In June of 1956, both Martin Luther King, Jr. and A. Philip Randolph were speakers for the Forty-Seventh Annual NAACP Convention in San Francisco. King’s Message for this Occasion was the telling of the Montgomery Bus Boycott which was then in progress. Just Six months earlier, on December 1, 1955, Mrs. Rosa Parks refused to move. The following Monday, December 5, the Minister’s came together across denominational lines at Holt Street Baptist Church.
King relayed to the NAACP Convention that by three o’clock that Montgomery Monday, hundreds of people started assembling in the church. By 7 pm the gathering was estimated at more than five thousand, overflowing into the streets. By the end of the meeting, The Montgomery Improvement Association was born. In organizing the Bus Boycott the Resolution adopted stated that Negro passengers would refuse to ride buses until: there is an improvement in the courtesy extended by the operators; a change in the seating arrangements; and Negro bus operators employed on predominantly Negro lines.
King told the Convention that Montgomery is the story of a handsome little city known as the cradle of the Confederacy. The story of a little town grappling with a new and creative approach to the crisis in race relations. A visitor to Montgomery prior to last December, heard bus operators referring to Negro passengers as “niggers”, “black apes”, and “black cows”. Negro passengers were required to get on at the front door, pay their fare, get off and go to the back door to board the bus. Often the bus rode off with his fare. Negro passengers would stand over unoccupied seats Reserved “whites Only” Section. In the Unreserved Sections, Seats had to be given to Whites or be arrested…