As Rosa Parks became the face of the discriminated bus rider and her name synonymous with a fearless struggle for racial equality, the stories of her success often overlook the role of Edgar Daniel (E.D.) Nixon, a prominent civil rights lawyer who took Parks’ case from a local unremarkable confrontation to a national case. Nixon knew Parks well from their time together at the NAACP; when he went to bail her out, he brought up the possibility of mounting a coordinated challenge to the law. Parks readily agreed.

On this day, December 5, in 1955, Edgar Nixon, together with Martin Luther King and their Montgomery Improvement Association, an assembly of African American civil rights activists, began their planned one-day boycott of the city buses.

The boycott was violently opposed by some of the white residents of the city. Nixon’s home was bombed – fortunately, while he was away – and against threats that any black workers not showing up for work that day would be fired, the MIA organized carpools. Their demands in retrospect seem restrained: instead of full side-by-side equality, they called for fixed black and white bus sections, so they would not have to give up seats when the white section overflowed. They also called for designated all-black bus lines with black drivers, that would not need to worry about section divisions.