To the 50,000 Negroes of Montgomery, Ala., the week dawned (as one of them put it) "darker than a thousand midnights." For more than eleven months, in a mass movement combining Christian fervor with Gandhi-like passive resistance, they had mounted and sustained in the "Cradle of the Confederacy" an almost total boycott of the city's segregated buses (TIME, April 2 ). Led by a handful of well-educated and young Negro leaders—notably by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., 27, pastor of a local Baptist church—they had efficiently put together and operated a car pool of some 200...
To continue reading:
or
Log-In
