1.
MONTGOMERY, 1955–1956
Besieging a City
The siege of Montgomery, otherwise known as the Montgomery bus boycott, marks the first major effort of the modern civil rights movement. The leaders and most of the participants certainly knew history was against them. But by the mid-1950s they were better prepared than earlier generations. Here the pieces came together for the first time—the awakening southern Black church; the returning Black soldiers, indignant at being denied access to the democratic rights for which they had fought; and a population weary of subjugation and ready to act.
The basis for action was organization. As in the military, even before discipline, the all-important beginning point was how people were organized and trained. These are subjects that deserve far more attention in studies of the civil rights movement.
What do you want to do? What are you going to do?
Long before the day in December 1955 when she sat down on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks had begun training for that moment. The previous summer, Parks, then an official with the Montgomery affiliate of the NAACP, had attended a session at the Highlander Folk School, a leftist, pro-labor, racially integrated outpost in the hills of eastern Tennessee. Founded in 1932, Highlander at first focused mainly on training union organizers for the hard task of operating in the South. In 1953, its leaders decided to turn more toward working for civil rights. Soon the head of its workshops was Septima Poinsette Clark, a brilliant, remarkable woman who had a powerful effect on a generation of civil rights activists. Born in South Carolina in 1898, the daughter of a formerly enslaved person, Clark had worked for decades to bring literacy to Blacks in the South, seeing the ability to read as enabling people not just to lead more productive lives—and perhaps eventually to register to vote—but also to elevate their sense of themselves. She had lost her job as a schoolteacher for belonging to the NAACP.
Along the way, Clark had developed a strategic way of thinking. She once commented, “I have a great belief in the fact that whenever there is chaos, it creates wonderful thinking. I consider chaos a gift.”
Each Highlander training session of one or two weeks began with a strategic question: “What do you want to do?” It ended with a tactical discussion of how to reach that outcome: “What are you going to do?” Significantly, the session Rosa Parks attended at Highlander was titled “Racial Desegregation: Implementing the Supreme Court Decision.” That decision was the ruling the previous year by the high court in Brown v. Board of Education that racial segregation in schools was illegal. Highlander’s teachers found Parks shy at first, especially around white people, but they drew her out by asking her to describe her civil rights work in Alabama. She found the experience liberating.
Clark wrote to friends, “Had you seen Rosa Parks (the Montgomery sparkplug) when she [first] came to Highlander, you would understand just how much guts she got while being here.” Parks took page upon page of notes during the sessions. She was struck by the idea that the goal of protest was not to influence attitudes, but to force change. “Desegregation prove[s] itself by being put in action,” she wrote in her notes. “Not changing attitudes, attitudes will change.” In other words, don’t try to begin by changing the way people think. Rather, change the way they actually live, and their thinking will follow.
Parks reveled in the novel experience of living alongside white people on a basis of equality. She emerged from her two-week session a changed person. “At Highlander, I found out for the first time in my adult life that this could be a unified society,” she later said, “that there was such a thing as people of different races and backgrounds meeting together in workshops, and living together in peace and harmony.” She had found herself laughing when she “hadn’t been able to laugh in a long time.” She added, “It was a place I was very reluctant to leave.” But depart she did, returning to Montgomery by summer’s end.
Rosa Parks sits
Parks and other civil rights leaders in Montgomery had been mulling the bus situation for years, and lately had been contemplating a boycott. There had been multiple cases of driver violence against Black passengers who talked back or moved too slowly for the taste of the dominant caste. Parks was close to Claudette Colvin, a scrappy teenager who in March 1955 refused to give up her seat on a bus, tussled with the police who came to move her, and was arrested. But other activists thought Colvin, who was unmarried and had become pregnant a few months after her arrest, was not the right person on whom to base a boycott campaign. By contrast, Parks—a quiet, steel-willed woman of forty-two—was perfect. She literally was a Sunday school teacher, at the St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal Church.
On the cool, wet afternoon of December 1, 1955, Parks finished her work as a department-store seamstress and did some shopping. “I was quite tired after spending a full day working,” she recounted the following year. It was just another gray Thursday when she boarded a crowded bus at Court Square and sat down in the fifth row. On that bus, there soon was a white man standing in the aisle. The bus driver, Jimmy Blake, then told the Blacks nearer the front of the vehicle to give up their seats so the white person could have the row, as was the custom. At first, none of the four moved.
“You all make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats,” Blake emphasized.
At this, one Black man and two Black women followed his instructions. Parks stayed in her seat. The driver left the bus and returned a few minutes later with two policemen. Blake pointed at Parks. One of the police officers approached her. “Why don’t you stand up?” he asked.
“I don’t think I should have to stand up,” she said. Then she added a human inquiry: “Why do you push us around?”
“I don’t know,” he said, “but the law is the law and you’re under arrest.”
Parks noticed with dismay that as she was taken from the bus, no other Blacks spoke in her defense or otherwise came to her aid.
So began the modern American civil rights movement, which would transform the nation over the following ten years. The story of Parks is a familiar story now, a modern American parable taught in elementary schools, some of them named after her. Parks had been readying herself for that moment for years. She had seen Blacks abused repeatedly—humiliated, raped, and even lynched—only to have police turn a blind eye. She felt the Black community had given up hope and was mired in despair.
Moreover, she had prepared in Highlander’s training program, which was rooted in the philosophy of well-disciplined nonviolent direct action—that is, of confronting problems and calling attention to them. Her quiet and dignified defiance on the bus may have been her answer to the parting question that ended each session at Highlander: What are you going to do? The movement’s great strength would be its determined adherence to nonviolence, even under the extraordinary stresses of church bombings, home burnings, jailhouse torture, and far more, as well as an endless stream of notes and telephone calls threatening all those things.
In the person of Parks, the city’s civil rights activists felt they now had the right person at the right time. When E. D. Nixon, Parks’ longtime colleague at the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP, heard she was being held in the jail because of her action on the Cleveland Avenue bus, he drove downtown to bail her out. Then he went home to his wife and said, according to his account, “Baby, we’ve got a case that we’re goin’ boycott the Montgomery city [bus] line.” Jo Ann Robinson, the president of a group of Black Montgomery women, surreptitiously mimeographed thirty-five thousand copies of a call for a one-day boycott to be held on the following Monday, December 5, 1955.
Early that Monday morning, Martin Luther King, Jr., a young minister new to town, watched with his wife out their front window as a bus from the South Jackson line passed. It was empty. So, too, was the second bus. The third one carried two white passengers. King, who at this point was simply an interested observer of the boycott, had hoped for a 60 percent success rate in the one-day boycott, but it turned out to be closer to the high 90s. Montgomery’s Black population clearly was responsive to the call, and certainly was tired of being abused during bus rides. Bus drivers complained that day that Black children mocked them and stuck out their tongues as the empty buses rolled by.
The ministers of the town followed up with a mass rally that Monday night at Holt Street Baptist, the biggest church in town. Thousands responded. “We had never seen a crowd like that before,” recalled the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, a friend of King’s who was far more established in Montgomery. There were too many attendees to fit into the church, so loudspeakers were set up to convey the proceedings to the crowds outside.
In a preliminary meeting that afternoon, King had been asked to speak that night at Holt. He had only a short time to prepare. His friend Elliott Finley drove him to the church, but because of the throng gathering outside it, they had to park blocks short of it and then make their way on foot. Struck by the surprising size of the crowd, which totaled about five thousand, King observed to his friend, “You know something, Finley, this could turn into something big.”
King speaks
King’s debut speech in the civil rights movement is remarkable for how well grounded it is in strategy and American history. As his first major public address, it would be worth dwelling on in any event. But even more, it requires attention because in it he outlined the stance that the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and indeed much of the Movement would take. It is intensely American, strongly nonviolent, and rooted in Christian faith, especially a vigorous belief in love and forgiveness. In it, King signaled that the Montgomery bus boycott and later the entire Movement would be a campaign not just to free Black people but also “to redeem the soul of America,” as he would put it years later to an ally in the Movement.
He began, as he often would, by establishing the context. “We are here this evening for serious business,” he said. “We are here in a general sense because first and foremost we are American citizens.” With that, he established the central claim of the Movement, the demand to be treated as equal members of American society. It frankly is amazing that he expressed the strategic goal so clearly in his first speech. That he did so goes a long way toward explaining his swift rise to leadership.
Next he reviewed the facts of the arrest of Parks on the previous Thursday.
Then he struck his second theme, a very human one: that Black Americans simply were tired of being abused. He did not say they were bitter or angry. Rather, he said, “We are here this evening because we’re tired now. And I want to say that we are not here advocating violence. We have never done that.… The only weapon we have in our hands is the weapon of protest.” Jesus was providing the spirit, King later said, while Gandhi was furnishing the method.
The question of King’s commitment to nonviolence at this point is complex. Bayard Rustin, who later advised him on the subject, would assert that King initially did not know much about nonviolence. For example, Rustin said, King employed armed guards at his house after it was attacked.
But the historical record indicates that there was a lot Rustin may not have known about King, such as that when King was a student at Pennsylvania’s Crozer Theological Seminary, he had heard a talk by Howard University’s Mordecai Johnson on Gandhi and got “fired up” and “began to read all the books on Gandhi he could lay his hands on.” Also, at his next school, as a graduate student in theology at Boston University, King became friends with Howard Thurman, a dean and a key figure in twentieth-century Black American theology. Thurman, who had been raised by a grandmother who was born enslaved, developed a philosophy of Black American nonviolence, depicting Jesus, writes one historian, as “a persecuted religious minority, a nonviolent political insurgent who courageously and strategically defied the demands of an empire and permanently altered the course of human history.” Thurman memorably wrote in 1925, “Jesus is still unknown in this land that is covered with churches erected in his honor.” Thurman also asserted that “implicit in the Christian message is a profoundly revolutionary ethic.” Subscribing to this view was not difficult, he added, but figuring out how to implement it was.
And in 1936, Thurman had traveled to India and met with Gandhi. The Indian leader asked him why American slaves had not become Muslims. Their interview ended memorably with Gandhi’s farewell comment that “it may be through the [American] Negroes that the unadulterated message of non-violence will be delivered to the world.” Speaking with another American in the 1940s, Gandhi asked about the treatment of its Black people and then said, “A civilization is to be judged by its treatment of minorities.”
King also was familiar with Thurman’s classic study, Jesus and the Disinherited, which portrays Christianity as a “survival kit” for “people who stand with their backs against the wall.” So King may not have been showing all his nonviolent cards to Rustin and other out-of-town experts. And if he consciously put a Christian face on Gandhi’s philosophy, as he appears to have done, following Thurman’s lead, that was an act of strategic genius.
In his speech that night at the packed Holt Street Baptist Church, King next linked the Montgomery action to Black Americans’ status as citizens. “The great glory of American democracy,” he said, “is the right to protest for right.” He then soared for the first time:
We are not wrong in what we are doing. If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong.… If we are wrong, justice is a lie.… We are determined here in Montgomery to work and fight until justice runs down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.
He came back down to earth with a tactical admonition: “Not only are we using the tools of persuasion, but we’ve come to see that we’ve got to use the tools of coercion.” He was saying that they would shun the buses of this city until they were desegregated. The tactical business at hand was to continue the boycott beyond the one-day wildcat action. That interesting word “coercion” left hanging a question of just who was being coerced. Was it simply the bus company? Or was it also reluctant Blacks of the sort who had not aided Rosa Parks but who would now be seen as breaking with the community if they rode a bus?
King finished with a second leap, this time into history itself: “When the history books are written in the future, somebody will have to say, There lived a race of people … who had the moral courage to stand up for their rights, and thereby they injected a new meaning into the veins of history and civilization.”
It was an amazing presentation. King, just twenty-six years old, the son of the pastor of one of Atlanta’s major churches, and holder of a doctorate from Boston University, had grasped the root of the matter, never an easy task in the middle of swirling events. He had laid out the way forward for the Movement, planting the flag of nonviolent action. And he had taken a long historical perspective in which he foresaw ultimate victory. He did it all in just sixteen minutes.
It helped King that the one-day boycott had been an enormous success. The Montgomery campaign, recalled Fred Shuttlesworth, the Black minister and activist watching from Birmingham, would be “the first actual massive uprising.” A major reason for that, he said, was King and his message: “Doctor King spoke with a new voice. Not only was it a new movement, but it was a new voice, that you must love, you must not hate. The … best thing to make out of your enemy is a friend. So, this had a very profound effect upon not only Blacks, but whites at this time.” Something different was happening in Montgomery, and it would eventually win the attention of the world.
That night the crowd voted, by standing, to extend the boycott indefinitely, under the auspices of a new organization which that night was dubbed the Montgomery Improvement Association. It tends to be forgotten that the boycotters’ initial demand was not for full integration; rather, they presented three requests that fell short of that—first, that sitting Blacks would no longer have to turn seats over to whites; second, that drivers act with courtesy; and third, that some Black drivers be hired. This modest approach would be dropped when it became clear that white officials were not interested even in such a gradualist compromise.
King would go on to lead an insurgency, not just in the city of Montgomery but across the entire region as well. To assert that King’s role was central is not, I think, to fall into the “great man” trap of relating history. Rather, it is to pose the beginning of a series of questions: What did he do, and what did others do? How and why did they do it? Why did they fail sometimes, but why did they succeed more often? All that is the subject of this book.
Copyright © 2022 by Thomas E. Ricks
Copyright © 2022 by Jeffrey L. Ward
