Why did the Montgomery bus boycott happen?

Answer 1

The Montgomery bus boycott was caused when Rosa Parks, an African American woman, refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man. Because she refused, police came and arrested her. Soon after, Martin Luther King Jr. led a boycott against the public transportation system because it was unfair. Eventually the issue was brought to the supreme court and racial segregation on buses was deemed unconstotutional. Soon after,King was seen sharing a bus seat with Rev. Glen Smiley, a white man.

Answer 2

The trigger event was the arrest of the black woman Rosa Parks for refusing to give up her seat on the bus to a white man. In a later interview, Rosa Parks said:
I did not want to be mistreated, I did not want to be deprived of a seat that I had paid for. It was just time... The more we gave in, the more we complied with that kind of treatment, the more oppressive it became. Apparently others felt the same. The night Rosa Parks was arrested, this flyer went out to the black community:
Another woman has been arrested and thrown in jail because she refused to get up out of her seat on the bus for a white person to sit down... This has to be stopped. Negroes have rights too, for if Negroes did not ride the buses, they could not operate... We are, therefore, asking every Negro to stay off the buses Monday in protest of the arrest and trial.
A church meeting the next day, led by Martin Luther King, proposed a citywide boycott of public transport. Enough blacks were fed up for the boycott to be a success; the public transport system lost so many passengers it came in serious economic trouble.

The White Citizen's Council fought back by firebombing the house of Martin Luther King and several black churches, and arrested 156 boycotters for "hindering" the buses, among them King who was sentenced to more than a year in jail. This brought nationwide attention, and the Supreme Court eventually ruled that the racial segregation laws were unconstitutional.

As for "why" compressed to a couple of sentences: Obviously because blacks didn't like being second-class citizens, and because there had been other civil rights protests elsewhere, enough to give the feeling that they didn't necessarily have to accept it. As Rosa put it, "it was just time...".

See related links.

Answer 3

Rosa Parks