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Black History Month: Five major events and figures

Black History Month is the annual celebration of the struggles, achievements and overall contribution African-Americans have made to the US.

4. The Montgomery Bus Boycott

  • By Michail Vafeiadis Contributor

Rosa Parks’ refusal to surrender her bus seat to a white passenger and her ensuing arrest and $10 fine in December 1955 was the spark that ignited the mass boycott of Montgomery’s public transit system by African-Americans.  

The next day, the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) was formed, aiming to continue the boycott under the guidance of a young minister, Martin Luther King, Jr.

Montgomery’s busing system at the time mandated that whites take the seats in the front rows and African-Americans occupy the rear rows.  Ultimately, when the two sections would meet, the black people sitting nearest to the front were required by law to get up and make space for white passengers. 

The boycott developed into a crippling financial burden for the city, since African Americans constituted “at least 75 percent of the bus ridership,” according to History.com.  

Eventually, on November 13, 1956, the US Supreme Court ruled that the state’s busing segregation laws were unconstitutional.    

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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