How did a year of walking to work end bus segregation in Montgomery?

The Montgomery bus boycott worked because it hit the bus company where it was weakest: most of its riders were Black. Under segregation, Black passengers were made to ride in the back and were often ordered to give up seats to white people, even though they made up 75% of the system's riders. When they stopped riding, the buses lost enough passengers to cause serious economic distress.

It is tempting to picture a single act of defiance: on 1 December 1955 Rosa Parks refused a driver's order to move back so a white man could sit, and was arrested. The record shows a great deal of preparation behind it. Parks had completed a course at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, where nonviolent civil disobedience had been discussed as a tactic. Other women, including 15-year-old Claudette Colvin, had been arrested for refusing to give up their seats earlier in 1955. E. D. Nixon, president of the local NAACP chapter, was looking for the right test case. When Colvin turned out to be pregnant, he passed; as he put it, "I had to be sure that I had somebody I could win with."

The night of Parks' arrest, the Women's Political Council, led by Jo Ann Robinson, printed and circulated a flyer calling for a one-day boycott. It grew into 382 days. Boycotters organised carpools, and when the city pressured insurers to drop coverage on the carpool cars, the leaders found policies at Lloyd's of London. Churches across the country sent money and shoes for the walkers.

The demands were modest on purpose: courteous treatment, first-come seating (with Black passengers still filling from the back), and Black drivers on mainly Black routes. Leaders judged that the city would be more likely to accept that than full integration. The boycott ended on 20 December 1956, after a federal court had ruled that Alabama's bus segregation laws were unconstitutional.