Montgomery bus boycott
In December 1955, Rosa Parks, a veteran of local black politics who worked as a tailor’s assistant in a Montgomery, Alabama, department store, refused to surrender her seat on a city bus to a white rider, as required by local law. Her arrest sparked a year-long bus boycott. Finally, the Supreme Court ruled segregation in public transportation unconstitutional.
The Montgomery bus boycott launched the movement for racial justice as a nonviolent crusade based in the black churches of the South. It marked the emergence of twenty-six-year-old Martin Luther King Jr., who had recently arrived in the city to become pastor of a Baptist church, as the movement’s national symbol. On the night of the first protest meeting, King’s speech electrified his audience: “We, the disinherited of this land, we who have been oppressed so long, are tired of going through the long night of captivity. And now we are reaching out for the daybreak of freedom and justice and equality.”
What are the central arguments that King makes?
What strategies does King use to create a larger, cross-racial movement?
The southern manifesto
The Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, outlawing racial segregation in public schools, inspired widespread hopes that racial equality was finally on the horizon. It also inspired a campaign of “massive resistance” in the white South. Drawn up in early 1956 and signed by 101 southern members of the Senate and House of Representatives, the Southern Manifesto repudiated the Supreme Court decision and offered support to the campaign of resistance then gaining force throughout the South. It drew on long-standing ideas of local autonomy as the basis of individual liberty and claimed that segregation was an old southern tradition favored by both whites and blacks. The Manifesto was a prelude to a decade of sometimes violent struggles as black southerners sought to claim equal rights in American society.
Read the attached document and answer the following questions:
Why does the Southern Manifesto claim that the Supreme Court decision is a threat to constitutional government?
Do you think that black southerners would agree with the statement that “amicable relations” had existed between the races for the past ninety years and that the Supreme Court decision threatened to undermine them?
