Black taxi drivers helped fuel the Montgomery Bus Boycott, even as they faced arrests and police pressure

• The Montgomery Bus Boycott began in December 1955 after Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat.
• Black taxi drivers provided alternative transportation for thousands of boycotters.

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was commuting home from her job as a seamstress on a bus when the driver asked her to vacate her seat for a white rider. Parks' refusal to do so sparked one of the seminal moments of the civil rights movement.

Within days, calls for a boycott spread throughout Montgomery. The Montgomery Bus Boycott not only catapulted figures like Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. to national fame, but also galvanized the city's African American community to action.

Black-owned newspapers and church ministers spread the news of the boycott. On December 5, around 40,000 Black bus riders — representing at least 75% of Montgomery's bus ridership — refused to take the bus, delivering a critical blow to the city's transportation system.

"We came to see that, in the long run, it is more honorable to walk in dignity than ride in humiliation," King said when he announced the end of the boycott, a year later, on December 20, 1956.

Without the help of Black taxi drivers, the boycott would have been severely hampered.

A need for alternative transportation

After recognizing the resounding success of the boycott's first day, Black leaders met to discuss how they could continue the boycott until the city met their demands to end busing segregation laws.

The organizers knew that to continue the boycott, they would need alternative transportation. Montgomery's Black-owned taxi companies, which operated a total of around 210 cabs, volunteered to lower their fares to just 10 cents, so passengers paid the same as they would for a bus ride.

The city's bus system felt the squeeze, losing 30,000 to 40,000 bus fares daily.

"Without the automobile, the bus boycott in Montgomery would not have been possible," Gretchen Sorin, author of "Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights," told Smithsonian Magazine.

Facing police pressure

In the face of the mounting boycott, Montgomery police instituted a minimum fare law and even arrested taxi drivers who helped the city's Black residents. In 1956, King was arrested and jailed for driving 30 miles per hour in a 25 miles per hour zone.

The city also pressured car insurance companies to revoke or refuse insurance to Black car owners, according to the National Archives.

But Black organizers refused to cave to the pressure. Protestors simply chose to walk to places and organized carpools. More than 200 people volunteered their cars to stop between roughly 100 pickup stations throughout the city, according to the National Park Service.

In his diary, civil rights leader Bayard Rustin remembered speaking with men who walked as much as 14 miles every day in honor of the boycott, and reflected on the Black drivers who helped keep the city moving.

"I wondered what the response of the drivers would be, since 28 of them had just been arrested on charges of conspiring to destroy the bus company," Rustin wrote in his diary. "One by one, they pledged that, if necessary, they would be arrested again and again."

On June 5, 1956, a Montgomery federal court ruled that laws requiring racial segregation on buses violated the 14th Amendment. Six months later on December 21, Montgomery's buses were integrated.