The campaign lasted from December 5, 1955—the Monday after Rosa Parks, an African-American woman, was arrested for her refusal to surrender her seat to a white person—to December 20, 1956, when the federal ruling Browder v. Gayle took effect, and led to a United States Supreme Court decision that declared the Alabama and Montgomery laws that segregated buses were unconstitutional.

[2] Many bus drivers treated their black passengers poorly beyond the law: African-Americans were assaulted, shortchanged, and left stranded after paying their fares.

The middle section of the bus consisted of sixteen unreserved seats for white and black people on a segregated basis.

[9] Often when boarding the buses, black people were required to pay at the front, get off, and reenter the bus through a separate door at the back.

[14] In 1955, Parks completed a course in "Race Relations" at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, where nonviolent civil disobedience had been discussed as a tactic.

[19] Some action against segregation had been in the works for some time before Parks' arrest, under the leadership of E. D. Nixon, president of the local NAACP chapter and a member of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.

Nixon intended that her arrest be a test case to allow Montgomery's black citizens to challenge segregation on the city's public buses.

When Colvin was arrested in March 1955, Nixon thought he had found the perfect person, but the teenager turned out to be pregnant.

[20][21] Between Parks' arrest and trial, Nixon organized a meeting of local ministers at Martin Luther King Jr.'s church.

Though Nixon could not attend the meeting because of his work schedule, he arranged that no election of a leader for the proposed boycott would take place until his return.

Nixon wanted King to lead the boycott because the young minister was new to Montgomery and the city fathers had not had time to intimidate him.

At a subsequent, larger meeting of ministers, Nixon's agenda was threatened by the clergymen's reluctance to support the campaign.

Nixon threatened to reveal the ministers' cowardice to the black community, and King spoke up, denying he was afraid to support the boycott.

[17][23]The next morning there was a meeting led by the new Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) head, King, where a group of 16 to 18 people gathered at the Mt.

The organizer of that campaign, T. R. M. Howard of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership, had spoken on the lynching of Emmett Till as King's guest at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church only four days before Parks's arrest.

On December 5, a mass meeting was held at the Holt Street Baptist Church to determine if the protest would continue.

[29] Given twenty minutes notice, King gave a speech[30] asking for a bus boycott and attendees enthusiastically agreed.

Starting December 7, J Edgar Hoover's FBI noted the "agitation among negroes" and tried to find "derogatory information" about King.

Instead of riding buses, boycotters organized a system of carpools, with car owners volunteering their vehicles or themselves driving people to various destinations.

When word of this reached city officials on December 8, the order went out to fine any cab driver who charged a rider less than 45 cents.

In addition to using private motor vehicles, some people used non-motorized means to get around, such as cycling, walking, or even riding mules or driving horse-drawn buggies.

As the buses received few, if any, passengers, their officials asked the City Commission to allow stopping service to black communities.

[48][49] Two days after the inauguration of desegregated seating, someone fired a shotgun through the front door of Martin Luther King's home.

On January 10, 1957, bombs destroyed five black churches and the home of Reverend Robert S. Graetz, one of the few white Montgomerians who had publicly sided with the MIA.

According to legal historian Randall Kennedy, "When the violence subsided and service was restored, many black Montgomerians enjoyed their newly recognized right only abstractly ...

In practically every other setting, Montgomery remained overwhelmingly segregated ..."[51] On January 23, a group of Klansmen (who would later be charged for the bombings) lynched a black man, Willie Edwards, on the pretext that he was dating a white woman.

About the same time, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled against Martin Luther King's appeal of his "illegal boycott" conviction.

"[55] The National Memorial for Peace and Justice contains, among other things, a sculpture "dedicated to the women who sustained the Montgomery Bus Boycott", by Dana King, to help illustrate the civil rights period.