Successful Boycott
What was expected to be a short boycott lasted 381 days. Despite fierce political opposition, police coercion, personal threats and their own sacrifices, the blacks of Montgomery held the boycott held. Bus ridership plummeted, and the bus company was on the verge of financial ruin. On February 1, 1956, a bomb exploded in front of Nixon's home. In the meantime, the court challenge worked its way through the court system until it reached the United States Supreme Court. Following the Supreme Court decision that Montgomery's segregation policy was unconstitutional, the organizers ended the boycott.
Nixon talked about the symbolism of the boycott to an audience of supporters at New York City's Madison Square Garden:
"I'm from Montgomery, Alabama, a city that's known as the 'Cradle of the Confederacy', that had stood still for more than ninety-three years until Rosa L. Parks was arrested and thrown in jail like a common criminal. Fifty thousand people rose up and caught hold to the Cradle of the Confederacy and began to rock it till the 'Jim Crow' rockers began to reel and the segregated slats began to fall out."
Read more about this topic: Edgar Nixon
Famous quotes containing the words successful and/or boycott:
“In the first place, all books that get fairly into the vital air of the world were written by the successful class, by the affirming and advancing class, who utter what tens of thousands feel though they cannot say.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Take away from the courts, if it could be taken away, the power to issue injunctions in labor disputes, and it would create a privileged class among the laborers and save the lawless among their number from a most needful remedy available to all men for the protection of their business interests against unlawful invasion.... The secondary boycott is an instrument of tyranny, and ought not to be made legitimate.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)