Brown, Montgomery and the early civil rights movement
Resistance to Brown and the Little Rock Crisis
The Supreme Court’s Brown ruling of 1954 did not automatically desegregate American schools. The follow-up ruling, Brown II (1955), only required desegregation to proceed with “all deliberate speed” — a phrase Southern states exploited to delay. The most dramatic confrontation came in September 1957 at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Nine Black students, later known as the Little Rock Nine, attempted to enrol. Governor Orval Faubus called out the National Guard to block them. President Eisenhower, though personally reluctant to intervene, could not allow a state governor to defy a federal court order. He sent 1,000 soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division to escort the students inside.
In September 1957, nine Black students tried to enter Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Governor Faubus used the National Guard to block them. President Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne to escort them in — the first use of federal troops to enforce civil rights in the South since Reconstruction.
The Montgomery Bus Boycott 1955–1956
On 1 December 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a segregated Montgomery, Alabama bus and was arrested. She was not simply a tired seamstress — Parks was a trained NAACP activist who had attended civil rights workshops at the Highlander Folk School. Her arrest was chosen by the NAACP as a legal test case precisely because Parks was an ideal plaintiff: dignified, educated and without a compromising personal history.
The Black community of Montgomery responded with a boycott of the city’s buses that lasted 381 days. The economic impact was significant: African Americans made up about 75% of bus passengers. A young Baptist minister, Martin Luther King Jr, emerged as the spokesman for the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA). His oratorical skill and philosophy of non-violent resistance made him a national figure. In November 1956, the Supreme Court ruled in Browder v Gayle that bus segregation was unconstitutional. The boycott had succeeded.
Three organisations shaped the early civil rights movement. The SCLC — Southern Christian Leadership Conference — was founded in 1957 by King and other Black ministers. It used the Black church network as its organisational base and King’s philosophy of non-violent direct action as its method. The NAACP continued its legal work and lobbying. In April 1960, younger activists — many inspired by the Greensboro sit-ins of February 1960, when four Black students sat at a whites-only lunch counter at Woolworth’s — founded the SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee). Ella Baker, who had worked for both the NAACP and SCLC, helped organise the founding meeting and encouraged the student activists to maintain their independence.
The Role of Emmett Till
Before the Montgomery boycott, a single murder illustrated the extreme violence underpinning Southern segregation. In August 1955, Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black teenager from Chicago visiting relatives in Mississippi, was abducted, tortured and murdered by two white men who claimed he had ‘offended’ a white woman. His killers were acquitted by an all-white jury in 67 minutes. Till’s mother, Mamie Till, insisted on an open-casket funeral so the world could see what had been done to her son. Photographs of his body were published in Jet magazine and shocked Black America. Rosa Parks later said that when she refused to give up her seat, she was thinking of Emmett Till.
King drew on the teachings of Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi as well as the Sermon on the Mount. He argued that non-violent direct action accomplished two things simultaneously: it demonstrated the moral superiority of the civil rights movement by refusing to respond to violence with violence; and it forced authorities into a position where, if they used violence against peaceful protesters, they would reveal their own brutality to a watching nation. This tactic would reach its fullest expression in Birmingham in 1963. Non-violence was a deliberate strategic choice as well as a moral one, not simply a passive response.
Rosa Parks was a trained NAACP activist, not simply a tired worker who refused to move. Her arrest in December 1955 was used as a deliberate legal test case because she was a composed, respectable plaintiff whose case would attract maximum public support.