The primary purpose of this passage is to describe

Question

A steady stream of cars and pedestrians jammed the streets around the Holt Street Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. By early evening a patient, orderly, and determined crowd of over 5,000 African Americans had packed the church and spilled
over onto the sidewalks. Loudspeakers had to be set up for the thousands who could not 1 squeeze inside. After a brief prayer and a reading from the Scripture, all attention focused
on the twenty-six-year-old minister who was to address the gathering. “We are here this evening,” he began slowly, “for serious business. We are here in a general sense because first and foremost we are American citizens and we are determined to apply our citizenship to the fullness of its means.”
Rosa Parks, a seamstress and well-known activist in Montgomery’s African

American community, had been arrested and put in jail for refusing to give up her seat to

a white passenger. Montgomery’s black community had long endured the humiliation of 2 a strictly segregated bus system. The day of the mass meeting, over 30,000 African Americans had answered a hastily organized call to boycott the city’s buses in protest of Parks’s arrest.
Even before the minister concluded his speech, it was clear to all present that the bus boycott would continue for more than just a day. By the time he finished his brief but stirring address, the minister had created a powerful sense of communion. “If we are
wrong, justice is a lie,” he told the clapping and shouting throng. “And we are 3 determined here in Montgomery to work and fight until justice runs down like water and

righteousness like a mighty stream.” Historians would look back at Montgomery, he noted, and have to say, “ ‘There lived a race of people, black people, fleecy locks and black complexion, of people who had the moral courage to stand up for their rights.’ And thereby they injected a new meaning into the veins of history and civilization.”

The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., made his way out of the church amid waves of applause and rows of hands reaching out to touch him. His speech catapulted 4
him into leadership of the Montgomery bus boycott, and it also proved him to be a prophet.


a. Rosa Parks’s background.
b. the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
c. Dr. Martin Luther King’s early days as a minister.
d. Dr. King’s role in the Montgomery bus boycott.

Answer 1

d. Dr. King’s role in the Montgomery bus boycott.