Montgomery: the Start of a Nonviolent, Grassroots Revolution

Our analysis of the Montgomery Bus Boycott  followed on the heels of our Brown vs. Board discussion.  Before this reading, I asked students if they thought Rosa Parks was famous because she was the first to resist segregation on the buses, and most of them - half of who are black - said "yes."  I replied, "Really?  You think white people could treat black people that badly and no one else resisted?" My question caused some tension in the room.  Many of them changed their minds.  

My black students were not excited about the upcoming lessons about Parks, King and X. As they told me over and over again, "We've been learning about them since we were babies!"  But they knew so little.  I felt an enormous responsibility to take them into new and expanded civil rights territory.  

While Brown vs. Board of Education was a significant legal case, Montgomery was a mass movement by the people.  Many people are under the impression that the Montgomery movement was started by Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King.  However, consider these words by Dr. King in his book Stride Towards Freedom:

When I went to Montgomery as a pastor, I had not the slightest idea that I would later become involved in a crisis in which nonviolent resistance would be applicable.  I neither started the protest nor suggested it.  I simply responded to the call of the people for a spokesman. 

When the protest began, my mind, either consciously or unconsciously, was driven back to the Sermon on the Mount, with its sublime teachings on love, and the Gandhian method of nonviolent resistance.  As the days unfolded, I came to see the power of nonviolence more and more.  Living through the actual experience of the protest, nonviolence became more than a method to which I gave intellectual assent; it became a commitment to a way of life.  Many of the things that I had not cleared up intellectually [while in university] concerning nonviolence were now solved in the sphere of practical action.

There are a few important things to take note of here:

1)   Not only did Dr. King not start the Montgomery movement, he did not even suggest it.  So who did?

2)   Although Dr. King had studied Gandhi in college, at the beginning of the Montgomery movement, he did not have a deep understanding of Gandhi.  He would gain that understanding through action.

 

Rosa Parks was not the Only One to Resist

Due to job discrimination, very few African Americans in Montgomery owned cars.  They relied on the buses, which were extraordinarily demeaning.  When whites began to fill the bus, the driver would yell “Niggers, move back!”  Every once and a while, people understandably refused this treatment; they were usually just kicked off the bus but not arrested.  In fact, in 1945, ten years before her arrest initiated the movement, Rosa Parks had been kicked off the bus for refusing to obey the drivers orders.

It’s important to realize that black resistance to discrimination on the buses was not unusual.  By portraying Rosa Parks as the only one to resist, history books have made the rest of the black community look passive and cowardly.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

Consider the especially radical example of Pauli Murray, who resisted arrest in 1940, fifteen years before the Montgomery bus boycott.  Pauli Murray was on a bus in North Carolina with her girlfriend Adeline McBean.  Not only were they arrested for refusing to move from their seats on the bus, they did so because they had been studying Gandhi and believed his tactics of nonviolent resistance could be used to desegregate buses.  The NAACP became interested in the case, and Thurgood Marshall himself represented it.  They decided to drop the case, however, because Pauli Murray was a socialist and a lesbian, which the NAACP worried would bring negative press to their cause.    

Reverend Pauli Murray

Shortly after this, Pauli Murray moved into a spiritual community in Harlem, called the Harlem Ashram, where she studied Gandhi with the black community.  She spent decades fighting for the rights of people of color, women, and LGBT people.  Her life proves that African Americans had been planning for what finally happened at Montgomery for a long, long time.  She is also proof of how many people are forgotten by popular history and forces us to ask why that it.   

The Boycott as a Grassroots Movement

The history most of us read, and the historical films and TV shows most of us watch tend to be about heroes, about magnificent individuals… women like Rosa Parks and men like Martin Luther King.  Such histories are often less about the truth, and more about creating a movie-like story that is exciting and easy to understand but not truthful.  Whenever we start going deeper into examining the truth of history, we find the work of many, many forgotten people behind the heroes we read about so often.  Whenever you read about a hero in history, always ask yourself: who supported their development?  Who made it possible for them to do what they did?  

One unsung hero is E.D. Nixon, the leader of the NAACP chapter in Montgomery.  Nixon understood that the arrest of a respected, strong willed and religious woman such as Rosa Parks could be used to initiate a boycott.  He understood that the public would sympathize with a woman more than a man, and especially with a woman of strong moral and religious integrity.  E. D. Nixon, in other words, had been waiting for this exact moment, and he sprung into action.    

E.D. Nixon, arrest photo from the Montgomery Bus Boycott

Historian James Patterson, an author of the Oxford History of the United States, writes that E.D. Nixon’s actions, and those of the NAACP, “revealed the central role played by unheralded black people in the fight for civil rights in the 1950’s and thereafter.  Dramatic leaders came and went, but they could do little without the sacrifices of local folk, who confronted great intimidation, including violence, on the grass-roots level.  And many of these people had long been restless indeed."  “The Reverend [Martin Luther King] he didn’t stir us up,” one young Montgomery woman told a reporter at the time.  “We’ve been stirred up a mighty long time.” 

It was everyday black women that really kicked the movement off: as Patterson writes,

Women played large roles in what followed in Montgomery and in other demonstrations to come.  Jo Ann Robinson, a black English teacher, moved quickly.  Hearing of Parks arrest, she stayed up most of the night, with other members of the Women’s Political Council of Montgomery, which she headed, to print leaflets, some 50,000 in all, to be distributed in the next few days.

The contribution of women like Robinson did not suggest that they were angrier than men; the mounting impatience of involved black people knew no gender boundaries.  But black women were often a little less susceptible to economic pressure and to violence than were black men.  Many, like Robinson, were steadfast in their goals, well disciplined, efficient, and for all these reasons vital to the cause of civil rights. 

Over the next day, everyday people, including E.D. Nixon and Jo Ann Robinson, met to discuss a plan.  Collectively, they decided on a bus boycott.  In other words, there was no one person that came up with the plan that followed.  Once they had a plan, they choose a spokesman: Dr. King.

Why a Boycott?

Boycott’s do not work in every situation.  Here are some of the reasons why a bus boycott was a good strategy in Montgomery.

Montgomery was a city of some 70,000 whites and 50,000 blacks.  Few blacks had cars, so they had to use buses to get around.  This meant the busing industry relied on them.  Because African Americans were such a large portion of the population, the bus boycott would strike a critical blow that it would not have in cities with lower black populations.    

This is important to consider when thinking of civil rights actions in the future: after the boycott ended, there were actually no major civil rights actions for a few years.  Why?  One reason is because boycotts don’t work everywhere.  For example, because African Americans were segregated from restaurants, movie theatres, and other places, they were not contributing to the success of these places.  In most cases of segregation, boycotts didn’t work.  Other strategies would become necessary.  

Race and the Propaganda Wars

This was a short piece I wrote for my students last year as part of a lesson that analyzed civil rights within a global context.  I couldn't find a way to make the poster below readable; but the point is to describe the successes of Carver, to portray the United States as a place where people of color can succeed, and to express the thankfulness the US feels for Carver's contributions.   

The lesson helped me to understand that most students only recognized propaganda when the focus was either to demonize people or had an explicit government message, such as Uncle Sam's "I Want You!" or Rosy the Riveter's "We Can Do It!"  They also assumed that because the image portrayed African American's in a positive light that it must have been created by people who supported civil rights.  Because of this, in our discussion about the image before the reading I asked them how different groups of people could USE this image for their own ends: could even racist groups benefit from using this image?      

The poster applauding George Washington Carver shown below was created by the US government during World War II.  How could distributing posters like this internationally have benefited the United States?   

  

The answer to this question is an important but little discussed part of civil rights.  In 1943, when the poster was created, the Japanese were creating propaganda showing the United States as an extremely racist nation towards all people of color.  They spread this propaganda across the world, hoping to convince people of color - or "countries of color" - not to ally with the United States. 

This propaganda was a major threat to the United States.  If Japan could convince the world's “countries of color” to side with it because of racism in the United States, America would obviously have a major problem.  In fact, for a time, many people in the world thought that a war between white countries and the “colored people of the world” was entirely possible.

After World War II ended, the global propaganda wars about race increased.  During the “Cold War,” the Soviet Union and the United States tried to gain allegiance from all the other nations of the world.  The Soviet Union tried to gain this allegiance by creating propaganda revealing the racism of the United States, and asking the nations of Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and South America why they would side with a country like the United States that looked at them as inferior.  In fact, the Soviet Union once invited Langston Hughes to travel to Russia and make a film depicting the horrors of slavery.  Their hope was that the movie would help reveal to the rest of the world the brutal faults about the “land of freedom.”  Hughes did go to Russia, but the film was never made.   

As time went on, the United States felt more and more of a need to convince the rest of the world that its ideals were not hollow, and that it truly was a land of freedom.  In order to do this, the US created a "counter-propaganda" campaign, flooding the world with images and stories about successful people of color in the United States.  But the US understood it had to go farther than mere images and words: Starting in the 1960’s, American politicians felt more and more of a need to support civil rights in order to gain the support of the rest of the world. 

  

For more on the international context of the civil rights movement, see: The international context of Brown vs. Board and the dialog between George Washington Carver and Gandhi.