BACKGROUND TO THE MODERN CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

For purposes of convenience, the Brown decision of 1954 is sometimes regarded as the beginning of the modern Civil Rights movement. The Brown decision was the culmination of a legal process begun by the NAACP back in 1935.

REMINDER ABOUT THE PLESSY CASE

It was made worse in 1896, in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson. This case involved a Louisiana state law that REQUIRED trains to have separate but equal accommodations by race, that is one for whites and one for the colored races. The Supreme Court voted 7-1 that separation of the races, or segregation, is not discrimination so long as facilities are provided equally to both races. In other words, segregation is permissible so long as facilities are provided to both races. The Court's doctrine of separate and equal did not require that the facility for blacks or the colored races had to be exactly as good as the one for the white race, only that there has to be one. To the Court, if each race had a facility, that was equal. This, if there is a rest room for the one, there should be a restore for the other; or a water fountain; or a school. In practice, the white facility was always vastly superior to the colored one. And eating establishments frequently refused to serve blacks at all. Howard Johnson's denied service to blacks as late as the early 1960s. More moderate establishments allowed Colored people to purchase food but they could not eat it there. White hotels simply did not allow blacks to stay in them. Obviously, what is running through all of this is a double standard.

The NAACP was established back in 1909, by Oswald Garrison Villard, the grandson of the great white abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison. The grandfather clauses that had been invented by Louisiana in 1898. Essentially it permitted a person to vote, even if he could not pass the literacy test, if his father or grandfather had been able to vote prior to a given date in 1867. Prior to that date, only whites had been permitted to vote. So the grandfather clause chose a date that discriminated against blacks but helped whites. Whites who could pass the literacy test did not need the grandfather clause. In practice, the grandfather clause was an escape hatch for illiterate whites. However, they still had to pay the poll tax. Following the example of Louisiana, the grandfather clause was adopted by Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Alabama and Oklahoma. South Carolina used the understanding clause. In 1915 the NAACP filed a brief with the Supreme Court in the case of Guinn v. US. This case challenged the grandfather clause in Oklahoma. In 1915 the court ruled that the grandfather clauses were unconstitutional, since the date selected was designed to screen out blacks and keep them from voting. However this did not affect the literacy tests or poll taxes, and in fact the grandfather clause had been a loophole by which illiterate whites could still vote. The wall of disfranchisement remained intact. The Guinn case was the first legal success of the NAACP, and put its reputation on the map.

In 1922 the House of Representatives passed the Dyer federal anti-lynching bill, 230-119 (Lerone Bennett, p. 523). But it was filibustered to death in the Senate by conservative white supremacist Southern Democrats.

In March 1927, in the case of Nixon v. Herndon, the Supreme Court struck down the Texas law which barred blacks from voting in the "white primary."

In 1944, in Philadelphia, 8 black men were upgraded into a training program to become operators on the trolleys and trains in Phila. Up to this time the job of driving a train or trolley car had been considered a "white man's job." White workers went out on strike and rioted in Phila, overturning the trolleys and burning them. The army needed the freight trains to deliver supplies and material for the war. The strike and rioting disrupted war production. FDR sent the US army into Phila to take over the operation of the trains for a week, and the Army warned that any worker who did not report to work by Monday morning would immediately be drafted. But as late as 1944, in Phila, in the North, racism was highly visible in the ranks of labor and the working class. Again, we can see how racism was used to exclude blacks from competing with whites for jobs. Racism is not just mindless hate. It is intimately tied to economic competition. That is part of its purpose, or function -- to maximize opportunities for one group by minimizing opportunity for another group. Opportunities for group A are maximized at the expense of group B. Racism involves the unequal distribution or allocation of opportunity. It involves the denial of opportunity. It is not just blind hate. It serves a very calculated purpose. It persists because someone BENEFITS from it. Racism (white supremacy) bestows an advantage to some people and groups. If it did not bestow advantages people would not cling to it so ferociously. Racial prejudice is USED to serve the economic class interests of a given group.

In April 1944 the Supreme Court decided the case of Smith v. Allwright. It reaffirmed the earlier decision of Nixon v. Herndon, and said that white primaries were unconstitutional.

In 1945 Colonel Benjamin. O. Davis became the first African American to head an army air force base. And it was in 1945 that the Brooklyn Dodgers signed Jackie Robinson, and initially sent him to their farm club. He first played in the major leagues in April 1947.

A WORD ABOUT CULTURAL STYLE

I do not want to give you the false impression that I am saying that the South was racist but the North was not. The difference was the mode or manner in which each expressed anti-black or anti-African antipathy (ill-feeling). White supremacy in the South was OVERT. It was naked and brutal. It was written into formal law (DE JURE). White supremacy in the North was more covert. It was more subtle. Northerners frowned upon open, naked, raw expressions of racism as "vulgar" and "in poor taste." It was not "refined." It was "lower class" and showed "poor breeding." Such vulgar displays were not in keeping with the Northern Puritan sense of superior moral worth and value. Northerners wished to feel good about themselves. Northern Puritan culture required that people be POLITE and restrained in public. Being polite was considered "good manners." Therefore native-born white Northerners felt constrained to hide or mask their racial antipathy. Northern culture constrained people to be, or at least pretend to be, polite in face-to-face relations in public. Public displays of racial antipathy were "bad manners." White Southerners, in contrast, did not usually hide behind such pretenses. Sometimes Northern whites felt contempt or disdain or discomfort about Afro-Americans, deep down inside, but it was IMPOLITE to show it OPENLY. Therefore Northern native-born culture tended to hide "racism." This caused white Northerners (some of them) to behave in a hypocritical fashion. They pretended to be liberal in order to appear polite, and they had a "smile in your face, stab you in the back" cultural style that could be deceiving.

Abolitionists such as John Brown and Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner had insisted that America was not a white country, or a country for whites only, but a universal country for everyone equally. But many in the North fell short of this ideal. I do not want to suggest that I am condemning all white Northerners as hypocrites. There were white Northerners who accepted African Americans.

But there was a deep reservoir of silence and indifference alongside both liberalism and hostility.

Perpetrators    Bystanders              Liberals and activists

MORGAN V. VIRGINIA

In June 1946 the Supreme Court handed down a ruling in the case of Morgan v, Virginia. The Court said that segregation in interstate bus travel was unconstitutional. However this was a narrow ruling that was interpreted to apply to interstate busses only, which is busses that traveled across state lines. It did not apply to local busses that traveled only within the state. Furthermore, it applied only to the bus, and said nothing about the bus terminal or a restaurant in the bus terminal or any water fountain or rest room in the bus terminal. And the Southern states just ignored the ruling anyway. In 1947 Bayard Rustin and George Hauser and members of the Congress of Racial Equality organized the Journey of Reconciliation. From April 9 to April 23 eight blacks and eight whites traveled through the South on a bus, with blacks and whites sitting together rather than whites in front and blacks in the back. They went to 15 cities in Kentucky, Virginia, North Carolina and Tennessee. It was meant to test compliance with the ruling. (Sitkoff, p. 99). The authorities did not bother them, and basically ignored them. There were few arrests, no violence, no publicity. Most Americans never heard of it. But although the South basically ignored the decision, the Morgan case laid a foundation for the future. Slowly but surely segregation was being chipped away at, around the edges.

EARLY CASES IN HIGHER EDUCATION

In 1935 an African American named Donald Murray, a graduate of Amherst College, sought admission to the Law School at the University of Maryland. Maryland practiced segregation, and did not admit blacks to the law school. But it had no separate law school for blacks either. Apparently Maryland did not think that blacks needed to be lawyers. Murray sued. Maryland offered to pay his tuition and costs to attend any law school anywhere, out of state, that would accept him. Murray rejected the offer. He wasn't trying to go out of Maryland. He wanted equal educational opportunity IN MARYLAND, his own state. In November 1935 the Maryland Court of Appeals ordered the University of Maryland to admit Donald Murray to the University of Maryland Law School. The Southern states had separate public schools for blacks and whites. And separate colleges for blacks and whites. But what if you wanted to go to medical school or law school, and the white law school didn't admit blacks and there wasn't any law school for blacks in the state? Maryland practiced segregation, and the university admitted whites only. There was not any law school for blacks. The US Supreme Court upheld the ruling of the Maryland courts, and Maryland had to admit Murray to the white law school at the U. of Maryland. The attorney for Donald Murray was Thurgood Marshall. The Murray case also illustrates how the aspirations of the college educated black middle class, which aspired to careers in the professions (law, medicine) were chafing up against the ceiling of segregation. White supremacists did not believe that African Americans ought to aspire to such ambitions.

This case prompted the Southern states to begin increasing funding for black law schools and medical schools lest they be forced to integrate the segregated white ones.

MISSOURI EX RE GAINES

In December 1938 the Supreme Court ruled in the Missouri ex re Gaines case. Lloyd Gaines wanted to attend the all-white law school in Missouri. He could not attend the black law school because there wasn't any law school for blacks in the illustrious state of Missouri. Missouri claimed it was going to build a black law school, but had not yet allocated the funds for doing so (and no one was exactly sure when this would happen either). However if he did not want to wait for the black law school to be built, Missouri would pay his tuition to attend a law school out-of-state. The Supreme Court rejected all of this, and set the precedent that paying for a black person to go out of state to avoid de-segregating a facility in the state was not acceptable. The Court also took the view that states had an obligation to provide equality of educational opportunity. (Eyes on the Prize, p. 14-15).(Lerone Bennett reports that although Gaines won the case he seems to have been threatened, and afterwards he disappeared [p. 532]). The attorney in the Gaines case was Charles Houston, dean of the Law School at Howard University. He was Thurgood Marshall's mentor.

Also in 1948 the California Supreme Court struck down a state law that banned inter-racial marriages. Southern Democrats were so angry with Truman for embracing the cause of African American civil rights, even in a token fashion, that they "bolted" the party in 1948. Southern Democrats nominated Strom Thurmond to run for president, and they embraced the confederate flag as the symbol of their opposition to equal civil rights for African Americans. Truman won election anyway.

In 1951 the Municipal Court of Appeals in Washington, DC ruled that segregation in restaurants in the city was illegal. This was challenged, and in June 1953 the Supreme Court upheld the ruling and banned segregation in restaurants in Washington, DC.

In 1952, for the first time in 71 years, there was no official report of a black person being lynched.
 

SWEATT V. PAINTER, JUNE 5, 1950

In June 1950 the Supreme Court handed down a ruling in the case of Sweatt v. Painter. This was a liberal court, with most of its members appointed by Franklin Roosevelt. In 1946 Heman Marion Sweatt was a Houston, TX mail carrier. He was Colored. He wanted to become a lawyer. In 1946 he applied to the University of Texas law school. The University of TX was all-white, segregated by state law. Sweatt appealed to Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP for help. Texas had no law school for blacks or colored people, not one. It took a few years for the Supreme Court to get the case, and in the interim Texas hastily threw together a supposed law school for blacks, in order to avoid being forced to admit Sweatt at U. Texas. But in June 1950 the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that even though Texas now had a law school for blacks, Sweatt had to be admitted at the U. Texas Law School.

Chief Justice Fred Vinson said that a newly created state law school for African Americans in Texas was in no objective way equal to the traditionally white University of Texas law school. Even if it were equal in its physical attributes, Vinson wrote, it would still lack the same nonmeasurable, intangible elements that made for a distinguished law school, such as the reputation of the faculty members, alumni prestige, traditions. These were tests of quality that no recently constructed school could meet.

The Court ruled that a new law school of inferior quality did not meet the requirements of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, that no state shall deny any person the equal protection of the law. The Supreme Court ordered Sweatt admitted to the previously all-white Texas law school. (Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court, Sweatt v. Painter, p. 851).

(You could not have a room in a basement somewhere and put up a sign that says "Negro law school," or some "jackleg facility," and pass that off as "equal.")

The Supreme Court was now applying a more rigorous standard to the doctrine of separate and equal, and requiring that the separate Colored facilities be substantively equal in quality to the white ones. The Court was pushing the South to live up to its own stated doctrine, which of course had been insincere in the first place. The South had never intended that colored facilities be equal in quality to those of whites. The stated doctrine of separate and equal had been a charade, a proverbial fig leaf. If the South had practiced separate and equal, maybe African Americans would not have minded that. But it always practiced separate and unequal.

Throughout the South, states now hastened to pretend to throw together law schools and medical schools to provide for the professional education that the children of the black middle class were demanding. The South had made little provision for this in the past.

The truth was that the doctrine of separate and equal was rotten at its core. White supremacists thought of Africans and persons of African ancestry as animals, as sub-human. In their minds, blacks DESERVED less. The Southern states appropriated less money for black public schools than for white public schools. The pay of the teachers differed by race. The water fountain for whites was a nice marble fixture with a pedestal and a water cooler: the water fountain for blacks was a pipe sticking out of a wall, and the water was not cooled. The white neighborhoods had paved roads, sidewalks, indoor plumbing, street lights, sewer lines. The black neighborhoods literally had dirt roads, no sidewalks, no sewers, no street lights. Blacks could not even take books out of the public libraries in the Deep South. The hospitals either did not admit blacks at all (private hospitals) or segregated them in a room or two in the basement (public hospitals).  Public hospitals practiced segregation. Typically, if there were 50 beds in the hospital, five beds in the basement might be reserved for blacks. If all five beds were full, and a black person needed to be admitted to the hospital, that sixth person would be sent to a black hospital, even if the 45 "white" beds were not all being used. This is what happened to Maltheus Avery in 1950, at Alamance Hospital and then Duke University Hospital in North Carolina. He had been injured in an automobile accident. He bled to death on the way to a third hospital, a black hospital. The circumstances of the death of Maltheus Avery were confused in popular legend with the death of Dr. Charles Drew the same year. All of these conditions illustrate the value of a black life: a black life had little or no value.

MCLAURIN V. OKLAHOMA STATE REGENTS (1950)

Another case led up to Brown. It is called McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education. (1950). George McLaurin was an Oklahoma citizen, an African American. He wanted a graduate degree in education. He attended college and then applied to the University of Oklahoma (at Norman). The university was segregated by law. Oklahoma law required that instruction must be "upon a segregated basis." McLaurin was denied admission. He appealed to the federal district court, which ruled that he must be admitted. However, after admitting him, what the university did was to segregate him within the university and within the classroom and other facilities. In class, he was assigned to a separate row, unto himself, with a sign that read "reserved for Negroes." In the library he was only permitted to use a separate desk, with a sign that read "reserved for Negroes." In the cafeteria, he had to sit and eat at a separate table. In every conceivable way, the university made a distinction between him and the white students on the basis of race. After all, in the South, the taboo was on any semblance of equality between the races. The entire purpose of segregation was to place the stamp or badge or stigma of inferiority on Colored people.

McLaurin appealed to the Supreme Court, aided by the NAACP. The Court heard the case at the same time as the Sweatt case. In a unanimous decision the Supreme Court ordered an end to the separate treatment. It said that the separate practices denied McLaurin his personal rights to the equal protection of the law. Further, Chief Justice Vinson wrote that the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment required that McLaurin must receive the same treatment as students of other races.

In these cases, Charles Houston sought to show that separate was not equal in the law schools, colleges, and graduate schools. The Court understood. But if separate was not really equal in the law school or the college, was it equal in the public school? Could "separate but equal" be unequal in college, but equal in K-12? The cases in higher education paved the way for the breakthrough case, in Brown, in 1954, dealing with public education in K-12. Cumulatively, the early cases chipped away at Plessy, and Brown was the "breakthrough" case that finally blew Plessy out of the water.

THE BROWN DECISION OF 1954

The NAACP decided to challenge school segregation. It argued that there were inequalities in the separate schools. In Clarendon County, SC., there was one teacher for every 28 white students, and one black teacher for every 47 black students.

By 1954 there were several cases challenging school segregation. The Supreme Court decided them together, and the package is most often referred to as the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. Thurgood Marshall argued the case before the court. In preliminary discussions, before any formal vote, the Court was split 7-2. Stanley Reed was one of the dissenting justices (Eyes on the Prize, p. 33). Chief Justice Earl Warren was a Republican, and had been nominated by President Eisenhower. Warren believed that it was important for the Court to issue a unanimous decision, so that Southerners would realize there was no hope of changing the decision by naming a few new justices to the Court. Therefore he agreed to a secret compromise. This only became public in the 1960s, no one knew it back in 1954. The deal was that if the two dissenting justices would agree to support a ruling against school segregation, the majority would agree NOT to order immediate implementation of school de-segregation. Thus in May 1954 a unanimous Court declared that racial segregation in the public schools was unconstitutional. The Court ruled that "in the field of public education the doctrine of separate but equal has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." Further, the Court took the view that segregation denied black children equal protection of the law under the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court ruled that even if the black and white facilities were identical in every way, and the only difference was that one was "for whites only" and the other "for blacks only," they still would not be equal and this would be a denial of equal opportunity (Sitkoff, p. 22-23). The Supreme Court ruled that separating children solely on the basis of race creates in the black children, who are kept separated, a sense of inferiority.(Ibid). In reaching this conclusion the court relied on the famous doll tests of Kenneth and Mamie Clark. In 1939 and 1940 they tested black school children and asked them to describe the white dolls and black dolls which they showed to the children. The children described the white dolls as good, and liked them better. They described the black dolls as bad. The researchers concluded that the children had internalized a sense of inferiority. Further, they said the children had internalized the sense of inferiority as a result of attending racially segregated schools. For Earl Warren this was proof of the damaging effect of segregation, and proof that it produced in black children a sense of inferiority. This was the psychological harm or injury that was produced by school segregation.(Juan Williams, Eyes, I, p. 23). Literally, white supremacy taught black children to be ashamed of themselves and to hate their blackness and to hate themselves.

Further, Earl Warren wrote that "education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments, and it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity to an education. Such an opportunity is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms." This is the principle that there should be equal educational opportunity for all students. On the opposite side of this issue, if one DOES NOT want to see a group of people "succeed in life," then of course one would deliberately wish to SABOTAGE their education--so that they are crippled in their struggle to compete.

However the NAACP was not satisfied with Brown I. It wanted the Court to order the immediate end of school segregation. In May 1955 the Court rejected the appeal for immediate de-segregation. Instead, it ordered that de-segregation should occur "with all deliberate speed." Furthermore, local school boards should devise the plans for implementation. In other words, de-segregation could occur gradually. And white supremacists who opposed de-segregation in the first place were asked to design its implementation. (asking the foxes to guard the chickens).

For the sake of convenience the Brown decision is regarded as the traditional start of the modern civil rights movement. It was a crucial watershed or turning point. It had several consequences.

1. This decision overturned the Plessy decision, and said that school segregation was wrong and unconstitutional. This was the law of the land, decreed by the highest court.

2. Now those who fought against segregation had the law and the constitution on their side. Now the segregationists were the ones in violation of the law.

3. The Brown decision created a tension, or an inconsistency, or a contradiction between the state and local laws on segregation, and the 14th Amendment as interpreted by the Supreme Court. To put it differently, there was now a contradiction between state law and federal law.

4. The Brown decision de-legitimized segregation. If segregation was wrong in the public schools, how could it be right on busses and trains, at restaurants and water fountains, in restrooms and hospitals? If racial segregation was wrong in one place, it was wrong in all places.

5. The Brown decision gave the civil rights movement a legal mandate to challenge the state and local laws on segregation.

6. Without knowing it or intending it, the Brown decision gave blacks and the civil rights movement a mandate, a sanction, to break state and local laws on segregation in the name of a higher law, namely federal law and the constitution. This was an invitation to civil disobedience and to the direct action tactics of Martin Luther King. The Brown decision created a legal framework in which civil disobedience became legal. It set the stage for what would come.

WHY SEGREGATION WAS "WRONG"

Segregation was wrong, or objectionable, for several reasons. I will discuss three of them here.

First, segregation was wrong because it denied freedom of choice. Let me give an example. Imagine that a white person in the South sat in the "wrong" section of the bus or in the black car on the train. If he or she refused to move, they would be arrested and fined. Under the system of Jim Crow segregation, racial segregation was required by law. It was mandatory. It was compulsory. It did not matter how you as an individual felt. Each person was a member of a group, and your treatment as an individual depended upon and was based upon the group to which you belonged. Individuals were treated according to the category to which they belonged. We call this categorical treatment. One's place in the social order is determined by the group. Even if that white person was not prejudiced and didn't mind being with the black people, it didn't matter. You were not allowed to. You had no choice. Even if a white man loved a black woman and they lived together and she was the mother of his children, by law they were not allowed to marry. Segregation artificially forced people apart. It denied them a choice. People of different races could not be together even if they wanted to. Segregation was wrong because it forced people apart, and denied them a choice. In other words, the separation was coercive.

Second, segregation was wrong because it was based on the doctrine of black inferiority. In other words, black people were not good enough to be the white people. It was based on the belief that contact with black people degrades white people. If blacks and white mingled freely and equally the black people would contaminate the white people. We would pull white people down, drag whites down into the mud. There would be race-mixing and amalgamation and miscegenation, and America would lose race purity and become a mulatto, mongrel nation. The pure, superior white society would be corrupted, diluted, sullied, debased. The white gene pool would suffer degeneration. To prevent this horror, the races had to be kept apart. These are simply the ideas of Gobineau, the father of Aryanism, in American form.

Third, the purpose of official, state-sponsored segregation was to dominate and subordinate and subjugate black people. The PURPOSE of the separation is what was objectionable. The purpose of the Southern system was to disfranchise black people and leave them powerless. The purpose of segregation was to symbolically demonstrate the inferiority of black people. Further, the system inferiorized black people. This term is borrowed from Barry Adam. Racism systematically restricted the "life chances" or opportunities of blacks. The purpose of separation was to keep black people down and deny them opportunity. IT may not have been separation itself that was so bad, but the purpose for which it was intended.

Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam pointed out that there is a difference between separation and segregation. Segregation is a relationsdhip that exists between an alleged superior and an alleged inferior. It is a condition that is forced and imposed on people against their will. Separation is chosen. People are apart because they WANT to be apart. And separation is a relationship between EQUALS. Many African Americans did not oppose being apart from whites. They just hated being told that they HAD to be apart because they supposedly were INFERIOR. Many black people opposed BOTH segregation and forced assimilation. They did not necesarily want to be WITH white people. But they did want their schools and facilities to be equal IN QUALITY, and they wanted the same job and housing oportunities, and they wanted to be respected as equal human beings and treated with dignity and respect.

THE MONTGOMERY BUS BOYCOTT

The Brown decision raised the hopes and aspirations and expectations of black people. It generated a revolution of rising expectations. This fed impatience. In December 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks decided that she was tired of the daily indignity and humiliation of being treated like a second class citizen. She was tired of having to give up her seat to someone else just because of the color of her skin. Blacks had to pay at the front, then get off the bus and come back in by the center door, and sit in the back. If all the seats in the front (the white section) became filled, blacks in the back (in the black section) had to stand (give up their seat) if a white person didn't have a seat. And Rosa Parks decided she was not going to obey the laws on bus segregation any longer. Indeed, this was not the first time she had refused to obey the law.

Earlier in 1955 another woman, Claudette Colvin, had refused to give up her seat. But then the clergymen learned that this sixteen year-old young lady was pregnant, and was not married. In the Fifties there was a terrible stigma attached to unwed pregnancy in the black community. It was considered a disgrace. The clergy felt that the community would not rally around a person of "questionable character." The black activists in Birmingham were looking for a test case with which to challenge the Alabama laws on bus segregation. Rosa Parks was a secretary for the NAACP, and friend of E.D. Nixon, a black leader of the local NAACP. Nixon was a member of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and a veteran of Randolph's 1941 march-on-Washington movement. Rosa Parks knew that the activists were looking for a test case. It was no accident that Rosa Parks decided to defy the law that day in December 1955. Fortunately, Rosa Parks was arrested for defying the bus segregation law. Had she been arrested for disorderly conduct, it would not have been possible to use her arrest to mount a legal challenge to the law on bus segregation. The community agreed to boycott the busses, and the boycott eventually lasted for 381 days. Jo Ann Robinson of the Black Women's Political Council played an instrumental role in organizing the boycott. She was a professor of English at Alabama University. She snuck into the office at the university and mimeographed 35,000 fliers announcing the boycott and organized the distribution of the fliers. Blacks accounted for 75% of the revenues of the bus company (Sitkoff, p. 51). As the boycott began 90% of the blacks stayed off the busses. Blacks formed the Montgomery Improvement Assoc.

The white power structure in Montgomery was absolutely intransigent. King was selected as the chairman of the boycott because the senior ministers were jeaolus of one another, and did not E.D. Nixon "in charge." King was new in town (26 years old), and so had not been there long enough to gain any enemies or owe any political debts. In his opening orations, King declared (to paraphrase) that there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled on. If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of the United States is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution is wrong. If we are wrong, God Allmighty is wrong." In time the mayor and business leaders did everything they could to break the boycott. In January King's home was dynamited. Martin Luther King's father pleaded and demanded that Martin Jr. leave and return to Atlanta. Coretta's father demanded that she leave. She remained with her husband. In February E.D. Nixon's home was bombed. People were beaten, harassed, intimidated. White women played an interesting role in that many of them drove their black maids and domestics to and from work, and told the mayor that if he didn't approve then he could come and clean their houses. Blacks resorted to carpools, and pressure from the city caused four insurance companies to cancel the insurance of the church-owned cars (Eyes, p. 88). In the fall of 1956 the authorities began arresting and fining the people whose cars were used. They accused the Montgomery Improvement Assoc. of operating a business --the carpools -- without a license (Sitkoff, p. 57). The city also sought an injunction against gathering on corners to wait for the cars, saying it was a public nuisance. These really hurt the boycott, because people could not avoid using the busses without the carpools. This threatened to break the back of the boycott.

However on February 5 members of the Women's Political Council had filed a lawsuit against the bus segregation law. Attorney Fred Gray tried to get men to file the suit. But he could not get a single man to come forward. The five courageous women who said that they had personally experienced discrimination on the municipal busses were Aurelia Browder (age 40), Susie McDonald (77), Jeanetta Reese (64), Claudette Colvin (16) and Mary Louise Smith (19). The case was Browder, Colvin, McDonald,Reese and Smith v. Gayle (Gayle was the mayor). In June the federal district court ruled in their favor. The court said that given the Brown decision, the Alabama laws on bus segregation were unconstitutional and violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment (no state shall deny any person the equal protection of the law). The state appealed this decision to the Supreme Court, and the case that came before the Supreme Court was Gayle v. Browder et al. Montgomery threatened the Montgomery Improvement Association and the churches that owned some of the vans with fines. But on Nov. 13, 1956 the Supreme Court upheld the lower court ruling. It said  that the Alabama state and local laws on bus segregation were unconstitutional. On December 20 federal injunctions or court orders prohibiting segregation on the busses were served on Alabama state and local officials and the officials of the bus companies. If they failed to obey, the would be liable to be held in contempt of court, and could be fined or jailed. On December 21 the busses were de-segregated, and the African-Americans ended the boycott. However the Ku Klux Klan tried to intimidate Afro-Americans, and snipers fired at the busses. Nevertheless, in the end, the busses were de-segregated.

The Montgomery bus boycott is important for several reasons.

1. First, it demonstrated that one person can make a difference. Rosa Parks stood up for principle, and the community rallied around her. Indeed, how could the men do less once the women stood up?

2. Second, the boycott demonstrated the power of direct action. That is people taking action or measures on their own, rather than waiting for the government to do it.

3. Third, it demonstrated the power of collective action, the power of numbers. One person can be isolated. But you can't oppress everybody.

4. However mass direct action, alone, by itself, is not always enough. In the end it was the power of the federal government, of the Supreme Court declaring that the Alabama state and local laws were unconstitutional, that defeated the city commissioners. King learned an important lesson from this. He learned that SOMETIMES in order for the civil rights movement to succeed there had to be federal intervention. The federal government was the one with the power.

The movement had to force the government to intervene, to step in with its power and force the South to change. Blacks, and the movement, had the power of initiative, of numbers, of direct action. Blacks had the power of mass direct action and civil disobedience. Blacks could be the catalyst. But the objective was to get federal intervention. SUCCESS WAS TO BE ACHIEVED BY THE COMBINATION OF BLACK INITIATIVE AND MASS DIRECT ACTION ON THE ONE HAND, AND FEDERAL INTERVENTION ON THE OTHER HAND.