THE SOUTH: A Great Ride

On a foggy, warm morning last week, the Negro boycott against the Montgomery, Ala. city bus lines came to an end—381 days after it began. The Negroes had won their fight: they rode unsegregated on buses in the Confederacy's birthplace. Desegregation still had a long way to go, but after Montgomery, Jim Crow would never again be quite the same.

The boycott started as a spectacular protest against the arrest (TIME, Jan. 16) of Mrs. Rosa Parks, a Negro seamstress, for refusing to move from the white section of a bus. It ended soon after U.S. District Court Clerk Robert Dodson received official notice that the Supreme Court had refused a rehearing on its earlier ruling against bus segregation in Montgomery. That afternoon Police Chief G. J. Ruppenthal held a closed meeting of his 159 officers, quietly told them that desegregation would begin immediately. That night the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the levelheaded boycott leader, told his fellow Negroes how they should behave. Said he: "Every Negro bears on his shoulders the weight of responsibility of the 50,000 Negroes in Montgomery. Violence must not come from any of us."

King was one of the first to ride on a bus next morning. The driver took one look at him and asked: "Is this the Reverend?" Replied King: "That's right. How much?" Told that the fare was 15¢ (it had been 10¢ when the boycott began), Martin Luther King dropped his coins in the slot, sat down with a white companion. When his trip ended, King murmured thankfully: "It was a great ride." Another who had a great ride that day was Mrs. Rosa Parks, who had started it all. She gazed peacefully out a bus window from a seat of her own choosing.

Most whites took the changeover with composure, many with downright good humor. Said a white bank teller of the jubilant Negroes: "They'll find that all they've won in their year of praying and boycotting is the same lousy service I've been getting every day." On one bus a white man sitting near a Negro said loudly and pointedly: "I see this isn't going to be a white Christmas." The Negro looked up, smiled gently, replied firmly: "Yes sir, that's right." Suddenly, astonishingly, everybody on the bus was smiling.