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But the Black South was determined to push forward at its own speed.

In 1953, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Blacks staged a successful 10-day boycott of the city's buses aimed at ending the requirement that Blacks give up their seats to whites. The boycott ended when Baton Rouge agreed to a first-come, first-served system with Blacks seated from the rear and whites seated from the front.

The Baton Rouge boycott marked the beginning of a new kind of Black protest. It was a mass movement, based in Baton Rouge's Black churches. Directed by a coalition of civic and civil rights organizations, including the NAACP, it rejected the NAACP's legal approach as too expensive and too slow.

Two years after the Baton Rouge bus boycott, a similar protest began in Montgomery, Alabama, that would become world-famous and would introduce the world to a new Black leader named Martin Luther King, Jr.