The Carpools of Montgomery

On December 5, 1955, over 40,000 Black residents of Montgomery, Alabama, refused to ride the city buses. What began as a one-day protest after Rosa Parks's arrest four days earlier became a 381-day movement that reshaped a nation. But the boycott's survival depended on something profoundly ordinary: people giving each other rides. The Montgomery Improvement Association, led by the twenty-six-year-old Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.…