Program Success July 2014 | Page 12

The Challenge to Social Segregation By the time of the Little Rock incident , the nation had already become aware of the heightened struggle in the South . In 1955 blacks in Montgomery , Ala ., organized a boycott of city buses in protest of the policy of segregated seating . Initiated by Rosa Parks ' refusal to give up her seat on a bus , the boycott lasted 3 81 days ; it succeeded in integrating the seating . It also led to the formation in 1957 of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference ( SCLC ), in Atlanta , Ga . This was presided over by a local black minister , Rev . Dr . Martin Luther King , Jr . As SCLC head , King would later become a central leader in the larger civil rights movement and ultimately paying the ultimate sacrifice as he was assassinated for his leadership .
Front Cover Feature We Shall Over Come Civil Rights 1964 - 2014 Rosa Parks , Ronald Martin , Robert Patterson , Mark Martin Jacksonville , Florida August 2014
Rosa Parks arrested after she refuse to give up '1, er seat on a Montgomery bus .
The Challenge to Social Segregation By the time of the Little Rock incident , the nation had already become aware of the heightened struggle in the South . In 1955 blacks in Montgomery , Ala ., organized a boycott of city buses in protest of the policy of segregated seating . Initiated by Rosa Parks ' refusal to give up her seat on a bus , the boycott lasted 3 81 days ; it succeeded in integrating the seating . It also led to the formation in 1957 of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference ( SCLC ), in Atlanta , Ga . This was presided over by a local black minister , Rev . Dr . Martin Luther King , Jr . As SCLC head , King would later become a central leader in the larger civil rights movement and ultimately paying the ultimate sacrifice as he was assassinated for his leadership .
A major incident in 1960 led to the founding of another important organization and expanded the movement ' s participants to include college-age blacks . In that year , four students from the all-black North
DIRECTLY LEFT Ronald Martin , Robert Patterson , and Mark Martin, students from North Carolina A & T College , shown seated during a staged sit-down strike at the F . W . Woolworth store in Greensboro , NC after being refused service at a luncheon counter reserved for white customers .
Agricultural and Technical College initiated sit-ins at a segregated Woolworth ' s lunch counter in Greensboro , N . C . Students from other southern black colleges and universities followed with similar sit-ins , bringing about the desegregation of several hundred lunch counters . During the sit-ins the young protesters organized the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ( SNCC ). Soon thereafter , many SNCC members joined forces with the Congress of Racial Equality ( CORE ). Founded in Chicago in the 1940s , CORE organized the Freedom Rides of 1961 . Black and white Freedom Riders boarded commercial buses in Washington , D . C ., and embarked on a route through the South ; their objective was to test the 1960 Supreme Court decision Boynton v . Virginia , which had outlawed segregation in interstate transportation terminals . Riders were beaten , arrested , and in one instance had their bus burned . Nevertheless , the Freedom Rides were ultimately successful , prompting the U . S . Interstate Commerce Commission to enforce the ruling in Boynton .