Nixon, who was a veteran organizer with the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, then organized a planning meeting for December 2 at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church for clergy and other African American leaders. Nixon, with help from white allies Clifford and Virginia Durr, secured bail for Rosa Parks quickly after her arrest and got her released. The organization produced and distributed leaflets throughout Montgomery’s African American community.įormer local NAACP president, E. In response to Parks’ arrest, the WPC called for a one-day boycott of Montgomery’s city buses for Monday, December 5, 1955. Due to her stature in the African American community in Montgomery, Parks’ arrest served as the spark for the Montgomery bus boycott. On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a leader in the African American community in Montgomery and in the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus to a white passenger. In the fall of that year, police arrested Mary Louise Smith after she refused to yield her seat to a white passenger.

In the spring of 1955, Claudette Colvin, 15 years old, was arrested for challenging Montgomery bus segregation. On May 21, 1954, WPC president Jo Ann Robinson wrote in a letter to the Mayor, “there has been talk from twenty-five or more local organizations of planning a city-wide boycott of buses.”

Montgomery’s Women’s Political Council (WPC), founded in 1946, was working to end segregation on city buses well before the start of the boycott. At that time in Montgomery, as well as in many cities across the southern United States, laws required African Americans to sit at the back of buses and yield their seats to white passengers if no other seats were available. The yearlong boycott of Montgomery, Alabama’s city buses by between 40,000 and 50,000 African American residents was in the works for years before it began in December 1955.

Freedom riders bus in color