ABSTRACT
A majority of blacks argued that the Fourteenth Amendment conveyed did not give them the right to travel in unsegregated railroad cars. The educated blacks began a counterattack, sure that in time the American legal system would yet again reflect American ideals. The NAACP was the chief vehicle of black protest. The leaders of the black community caucused, decided on a bus boycott to protest segregation and Rosa Parks' arrest, and elected King the leader of the movement. The early years of the Xerox revolution were underway, and the group managed to run off forty thousand copies of their boycott statement in local college. The inhumanity of the white response defeated its own goals. President John F. Kennedy sent a new and broad civil rights bill to Congress; Northern businessmen with Birmingham interests put pressure on local businessmen to end their opposition.
