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Architects of Change Summer Camp

2025 Architects of Change summer camp graphic

The Rosa Parks Museum's annual educational summer day camp, Architects of Change, is open to all River Region middle students who will be entering grades 6-8 during the 2025-2026 school year. The mission of the camp is to share the techniques of non-violent conflict resolution used by Mrs. Rosa Parks, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and other leaders of the early Civil Rights Movement. Our goal is to connect past struggles in the quest for equal rights to social justice struggles that continue today. This year's camp has been extended to two weeks in order to incorporate participation in the first-ever Heartstone Global Story Circle in the United States! This is a long-running program started in Great Britain in 2000 and has since spread throughout the U.K., Australia, and Kosovo (http://heartstonechandra.com/home/).

About the camp…

Workshops on conflict resolution and building toward the Beloved Community.
Training helps campers to handle conflict effectively and peacefully; embrace forgiveness, understanding, and acceptance and respond to conflict with reconciliation instead of lashing out or holding grudges
Connecting past Civil Rights events to modern social justice issues through visits to civil rights sites
The Heartstone Odyssey novel study and Global Story Circle program with a culminating art project

Field trips…(subject to change)

Rosa Parks Museum and Children's Wing
Walking tour of downtown Montgomery's civil rights historic sites
Tuskegee University (including The Oaks, home of Booker T. Washington, and the George Washington Carver Museum)
Tuskegee Airmen Museum at Moten Field
Birmingham Civil Rights Institute
Negro Southern League Baseball Museum

Fees and other important info…

Located at the Rosa Parks Museum (Troy University Montgomery)
May 26 - June 6, 2025, from 8:00 AM to 4:00 PM daily
$100 per student (discounted rates for additional children within the same family)
There are a limited number of scholarships available. (Please contact McKenzie or Donna for application, which is due no later than April 15th.)
Breakfast, lunch, and snacks provided daily
Non-refundable $20 deposit due with application no later than Friday, April 18, 2025.
Balance due Friday, May 16, 2025
Parents will receive camp itinerary no later than May 19th.

If you have questions or need more information, please contact:

McKenzie Walker, mwalker166145@troy.edu (334.241.9541)

Donna Beisel, dbeisel@troy.edu (334.832.7295)

Tired of Giving In: Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott Mobile App

FAQs

Frequently Asked Questions about Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott

What was Montgomery like in 1955?

There were approximately 30,000 blacks of voting age living in Montgomery in 1954, yet only 2,000 were registered to vote. Blacks were often banned from holding public offices not only in Montgomery but throughout the Jim Crow South. In 1950, the median annual income for whites was $1,730 while the median annual income for blacks was $970. Sixty-three percent of African American females were domestic workers (working in homes as maids, nannies, etc.) whereas forty-eight percent of African American males were domestic workers. Montgomery schools were still segregated despite the U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education that segregation in public places was unconstitutional.

What were the “Jim Crow” laws?

The “Jim Crow laws” were laws established in the South and were meant to enforce segregation. These “laws” got their name from a minstrel routine by the name of Jump Jim Crow that was supposedly inspired by the ridiculing of a crippled African slave named Jim Crow. By the end of the 1930s, the term “Jim Crow” was used as a derogatory name for African Americans, thus leading the segregation laws to be referred to as “Jim Crow laws”. These laws were supported with the U.S. Supreme Court's “separate but equal” decision in Plessy v. Ferguson. The Jim Crow laws prohibited African Americans from having access to certain forms of employment and to public places, such as restaurants, hotels, and other facilities. In the South especially, blacks lived in fear of racially motivated violence.

Examples of Alabama “Jim Crow” laws

Hospitals No person or corporation shall require any white female nurse to nurse in wards or rooms in hospitals, either public or private, in which Negro men are placed.
Buses All passenger stations in this state operated by any motor transportation company shall have separate waiting rooms or space and separate ticket windows for the white and colored races.
Railroads The conductor of each passenger train is authorized to and required to assign each passenger to the car or the division of the car, when it is divided by a partition, designated for the race to which such passenger belongs.
Restaurants It shall be unlawful to conduct a restaurant or other place for the serving of food in the city, at which white and colored people are served in the same room, unless such white and colored persons are effectually separated by a solid partition extending from the floor upward to a distance of seven feet or higher, and unless a separate entrance from the street is provided for each compartment.
Pool & Billiard Rooms It shall be unlawful for a Negro and white person to play together or in company with each other at any game of pool or billiards.

What was the catalyst for the Montgomery Bus Boycott?

On December 1, 1995, Rosa Parks, a 42 year-old African American seamstress, boarded a Montgomery City Lines bus to go home from work. She sat near the middle of the bus in the neutral section just behind the ten seats reserved for white passengers. Soon, the seats in the white section were filled. When a white man entered the bus, the driver (following standard practices of segregation) insisted that the four blacks sitting in the first row of “colored” seats give up their seats so that the white man could sit down. Mrs. Parks quietly refused to give up her seat and was, therefore, arrested.

What crime was Rosa Parks charged with when she was arrested?

Rosa Parks was arrested and convicted of violating the laws of segregations known as the “Jim Crow laws” and for disorderly conduct. She was found guilty and fined $10.00 plus $4.00 in court fees. She appealed her conviction, thus formally challenging the legality of segregation.

What were the bus laws in Montgomery at the time?

In 1906 (during the Jim Crow era), a new city ordinance was passed in Montgomery that segregated public transportation. The ordinance said that blacks in all public accommodations, such as trolleys, had to be completely separated from whites. The law did not merely require partitions between the races, there could be no mixing at all. The ordinance sparked the first protest over racial discrimination on Montgomery mass transit. This protest was known as the “Lightning Route Trolley Boycott” by streetcar conductors and their management who chose to protest the law. It resulted in a compromise that established the Montgomery rule that “blacks sit in the back.” In addition, blacks often had to pay at the front entrance to bus, disembark the bus, and then move to the “colored” entrance at the back of the bus. It became the accepted rule that whites were to enter the bus at the front and begin filling it from front to back. Blacks were to get on the bus in the back and begin filling seats back to front. Once the black section was full, any other blacks who boarded had to stand. If the white section was full, black in the front of the “colored” section had to get up and give their seat to the white rider. Mrs. Parks' attorney, Fred Gray, remembered, “Virtually every African American person in Montgomery had some negative experience with the buses. But we had no choice. We had to use the buses for transportation.”

Did Rosa Parks and the NAACP plan the events that led to her arrest and the subsequent Montgomery Bus Boycott?

No. Mrs. Parks' actions were spontaneous and not premeditated, although her previous civil rights involvement, nonviolence training, and strong sense of justice were obvious influences. “When I made that decision,” she said later, “I knew that I had the strength of my ancestors with me.”

However, it was fitting that the civil rights movement really began on a city bus because the “separate but equal” foundation for the Jim Crow laws actually started on a racially segregated train. In a famous 1896 case, Plessy v. Ferguson, the U.S. Supreme Court pronounced the separate but equal rationale, but of course, the facilities and treatment were never equal. Mrs. Parks remembers going to school in Pine Level, Alabama, where buses took white kids to the new school, but black kids had to walk to their school. “I'd see the bus pass every day,” she said, “but to me, that was a way of life; we had no choice but to accept what was the custom. The bus was among the first ways I realized there was a black world and a white world.”

Under Jim Crow customs, it was relatively easy to separate the races in every area of life except transportation. Bus and train companies often couldn't afford separate cars, so blacks and whites had to occupy the same space. Thus, transportation was one of the most volatile arenas for race relations in the South.

Were there attempts to boycott before December 1955?

In May, 1954, four days after the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education ruling, Jo Ann Robinson, an English teacher at Alabama State College (now Alabama State University) who had had her own traumatic experience on a bus in 1949, wrote a letter to Montgomery Mayor W. A. Gayle. Robinson was the president of the women's Political council and in this letter threatened a black boycott of Montgomery buses if abuses on the buses were not curtailed.

Who was Jo Ann Robinson, and what role did she play in the Montgomery Bus Boycott?

Jo Ann Gibson Robinson was born on April 17, 1912, in Culloden, Alabama, and was the youngest of twelve children. She was educated in the segregated public schools of Macon, Georgia, and later at Fort Valley State College. She then earned an M.A. in English at Atlanta University. In the fall of 1949, she accepted a position as professor of English at Alabama State College in Montgomery where she remained throughout the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Ms. Robinson joined both the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church and its Women's Political Council (WPC), which had been founded by another Alabama State English professor Mary Fair Burks. Near the end of 1949, while boarding a public bus to go to a friend's house before going to the airport, Robinson was humiliated by an abusive and racist Montgomery City Lines bus driver who yelled at and ridiculed her for mistakenly sitting in the “white section” of the bus even though there were only two other passengers on board. Because of this incident, she used the WPC to target racial seating practices on Montgomery buses.

In 1960, after years of being targeted and harassed for her role in the civil rights movement, Robinson left Alabama State (and Montgomery), as did many other activist faculty members. After teaching for one year at Grambling College, Robinson moved to Los Angeles, where she taught English in a public school until her retirement in 1976. Robinson's health suffered a serious decline just as her memoir, The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It, was published in 1987. She was honored with a 1989 publication prize given by the Southern Association for Women Historians but was unable to accept the award in person due to her poor health. She died in Los Angeles on August 29, 1992.

What was the Women's Political Council?

In 1946, Mary Fair Burks had been refused permission to become a member of the League of Women Voters and later was arrested after a traffic disagreement with a white woman. These events led her to form an organization meant to fight the injustices of the discriminatory separate but equal doctrine in Montgomery. Her main goal was to teach African Americans their constitutional rights in order to get them to vote. The WPC became one of the most active organizations in the struggle for equal rights and promoting social justice. Burks remained president until Jo Ann Robinson took over in 1950. The WPC was a vital part of the bus boycott and was actually the group that initially called for and organized a boycott after Rosa Parks' arrest.

What was the MIA?

Jo Ann Robinson and the Women's Political Council began to organize a one-day protest after Rosa Parks' arrest in December of 1955. It was Robinson, along with some of her students, who produced and distributed the leaflets encouraging blacks in Montgomery to stay off the buses the following Monday (December 5, 1955). When word spread of the boycott, local black leaders wanted a meeting to discuss and organize their plans moving forward. Many prominent African American leaders in Montgomery, under the leadership of E.D. Nixon, former chair of the NAACP of Montgomery and including Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph Abernathy, H.H. Hubbard, and Ms. A.W. West gathered and finally proceeded with an organized movement. A meeting was held the day after Mrs. Parks' arrest at the Holt Street Baptist Church where a group ranging from students to church groups to prominent city leaders in the black community met and from there decided that in order to efficiently and effectively carry out their goal of combating the racism of the segregation laws, a boycott was not only necessary but vital. As a result, the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) was formed, with Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. as its leader. The MIA adopted a plan of action for the protest that was officially to begin on December 5, 1955.

What were the goals of the MIA?

At the onset of the boycott, African American leaders in Montgomery weren't looking to end segregation on Montgomery city buses; they just wanted to be treated fairly. The MIA initially had three simple demands:

Blacks would not ride the buses until polite treatment by bus drivers were guaranteed to them.
Seating should be offered on a first-come, first-served basis.
Black bus drivers should be employed especially in areas that were predominantly black.

When these demands were met, blacks would resume riding the city buses.

Rosa Parks was not the first woman arrested on a bus in Montgomery. Who were the others who preceded her?

On March 2, 1955, 15-year-old Booker T. Washington student Claudette Colvin was the first young woman to be arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white person. Charged with violating the segregation laws, she was tried, convicted, and fined. She was a plaintiff and testified in the Browder v. Gayle case. [see below for more]

One month later, in April 1955, Aurelia Shines Browder was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger. She was named as the lead plaintiff in the Browder v. Gayle case.

On October 21, 1955, Mary Louise Smith, and 18-year-old student refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white woman and was arrested on the spot. She was tried, jailed, and fined nine dollars. She was also a plaintiff and testified in Browder v. Gayle.

Why didn't Claudette Colvin's arrest pose a challenge to bus segregation in Montgomery?

Although Fred Gray and Charles Langford, the city's only African American attorneys, ably defended her, the juvenile court judge (first cousin of Alabama senator J. Lister Hill) found Colvin guilty of violating the state, not city, bus segregation law just two weeks after her arrest. She was also found guilty of assault and battery and for resisting arrest. As a result, she was given probation. Gray and Langford appealed to the Montgomery Circuit Court, and on May 6, 1955, Judge Eugene Carter affirmed the assault conviction while dismissing the segregation code violation. His ruling prevented the lawyers from using Colvin's arrest as a test case to challenge the bus segregation laws. In addition, her parents did not want her used as a test case in the public eye.

The Colvin incident roused the black community in Montgomery. The Citizens Coordinating Committee, led by local businessman Rufus Lewis, issued an appeal to the “Friends of Justice and Human Rights.” It denounced “certain legal and moral injustices incurred in the public transportation system” and offered the Colvin case as “an opportunity, in the spirit of democracy, and in the spirit of Christ, to deal courageously with these problems.”

What kind of impact did the boycott have on the community at large?

Since African Americans made up about 75 percent of the bus riders in Montgomery, the boycott posed a serious economic threat to the bus company a social threat to white rule in the city.

Initially, Montgomery city officials were amused the demands of the MIA and the boycott and thought it would quickly fade out. After the first months of the boycott, they were not as amused as the boycott continued affecting Montgomery's economy. White downtown business owners began to feel the effects of the boycott as they were receiving less traffic in those areas. The bus companies began losing approximately $3,000.00 per day from lost fares. As a result, the bus company raised fares and terminated bus routes in many African American neighborhood to offset the losses. Many white families who employed black domestic workers (such as maids, cooks, etc.) were unhappy that they had to travel miles to carry their workers to and from work. On January 23, 1956, negotiations between Mayor Gayle, the bus company, and the MIA ceased. Mayor Gayle stated that there would be no more negotiations until Montgomery's African American citizens got back on the buses.

Once the white leaders of Montgomery realized these techniques were not working in getting people back on the buses, they turned their attentions towards the citizens themselves.

The social impact of the boycott was also felt throughout Montgomery. Even though many whites were upset with having to drive their workers, other white housewives were sympathetic to the cause and willingly drove their workers wherever they needed to go. Occasionally, as a way to try to stop the boycott, black were arrested for simply walking down the street. They often had things such as water and urine thrown on them as an intimidation technique. The boycott leaders also suffered. Rev. King's house was bombed in January of 1956, as was the house of Rev. Robert Graetz in August 1956. These tactics did not work, and the boycott remained in effect. Also in January of that year, Mayor Gayle and several other white leaders of Montgomery formed the local chapter of the White Citizens' Council (WCC) whose main goal was to maintain racial segregation. Mayor Gayle encouraged Montgomery citizens to not give in to the demands of the boycotters because they were “after the destruction of our social fabric.”

What was the significance of Browder v. Gayle?

By early 1956, attorney Fred Gray had vowed to end segregation. On February 1st of that year, Gray and Charles Langford filed a petition in federal district court that would later become known as the Browder v. Gayle case. The petition was filed on behalf of four other women who had been arrested or fined for refusing to give up their bus seats to white passengers: Claudette Colvin, Aurelia Browder, Mary Louise Smith, and seventy-year-old Susie McDonald. (Jeanette Reese was another original plaintiff, but she withdrew her name shortly thereafter due to being threatened and intimidated by white citizens.) Browder v. Gayle challenged the constitutionality of a state statute and therefore had to go before a three- judge U.S. District Court panel. On June 5, 1956, the panel ruled that segregation on Alabama, and thus Montgomery, buses was unconstitutional. Mayor Gayle then filed an appeal hoping to reverse the lower court's decision. On November 13, 1956, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the District Court's ruling. Dr. King urged citizens not to return to the buses and implement integration until the documentation from the court arrived in Montgomery. On December 17, 1956, the Supreme Court rejected city and state appeals to reconsider their decision. Three days later (381 days after the boycott started), the order for integrated buses arrived in Montgomery. African Americans in Montgomery returned to the buses on December 21, 1956, 382 days after the Montgomery Bus Boycott began. On this day, Dr. King, Rev. Ralph Abernathy, Fred Gray, Rev. Glenn Smiley, and other boycott leaders rode the buses around town greeting passengers and showing their appreciation for the masses who had sacrificed to make the boycott a success. These became known as the Victory Rides.

What was the impact of the Montgomery Bus Boycott?

The majority of the white community in Montgomery did accept the Supreme Court's ruling in Browder v. Gayle, even if they weren't necessarily happy about it. There were still instances of violence, and racial tensions ran high for many years to come. Even though the buses were integrated, it took about another ten to fifteen years for segregation to be completely banned in Montgomery.

Furthermore, the Montgomery Bus Boycott started what would become known as the Modern Civil Rights Movement. Several of the boycott leaders, such as King and Abernathy, went on to lead other civil rights events. Many of the techniques of nonviolent resistance that were used to great success went on to great effectiveness in other civil rights events.