A New Kind of Democracy? Political and Cultural Developments in the 1960s 405and shocked the nation, helping create a consciousness among Americans in
the North and elsewhere about the evils of apartheid in the South. And later
that year, a woman in Montgomery, Alabama would even more awake the
country to the ugly reality of segregation. On December 1st, Rosa Parks, a
longtime activist, refused, as the law demanded, to give up her seat on a pub-
lic bus to a White man.
She was arrested [not the first time an African-American had been arrest-
ed for this] and bailed out a day later, but the African American community
of Montgomery decided it was time to make a stand. Led by the Women’s
Political Council, Black leaders called for a boycott of the public bus system.
Since the majority of riders were African American, this would be a major hit
to the bus system, but the White community assumed that the boycott would
not last long–after all, Blacks often had jobs a great distance from their homes
and had to take the buses every day to get to work. But the community rallied
and set up an intricate system of car pools, and many simply walked great
distances, and the boycott stuck. Finally, in December 1956, over a year after
Parks’ arrest, Montgomery buckled and desegregated the bus lines. While
Brown v. Board had shown the importance of the courts, the bus boycott dem-
onstrated the power of the streets, i.e. direct action by the people in defiance
of segregation.
The bus boycott has become a pivot point in civil rights also because it
marked the emergence of a charismatic leader who would become the most
important African- American leader prior to Barack Obama, Rev. Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr. He was the son of a well-known southern minister and had
received a B.A. from Morehouse University and his Ph.D. from Boston
University. He was part of the so-called black bourgeoisie and an intellectual,
but was also keenly aware of the power of taking people into the streets, and
his leadership of the Montgomery movement made him a national figure.
King, more than almost all the other black leaders of the day, recognized the
importance of the young people in the movements and the tactics of nonviolent
direct action [developed from his studies of Mahatma Gandhi], ideas that would
be critical in 1960 during the emergence of the sit-ins.
In February 1960 students from North Carolina A&T in Greensboro began
to sit down at restaurant counters and asked to be served, giving notice of a
new, aggressive, and more direct-action oriented phase in the Civil Rights era.
Local authorities called out the police and eventually, amid threats of violence,