Chapter 1 focuses on the efforts of the black community in Montgomery, Alabama, to desegregate the city's buses between 1955 and 1956. It explores the way in which city authorities attempted to destroy the bus boycott by using the threat of arrest and imprisonment to intimidate supporters and isolate the leadership. In response, community members resisted such repression by seeking to transform imprisonment from something to be feared into a source of pride and an act of resistance. However, the author concludes that the period from 1955 to 1960 was one of limited change in terms of movement responses to the legal repression of civil rights activity.