Doris Crenshaw was 12 years old on Dec. 5, 1955, when she and her sister eagerly rushed door to door in their neighborhood, distributing flyers prepared by activists planning a boycott of city buses in Montgomery, Alabama.
“Don’t ride the bus to work, to town, to school or any place on Monday,” the flyers read, urging people to attend a mass meeting that evening.
There was a sense of urgency. Days earlier, Rosa Parks, the secretary of the local NAACP chapter, had been the latest Black person arrested for refusing to give up a bus seat to a white passenger on the segregated buses. For 381 days, an estimated 40,000 Black residents stayed off city buses — opting to walk, ride in car pools or take Black-owned cabs — until a legal challenge struck down bus-segregation laws.
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