![]() ![]() Black-owned automobiles helped ensure the historic boycott’s success. ![]() King was one of hundreds of people cited that week in 1956-people who used a carefully orchestrated carpool system to help smash the segregated bus system in the Alabama capital. But he knew the real reason he was being hassled: The civil rights leader had been using his car to help participants in the Montgomery bus boycott. The grounds for King’s arrest were that he had supposedly been driving 30 miles per hour in a 25-mile-per-hour zone. had just been arrested for the first time. Instead, they took their time as they drove. Soon a patrol car arrived to take him to jail.Īs the police cruiser turned down the dark streets of Montgomery, Alabama, he worried the police might beat him and leave him for dead. Two armed police officers demanded he get out of the car, then arrested him. Then, as he stopped to let a passenger out of his car, the motorcycles pulled up toward him and it began: an ordeal mirrored every day by African American people hassled by the police for minor infractions. He glanced at his speedometer, determined to follow every traffic law. ![]() The police motorcycles he had noticed a few blocks earlier were definitely trailing him. ![]() The driver glanced nervously into his rear-view mirror. ![]()
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