2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: Imagine if our civil rights champions had the same disdain for pragmatism as some BS supporters have [View all]Empowerer
(3,900 posts)The Montgomery Bus Boycott was part of a larger strategy that was carefully crafted by the local NAACP. It was not organic.
Rosa Parks was the Secretary of the local NAACP chapter, which was looking for an opportunity to attack the city's bus segregation laws. She was not the first person arrested for violating the city's segregation laws. Several people had been arrested prior, but for various strategic and, yes, pragmatic reasons, the NAACP decided not to make test cases out of their arrests. Another woman was arrested shortly before Mrs. Parks, but the NAACP opted not to build anything on her arrest because she was an unwed mother and would not have been seen as a sympathetic victim. Mrs. Parks was ideal because she had an impeccable reputation. So when she was arrested, it was decided to make her arrest the test case.
And, were you aware that the only reason the bus boycott prevailed was because of the precedent set in Brown v. Board of Education - which was the result of the decades-long, incremental jurisprudence crafted by Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall, who knew that it would be impossible to launch a wholesale frontal attack on separate but equal in the 1930s, so they instead mounted a gradual challenge that eventually grew into Brown.
And were you also aware that even the victory of the bus boycott was an incremental one. The city agreed - and the boycotters, led by Dr. King accepted - to desegregate the buses only to limited extend. The buses actually remained partially segregated, with blacks filling up the seats from the back to the front and whites filling the seats up from the front to the back. Only when the black section was full could blacks begin taking seats in the front, if there were any available - and vice versa. This was clearly an incremental change, not a full victory, but the boycotters saw this as a great victory, even though it did not result in complete desegregation immediately.