Isabel Wilkerson

Isabel Wilkerson Instagram – It was 70 years ago this very month that the people with the least power in Alabama began a bus boycott in Montgomery that would become a turning point in American history.
It rained all day December 5, the boycott’s first day. Still they walked — 40,000 people for 381 days, until the buses were desegregated.
Under Jim Crow, black riders had to sit in the back, move further back or stand if white people needed seats. True to the caste system, black people were not permitted to sit across from or in the same row as a white person. Black people could not board from the front but rather had to pay, disembark and then board from the back door. The bus often left before they could climb on.
A few lone riders had tried to resist. Just that spring, a teenager named Claudette Colvin was arrested for refusing to give up her seat. So when longtime civil rights activist Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to yield hers, local NAACP leaders and politically active black women, led by college professor JoAnn Robinson, were primed to go into action. They sent out 35,000 leaflets to black residents: “We are asking every Negro to stay off the busses Monday….If you work, take a cab, or walk, but please, don’t get on a bus.”
Without TikTok or Instagram or email or cell phones, they managed to organize a boycott in five days. Workers joined together in carpools. Churches arranged shuttles and taxis. People rode bicycles or walked as far as 20 miles to get to their destinations.
Hostility mounted as city buses sat idle in parking lots. Boycotters were beaten and fired from their jobs. Black churches were firebombed. Martin Luther King Jr. and other ministers, along with carpool drivers, were jailed. Still the people walked.
At the same time, a lawsuit challenging bus segregation, Browder v. Gayle, made its way through the courts. In November 1956, the Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling outlawing segregated buses. The ruling took effect December 20, 1956, permitting black riders to sit where they chose.
From there, the Civil Rights Movement spread throughout the South. The people at the very bottom of the caste system had managed to overturn a central part of it. | Posted on 19/Dec/2025 03:36:50