None of this was unusual. Daily, all across the South, black women
surrendered their seats to demanding whites. Although most of them did it
without complaint, the arrest of an obstructionist was entirely within
the framework of local laws and in itself was not a noteworthy event.
However, the arrest of Mrs. Parks touched off a chain reaction within
Montgomery's Afro-American community. If she had been a troublemaker, the
community might have thought that she had only received what she
deserved. On the contrary, its citizens viewed her as an innocent,
hardworking woman who had been mistreated. Her humiliation became their
own.

Spontaneous protest meetings occurred all across Montgomery, and the idea
of retaliating against the entire system by conducting a bus boycott took
hold. Almost immediately, the call for a black boycott of Montgomery
buses spread throughout the community, and car pools were quickly
organized to help people in getting to and from their employment. Whites
refused to believe that the black community could either organize or
sustain such a campaign. Nevertheless, Montgomery buses were running
half empty and all white.

The man chosen to lead the Montgomery bus boycott was a young Baptist
minister named Martin Luther King, Jr. He and ninety others were indicted
under the provisions of an anti-union law which made it illegal to
conspire to obstruct the operation of a business. King and several others
were found guilty, but they appealed their case. As the boycott dragged
on month after month, Montgomery gained national prominence through the
mass media, and King quickly gained a national reputation. When the bus
company was finally compelled to capitulate and to drop its policy of
segregated seating, King had become a national hero. Mass resistance,
including some forms of civil disobedience, became popular as the best
way to achieve racial change.

King had already given considerable thought to the question of how best
to achieve social change, and, more important, to do it within the
framework of moral law. His experiences with direct action techniques in
Montgomery helped him to confirm and to further elaborate his thinking.
His philosophy had been influenced by the writings of Henry Thoreau and
Mahatma Gandhi with the result that he developed an ideology of
nonviolent resistance. Like Gandhi, King wanted to make clear that
nonviolence was not the same as nonresistance. Both maintained that if