Lucille Times

By Kirsten J. Barnes
Montgomery Advertiser

Tired of mistreatment, Lucille Times started her own private boycott of the buses six months before the Montgomery Bus Boycott began. (Rainier Ehrhardt, Special to the Advertiser)

For most black residents of Montgomery, the bus boycott began on Dec. 3, 1955. But for Lucille Times, it started six months earlier, after she had a fight with a Montgomery bus driver on a warm afternoon in early June.

As she drove her 1955 navy-and-eggshell Buick LaSabre to Washington Park Dry Cleaners on the corner of Mobile and Mill streets, she remembers being run almost off the road by a city bus.

"I pulled off and he tried to force me off the road and force me into a ditch," she said recently at her home on Holt Street, where she's lived for 55 years.

After arriving at the cleaners, Times didn't notice that the driver had parked his bus across the street, gotten off and was heading her way, until he looked at her and called her a "black son of a bitch." She responded by calling him a "white son of a bitch" and a fight ensued.

"I felt something hit me on the back of the neck and when I looked down I could see the boots of a motorcycle cop. He talked to the bus driver off to the side and then he asked me, 'Do you know that was a white man you called a white son of a bitch?' I said, 'Do you know I'm a black woman that he called a black son of a bitch?'"

Times said the police officer shook his flashlight at her and told her if she had been a black man he would have "beat my head to jelly."

As the officer released her and she got back into her car, she was furious. "My blood was almost boiling," she said. "I didn't even take my clothes into the dry cleaners."

By the time she got home someone had already called her husband, who was across the street from their house at Times Café, which the couple owned and operated for 32 years.

The Timeses discussed the incident and decided to tell E.D. Nixon, then-president of Montgomery's NAACP chapter.

"I told Mr. Nixon what happened and told him we should boycott the buses," Times recalled. She'd seen a similar boycott of a grocery store in Detroit, while there visiting relatives.

"He told me, 'We can't do anything about what happened off the bus. Something has to happen on the bus, but we're going to do something about it.'"

Times told Nixon she was going to boycott the buses by taking people around in her car and her husband's car. Nixon liked her idea, but cautioned her to wait.

"He told me we needed to plan it and wait until after Thanksgiving and hit the bus company in their pockets. He knew people would need to have an alternate way to get around," she said.

After the incident Times wrote letters to the Montgomery Advertiser and the Alabama Journal explaining what happened.

"Neither one would print the letter. I was angry with the Montgomery Advertiser and the Alabama Journal, but I continued to take them. If they had published that letter, those people would have destroyed their building," she said.

So for six months, leaders kept the plan a secret. Times said Nixon raised money to purchase station wagons and pay for gas.

Still, Times didn't wait. She immediately began cruising the bus stops and picking up people, taking them to and from work.

"I gave them the number to my house and the café so they could call me and my husband. We took people to Maxwell Air Force Base, Gunter Field, Huntingdon College, the Montgomery Country Club, Cloverdale and downtown free of charge," Times recalled.

After the boycott was in full swing, Times and her husband continued providing rides to people and allowing out-of-town supporters to stay in their home.

Times is not bitter about the past, she said, but to this day she has not ridden again on a Montgomery City Bus.