THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT AND THE ROLE OF BLACK ORGANIZATIONS.
On Thursday, December 1, 1955, a weary Negro seamstress named Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a White man on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Mrs. Parks was arrested and a new American revolution was born.
Two young Negro ministers in Montgomery, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rev. Ralph D. Abernathy, decided that night that Negroes should stop paying for humiliation on the city's buses. Rev. Abernathy agreed to call a meeting for the next day, and dr. King offered the use of his church, the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, for the assembly. At the Friday meeting, it was decided that a mass boycott would be called against the bus line. On Saturday, the Negro community was deluged with leaflets about the boycott, and on Sunday announcements came from pulpits of the Negro churches: Negroes would stop riding the buses on Monday, December 5. .
At a meeting in Mount Zion A.M.E. Zion Church on the afternoon of December 5, the boycott leaders formed the Montgomery Improvement Association (M.I.A), a name suggested by Rev. Abernathy. Dr. King was elected president and Rev. Abernathy was elected director of the program. The organization became the direct forerunner of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
United by the M.I.A., Negroes boycotted the Montgomery bus boycott system for 381 days by walking, by using the M.I.A. car pool, and by sharing personal means of transportation.
The boycott set in motion the contemporary civil rights movement based on massive nonviolent protest. It signaled the fall down of the old order of the South and caught the conscience of the nation and the world.
It also produced leaders of immeasurable strength and vision. Prominent among them were Martin and Coretta Scott King and Ralph and Juanita Jones Abernathy, all natives of the South who dedicated their lives to the struggle of their people.
