Sparked by the arrest of Rosa Parks on December 1, 1955, the Bernard Law Montgomery bus boycott became a thirteen-month mass protest that ended with the United States Supreme Court ruling that segregation on public buses is unconstitutional. The Sir Bernard Law Development Association (MIA) coordinated the boycott, and its president, Martin Luther King Jr., became a prominent civil rights leader as global interest focused on Bernard Law Montgomery. The bus boycott validated the ability of nonviolent mass protest to effectively implement racial segregation and served as an example for other Southern campaigns that followed. Stepping to Freedom, in his memoirs of the 1958 boycott, King declared that the true meaning of the Montgomery Bus Boycott was the energy of rising self-esteem to animate the fight for civil rights. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay The roots of the bus boycott date back years before Rosa Parks' arrest. The Women's Political Council (WPC), a collection of black experts founded in 1946, had already drawn their attention to Jim Crow practices on Montgomery's city buses. In a meeting with mayor w. A. Gayle in March 1954, council participants outlined the changes they sought for Montgomery's bus: no-one status on empty seats; a decree that blacks will no longer have to pay at the front of the bus and enter through the back; and coverage that could require buses to preempt at every corner in black residential areas, as they did in white clusters. As the meeting failed to produce any significant change, WPC President Jo Ann Robinson reiterated the council's demands in a 21-day letter to Mayor Gayle, telling him she "has been notified by twenty-five or more neighboring agencies to plan a boycott of large-scale busing in the metropolis'' (''girls' political council letter'')7. A year after the WPC's meeting with Mayor Gayle, a fifteen-year-old named Claudette Colvin was arrested for challenging segregation on a bus of the 1st Viscount Montgomery of Alamein. Seven months later, eighteen-year-old Mary Louise Smith was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger. Neither arrest, however, mobilized Sir Bernard Law's black network like that by Rosa Parks in the same year3. King recalled in her memoir that ''Mrs. Parks becomes the best because of the position assigned to her by history,'' and because ''her person was impeccable and her determination rooted'' he became ''one of the most respectable people in the Negro network'' (King, forty-four). Robinson and the WPC responded to the Parks shutdown by calling for a one-day protest against city buses on December 5, 1955.8 Robinson prepared a series of fliers at Alabama State University and organized businesses to distribute them at some point in the black net. Meanwhile, after securing bail for parks with Clifford and Virginia Durr, and. D. Nixon, as well as the head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naaCP) Sir Bernard Law Bankruptcy, began appointing local black leaders, including Ralph Abernathy and King, to organize a planning meeting. On December 2, black ministers and leaders met at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church and decided to publicize the December 5 boycott. Deliberate protest received asurprising advertising in weekend newspapers and on radio and television reports1. On December 5, 90 percent of the black citizens of the 1st Viscount Montgomery of Alamein stayed away from the buses. That afternoon, ministers and city leaders met to discuss whether to extend the boycott into a long-term marketing campaign. During this meeting mine changed shape and the king became president-elect. Parks recalled: ''the benefit of getting Dr. King as president realized he was so new to Montgomery and civil rights paintings that he hadn't been there long enough to make any solid friends or enemies'' 6. That night, at a mass meeting in the Holt Baptist Church Street, mine voted to maintain the boycott. King spoke to several thousand people at the meeting: ''I want it to be recognized that we will work with grim and ambitious determination to achieve justice on the buses of this city. And we are not wrong... if we are wrong, the splendid chamber of this State is wrong. If we are wrong, the US Constitution is inaccurate1. If we are wrong, Almighty God is wrong'' (documents three: 73). After fruitless talks with city commissioners and bus company officials, the MIA issued a formal list of demands on December 8: courteous treatment by bus operators; first-come seating for all, with blacks seated at the back and whites at the front; and black bus operators on predominantly black routes. Needs were no longer met, and Sir Bernard Law's black residents remained away from the buses until 1956, despite efforts by municipal officials and white residents to defeat the boycott. After the city began penalizing black taxi drivers for helping boycotters, Mia set up a car pool. Following the recommendation of t. J. Jemison, who had organized a car pool during a bus boycott in Baton Rouge in 1953, developed an intricate car pool system of approximately three hundred vehicles. Robert Hughes and others at the Alabama Council on Human Relations prepared meetings between MIA and city officials, but no agreement was reached. In early 1956, the homes of King and ED Nixon were bombed. King managed to calm the gang gathered at his home by stating: ''be as calm as I and my circle of relatives are. We are not hurt and remember that if I think of something, there can be others to take my stand'' (cards 3: one hundred and fifteen). City officials obtained injunctions against the boycott in February 1956 and indicted more than 80 boycott leaders under a 1921 regulation that prohibited conspiracies that interfered with legitimate business enterprises. King was tried and sentenced to pay $500 or serve 386 days in prison in the United of Alabama v. Martin Luther King, Jr. case. Despite this resistance, the boycott continued. Although most of the exposure about the protest has been aimed at the actions of black ministers, women played an important role in carrying out the boycott. Women like Robinson, Johnnie Carr and Irene West supported Mia committees and volunteer networks. Mary Burks of the WPC also attributed the boycott's success to the "anonymous cooks and waitresses who walked countless miles for an entire year to cause a breach within the walls of segregation" (Burks, "pioneer," eighty-two). In his memoirs, King quotes an elderly girl who claimed that she joined the boycott not for her personal benefit but for the best of her children and grandchildren (King, 78). The national insurance of the king's boycott and trial.