
          The Origins of the Montgomery Bus Boycott
          By Garrow, David J.David J. Garrow
          Vol. 7, No. 5, 1985, pp. 21-27
          
          Jo Ann Gibson Robinson moved to Montgomery, Alabama, in the late
summer of 1949 to join the English Department at all-black Alabama
State College. A thirty-three year old native of Culloden, Georgia,
twenty-five miles from Macon, she was the twelfth and youngest child
of Owen Boston Gibson and Dollie Webb Gibson, landowning black farmers
who prospered until Owen Gibson died when Jo Ann was six years old. As
the older children moved away, operating the farm grew more difficult
for Mrs. Gibson, who eventually sold the property and moved into Macon
with her younger offspring. Jo Ann graduated from high school there as
the class valedictorian, and went on to earn her undergraduate degree
at Fort Valley State College, the first member of her family to
complete college. She took a public school teaching job in Macon and
married Wilbur Robinson, but the marriage, heavily burdened by the
death in infancy of their first and only child, lasted only a short
time. Twelve months later, after five years of teaching in Macon, Jo
Ann Robinson moved to Atlanta to take an M.A. in English at Atlanta
University and then accepted a teaching position at Mary Allen College
in Crockett, Texas. After one year there, Mrs. Robinson received a
better offer from Alabama State, and moved to Montgomery.
          Mrs. Robinson was an enthusiastic teacher and responded
energetically to her new position at Alabama State. She also became an
active member of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, which many Alabama
State professors attended, and she joined the Women's Political
Council, a black professional women's civic group that one of her
English Department colleagues, Mrs. Mary Fair Burks, had founded three
years earlier when the local League of Women Voters had refused to
integrate.
          It was a blissful fall, Mrs. Robinson later remembered. "I loved
every minute of it. " Just prior to Christmas she made preparations to
visit some relatives in Cleveland for the holidays. Storing her car in
a garage, she boarded a Montgomery City Lines public bus for the ride
to Dannelly Field, the municipal airport. Only two other passengers
were aboard, and Mrs. Robinson, immersed in holiday thoughts, took a
seat towards the front of the bus. Suddenly, however, she was roused
from her thoughts about her family by angry words from the driver, who
was ordering her to get up.
          "He was standing over me, saying 'Get up from there! Get up from
there,' with his hand drawn back," she later recalled.
          Shaken and frightened, Mrs. Robinson fled from the bus. "I felt
like a dog. And I got mad, after this was over, and I realized that I
was a human being, and just as intelligent and far more trained than
that bus driver was. But I think he wanted to hurt me, and he did
. . . I cried all the way to Cleveland."
          That experience convinced Mrs. Robinson that the 'Women's Political
Council ought to target Montgomery's segregated bus seating for
immediate attention. "It was then that I made up . . . my mind that
whatever Icould add to that organization that would help to bring that
practice down, I would do it," Mrs. Robinson recalled. "When I came
back, the first thing I did was to call a meeting . . . and tell 

them
what had happened."
          Only then did Mrs. Robinson learn that her experience was far from
unique, that dozens of other black citizens, primarily women, had
suffered similar abuse from Montgomery bus drivers. Over the previous
few years several black women, Mrs. Geneva Johnson, Mrs. Viola White,
and Miss Katie Wingfield, had been arrested and convicted for refusing
to give up their seats. Earlier in 1949, two young children, visiting
from the north and unfamiliar with Montgomery's practice of reserving
the first ten seats on each bus for white riders only, even if black
passengers were forced to stand over vacant seats, also were hauled in
for refusing a driver's command to surrender their seats. Some
oldtimers in Montgomery remembered how the black community had mounted
a boycott in the summer of 1900, when the city had first imposed
segregated seating on Montgomery's street cars, a boycott that had won
a refinement of the city ordinance so as to specify that no rider had
to surrender a seat unless another was available. Nonetheless, drivers
often made black riders who were seated just behind the whites-only
section get up and stand so that all white passengers could sit.
          Mrs. Burks thought black toleration of those seating practices and
other driver abuse, such as forcing black passengers to pay their dime
at the front, and then get off and board the bus through the rear,
side door, was scandalous. "Everyone would look the other way. Nobody
would acknowledge what was going on," Mrs. Burks remembered. "It
outraged me that this kind of conduct was going on," and that so far
no black community organizations had done anything about it.
          Black activism did exist in Montgomery, even though it had not yet
focused upon bus conditions, despite the widespread
complaints. Several years earlier Arthur Madison, a New York lawyer
who came from one of black Montgomery's most prominent families, had
returned home and tried to stimulate black voter registration, but
white legal harassment had forced him to return to New York. The
outspoken pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Rev. Vernon Johns,
who had come to Montgomery in 1948, regularly denounced the bus
situation, but many blacks viewed Johns as too unpredictable and
idiosyncratic to assume a leadership role in the community. The brutal
rape of a black teenager, Gertrude Perkins, by two white policemen
earlier in 1949had led Rev. Solomon S. Seay to repeated efforts to
obtain justice in the case, but white officials had brushed off his
complaints.
          Another visible black activist was Pullman porter Edgar Daniel
Nixon, a member of A. Philip Randolph's Brotherhood of Sleeping Car
Porters and a local leader of the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NMCP). Nixon served as Alabama state
president of the NMCP in 1948-1949, and also devoted much time to his
Alabama Progressive Democratic Association, a black alternative to a
state Democratic Party that continued to discourage black
participation despite the 1940s' demise of the "white primary." Nixon
regularly mounted one initiative after another; in 1954 he succeeded
in winning 42 percent of the vote in a losing race for a seat on the
party's Montgomery County Democratic Executive Committee, a tribute
not only to the more than 1,500 black voters that Nixon and other
activists like businessman Rufus A. Lewis had helped register, but
also to the grudging respect that many whites felt for Nixon's
tireless efforts.
          Lewis, a well-known former football coach at Alabama State College,
had been especially active not only in encouraging black registration
but also in trying to unify black Montgomery's civic
activism. Although some colleagues viewed Lewis and Nixon as low-key
rivals for top leadership, Lewis' Citizens Club served as a regular
hang-out for politically-minded blacks; his Citizens Steering
Committee, formed in the fall of 1952, looked to find ways to exert
some black political influence over Montgomery's city policies.
          Equally if not more important to the political life of black
Montgomery than Nixon's Progressive Democrats, the NMCP branch, or
Lewis' Citizens Committee, however, was Mrs. Burks and Mrs. Robinson's
Women's Political Council. By the early 1950s Robinson had succeeded
Burks as president, and the core membership of regularly active
participants numbered at least thirty women such as Thelma Glass, Mary
Cross, Irene West, Euretta Adair, Elizabeth Arrington, and Zoeline
Pierce, who were either faculty members at Alabama State, teachers in
the local, segregated public schools, or wives of relatively
well-to-do black professional men. More than either Nixon's circle or
Lewis', these middle-class women were the most numerous, most
reform-minded group of black civic activists in Montgomery.
          The first notable opportunity for black political influence to make
itself felt came in November, 1953, in a special election to fill one
vacant seat on the three-member Montgomery City Commission. The
black-supported victor, Dave Birmingham, a genuine racial liberal, won
fifty-three percent of the vote in a contest that involved little
discussion of race and allowed Birmingham to construct an electoral
coalition of blacks and lower-class whites.
          Impressed by their success in representing the balance of power,
black civic activists, led by the WPC, met in late 1953 with
Birmingham and his two racially moderate colleagues, Mayor
W. A. "Tacky" Gayle and George Cleere, to voice three complaints about
the racial practices of the municipally regulated and chartered bus
company, Montgomery City Lines. Blacks having to stand over empty,
white only seats on crowded buses was a constant insult and
problem. So 

was most drivers' practice of forcing blacks to board
through the rear door. Additionally, while buses stopped at every
block in white sections of town, it was only every other block in
black neighborhoods.
          The three commissioners, Birmingham in particular, listened
politely, but nothing came of the session.
          Undaunted, Mrs. Robinson, who served as the WPC and black
community's principal spokesperson, obtained another audience with the
commission in March, 1954, and reiterated the three complaints. The
WPC, which historian of Montgomery J. Mills Thornton III has
accurately termed "the most militant and uncompromising organ of the
black community" in pre-1956 Montgomery, also presented the commission
with specific details of driver abuse of black passengers. This time
the city officials agreed to alter the bus company's practice of
stopping only at alternate blocks in black areas, but they and the
city's lawyers insisted there was no way, under Alabama's state
segregation statutes, that any changes or improvements could be made
in bus seating practices. Robinson and other black representatives
contended that elimination of the reserved, whites only seats, and a
halt to the practice of making blacks surrender seats to whites on
overcrowded buses would eliminate the most serious problems, but the
white officials rejected the WPC's proposal that the front-to-back
seating of whites, and back-to-front seating of blacks, with no one
having to stand over an empty seat or give one up after being seated,
would in no way offend the state segregation law.
          Mrs. Robinson and her colleagues were unhappy over the city is
refusal to show any flexibility. In early May, the Commission did
approve the hiring of Montgomery's first four black police officers,
but many black Montgomerians attached greater importance to the
ongoing prosecution of a black teenager, Jeremiah Reeves, who faced
the death penalty for the supposed rape of a white woman in 1951.
          Mrs. Robinson was already thinking of how to put more pressure on
the Commission to improve bus conditions when, on May 17, came a news
announcement that strengthened her determination. The United States
Supreme Court, in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka and five
companion cases challenging racially segregated public schools, ruled
that governmentally-mandated school segregation was unconstitutional
and that the sixty-year-old doctrine of "separate but equal" was no
longer valid.
          Four days after the landmark Brown decision, Mrs. Robinson typed a
letter to Montgomery's Mayor Gayle, with a copy to Montgomery City
Lines manager J. H. Bagley. She, thanked Gayle for the March meeting
and for the change in the buses' alternate block stopping practice,
but reiterated the WPC's great unhappiness at the ongoing seating
policies. Then she politely voiced the threat she had quietly been
recommending to her black leadership colleagues.
          
            Mayor Gayle, three-fourths of the riders of these
public conveyances are Negroes. y Negroes did not patronize them, they
could not possibly operate.
          
          
            More and more of ourr people are already arrangin
with neighbors and friends to ride to keep from being insulted and
humiliated, by bus drivers. There has been talk from twenty-five or
more local organizations of planning a city-wide boycott of buses. We,
sir, do not feel that forceful measures are necessary in bargaining
for a convenience which is right for all bus passengers. We, the
Council, believe that when this matter has been put before you and the
Commissioners, that agreeable terms can be met in a quiet and
unostensible manner to the satisfaction of all concerned.
          
          Mrs. Robinson pointedly noted that many Southern cities, including
Mobile, already were using the front-to-back, back-to-front segregated
seating plan that Montgomery refused to implement. "Please consider
this plea, and if possible, act favorably upon it," she concluded,
"for even now plans are being made to ride less, or not at all, on our
buses. We do not want this."
          Despite the extremely gentle and tactful language she employed in
her letter to Gayle, Mrs. Robinson was hoping that black community
sentiment would support a bus boycott to force the Commission's
hand. Another meeting with the white officials on June 1 registered no
progress, but Mrs. Robinson found only modest interest in her boycott
idea throughout much of the black community, and placed the idea on a
back burner for the time being.
          Next to bus conditions, the second civic concern troubling the WPC
and other black activists was the decidedly inferior quality of the
segregated parks and recreation facilities; available to black
Montgomerians. One step the WPG had identified as a partial remedy was
the appointment of a black member, such as WPC member Mrs. Irene West,
to the 

city's Parks and Recreation Board. Mrs. Robinson voiced this
request at a January, 1955, meeting of the City Commission, but
despite supportive comments from Birmingham and Mayor Gayle, nothing
happened. Instead, attention turned to the upcoming mid-March city
elections, and a public candidates' forum that E. D. Nixon's
Progressive Democratic Association held on February 23 at the black
Ben Moore Hotel.
          All three incumbents, plus their major challengers, Harold McGlynn
for Gayle, Frank Parks for Cleere, and Sam Sterns and Clyde Sellers
for Birmingham, attended the first-of-its-kind event and faced
questions about bus conditions as well as the Parks and Recreation
appointment. A majority of the contenders endorsed a black appointment
to the Parks Board, while others avoided any specifics on either
topic. Although the open soliciting of black votes by so many white
candidates seemed impressive, one of Birmingham's challengers, former
Auburn University football star and state highway patrol officer Clyde
Sellers, saw the convocation, and Birmingham's sympathy for black
concerns, as just the opening that was needed to cut into Birmingham's
previously solid white working class electoral support.
          Sellers' strategic desire to make race an election issue got a
coincidental boost on March 2 when a fifteen-year-old black girl,
Claudette Colvin, refused to give up her bus seat, well toward the
rear of the vehicle, so as to accommodate an overflow of
newly-boarding white passengers.
          Police officers were able to drag Colvin from the bus only with
considerable force. The incident immediately sent the black leadership
into action. Mrs. Rosa Parks, a seamstress and long time NAACP member
who was adult advisor to the NAACP Youth Council, to which Claudette
Colvin belonged, immediately began soliciting financial assistance for
the her legal defense, as did Mrs. Parkst good friend Virginia Foster
Durr, one of Montgomery's few racially liberal whites.
          Rufus Lewis' newly formed Citizen's Coordinating Committee, yet
another leadershipunity organization which included E. D. Nixon and
the WPC's Thelma Glass among its top officers, quickly sent out a
mimeographed letter, "To Friends of Justice and Human Rights," seeking
Colvin's acquittal, a reprimand of the bus driver involved, and
clarification of the oft-ignored city provision that no rider had to
give up a seat unless another was available.
          Nixon and Mrs. Robinson, thinking that Colvin's case might supply
an opportunity for a court challenge to the constitutionality of
Montgomery's bus seating practices, interviewed the young woman, but
concluded that her personal situation and the particulars of the
arrest precluded using the incident as a test case. Robinson and
others met, unsuccessfully, with city and bus company officials to
seek dismissal of the charges.
          Claudette Colvin was quickly convicted for both assault and battery
and violating the segregation statute at a March 18 trial, only three
days before the city election. When Colvin's attorney, young
Montgomery native Fred Gray--who had been one of Mrs. Robinson's
Alabama State students before attending law school in Ohio--filed
notice of appeal, the prosecutor indicated that he would pursue only
the assault and battery charge, not the segregation issue.
          On the 21st, Sellers narrowly bested Dave Birmingham, who declined
a possible runoff because of bad health, while Frank Parks, who had
received black support, defeated Cleere. Disappointed both by the
Colvin outcome and Birmingham's loss, the black leadership hoped for
other opportunities.
          In June, Mrs. Robinson, Gray and other black representatives met
once again with city and bus company officials. Despite Gray's
observations about Mobile's practices, the white officials,
particularly bus company lawyer Jack Crenshaw, adhered firmly to their
contention that no changes could be made legally in bus seating
practices. Popular complaints about the seating situation and driver
abuse remained at high levels, but no further organized initiatives
were undertaken.
          One relative newcomer to the city, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.,
who had succeeded Vernon Johns as pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist
Church in mid-1954 and accompanied Robinson's delegation to the early
March meeting with the city, attributed a good part of the inaction to
what he later termed "an appalling lack of unity among the leaders"
and a "crippling factionalism." More of a problem than competition
among the active leaders, King thought, was the pervasive indifference
of many middleclass black Montgomerians to any political or civic
concern. Economic vulnerability and fear of white retribution
understandably inhibited some, but "too much of the inaction was due
to sheer apathy," King later wrote.
          Although Mrs. Robinson still husbanded her hope that the WPC could
at some point launch a boycott of the buses, the late summer and fall
of 1955 passed with relative quiet; the October 21 arrest of one black
woman, Mrs. Mary Louise Smith, for refusing to surrender her seat
became known to most of the black leadership only several months
later.
          On Thursday evening December 1, Mrs. Rosa Parks, the NAACP activist
who had assisted Claudette Colvin's defense, felt tired and weary from
her seamstress work at the Montgomery Fair department store when she
boarded one of the Cleveland Avenue route buses at Montgomery's Court
Square for her regular ride home. One stop later, after taking a seat
in the first row behind the ten whites-only seats, Mrs. Parks and the
three other black passengers in that row were ordered by the driver,
J. F. Blake, to get up so that one newly-boarding white man--who could
not be accommodated in the front section--could sit. Although the
other three people complied, Mrs. Parks silently refused, and two
police officers were summoned to place her under arrest and transport
her to the city jail.
          Word of the incident spread quickly. E. D. Nixon called the jail to
learn about the charges, only to be refused an answer by the officer
on duty. Knowing that attorney Gray was out of town for the day, Nixon
called white lawyer Clifford Durr, who like his wife Virginia, already
knew Mrs. Parks. The Durrs and Nixon drove to the jail to sign the
bond for Mrs. Parks' release. A Monday trial date was set for the
charge of violating the city's segregated seating ordinance.
          While attorney Durr explained to Nixon and Mrs. Parks that they
could win her acquittal since there had been no other seat available
for her to take when driver Blake demanded hers, Nixon argued that the
arrest of Mrs. Parks, 

a widely-known and well-respected person in
black Montgomery, was precisely the opportunity the black leadership
had long-awaited for challenging the entire bus seating
situation. With some hesitance Mrs. Parks agreed, and Nixon went home
to plan his next steps.
          Later that evening Fred Gray returned to town, learned of
Mrs. Parks' arrest and immediately called Mrs. Robinson, who he knew
to be the "real moving force" among the black
leadership. Mrs. Robinson in turn called Nixon. They quickly agreed
that the moment for launching the long-pondered boycott of the buses
was at hand.
          Nixon would make the calls to set up a black leadership meeting
Friday evening; Mrs. Robinson and her WPC colleagues would immediately
start producing and distributing handbills calling upon black
Montgomerians to stay off the buses on Monday, December 5. "We had
planned the protest long before Mrs. Parks was arrested,"
Mrs. Robinson later emphasized. "There had been so many things that
happened that the black women had been embarrassed over, and they were
ready to explode." They knew immediately that "Mrs. Parks had the
caliber of character we needed to get the city to rally behind us."
          Wasting not a moment7 Mrs. Robinson sat down at her typewriter with
a mimeograph stencil and typed the same message on the sheet several
times:
          
            This is for Monday, December 5, 1955
          
          
            Another Negro woman has been arrested and thrown
into jail because she refused to get up out of her seat on the bus for
a white person to sit down.
          
          
            It is the second time since the Claudette Colbert
(sic) case that a Negro woman has been arrested for the same thing
This has to be stopped.
          
          
            Negroes have rights, too, for if Negroes did not
ride the buses, they could not operate. Three-fourths of the riders
are Negroes, yet we are arrested, or have to stand over empty
seats. If we do not do something to stop these arrests, they will
continue. The next time it may be you, or your daughter, or
mother.
          
          
            This woman 's case will come up on Monday. We are,
therefore, asking every Negro to stay off the buses Monday in protest
of the arrest and trial. Don 't ride the buses to work, to town, to
school, or anywhere on Monday.
          
          
            You can afford to stay out of school for one day if
you have no other way to go except by bus.
          
          
            You can also afford to stay out of town for one
day. If you work, take a cab, or walk. But please, children and
grown-ups, don't ride the bus at all on Monday. Please stay off of all
buses Monday.
          
          The stencil complete. Mrs. Robinson called one of her Alabama State
colleagues, business department chairman John Cannon, who had access
to the school's mimeograph room and readily agreed to join her for a
long night of work. By daybreak they had run off thousands of sheets,
cut them into single copies, and organized the brief flyers into
batches for distribution to dozens of WPC members and their
friends. After teaching her first morning class, Mrs. Robinson and two
students set out in her car, dropping off the bundles to helpers all
across Montgomery. Thousands upon thousands of the leaflets went from
hand-to-hand throughout black Montgomery.
          While the WPC's network put the boycott into effect, E. D. Nixon
made dozens of phone calls to assemble the black leadership. Like
Robinson and her WPC colleagues, Nixon knew that for their protest to
win mass support, the city's ministers, not always in the forefront to
black civic initiatives, would have to be convinced to give the effort
their full and active support. The WPC's post-haste distribution of
the announcements, Robinson and Nixon knew, ought to short-circuit any
arguments that now was not a good time for a boycott, even before they
could be voiced. As Fred Gray later emphasized, "the ministers didn't
know anything about those leaflets until they appeared."
          Although the Friday evening leadership caucus had some difficulties
in overcoming the autocratic style of one black pastor, agreement was
reached on further publicizing the Monday boycott and on holding a
Monday evening mass rally to assess the first day's success. The
leadership would meet again Monday afternoon to plan the rally, and
amidst scores of weekend phone conversations between the various black
activists, a consensus gradually emerged that perhaps a new,
all-encompassing community organization ought to be created to oversee
this unique effort.
          Mrs. Robinson and the WPC membership knew that with the protest
going public, their state-payroll positions at Alabama State, and the
budgetary vulnerability of the college to white political retaliation,
required that they 

remain in the background. As Mrs. Burks later noted
in explaining why the origin of the boycott leaflets was treated as a
closely-guarded secret well into the 1960s, "the full extent of our
activities was never revealed because of the fact that we worked at
State."
          Monday morning the amazing success of the protest was readily
apparent as onlooker after onlooker observed no more than a handful of
black bus riders on Montgomery's largely empty vehicles.
          Also on Monday, Mrs. Parks, in a very brief trial, was convicted of
failing to obey-the driver's command to surrender- her seat. Hundreds
of black Montgomerians, in a remarkable scene, gathered at the
courthouse to show their support. That afternoon, when the black
leadership assembled, Rufus Lewis--to be certain that leadership did
not fall into unskilled hands--quickly nominated his pastor,
Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., to be president of their new community
group, the Montgomery Improvement Association. A surprised King
hesitantly accepted, and the leadership agreed to make continuation of
the boycott beyond their one day success, contingent upon mass
sentiment at the evening rally.
          A huge and enthusiastic turnout for the evening event quickly and
convincingly answered that question. Now the community leaders turned
their efforts to organizing substitute means of transportation for the
thousands of black Montgomerians eager to forsake a transportation
system that most had assumed was an unpleasant but unavoidable fact of
daily life.
          Thursday morning, with the boycott four days old, more than half a
dozen MIA representatives, including King, Robinson and Gray, met with
city and bus company officials under the auspices of the bi-racial
Alabama Council for Human Relations. Even though King emphasized to
the whites that "we are not out to change the segregation laws," but
only to win the driver courtesy and first come, first seated
front-to-back and back-to-front seating policy that the WPC had been
requesting for well over a year, the white officials would not budge
from their insistent refusal that no changes in seating practices
could be implemented.
          The whiles' complete intransigence, in the face of a black
community effort of such impressive proportions, surprised the black
leadership, who had entered into those: first negotiations believing
that their modest demands ought to make for a quick settlement. Since
"our demands were moderate," King later recalled, "I had assumed that
they would be granted with little question." Only in the wake of that
unproductive meeting did the MIA leaders begin to realize that it was
the very fact of their challenge, and not the particulars of their
demands, that had meaning for white Montgomery.
          To the city and bus company officials such as Commissioner Clyde
Sellers and attorney Jack Crenshaw, the real issue was not which
precise seating plan was legally permissible, but the defense of
segregation's policies as an exemplar of the underlying doctrine of
white racial supremacy. On that question no compromise could be
possible; there either was superiority or there wasn't. "They feared
that anything they gave would be viewed by us as just a start,"
Mrs. Robinson later reflected. "And you know, they were probably
right."
          An often shy and resolutely self-effacing person. Jo Ann Gibson
Robinson is now almost seventy and lives quietly b. herself in
retirement in Los Angeles. Only with some gentle encouragement will
she acknowledge herself as "the instigator of the movement to start
that boycott." Even then, however, she seeks to avoid any special
credit for herself or any other single individual. Very simply, she
says, "the black women did it." And she's right.
          
            Sources and Suggested Further Reading
          
          First and foremost, my understanding of Montgomery is based upon my
personal interviews with many of the principals--Mrs. Robinson,
Mrs. Burks, Mr. Nixon, Mr. Lewis, attorney Gray, Rev. Seay, Mrs. Durr
and the late Jack Crenshaw, as well as Rev. Ralph D. Abernathy,
Juanita J. Abernathy, Robert D. Nesbitt, Robert Williams, Rev. Robert
S. Graetz, Maude Ballou, Lillie Armstrong Thomas (now Brown), Elliot
Finley, Rev. Robert E. Hughes, and Jack Shows. I have also benefitted
greatly from the interviews with some of the principals that are on
deposit in the oral history collections of the Moorland-Spingarn
Research Center, Howard University. Washington, DC; the Martin Luther
King, Jr., Center for Nonviolent Social Change, Atlanta; and the
Highlander Center, New Market, TN, as well as from the interviews that
have been shared with me by David Levering Lewis, Milton Viorst, and
Worth Long and Randall Williams. I also strongly recommend the
Statewide Oral History Program collection of interviews, compiled in
1973,by the Alabama Center for Higher Education, copies of which are
on deposit at all of Alabama's traditionally black colleges.

          There are a number of invaluable, unpublished manuscripts which
shed crucial light on the boycott, particularly Mrs. Robinson's "The
Montgomery Story," which the University of Tennessee Press will
publish later this year, and Ralph D. Abernathy's "The Natural History
of a Social Movement: The Montgomery Improvement Association," a 1958
M.A. thesis in Sociology at Atlanta University. Also extremely
valuable are Sheldon Hackney and Ray Arsenault's "The Montgomery Bus
Boycott: A Case Book"; Peter C. Mohr, "Journal Out of Egypt: The
Development of Negro Leadership in Alabama from Booker T. Washington
to Martin Luther King," B.A. thesis, Princeton University, 1958;
Thomas }. Gilliam, "The Montgomery Bus Boycott of 19551956,"
M.A. thesis, Auburn University, 1968; Gordon L. Hartstein, "The
Montgomery Bus Protest 1955-1956: What Precipitated, Sustained, and
Prolonged the Boycott," B.A. thesis, Princeton University, 1973;
Lamont H. Yeakey, "The Montgomery, Alabama Bus Boycott, 1955-1956,"
Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1979; Steven M. Milner, "The
Montgomery Bus Boycott: A Case Study in the Emergence and Career of a
Social Movement," Ph.D. dissertation, University of California,
Berkeley, 1981; and Donald H. Smith, "Martin Luther King, Jr.:
Rhetorician of Revolt," Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin,
1964.
          Among published works, the serious student will benefit from not
only chapter two of Dr. King's Stride Toward Freedom (New York: Harper
&Bros., 1958), but also Preston Valien, "The Montgomery Bus Protest
as a Social Movement," in Jitsuichi Masuoka &Valien, eds., Race
Relations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961),
pp. 112-27; Aleine Austin, "Behind the Montgomery Bus Boycott,"
Monthly Review 8 (September 1956): 163-67; and Ralph H. Hines and
James E. Pierce, "Negro Leadership After the Social Crisis: An
Analysis of Leadership Changes in Montgomery, Alabama," Phylon 26
(Summer 1965): 162-72. Far and away the most valuable and insightful
published analysis of the protest, and the place where anyone with
further interest should begin, is J. Mills Thornton, III's "Challenge
and Response in the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-56," Alabama Review
33 (July 1980): 163-235.
          
            David J. Garrow is associate professor of political
science at the City College of New York and the City University
Graduate School. He is the author of Protest at Selma
(Yale,1978)and The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr.
(Norton, l 981), as well as the forthcoming Bearing the Cross:
Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference, 1955-1968, which William Morrow &Co. will publish
in the fall of l986.
          
        