Montgomery

Explain Rosa Parks and the boycott, and locate Montgomery.

Warm-up, learn, try it together, practice, then a quick check. About 15 minutes.

What children learn in Level 70

Find Montgomery, Alabama, just west of Georgia. In 1955, its city buses made Black riders sit in the back, and give up seats to white riders.
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a seamstress and longtime NAACP activist, refused to give up a seat. Parks was arrested.
Black citizens of Montgomery decided to stop riding the buses. A boycott is refusing to buy or use something as a protest. They chose a young pastor to guide them: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who was only 26.
For more than a year, people walked miles to work, and shared rides, in rain and heat. Their leaders' homes were bombed, and they kept going. The bus company lost most of its riders.
In 1956, the Supreme Court ruled that segregated buses were against the Constitution. Everyday people, working together, had won.

Georgia Standards of Excellence in Social Studies:

SS5H6.b — Explain the key events and people of the Civil Rights movement: Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Montgomery Bus Boycott, the March on Washington, Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, and civil rights activities of Thurgood Marshall, Lyndon B. Johnson, Cesar Chavez, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King, Jr.
SS5G1.a — Locate important man-made places; include the Chisholm Trail; Pittsburgh, PA; Kitty Hawk, NC; Pearl Harbor, HI; Montgomery, AL.; and Chicago, IL.