The Boycott Begins

The timeline above, provided by Timeline JS from Knight Lab, contains key events during the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott and Georgia Gilmore’s participation in the movement. The timeline does not represent an exhaustive list of occurrences, instead; it offers a general overview.

Chapter 6, section 10 of the Montgomery city code required the separation of races on Montgomery city bus lines. The law allotted bus drivers the power to assign passengers to seats on the vehicle to maintain the separation from blacks and whites. Section 11 granted bus driver’s power equal to that of a Montgomery city police officer while they operated the bus. The code also made any refusal to take the seat assigned by the bus driver unlawful. When Montgomery police arrested Claudette Colvin, Mary Louise Smith, Aurelia Browder, and Rosa Parks, these were the codes the women defied.

The city code ordered black Montgomerians to sit in the back of public buses under the guise of “separate but equal.” However, black residents often faced unequal treatment while riding the bus. The law partitioned Montgomery buses into two equal segments: whites at the front and blacks at the back of the bus. In the theory, the middle of the bus became the limit if patrons inhabited all seats at the back of the bus. But in reality, when whites boarded the bus and the white section reached capacity, the bus driver extended the white section toward the back of the bus. Bus drivers forced black patrons to stand in the back if there were no seats available in the black section, even if seats in the white section were vacant. Black residents riding the bus were often told to relinquish their seats for white bus riders and faced harsh treatment while trying to commute to and from work. Instances of drivers calling black riders derogatory names, refusing to give black passengers change, and forcing them to enter from the back door of the bus were common in Montgomery.

Bus drivers physically assaulted black passengers or risked hurting them as they pulled off while black riders attempted to find a seat, or while they were exiting the bus. Martha Walker testified to her mistreatment during the State of Alabama v. M. L. King, Jr. trial in 1956. While Mrs. Walker helped her blind husband off the bus, the driver slammed the door shut on her husband’s right foot and drove away, dragging Mr. Walker before he managed to get his foot free. Black women faced an additional burden while riding the city buses as women. Bus drivers called African American women gendered derogatory names such as “heifer” and frequently cursed them. Public transportation provided an opportunity for white men to humiliate and assault Black women in a display of power that reinforced white male supremacy. As a group that depended on public transportation, the black working-class faced the brunt of the discrimination faced on Montgomery city buses. Black working-class women felt the sting of abuse and discrimination even more as a demographic that often “lived in a white-dominant world” (Edge, 17).

Most Black women worked as domestic workers as maids and cooks during Jim Crow. The nature of domestic work required African American women to commute from black neighborhoods to the white neighborhoods of Montgomery, like Cloverdale and the Garden District. Black working-class women comprised a bulk of the patrons of the Montgomery bus lines and faced the volatile atmosphere of public transportation in the Jim Crow South. These spaces became “a terrain of class, race, and gender conflict” where the black working-class experienced embarrassing interactions as they tried to move through white-dominated spaces (Kelley, 75). The complaints of profanity and verbal abuse leveled at black women led the Women’s Political Council (WPC) to file a complaint to the mayor, W. A. Gayle in 1954. The refusal to keep quiet about the abuse showcased how Black domestic workers used their voices and stories to challenge the daily humiliation and assaults they faced on city buses. Black working-class women also challenged their mistreatment directly. Almost a few years before the arrest of Rosa Parks and the official start of the Montgomery bus boycott, Georgia Gilmore stopped riding the bus. As a cook in the downtown restaurant, the National Lunch Company, Gilmore relied on public transportation to commute to and from work. However, in October 1954, a bus driver forced Gilmore to board the bus from the back door and drove off when she stepped off to enter from the rear. After the incident, Gilmore walked rather than face the humiliation of riding the bus.

Black residents listened to the radio as they announced the first mass meeting of the newly formed Montgomery Improvement Association, an organization composed of local black ministers and community leaders to guide the boycott at 7 o’clock on December 5,1955. Roughly 5,000 African Americans crowded into the church and more listened to a mounted loudspeaker in the church parking lot to hear the speeches. The speech, given by the twenty-six-year-old Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., called upon black Montgomerians to unify against discrimination (listen to the Holt Street Address here). Arriving almost two hours early to the meeting, Georgia Gilmore sat ready to listen and participate in the historic moment. At the first mass meeting, Gilmore collected $14 to buy chicken, lettuce, and white bread to prepare a basket of fried chicken sandwiches. Gilmore and her friends sold chicken sandwiches in the parking lot and on the front steps of Holt Street Baptist Church at the next mass meeting. When the MIA extended the boycott and created an alternative transportation system, headed by Rufus Lewis, Gilmore provided needed funding for the organization. Meeting after meeting, Gilmore sold sandwiches to meeting attendees and collected the money to funnel into the MIA. She believed in the mission of the MIA and wanted to contribute to the movement the best way she knew, through cooking.

Sources

• Edge, John T. The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South. New York: Penguin Books, 2017.

• Edge, John T. “The Welcome Table.” Oxford American (2000). http://www.npr.org/programs/morning/features/hiddenkitchens/stories/week13/edgearticle.pdf

• Kelley, Robin D. G. Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class. New York: Free Press, 1994.

• McGuire, Danielle L. At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance--A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010.

• Nadasen, Premilla. Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built A Movement. Boston: Beacon Press, 2015.

• Nokow, Julie. “Segregation (Jim Crow).”The Encyclopedia of Alabama. 14 November 2019. http://encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/h-1248

• “Section of the city code of Montgomery, Alabama, requiring segregation on buses.”1952. Alabama Department of Archives and History.

• Transcript, State of Alabama v. M. L. King, Jr., No. 7399 (Court of Appeals of Alabama, 1956), pp. 482-507

• Wilson, Kurt H. “Interpreting the Discursive Field of the Montgomery Bus Boycott: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Holt Street Address,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 8, no. 2 (2005): 299–326.