The local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), of which Parks was the secretary, and another political group with which she was associated, the Women's Political Council (WPC) of Montgomery, sprang to her defense. Parks's lawyer began to develop a test case that would challenge the constitutionality of segregated buses, but the WPC started something even more significant-a black boycott of Montgomery's public transit system. Originally, the boycott was to last only one day-December 5, 1955-but the black population of Montgomery was so incensed with the prejudice and restrictions with which they were forced to live that they decided to extend the boycott indefinitely. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a young Baptist minister, emerged as their leader, and under his direction the Montgomery bus strike lasted thirteen months.
Montgomery's buses had been patronized primarily by the city's African American population, almost all of whom began walking to work or using carpools, winter and summer, an act which brought public transit in the city to its knees. Without African American passengers, the buses were practically empty. The first goal of the boycotters was not desegregated buses, but merely a more fair system of segregation in which there were clearly marked black and white sections of the bus that could not be waived according to the whim of the driver and the number of white riders.
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