Rosa Parks is a local civil rights actvist who boards a city bus and is arrested when she refuses to obey the rules of segregation. When Rosa Parks that December evening is asked to get up of her seat she says she thinks about Emma Till was the young man from Chigago who'd came to Mississippi to visit his uncle and was lynched for making a comment to a white woman. Two men who murdered Till have just been acquitted causing outrage in black communities across the Deep South activists in Montgomery Alabama organize an anti-segregation protest. A one-day boycott of the city bus system to begin after Rosa Parks arrest it elicits an immediate response 'we expect the city bus lines on Montgomery and the people of Montgomery to continue to obey all segregation laws as written and as long as I am police commissioner of the city of Montgomery I intend to follow this course'. Initially the boycott was scheduled to last one day and it was only after they saw the success of it that they began thinking about well we can sustain and I don't think they realize how diffcult that would be. What they were doing was almost doing a power map and looking a sort of what tools do we had to have at our disposal how is structure and the system set up in a way that needs us. 75% of the bus riders are black a total boycott is an economic threat that cannot be ignored. There's a huge mass meeting at Hold Street Baptist Church and said that meeting where the community makes the decision to go forward and turn this one day boycott into a kind of extended boycott. The movement also chooses its leader a 26 years old minister who's determined to keep the protest going Dr. Martin Luther King, part of how Montgomery's black community sustains a boycott is because. They organize this massive incredibly impressive carpool system they set 40 pickup stations around town. They organize thousands and thousands of rides a day taxi cabs and car pools are pressed into services blacks in Montgomery continue to boycott the buses week after week month after month These people who have been engaged. Grassroots resistance in politics around rights for but also they had a very astute understanding of what it would take in order for change to happen power conceives nothing lightly. The boycott continues over a year costing Montgomery city bus lines 3.000 dollars a day in Lost Revenue white segregation react with violence Yet King and leaders of the SCLC stay committed to face any intimidationwith non-violence. Part of his commitment to non-violence is a commitment to not letting white people determine the terms of their interaction and the power in that we often focus when we talk about not-violent direct action on just the peacefulness of it but part of it is not wanting your opponent to get to set the terms of your engagement there's nothing passive about. While the boycott keeps up pubblic pressure in the streets. In the courts civil rights organizers are pushing for change at the national level when Rosa Parks is arrested she is represented by a young lawyer in Alabama named Fred Gray takes the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and 381 days after it began the bus boycott ends in victory when the court rules that segregation on public transportation is unconstitutional. In the December 1955 arrest of Rosa Parks for refusing to give up her seat on a bus to white passengers sparked the Montgomery Alabama bus boycott. Boycott against the segregated bus system was supposted to last one day but an estimated 17,000 African Americans supported it. The boycott lasted more than a year the community's enthusiasm led organizers to extend the protest and appoint a spokesman that person turned out to be a young Montgomery minister Dr. Martin Luther King opponents of the boycott resorted to many tactics to deter and intimidate protesters from participating among those tactics legal harassment on February 21st 1956 a Montgomery Alabama grand jury indicted 89 leaders of the boycott including Dr. King and the Reverend Ralph Abernathy their crime violating 1921 state statute forbidding boycotts without quote just cause along with the indictment the grand jury issued a report repudiating the anti-segregation efforts grand jurors wrote quote in this state we are committed to segregation by custom of law. On February 26, 2012 Trayvon Martin
