1. Warm-up:
“The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.” Explain what Martin Luther King, Jr. meant by this quote?

2. The Movement

3. Montgomery, Alabama
December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks got on a bus to ride home
When the driver asked 4 blacks to move to the back to make seats for a group of whites that got on, Parks refused and was arrested
NAACP and churches asked blacks to boycott the busses in Montgomery
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr told them “we’re tired of being segregated and humiliated”
King and other leaders faced death threats, bombings, and jailings
Boycott lasted 13 months and cost bus company $$$$$$

4. Results of Bus Boycott Ended segregation on Montgomery busses
Supreme Court eventually declared bus segregation illegal
Now blacks could sit anywhere they wanted on busses
Led to the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)
Coordinated nonviolent civil rights protests all over the South
Boycott made Martin Luther King, Jr. national figure in civil rights movement
The boycott introduced a new generation of African American leaders

5. Little Rock, Arkansas Massive resistance threatened school segregation
After Brown case, Little Rock school board planned to integrate
9 black students sent to Central High School in September 1957…The Little Rock Nine
Segregationists tried to stop them
Governor Orval Faubus called in National Guard to prevent the students from entering school
After3 weeks, President Eisenhower ordered the 101st Airborne Division to protect the students as they went to school

6. New Orleans, Louisiana
November 1960, Ruby Bridges, a 6 year old African American, was ordered by a federal judge to be one of the first elementary students to be integrated into the public school system in New Orleans
She met with yelling, heckling and discrimination but kept going
White parents pulled their kids out of the school
Ruby finished first grade with only herself and the teacher in the classroom
When she began second grade a year later, her experience was much different, with many other African Americans enrolled in the school as well