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Martin luther king,jr.


The 'turn the other cheek' philosophy and 'love your enemies' philosophy were only valid, I felt, when individuals were in conflict with other individuals. When racial groups and nations were in conflict a more realistic approach seemed necessary. But after reading Gandhi, I saw how utterly mistaken I was. .
             On December 5, 1955, after a Civil Rights activist Rosa Parks refused to comply with Montgomery's segregation policy on buses, the Black residents launched a bus boycott and elected King president of the newly-formed Montgomery Improvement Association. The boycott continued throughout 1956 and King gained a national prominence for his role in the campaign. In December 1956 the U.S. Supreme Court declared by 9 to 0 ruling Alabama's segregation laws unconstitutional and Montgomery buses were desegregated. The roots of the bus boycott in Montgomery began years before Rosa Parks' arrest. The Women's Political Council (WPC), a group of Black professionals founded in 1946, had turned their attention to Jim Crow practices on the Montgomery city buses in 1953. In a meeting with Mayor W.A. Gayle in March 1954, the Council's members outlined their wishes: a city law that would make it possible for blacks to sit from back toward front and whites from front toward back until the bus was filled, a decree that black individuals not be made to pay at the front of the bus but go to the rear to enter, and a promise that buses stop at every corner in black residential areas as they did in white communities. When little resulted from this meeting, WPC's President Jo Ann Robinson reiterated the Council's requests in a May 21 letter to Mayor Gayle, asking him, "Please consider this plan, and if possible, act favorably upon it, for even now plans are being made to ride less, or not at all, on our buses." jjjjjOn December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to move after the bus driver demanded that she give her seat to a white man, resulting in her arrest.


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