The Brown decision demonstrated that the litigation strategy of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) could undermine the legal foundations of southern segregationist practices, but the strategy worked only when blacks, acting individually or in small groups, assumed the risk associated with crossing. racial barriers.
Thus, even after the Supreme Court declared that public school segregation was unconstitutional, black activism was necessary to compel the federal government to implement the decision and extend its principles to all areas of public life rather than simply in schools.
During the 1950s and 1960s, therefore, NAACP-sponsored legal suits and legislative lobbying were supplemented by an increasingly massive and militant social movement seeking a broad range of social changes.
Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the initial phase of black protest activity in the post-Brown period began on December 1, 1955.
Rosa Parks of Montgomery, Alabama, refused to give up her seat to a white bus rider, there by defying a southern custom that required blacks to give seats toward the front of buses to whites.
When she was jailed, a black community boycott of the city's buses began. The boycott lasted more than a year, demonstrating the unity and determination of black residents and inspiring blacks elsewhere
Martin Luther King, Jr., who emerged as the boycott movement's most efective leader, possessed unique conciliatory and oratorical skills.
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He understood the larger significance of the boycott and quickly realized that the nonviolent tactics used by the Indian nationalist Mahatma Gandhi could be used by southern black.
"I had come to see early that the Christian doctrine of love operating through the Gandhian method of non-violence was one of the most potent weapons available to the Negro in his struggle for freedom," he explained.
Although Parks and King were members of the NAACP, the Montgomery movement led to the creation in 1957 of a new regional organization, the clergy-led Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) with King as its president.
(Diadaptasi dari www.history.com)