The Role of Law in the Civil Rights Movement: The Montgomery Bus Boycott, 1955–1957

Abstract

Accompanying the national move to create a holiday honoring Martin Luther King, Jr., and the commemoration of anniversaries of important episodes in the modern civil rights movement, has come a welcome literature by historians, political scientists, sociologists, journalists, and movement participants analyzing and interpreting the movement. Considerable attention has naturally focused on the Montgomery bus boycott that signaled the start of the modern civil rights movement in December, 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to go to the back of the bus. These recent works have reaffirmed the traditional interpretation of the boycott: Led by Martin Luther King, Jr., and sustained by the sacrifices of the thousands who refrained from using public buses, the boycott proved that, by acting collectively, an African-American community could demand and obtain an end to segregation. The technique of nonviolent resistance to oppression, it is said, successfully integrated Montgomery buses.

Collective Forgetting And The Symbolic Power Of Oneness: The Strange Apotheosis Of Rosa Parks

“…After eleven months, the black community was far worse off than the white, and the city had no incentive to give in. When an Alabama circuit court was about to prohibit the use of car pools, the boycott was, in fact, on the verge of collapse (Glennon 1991), and it would have collapsed had not the federal district court issued its Browder ruling. There was no direct cause and effect relationship, observes legal scholar Robert J. Glennon, "between the boycott and the end of segregated buses in Montgomery."…”

“…Gray's advice turned out to be prescient. On June 1, 1956, Alabama's attorney general claimed that the NAACP had not followed proper registration requirements and barred it from conducting business in the state(Glennon 1991).4 Dates of arrest for Reese and MacDonald are unknown.…”

Behavioral descriptions pretested for racial stereotypicality and valence: Data from an American and a Portuguese sample

“…Despite this, the American history of the last century continued to be marked by the troubled relationship between Whites and Blacks. Freom Rosa Parks bus boycott that started the modern civil rights movement, in 1955, to the "I Have a Dream Speech" of Martin Luther King, in 1963, to more dramatic events marked, for example, by the shooting of Amadou Diallo, a West-African immigrant wrongly suspected of rape, and to whom the police fired forty-one shots (Correll et al, 2002;Glennon, 1991).…”