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Frustration of some Americans over the policy of segregation and resistance by other Americans to integration eventually gave rise to the acts of civil disobedience that would mark the beginning of the civil rights movement. In demonstration after demonstration one or more individuals would inspire others to take a stand against a system based on prejudice.
On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, one small act of disobedience helped launch a movement and give rise to its leader. While seated in the back of a bus, which was the law at the time for black commuters, one passenger was asked to give up her seat during a busy Friday evening so that a white passenger could sit down. Refusing to give up her seat, Rosa Parks, a department store seamstress and also the secretary for the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP, was threatened with arrest. She simply responded, "you may do that."
The day after Parks was arrested, black community leaders gathered together at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. The charismatic pastor of the church was the 26-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr., who helped to organize a citywide protest in response to the arrest of Parks. Born in Atlanta, Georgia, King earned his Ph.D. in philosophy at Boston University. An eloquent speaker and a natural leader, King's ability to rally people behind his message of nonviolent resistance to bring about change quickly associated him with the civil rights movement. He said, "We must use the weapon of love," which was a reference to his belief in the attainment of goals without resorting to violence. His civil disobedience ideas reflected those of Mohandas Gandhi, who had used economic tactics to slowly gain Indian independence from England.
King and other community leaders organized a boycott of the Montgomery public transportation system. Their strategy proved effective because a substantial majority of bus patrons were African American. Many blacks simply started walking, and to relieve the burden on those who could not walk to their destination, black taxi owners lowered their rates significantly. When Montgomery city leaders declared the lowered taxi fares were illegal, carpools were organized. Even though only approximately 350 African Americans owned cars and there were 10,000 commuters, those who did readily offered their assistance.
In an effort to end the boycott, the city authorities arrested over 100 of the boycott's leaders. However, instead of breaking the boycott, the arrests focused national attention on Montgomery, and people across the country began lending money to support the protesters. The Montgomery bus boycott lasted for well over a year, finally ending when the Supreme Court let stand a lower court's decision that bus segregation was unconstitutional. Inspired by the success of the bus boycott, King and his associates founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), an organization devoted to contesting segregation.
Despite the early victory, the civil rights movement would soon face more challenges. In September of the 1957, another southern city became a segregation battleground. Just weeks after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957, Arkansas's governor, Orval Faubus, called on the National Guard to prevent nine black high school students from enrolling at Little Rock's Central High School. President Eisenhower met with the governor to convince him to allow the students to enroll, but Faubus would not relent.
It took a court order to remove the National Guard before Faubus would allow the black students access to the school. When the nine students returned to the school to register, a white mob began to riot in protest against their enrollment. The situation became so serious that the black students had to be taken away from the school for their own safety. To end the situation, Eisenhower sent 1,000 federal troops to Little Rock and brought the Arkansas National Guard under federal control. The troops remained at the school for the rest of the year to ensure the safety of both the students and the school.
The following school year, governor Faubus ordered all public high schools in Little Rock closed rather than face integration. Most white students were able to attended private schools, but most black students had no reasonable educational option. It was not until August of 1959 that the public school system was forced to reopen following another Supreme Court ruling.
Although segregationists continued their attempts to halt integration, like the Virginia legislature's passage of a law that cut funding from integrated schools, state and federal courts continually found such laws unconstitutional. School integration, however, was only one of many divisive racial issues, and the courts were only one means to help bring about change.
A more spontaneous fight against desegregation started on February 1, 1960, in Greensboro, North Carolina. Four black college freshmen entered a whites-only Woolworth's lunch counter and demanded service. The students were refused, but they did not leave the establishment. Instead they sat for the rest of the day in the restaurant in protest. The following day, the four students returned with 19 fellow classmates. On the third day, 85 students joined the sit-in, and by the end of the week approximately 1,000 were taking part. Although they were still denied service, the sit-in continued and stimulated new variations on peaceful disobedience. Soon six towns in the state experienced their own sit-ins, and within two months 54 cities across nine states were witness to the peaceful protests.
The Greensboro sit-ins led to "kneel-ins" at discriminatory churches, "read-ins" at whites-only libraries, and "wade-ins" at segregated swimming pools. Change was being coerced, and King's SCLC was helping spread and organize the once spontaneous protests. Despite the pressure applied against the merchants in Greensboro, they held out for six months before giving in to the protesters' wishes.
Copyright 2006 The Regents of the University of California and Monterey Institute for Technology and Education