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Juneteenth News: Mayor-President Broome, Mayor Waites & Capital Area Transit System (CATS) Commemorate the 1953 Baton Rouge Bus Boycott
The 1953 Baton Rouge Bus Boycott, the first boycott of the segregated southern bus system which inspired the Montgomery Bus Boycott was commemorated on Friday by Mayors Waites and Broome at the CATS facility.
The Baton Rouge Bus Boycott was a defining moment in the Civil Rights movement and proved to be a catalyst of great influence; Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in his book Stride Toward Freedom, that a detailed “description of the Baton Rouge experience was invaluable” in the early stages of the Montgomery boycott. Rosa Parks' biographer and Signpost scholar Douglas Brinkley says Mrs. Parks and other NAACP activists throughout the South monitored the developments in the Baton Rouge boycott very closely at the time.
According to internationally known civil rights historian and Signpost advisor Dr. Adam Fairclough, “the Baton Rouge protest pioneered many of the techniques that became standard practice in the civil rights movement of the late 1950s and 1960s: mass non-violent protest, the leadership of Baptist ministers and the foundation of alternative transportation systems.”
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 Mayor Darnell Waites
 Mayor-President Sharon Weston Broome
 Bill Deville - CEO CATS, Mayor Waites, Linda Perkins - CATS Board Member
 CATS Employees
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I am leaving this legacy to all of you...to bring peace, justice, equality, love and a fulfillment of what our lives should be. Without vision, the people will perish, and without courage and inspiration, dreams will die - the dream of freedom and peace.
Rosa Parks
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