Table of Contents In this book you will read about the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 and 1956 Each perspective is based on real things that happened to real people who took part in or experienced the effects of the boycott As you’ll see the same event can look different depending on one’s point of view Chapter 1 4 Reginald Brown Church Leader Chapter 2 1 2 Matilda Lee Opponent of the Boycott Chapter 3 2 0 Louis Washburn Civil Rights Activist Look Look Again 30 Glossary 3 1 Learn More 3 1 Index 32 About the Author 32
4 1 December 1 1955 was a huge day for us It was the beginning of the mass bus boycott in our city Montgomery Alabama In Montgomery buses are segregated It all started because Negroes are allowed to sit only in the back rows of the bus Most of us get up and stand if the seats in front reserved for whites fill up and a white person wants to sit down Reginald Brown Church Leader
5 On that December day Rosa Parks sat in a seat toward the back of a full bus When a white man entered the bus the bus driver asked Parks to give her seat to him She refused and was arrested I know that Rosa Parks was not the first brave Negro in this fight for equality So many people laid the groundwork for this boycott Individuals such as Pastor Vernon Johns and organizations such as the Women’s Political Council had wanted to do something about bus segregation before this day Others were even arrested for protesting where Negroes could sit But Parks’s arrest was the spark that inspired us to take action against segregation in our community Hallelujah for that instrumental day E D Nixon played a big role in the beginning of the bus boycott He was Parks’s supervisor at the Montgomery branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People NAACP After her arrest Nixon picked Parks’s case to test bus
