Meet Martin Luther King, Jr.

7
Rosa Parks

On December 1, 1955, a black woman named Rosa Parks did something about the Jim Crow buses.

Mrs. Parks worked in a department store. That evening she climbed on a bus and sat down.

Each time the bus stopped, more people got on. Soon no seats were left in the white part of the bus.

At the next stop some white people got on. The driver got up and walked over to Rosa Parks. He told her to give her seat to a white person.

But Rosa Parks was tired. Her feet hurt. She did something she had never done before. She just stayed in her seat.

Again the driver told Rosa Parks to get up. But she would not move.

The driver was furious. He called a policeman. He told him that a black woman would not give up her seat.

The policeman pulled Mrs. Parks off the bus. He took her to the police station. The police took her fingerprints and threw her in jail. All because she was tired and didn’t want to get up!

Black people all over the city heard about Rosa Parks. They were very angry. They were mad at the Jim Crow laws. They were mad at the police. They were mad at the bus company. But what could they do?

Then one man said, “Why don’t we boycott the buses?” This meant that all the black people would stop riding the buses. Soon the bus company would lose money. Maybe then the owners would be fair to blacks.

Boycott! The word spread like wildfire. Someone called Martin Luther King. He liked the idea right away.

But a boycott would work only if all the blacks stayed off the buses. How could the leaders get word to every black person in Montgomery in time?

Martin and the others worked fast. They wrote a flier about the boycott. They gave copies away in every part of the city where black people lived. But they could not reach everybody.