Montgomery businessman Loyd Howard attended a mass meeting at Holt Street Baptist Church on Dec. 5, 1955, that galvanized the Black community behind the bus boycott that started that day.
— Mike Cason | mcason@al.com, Al .com
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.