Mrs. Times drove off furious. “My blood almost boiled,” she said. “I didn’t even take my clothes to the dry cleaners.”
At home, her husband, Charlie, had already heard of the incident. Together, they called ED Nixon, the head of the local NAACP branch, and asked what they could do. He came by that evening.
As a child, she had taken part in a boycott of a butcher shop in Detroit, where she visited relatives, and suggested to Nixon that the city’s black community could do the same. He agreed, but said the time was not right – they would need money, cars and other supplies to make it happen. He asked her to be patient.
She called the city bus company to complain, but no one responded. She sent letters to The Montgomery Advertiser and The Atlanta Journal, but they refused to print them. She decided not to wait.
Over the next six months, she carried out her own boycott, driving to bus stops and offering free rides to black passengers waiting to board. Charlie, with whom she ran a cafe across the street from their house, raised money for gasoline, and they used the cafe as a scheduling center — people could call Charlie to arrange a ride, and he’d set up a schedule for his wife.
“Lucille was full of bears, and she wouldn’t stop at nothing,” Mr. Nichols said. “She was full steam ahead.”
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a seamstress and activist in the Montgomery NAACP, boarded Mr. Blake’s bus and sat in the front section, which was reserved for white riders. When he ordered her to get back, she refused and was arrested. Four days later, the Montgomery Improvement Association, formed in conjunction with the NAACP and led by a 26-year-old preacher, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a citywide boycott.
