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"Our leaders is just we ourself."

-- Claudette Colvin, sixteen, Montgomery federal court, May 11, 1956

On the morning of December 5, 1955, the black citizens of Montgomery, Alabama, inaugurated a year-long boycott of the racially segregated city buses. That afternoon, the boycott leaders elected Martin Luther King Jr., twenty-sixyear-old pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, as president of the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), which they formed to direct the protest. Although King did not start the bus boycott, he grasped its significance at once. Chosen more bec...

Posted by: Arianna Escobar

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