Baton Rouge bus boycott

The Baton Rouge bus boycott was a week-long protest campaign against the policy of racial segregation on the city buses of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The boycott was launched on June 19, 1953 by African-American residents who comprised 80% of bus riders in Louisiana's capital city, and yet were barred under Jim Crow rules from sitting in the front rows of a municipal bus. Instead, they were forced into the back of the bus, often having to stand, even as numerous seats reserved for whites remained empty.

The boycott ended with a compromise that opened up additional seats on buses for use by black riders, while still preserving a framework of segregation. The Baton Rouge free-ride system—quickly organized by the city's black churches to offer car rides to bus boycotters—was studied later by Martin Luther King Jr. as a model to copy on a larger scale in Montgomery, Alabama. Although overshadowed by the more famous Montgomery bus boycott of 1955–56, the action taken in 1953 by the African-American community in Baton Rouge has come to be recognized as a pivotal early event in the civil rights movement.^[1]