There comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression
People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.
Fifty years ago today, Rosa Louise McCauley Parks boarded the Cleveland Ave bus for the ride home from work. Eventually the bus filled up and she was told that she needed to move to the back of the bus so that a white man could have her seat, as was the law in those days. Unfortunately for the Mongomery City Lines, this shit had been applied just a few too many times and the black community was ready to react.
Ms. Parks was dragged off to the police station and charged with riding a bus while black, and almost immediately the mimeograph machines started, printing 35000 copies of a flier reading
Another Negro woman has been arrested and thrown in 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 Colvin 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 all buses Monday.
On Monday, December 5th, the city of Mongomery found Rosa Parks guilty of riding the bus while black, and charged her US$10 + US$4 court costs. And that might have been it, except that " On the morning of Parks's trial, buses rumbled nearly empty through the streets of Montgomery" -- The boycott was on, and Montgomery City Lines discovered, to their horror, that all of their black customers had decided to stop riding the busses. And they stayed off the busses, despite heroic efforts by the bigoted city fathers to force those ungrateful negros™ back on to the busses where they could stand next to empty seats like G-d himself intended!
In November 1956, the US Supreme Court agreed with the district court that the segregation laws for mass transit were unconstitutional, and on December 21st the boycott was over.