Exhilarated by the boycott and increasingly alienated from the conservative complacency of Wall Street, she gravitated toward a commitment to full-time activism, accepting a CORE field secretary position in the fall of 1960. According to Raymond Arsenault: "During the late 1950s she (Hughes) became active in the local chapter of CORE, eventually helping to rejuvenate the chapter by co-ordinating a boycott of dime stores affiliated with chains resisting the sit-in movement in the South. James Farmer became national director of CORE and in 1960 Genevieve Hughes was appointed as a field secretary. Transport segregation continued in the Deep South, so the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) began to develop strategies to bring it to an end. Martin Luther King toured the country making speeches urging other groups to take up the struggle against segregation, to spread the "Montgomery experience" across the South". Eventually, the loss of revenue and a decision by the Supreme Court forced the Montgomery Bus Company to accept integration. (2)įor thirteen months the 17,000 black people in Montgomery walked to work or obtained lifts from the small car-owning black population of the city. Others involved in the Montgomery Bus Boycott also suffered from harassment and intimidation, but the protest continued. King was arrested and his house was fire-bombed. It was decided that black people in Montgomery would refuse to use the buses until passengers were completely integrated. After her arrest, Martin Luther King, a pastor at the local Baptist Church, helped organize protests against bus segregation. On 1st December, 1955, Rosa Parks, a middle-aged tailor's assistant from Montgomery, Alabama, who was tired after a hard day's work, refused to give up her seat to a white man. (1)Īfrican American people who disobeyed the state's transport segregation policies were arrested and fined. This usually involved whites sitting in the front and blacks sitting nearest to the front had to give up their seats to any whites that were standing. However, states in the Deep South continued their own policy of transport segregation. This was followed in 1954 by a similar judgment concerning inter-state buses. In 1952 segregation on inter-state railways was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. In the 1950s the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People was involved in the struggle to end segregation on buses and trains.
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