People today get mired in 'the right action.' Many criticize current actions as being disruptive or improbable. But the biggest lesson of the boycott is that wewill not know what will work—you have to take step after step, it will be lonely, people will call it disruptive, but you must do it anyway.

It wasn't all about walking. To sustain the yearlong boycott, they built a massive organized carpool system with 40 pickup stations around the city; at their peak, they were giving 15,000 rides a day. The police harassed them. Politicians and commentators called them disruptive. But they persisted.

Montgomery's activists worried all weekend whether people would do it But people did! It was feeling their power after the successful first day that the community decided to continue the 1-day boycott indefinitely. But it took deep sacrifice. Parks lost her job. The Kings home was bombed.

The movement didn't magically happen. Connections & ideas had built. The Women's Political Council had been organizing; the night Parks was arrested they decided to call for a 1-day boycott Monday. WPC leader Robinson ran off 35,000 leaflets ; they distributed them through town.

Rosa Parks' courage was precisely NOT a single act but perseverance. What made it so courageous was she had made stands before, others had, there was NOTHING to suggest that taking a stand this day would do something. But still, if "I got up I would approve of this treatment and I did NOT approve."

What to get for the teacher who's furious about book bans