Lucille Times was a civil rights activist in Montgomery, Alabama, who started a one-woman bus boycott in 1955 shortly before Martin Luther King Jr. took the boycott citywide to protest Montgomery’s discrimination against Black Americans.
- Died: Monday, August 16, 2021. (Who else died on August 16?)
- Details of death: Died in Montgomery, Alabama, at the age of 100 from complications of Covid-19.
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The Other Montgomery Bus Incident
In June 1955, six months before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus, Lucille Times got into a fistfight with that same bus driver, James Blake, after he reportedly tried to run her car off the road. She told the story at the Rosa Parks Museum in 2007.
Following the incident, Times began driving to bus stops around the city and offering rides to Black citizens so they wouldn’t have to take the bus. And the local cafe she and her husband owned, the Times Cafe, was a frequent meeting place for civil rights leaders as they planned the larger boycott that soon followed, after Parks’s arrest for defying Blake in December 1955.
In 2017, Times’s story reached a nationwide audience when she appeared in a Facebook video titled “Living History”:
Tributes to Lucille Times
Full obituary: Washington Post
