On December 5, 1955, the Montgomery Bus Boycott began, four days after Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to surrender her seat to a white passenger. Thousands of Black residents walked, carpooled, or took Black-owned taxis instead of riding city buses. That evening, the Montgomery Improvement Association elected a 26-year-old Baptist minister, Martin Luther King Jr., as its president.
The boycott's organizers, led by Jo Ann Robinson of the Women's Political Council, had mimeographed and distributed 35,000 leaflets overnight calling for the one-day boycott to coincide with Parks' trial. Its success — buses rolled through Montgomery nearly empty that morning — convinced organizers to extend it indefinitely.
King was a newcomer to Montgomery, having arrived at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church barely a year earlier. His relative lack of entanglement in local politics made him an acceptable compromise choice for the fractious coalition of ministers and civic leaders. That night, at a mass meeting at Holt Street Baptist Church, he delivered an electrifying speech that thrust him into national prominence for the first time.
The boycott lasted 381 days, crippling the bus system's finances and drawing global attention to segregation in the American South. It ended only after the Supreme Court affirmed a ruling that Montgomery's segregated buses were unconstitutional, a victory that established the template — mass nonviolent action, church-based organizing, charismatic young leadership — for the civil rights movement's coming decade.