On This Day In Alabama History: Montgomery Improvement Association Founded
By Graydon Rust Alabama 200
December 5, 1955
Local civil rights leaders formed the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) to oversee the Montgomery bus boycott following the arrest of Rosa Parks days earlier. The activists organized at a mass meeting at Holt Street Baptist Church and decided to prolong and expand the boycott, which began earlier that day and continued for more than a year. The MIA elected 26-year-old Martin Luther King Jr. as president and later worked with the NAACP to mount a legal challenge that ultimately integrated the city’s buses with the U.S. Supreme Court decision Browder v. Gayle. After completing the successful boycott, the MIA helped to found the much larger Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957.
Read more at Encyclopedia of Alabama.For more on Alabama’s Bicentennial, visit Alabama 200.
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