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.
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.
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