American History Tellers - Civil Rights - Strides Towards Freedom | 2

Episode Date: October 10, 2018

In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that segregation was legal, on a “separate but equal” basis. But for more than five decades, life for black and white Americans was seldom equal, but always separate.To fight segregation, the NAACP and others exposed the dismal and debasing conditions in black schools. They won a monumental victory in Brown v. Board of Education—but then a young boy from Chicago named Emmett Till was dredged from the swamps of Mississippi.Till’s death galvanized the movement. Listening to an activist speak about Till’s murder, one woman would rise to become the face of the fight against segregation. On a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat.Support us by supporting our sponsors!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge new seasons of American History Tellers early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Imagine that you're a young black parent in a small Virginia town. It's a cold, rainy morning in the early months of 1951, but the stove is keeping the kitchen warm and breakfast is halfway cooked. You're waiting for your children to finish getting ready for school. Ruby, you make sure you don't forget your coat today. You know that classroom is liable to freeze over before the day is out.

You glance at the clock and stir the eggs in the pan. They need to hurry up or they'll be late. You turn to your husband, sitting at the kitchen table sipping his coffee and reading the paper. Will you tell them to get going? He seems lost in thought, but puts his coffee down for a moment. You all listen to your mother and come on out here. Your education isn't going to wait for you. You hope that'll be the extra motivation they need. But as they continue getting ready, your thoughts can't help but turn to the kind of education they're really receiving. The one high school in your county that's open to black students is so overcrowded that for the last two years they've taught the school day in shifts. Your classes end at lunchtime

every day so the next round of students can come in. The school board's solution for this year isn't much better. Though there's now a full school day, your children attend class in a pair of hastily constructed shacks with no electricity or running water. When you first saw the, quote, new buildings, you'd mistaken them for chicken coops. In truth, they weren't much better than that. The roof leaks when it rains, and Ruby's already had one bad case of pneumonia this winter because of the cold and wet inside. Honey, you better have a look at this. Your husband interrupts your furious thoughts. He extends the newspaper in your direction, pointing at the page. What is it? Says the school board has approved funds to start building a new high school. Well, thank the Lord!

We've been writing and standing up at those meetings for years trying to make this happen, always telling us they don't have the money and looking at us like they could spit. It's about time they made it right. No, Celia. They're saying the money's for a new white school. You can feel yourself starting to shake with outrage. You've seen Jim Crow's unrelenting grip shape your life and it's doing the same thing to your kids. That can't be right. No, it's it's wrong. It's just wrong what they keep doing to these children, to our children. I know it, but there's not much more we can do. I don't accept that. I can't. They desegregated the whole U.S. Army, didn't they? What are a few country schools compared to that? But honey, that took a whole movement to do. Had to get the president involved in everything. Well, then maybe that's what we need right here. So what? You're going

to be an activist now? Like those folks in the NAACP? Maybe I will. All I know is it can't stay like this. Somebody's got to do something. You turn back to the stove. We've got to do something. You've never really thought of yourself as an activist before. You turn back to the stove. We've got to do something. You've never really thought of yourself as an activist before. You've gone to the school board and tried to make things better, but that always felt like it was just your job as a parent. This feels different, though. After all, your husband's right

about one thing. There's a movement going on, and it's about time you became part of it. Hey, this is Nick. And it's about time you became part of it. to the best idea yet on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Sachi Cole. And I'm Sarah Hagee. And we're the hosts of Scamfluencers, a weekly podcast from Wondery that takes you along the twists and turns of the most infamous scams of all time,

the impact on victims, and what's left once the facade falls away. Follow Scamfluencers on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. From Wondery, I'm Lindsey Graham, and this is American History Tellers. Our history. Your story. Today we're continuing our six-episode series on the American Civil Rights Movement with a look at how the movement expanded and evolved in the early 1950s. This is Part 2, Strides Toward Freedom.

For all the injustice of racial segregation in American society, one of the troubling realities for civil rights activists was that Jim Crow was legal. Since 1896, the United States Supreme Court had condoned the practice of segregation. The court had insisted that racially separate facilities did not violate the constitutional rights of American citizens, as long as members of each race had access to facilities that were equal. But this idea of separate but equal, as the law of the land, never really looked equal in practice. And for more than half a century, racial exclusion and the staggering inequalities of Jim Crow flourished as the Supreme Court turned a blind eye and offered its stamp of approval.

In the post-World War II years, a key battle for civil rights activists was stripping Jim Crowe of its legal protections. But in spite of a string of victories by the NAACP's Legal Defense and Education Fund, getting the court to overturn the separate-but-equal doctrine was a major challenge. It was one thing to point out or correct obvious examples of inequality in segregated institutions, something that the court had been more willing to do in recent years. It was something else entirely, to admit that segregation itself was inherently wrong. Since the 1930s, civil rights lawyers had typically worked around the edges of separate but equal. They often pushed for states to equalize rather than desegregate the public facilities that serve Black communities, believing that this would make

it too expensive for states to keep segregation in place. But by 1950, the time for a more direct attack had come. In June of that year, the nation's leading civil rights lawyers, spearheaded by NAACP legal director Thurgood Marshall, decided to aggressively pursue desegregation. An attack on separate but equal was their primary objective. Marshall had served as chief counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund since 1940. Ten years later, he was 42 years old and one of the most highly regarded civil rights litigators in the nation. He was driven, in part, by his experiences as a student, having been denied admission to the University of Maryland Law School because of his race. Over the following decades, he worked relentlessly to ensure the next generation of students would not face the same kind of exclusion.

Indeed, schools were one of the most important places to stage this legal battle. Segregated schools laid bare the dramatic and tangible inequalities of life under Jim Crow. Few realities were as disheartening for parents in Black communities than the conditions that their children faced when trying to get an education. Without access to decent schools, without a real investment in the potential of the next generations, continued inequality in virtually every aspect of life seemed like a foregone conclusion. So the campaign against Jim Crow schools quickly escalated. Marshall and the NAACP's team of lawyers soon began selecting cases to take to

the Supreme Court. But while the lawyers would lead the way in Washington, the driving force behind this new wave of challenges came from local communities, and sometimes from the students themselves. Farmville, Virginia was a tobacco and lumber town of little more than 4,000 residents about 65 miles southwest of Richmond. In November 1950, a high school student named Barbara Rose Johns was fed up with the conditions at her segregated high school. The overcrowding, the lack of decent facilities, the hand-me-down school buses that barely stayed running, the tar paper shacks the school board had forced many of the students

into, it had all become too much to bear. So she gathered a small group of students together and secretly planned a protest to take place in the coming spring. On the morning of April 23, 1951, Johns forged notes from the school principal asking teachers to convene an assembly at 11 a.m. A little before 11, another student, pretending to be a parent, called the principal's office saying two pupils were causing trouble at the local bus station. As the principal hurried away from campus to deal with the disturbance, the student body began filing into the auditorium. When they arrived, it was Johns who took the podium. She asked all of the teachers to leave so that she could address her classmates about an urgent matter. Despite some initial hesitation, most of the teachers left right away. One or two protested, but a chorus of booing from the 450 students in the room soon chased them out.

Then Johns began to speak. She was on fire. She later recalled, I related with heated emphasis the facts they knew to be the truth. We mapped out for those students our wish that they would not accept the conditions of our school and that they would do something about it. She called for the students to boycott. Together, she insisted, they would protest until all the county schools were integrated and every student had access to the same quality of education.

Their boycott began that afternoon. The following day, Johns and a group of student leaders marched down Main Street to the county courthouse. There, they met with the school superintendent and presented their demands. Though that meeting ended in a stalemate, the students had also invited a veteran team of NAACP lawyers in Virginia to investigate the inequalities in Farmville's schools. Before long, the protests that Johns had ignited would transform into a legal battle, one that would eventually make it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The students from Farmville would see their case make national headlines, into a legal battle, one that would eventually make it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The students from Farmville would see their case make national headlines, along with four others from Kansas, Delaware, South Carolina, and Washington, D.C. Known collectively as Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, these five cases became the NAACP's most important and ambitious battleground yet in the fight against segregation. The legal team worked tirelessly to prepare for their day in court, presenting their final arguments in December 1953. After that, all they could do was wait to see if their painstaking effort would be enough. In the months that followed, the NAACP's lawyers were hopeful but nervous. The stakes were high.

Losing would reaffirm the constitutionality of segregation and in all likelihood guarantee the survival of Jim Crow for at least another generation. After all, it had taken nearly 60 years before the court had been willing to seriously scrutinize the 1896 separate but equal decision. Victory, on the other hand, that would publicly put segregation on the wrong side of the Constitution. It would turn Jim Crow's architects into lawbreakers. A victory might just change the nation. Imagine you're at home with your family in Baltimore, Maryland. It's May 1954, and you're playing with your young son, who has just gotten home from school. Hello? Clara, it's me. Are Mama and Daddy there? Yes, they're out front.

Go get them and turn on the radio. What's going on? Just turn it on. I'll call you back. You send your son to bring his grandparents in from the front yard. You walk across the room and turn the radio on. Not sure what to expect, you find a news station and settle into a chair nearby. Your son comes running in, your parents close behind. Seeing the anxious look on your face, they move quietly to the other chairs in the room while your son sits on the floor and plays with a toy car. Again, in breaking news, the United States Supreme Court has announced its unanimous decision in the public school segregation cases today.

Chief Justice Earl Warren has put the stamp of unconstitutionality on segregated schools in 21 states and the District of Columbia, including right here in Maryland. In the field of public education, the court declared, the doctrine of separate but equal has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. You look across the room at your parents in a stunned silence. Before any of you can put words to what you're feeling, the phone rings again. You get up and reach for the receiver. Hello? Clara, did you hear it? It's wonderful.

We heard. I just, I can't believe it. Tell Mama and Daddy we're coming over. We'll be there soon. You place the phone back in the cradle and look back to your parents. They're standing now, hugging each other. They look at you, each with a quiet, tearful smile. And all three of you look down at your son, playing quietly with his toys. He just inherited a very different future. News of the Court's May 1954 decision was like a shot of adrenaline to civil rights activists throughout the nation. It was perhaps the most important

blow to date against the forces that kept prejudice and inequality so deeply entrenched in the United States. Jim Crow's solid legal footing had slipped, and millions of Black Americans now felt new hope for the future. In New York City, the NAACP's attorneys were ecstatic. At the legal team's offices, lawyers and activists gathered for a well-deserved night of celebration. They knew they were part of something historic. Attorney Constance Baker Motley described the excitement of that night. It was bedlam. The party went on most of the night. I remember being there when the clock struck 3.30 a.m. Becoming a part of history is a special experience,

reserved for only a few. It's like earning a law degree or a Ph.D. Nobody can take it away from you. You may be forgotten, but it's like immortality. You'll always be there. As the party went on, however, Thurgood Marshall seemed increasingly worried. He sensed that despite the magnitude of what they had accomplished, their fight was really only beginning. In the months ahead, Marshall's

concerns were proven right. The victory was a worthy cause for celebration, but it wasn't the finish line. The Brown decision had opened up a whole new set of battles that would need to be fought in the years ahead. It would be up to local communities and civil rights lawyers to push forward school integration in town after town throughout the South, and in more than a few northern communities, too. It would be slow, hard, and often dangerous work. After all, the violence that fueled and sustained white supremacy was never far from the surface. The year that followed the Brown v. Board of Education decision

brought a particularly vicious reminder of that fact of life. In that summer of 1955, Jim Crow would strike back with violence. How did Birkenstocks go from a German cobbler's passion project 250 years ago to the Barbie movie today? Who created that bottle of red Sriracha with a green top that's permanently living in your fridge? Did you know that the Air Jordans were initially banned by the NBA? We'll explore all that and more in The Best Idea Yet, a brand new podcast from Wondery and T-Boys. This is Nick. This is Jack.

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ever. Follow The Best Idea Yet on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to The Best Idea Yet early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. In November 1991, media tycoon Robert Maxwell mysteriously vanished from his luxury yacht in the Canary Islands. But it wasn't just his body that would come to the surface in the days that followed. It soon emerged that Robert's business was on the brink of collapse, and behind his facade of wealth and success was a litany of bad investments, mounting debt, and multi-million dollar fraud. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of Wondery Show Business Movers. We tell the true stories of business leaders who risked it all, the critical moments that define their journey,

and the ideas that transform the way we live our lives. In our latest series, a young refugee fleeing the Nazis arrives in Britain determined to make something of his life. Taking the name Robert Maxwell, he builds a publishing and newspaper empire that spans the globe. But ambition eventually curdles into desperation, and Robert's determination to succeed turns into a willingness to do anything to get ahead. Follow Business Movers wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. Imagine you're a young white man in rural Mississippi. It's late August, 1955, and this morning you're walking the banks of the Tallahatchie River, taking a friend to your favorite fishing

hole. It's early, but the heat is already thick, making your shirt stick with sweat as you pick your way along a trail towards the water's edge. Up ahead, you hear voices and a boat's engine. They're going to scare off all the fish if they don't keep that noise down. Come on, let's see if we can't tell them to take it somewhere else. You move a little quicker now and soon reach a clearing. You spot two boats, idling just off the shore. But before you can shout to them, you see the county sheriff standing in a patch of shade on the bank. He's watching the men on

the boats as they scan the muddy brown water. What's the trouble, Sheriff? He looks your way, surprised to see anyone else here. Seems some of the boys out here fishing this morning thought they saw something in the water, so they ran off and called us in. What'd they see? Might be nothing, but they said it looked like a body. Just then, the sheriff's men pull something out of the water. Ah, hell. You all better move along.

You turn back toward the trees. But then one of the boats starts moving toward the bank, dragging a rope behind it. You stop to watch. With the boats now on shore, three of the men have grabbed the rope and are steadily pulling it in, straining a bit with the weight and the slippery footing. After a few moments, you can see what they're pulling up from the river bottom as it slowly comes out of the muck. My God. It's the body of a young boy, dragged feet first from the water. You turn away, but not before the image is burned in your memory. The child's body is beaten and bloated with a gunshot wound

on the right side of his head. His neck is wrapped with barbed wire and tied to a heavy mud-soaked iron fan. The sheriff steps out of the shade

and walks over to the body. He stares briefly. I expect that's the one those Chicago folks have been making all the fuss about. He turns

and spits as he walks back up the riverbank. Guess somebody ought to call the coroner. The body recovered from the Tallahatchie River in August 1955 would quickly be identified as that of Emmett Till. Till was a 14-year-old African-American student from Chicago,

visiting family in rural Mississippi. He had been kidnapped, missing for three days. The discovery of his body confirmed his family's worst fears. Till's abduction and murder had stemmed from an alleged incident at a local store. Though no one knows exactly what happened on the evening of August 24th, witnesses agreed that Till entered the store alone and spoke for only a minute to Carolyn Bryant, the 21-year-old white woman behind the counter inside. Having grown up in Chicago, Till was unfamiliar with the many rules, spoken and unspoken, that regulated interactions between

black men and white women in the South. In their quick exchange, Till supposedly spoke to Bryant in a way that she deemed too familiar or disrespectful. He may also have touched her hand as he gave her the money for his purchase, instead of placing it on the counter as black patrons were generally expected to do. At the time, Bryant insisted that Till had grabbed her waist and put his hands on her waist, but decades later, she would recant those details. By the time Till's cousin entered the store to check on him, things had already become tense. They moved quickly outside.

Shortly after, Bryant exited to retrieve something from her car. But as she went to the vehicle, Till apparently let out a whistle. In the violent climate of Jim Crow, Mississippi, the situation had just become potentially deadly. Immediately, Till's friends hurried him away from the store. They rode home in silence. Nothing happened the next day, but the fear that something terrible might be coming started to build. A young woman who lived near where Till was staying told the boys that she knew Carolyn Brandt's family. They're not just

going to forget what happened, she warned. It was the night of August 27th when Bryant's husband and his half-brother appeared and kidnapped Till at gunpoint. Over the next several hours, the two men tortured their 14-year-old captive before finally delivering the fatal gunshot and dumping his body in the river. They assumed he would never be discovered. As Till's family frantically searched for him, the local sheriff oversaw the gruesome recovery. But Till's body was a problem that the sheriff did not want, so he tried to orchestrate a hasty burial there in Mississippi before too many others could see the extent of the child's injuries. Till's family protested. His mother, 33-year-old Mamie Bradley, insisted that her son be returned home to Chicago for a proper funeral.

Two days later, she met the train from Mississippi that carried his remains. Defying instructions from Mississippi authorities, she insisted that the casket be opened so that she could see her only child one last time. She was so horrified by the sight that she collapsed. In the midst of her grief, however, Bradley made a courageous choice. She hoped that public awareness of the brutality of her son's murder would call attention to the extraordinary violence that African Americans face throughout the South. She told the funeral home director, let the world see what I've seen. It was a painful, heart-rending decision. Bradley held an open casket funeral, allowing news magazines to

publish photographs of her son's body. Though white newspapers refused to carry the images, in the weeks that followed, the evidence of Mississippi's racial brutality appeared on the front pages of Black publications across the United States. The public outcry they created would help ensure that the men who murdered Till faced prosecution. But the trial of Till's killers would ultimately add insult to injury. In late September 1955, just weeks after the funeral, an all-white jury in the town of Summer, Mississippi, hastily acquitted the two men responsible for Till's torture and execution. There would be no justice here. The impact of Till's death echoed across the country. His murder would haunt a generation. For decades afterward, Black children who came of age in the late 1940s and 50s

would describe how that summer and the pictures of Till's body shaped their adolescence. But as Mamie Bradley had intended when she opened her son's casket, his murder also galvanized a new wave of protest. Mothers and fathers, sons and daughters determined to fight the brutality that had cut short Till's life, as it was a threat they all faced. In the wake of the killer's acquittal, Mississippi civil rights activist Dr. T.R.M. Howard began a speaking tour across the country to raise awareness about the violence in his home state. On a November evening in 1955, three days after Thanksgiving, Howard spoke to a large audience in Montgomery, Alabama, the state's capital city and a place that many still call the cradle of the Confederacy.

The text of Howard's speech hasn't survived, but as he described the final hours of Emmett Till's life, the men and women in the church pews were moved and heartbroken. His speech rang in their ears. So did his call to action. They recognized the pain and the passion in Howard's voice. They knew it well. Something had been building in Montgomery over the course of that year, a spirit of protest that was ready to explode.

Four days after Howard's speech, a woman from the audience that night would help launch one of the most significant social justice campaigns in American history. Her name was Rosa Parks. Are you in trouble with the law? Need a lawyer who will fight like hell to keep you out of jail? We defend and we fight just like you'd want your own children defended. Whether you're facing a drug charge, caught up on a murder rap, accused of committing war crimes, look no further than Paul Bergeron. All the big guys go to Bergeron because he gets everybody off.

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that my wife's great-grandmother was murdered in the house next door to where I grew up, I started wondering about the inexplicable things that happened in my childhood bedroom. When I tried to find out more, I discovered that someone who slept in my room after me, someone I'd never met, was visited by the ghost of a faceless woman. So I started digging into the murder in my wife's family, and I unearthed family secrets nobody could have imagined. Ghost Story won Best Documentary Podcast at the 2024 Ambies and is a Best True Crime Nominee at the British Podcast Awards 2024. Ghost Story is now the first ever Apple Podcast Series Essential. Each month, Apple Podcasts editors spotlight one series that

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called and told me the news. It's shameful. Same thing they did to that poor Colvin girl a few months back. Didn't say who it was this time though. I heard from a lady over at the Women's Political Council that it was Mrs. Parks. That woman from the NAACP? Now what in the world did they want to do that for? You know as well as I do they don't need much in the way of reason. You nod. While neither of you has ever faced arrest, you could both trade any number of stories about the insults and embarrassments you've had to put up with on the city buses.

You know that every time you ride, you have to brace yourself for the possibility of something cruel or rude or even violent. The truth is, these rides fill you with a special kind of dread each and every working day. I think they might have bitten off a little more than they can chew this time, though. Vivian hands you the paper she's been clutching. My neighbor gave me this on the way out here.

You start to unfold a small square. They're talking about a boycott on Monday. You really think the folks would go along with that? Honestly, I don't know. The folks are tired of this. I know that much. You really think the folks would go along with that? Honestly, I don't know. The folks are tired of this. I know that much. You're not wrong. You both enter the bus and pay your fare. It's crowded this morning and dozens of people are jammed in the aisles, and every one of them is black. There's hardly any open space at all, except, of course, for the ten empty seats at the front, reserved, as always, for white passengers.

As you start to move in from the door, the driver glares. Where do you think you're going? I paid my fare. You get out and board at the back doors. I don't want you anywhere near me. There isn't any room in the back. Did I ask if there was room? You had better get on out before you make trouble for everybody on this bus. Didn't you hear? We had one of you locked up yesterday. I'd be happy to give her some company. You and Vivian back slowly out the door, trying not to turn around in case this driver is the type to take a swing at you.

You walk quickly to the rear doors, knowing that sometimes the drivers will just take off before you can enter the back. But the doors aren't open when you get there. The bus sits there, idling as you wait. After a moment, you know what he wants. But the idea of it makes you taste bile in the back of your throat. Finally, Vivian swallows hard. Please, mister, we've got to get to work.

The doors open and you squeeze in, jostling two other women. You hear the driver chuckle from the front of the bus as he pulls into the street. You can barely contain your anger. And from the looks on the faces of the women around you, you're not the first ones he's done this to today. But you notice something else as you glance at the people crowded into the aisle. Sure enough, every one of them is clutching a copy of that same piece of paper. Vivian's eyes light up at the aisle. Sure enough, every one of them is clutching a copy of that same piece of paper. Vivian's eyes light up at the sight. Monday might be something special.

Buses were hostile, humiliating, and often violent places in the Jim Crow South. Bus drivers acted with impunity to uphold the customs of white supremacy. Montgomery was no different than most southern cities in that respect. Roughly 25,000 black Montgomery citizens rode the city buses every year. The vast majority had at least one terrible experience with white drivers or riders as a result of discrimination. There were plenty of insults that black passengers faced regularly. Drivers were notorious for throwing change and transfer slips on the floor or refusing to make change at all.

Drivers would pass stops crowded with black passengers, especially on rainy or cold days, or they would hurl insults and epithets at those who didn't move fast enough for their liking. At some point, most black passengers had probably witnessed a fellow rider being manhandled, beaten, or arrested aboard one of the city's yellow monsters, as they had come to be called. And then there were the seats. On every bus, whether there were white passengers or not, the first ten double seats were reserved for whites only. At times, thirty or forty black passengers would be jammed into the aisles while rows of seats stayed empty.

If white passengers did fill the front seats, black riders were expected to stand and move back each time a new white rider boarded. For thousands of black citizens in Montgomery, their daily commute brought humiliating reminders of their second-class status. Despite this long record of mistreatment and some individual examples of resistance on Montgomery's buses, it wasn't until 1955 that the situation reached a boiling point. Things had gotten notably worse since 1954, the year of the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education. White Southerners were reacting harshly to the court's ruling. Black citizens were increasingly restless with the persistence of segregation. The battle on the buses was coming to a head. In March of 1955, police nearly ignited major protests when they arrested a Black high school student named

Claudette Colvin after she refused to give up her seat to a white passenger. Her subsequent conviction had angered many in Montgomery's Black community, but had stopped short of causing public demonstrations. A few months later, in October, 18-year-old Mary Louise Smith was arrested and fined under similar circumstances. After each arrest, Montgomery's Black community grew more frustrated and eager for change. While these arrests served as flashpoints, behind the scenes, a local organization called the Women's Political Council had begun preparing to stage some sort of demonstration to improve conditions on the buses. Led by Joanne Robinson, a professor at nearby Alabama State College, the council had previously tried negotiating with city officials to address some of the more offensive practices of Montgomery's bus drivers. When these efforts failed, the women in the group began laying plans for a mass boycott. The only question left was when. Their opportunity came in early December

with the arrest of 42-year-old Rosa Parks. By 1955, Parks was no stranger to political organizing. Known and respected throughout Montgomery's Black community for her bold commitment to racial justice, Parks had joined the NAACP in the early 40s and had served for several years on the organization's state executive committee. She had fought for an array of causes over the preceding decade. She had publicly championed the rights of African American women who had been assaulted by white men. She had campaigned to register Black voters. She also helped to run the city's NAACP Youth Council, of which Claudette Colvin was an active member.

Even before her protests on the buses, if you were a politically engaged Black citizen of Montgomery in the 1950s, you knew the name of Rosa Parks. Her arrest on December 1, 1955, for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger, quickly became the rallying point that other activists had been searching for. Joanne Robinson and the Women's Political Council sprang into action. Working throughout the night, Robinson and a small team of her students at Alabama State produced more than 50,000 leaflets announcing plans for a one-day boycott to take place on Monday, December 5th, the day that Parks was scheduled to go to court. Robinson's team sped through the city during the morning hours,

dropping bundles of leaflets at schools, storefronts, beauty shops, barbershops, churches, and other meeting places throughout Montgomery's Black neighborhoods. By 2 o'clock that afternoon, practically every Black citizen of Montgomery had learned of the planned demonstration. That same night, Friday, December 2nd, Black ministers in the city called for a meeting to help encourage participation in the boycott and to help organize alternate systems of

transportation for the following Monday. Throughout the weekend, anticipation continued to build. On Monday morning, Black residents who had lived along the bus routes were up before dawn. Eagerly, they watched and waited. And something remarkable started to happen. Thousands of regular commuters called in sick, walked, or shared car rides. The buses stayed empty. The boycott was working. As Joanne Robinson described it,

the power of tens of thousands of Black Southerners united in purpose was unlike anything she had ever experienced. She said, They were really free. Free inside. They felt it. Acted it. Manifested it in their entire beings. The day was an undeniable triumph. That night, 6,000 boycotters overflowed the pews of the Holt Street Baptist Church

while thousands more crowded the streets nearby. The meeting had been scheduled as a way to reflect on the lessons of the day's protest. But now, the crowd called for the boycott to continue. Nobody wanted this feeling to end. As the evening's program rolled along, Holt Street's pastor called forward one of his young colleagues in ministry to address the crowd. Into the pulpit stepped 26-year-old Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

The young scholar and reverend was still unfamiliar to most in the audience. He had been in Montgomery for just over a year, pastoring a relatively small congregation of a few hundred people at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. Earlier that evening, a planning committee made up of many of the city's Black religious and political leaders had selected King to lead the Montgomery Improvement Association. The MIA was organized to negotiate with white city officials and help coordinate any further boycott efforts. King was a consensus choice. He had begun to distinguish himself as a thoughtful and passionate speaker, unburdened by any personal conflicts with other Black leaders.

Not that there was a lot of competition for the role. After all, despite the success that day, no one was really sure whether a protest like this could last much longer or if it could force real change. From the pulpit at Holt Street that night, King began slowly, speaking of the serious business that they were there to conduct. With a few hastily scrawled notes as his guide, the young preacher built the crowd's enthusiasm to new heights. The rhythm and run that would make his speeches famous in the years ahead brought shouts and explosions of applause from the thousands who had assembled. And as he was reaching his conclusion, he told the men and women there that night something that they had already begun to suspect,

that theirs was a fight that would be remembered. Let us go out with a grim and bold determination that we are going to stick together. We are going to work together, right here in Montgomery. When the history books are written in the future, somebody will have to say, there lived a race of people, a black people, a people who had the moral courage to stand up for their rights, and thereby they injected a new meaning

into the veins of history and of civilization. The crowd decided to continue the boycott indefinitely. Fueled by the sacrifice and meticulous organization of hundreds of community members and the steady contributions of Montgomery's Black women, the buses stayed empty. Weeks passed, then months. Before long, the boycott had lasted a whole year. Along the way, the protesters faced heckling, arrests, intimidation, constant pressure. But the movement held its course. An unyielding resolve had set in. They had to see this through,

for themselves and for other communities like theirs. It seemed like the whole nation was watching. Finally, after 13 grueling months of protest, victory came. A U.S. Supreme Court ruling in a case brought by Claudette Colvin and three other Black women in Montgomery affirmed that the buses should be desegregated. White city leaders grudgingly gave in. Shortly before Christmas 1956, Black citizens of Montgomery began returning to the bus stops. One after another, they paid their fares and

settled into seats in the front rows. But their fight had been about much more than seating arrangements. As one leader described it, this had been about seizing a new sense of dignity and destiny. And they had won. The victory in Alabama stood as one of the most remarkable examples of an idea that was taking root in more and more communities. The end of Jim Crow might not be generations away. Maybe it could happen right here and right now. That possibility was tantalizing. It helped inspire new, audacious hopes of what the future might hold. But the road ahead was a rocky one. Jim Crow wasn't going down without a fight. On the next episode of American History Tellers, the segregationist strategy of massive resistance hands the growing civil rights movement some of its toughest challenges yet. In Little Rock and

Prince Edward County, communities will fight to implement the Brown decision and eliminate separate but equal schools. And before you go, tell us about yourself by Jenny Lauer, produced by George Lavender. Our executive producer is Marshall Louis, created by Hernán López for Wondery. For more than two centuries, the White House has been the stage for some of the most dramatic scenes in American history. Inspired by the hit podcast American History Tellers, Wondery and William Morrow present the new book, The Hidden History of the White House. Each chapter will bring you inside the fierce power struggles, the world-altering decisions, and shocking scandals that have shaped our nation. You'll be there when the very foundations of the White House are laid in 1792,

and you'll watch as the British burn it down in 1814. Then you'll hear the intimate conversations between FDR and Winston Churchill as they make plans to defeat Nazi forces in 1941. And you'll be in the Situation Room when President Barack Obama approves the raid to bring down the most infamous terrorist in American history.

Order The Hidden History of the White House now in hardcover or digital edition, wherever you get your books.