Carter, Eugene W., b.1894.

Montgomery County Circuit Court Judge Eugene W. Carter presided over the 1956 trial of Martin Luther King, Jr., president of the Montgomery Improvement Association, who was indicted for conspiring to boycott.

On Dec. 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery municipal bus to a white person. Protesting the arrest, black citizens of Montgomery boycotted the city's bus system in order to force the bus company and the city to abolish the segregated seating policies. The boycott, which began on Dec. 5, 1955, was spearheaded by the newly-formed Montgomery Improvement Association.

On Feb. 21 eighty-nine blacks, including King, were indicted for the misdemeanor of conspiring to boycott. This was a misdemeanor under the Alabama anti-boycott law which was passed in 1921 in response to a violent strike of Birmingham coal miners. King was brought to trial in March and although he was convicted, Judge Eugene W. Carter refused to sentence him to prison on the grounds that King had worked to avoid violence.

The boycott ended in December 1956 when the U.S. Supreme Court intervened and ruled that Montgomery had to desegregate its buses. The Montgomery bus boycott was the first of many non-violent protests which led to equal rights for African Americans.