For Black Montgomerians, though they won the right to sit wherever on the buses, things got much worse in many other ways. The Montgomery city council enacted further segregation laws on many other aspects of Montgomery and those that rode the buses faced violence. Snipers regularly targeted integrated buses in an effort to shut them down and in one instance a pregnant woman was taken to the hospital for bullet wounds in both legs. Several churches and homes were attacked with dynamite or burned down and at this time there's a sharp upswing in Klan recruitment and attacks. African-Americans themselves see a sharp boost in morale due to the success of demonstrations like the Montgomery Bus Boycott but to white southerners this is a direct affront to their culture and way of life. So you see both empowerment but this also sets the tone for the next two decades of the Civil Rights Movement

Sources: Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63, Taylor Branch Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Junior and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference David Garrow