Bus Boycott Sparks Civil Rights Cause

Thirty Years Ago, on Dec. 1, 1955, a tired black seamstress refused to give her seat to a white man on a bus in Montgomery, Ala., and touched off a period of extraordinary change for black Americans. To protest Rosa Parks' arrest and the city's segregation ordinance, Montgomery's black community boycotted city buses for nearly a year. The non-violent boycott propelled its leader, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to national prominence and set the pattern for the civil rights demonstrations that would result in passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Those two laws guaranteed blacks access to public accommodations, voting booths and jobs. Other federal laws followed, barring discrimination in housing and offering a whole range of federal programs to put blacks on an equal footing with whites. With these new rights and supports, blacks in large numbers took advantage of educational and job training opportunities and entered the mainstream of American economics and politics. The civil rights movement “is probably the greatest revolution that America has ever seen,” said Ken Johnson, acting president of the Southern Regional Council.

The struggle was not without great cost. King was assassinated in April 1968, leaving the movement without a leader who could draw its many disparate elements together. Frustration and broken expectations left many inner cities in flames during the long hot summers of the late 1960s. And violent opposition to busing in several Northern cities began to pull apart white support for the black movement. Today blacks as a group still are not fully integrated into American life. Racial stereotypes persist. Hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan still exist. Civil rights organizers say efforts to keep blacks from moving into white neighborhoods remain common. Strong resistance has stymied school desegregation in many communities.