Freedom Walkers is a work of non-fiction aimed at a Young Adult audience by Russell Freedman, published in 2006. Freedman combines a simple prose style with well-researched historical facts to make the Montgomery Bus Boycott and eventual Supreme Court ruling that the segregated bus system in that city was unconstitutional accessible and appealing to a young audience.
Freedman begins by describing the state of race relations in the southern U.S. in 1949. He describes the Jim Crow Laws as a way of enforcing white supremacy by creating a system of doubled services and rights known as segregation. He also describes other ways that black people saw their rights limited or denied altogether, including the Poll Taxes that required you to pay a fee if you wanted to vote in elections—a fee most black people in the South were too poor to afford. Freedman describes the growing discontent at the unfairness and blatant racism of this system, and asserts that the people of Montgomery, Alabama were actively seeking a way to effectively protest and eliminate these onerous segregation laws.
A black teacher named Jo Ann Robinson sat in the white section of a city bus and was thrown off the bus as a result. Robinson joined forces with a local group called the Women’s Political Council and brought their grievances to the mayor of Montgomery, demanding that changes be made. They wanted more black bus drivers and the end of mistreatment of black passengers. They warned the mayor that if changes weren’t made, the Council had a plan for a city-wide boycott of the buses. Black leaders continued to look for the perfect opportunity to protest segregation laws, knowing they would have one chance to make their case on a national level. In 1955 a woman named Claudette Colvin was arrested for not giving up her seat to a white passenger on a bus, a common requirement under Jim Crow. But she was not considered a suitable person to champion because of her youth and the fact that she had reputedly had an affair with a married man; black leaders wanted an ideal person to be the face of their proposed movement