Montgomery Bus Boycott 51unconstitutional. By then, the bus boycott had outlasted 381 days of intim-
idation, bombings, and court challenges and resulted in a major civil rights
victory. Black Montgomerians shouted and wept as they voted to end the
boycott. A janitor said proudly, ‘We got our heads up now, and we won’t
ever bow down again – no, sir – except before God.’ A few whites such as
Virginia Durr expressed ‘pure, unadulterated joy’ at the news. ‘It was as if
a great burden had fallen off us.’ Though some southern cities resisted
the Court’s decision for years, Timemagazine predicted accurately that ‘Jim
Crow would never again be quite the same.’ Montgomery, once the cradle
of the Confederacy, had become the cradle of the civil rights movement.
At 5.45 a.m. on 21 December, King, Nixon, Abernathy, and Gray climbed
aboard the first integrated bus and sat in front.
Most whites accepted bus desegregation with resignation, but some retali-
ated. A whites-only bus line was formed but soon failed. A drive-by sniper
fired through King’s front door and dynamite with a burned-out fuse was
found on his porch. Snipers also fired on two buses, wounding a pregnant
black woman. Five white men beat a 15-year-old black girl as she left a bus.
Citing the violence, city officials shut down the bus service for two weeks,
forcing blacks to walk because whites ordered it. Then, bombs pulverized
four black churches and the homes of King and Abernathy. When Abernathy
wanted to see what remained of his ruined church, a policeman threatened
him: ‘If you go inside, I’ll blow your brains out.’ Frustrated that no one had
died, the Klan targeted a black truck driver who was dating a white woman.
They got the wrong man. A substitute driver was forced at gunpoint to jump
from a bridge to his death.
Although the city remained mostly segregated for years, the Montgomery
bus boycott demonstrated several lessons for the larger civil rights struggle.
The smug white belief that blacks were ‘happy’ with their subservience was
an obvious lie. Moreover, black unhappiness was not stimulated by outside
protesters. Nor was it true that blacks were incapable of organizing them-
selves for any substantial goal or that they possessed little economic clout.
The boycott catapulted to the front of the movement a new leader of the
first rank, Martin Luther King, Jr., whose noble goals, soaring rhetoric,
and extraordinary courage would inspire many black southerners and white
northerners to join the civil rights crusade. Most important, the boycott
showed that protesters needed to create sufficient internal pressure to com-
pel intervention from outside the South. The MIA’s interlocking strategy of
local boycott, nonviolent protest, and federal lawsuit, would prove success-
ful time and again. The victory in Montgomery led the Reverends Joseph
Lowery of Mobile, Alabama, and C.K. Steele of Tallahassee, Florida, to initi-
ate their own bus boycotts. Altogether, more than twenty cities desegregated
their bus lines.