Most people (if not all) know that Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus and so the bus boycott was started. However, she was not the only one that tried to sit were they weren't supposed to. Jo Ann Robinson, a black professor, sat in the front of a bus and ran off in tears when the bus driver yelled at her for it. A black pastor named Vernon John also protested to having to give up his seat to a white man and even tried to get other blacks to leave the bus with him. Finally on December 1st, 1955, the blacks of Montgomery rallied and decided that they would no longer take the bus until they could sit wherever they wished on it.
Jo Ann Robinson, an educated professor at the all-black Alabama State College and a member of the Women's Political Council of Montgomery, attempted to start a protest. However, this idea was blown off by the council. After the Supreme Court's ruling the Brown case in 1954, the Council changed their minds. What they needed was for someone to be arrested that would anger the black community into action, who would not be afraid to try the segregation laws in court, and someone who was faultless. E.D. Nixon, a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), thought they had the perfect case when a fifteen year-old girl was arrested--until they learned she was pregnant.
That's when the events that made Rosa Parks famous occurred. Through her case, the boycott was started. Word was spread of how on the Monday of her trial, blacks were to stay off the buses. If all went well, then the boycott would continue. The original group that met to discuss the boycott were the same that met after to decide if the boycott should continue. This group of black ministers and civil rights leaders decided to call them selves the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA). They elected Martin Luther King Jr. as the president. Before now i didn't realize that King had a part in the boycott. While some wanted to continue the boycott, others wanted to just call it a one day success. Nixon then rose and gave a rousing four line speech (and it was quite a 'speech'; i read it on the first site) that convinced the people to vote on it at the mass meeting that night. When the vote was taken it was unanimous; the boycott would continue.
King and a few other officials of the MIA went and confronted officials and lawyers of the bus company with a modest proposal for desegregated buses. The officials and lawyers, as well as city commissioners, wouldn't hear it. In return for this proposal, they stated that any cab charging less than 45 cents for cab fare would be prosecuted. This was a major blow since the black cabs were only charging 10 cents for fare, the same as it would have been for them to take the bus. They had hoped to end the boycott with their proposal but now they were facing a raised cab fare and no end was in sight for the boycott. A solution was soon found, however, a private taxi plan: Blacks who owned cars would pick up and drop off others at designated points. I think that was a really smart idea. They knew that they had to fight back one way or another and that was how they did it.
Whites tried to fight with all they had. City commissioners met with a couple of non-MIA ministers and got them to agree to a compromise that was basically putting things back to way they were before the boycott. By the time the MIA found out about this compromise by a wire from black reporter in the North, it was Saturday night and the story about the boycott being over was to be printed in the next day's newspaper. Unfortunately of the city, they hadn't counted on a group of blacks that went bar-hopping to spread the word that the boycott was still on. When this failed, whites turned to violence and bombed the homes of King and Nixon. Okay so violence never really solves anything and this just kind of proves that because bombing them didn't make them give up.
Whites also turned to the courts. 89 blacks were cited by an old law that prohibited boycotts. Among those arrested was King. The blacks private taxi service was also attacked. Many drivers were arrested for minor driving offenses. Among them was King, who was cited for driving thirty mph in a twenty-five mph zone. Liability insurance was canceled four times on station wagons that had been purchased by churches for the use of transportation in the private taxi service. Finally King was able to get insurance out of a black agent in Atlanta. This just goes to show that nothing was going to stop King. He would always try to find a way.
By this point blacks were now trying to end the bus boycott; but now they would settle for no less than complete integration. The city was fighting a losing battle as the blacks were armed with the decision in the Brown case. Two years earlier the Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional for there to be segregation in schools and so, the blacks argued, it was unconstitutional for there to be segregation on buses or in other public facilities. The federal court finally decided 2-1 with the blacks. On November 13, 1956, the Supreme Court agreed with the federal ruling and declared that segregation on buses was, indeed, unconstitutional.
The Montgomery Bus Boycott was over.
Source 1
Source 2
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