- Lucille was a civil rights leader who initiated the Montgomery bus boycott six months before Rosa Parks. He has died at the age of 100.
- After the bus driver James Black tried to drive her off the road, the era began her boycott.
- Six months later, Black and Parks were the same bus driver who was arrested for refusing to move in front of the bus.
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In Lucille’s time, this woman triggered a boycott of the Montgomery, Alabama bus system six months before Rosa Parks’ better-known protest. Died from Covid infection last week. She is 100 years old.
In June 1955, the Times had an argument with Montgomery bus driver James Black. Six months ago, Parkes, Dr. Martin Luther King, and other civil rights leaders launched a boycott of buses in the city.
In 2017, the New York Times said in an interview with Dr. Felicia Bell about Blake: “The bus driver was angry and tried to drive me from the road to the ditch.” Troy University.
She exchanged words with Black—he called her “the son of a black—”—which escalated into physical conflict. The police eventually separated the two, but the Times’ interaction with Black left an indelible mark.
“I called the bus office three times to report James Black, but the boss of the bus company would never call me back,” she told Bell. “I started boycotting buses the next day.”
Time and her husband cooperated with their local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and began to resist. She began to drive around the Montgomery area to provide ride services for the blacks she saw waiting for the bus. In the end, she and her husband opened a hotline outside the cafe they ran, allowing locals to call and ask for a car.
Six months after Times’ boycott and ride-hailing services began, 42-year-old Rosa Parks boarded a bus driven by James Blake, who was the driver trying to drive Times off the road. Parks sat in the front of the bus, which was reserved for white customers.
Black asked her to move. Parkes refused and was arrested.
Parkes’ arrest triggered a more comprehensive Montgomery bus boycott, Which lasted for more than a year, led to the segregation of the urban transportation system.
But the contribution of the times to Montgomery’s civil rights struggle should not be underestimated: “Lucille can’t wait, she won’t shrink from nothing,” her nephew Daniel Nichols told New York Times“She went all out.”
