3. Strain, Christopher Barry. “Civil Rights and ... - Freedom Archives

expressed an urge to "give as good as we get." Z 81ack community leaders such as E. D.
Nixon and Jo Ann Robinson realized that they had to act quickly and proactively to
capitalize on the situation and to prevent bloodshed.3 To avert violent retaliation by local
blacks, and to maintain resolution in the face of white disapproval, they agreed to endorse
a boycott on Monday, December 5 . Local blacks would decline to ride the city's buses
for one day: an action that would grow into an extended, nonviolent protest lasting over a
year. Over the span of a weekend, Parks, already a respected figure within the black
community of Montgomery, became a symbol of the years of injustice and indignity
blacks had suffered there, and her friends and neighbors rallied to her cause .
Like an insect trapped in amber, Montgomery was a place entombed by its past .
Known as the "Cradle of the Confederacy," it was the capital of Alabama and, on
February 4, 1861, the birthplace of the Confederate States of America. The city boasted
not only a large livestock market but also diversified industry, which developed after the
Civil War . It also served as marketing center for the region's fertile, black-soil farms .
But one-crop farming and sharecropping had brought poverty to Montgomery and its
ZStephen Oates, i.et the Trumy~t Sound : The Life of Martin Luther Kin, (New
York: Harper and Row, 1982), 65 .
3E . D. Nixon was a civil rights activist and former Pullman car porter who
founded not only the Montgomery branch of the NAACP in 1928 but also the local
chapter of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in 1938 . Jo Ann Robinson was an
English professor at Alabama State and stalwart of the Women's Political Council . Both
played key roles in organizing the Montgomery Improvement Association, as did Ralph
David Abernathy, pastor of the First Baptist Church . Abernathy, who would baome
King's closest personal friend in the movement, was antsted nineteen times with King
between 1955 and 1%8 . For brief biographical sketches, see Ralph E. Luker, Historical
Dictionary of the Civil R~ahts Movement, Historical Dictionaries of Religions,
Philosophies, and Movements, No. 11(Lanham, Md . : Scarecrow Press, 1997) .
3