Montgomery businessman Loyd Howard was 14 when he joined an overflow crowd at Holt Street Baptist Church for a meeting that would unite the Black community behind a boycott of the city’s bus system.
It was a Monday night, Dec. 5, 1955, four days after seamstress Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give her bus seat to a white passenger. The boycotters would persevere for 13 months until a coinciding lawsuit overturned the local and state laws that segregated the buses.
The Montgomery Bus Boycott stands as a civil rights landmark, one that would launch Martin Luther King Jr., as a national leader and set an example for the movement that would gradually break the Jim Crow system that oppressed Black Americans for most of the 20th century.
Howard, whose family was active in the Black business district in downtown Montgomery, said he believes many of the thousands who made the boycott a success saw it more narrowly, a practical campaign to end the humiliations they endured on a bus system that was essential to their lives in the years when few had automobiles.
“What I really was interested in was seeing how we could change the way buses were being handled, the way people were being handled on the buses,” Howard said. “I was young and my focus was right there. It wasn’t that you were looking outside of the bus situation. You really were thinking the bus situation. How can we stop this? Because it makes you angry.”
Howard’s uncle owned a barbershop and cab stand downtown. Howard grew up in the Washington Park neighborhood in west Montgomery and started working after school in the family businesses when he was 10, sweeping the barbershop and answering the phone for the taxi service.
It was an era of segregated restrooms, water fountains and lunch counters. Black people, who made up about 40% of Montgomery’s population, which was 106,000 in 1950, were locked out of many white-owned businesses and services. That meant there were always customers for the stores, restaurants, beauty shops, and insurance companies that served them, Howard said.
“Montgomery was strongly segregated so there were only a few things you could do with white folk at that time,” Howard said. “So Black folk who owned businesses had a fixed audience because when Black folks came to town, they knew they couldn’t go in other businesses. So they looked for a place to eat, get their hair cut, and if they needed a cab, you’re going to use one of the black cabs.”
At the center of this commerce, Howard’s family came to know the leaders and organizers of the civil rights movement that was already a quiet force in Montgomery in the years preceding the boycott. Parks worked at the Montgomery Fair department store near the family businesses. Long before her arrest, Parks was a civil rights advocate who was active in the NAACP. Parks’ husband, Raymond Parks, was a barber in Howard’s uncle’s shop.
Howard said Raymond Parks feared the worst for him and his wife the day after her arrest, that backlash from their activism could cost them their lives. Howard said the cab drivers and bus drivers reassured him to an extent. “We got him to calm down,” Howard said. “Of course he was still afraid.”
Violence from white extremists was a legitimate threat. King’s home would be bombed during the boycott, in January 1956.
E.D. Nixon, a Pullman porter union leader and NAACP leader who bailed Parks out of jail, came to the barbershop a day or two after her arrest and spread the word that a boycott was coming. Howard said the men in the shop had their doubts.
“You think you’re going to be able to get folks to get off the bus? That’s asking a lot,” Howard said they told Nixon. “He said, ‘I don’t know, but we’re sure going to need to try it.’”
The organizers moved fast. The night after Parks’ arrest, Jo Ann Robinson, an English professor at Alabama State and leader of the Women’s Political Council, wrote a flyer and mimeographed thousands of copies that went out to Black neighborhoods. The flyer called for a one-day boycott, on Dec. 5, according to the book “Daybreak of Freedom: The Montgomery Bus Boycott,” by Stewart Burns.
Nixon helped enlist Black pastors for the effort, including King and Ralph David Abernathy. Organizers established the Montgomery Improvement Association to run the boycott. They picked King to lead it. King was 26 and had come to Montgomery only a year earlier to become pastor at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.
Howard said King was not an established leader in the Black community. But Howard said he galvanized the community at the meeting at Holt Street Baptist on Dec. 5. Howard said the church was “filled to the brim” and people were assembled outside. He remembers Holt Street Pastor A.W. Wilson introducing King.
“About two or three minutes into that speech, everybody stands up on their feet,” Howard said. “Right man for the job. Right man for the job. Because he started talking about something nobody had ever heard of in Montgomery. Because we had accepted Jim Crow. We had accepted seats on the bus, black and white.”
Howard said what people could not accept, and a main source of the rising tide for change that brought that huge crowd to the church, was needless harassment of Black passengers when there was ample room for the few white passengers he generally saw on the buses.
For example, Howard said drivers sometimes moved the sign designating the colored seating area toward the back of the bus, forcing riders who had paid their fares to stand by empty seats. He remembers drivers calling the Black women “gals” and elderly women being ordered to move or stand.
“I think the anger and the bitterness had built up with the drivers and the way they were treated on the bus, people were actually ready to put up a fight,” Howard said. “Because they would embarrass you right there in front of everybody. ‘Hey, y’all got to get up, move back.’ And you paid your money and you’re standing over your seat.”
Howard said his usual response to harassment from a driver was to get off the bus and walk. Others did that, too, he said, but for some that was a difficult option.
“You had some women would get off the bus,” Howard said. “But that was hard. Because a lot of them worked and they had bought food daily or every other day because they didn’t have a lot of money. So they’d have brown bags of food for their family. And it was cruel to have to deal with that.”
Howard said King urged the crowd to channel their anger in peaceful protest.
”He said the movement is going to be nonviolent,” Howard said. “We didn’t want anybody throwing anything on the bus or doing anything to people who didn’t want to get off the bus. We want people to come together and walk. We will walk wherever we’re going and we just don’t want to ride the bus anymore.”
Howard said he left the meeting inspired about carrying out the boycott. He said other young people generally felt the same way.
“There were elderly people who were concerned because if you live with racism so long you have a sense to think that nothing is going to change it,” he said.
Forgoing what for many was their best option for transportation was hard. Riding the bus was cheap and convenient. And launching the boycott at the onset of winter raised the prospect of long walks in the cold.
But the protesters were organized and disciplined, arranging car pools and other alternatives. The mass meetings, like the one at Holt Street Baptist on Dec. 5, continued on a weekly basis at churches.
Howard said his father charged cab passengers only the dime fare they would have paid to ride the bus and carried five or six at a time. City officials threatened to take the licenses of cab drivers who did that, but Howard said his father ignored the warning.
“After about probably three or four months into the movement, going through that cold, hard winter, you realized then that Black folk had made up their mind that they were going to make it work,” Howard said. “You’d hear about four or five people on the bus and all that kind of stuff. And after a while, the buses were completely empty.”
A few months into the boycott, a Montgomery County grand jury indicted King and 89 other leaders, including about two dozen other ministers, for conspiring to disrupt businesses, according to Burns’ book “Daybreak to Freedom.” King was convicted and fined, but the case generated publicity that boosted King’s profile and fundraising for the Montgomery Improvement Association, Burns wrote.
In June 1956, a three-judge federal court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the state and local laws that segregated the buses. The plaintiffs were four Black women and were represented by Montgomery attorneys Fred Gray and Charles Langford. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the decision and in December 1956 denied the appeals.
Howard said there was elation when riders returned to open seating on the buses.
“We flooded it a bit,” he said. “You had Black folk go sit right behind the bus driver, knowing that will make him mad, but he couldn’t do nothing about it. Especially the young boys. You got a lot of enjoyment out of it. He couldn’t get up and say, ‘All right you need to move back.’ Not anymore.”
In the wake of the boycott’s success, Howard said King was quick to urge the Black community to strive for bigger reforms, such as pressing the city to hire Black police, firefighters, and bus drivers, and ending segregated public facilities. He warned the people that the next phase would be harder than the boycott, Howard said.
“He started talking to most of the young people because he knew the old people just wasn’t going to attach themselves to an in-your-face protest, where you start to talk about breaking down lunch counters and restrooms and all of those things,” Howard said. “Because those are things that we had accepted so long.”
“The people and ministers and some leaders in Montgomery thought it was a little too harsh,” Howard said. “We’ve done the bus boycott. We need a break. And Dr. King was saying, no, there is no way for us to stop. We need to move forward now.”
Howard has been cutting hair since 1957 and his family still has a barbershop. He has other business interests, including membership in a limited liability corporation that sells components for the Hyundai assembly plant in Montgomery.
Howard, 79, is president of the Montgomery Improvement Association Foundation, and is participating in events this week commemorating the 65th anniversary of the boycott.
A marker outside Holt Street Baptist Church in Montgomery describes the church's history, including its importance as a place where a mass meeting solidified support for the Montgomery Bus Boycott four days after Rosa Parks arrest in December 1955.
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