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preamble and to salute the flag. I got to the point where I got poisoned against that. I didn’t care anything for the preamble. I didn’t care about singing “America the Beautiful” because it wasn’t beautiful to me. I had gotten to the point in elementary school that I wouldn’t even hold my hand over my heart.
    The movement made a difference because it made me realize that somebody else agreed that this was not right. And it wasn’t just one other person. There were thousands of people who felt the same way, who felt we’ve got to turn this nation around. This is wrong.
    One of my major excitements was going to a mass meeting and finding whites there, and from different geographic corners of the country. You’d sit on your porch over here and be told by one group of whites, “You’re black, get back, this is not for you.” And then over there there’s another group of whites saying, “We’re all equal, but you’ve got to fight for it. And you got to fight for it by getting out there and being counted in numbers.”

Facing page: Waiting for a car pool during the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama.

    2 ◆ The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Beginning of the Movement
    The modern civil rights movement is often said to have started with the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-56. For over a year, nearly fifty thousand blacks in Montgomery stayed off the buses. They walked, hitchhiked, carpooled, all in protest against the discriminatory and demeaning system of segregation.
    In Montgomery, black riders were about seventy-five percent of all bus passengers. Still they had to give their seats to any standing white person, or stand themselves over empty seats in the “white only” area.
    Jo Ann Robinson was a teacher at Alabama State College and head of the Women’s Political Council, a group of black professional women. E. D. Nixon was past president of the Montgomery NAACP, a Pullman porter, and an active member of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Both had urged a bus boycott for many years. They waited only for the right moment.
    On December 1, 1955, a forty-three-year-old seamstress named Rosa Parks, who had worked as secretary at the local NAACP, was arrested and charged with violating the segregation laws for refusing to get up and give her bus seat to a white person. The night Rosa Parks was arrested, Robinson and some friends printed thousands of leaflets calling for a one-day boycott. The leaflet read:
    Another Negro woman has been arrested and thrown in jail because she refused to get up out of her seat on the bus for a white person to sit down. It is the second time since the Claudette Colvin case that a Negro woman has been arrested for the same thing. This has to be stopped. Negroes have rights too, for if Negroes did not ride the buses, they could not operate. Three-fourths of the riders are Negroes, yet we are arrested, or have to stand over empty seats. If we do not do something to stop these arrests, they will continue. The next time it may be you, or your daughter, or mother. This woman’s case will come up on Monday. We are, therefore, asking every Negro to stay off the buses Monday in protest of the arrest and trial. Don’t ride the buses to work, to town, to school, or anywhere on Monday. You can afford to stay out of school for one day if you have no other way to go except by bus. You can also afford to stay out of town for one day. If you work, take a cab, or walk. But please, children and grown-ups, don’t ride the bus at all on Monday. Please stay off of all buses Monday.
    Monday morning the buses rolled through the black neighborhoods empty. The boycott was virtually total. Fueled by the success of the one-day action, thousands at a church meeting that night voted to continue the boycott. The Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) was organized to coordinate boycott activities. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,