest movement. Following her we presented Mr. Daniels, who happily for our meeting had been arrested on that day.... The appearance of these persons created enthusiasm, thereby giving momentum to the movement.

We then heard the resolutions calling for the continuation of the boycott... unanimously and enthusiastically adopted by the 7,000 individuals both inside and outside the church....

SOURCE | Ralph Abernathy, "Recollection of the First MIA Mass Meeting," in Daybreak of Freedom: The Montgomery Bus Boycott, ed. Stewart Burns (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997), pp. 93-95; from George Mason University Center for History and New Media and Stanford University School of Education, "Rosa Parks," Historical Thinking Matters, http://historicalthinkingmatters.org//rosaparks/0/inquiry/main/resources/22/ CREATOR | Ralph Abernathy ITEM TYPE | Book (excerpt)

Why Did the Montgomery Bus Boycott Last So Long?

Find evidence for one of the three reasons why the Montgomery bus boycott lasted so long (from December 1955 to November 1956). Write down a sentence or phrase or describe part of a photo. Some documents may have evidence for more than one reason.

Intolerable Conditions Document Organization Community Support on the Buses

Jo Ann Robinson Describes the Bus Boycott

An African-American Woman Describes Segregated Buses in Montgomery, Alabama

Bayard Rustin Explains Car Pools in the Montgomery Bus Boycott

Reverend Abernathy Recalls the Montgomery Improvement Association's First Meeting

“Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Speaking in Church During the Montgomery Bus Boycott, 1956”

Writing Prompt: Using evidence from the chart you filled in, write a paragraph explaining why the bus boycott lasted so long.