The fiftieth anniversary
of the beginning of the year long Montgomery Bus Boycott
will be celebrated this December. According to the
official version of the Boycott it was started by Rosa
Parks on the evening of December 1, 1955, when she
refused to give up her seat to a white man.
That was the day when the Black
population of Montgomery, Alabama, democratically decided
that they would boycott the city buses until they could
sit anywhere they wanted, instead of being relegated to
the back when a white boarded. It was not, however, the
day that the movement to desegregate the buses started.
Perhaps the movement started on the day in 1943 when a
black seamstress named Rosa Parks paid her bus fare and
then watched the bus drive off as she tried to reenter
through the rear door, as the driver had told her to do.
Perhaps the movement started on the day in 1949 when a
black professor Jo Ann Robinson absentmindedly sat at the
front of a nearly empty bus, then ran off in tears when
the bus driver screamed at her for doing so. Perhaps the
movement started on the day in the early 1950s when a
black pastor named Vernon Johns tried to get other blacks
to leave a bus in protest after he was forced to give up
his seat to a white man, only to have them tell him, "You
ought to knowed better."
The story of the Montgomery Bus
Boycott is often told as a simple, happy tale of the
"little people" triumphing over the seemingly
insurmountable forces of evil. The truth is a little less
romantic and a little more complex. As the 50th
anniversary of the boycott approaches, Claudette Colvin's
name and act of courage remain almost unknown -- a lost
footnote to Rosa Parks' more famous defiance on a city
bus that same year. But Colvin, a 15-year-old high school
student at the time, refused to give up her bus seat to a
white woman nine months before Parks took her stand. And
it was a federal court suit involving Colvin that
eventually led to a Supreme Court order outlawing
segregated buses.
Tuskegee and Montgomery
attorney, Fred Gray, who represented Parks in the boycott
case, also represented Colvin in the days following her
arrest.
"I've probably been a one-person
crusader," he told The Associated Press. "Every time I
make a speech about the Montgomery bus boycott, I talk
about Claudette Colvin because if there had not been a
Claudette Colvin, there may very well have never been a
Mrs. Rosa Parks as we know her today.
Gray said Colvin was coming home
from school on March 2, 1955, when she got on a Capital
Heights bus downtown at the same place Parks boarded
another bus months later. "Colvin was sitting about two
seats from the emergency exit when four whites boarded
and the driver ordered her, along with three other
blacks, to get up. She refused and was removed from the
bus by two police officers, who took her to
jail.
"'The bus was getting crowded
and I remember him (the bus driver) looking through the
rearview mirror asking her to get up out of her seat,
which she didn't,' said a classmate at the time, Annie
Larkins Price. 'She didn't say anything. She just
continued looking out the window. She decided on that day
that she wasn't going to move.'"1
Gray described Colvin as a
persuasive and determined young person who had been a
part of Parks' Youth Council in the NAACP. Gray talked
with civil rights activists Edgar Daniel (E.D.) Nixon.
Nixon and Jo Anne Robinson, who joined him in meetings
with the bus company and city about Colvin's case. They
discussed the possibility of a boycott by
blacks.
Gray said he told Parks and
other Montgomery leaders that he thought Colvin's arrest
was a good test case to end segregation on the buses, but
the black leadership thought they should wait.
Actually I believe that the
movement started with the "Compromise of 1876" and the
Police and Ku Klux Klan illegal force and violence
(Terrorism), along with the Democratic Party and
non-radical Republicans restoring the rights to property
of the former slave owners, that laid the basis for the
overthrow of Black Reconstruction ("40 acres and a
mule"), after the Civil War, and the institutionalization
of Jim Crow (legal segregation) in the South.
The subsequent lynchings and
rule of terror that followed for the next 80 years, Led
to a great fear for Black People in the South should they
"step out of place" and suffer the consequences.
It was only after the rise of
the CIO and the large migrations to the North during
World War II to work for the "War Effort," Black people
began to gain self-confidence as a people as they became
part of the workforce and ardent defenders of the gains
of the CIO, when it had become a social movement.
After the desegregation of the
armed forces lead by A. Philip Randolph of the Sleeping
Car Porter union, blacks were drafted into the army
during the Korean War to fight for "freedom." This led to
more self-confidence as they learned how to use machinery
and weapons during the war. When the soldiers returned
home, after serving in Korea, they wanted some of that
"freedom" they were supposed to be fighting for in Korea.
Concurrently, the post World War
II rise of the African Liberation Movement against
colonialism was another major factor that led to
self-confidence, self respect, by the American
Negro.
The leaders of the United States
had great difficulty getting African Liberation Movement
Leaders to support American democracy and capitalism due
to how Black people were treated in the United States.
These were the main reasons why the United States Supreme
Court came out with its "BROWN v. BOARD OF EDUCATION"
decision in 1954 outlawing segregation in the public
schools in 1954.
"There is nothing more
powerful than an idea whose time has come" --Victor
Hugo
With all of these factors the
time had finally come for the overthrow of Jim Crow. Or
as Martin Luther King stated at a meeting, in San
Francisco, Ca on June 27,1956, to gather support for the
Boycott:
"With this new self-respect,
this new sense of dignity on the part of the Negro, the
South's negative peace was gradually undermined. The
tension which we witness in the southland today can be
explained by the revolutionary change in the Negro's
evaluation of his nature and destiny, by his
determination to stand up and struggle until the walls of
injustice have crumbled. [applause] The Negro
[figures it's?] clear insanity, that feeling that
he is inferior, everything would be all right down in
Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi. But the Negro rightly
feels that he is somebody now. [applause]
[words inaudible]
"That is at bottom the meaning
of what is happening in Montgomery. You can never
understand the Montgomery story without understanding
that there is a brand new Negro in the South, with a new
sense of dignity and destiny. [applause]
["There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose
time has come." RS]
"Over the years the bus
situation has been one of the sore spots of Montgomery.
If a visitor had come to Montgomery prior to last
December, he would have heard bus operators referring to
Negro passengers as 'niggers,' 'black apes,' and 'black
cows.' He would have frequently noticed Negro passengers
getting on the front door and paying their fares, and
then being forced to get off and go to the back doors to
board the bus, and often after paying that fare he would
have noticed that before the Negro passenger could get to
the back door, the bus rode off with his fare in the box.
But even more that visitor would have noticed Negro
passengers standing over empty seats. I am sure that
visitor would have wondered what was happening. But soon
he would discover that the reserved section, the
unoccupied seats, were for 'whites only.' No matter if a
white person never got on the bus, the bus was filled up
with Negro passengers, these Negro passengers were
prohibited from sitting in the first four seats--which
hold about ten persons--because they were only for white
passengers. But it even went beyond this. If the reserved
section for whites was filled up with white persons,
additional white persons boarded the bus, then Negro
passengers sitting in the unreserved section were often
asked to stand up and give their seats to white persons.
If they refused to do this, they were arrested."
2
E.D. Nixon
E. D. Nixon was the organizer of
the Montgomery Bus Boycott. According to Adib Rashad
:
"E. D. Nixon was a long time
activist, outspoken organizer in the African American
community, and a past president of the Montgomery chapter
of the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP). He was also a Pullman porter who
was greatly inspired by A. Philip Randolph. In fact,
Randolph's union leadership ability and articulatory
skills enhanced Nixon's will to fight more relentlessly
for African American justice….
"In the 1920s and 1930s, he
worked closely with the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car
Porters under the leadership of A. Philip Randolph to
organize fellow workers into the union. I hasten to add
that Mr. Randolph was the first African American leader
to organize a March on Washington; unfortunately,
political circumstances impelled him to call it off.
"Mr. Nixon also assisted many
other workers--African American and European
American--organize to fight for union wages and better
working conditions in Alabama. His uncontrollable courage
was also manifested in 1944, when he led 750 African
Americans in a march to the Montgomery County Courthouse
where they tried to register to vote.
"… [he] organized
the historic Montgomery bus boycott. He was also chairman
of the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) which was
formed to organize the boycott. The MIA was the outgrowth
of many previous struggles in Montgomery. Mr. Nixon made
this comment:
"The Montgomery Improvement
Association was not started just because someone came to
town or someone felt it was the proper thing to do at
this time. It was started because there had been a
struggle of people for long years. It is fairly well
known that it was Mrs. Rosa Park's refusal to relinquish
her bus seat to a Caucasian man that ignited the
organized struggle against southern segregation. However,
Mr. Nixon pointed out that Mrs. Parks had been the third
person to be arrested for defying this customary Jim Crow
practice; however, he knew that Mrs. Parks could be
depended on for a test case--history would prove him
correct.
"In 1951, several years prior to
the bus boycott, a French journalist, Daniel Guerin,
toured the South and met E. D. Nixon. In his book titled
Negroes on the March, Guerin discussed the African
American leadership hierarchy that emerged out of the
labor battles of the previous decades."
(Guerin made the following
statement: "A living example of this evolution was
presented to me by E. D. Nixon of Montgomery, Alabama, a
vigorous colored union militant who was the leading
spirit in this city of both the local union of sleeping
Car Porters and the local branch of the NAACP. What a
difference from other branches of the Association, which
are controlled by dentists, pastors, and undertakers.
Nixon has both feet on the ground. He is linked to the
masses. He speaks their language. He has organized the
work of race defense with the precision and method of a
trade unionist.")
"Guerin indicated he had a firm
grip on the issue when he alluded to the organizational
methods and evolving self-confidence acquired by African
American workers in the union movement, which prepared
them for key roles in leading and pushing forward the
movement. Therefore, it was not happenstance that the
civil rights movement began with Mrs. Parks, or that Mr.
Nixon would lead and organize her defense and conceive
the bus boycott tactic.
"December 3,1955, was the day
that the African American community in Montgomery issued
the cry to stay off the buses as a one day protest on
behalf of Mrs. Parks. The vast majority of African
American riders did just that. Mrs. Parks was convicted
and fined ten dollars. As a result of this blatant
injustice, the African American community scheduled a
mass meeting at one of the local churches. However,
because of deep-seated fear, many of the ministers were
reluctant to participate. Mr. Nixon expressed his
outrage, I almost lost patience with them, he continued,
I told them what I thought about and told them, unless
you accept this program to continue this boycott this
evening, there'll be more than a thousand people at the
church tonight. I'll take the microphone and tell the
people that we don't have a program because you all are
too cowardly to stand on your feet and fight.
"The reputation of Mr. Nixon as
a strong, courageous community leader prevailed; thus,
the ministers and more than five thousand people attended
the meeting and unanimously voted to continue the
boycott. Mr. Nixon also used his influence to encourage
Dr. King, who also was hesitant, to get involved. Dr.
King was later made chairman of the Montgomery
Improvement Association." 3
On December 13, 1965, on the
tenth anniversary of the Montgomery Boycott, E.D. Nixon
spoke at the Militant Labor Forum in New York City, since
he was not invited to the tenth anniversary celebration
in Montgomery. In his speech, he emphasized the value and
role of the MIA in organizing and leading the day to day
work of the yearlong boycott. He also explained that in
organizing the MIA the first two people that he called
and who gave support were Rev. Ralph Abernathy and the
Rev. H.H. Hubard. The third person he called was Rev.
Martin Luther King and King said: "Let me think about it
for a while." After calling fifteen other people, E.D.
Nixon again called King, who then came on board.
4
There is no doubt that the
Montgomery bus boycott was the pivotal point in the civil
rights struggle; it was the first mass action movement of
its kind. Inspirationally speaking, there were many
others over the ten year period that eventually toppled
the Jim Crow system. However, according to some political
analysts, none was better organized. This can be
attributed to the insightfulness and organizing talents
of E.D. Nixon. Interestingly, Mr. Nixon never wanted
national attention; he preferred to stay in the
background and work.
E.D. Nixon did not have much
formal education, and he was not always liked by his
contemporaries. Nevertheless, he worked incessantly to
bring about a change in Montgomery. He strongly believed
that a man must stand for what is right, even if it meant
standing alone. On February 25,1987, Mr. E. D. Nixon at
the age of 87, died of a cardiac arrest. History must
never forget this man and what he
accomplished.
Rosa Parks
Another example of the new mood
among blacks was Rosa Parks. The following review of her
book "Rosa Parks,"5 Grace Lee Boggs, a lifelong Detroit
activist, wrote, at the time of Rosa Parks' death, we are
given a picture of Rosa Parks that is not commonly
known:
"Rosa Parks has become a symbol
of courage for our time and for all time. All over the
world, she ranks with Nelson Mandela and Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr., in the pantheon of 20th-century heroes
and sheroes who have expanded our notion of what it means
to be a human being.
"But in becoming an icon, Parks
has been turned into a shadow of her real self. Few
people are aware of her lifetime of struggle before and
after that fateful day in 1955, when her refusal to give
up her seat on an Alabama bus triggered the 13-month-long
boycott that launched the modern civil rights
movement.
"How many people know that,
unlike Gandhi and King, she refused to rule out the
righteous use of force? Not only did she admire Malcolm
X, she flew down to Monroe, North Carolina, just a few
years ago for the funeral of Robert Williams, the
outspoken advocate of armed self-defense by the black
community.
"One of the main virtues of this
book is that it demolishes the myth that Rosa Parks was
just a good-hearted, middle-aged seamstress who was
simply too tired from working all day to give up her
seat. Historian Douglas Brinkley, also the author of
award-winning biographies of Jimmy Carter and Franklin D.
Roosevelt, reveals the difficult decisions that educated
Parks politically and empowered her not only to say 'no'
on December 1, 1955, but to give permission for her 'no'
to become the basis for a constitutional challenge to
Montgomery's bus segregation ordinance.
"Brinkley writes, 'While the
NAACP executives made dinner speeches and attended
national conferences,' Parks, as the local NAACP
secretary, 'balanced the ledgers, kept the books, and
recorded every report of racial discrimination that
crossed her desk. She also did field research, traveling
from towns like Union Springs to cities like Selma to
interview African Americans with legal complaints,
including some who had witnessed the murders of blacks by
whites in rural areas.
"As the mother of the Civil
Rights movement, Rosa Parks received countless awards,
including the Congressional Gold Medal. But most people
see only the fame and not the enormous risks she took. In
1957, for example, the family was forced to leave
Montgomery and move to Detroit, because continuing death
threats were driving her husband to 'near-suicidal
despair,' and also because Rosa's celebrity status had
made the couple unemployable by Montgomery's white
business community."6
Additional insight about Rosa
Parks, can be found in Diane McWhorter's essay, Rosa
Parks The story behind her sitting down. In this essay
she wrote the following:
"My favorite image of Rosa
Parks, who died Monday at the age of 92, is of the
confrontation between her and a policeman on that
auspicious afternoon of Dec. 1, 1955, when she refused to
move to the back of a bus in Montgomery, Ala. After the
officer had instructed her to 'make it light on yourself'
and give up her seat to a standing white man, she later
said, she asked him, 'Why do you push us around?' And he
had given an honest answer: 'I don't know.' But then he
explained that he had to arrest her anyway (even though
she was not in technical violation of the city's
segregation laws, but that's a whole other tangent of
this rich saga). And so did history turn. In support of
Parks' defiance, the black citizens of Montgomery
boycotted the city buses until segregated seating was
abolished, one whole year later. And so was born what is
still known as the modern civil rights
movement.
"… It took a while for the
general public--and perhaps even Parks herself--to catch
onto the historic logic of her action. For years, she was
seen as a woman without a context, a poor-but-proud
broken-down seamstress who had refused to move simply
because she was 'tired,' clueless of the implications. In
fact, her life (and she was only 42) encompassed the
preceding two decades of black liberation. She had met
her husband, Raymond Parks, in the early 1930s when he
was raising money for the Scottsboro Boys, nine young
black men falsely accused of raping two white women on a
freight train, who had become an international cause
célèbre thanks to the legal and propaganda
efforts of the American Communist Party. (Virtually alone
in that era, the Communist Party advocated full equality
for African-Americans, and even the term "civil rights"
was considered left-wing jargon.) With her high-school
diploma--a credential that required resourcefulness and
commitment for a black female of her time--Parks had
served for years as the secretary in the Montgomery
chapter of the NAACP. She and E.D. Nixon, had already
been discussing a way to protest that most demeaning
daily feature of black life: the segregated bus ride to
work and home under the watch of the city's famously
abusive bus drivers. Nixon's day job was as a
sleeping-car porter; his civil rights hero was A. Philip
Randolph, the socialist intellectual who had turned the
Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters into the first
significant black labor union.
"Nixon bailed Parks out of jail
that December evening. Along with him were two white
aristocratic Alabama renegades, Clifford and Virginia
Durr, who had been prominent New Dealers (Cliff was an
early Federal Communications Commission member*) and were
among the seamstress's private clients. Cliff, a skilled
constitutional lawyer, became a behind-the-scenes adviser
to Fred Gray.
"....who handled the
class-action suit that pressed the legal brief against
bus segregation at the same time the boycotters protested
with their feet. In one of the ironies of the boycott
story, Parks (Gray's constant lunch companion) was not in
fact a named plaintiff in the constitutional test case
she had inspired. And yet it was that case, on which the
Supreme Court ruled in November 1956, that ended up
desegregating the buses….
"… In fact, the boycott
represented a quantum shift in black emancipation. It was
the passing of the torch from the mandarins of the NAACP,
whose lawyers had tried to dismantle segregation statute
by statute, to the ordinary bus riders, the 'little
people' now taking charge of their own destinies. By
moving the struggle out of the courtroom and into the
street, the droves of 'walkers' (Virginia Durr likened
them to a daily black tide) presented a vivid moral
witness that piqued the country's imagination. And the
boycott anointed Martin Luther King as the man of the
very long ensuing hour, transforming the civil rights
movement from a strategic offensive directed from New
York to a spiritual uprising out of the black church.
Rosa Parks not only launched this new paradigm but
incorporated all those that preceded it: Old Leftism, New
Deal liberalism, unionism, NAACP legalism and gradualism.
She was an embodiment of the civil rights movement to
that moment, even if the impression persists that she was
a simple old lady with aching feet.
"Despite what the eulogies might
suggest, Parks did not ride off into the sunset on the
front of that bus. The boycotters' organization, the
Montgomery Improvement Association, split bitterly
between Martin Luther King's faction, with its bourgeois
gloss and razzle-dazzle access to the national media, and
the earthier locals like E.D. Nixon, who complained that
King treated him 'as a child.' Nixon would remain vocally
bitter about being overlooked as the father of the
boycott, regretting that he had tapped King to be the
protest's leader ('and, with that bad guess,' he would
write, 'we got Moses'). Nixon's ally, Rosa Parks, would
quietly suffer her removal from the action, taking a job
at Virginia's Hampton Institute (the Upper South version
of Tuskegee Institute) within months of the boycott's
end, since her notoriety prevented her from finding work
in Montgomery. Birmingham's firebrand civil rights
leader, Fred Shuttlesworth, chewed out the MIA leadership
for not recognizing her symbolic importance to the
struggle and finding a way to support her." 7
I took the time to elaborate the
roles of E.D. Nixon and Rosa Parks in order to give the
readers an understanding of the individuals who initiated
the boycott and the quality of their leadership. There
were also many more people who played the initial
leadership and organizational roles in this struggle for
justice.
Montgomery Improvement
Association
The Montgomery Improvement
Association (MIA) which was founded in Montgomery on 5
December 1955 was primarily organized by E.D. Nixon and
other community leaders. The MIA was instrumental in
guiding the successful Montgomery bus boycott, a campaign
that focused national attention on Jim Crow in the South
and catapulted King into the national spotlight.
Following Rosa Parks' arrest on
December 1, 1965 for failing to vacate her seat for a
white passenger on a Montgomery City bus, E. D. Nixon of
the NAACP and Jo Anne Robinson of the Women's Political
Council launched plans for a one-day boycott of
Montgomery buses. On December 5, ninety percent of the
black community participated and stayed off the buses
that day, prompting calls for boycott leaders to harness
the momentum into a larger protest campaign. At the mass
meeting that evening, the MIA was established to oversee
the continuation of the MIA's mission as it also sought
to improve the general status of the City of Montgomery
and to improve race relations.
After this initial meeting, the
executive committee drafted the demands of the boycott
campaign and agreed that the boycott would continue until
demands were met. Over the next year, the MIA organized
carpools and held weekly mass meetings with sermons and
music to help keep the black community mobilized. The
Association's leaders negotiated with Montgomery City
leaders and coordinated legal challenges to the city's
bus segregation ordinance. MIA also supported the boycott
financially, raising money by passing the plate at
meetings and soliciting support from northern and
southern civil rights organizations.
The boycott ended in success
when the US Supreme Court struck down segregated seating
on public buses in November 1956. King emerged as a
national figure and the MIA's tactics cast a mold for the
many protests that would follow in the civil rights
movement. The Montgomery victory affirmed the potential
for mass-based nonviolent resistance to successfully
challenge segregation.
Why the Boycott Was
Successful
The boycott was successful, in
my opinion for several reasons.
1. It had mass support and it
strength developed from the unity of the Black masses to
boycott the buses.
2. In order to sustain the
boycott, the MIA had organized an alternative
transportation system, which gave the masses the ability
to get to work for over a year, something that was
crucial to the success of the boycott. In his San
Francisco speech, King explained this system and
decision. He stated:
"One of the first practical
problems that the ex-bus riders [had experienced]
is that in finding some way to get around the city. The
first thing that we decided to do was to use a taxi, and
they had agreed to transport the people for just ten
cents, the same as the buses. Then the police commission
stopped this by warning the taxis that they must charge a
minimum of forty-five cents a person. Then we immediately
got on the job and organized a volunteer car pool. And
almost overnight over three hundred cars were out on the
streets of Montgomery. [applause] They were out
on the streets of Montgomery carrying the people to and
from work from the various pickup and dispatch stations.
It worked amazingly well. Even Commissioner Sellers had
to admit in a White Citizens Council meeting that the
system worked with 'military precision.'
[applause] It has continued to grow and it is
still growing.
"Since that time we have added
more than twenty station wagons to the car pool and
they're working every day, all day, transporting the
people. It has been an expensive project. Started out
about two thousand dollars or more a week, but now it
runs more than five thousand dollars a week. We have been
able to carry on because of the contributions coming from
the local community and nationally, from the great
contributions that have come from friends of good will
all over the nation and all over the world.
[applause]"8
I had the good fortune to meet
E.D. Nixon a few hours prior to the December 13, 1965
Militant Labor Forum.
From my conversations, prior to
this forum, with E.D. Nixon and Clifton DeBerry, (1964
Presidential candidate of the Socialist Workers Party),
who helped organize the 1956 "Stationwagons for
Montgomery Campaign," it became clear to me, that the
success of this transportation system was made possible
by the Korean War GI's, who used their experience in the
army's "motor pools" specifically and the army generally,
to perform the maintenance of the automobiles and become
the hard core of the drivers that sustained this
transportation system for a year. It was also widely
known, in Montgomery, that these men also had the ability
and the willingness to defend themselves if the KKK
attacked the transportation system. Due to the wide
knowledge of this fact, and the world attention that the
Boycott had achieved, the racists were unable to disrupt
the car pool, that "worked with military precision."
3. The democratically organized
Montgomery Improvement Association had regular weekly
mass meetings of thousands to decide the strategy and
tactics of the movement. The people in the struggle had
control and the final say--not the leaders from on high.
This helped to insured the power of the movement, for the
masses saw the MIA as their organization and were
committed by their votes to implement their
decisions.
The tactics of both mass civil
disobedience (the boycott) and self defense by the MIA
was key to the success of the struggle.
4. The power of independent mass
action, independent of the politicians, was demonstrated
by the Montgomery Bus Boycott. This is the power that
inspired and garnered support from throughout the nation
and the world.
In 1967 Martin Luther King said:
"There is nothing but a lack of
social vision to prevent us from paying an adequate wage
to every American citizen whether he be a hospital
worker, laundry worker, maid, or day laborer.
"There is nothing except
shortsightedness to prevent us from guaranteeing an
annual minimum-and livable-income for every American
family.
"There is nothing, except a
tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our
priorities….
"… The coalition of an
energized section of labor, Negroes, unemployed, and
welfare recipients may be the source of power that
reshapes economic relationships and ushers in a
breakthrough to a new level of social reform.
"The total elimination of
poverty, now a practical responsibility, the reality of
equality in race relations and other profound structural
changes in society may well begin here." 9
The Montgomery Bus Boycott led
by the Montgomery Improvement Association was an example
of such a coalition and it remains, to this day, one of
the best models for victorious struggle in the history of
working people in the United States. The Montgomery Bus
Boycott was a demonstration of the power of Black Unity
in action independent of and not reliant to the
Democratic and Republican Parties.
_________
Footnotes
1. Amanda Dawkins, "Colvin Is
Unsung Heroine of Alabama Bus Boycott" The
Repository, (February 9, 2005). Retrieved 11/30/05,
from http://www.cantonrep.com/index.php?Category=23&ID=207125&r=4
.
2. Martin Luther King, Jr.
The Montgomery Story, Address delivered at the
Forty-Seventh Annual Convention of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP). [6/27/56]. [San Francisco,
Calif.]. Retrieved 11/30/2005, from
http://www.stanford.edu/group/King/publications/speechesFrame.htm
.
3. Adib Rashad, E. D. Nixon:
Pioneer Civil Rights Organizer. Retrieved 11/30/2005,
from http://www.theblacklist.net/board/msgs/10069.html
.
4. Harry Ring, "E.D.Nixon
honored at Dinner" The Militant, (January 13,
1966).
5. Douglas Brinkley, Rosa
Parks (New York: Viking, 2000).
6. Grace Lee Boggs, "Book
Review: Rosa Parks" Yes! (Spring 2001) Retrieved
11/30/05, from http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?ID=408
.
7. Diane McWhorter, "Rosa Parks:
The Story Behind Her Sitting Down" Slate (October
25, 2005). Retrieved 11/30/05, from http://www.slate.com/id/2128752/
.
8. King, The Montgomery
Story.
9. King, A Testament of Hope:
The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King Jr. (New
York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1990), 630-34.
