Years later, Thurgood Marshall would say that the NAACP deserved more credit for its role in ending Montgomery’s system of segregated busing, telling one interviewer that he perceived King and the boycotters as a sideshow. It was true that the city of Montgomery had proved mostly impervious to protest and economic pressure, and that litigation had won the day. But the biggest development in Montgomery was the creation of a new state of mind, a new sense of power, coalesced around King, who described the Montgomery movement as “our twelve months of glorious dignity.”
