The Montgomery bus boycott · Grade 11

The passage and its 7 questions

Directions: Read the passage carefully. Then answer the questions in full sentences.

• In 1955 the city buses of Montgomery, Alabama, were segregated by law. Black riders, who made up most of the passengers, had to sit in the back, and drivers could order them to give up their seats to white riders. Black residents had protested this treatment for years, and earlier in 1955 several Black women and girls had been arrested for refusing to give up their seats.
• On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a seamstress and longtime secretary of the local
• NAACP chapter, was arrested for refusing a driver's order to give up her seat. Her arrest became the spark that local organizers had been waiting for. That night Jo Ann
• Robinson and the Women's Political Council used a college duplicating machine to print tens of thousands of leaflets calling on Black residents to stay off the buses on Monday,
• December 5, the day of Parks's trial.
• The one-day protest was so successful that community leaders formed the
• Montgomery Improvement Association to continue it. As president they chose a
• 26-year-old minister who was new to town, Martin Luther King Jr. At first the boycott's demands were modest: courteous treatment, first-come seating within the segregated system, and the hiring of Black drivers.
• Staying off the buses took enormous organization. Volunteers ran a carpool system with dozens of pickup stations, and churches raised money to buy station wagons.
• Thousands of people walked miles to work every day, through rain and cold, for more than a year. City officials tried to break the protest by ticketing carpool drivers and charging boycott leaders under an old anti-boycott law, but the boycott held. Because
• Black riders had been about three-quarters of the bus company's passengers, the company lost much of its income.
• Meanwhile, the struggle moved to the courts. Black attorneys filed a federal lawsuit,
• Browder v. Gayle, on behalf of four Black women who had been mistreated on the city's buses. In June 1956 a federal court ruled that bus segregation violated the Fourteenth
• Amendment's promise of equal protection, and in November the Supreme Court upheld that ruling. On December 21, 1956, after 381 days, Black riders returned to integrated buses.
• The boycott showed that ordinary people, acting together and without violence, could apply both economic and legal pressure for change. It also introduced the nation to new leaders and inspired protests across the South in the years that followed.
• 1. What was the immediate cause of the boycott?
• 2. Why did the boycott hurt the bus company financially?
• 3. Explain how the movement combined economic pressure with legal action.
• 4. In paragraph 3, what does 'modest' mean as used to describe the first demands?
• 5. Why does the author call Parks's arrest 'the spark that local organizers had been waiting for'?
• 6. If you wanted to verify how people got to work during the boycott, what primary sources might you look for?
• 7. Rewrite the opening sentence for a different audience and explain your choices.