Cross Cultural Solidarity

History; in the Service of Solidarity

An Incomparable Loss: The Mourning of Martin Luther King’s Friends and Family

By Lynn Burnett

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Martin Luther King stepped out onto the balcony, smiling and laughing at his friends below as they got into their cars to head to dinner. King had just been teasing one of his top aides, Andrew Young, which had turned into a playful wrestling match. Other aides had ganged up on Young, mercilessly tickling him. A wild pillow fight had broken out, with Martin chasing his brother A.D. King around the room as if they were kids again. Out on the balcony now, King leaned over the rail and chatted with Jesse Jackson about music. He laughed as Andrew Young started goofily shadowboxing with the 6’4, 348 pound James Orange… who had almost become a pro-football player before joining King’s organization, where he helped King build positive relationships with young people and gang members living in disenfranchised Black ghettos across the country.

King had been living in a state of constant despair and exhaustion recently, concerned that the civil rights movement was falling apart. Outside of the South, conditions for African Americans were worsening. New technologies had wiped out millions of jobs in steel, auto, meatpacking, tobacco, mining and cotton industries, and African Americans were the first to be let go. Unions often excluded them, and hiring discrimination made it difficult to find new work. Seeking a way out of poverty, masses of Black men went to Vietnam: although African Americans were only 13 percent of the nation’s population, Black men made up almost 40 percent of Vietnam’s soldiers. They were given the most dangerous missions and were killed at twice the rate of their White comrades. As jobs vanished from America’s cities, White people found new opportunities in suburbs that systematically excluded African Americans. Very few White Americans understood that poverty and segregation had actually worsened outside of the South for African Americans during the civil rights movement, and many lost their sympathy for the continuing struggle for civil rights. Politicians thus felt less and less pressure to support that struggle, and even had an increasing incentive not to. As riots erupted in impoverished Black ghettos where police brutality ran rampant, politicians responded by demonizing African Americans for embracing a “culture of poverty” and “criminality.” Such rhetoric helped lay the groundwork for the devastating system of mass incarceration that would even further eviscerate Black communities in the decades to come.

It was for these reasons that Martin Luther King was despairing. But what he was seeing in Memphis had raised his spirits: here was a living, breathing example of the labor and civil rights movements coming together as one. Here was a concrete manifestation of King’s vision for solving poverty. And in a time where Black communities were often fracturing around their different ideas of how to move forward, here was a Black community that had united across their divisions of class, religious denomination, and age, in order to fight for the right to a living wage and humane working conditions for Black workers. Success for the striking sanitation workers in Memphis would put the movement on the right track again by creating a powerful example of the fusion of racial and economic justice. It would be the perfect start to the enormous Poor People’s Campaign planned in Washington the following month.

King smiled. A bullet blasted through his jaw, ripping off his chin, cutting through his jugular vein and spinal cord, and slamming him onto his back. His dear friend Ralph Abernathy had been in the room with him and rushed to his side, cradling his head: “Martin, Martin, this is Ralph. Do you hear me?” Abernethy saw Martin Luther King’s lips quiver and thought he was trying to respond. King’s eyes stared blankly out into space. An undercover agent named Marrell McCullough grabbed towels from a hotel cleaning cart as he bounded up the stairs, and tried to use them to stanch the wound as a pool of blood spread across the balcony. As howls of anguish erupted from the street below, the local reverend who had invited King and his friends to dinner, Billy Kyles, threw a blanket over King to try and keep him warm as King’s skin began to grow pale.

A group of radical Black Power youth from a gang called the Invaders had just left the motel after meeting with King, where they discussed lending their street cred to an upcoming, nonviolent march. Having been shot at before, the Invaders scattered in all directions, thinking that it was they who were being attacked. One of their comrades, Charles Cabbage, had just gotten in his car when he heard the crack of the rifle shot. He slammed on the gas, only slowing down once he was sure he was far from danger. Turning on the radio, however, he heard that the gunfire had been aimed at King. The radio said to be on the lookout for a light blue or white Mustang. Cabbage was driving a light blue Mustang. Cabbage had just fled the scene. He hit the gas again, hid the car in his backyard, and covered it with tree branches as helicopters began to circle overhead. The young Black Power militant who had just been negotiating with King was soon overpowered by an immense nervous breakdown. His muscles began to freeze and spasm. While Cabbage slipped into an incapacitating seizure brought on by the trauma of the loss of King combined with the fear that he was a suspect, the real assassin slipped quickly across the border, out of Tennessee, and soon out of the country.

Back at the scene of the crime, Lorene Bailey, who owned the Lorraine Motel with her husband Walter, froze when she heard the crack of the rifle and realized that King had been shot. Having King stay at her motel had been the pride of her life, and now he had been killed there. Her husband later said that she began shaking wildly, “like a leaf in the wind.” Later that night a blood vessel to her brain burst and she collapsed, fell into a coma, and died a few days later. King’s brother had been in the shower and hadn’t heard the shot; he emerged to find his worst nightmare unfolding in front of him and fell to the floor sobbing. A.D. King would drown in a pool the following year. Although there was no evidence of murder, King’s brother was a good swimmer, and many of his friends couldn’t help but wonder. A few years later a Black man walked into Ebenezer Baptist Church, where the King brothers had spent their childhood, and shot and killed their mother as she was playing the organ. Martin Luther King’s father had just lost two sons, and now he had to watch with his own eyes as the body of his beloved wife, Alberta Williams King, slumped across the organ.

Martin and A.D. King had called Alberta Williams King a few hours before Martin was killed, “just to pester her,” their father Daddy King later wrote: the two brothers would try to disguise their voices and pretend to be someone else when they called their mother, and then break into howls of laughter. Martin told his mother that things were better in Memphis than he had expected; that the news reports were exaggerating the danger he was in; and that she need not worry. However, just a few weeks before this, Martin had made a point to sit down with his parents and ground them in the reality that he likely would not live much longer. He told them that large amounts of money were being offered to professional killers. Martin told his parents that they needed to spiritually prepare themselves for his impending death. By the time Martin sat his parents down for this talk, they had long lived in fear. For years, every knock on the door or telephone call they received felt like it would be news of their son’s death. Now, later in the evening, at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, they heard the news they had long feared on the radio. Martin’s parents wept silently. Daddy King later wrote of he and his wife: “Neither of us could say anything. We had waited, agonizing through the nights and days without sleep, startled by nearly any sound, unable to eat, simply staring at our meals. Suddenly, in a few seconds of radio time, it was over.”

Back in Memphis, James Lawson was one of the first to be notified about King’s death who wasn’t actually present at the scene. He received a call immediately afterwards, as he was sitting down to have dinner with his family. Lawson had been studying nonviolent resistance in India when the Montgomery bus boycott broke out, and had rushed back to the United States to meet with King. He became perhaps the greatest trainer of nonviolent resistance in the country; training a group of students in Nashville who later became an important force in the sit-ins and Freedom Rides and helped to found SNCC. Lawson had moved to Memphis, and it had been he who had convinced King to come and support the Black garbage workers who had gone on strike. Fearing riots, he immediately rushed to Memphis’s most popular Black radio station and recorded a tape that was played throughout the night, urging people to honor King’s legacy and mourn with their communities rather than taking their rage out into the streets. After leaving the radio station, Lawson sat alone in his car, gripping the steering wheel. Even this profoundly spiritual, philosophical spirit, this student and warrior and mentor of nonviolent resistance, felt an overwhelming sense of rage. He understood better than anyone how disastrous King’s death would be for the trajectory of the country. Lawson wanted to break down and scream and weep as he gripped his steering wheel, but he knew he had work to do. It would be Lawson who called the man who had emerged as perhaps Martin Luther King’s greatest mentor, during the Montgomery bus boycott: Bayard Rustin.

Rustin received the news from Lawson before the national news networks had picked it up, and quickly boarded a flight to Memphis. In mid-flight, the airplane received orders from President Johnson to turn around and bring Rustin to Washington D.C. The President sought Rustin’s advice on the appropriate federal response to King’s death. Rustin warned Johnson that he needed to do something that would assure America’s poor that hope was on the horizon, and that he needed to honor King by passing legislation focused on the economic justice issues he died fighting for. Thurgood Marshall — who had just become the nation’s first Black Supreme Court Justice — expressed a similar opinion, warning the President that the nation had slipped into a deep “mood of depression” that required immediate and meaningful action. When Rustin finally arrived in Memphis, he told the striking garbage collectors that what they were doing represented a “totally new stage” in the civil rights struggle. The fusion of the struggle for racial justice with labor rights would be the path forward to wiping out poverty in the United States, he said. They must continue. Rustin — the master organizer of the March on Washington — stayed in town to orchestrate a completely silent march of 42,000 people. Shortly afterwards, the striking garbage collectors succeeded at winning basic labor rights, such as being paid for overtime work, gaining access to promotions previously available only to Whites, setting up a grievance procedure so they could challenge their bosses when they had been wronged without being fired, and forming an officially recognized union.

As for President Johnson, he leveraged the pressure created by King’s death to pass the last major piece of civil rights legislation of the 1960s: the Fair Housing Act of 1968. It was, in part, a reaction to Martin Luther King’s Chicago Campaign of 1966, where he pushed for an end to the rampant housing discrimination that existed throughout the entire country. Johnson had tried to pass a fair housing act after King’s Chicago Campaign, but with 70 percent of White Americans telling pollsters that they opposed opening up their neighborhoods to African Americans, Congress overwhelming refused to support the bill. Now, it succeeded by just one vote. The Fair Housing Act made it a crime to deny anyone the right to buy or rent property based on race, but just like the Brown v. Board of Education ruling 15 years earlier, it had weak enforcement powers and didn’t lead to nearly as much change as many had hoped. In the words of historian Jason Sokol: “From the perspective of many political leaders, the bill was significant primarily because it allowed them to boast that they had enacted a major civil rights law,” and thereby create the illusion that they were honoring Martin Luther King. Like so much civil rights legislation before it, the actual effectiveness of the Fair Housing Act was not the point.

Meanwhile, riots rippled through 125 cities across the nation, with some lasting over a week. 72,800 Army and National Guard troops were deployed, and 50,000 soldiers stood ready for deployment on military bases around the country. It was the largest domestic deployment of military force since the Civil War. By the end of the week, the nation had sustained over $100 million in property damage, much of it explicitly targeted at White owned businesses with known histories of discrimination. 21,000 Black people were arrested. 40 people were killed, 2,500 were injured, and over 5,000 people were left homeless. Almost all were Black.

In the Black ghettos of the nation’s capital, Stokely Carmichael — who had unleashed the call for Black Power two years earlier while marching with King — roamed the streets, attempting to calm the growing and angry crowds. Although Carmichael and King were portrayed as total opposites, the two men had developed a deep friendship, with King being almost a fatherly figure to the young Black Power militant. They both had a deep love for Black culture and history and Black rural folk traditions. Both were students of philosophy. When White Americans heard “Black Power” they tended to imagine a Black version of the violent domination signified by White power, but what Carmichael meant was having equal access to political power, economic power, and cultural power… meaning cultural empowerment and Black self-love. Having power meant to not be disempowered; it meant to not be politically powerless and economically destitute. For Black Power activists, cultural empowerment also meant not watering down Black speech and Black feelings in order to gain concessions or respect from Whites. White people were often angered, scared and confused when Black people expressed their honest thoughts and feelings about their oppression, and these reactions contributed to the demonization of Black Power and to the backlash of White “moderates” against the completion of the civil rights movement.

For King’s part, the notion of Black Power was not new to him, and indeed it had deep historical roots reaching back across the generations. At a mass meeting during the Montgomery bus boycott a decade earlier, King had told the crowd “…until we as a race learn to develop our power, we will get nowhere. We’ve got to get political power and economic power for our race.” Ending segregation had always been just the beginning for Martin Luther King. While the two men had many disagreements, Carmichael also felt many commonalities with King. He had been moved by King’s deep and obvious love for Black people, and by his ability to connect with them in communities across the nation. He had personally witnessed King risk his life over and over again. When the media began portraying Carmichael as an enemy of King, Carmichael had reacted by praising King whenever he could.

Now, in the Black ghettos of D.C., Stokely Carmichael stopped a young man who had begun breaking windows. He took his gun. He prevented a group of security guards from being attacked. When Carmichael stood up to speak to the growing crowds on the streets, they chanted “Black Power!” and he replied, “Brother King is dead; keep a cool head!” Stokely urged them to de-escalate the tensions on the streets by returning to their homes. But he also said that White America had killed the opportunity for nonviolence when they killed King; that King had been the only force advocating nonviolence that Black Power militants like himself admired and would listen to. A race war might be coming, Stokely told the crowd. Don’t be undisciplined and riot. Channel your anger into disciplined preparation for race war. Untold numbers of Black Americans agreed… and they took action. King’s death transformed the Black Panther Party for Self Defense from an organization based in Oakland — with a second chapter in L.A. — into an organization with dozens of highly militant and effective chapters across the nation. As Black America prepared to physically defend itself, the FBI cracked down with an even fiercer brutality than it had shown to its most profound enemy: Martin Luther King.

A few days later, Stokely Carmichael, his fiancé Miriam Makeba, and his friend Cleveland Sellers drove to Atlanta, passing through numerous cities under martial law, to attend King’s funeral. Unable to contact King’s family, they rose extremely early to try and get into the church. The crowd outside Ebenezer Baptist Church, however, was already swelling to 60,000 — mostly poor African Americans. It looked as though those let into the church were primarily White dignitaries from across the country, which infuriated Carmichael and Sellers. They pushed through the crowds and waited for the King family to arrive at the entrance, and then audaciously jumped in behind them. The guards at the entrance were surprised, but recognizing Stokely, let them through. These legendary Black Power militants who loved King sat a few rows behind the King family, in the same aisle with the governor of New York state and the mayor of New York City. Looking around, they were disturbed to see many political figures who had never supported King. They were troubled to see so few Black freedom fighters, including no one else from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee… although one of its great leaders, James Foreman, was indeed in the audience, sitting alongside a man he had profound disagreements with: the president of the NAACP, Roy Wilkins. Carmichael and Sellers — with all the alertness of true soldiers — then noticed someone hiding in the back of the church: another SNCC member, understanding that grassroots folks like himself wouldn’t be let in, had snuck into the church in the middle of the night.

Another Black luminary who pressed through that vast crowd to become one of the merely 1,300 entrants into Ebenezer Baptist Church was James Baldwin. Baldwin’s memory of King’s assassination was already a haze: in his words, it had “retired into some deep cavern in my mind.” The famed author did what he could to squeeze through the crowd, inch by inch, until the wall of people simply became impenetrable. Not only was every inch of street and sidewalk and lawn occupied… so were the limbs of the trees. The crowds had overflowed onto the rooftops of houses. Baldwin later wrote: “Every inch of ground, as far as the eye could see, was black with people, and they stood in silence.” He was finally able to wave down someone at the entrance of the church, and was literally lifted over the crowd. Inside the church he described “a tension indescribable — as though something, perhaps the heavens, perhaps the earth, might crack.” Soon, busloads of sanitation workers — who Martin had died defending in Memphis — poured in. They had travelled unstopping through the night, and had not even had time to change out of their work clothes. Ultimately, 120 million Americans — out of the 1968 population of 201 million — watched the funeral service on television. Martin’s wife Coretta decided to let her husband deliver his own eulogy. A recording of his voice, from a church service exactly two months before his death, unfolded before the vast audience:

“I don’t want a long funeral. And if you get somebody to deliver the eulogy, tell them not to talk too long… Tell them not to mention that I have a Nobel Peace Prize… that’s not important… I’d like somebody to mention that day that Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to give his life serving others. I’d like for somebody to say that day that Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to love somebody. I want you to say that day that I tried to be right on the war question. I want you to be able to say that day that I did try to feed the hungry. And I want you to be able to say that day that I did try in my life to clothe those who were naked. I want you to say on that day that I did try in my life to visit those who were in prison. I want you to say that I tried to love and serve humanity…”

Today’s most famous leader of SNCC, Congressman John Lewis, was not inside the church that day. Lewis had received the news of King’s death while at a rally for Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign. One of Kennedy’s aides had pressed through the crowd to find Lewis and tell him before the news broke. Lewis felt time pause. He would later write that a part of his spirit seemed to die that day. Lewis gathered himself together and huddled with some of Kennedy’s aides. They all decided that the presidential candidate needed to inform the crowd. In an age before news transmitted instantly over the internet and smartphones, it would be Kennedy’s televised address that broke the news to many people across the country. Kennedy soon called King’s wife, Coretta Scott King, to offer her any help necessary. He put a private jet at their disposal, arranging transportation for the King family to the funeral, and for King’s body to be transported from Memphis to Atlanta. He also reserved large sections of several hotels in Atlanta to ensure that the thousands of people who would be coming to the funeral would have places to stay. Referring to his brother’s assassination a few years earlier, Robert Kennedy commented that he had experience with this sort of thing.

At 3AM on the night before the funeral, John Lewis led Robert Kennedy personally into Ebenezer Baptist Church, where they viewed King’s body alone, in the quiet of the night. Lewis, feeling that he had had a final, meaningful moment with King, decided to give up his seat at the funeral the following day so that someone else could attend. He would later stand with King’s family as Martin’s casket was lowered into the ground. Like many African Americans, John Lewis then threw himself full force into supporting Robert Kennedy’s candidacy for president, feeling that he was the best hope now for the continuance of the struggle for civil rights. Such hopes were soon shattered: Robert Kennedy would be assassinated two months later, just after giving a major speech alongside Cesar Chavez. Like Martin — and so many others in the civil rights struggle — Robert Kennedy had foreseen his own death, telling an aide that “There are guns between me and the White House.”

As for Coretta Scott King: as Martin had leaned over the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, he had chatted with Jesse Jackson below. It was Jackson who first called Coretta, but he couldn’t bring himself to break the news: he said King had been shot… but that maybe he would be all right. Although King had not died immediately, he had obviously sustained a mortal would. King’s aide Andrew Young intervened and told Coretta that her husband did not have long to live and that she needed to get down to Memphis. The mayor of Atlanta and a contingent of police rushed her to the airport to board a plane, and it was at the airport that Coretta received the news that her husband had already died. She decided to not board the plane, but to console their four children in the comfort of their own home. King’s friend Andrew Young later wrote that he suspected that Martin and Coretta had prepared their children for this moment, just as King had prepared the rest of his family. One of Young’s most vivid memories of the days following King’s death was of King’s children telling him: “Daddy wouldn’t want us to hate the man who killed him. He was just an ignorant man who didn’t know any better.” And: “This man didn’t know our Daddy, did he? Because if he had known Daddy, he wouldn’t have shot him.” Coretta, however, was worried about their youngest child, the five-year-old Bernice, affectionately nicknamed “Bunny.” Bunny was very quiet and Coretta worried about what she was going through: one time Bunny was flipping through a family photo album and innocently asked her mother who would be killed next.

Coretta had lived with the likelihood of her husbands death ever since the Montgomery Bus Boycott, during which their house had been bombed. Ever since that moment, the threat of death had been constant, and she had been the number one force in Martin’s life helping him to proceed on the path that he needed to walk, through the dark valleys of doubt and fear. In 1963, as they watched the news coverage of President Kennedy’s assassination, Martin had said, “This is what is going to happen to me.” He had believed it already, but knowing that the very president of the United States couldn’t be adequately protected increased King’s belief that nothing in the world could save him. Coretta knew it to be true. Just as her husband often told crowds that the movement needed to continue even if he didn’t make it — even once he was no longer there with them — so too did Coretta say this in her own speeches to packed audiences. In the last months of Martin’s life, it was clear that the threats were escalating. When he left for a speaking tour to promote the Poor People’s Campaign, he gave his wife a synthetic rose — a flower that would always last, in case he didn’t return.

On April 5, the day after Martin’s death, friends and relatives flooded into the King family’s home. Many of them later recalled the strong smell of coffee as pot after pot was brewed — for many had not slept the night before. They recalled the endless boxes of tissues being brought in as others were being emptied out. They recalled the two men who stood at the door — one White and one Black — each of whom gave a big hug to every single person who entered. Some felt slightly star struck by the guests — especially the famed singer, actor, and activist, Harry Belafonte — who arrived, he told Coretta, to help her do “the menial things:” washing dishes and helping her take care of the kids. He also helped her choose Martin Luther King’s funeral suit and ensured that her family would be financially secure in the years to come… for Martin Luther King had died with only $5000 in his bank account; enough to pay for his family’s needs for a few months. King brought in enormous sums from his speaking tours, but he gave it all back to the movement.

Some of those present at the King family’s home that day probably wondered who the slightly uncomfortable looking and unfamiliar White man was who kept ducking into the King’s bedroom with Belafonte to check on Coretta and the kids. That was Stanley Levison. Levison was an ex-Communist and a wealthy Jewish businessman from New York. Together with Ella Baker and Bayard Rustin, he had been involved in an effort to fund movements in the South that were trying to get off the ground… including the Montgomery bus boycott. From that moment on, Levison had been King’s invisible confidant, the man who King always knew he could call if he woke up at 3AM filled with fears or with new ideas he wanted to explore. Although King and his mentor Rustin had drifted apart in the years since the Voting Rights Act was passed — over a difference of ideas regarding where the movement should turn to next — King’s relationship with Levison had never wavered, because Levison had no interest in pushing King’s ideas or strategies in a certain direction. He simply wanted to help King talk through his difficult emotions and refine his own thoughts. King, knowing that Levison didn’t want anything from him in return — such as to influence his ideas or to gain status through associating with him — trusted Levison more than anyone else to be brutally honest with him. One of King’s good friends and most important aides, Andrew Young, later said of Levison: “Of all the unknown supporters of the civil rights movement, he was perhaps the most important.” Levison joined his friend Belafonte in ensuring that Martin’s wife and children would have no economic difficulties, and he continued to fund a variety of movement causes until the day he died.

At a rally in Memphis the following day, Coretta told the striking sanitation workers and their supporters that the struggle must continue until every person was truly free, until every person could live a life of dignity. “His campaign for the poor must go on,” she said. And then her voice cracked. “How many men must die before we can really have a free and true and peaceful society?” On April 8, she led the mass march in Memphis that had been organized by Bayard Rustin and James Lawson. Many Black Memphians later said that listening to Coretta Scott King had inspired the crowd and grounded the rage that so many of them felt. As cities around the nation burned, Memphis stayed quiet, and many felt this was largely due to the influence of Martin Luther King’s powerful wife.

In Atlanta the following day, April 9, an old wooden cart drawn by mules — symbolizing the labor and poverty of Black sharecroppers — carried Martin’s body from the church where he had been raised, five miles to Morehouse college, where he had studied. Coretta walked at the front of a funeral procession that drew a crowd of 150,000… 140,000 of whom were Black. John Lewis walked alongside the wooden cart that bore King’s body. King’s mentor at Morehouse, Benjamin Mays — who had met personally with Gandhi in 1936 and helped transmit the tradition of nonviolent resistance to Black America — gave the eulogy: “He believed especially that he was sent to champion the cause of the man farthest down. He would probably say that, if death had to come, I’m sure there was no greater cause to die for than fighting to get a just wage for garbage collectors.”

On May 2, Coretta stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel where her husband had been shot. Looking out over the crowd below, she launched the Poor People’s Campaign. The campaign went down in history as disorganized and ineffective; partly the result of the trauma the organizers had just endured. Often unsaid, however, is that many who attended — including representatives of Native American reservations, poor White communities, and Latino neighborhoods and migrant labor camps — returned home with fresh ideas, having plugged into a multiracial, nationwide network of antiracist and antipoverty activists. Many who participated emerged as new leaders of Chicano and Native American civil rights struggles. Meanwhile, Coretta was flooded with invitations to speak across the world, and later wrote that her travels were “a humbling reminder that our mission was respected on a global stage.” Indeed, just as freedom fighters across the world had looked to Gandhi, they now looked to the example of King. Martin had died fighting for humane working conditions for Black garbage collectors in a single city. But he also died having provided lessons for all people committed to building a just and humane world… lessons for people of all races, and even of all nations.

 

The Life of Anne Braden, Part Two: a Life in the Movement

By Lynn Burnett

Read Part One. Inquire about Braden workshops here. Listen on SoundCloud. Download the PDF & discussion questions. Support resources on White antiracist history here.

As Anne Braden crisscrossed the nation raising support to free her husband, the love of her life was unbeknownst to her locked away in solitary confinement. Although they wrote to each other often, Carl worried that Anne already had far too many burdens to bear, and therefore didn’t reveal how difficult his circumstances truly were. Carl used his time in solitary to develop an ascetic quality in himself, composing and reflecting on ethical goals. Anne meanwhile cultivated a large, national network of supporters through her travels, writings and journalistic connections. Civil rights activists and labor organizers across the country understood that if the Bradens could be charged with being part of a Communist conspiracy simply for helping a Black family move into a White neighborhood, that they could be charged with subversion for their activities as well. Freeing Carl Braden thus became a major cause: although his bail was the highest in Kentucky’s history, it was raised in seven months. Carl was released in the summer of 1955. Eight months later, the Supreme Court ruled that the state sedition laws that had been used to target the Bradens were unconstitutional. All charges were dropped. The prosecutor of the Bradens, Scott Hamilton, had hoped to rise to fame through building a sensational anti-Communist case. He instead found his career discredited. A few years later, he put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.

Anne and Carl could not, however, simply return to their old lives. They were now highly public and ruthlessly demonized figures throughout the White South. In order to stay safe and be in a supportive environment, they moved into a Black neighborhood, where their children wouldn’t have to see their parents being constantly ostracized. However, the very public nature of their demonization affected their ability to become involved in the civil rights movement as it began to ignite. Carl had been released just months before the Montgomery bus boycott began, and although the Bradens attended a few of the early meetings, their continuing legal battles and dire economic circumstances took all of their energy and prevented a high level of involvement. Once the case was dropped and the Bradens had more energy to put into the movement, they found that many civil rights activists were wary of associating with them. Even with the case dismissed, the Bradens were still widely viewed as Communist subversives, and the early civil rights movement was desperately trying to prove itself to have no such affiliations. The Bradens therefore developed a practice of playing behind-the-scenes roles and staying out of sight.

The SCEF: Rallying White Southern Support

In 1957, shortly after the Montgomery bus boycott ended, the Bradens joined the Southern Conference Education Fund, or SCEF. The SCEF was an organization dedicated to building White southern support for integration, and had thrown their full support behind the Bradens during their sedition trial. Its monthly newsletter, the Southern Patriot, was subscribed to by supporters of civil rights across the nation. During Carl’s incarceration, the Patriot had published articles by Anne and had helped her gain a national audience. The executive director, Jim Dombrowski, was a somewhat saintly theologian in Anne’s eyes. He became a significant mentor to her, and a lifelong friend to Carl.

The SCEF was suffering in 1957. The Brown v. Board Supreme Court ruling of 1954, coupled with the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-1956, had led to a massive White backlash. In the context of this backlash, White southerners who had previously spoken in support of integration now felt forced into silence. Previously viewed as eccentrics, the cost of speaking out in an era in which segregation seemed seriously under threat now included character assassination, social isolation, economic retaliation, and physical threats. In this context, support for SCEF evaporated. The readership of the Southern Patriot plummeted. Dombrowski told Anne that “SCEF must expand or die.” The Bradens became essential to keeping the organization alive.

The SCEF hired Anne and Carl to scour the South for potentially supportive Whites, and to find ways to help them step forward. In Anne’s words, “I knew white people were there somewhere, and we had to get to them. A lot of the whites who had been active earlier in the South had been caught in the witch hunts and run out.” The president of the SCEF, Aubrey Williams, put it this way: “I know there are more white people around the South that think like we do, but you have to get out and find them. They are not going to come to us. We need to go out and beat the bushes and find people, and that’s what we want you and Carl to do.” Aubrey also gave Anne a warning: “…this whole question of how you can get white people in the South to really deal with the issue of segregation has broken the hearts of most people who have tried. I just hope it doesn’t break yours.”

And so, to use Anne’s words, the Bradens became “travelling agitators.” As they travelled, they found that many sympathetic White Southerners were older, had been active in the pre-McCarthy, New Deal era, and now felt a sense of isolation and futility as White Southerners became more reactionary. However, this older generation also had a racially paternalistic attitude and a belief in “gradual” racial progress that was unacceptable to the new generation of racial justice activists, and especially to African Americans during the civil rights years. Although it was dismaying to discover that these were often the most progressive White Southerners, SCEF went to work providing them with a desperately needed support network and a hard-to-find extended community by creating mailing lists and regional gatherings. It was also critical for White Southern supporters of integration to develop connections with local Black leadership, which the regional gatherings served to do as well. These gatherings emerged as critical spaces in a segregated landscape: it was here that many African Americans encountered the first White people they had ever met who were committed to racial justice; and where many White people had their first opportunities to hear Black people speak frankly about race relations and what they needed from their potential White allies.

Although often frustrated even by those White southerners who supported integration, Anne was simultaneously empowered by building ties with this primarily older generation. Many of them had experienced waves of racial progress and repression throughout their lives, and they provided Anne with a deepened sense of southern social justice history and an empowering sense of being part of a lineage. Virginia Durr played this role for Anne more than anyone else. A generation older than Anne, Virginia was a White Southern aristocrat whose husband, Clifford Durr, had worked in the Roosevelt administration during the New Deal. The couple lived in Montgomery, and Clifford had played an important background role in the Montgomery bus boycott by offering expert legal advice and mentorship to the Black lawyers who represented Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, and others.

Even with their economic and social privilege and proximity to power, the Durrs still experienced intense isolation as White Southern supporters of the civil rights movement. Virginia – someone who loved throwing fancy salons and dinner parties, and who now deeply missed being able to do – combatted her isolation partly by keeping up a voluminous correspondence with like-minded Whites across the nation. Writing to a friend in the fall of 1959, Virginia said, “I have made a new friend, Anne Braden… Who sees life in Alabama as I do, but with even deeper insight, much deeper I think. She is a lovely and charming and gentle person with a brilliant mind and is such a comfort to me.” A few months later, she wrote: “Anne Braden is arriving here on Sunday to stay with me, and Mrs. Martin Luther King is having a big female party for her.” And another letter days later: “Anne Braden has been here recently and she is a perfect darling and I love her and I think she is a very good writer too. After she was gone, the Attorney General came out with a huge warning to all the people of Alabama to beware of her as she was so dangerous.” Virginia and Anne soon became fast friends.

Virginia told Anne stories about how White people in Montgomery who dared to consider integration were hounded: they were constantly followed as they drove; they received threatening phone calls; and their names, phone numbers and businesses were published in the papers. The story of Juliette Morgan had an especially strong impact on Anne: after expressing her support for the civil rights movement, Morgan found herself berated by her friends and family. Everyone distanced themselves from her, and even those who supported her position refused to reach out for fear of retaliation themselves. After a few years of intense isolation, Morgan took her own life. In a letter to Virginia Durr, Anne reflected: “I could so easily have been Juliette Morgan… There was so much in her early life that was just like mine.” If Anne hadn’t gone away to college and discovered fellow thinkers and mentors; if she had expressed such views without having any supportive community; despair might have completely consumed her as well. Anne wrote that being attacked on a daily basis was difficult, but even worse was living in a world where everyone around you constantly told you that you were wrong. In such an environment, it was only having a community of support that allowed a potential White antiracist to not succumb to doubting their own convictions and understandings, and wondering if perhaps they were wrong after all.

The Southern Patriot

When the Bradens joined the SCEF, Carl did most of the travelling at first while Anne stayed home with the children and worked to revive the SCEF’s Southern Patriot. As the new editor, Anne essentially turned the monthly newsletter into a report about what she felt were the most important developments in race relations that month. To facilitate this goal, she subscribed to Black newspapers from across the nation, in order to keep up with events in various localities. She then used her role as writer and editor to interview and thereby build connections with key figures in local movements. Whenever Anne wrote about local actions, she made sure that the community received extra copies of the paper, because she knew that it made people feel more empowered when they saw that their actions were newsworthy.

Anne made a special effort to highlight White actions, partly so that Black people could recognize that White support was in fact a possibility and a potential game-changer, and partly because antiracist White Southerners usually felt isolated, invisible, and demoralized. In Anne’s words, “If whites were doing anything, we said so. Once they saw something in print [and realized] it was significant enough for somebody to notice it, that made it more likely that they could keep struggling.” The Bradens were critical of the leftist press that wrote endlessly about the White backlash to civil rights, but focused almost no attention of those Whites who were standing up for racial justice. Without those stories to inspire potentially supportive White people to stand up; the feeling of futility was strengthened. Anne’s journalism was an excellent example of how good reporting could bring new people into the struggle, and could keep those struggles alive.

It also kept people alive… literally. For example, when leading Birmingham activists Fred and Ruby Shuttlesworth tried to enroll their children in an all-White school; Fred was severely beaten and Ruby was stabbed. Fred Shuttlesworth commented, “if it had not been for Carl and Anne Braden, I’m sure I would have been dead.” Instead, he lived to facilitate the famed 1963 showdown, when high-pressure fire hoses and attack dogs were loosed upon Black students. In the years leading up to that, it was often the Bradens who got the news out about the violence the Shuttlesworths faced; the Bradens who could tap into their national media network and make sure that what was happening to Black people in Birmingham was getting media attention in the North, even when papers in the South refused to report on it. Like many others, Fred felt that without Anne shining her journalistic light on the violence he faced, he would have been relegated to a darkness in which he could have been killed and few would have ever known or cared. Anne’s powerful and honest portrayals of Black freedom fighters and civil rights actions made the Southern Patriot essential reading for anyone interested in the movement. She tripled the amount of subscriptions in just two years.

Building Ties with Black Freedom Fighters

As the Bradens sought to organize Whites, they simultaneously worked to deepen their ties with Black civil rights leaders. Fred Shuttlesworth became their first major supporter. In Shuttlesworth’s words, “white people were the missing link” in bringing meaningful racial change to the South. Like the Bradens and the SCEF, Shuttlesworth believed that White Southerners needed a support system to break through their isolation. He believed that the anticommunist hysteria was being used to silence potentially supportive White voices, and that finding White allies necessitated fighting the political repression they faced, which would allow them to speak up. Anne’s first meeting with Shuttlesworth was at a hotel, where he was temporarily living after White supremacists had bombed his home. When they got in a cab together to go visit his church, Shuttlesworth whispered to her with a twinkle in his eye: “You know this is illegal? We aren’t supposed to be riding in a cab together.” She immediately loved his mischievous and courageous spirit. Shuttlesworth joined the SCEF board and became the most important early link between SCEF and the Black freedom struggle. E.D. Nixon, the brilliant organizer from Montgomery and Rosa Parks’ primary political partner, soon joined as well.

In September of 1957, Anne met Martin Luther King himself, at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee. Founded in 1932, Highlander was originally a training ground for labor organizers before switching its focus to racial justice in the early 1950s. The school’s co-founder, Myles Horton, was raised in an impoverished White sharecropping family in Tennessee, and originally envisioned the school as a place of self-empowerment for the Appalachian poor… a place that would help them discover the means to combat the injustices they faced in life. Horton emphasized the importance of anticipating movements and laying the groundwork for their success. Anticipating the Brown v. Board of Education ruling a year in advance – as well as the subsequent escalation both of the civil rights struggle and the White backlash – he began shifting the orientation of the school towards racial justice. Highlander thus became a unique Southern space, bringing people of all races together to discuss the intertwining problems of poverty and racism.

During his visit to Highlander, King expressed that he needed a ride to a Baptist convention he was attending in Louisville; where Anne happened to live. She offered him a ride, and they entered into a long, meandering conversation as they drove through the twisting mountain roads of eastern Tennessee and into Kentucky. Martin later told his wife Coretta that he was blown away by Anne: he had never before imagined that a White southern woman could so thoroughly break from her past. She was a symbol of possibility; a living, breathing example of southern whiteness liberated from the shackles of prejudice. Martin dove into her writings and wrote to her that he was deeply moved by them. Anne and Carl befriended Martin and Coretta over the next few years, and the Bradens would sometimes stay at the King’s home in Atlanta during their travels across the South. As Martin’s prominence rose, enemies of the movement often pointed to his connection with the Bradens as proof that he associated with and was influenced by communists. His own advisors worried that his association with people widely believed to be subversives would damage the reputations both of King and of the movement, and urged Martin to break his ties with the Bradens. He refused.

As Anne deepened her ties with Martin Luther King, she also built a strong friendship with Ella Baker… the director of King’s new organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC.) Anne had met Ella briefly in 1955, during her travels to gain support to overthrow Carl’s sedition charge, but the two women had not stayed in touch. Those were the months leading up to the Montgomery bus boycott. At the time, Ella Baker was based in New York, working closely with Bayard Rustin and Stanley Levison in an organization called In Friendship, which focused on fundraising for civil rights actions as they erupted in the South. The hope was that with outside support, one of these actions would grow into a movement – which of course happened in Montgomery. In Friendship provided crucial outside support for the boycott, during the first months before it gained national attention. Like her colleagues Rustin and Levison, Baker helped to create the SCLC after the boycott ended, with the hope that the organization could help facilitate “many Montgomerys” throughout the South. As a master organizer, Baker became the director of the almost entirely male, ministerial organization. King hesitated to hire her, knowing that the other members expected the director to be a man: but Rustin and Levison – who had both become highly trusted advisors to King during the boycott – told him that if he was serious about the SCLC, there was only one person for the job. Baker would subsequently become a fierce critic of the misogyny she encountered amongst King and his colleagues, as well as of the homophobia King’s colleagues showed towards Rustin.

Baker also famously critiqued King’s charismatic leadership style, which she believed drew energy away from the development of the kind of grassroots leadership that actually empowered communities and sustained movements. When the sit-ins erupted in 1960, Ella Baker saw a golden opportunity to build an organization that focused on developing many leaders at the local level: it was she who hosted the famous gathering that brought together student leaders from many cities across many states; leading to the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Baker left the SCLC soon afterwards to take on a background mentorship role, supporting the students in building what soon became the most important civil rights organization in terms of grassroots leadership: SNCC.

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

By the time the sit-ins erupted, Anne Braden and Ella Baker had become very close, sometimes even retreating to a wooded cabin together to sip whisky, discuss life, and allow their thoughts to settle and coalesce so they could re-enter the movement at a higher level and stay with it for the long-haul. Ella wrote to Anne about her high hopes for the student gathering, which brought together 200 student leaders from 12 southern states. Anne and Ella were of the same mind regarding the students: in Anne’s words, it was important to “go easy on the advice and heavy on the assistance,” in order to gain their trust and allow them to cultivate their own ideas and actions and fully step into leadership. Anne had just had a new baby and was unable to attend the historic gathering from which SNCC emerged; if she had attended she would have been one of only a dozen Whites.

Anne was, however, able to attend SNCC’s second mass meeting, in October of 1960; during which she stayed in Martin and Coretta’s home. In the words of her biographer Catherine Fosl, Braden struck many of the students as a kind of “renegade southern lady”: she was soft-spoken and ladylike; she always wore dresses and was well put together… and yet she possessed a fierce flame of resistance. Although on the surface she appeared a respectable southern lady to the core, she also totally defied gender norms by travelling alone, throwing herself into passionate public debates, and standing up to powerful men. Once, while at a strategy session in the King families home, Anne demanded that Coretta be included: Martin was surprised, but he immediately acquiesced. Her respectable-yet-independent-and-rebellious persona was attractive to many young female freedom fighters – both Black and White – and Anne quickly became a role model for many of them. In the words of the White Southern Freedom Rider Joan Browning, Anne “showed me that one could be a loyal Southerner and a respectable woman while fighting for social justice. The fact that Anne was Southern to the bone and had that wonderful slow Southern speech helped me redefine myself.” The fact that the Bradens clearly had the respect of luminaries like Shuttlesworth, King, and Baker also deeply impressed the students, and helped them reconceptualize the role of Whites in the Black freedom struggle.

Many SNCC students came to know Anne through her personal interviews with them, as she documented this new phase of the movement in detail. Whereas the mainstream press focused on the sensationalism of mass arrests and White supremacist brutality, the Southern Patriot reported the intimate stories of how students conceptualized, built, and sustained a movement… from their own perspective, and through their own voices. In the famed SNCC organizer Julian Bond’s words, “Anne helped to define who we were to the Patriot audience and to a broader audience as well. That was very helpful to us because it was the definition we held of ourselves as this vanguard challenging not just the segregation system but older organizations too, like the NAACP.”

Anne and Carl were also critical in teaching media skills to SNCC members. They introduced them to their vast media connections… to the 320 news outlets the Bradens were connected to, including religious, labor, agricultural, student, liberal and left publications. These connections helped SNCC get their stories out. The SNCC students also had little experience with fundraising; once again, the Braden network proved crucial. In Julian Bond’s words, the Bradens “widened our list of political and fundraising contacts and exposed us to journalists and writers whom we didn’t know about.” Once the violent drama of the Freedom Rides broke out in the spring of 1961, the images of burning buses turned SNCC into a household name that was capable of raising far more funds than the Bradens and the SCEF. The Bradens, however, were crucial in the first year of the organization’s existence.

Anne’s primary goal with SNCC was to build White Southern student leadership and support. At Anne’s urging, SCEF set aside funds for a new staff position at SNCC. The position was for a White student, whose task would be to travel the South, organizing other White students on college campuses. It was a dangerous job – in fact, it would take Anne a full year to find someone to fill the position. She finally found her man in Bob Zellner, a working-class college student and former street fighter who had been raised by a reformed Klansman. Zellner had been run out of town for his support of civil rights and felt he had little to lose: he thus reported to SNCC headquarters in Atlanta in September, 1961. Going onto White campuses where his message was not welcomed, he had to find ways to function in secret. Realizing that he needed to prove himself to dubious members of SNCC, he often put his body on the line and repeatedly risked his life, taking many brutal beatings to protect his Black comrades. In doing so, Zellner built a deep camaraderie with his fellow SNCC organizers. This protégé of Anne Braden was the very last White person to leave SNCC when it became an all-Black organization in the late sixties: some Black Power militants in the organization argued that he alone should be allowed to stay, but Zellner left of his own accord. He had, however, only held the White student organizing position for two years; his friend Sam Shirah had then taken over. Shirah had more success than Zellner: by 1963, following the brutal Freedom Rides and infamous footage from Birmingham, it became easier to mobilize White Southern students. They became a small but noticeable presence amongst civil rights workers.

Continuing Attacks

During this entire time, the Bradens had remained under attack. When they emerged as regional organizers for integration through their work with SCEF, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) – which equated civil rights work with a communistic undermining of the proper order of society – turned its gaze on the Bradens with a vengeance. In the summer of 1958, HUAC issued subpoenas to twenty leading White labor and civil rights organizers, which of course included Anne and Carl. After the Supreme Court rolled back some of the restrictions it had placed on anticommunist prosecutions just two years earlier, Carl was sentenced to a year in prison, in the winter of 1959. His appeal went to the Supreme Court, where it was rejected in February 1961. In a symbolic gesture, Carl presented himself to the federal authorities to serve out his year on International Workers Day, May 1. On May 4, the first Freedom Ride left Washington, D.C. Fred Shuttlesworth called Anne – whose own trial had been postponed, and was never returned to – hoping that she could help round up more Freedom Riders; she almost thought of going herself but there was no one else to care for the children.

Thus, as the Freedom Rides were going on, Anne once again tried to mount support to free her husband. The first person she turned to was Martin Luther King. He had, of course, heard of Carl’s imprisonment, and when Anne came to visit he asked her how he could help. Anne asked Martin if he would be willing to develop a petition to free Carl, given that a petition coming from him would gather far more support. It was a lot to ask for: Martin’s stature had grown by this time, and taking such a public stance of support for a “subversive” figure could harm his ability to cultivate a relationship with President Kennedy and with major funders. Martin told her that he would have to think on it. In the following days he seemed to avoid and ignore her calls, which he usually returned promptly. He finally called Anne back and said that he had to pray a lot over this question: he worried that it might hurt the movement, but he knew it was the right thing to do. Martin not only signed the petition, he invited Anne to give a lecture on nonviolent resistance at SCLC’s annual convention. Anne knew that Martin could have found better speakers on the subject than she, and thought that it was his way of showing some of his colleagues that he wouldn’t be influenced by their constant warnings to sever his ties with so-called subversives. Opponents of the civil rights movement circulated photos of Anne speaking for the SCLC across the South to prove that King had communist affiliations… an outcome that King was surely aware of in advance. In deciding to so seriously and publicly honor Braden, he had gone against the advice of virtually everyone in his organization.

Freedom Summer & Beyond

In 1963, SNCC shifted its energies in Mississippi away from the nonviolent resistance embodied by the sit-ins and Freedom Rides, and towards voter registration. With 96 percent of Black Mississippians unregistered and facing barriers that were impossible to surmount, SNCC developed an ingenious strategy: in order to dramatize their exclusion from democracy, Black Mississippians would hold their very own – unofficial but symbolic – Freedom Vote. They would create their own political platform, run their own candidates, and cast their own votes from officially monitored booths located in the safe spaces of Black churches, in Black communities. SNCC representatives would then attend the Democratic National Convention, where they would present these votes as evidence of their exclusion from democracy… and they would use this as pressure to unseat some of the segregationist candidates, and to gain their own seats.

Building up this entire democratic infrastructure on their own was a phenomenal undertaking, and the truth was that by 1963 many SNCC workers were burnt out. They had been in the trenches for a few years, facing violence, and often watching their friends get killed. They had experienced a lot of trauma and needed outside support if they were going to continue. By this time in the movement, many White students in the North were mobilizing, and SNCC called on them to head south and support the Freedom Vote. They also knew that having White students from universities like Yale and Stanford would lead the Justice Department to send FBI agents to monitor White supremacist retaliation to the Freedom Vote… something they didn’t feel obligated to do when it was Black life under assault. Everyone also knew that some of these White students would be killed, and that when they were, it would draw massive outside attention to their cause, and with it pressure for federal intervention… something that no amount of Black death had ever accomplished.

The freedom votes were cast in the summer of 1964: The Mississippi Freedom Summer. As White students from the North flooded into Mississippi to support the effort, the state saw its most violent year since Reconstruction: there were at least six murders of civil rights workers, 80 reported (and far more unreported) beatings; 65 buildings bombed; and over 1000 arrests of civil rights workers by police officers enforcing Mississippi’s White supremacist traditions. Most infamously, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were murdered after barely 24 hours in Mississippi; and it was only the fact that two of them were White that drew intense national scrutiny during the excruciatingly long search for their bodies. Although understanding that White deaths would lead to a national outcry had been part of SNCC’s strategy, once those deaths actually came to pass, it was incredibly painful for Black SNCC workers to witness how different the response was compared to their many Black comrades who had been killed… and whose deaths had remained invisible. This bitter reality – combined with the fact that many of these White students harbored their own unconscious racial and class prejudices despite their high level of commitment – was an early factor in pushing SNCC towards becoming an all-Black organization two years later.

During this time, SNCC members escalated their discussions about how Whites could best support the civil rights movement, and the notion that White allies should focus their energies on organizing White communities began to predominate. Serious change would only happen if White people – the vast majority of Americans, and the group that held by far the most political and economic power – changed their racial beliefs and attitudes, and began actively supporting racial justice. James Foreman – one of the great visionary leaders of SNCC – said that such a change would be truly revolutionary, and that White SNCC supporters were in the best position to play this role. Foreman also believed that young White allies needed more opportunities to take on leadership roles, and that it would be easier for them to do so as organizers of White communities.

Such ideas had long shaped Anne’s own stance: in 1951, after giving a series of speeches at Black churches, she was told by an important civil rights leader that the Black community already understood what she was talking about: what she needed to do was talk with Whites. Anne’s focus on developing White support for racial justice had been what had drawn civil rights luminaries like Fred Shuttlesworth to her in the first place: as he had said when they first began working together, “Whites were the missing link.” Despite Anne’s agreement with SNCC’s gradually shifting understanding of the role of White supporters, she was disturbed by the idea of racial separation: while she believed that Whites should focus on generating White support, she also believed that they needed to be in deep relationship with Black communities and organizations in order to do so with any degree of success. If White supporters of racial justice were segregated from Black communities, it would far too easy for them to perpetuate unconscious racial prejudices and take inappropriate actions. It was through relationship, more than anything else, that prejudice was broken down and mutual understanding, trust, and solidarity was developed. Anne, however, did not equate Black Power with racial separation… as did almost all other White journalists. She properly understood Black Power as Black self-empowerment, and was one of the few White journalists in the nation who helped to translate an accurate interpretation of Black Power to a White audience.

Many White SNCC organizers took the message to organize White communities very seriously, and when SNCC became an all-Black organization, many of them flooded into SCEF. During this time, SCEF started the Southern Mountain Project in Appalachia to organize poor Whites. However, the young members who had just left SNCC offended the local sensibilities with their long hair, casual interactions, and revolutionary rhetoric. When Black SNCC students had gone down into the Mississippi Delta to organize sharecroppers, they had also learned to dress and talk and socialize like sharecroppers in order to connect and build trust. The White students in Appalachia failed to do the same with the White communities they sought to organize.

Anne also noted that these White organizers often faced a “reentry problem.” In her words, “This happened to whites who’d been in Mississippi, where every white face was an enemy. They just didn’t like white people! You can’t organize people if you don’t like them.” Unlike Anne and other White Southern supporters, many of these students from the North didn’t grasp how difficult it was for White Southerners to liberate themselves from the traditional prejudices they had been saturated in all their lives. They lacked the ability to be compassionate and to empathize and connect with them as human beings. They also often embraced dogmatic political beliefs that split hairs: as these new organizers flooded into the SCEF, it fell prey to vicious infighting and quickly disintegrated. The Bradens abandoned the organization before its total collapse, as did its executive director James Dombrowski and Fred Shuttlesworth, who had done so much to connect SCEF with the heart and soul of the Black freedom struggle. The fact that a decades old organization that had been under constant attack by powerful government forces was so quickly undone from squabbling on the inside would pain Anne for the rest of her life.

In the late 60s, as local politicians sought to draw attention to themselves, they ranted about running the Bradens out of Kentucky and even passed out anti-Braden bumper stickers at political rallies. Once again, the couple was arrested on sedition charges. This time, however, the court was packed with supporters. When the judge asked, “are you now, or have you ever been a Communist,” the room erupted in laughter. The charges of communism had by that time become a bad joke from a notorious era of civil liberties infringements, even if segregationists continued to cling to it. In Anne’s words, “I realized at that moment that the 1950s were finally over.” State sedition laws were finally – and permanently this time – declared unconstitutional. The Bradens would never again face legal attack for their activism.

Although the days of McCarthyism were finally over for the Bradens, the FBI counterintelligence programs originally established to target communists now turned its full-force against the Black freedom struggle. Anne felt that Black freedom fighters in the late 60s faced far more government repression than had ever existed in the McCarthy era. Entire communities were wiretapped, infiltrated, and given disinformation that turned them against one another.   Anne now used what she had learned from her battles with McCarthyism to attack the repression that Black freedom fighters faced. When Angela Davis was infamously incarcerated, Ella Baker introduced Anne to Angela’s mother, and Anne turned her journalistic expertise towards the effort to free Angela… who Anne soon became something of a mentor to. As the Klan rose again in the mid-70s, embracing the old White Citizens Council Rhetoric that it was White people who were truly being oppressed by neighborhood and school desegregation, Anne mentored that generation. When the horrors of mass incarceration rose in the 1980s and 1990s, Anne mentored that generation. Until the day she died in 2006, Anne could often be found sitting cross-legged on the floor, talking with each new generation of freedom fighters throughout the night… always trying to push them further, so that they could meet the new obstacles that each passing decade brought with it.

Did you enjoy this story? If you’d like to receive updates on the wealth of racial justice resources created by Cross Cultural Solidarity, become a supporter today!  

Bibliography

Braden, Anne. The Wall Between: with a New Epilogue. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999. First published 1958.  

Fosl, Catherine. Subversive Southerner: Anne Braden and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Cold War South. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.

Additional Resources

New book: Ben Wilkins (editor): Anne Braden Speaks: Selected Writings and Speeches, 1947-1999.

Video discussion: Ben Wilkins in conversation with Robin D.G. Kelley & Roz Pelles about Anne Braden Speaks.

Documentary: Anne Braden: Southern Patriot.

Anne Braden:

SNCC Digital Gateway: entry on Anne and Carl Braden.

Search through the Anne Braden archives of the Wisconsin Historical Society.

The Anne Braden Institute for Social Justice Research, directed by Braden’s biographer, Catherine Fosl.

See copies of the Southern Patriot newspaper here and here (from the Civil Rights Movement Veterans Website).

Memorial to Anne Braden: friends and comrades remember her at the Civil Rights Movement Veterans website.

The Carl Braden Memorial Center.

Black Freedom, White Allies, Red Scare. (Website exploring the Wade case.)

 

The 1968 Memphis Strike, Part One: The Garbage Workers

By Lynn Burnett

The following story is based primarily on Michael K. Honey’s Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign.

February 1, 1968: it was a cold, rainy day in Memphis, Tennessee. Two of the city’s 1,100 garbage collectors, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, had been at work all day. They were cold, exhausted, and covered in grime. The garbage collectors not only moved trash cans, they had to pick up all the garbage off the streets or on the lawns of the areas they covered, loading it into bins which they carried on their shoulders or on top of their heads. The bins were old and often had holes in them, and when it rained, the workers would get covered in grimy, trash-saturated water. They were not provided with showers at work, forcing them to return home to their families covered in filth. It was dirty, low paying work: and in the Tennessee of 1968, that meant work fit only for Black people.

The work was also backbreaking. If residents had cut down trees on their properties, it was up to the garbage workers to chop them up and haul them away. Memphis had no standardized trashcans at the time: people just loaded their garbage into large barrels, which they were not required to take to the curb. White residents took the hard labor of the Black garbage collectors for granted, and often thoughtlessly left the lids off the garbage barrels, which then quickly filled up with rain. The workers would get in trouble if they poured the garbage-saturated rainwater out on a White person’s property in order to lift the barrels, or if they rolled the barrels across their lawns. And so, they had little choice but to lift these enormously heavy, water-laden containers. Such work led to many injuries.

The families of the garbage collectors lived in poverty. Many of them had formerly been sharecroppers in Mississippi, who had hoped that they could escape the backbreaking labor of the plantations by escaping across the Mississippi border to Memphis. Job discrimination, however, forced them into only the lowest forms of employment. Although away from the plantations, the sanitation workers in Memphis found that many of their supervisors were White men who had once been plantation supervisors… perhaps hired because of their “expertise” at managing Black labor. These supervisors had a plantation mentality, which included expecting their workers to work from sunup to sundown. The garbage collectors only got paid for an eight-hour day, but the work often took longer, and they were required to finish it or be fired. In conditions of rain, it could take up to twelve hours.

Conditions worsened further in January of 1968, when Henry Loeb became the new mayor of Memphis. Loeb had run a campaign based on enforcing “law and order.” Although most people today think of Richard Nixon’s 1968 campaign when they hear that phrase, the roots of “law and order” rhetoric came from the Jim Crow South. In the White South, civil rights protestors were regularly described as a disorderly threat to “peaceful race relations,” and those who broke the Jim Crow laws in sit-ins and freedom rides were condemned as law-breaking criminals. By the mid-sixties, public figures would be denounced for using explicitly racist language, and early law and order rhetoric was used as a way to signal an anti-civil rights message to White voters while also being able to deny any racist intentions. Over 90 percent of White Memphians voted for Loeb, while virtually no African Americans did. Like Richard Nixon, Loeb calculated that if he could win enough of the White vote by using non-explicitly racist appeals, he could ignore Blacks entirely. Which is exactly what he proceeded to do.

Loeb combined his law-and-order message with a message of fiscal responsibility, vowing to slash taxes by cutting back on city costs. Once again, this was race-neutral language that was used to hold back the progress of Black communities: for Loeb, “fiscal responsibility” included reducing the amount of garbage collectors, which meant that less men had to do the same amount of labor, meaning more overtime work that the garbage collectors would not get paid for. For Mayor Loeb, cutting costs also meant refusing to repair broken vehicles. The garbage collectors constantly warned the city that many of their trucks had bad brakes, which could be especially dangerous in stormy weather. Some trucks needed to be replaced entirely. Whereas previous administrations would at least discuss these concerns with the garbage collectors, Mayor Loeb decided to totally ignore them. Completely unconcerned with getting Black votes, he balanced the city’s budget on the backs of the city’s poorest and least politically powerful members.

Given all of these conditions, the two garbage collectors, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, were exhausted. As the truck drove, they would normally ride on the sides, jumping off at each house to collect the trash. On February 1, however, with the cold rain blasting down on them, they needed to take cover. There was only enough room in the front of the truck for the driver, and they couldn’t even get a brief respite from the storm by taking shelter under an overhang somewhere because White residents would issue complaints about Black workers lounging about in their neighborhoods. Such “lounging” in White areas was a fireable offense. And so, Echol Cole and Robert Walker decided to take cover in the back of the old, dilapidated garbage truck. As the truck drove to the next destination, the trash compactor malfunctioned and suddenly turned on. The driver slammed on the brakes and rushed to stop it, but Walker and Cole were already being pulled into the compactor. One of them was about to jump free when the compactor caught his raincoat and pulled him in.

The Garbage Collectors Get Organized

Fury rippled through the community of garbage workers. Henry Loeb had been mayor from 1960 to 1963 as well – before being defeated in his first re-election bid – and these workers had dark memories of his unwillingness to invest in the repairs necessary to keep them safe. Two men had also died during Loeb’s first term, in accidents that would have been prevented if the mayor had valued Black life enough to invest in minor repairs. In the week that followed the deaths of Echol Cole and Robert Walker, the anger amongst the garbage workers intensified when they discovered that the city had offered almost no compensation to the families of the deceased men, leaving their wives and children destitute. During that same week, drainage and sewage workers – who, along with the garbage collectors, made up the cities sanitation division – found out that their paychecks had been slashed after they had been told to go home because of a storm, despite the fact that they had been assured they would receive a full paycheck. For workers who lived week-to-week, an unexpected day without pay could mean not being able to put food on the table.

On Sunday, February 11, an infuriated 900 Black men crammed into the Memphis Labor Temple to express their grievances. Most had never attended a union meeting before, because they were afraid they would get fired if they attempted to unionize. A man named T.O. Jones stepped forward to address them. Jones had been born in Memphis in 1924, joined the Navy as a young man, and had worked in the Oakland shipyards after completing his military service. While in the shipyards, he had experienced the power of unions to provide workers with better wages and working conditions. When Jones returned to Memphis and became a garbage worker in 1959, he tried to convince his fellow workers to unionize. Despite his determination, he met with little success. In 1963, Jones was finally able to bring a few dozen men together to discuss unionization… but Mayor Loeb, then in his first term, sent informers to infiltrate the meeting. Everyone who attended was promptly fired.

After the firings, T.O. Jones reached out to local attorneys, union leaders, and ministers, who convinced Loeb to allow the men to return to work. Jones, however, decided not to return. Understanding that he would just lose his job again if he continued to organize, he began working as a janitor and focused his energies on organizing the garbage collectors from the outside. Jones began holding secret meetings to protect the identities of the workers, and spent years meeting one-on-one with them in the hopes of convincing each individual to support unionization. He borrowed money so that he could have more time to organize, went deeply into debt, and destroyed his relationship with his wife in the process. Unable to fire him, politicians offered to pay Jones off to stop his organizing, but he refused. By the time that Echol Cole and Robert Walker were killed, Jones had been trying to unionize the garbage collectors for almost a decade. He had sacrificed everything. In the process, he had also gained the trust and respect of the garbage workers. Now, T.O. Jones laid out their demands.

The workers wanted old and unsafe equipment fixed or replaced, Jones said to the 900 men, so that they would no longer have to fear that yet another worker would be killed. They wanted assurances that they would still get paid on rainy days, so they could predict their incomes and reliably feed and shelter their families. They wanted the right to unionize without fear of being fired, so that they could protect themselves and fight for decent working conditions. They wanted access to job promotions within the city’s sanitation division, which were currently available only to Whites. And they wanted a modest raise.

When the crowd approved these demands, Jones rushed from the Labor Temple to meet with the director of Public Works, who managed all jobs that involved keeping the city clean. The director ignored the demands completely: following the fiscal responsibility narrative of Mayor Loeb, he told Jones that the budget was out of balance, and that nothing could be done. He refused to negotiate in any way whatsoever. When the garbage collectors – who were waiting at the Labor Temple for a response – heard that their concerns had been so casually dismissed despite their very lives being at stake, their fury boiled over. Men who were previously too frightened to unionize now spontaneously decided to strike. They felt their conditions were so bad that they had little to lose. When a minister who was present asked if they were actually prepared to sustain a strike, one of the men exclaimed that it didn’t matter: “We don’t have anything no how.”

What followed was a sort of “Montgomery moment.” Twelve years earlier, Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, and less recognized leaders like E.D. Nixon and Jo Anne Robinson had anxiously waited during that first morning of the famous boycott to see if Black Montgomerians would actually stay off of the buses. Now, the garbage collectors anxiously waited to see how many people would actually refuse to go to work. The response was incredible: out of workforce of 1,300 men, only 75 showed up to work on the first day of the strike. Half of these were men who simply hadn’t gotten the word that a strike was on, and many of them walked away from work halfway through the day. Only thirty men showed up on the second day. Those who stayed immediately became social outcasts: many Black Memphians were connected to the garbage collectors through their churches and communities, and they understood how hard they worked and how bad their conditions were. One man’s wife even left him because he refused to join the strike… an action she interpreted as a selfish unwillingness to stand up for the Black community.

For the garbage workers, this felt like an inspiring and successful start. Virtually all of them had joined the strike, and they had gained widespread community support. However, more experienced labor organizers were concerned that the garbage workers were setting themselves up for failure. They were striking during the month of February, when seasonal agricultural work was dropping off in the surrounding areas. Unemployed agricultural workers could easily be enticed to replace the garbage collectors, especially if they were migrant laborers who wouldn’t be subjected to community pressure to support the strike. February was also cold, meaning that if garbage didn’t get collected, it would take a while for it to start to smell. A strike during the hot summer months, when uncollected garbage would quickly start to stink up entire neighborhoods, would have created much more public pressure to negotiate with the garbage collectors in order to end the strike quickly.

Among those who were concerned was Jerry Wurf, the president of America’s largest union for public employees – the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union – or AFSCME, which was headquartered in Washington, D.C.  Jones had built a relationship with Wurf during his nine years of trying to organize the Memphis garbage workers, and Wurf had pledged his support. Jerry Wurf was a Jewish man who had grown up on the Lower East Side during the Great Depression, and was a fierce fighter for social justice and one of the nation’s most dynamic union leaders. Not only had the AFSCME supported successful strikes by sanitation workers in other cities under his leadership, Wurf had also desegregated the union, and supported people of color and religious minorities in taking on leadership roles. He was exactly the type of outside support the Memphis garbage workers needed if they were going to succeed. However, the spontaneous nature of the strike in Memphis broke all of Wurf’s rules for an effective strike. It was not well timed. It was the product not of strategy, but was compulsive. Most importantly, the financial backing the strikers would require to pay for the needs of their families had not been prepared for, meaning that the garbage workers would very quickly feel the burning economic need to return to work.

Wurf was concerned that if AFSCME sank money and resources into a failed strike, that it would damage the union’s reputation and jeopardize its effectiveness as a whole. However, when the high level of solidarity and determination amongst the garbage workers became clear, Wurf felt compelled to support them despite the risks to the larger labor struggle. He immediately sent an interracial team of advisors to Memphis. And so, thanks to groundwork laid by T.O. Jones over many years of what often seemed like fruitless labor, the Memphis garbage collectors quickly found themselves backed up by one of the nation’s major unions. They also quickly found themselves welcomed into a large union hall where they could hold their daily mass meetings: Memphis had a Firestone Tire factory that was highly organized by the United Rubber Workers union, which opened their space to the garbage workers.

Thus, on the third day of the strike – Tuesday, February 13 – AFSCME officials from Washington D.C. met with Mayor Loeb to negotiate on the workers behalf, while 1,300 sanitation workers attended a mass meeting at the union hall of the United Rubber Workers. The negotiations with the mayor broke down quickly: the garbage workers were breaking the law by striking, Loeb exclaimed, and he refused to negotiate with lawbreakers. He left the meeting and informed the press of his position of no compromise. In response, the workers decided to march five miles to City Hall. They flooded into the City Council chambers – built to hold no more than 400 people – while the Council was in session. They demanded to speak with the mayor themselves.

Mayor Loeb appeared. A wealthy White man from the Jim Crow South, he was accustomed to giving orders to Black people. He expected to be obeyed. Loeb now commanded the garbage collectors to get back to work. And then something happened that he had never experienced: the Black workers laughed in his face. The mayor was shocked. He screamed at them: “Go back to work!” The boos of the workers echoed through City Hall. Infuriated, the mayor hardened his position… and the workers became even more determined.

The White Media Responds

Whereas Black Memphians learned about the strike through their churches, communities, and personal connections with the garbage workers, White Memphians relied on White-dominated newspapers that dismissed Black voices. In fact, both of Memphis’s two major, White newspapers – the Commercial Appeal and the Press-Scimitar – failed to interview the garbage workers entirely, and instead based their reporting on racist assumptions. White Memphians treated the Black population very well, the papers asserted… a claim that was itself a denial of Black voices, as a way of assuaging White feelings. Given that local race relations had been “just fine,” some “troublemakers” must have come along to stir up the previously contented Black population. On the first day of the strike, the White media identified the “troublemaker” as T.O. Jones, who was blamed for starting the strike… despite the fact that it was the workers as a nearly unanimous whole who had decided on the action. Then, when the AFSCME got involved, the media began reporting that a big union based in Washington, D.C. was the cause of the strike… even though it was Jones who had contacted the AFSCME, and even though the AFSCME had felt dubious about supporting the garbage workers. White Memphians tended to uncritically assume that their news sources were accurate, and therefore had no understanding of why the garbage collectors were striking, and why their garbage wasn’t being collected. They easily fell prey to a false narrative.

As union representatives continued their attempts to negotiate with Mayor Loeb, the mayor spun a narrative that the strike was really about the crafty AFSCME officials taking advantage of gullible Black workers. This union, the mayor claimed, understood that if the garbage workers in Memphis were unionized, those workers would have to pay union dues. This “outsider” union, in other words, was really just after the worker’s money. Of course, it was true that union members would have to pay union dues if they wanted an effective union: after all, it was only those dues that allowed for unions to pay for the needs of worker’s families during a strike or to rent a union hall. The local papers failed to ask any garbage workers how they felt about unionization and paying union dues, and simply accepted the mayor’s false and politicized words as truth.

Mayor Loeb also opened all of the negotiations with the union up to the media, which turned the meetings away from being honest discussions and instead into performances for the public. The union representatives were tough men who had worked in mines and steel mills; they possessed a working-class swagger and a fiery way of negotiating that came off as overly aggressive on camera. The mayor strategically kept his cool during these televised meetings, and used the presence of the media to promote his message of law and order and to prove that he would not compromise with these “outsiders.”

Within days, a headline in the Commercial Appeal read: “Memphis is Being Used.” The article echoed the mayor’s narrative: “Make no mistake about it. Memphis was a carefully selected target for the garbage strike.” A cartoon portrayed a fat union leader standing on a pile of garbage with a sign reading: “The Right to Strike is Above Public Health.” The strikers were portrayed as loud, angry, lazy Black people demanding things from hard-working White people… even as television stations showed footage of strikers picketing in the cold rain day after day, and lying their bodies down on hard, oily streets to prevent garbage trucks from moving. The White press never explained why Black workers would make such obvious sacrifices. None of this was a surprise to African Americans: even when it came to Martin Luther King himself, the images the White southern media used were always of him looking angry; and certainly not looking peaceful, calm and composed. The White media – in Memphis and throughout much of the nation – enforced the mentality of segregation and Black dehumanization, on a daily basis.

Civil Rights Organizations Get Involved

On the evening of February 15, with negotiations with the mayor going nowhere, AFSCME officials made one last effort. They arranged to meet privately with Mayor Loeb in his home, and warned the mayor that his position of no compromise was only making the workers more determined. Indeed, the mayor’s hardline position had gained the attention of other unions, which now sought to support the garbage workers as well. To bring this point home, the AFSCME representatives brought with them the president of the United Rubber Workers, as well as a representative from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. Collectively, they represented a huge working class population. These men all emphasized to the mayor that a slight raise for the garbage workers, and a commitment to fix their equipment, was a miniscule expenditure for the city. He could end the strike now… or it was going to escalate.

For Loeb, however, the racial and class hierarchies he believed in were at stake. The garbage workers were also asking for access to promotions within the sanitation division that he thought should be available to Whites only. If Loeb caved on that, it would chip away at the racial hierarchy in other professions as well. And if he agreed to raise the wages for the garbage workers, he worried that it would be an incentive for more African Americans and working class people to demand raises –and to unionize – as well. Mayor Loeb rightfully understood that if he didn’t take a hardline stance on this, that it would upset the business leaders of Memphis, who would worry that their employees would be incentivized to fight for better conditions. If Loeb wanted the support of the city’s elite, he needed to hold a hard line. He therefore refused to budge. The union representatives then gave him one last warning: so far, this had only been a labor dispute, they said. But if the mayor didn’t end this now, civil rights organizations were going to get involved. The Black population of Memphis was up in arms over the treatment of the garbage workers, and the mayor could easily find himself with a movement on his hands.

Indeed, the very next day – Friday, February 16 – the Memphis NAACP chapter held a press conference and charged the city with “racial discrimination in the treatment of the sanitation workers.” The chapter had a long history of supporting direct, nonviolent action, including a strong involvement in the sit-in movement. They now endorsed the strike. On Saturday, February 17, the first truly mass meeting was held. No longer was it only the striking sanitation workers meeting in a union hall: Black ministers and civil rights leaders gave speeches alongside labor leaders, to an audience of 2000 people. On Sunday the 18th, anxious Memphis City Council members met secretly in an effort to prevent the relatively small labor dispute from escalating into a major social conflict. They endorsed giving the workers a small raise if they returned to work… but when the mayor found out, he condemned the Council, and they backed down. On Monday the 19th, after it had been made absolutely clear that negotiations with the mayor and City Council were impossible, the AFSCME and the NAACP began a formal alliance. The NAACP called for a boycott of downtown businesses, in order to put pressure on business owners… who would then put pressure on the mayor to end the strike. Things had, indeed, escalated. But they were also just getting started.

Showdown at City Hall

On Thursday, Feb. 22, Fred Davis – one of Memphis’s three Black City Council members – arranged to hold a hearing where the Council could discuss the strike with the garbage workers, union leaders, and supportive ministers. The hope was to find a way for the City Council to bring an end to the strike. Soon, the room designed for 400 was overflowing with 700 strikers. “Do you want a union?!”, one of them yelled, and the rest shouted back, “YES!” If they had ever truly doubted it, the Council was now forced to witness that unionization was not being forced on the workers, but was something they were demanding. Some of the workers then began to heckle the Black Council members: Why hadn’t they spoken out in support of the strike? Why hadn’t they stood up to the mayor? Fred Davis responded that he had to represent both White and Black Memphians. One of the ministers confronted him: “You can’t do it. You’re with us or not.”

Concerned about the rising tension in the room, one of the Council members proposed moving the meeting to a larger auditorium. The much-respected local civil rights leader O.Z. Evers, however, stood up and urged the men to “stay until Council recognizes the union and recognizes they can overrule the Mayor.” Sensing the energy in the crowd, union leaders took the microphone and insisted that they would not leave until the Council acknowledged that they had the power and the commitment to support the workers. The strikers began to sing freedom songs, ministers called their churches, and soon enough food was arriving – spread out across tables where city lawyers normally sat – to feed the 700 strikers who refused to leave City Hall. As police began surrounding the building, City Council members huddled, recognizing that they needed to do something to prevent a major social conflict. They promised the workers that they would spend the evening drawing up a resolution allowing for union recognition, and would present it to the City Council for a vote the following day. They would use their power to go around the mayor. The strikers cheered. They left City Hall, looking forward to the next morning.

The leading headline the next day, however, read: “Committee Gives In to Sit-In of Strikers, but Loeb Holds Firm.” The article condemned the Council for giving in to “a belligerent show of force,” and exclaimed that “Mr. Loeb’s stand is what will maintain law and order.” An accompanying cartoon portrayed the garbage workers as dark, dirty, sinister figures sitting atop piles of stinking trash. The City Council members, realizing that they would face a massive political backlash of angry White voters, quickly changed the resolution they were going to vote on: instead of a resolution on union recognition for the garbage workers, the resolution recognized Mayor Loeb as the sole decision maker on all matters regarding the strike.

That afternoon, a thousand garbage workers and their supporters – feeling in a celebratory mood – gathered in an auditorium to watch the Council members sign the resolution… with no knowledge that it had been changed. When the resolution was read, and the majority of Council members quickly signed it, the workers were shocked. For a moment, they sat in stunned silence. Police quickly appeared and whisked the Council members away as the workers rose to their feet in anger. A Black Air Force veteran held up the cartoon from the morning paper and shouted to the audience, “This is what they think of you!”, and then, “You’ll get only what you’re strong enough to take!” Others shouted that it was time to reach out to Black Power militants: “If they want trouble, we’ll give them trouble!” At that point, a pivotal member of the civil rights movement rushed forward. James Lawson – who had trained the students who led the sit ins and freedom rides and who had helped to form the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee – urged the crowd to sit down for a moment. Now a local minister, Lawson said to the crowd: “Lets look at this for a few minutes and see what we’re going to do next.” They decided to march to a nearby church to hold a mass meeting and plan their response.

Led by T.O. Jones, the crowd poured out of the auditorium and onto the street, ready to march. Outside, however, they encountered hundreds of police who blocked their path. They were told they lacked a marching permit. James Lawson immediately got on the phone with the police director, and warned him that these men were angry and needed to blow off some steam if they were realistically going to remain nonviolent. A march would help them do that, while denying the march would add fuel to the fire. Other civil rights leaders rushed to the mayor’s office to warn him that he needed to allow this march to prevent a riot. To his credit, Mayor Loeb ordered the police to allow the march to go forward.

The police ordered the enormous crowd to take up no more than one lane of traffic… but once the march began, it predictably spilled out onto the whole street. Once it did, a long line of police cars quickly appeared, driving bumper-to-bumper, each one with five officers armed with rifles and holding their billy clubs ready. The line of cars began pushing up against the crowd, aggressively trying to force them back into one lane. James Lawson – a veteran of violent police attacks – warned those around him to keep their cool: the police were trying to provoke the marchers in order to create an excuse for a crackdown. Suddenly, there was a scream: one of the police cars, slowly moving alongside the crowd, had come to rest on a woman’s foot. When the car didn’t move, the crowd rushed over, collectively trying to lift the vehicle off her foot… an action the police later described as attacking the car.

It was at this point that orders were given for officers to don their gas masks. In a move that was clearly premeditated, police cars suddenly appeared from the side streets along the march. Officers poured out of the cars, spraying mace into the eyes and up the noses of whoever they could reach, beating them with their batons, and shoving them off of the street. Total panic ensued as the marchers fell to the ground, blinded, struggling to breath, their skin peeling off and burning with excruciating pain. Mace was a chemical that had originally been developed for war, and it was now being used on completely peaceful protestors who were simply fighting for humane working conditions. A number of ministers had been trying to de-escalate the energy of the march by politely conversing with nearby officers; those officers now suddenly turned on them. As people in the crowd ran screaming in all directions, Civil Rights Commissioner Jacques Wilmore – who was there in an official capacity to observe the march – looked on in shock: he noted that one of the Black police officers, with a look of profound shame on his face, was purposefully spraying mace into the air instead of at his community members. When an officer approached him, Wilmore showed the officer his government badge… and was maced anyway. In Wilmore’s words, “The police officer just saw the color of my skin… he just operated automatically, at that moment the enemy was anybody with a black face.” Even Black shoppers coming out of stores found themselves attacked.

As hundreds of beaten, bleeding and half blinded African Americans fled back into their communities, a collective sense of horror rippled through Black Memphis. It was a turning point. An immediate, intense sense of unity spread throughout the entire Black community that transcended class, age, and any religious or political differences. The strike of the garbage workers had now become the major, social upheaval that union representatives had warned the mayor he would be wise to prevent.

Headlines the next day revealed the chasm between White and Black Memphians: newspapers claimed the police had used “extreme restraint” and “self control.” After all, one paper wrote, “They had guns, but they didn’t shoot.” The mayor praised the police for maintaining “law and order.”

The Youth, The Invaders, and Black Power

In the wake of the attack, the garbage workers adopted the iconic civil rights slogan, “I AM a Man,” and began twice-daily marches – once in the morning and once in the afternoon – to City Hall holding those iconic signs. The signs were an assertion of their dignity and humanity; a way of saying that Black lives mattered. City officials warned the strikers that any union representatives or workers speaking out on behalf of the strike would now be arrested. In response, 150 ministers gathered to create the Community on the Move for Equality (COME), to be led by James Lawson. With the workers and union leaders no longer able to speak publicly in support of the strike, Lawson and this new ministerial organization now took on the role of public leadership. The organization included a full half of the city’s Black ministers, and they urged their congregations to boycott downtown stores. Memphis was forty percent Black, and the impact of the boycott was soon painfully felt. Pickets of downtown stores were organized as well, driving away many White customers who felt uncomfortable walking through the racially tense atmosphere.

Other community members took a different sort of action. By this time, the strike was a month old, and the mayor had been able to hire 317 workers. Most were outsiders, but 62 were men who had broken with the strike. On Saturday, March 2, two of these strikebreakers were assaulted, and another had a Molotov cocktail thrown through the window of his home. Bricks shattered the windows of businesses associated with Mayor Loeb. Dozens of piles of trash were poured out onto the streets and lit on fire, forcing the fire department to make fifty-two runs on Saturday night alone.

In the week that followed, such actions escalated. The police attacks had radicalized the youth, and many of them were on fire with indignation. On March 5, the garbage workers once again flooded into the City Council, and when they refused to leave, 121 people were arrested. Masses of Black youth marched to City Hall, linking arms and blocking the police from taking the workers away. When they eventually opened a corridor in the crowd for the arrested workers to pass through, the youth cheered for their elders, proud of them for fighting so hard for their dignity. In such an atmosphere, school felt irrelevant, and many Black high school students began skipping classes and organizing their own marches to City Hall. Some of those marches looked like the marches of their elders, with the youth singing freedom songs… but in others, students marched through the city, symbolically overturning trash cans; or marched through downtown chanting “Black Power!” Some youth roamed the city looking for police cars, smashing their windows and in some cases totally destroying them.

Many of these youth, burning with a desire to take action, were drawn to a street gang called The Invaders. The Invaders sported Afros and African amulets, listened to the psychedelic rock of Jimi Hendrix, and experimented with hallucinogens for fun and for political and spiritual expansion. They had chosen their name because they felt that White Memphians treated Black people as if they were dangerous, alien beings. The Invaders emphasized Black unity, and sought to build bridges between youth who were fighting over different turfs in the Black ghettos of Memphis. They wore jackets with their logo emblazoned on them; these jackets soon became hip amongst Black students, even if they weren’t members of the gang.

The Invaders were influenced by local, Black Power-inspired community organizers like Charles Cabbage, who had studied history at Morehouse College. Like other Black Power activists, Cabbage had been drawn to the anticolonial freedom fighters in Africa and Asia who were breaking free from the chains of European colonialism during the same years that the civil rights movement was igniting in the United States. Like most Black freedom fighters – including luminaries from Du Bois to King – Cabbage viewed the Black freedom struggle in the United States as one manifestation of a larger; long-standing assault on global White supremacy. By 1968, Cabbage had concluded that a full-scale revolution was necessary in the United States, just as it was in the lands colonized by Europeans. Like some other Black Power revolutionaries, Cabbage and his comrades believed that only the most oppressed people would be willing to take the ultimate risks to organize total revolution. Cabbage had therefore abandoned his original attempt to organize Black college students and had returned to organize the Black ghettos of Memphis. Cabbage emphasized ideas inspired by anticolonial freedom fighters, including that oppressed people can only regain their full sense of dignity if they attack their oppressors head on. Cabbage believed that nonviolence could only bring about limited change, and that even then, oppressive forces would only cave in to nonviolent action if they perceived that if they did not, more violent, revolutionary actions would be taken. As the strike of the garbage workers became increasingly intense, Charles Cabbage and The Invaders started to view themselves as representing a more pervasive, violent threat that lurked in the background if strategies of nonviolence failed. It was only that threat, they believed, which would force White Memphians to compromise.

In the midst of these developments, two visionary freedom fighters arrived in town. One was Roy Wilkins, the president of the NAACP. Wilkins had spent a lifetime in the struggle: he had first traveled through Memphis in 1929… investigating African American working conditions. He now told the audience that when you work over forty hours a week and get paid so little that you still depend on welfare to survive, “that you ought to stay here and fight until hell freezes over.” The other speaker was Martin Luther King’s great mentor, and the master organizer of the March on Washington: Bayard Rustin. Rustin was renowned as one of the greatest strategists of nonviolent resistance not only in the nation, but in the world, and he had famously been sent down to Montgomery to support the young Martin Luther King navigate the boycott that initiated the movement.

Rustin had always urged King to build strong connections between the labor movement and the fight for racial justice. He now told the crowd that Memphis embodied the labor/civil rights unity that he and King had always fought for. Memphis was an example of where the movement needed to go from here, in order to fulfill the ultimate goals of freedom, equality, and a truly robust democracy. Rustin told the crowd of 9,000: “This becomes the symbol of the movement to get rid of poverty… this fight is going to be won because the black people in this community and the trade unions stand together.” Rustin added, “I am sure your papers do not report and debate the truth of what’s happening here,” but “people who believe in justice and democracy are behind you.”

Indeed they were. On March 17, White Memphians woke up to a newspaper headline that shocked them: “King to Lend Vocal Support at Rally.” A man many of them greatly feared was going to be arriving in town the very next day: Martin Luther King.

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Bibliography

This story was based primarily on Michael K. Honey’s profoundly moving book, Going Down Jericho Road.  I’m grateful for his generous feedback on this piece.  Other works consulted include:

Branch, Taylor.  At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68(New York: Simon and Schuster Paperbacks, 2006.)

Garrow, David J. Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: Vintage Books, 1986).

Jackson, Thomas F. From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Struggle for Economic Justice (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).

Additional Resources

For teachers: Facing History lesson on the Memphis Strike.

From Invaders member John Burl Smith: I Met With Martin Luther King Minuted Before He Was Murdered.

NPR interview with Michael K. Honey, historian of the Memphis Strike and Martin Luther King’s final stand.

From NPR’s StoryCorps: Standing With Dr. King in Memphis.

Remembering Baxter Leach, one of the last surviving sanitation workers who passed in August, 2019.

From the New York Times, July 2017: Decades Later, Memphis to Compensate Black Sanitation Workers of 1968.

From the New York Times: How Dr. King Changed a Sanitation Workers Life.

From the AFSCME: a chronology of the strike.

Washington Post commemoration of the strike, 50 years later.

The Smithsonian commemoration of the strike, 50 years later.

Wayne State University exhibit of the strike.

Plaza dedicated to the strike erected in downtown Memphis for it’s 50th anniversary.

NAACP honors the 14 surviving sanitation workers at 50th anniversary of the strike.

Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland writing about the 50 anniversary of the strike.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott: The Full Story

By Lynn Burnett

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Rosa Parks was born in Alabama, in 1913, shortly before the outbreak of World War I. Her father travelled constantly, always searching for work. When the war broke out, factories in the North rushed to find more workers, and began hiring Black Americans for the first time. Rosa’s father joined a million other Black southerners on the journey North in hopes of finding a better life and better economic opportunities. Rosa’s mother, wanting to remain close to her family, decided to remain in the South.

The young Rosa and her mother moved in with her grandparents, who had both been slaves. She grew especially close to her grandfather, who was the son of a slave woman and a slave owner. Rosa said that the slave woman probably had a lot of White ancestry herself, because her grandfather’s African ancestry was not visible at all: he appeared White. Still, her almost totally White grandfather was a slave. While still a little boy, a new owner took possession of him, beat him mercilessly, and even tried to starve him. Because of this, Rosa said that her grandfather developed “a very intense, passionate hatred for white people.” He wouldn’t let his daughters work in White houses, and wouldn’t let his grandchildren play with White children. Whenever there was Ku Klux Klan activity going on, Rosa’s grandfather would stay up all night on the front porch with his rifle, practically daring the hooded nightriders to come onto his property. Rosa would sometimes join him. She later expressed, “I wanted to see him kill a Ku Kluxer.”

The young Rosa may have learned from her grandfather to stand her ground when threatened by White folks. When she was ten, a White boy threatened to hit her. Rosa picked up a brick and dared him to. But when her grandmother heard about this, she scolded Rosa severely, telling her that she should never retaliate even if White people hurt her. Her grandmother warned that if she acted like that, she would get lynched before she even had a chance to grow up. Rosa began to sob, feeling, in her own words, that her grandmother had taken the side of the “hostile white race against me.” She told her grandmother, “I would rather be lynched than be run over by them. They could get the rope ready for me any time.”

The Beginning of Rosa’s Activism

When Rosa was 18 years old, she met Raymond Parks. She was impressed by how Raymond – like her grandfather – refused to be intimidated by White people. Raymond believed that self-defense was an important part of the Black freedom struggle. He carried a gun, and worked with the local chapter of the country’s leading civil rights organization: the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP. Rosa later wrote that he was “the first real activist I ever met.” She admired him, fell in love with him, and the two were soon married. The year was 1932, during the Great Depression.

Raymond’s activism placed him in constant danger. He attended secret meetings at night, and Rosa often feared that he would not make it home alive. Because of the danger, Raymond didn’t want Rosa to get involved. But when the meetings were held in their own house, Rosa participated. She recalled that the men would spread their guns out on the table in case the Ku Klux Klan raided the meeting. In her autobiography, she wrote that “There was a little table about the size of a card table that they were sitting around. This was the first time I’d seen so few men with so many guns.” She wrote that the table was “so covered with guns, I don’t know where I would have put any refreshments.”

Rosa became more deeply involved in activism in 1943, when she became the secretary for the local branch of the NAACP in Montgomery. Soon, she found herself working with a small group of the most committed activists in that city. Rosa worked especially closely with a man named E.D. Nixon. Nixon was one of the most brilliant and experienced activists in the state, and inspired Rosa to join him in helping Black Americans register to vote.

At the time, only thirty-one out of thousands of Black Americans were registered in Montgomery.  In order to register, Blacks were forced to answer a long list of questions about the law that were so technical that even professional lawyers often failed the test. They had to pay a substantial, often-unaffordable fee to register. They also had to identify their employer, who was usually White and would often fire them for registering to vote. And finally, Black Americans who successfully registered would have their names printed in the newspaper, turning them into potential targets for violent White supremacists. Rosa overcame all these obstacles herself, successfully registering to vote. She worked closely with Nixon to help other Black folks in Montgomery study for the tests, raise the money for the fees, find new jobs if they were fired, and gain the courage to potentially face violence.

Rosa Parks and E.D. Nixon also sought to use the law against Whites who attacked or killed Black people or who raped Black women. Such crimes were common in the South, but almost always went unpunished. Although her position as NAACP secretary might sound tame, that position involved the dangerous job of investigating instances of racial violence. Rosa Parks often risked her life journeying down the isolated, dusty roads of rural Alabama, interviewing survivors and witnesses of racial assaults. In response to the especially brutal rape of a young woman named Recy Taylor just a year into Rosa’s position as secretary, Rosa and E.D. Nixon helped to develop a national campaign to bring the perpetrators to justice. Although the campaign did not achieve this goal, it was one of the most successful campaigns of the decade in terms of bringing national awareness to racial violence in the South. The nationwide contacts that Parks and Nixon developed through the campaign would later become a crucial source of outside support during the Montgomery bus boycott.

Rosa Parks was, in other words, a leading investigator of racial violence and an anti-rape activist who had helped develop effective national campaigns… all over a decade before she famously refused to move from her seat on a bus in Montgomery.

The History of Busing in Montgomery

Rosa Parks was hardly the first Black American to resist segregated transportation. In fact, between 1900 and 1906, as laws enforcing segregation spread across the South, twenty-five Southern cities staged bus boycotts. The first Montgomery bus boycott occurred in 1900. Only, buses didn’t exist yet: it was streetcars that were segregated. Although the rights gained from that first Montgomery boycott were quickly lost again, the resistance to segregated transportation continued.

During World War II, the fight against segregated busing spread across the South once more, as Black veterans demanded equal treatment. They were not about to die fighting the horrendous racism of the Nazis in Europe, while refusing to fight racism at home. During the war, buses became frequent scenes of confrontation. Unlike other segregated spaces, such as restaurants or movie theatres – where Black Americans were often not allowed at all – buses forced White and Black Americans into extremely close quarters. When Whites humiliated Black busriders, the humiliation was made greater by the fact that so many people were watching. And there was no way to escape, because the bus was often moving. The tension on the buses was increased even further by the fact that bus drivers were given police powers and carried guns in order to enforce segregation.

Montgomery was close to two air force bases, which brought Black servicemen from across the country to the city. During the war, when one of these servicemen resisted the orders of a bus driver, a policeman was called and the man was shot. In another instance, a Black veteran refused to move from his seat, and the bus driver shot him in the leg. In a third instance, when a Black female army lieutenant refused to give up her seat to White passengers, police beat her and took her to jail. In 1945, during the last year of the war, two members of the Women’s Army Corp refused to move from their seat and were beaten by the driver. Although resistance to segregated transportation happened in other areas of the South as well, the fact that Montgomery had two air force bases meant that it “stood at the epicenter of the guerilla war on buses,” to use the words of the great historian Glenda Gilmore.

The air force bases in Montgomery contributed to resistance in another way as well: the bases were not segregated. In 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt had ordered all military industries to be desegregated in order to prevent a massive march on Washington. This meant that, even in the most racist parts of the South, Blacks and Whites worked side by side on military bases. In Montgomery, one out of every fourteen civilians – including Rosa Parks – worked on these desegregated bases during World War II. The buses on the air force bases were also desegregated, and Rosa would often ride with a White woman and her little boy while on the base bus. Once they boarded the city bus, however, they would have to stop their conversation as Rosa went to the back. Mrs. Parks wrote that “You might just say Maxwell [air force base] opened my eyes up. It was an alternative reality to the ugly policies of Jim Crow.”

The fact that so many Black Americans in Montgomery were treated equally while riding the buses on the air force bases increased their resistance to the humiliation and danger they faced when riding the city buses. During and after World War II, an increasing amount of Black civilians refused to give up their seats to Whites. They were usually beaten and arrested, and in one case, when a woman tried to take the police to court for beating her, two policemen raped her daughter in retaliation. Rosa Parks would have known many of these people, and as the NAACP secretary, would have been involved in documenting their cases.

Events Leading up to the Boycott

In 1946, the organization responsible for launching the Montgomery bus boycott was founded: the Women’s Political Council. It soon became the most radical organization in the city. As Jeanne Theoharis, author of the powerful book The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks writes: “By the early 1950s, people knew to bring their complaints about bus segregation to the WPC [Women’s Political Council.] The women of the organization, three hundred strong by 1954, collected petitions, met with city officials, went door to door, packed public hearings, and generally made their outrage around bus segregation publicly known.” The president of the Council, Jo Ann Robinson, described the organization as “‘woman power,’ organized to cope with any injustice, no matter what.”

In 1954, a year and a half before the Montgomery bus boycott, Jo Ann Robinson sent a letter to the mayor of Montgomery, informing him that a boycott would be organized if conditions on buses were not improved. She reminded him that three out of four riders were Black, and that the bus system would collapse without the financial support of Black riders. The struggle against segregated busing escalated in 1954 for a reason: the Supreme Court outlawed segregated schools that year, leading many Black Americans to feel that the time was right to challenge segregation in other areas as well.

As the Women’s Political Council began to plan for a boycott, the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP considered a different strategy for fighting segregated busing: by challenging its legality in the court of law, just as they had successfully challenged the legality of segregated schools. To challenge the segregation laws, they first needed someone to be arrested for breaking those laws. Then, instead of pleading guilty to breaking the law, the NAACP lawyers would instead claim that the law itself was unconstitutional. The local courts in the South, of course, would never accept this claim… and so, the NAACP would appeal the case to higher and higher courts, with the ultimate goal of taking the case to the Supreme Court. With this goal in mind, the local NAACP – including Rosa Parks and her political partner E.D. Nixon – waited for the right arrest to be made, which would allow them to build a case.

Soon, the daughter of a local minister was arrested for refusing to move from her seat on the bus, but her father was uncomfortable with the NAACP building a big case around his daughter. And so, Rosa Parks and E.D. Nixon continued to wait. On March 2, 1955, a high school student named Claudette Colvin was arrested for refusing to move from her seat. Claudette had recently written a paper on resistance to segregation. As she later explained, “We had been studying the Constitution in Miss Nesbitt’s class. I knew I had rights.”

Colvin and her parents said that they were willing to build a case around her arrest, even if it meant facing lynch mobs. However, E.D. Nixon doubted that the young Claudette could hold up under the pressure. Moving her case from the local courts into the state courts, and then into the federal courts and up to the Supreme Court would take many months… months during which the phone might be ringing all night with death threats, months during which she would be constantly demonized in the local media. It was one thing to courageously face a single moment of danger, and another to withstand months and months of constant, intense harassment. Nixon felt that they needed to build a case around someone who had proven they could tough it out.

Claudette was heartbroken when the leaders of Montgomery decided that she was not suitable to build a case around. Even those who had believed in her seemed to turn their backs when it was discovered that she was pregnant. Many people believed that being a young, unwed mother was shameful, and began using her pregnancy as an excuse for not supporting her. Claudette later wrote that Rosa Parks was the only one that helped her through this painful time. Parks saw great leadership potential in Colvin, and invited her to attend the NAACP Youth Council that she had recently founded. Under Rosa’s guidance, these youth travelled the state raising awareness, urging voter registration, and even experimenting with disobeying laws enforcing segregation. Parks made Claudette the secretary of the Youth Council, and urged other youth to follow her example of resisting segregation on the bus. Some of them did, but with no arrests.

Although Claudette had hoped that a case would be built around her, and was deeply hurt by the rejection of Montgomery’s leaders, she trusted that if anyone was up to the task, it would be Rosa Parks. As she later expressed, “There was a time when I thought I would be the centerpiece of the bus case. I was eager to keep going in court. I had wanted them to keep appealing my case. I had enough self-confidence to keep going.” However, “having been with Rosa at the NAACP meetings, I thought, Well, maybe she’s the right person – she’s strong.”

The Arrest of Rosa Parks

On the morning of December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks went to work. During her coffee break, she met with the president of the local college to discuss organizing an NAACP workshop, and during her lunch break, she met with the lawyer who handled Claudette Colvin’s case. By the end of her day, she was tired. As she boarded the bus to go home, she was looking forward to getting some rest.

Rosa Parks did not sit in the White section. She took a seat in the middle of the bus. However, the White section in the front soon filled up, and the bus driver called out for the Black folks sitting in the middle to move further back. When he yelled, “You all better make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats,” Rosa Parks thought to herself that obeying such orders “wasn’t making it light on ourselves as a people.” In that moment, she thought about the NAACP Youth Council that she led, later explaining that “an opportunity was being given to me to do what I had asked of others.” It was time for her to become “an example of what I was preaching.”

When Rosa Parks refused to move, the bus driver walked back to her and asked: “Are you going to stand up?” Rosa Parks looked him straight in the eye and said, “No.” She calmly explained to him that she was equal to any other person. He then told her, “Well, I’m going to have you arrested.” Her response was simply, “You may do that.” Parks understood the risks. Other Black women had been beaten, raped, and even killed after police had arrested them for refusing to give up their seats. She later said, “As I sat there, I tried not to think about what might happen. I knew that anything was possible.”

While Parks had not planned to be arrested, she expected that the day would come. As she told an interviewer years later, “I had felt for a long time, that if I was ever told to get up so a white person could sit, that I would refuse to do so.” The historian Jeanne Theoharis has written that on “That evening, as she waited on that bus, there was thunder in her silence.” Within the quiet thunder of Rosa Parks were thoughts of how she could use her arrest to organize the community.

Organizing the Boycott

Word of Parks arrest quickly spread. When E.D. Nixon received the call, he turned to his wife and said, “I believe Jim Crow dropped in our lap just what we are looking for.” Nixon believed that Rosa Parks was the perfect person to build a case around. Whereas Nixon had doubted Claudette Colvin, he was certain that Rosa Parks was unbreakable. In his own words, “If there ever, ever was a woman who was dedicated to the cause, Rosa Parks was that woman.” She was a “real fighter” who wouldn’t be scared off by White violence. As a religious, hardworking, and dignified woman who was widely respected for her activism, Rosa Parks was also the perfect symbol for people to organize around.

E.D. Nixon quickly bailed Parks out of jail. That evening, they discussed building a case around her, agreed that this was the opportunity they had been waiting for, and then went to sleep. But not everyone slept that night. Rosa Parks and E.D. Nixon had decided to build a legal case around her arrest, not a boycott. It was the Women’s Political Council that did that, and Jo Ann Robinson in particular. Robinson had wanted to stage a boycott when Claudette Colvin was arrested, but had waited to get everyone’s support. This time, she was not going to wait.

Robinson, a professor at Alabama State College, secretly met with her most trusted students on campus in the middle of the night. Working until dawn, they printed out fifty thousand notifications of a bus boycott to be held the following Monday, when Rosa Parks went to trial. They were able to work quickly because the Women’s Political Council had been planning a boycott for months, and were just waiting for the right time and place. The Council had already planned distribution routes to ensure that each of Montgomery’s fifty thousand Black citizens would quickly receive word of the boycott. Within twenty-four hours of Rosa Parks’ arrest, tens of thousands of Black Montgomerians would receive this message:

Another Negro woman has been arrested and thrown in jail because she refused to get up out of her seat on the bus for a white person… If we do not do something to stop these arrests, they will continue… The next time it may be you, or your daughter, or mother… We are, therefore, asking every Negro to stay off the buses Monday.

However, simply delivering the message was not enough. A successful boycott would require more extensive organizing, and no one was better at organizing in Montgomery than E.D. Nixon. At 3 a.m., as Robinson was printing the notifications, she called Nixon to inform him of her plans. Nixon believed that the boycott would be made much more successful if all the ministers in town urged their congregations to participate on Sunday. And so, at 3 a.m., Nixon began to consider how to organize the ministers.

Nixon needed a central meeting place for the ministers to gather, and Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, located in the central town square, came to mind. The minister at Dexter was new in town, which could be helpful. Many of the ministers competed for leadership roles and distrusted each other, but no one had any reason to distrust the newcomer. He might be the perfect person to organize the ministers. Nixon also believed that the new minister’s remarkable speaking skills could inspire and unify the community. For all of these reasons, Nixon called the new minister around 6 a.m. and asked for his support. The new minister was, of course, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

That evening, nearly fifty ministers gathered at Martin Luther King’s church and agreed to endorse the boycott. Events were moving quickly: Rosa Parks had been arrested on Thursday evening. Thanks to Jo Ann Robinson, by Friday afternoon most Black Montgomerians knew the plans for the boycott. On Friday evening, the ministers endorsed the boycott. On Sunday, they urged their congregations to stay off the buses. And on Monday, Rosa Parks went to trial, and the Montgomery bus boycott, destined to ignite the civil rights movement, began.

The First Day of the Boycott

On Monday, December 5, 1955, Black Montgomerians stayed off the buses. While those with cars drove people to work, thousands walked many miles, and some even rode mules. Whatever it took to not ride the buses, they did.

At Rosa Parks’ trial, people flooded the courthouse, and hundreds had to stand outside. The trial lasted a mere half hour: Rosa Parks was found guilty of breaking state segregation laws. The ruling gave Rosa’s lawyer, Fred Gray, an opportunity to put the NAACP’s plan into action: he challenged the law as unconstitutional. Once a law was challenged as unconstitutional, it was supposed to immediately move out of the state courts, and into the federal courts, where the judges represented the U.S. government rather than the state government. The hope was that higher and higher courts would debate the case of Rosa Parks, with the Supreme Court making the final decision. Southern lawyers, however, were able to prevent this from happening, but Parks’ lawyer learned from his mistakes, and built a second case… around the teenager, Claudette Colvin, who had been abandoned earlier by the activists of Montgomery. It was the case built around Colvin, not Parks, that eventually reached the Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of Colvin. Until that ruling ended segregated busing in Montgomery, the boycott continued for a long 381 days.

The initial plan had been for a simple one-day boycott. But inspired by the success of the morning, leaders met shortly after Parks’ trial and created an organization that could sustain a boycott that could last until the busing laws were changed. The organization was called the Montgomery Improvement Association, and Martin Luther King was elected to be its leader.

The leaders at the meeting decided on three demands for the boycott. Believing that asking for total desegregation was too radical for the city to agree to, the first demand was for first come, first-serve seating, with Black Americans sitting from the back towards the front, and Whites sitting from the front towards the back. With this plan, segregation would remain, but Blacks would not be forced to stand next to empty seats reserved for Whites.

The second demand was for courteous treatment. Especially important was that Black Americans not be asked to pay at the front, and then exit the bus to enter through the back. This practice was not only humiliating, but the buses often drove away before the paying customers had reentered. The third demand was for the hiring of Black bus drivers on primarily Black routes. This demand aimed to create Black jobs, which was an essential demand, given that most Black Americans cared far more about economic equality than integration.

Neither Rosa Parks nor Jo Ann Robinson were present at this meeting. Despite the fact that these two women had spent years laying the groundwork for this moment, they were living in a patriarchal, male-dominated society that viewed public leadership as a man’s role. With the creation of the Montgomery Improvement Association, the ministers took over these public leadership roles, despite the fact that Rosa Parks and Jo Ann Robinson had far more political experience than virtually every minister.

However, there were other reasons for why Rosa Parks and Jo Ann Robinson did not step forward into public leadership roles. Robinson had to downplay her involvement in order to protect her job. She could also sense a spirit of rebellion in the air, and felt that the best way to build a peaceful and sustainable movement was to have the ministers assume leadership. In Robinson’s words, these ministers were able to give “Christian guidance to a rebellious people,” many of whom valued self-defense more than nonviolent resistance.

As for Rosa Parks, the success of the movement depended on crafting a public image of her that everyone could rally behind, and that no one could attack. And so, Rosa was presented to the public as a hardworking, good Christian woman who didn’t move from her seat when ordered to because she was simply too tired. This was a safe, noncontroversial image that produced sympathy and support from people all over the country. However, there were plenty of hard working, good Christian Black women in Montgomery. It was Rosa Parks’ long history of activism that gained her a special level of respect and allowed the community to unanimously support her.

And yet, the White and Black communities were so separate that the White community was unaware of the fact that Rosa Parks was a veteran activist. And for the boycott to be successful, it would have to stay that way: Rosa’s activism would become a well-kept secret… a secret that, for decades, went down in the history books as reality.

The White Backlash

Negotiations between Black leaders and White city officials broke down quickly. Two meetings were held during the first week of the boycott, with leading White supremacists invited to the second. The Black leadership had originally believed that city officials would be willing to consider their modest proposal for a more polite form of segregation, and for good reason: a bus boycott in Louisiana two years earlier, asking for similar terms, had been won within a week. After the failed meetings, however, the Black leadership began planning for a yearlong campaign.

The city immediately moved to cripple the boycott, announcing that Black cab drivers, who had promised to drive Black community members for the same price as the bus, would receive fines if they reduced their fares. Within days, the boycott could no longer rely on cabs. Advice from the leaders of the Louisiana boycott two years earlier allowed Black Montgomerians to swiftly create a massive car-pooling system, with over 200 volunteer drivers picking people up from forty car-pooling stations.

The Montgomery Improvement Association was soon coordinating up to 20,000 rides per day. Police responded by ticketing cars that were “overloaded.”

However, most Whites were not angered by the boycott. Many simply didn’t care, and some even supported it. Many Black maids, working in White houses and caring for White children, reported that the families they worked for gave them donations to support the boycott. White housewives sometimes picked up their maids so they wouldn’t have to walk to work. One even fired her maid after discovering that she had ridden the bus, telling her that if she didn’t stand up for her people, she was an untrustworthy person. Some White people decided not to ride the bus themselves.

Many White Montgomerians prided themselves as racially progressive and looked down on the more aggressively racist areas in the South. They avoided a new organization, called the White Citizens Council, which was formed after the passage of Brown vs. Board of Education. The Council was thought of as a Ku Klux Klan for businessmen and politicians. It pressured employers to fire anyone who failed to support its racist policies, pressured insurance agencies to cancel insurance policies on cars and homes, and boycotted the businesses of anyone who was judged to support racial equality in any way. The Council waged economic warfare to maintain White supremacy, preferring it to the violent methods of the Ku Klux Klan. Whereas violence created negative attention, economic retaliation usually remained invisible to the outside world, making it a more effective form of control.

The Montgomery bus boycott became an opportunity for the White Citizens Council to spread its roots into the capital of Alabama. A month into the boycott, they held a twelve hundred person rally, during which the police commissioner joined. The next day, the local paper exclaimed that “In effect, the Montgomery police force is now an arm of the White Citizens Council.” Many prominent citizens soon joined, including the mayor. While these White leaders never called for violence, joining the Council sent a clear message to the general public that the more aggressively racist behavior that White Montgomerians traditionally looked down on was now acceptable.

Things began to get ugly. The kind of positive statements some Whites had originally made about the boycott now led to economic attacks from the White Citizens Council. One White woman, after praising the determination of the Black community, was fired, began receiving threatening phone calls, and would hear tapping on her window late at night. Her friends and colleagues began avoiding her. After a year and a half of isolation and intimidation, she took her own life. With very few exceptions, sympathetic White people played it safe and kept their mouths shut.

Meanwhile, Black carpool drivers found their vehicles vandalized, covered in acid, their brakes cut, their tanks filled with sugar. Nails were scattered across the streets of Black neighborhoods. Cars full of Whites began hurling food, stones, and balloons filled with urine at Black Americans walking to work. Police cars began waiting next to the car-pooling stations, ticketing each car as it pulled in to pick up passengers, usually for completely imaginary infractions.

The cost of the tickets and car repairs soon became overwhelming. If the boycott was to continue under these conditions, it would require outside financial support. However, although nearly two months into its existence, the boycott had received little outside attention. That would soon change as White violence continued to escalate, and was met by the profound leadership of Martin Luther King.

The Suffering of Martin Luther King

The ticketing of car-pool drivers soon escalated to arrests. Martin Luther King was one of the first to be arrested… for driving five miles over the speed limit. As White animosity increased, King had begun receiving dozens of death threats per day, and as the police car travelled further and further out of the city, he began to tremble in fear that he was being taken to a lynch mob. When the car instead pulled up to the jail, he was relieved. A friend appeared within minutes and bailed King out.

When he returned home, his wife and newborn child were sleeping. As he stood looking at them, the phone rang. The voice on the other end told him, “If you aren’t out of this town in three days, we’re going to blow your brains out.” King put the phone down and tried to sleep, but he felt broken and filled with fear. He doubted himself. He had never wanted this. He had gotten involved in the boycott because he thought it would only last a few weeks. Unable to sleep, he made himself a pot of coffee. He later said that at this moment, “ I was ready to give up. With my cup of coffee sitting untouched before me I tried to figure out a way to move out of the picture without appearing a coward.”

I sat there and thought about a beautiful little daughter who had just been born… She was the darling of my life. I’d come in night after night and see that little gentle smile. And I sat at that table thinking about that little girl and thinking about the fact that she could be taken away from me at any minute. And I started thinking about a dedicated, devoted and loyal wife, who was over there asleep. And she could be taken from me, or I could be taken from her. And I just couldn’t take it any longer.

King began to pray over his coffee: “Lord, I must confess that I’m weak now. I’m faltering. I’m losing my courage.” As he continued to pray, he began to “hear an inner voice saying to me, ‘Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth. And lo I will be with you, even until the end of the world.’” For the rest of his life, whenever King felt that death was at his doorstep, he focused on this moment and found the strength to overcome his fear.

Days later, Coretta Scott King heard a thump outside their home and then footsteps running away. She rushed to the back of the house, and within seconds a bomb ripped through the front room. King was away addressing a mass meeting. When he was told of the bombing of his home, and the possible death of his family, he shocked the crowd with his calm reaction, later commenting that “My religious experience a few nights before had given me the strength to face it.”

He arrived home to find a large, angry crowd surrounding his house. “As I walked towards the front porch,” he later wrote, “I realized that many people were armed. Nonviolent resistance was on the verge of being transformed into violence.” As word of the bombing spread the crowd grew larger and the anger intensified. King later said that he feared that a “race war” would break out. Stepping onto his smoldering porch to address the crowd, he urged them to remain peaceful and to not allow their anger at the assassination attempt to grow into physical retaliation against Whites. “Brothers and sisters,” he said, “Don’t get panicky… don’t get your weapons. I want it to be known the length and breadth of this land that if I am stopped, this movement will not stop.”

However, even as King urged his sisters and brothers not to get their weapons, the bombing convinced him that it was time to arm himself. He applied for a handgun the next day but was denied a permit. That same evening, a bomb was thrown at E.D. Nixon’s house. King called the governor of Alabama the next day to request the gun permit from him directly, but the governor told him that was a decision to be made by the local sheriff.

It was at this crucial point in time, as King was beginning to wrestle with facing an increasingly violent situation with methods of nonviolence, that he would meet the strategist and mentor who would guide him for many years to come.

The Entrance of Bayard Rustin

When Martin Luther King’s home was bombed, a group of civil rights activists based in New York City sent support. They were worried that King would not be able to sustain a peaceful movement in the face of rising White violence. The situation felt especially serious because they had received word that Black Americans were smuggling weapons into Montgomery. Fearing a possible race war, the group sent the most experienced nonviolent activist in the country to examine the situation and offer advice.

His name was Bayard Rustin. Rustin had been dedicated to spreading the teachings of nonviolent resistance for two decades by the time the Montgomery bus boycott took place. During his extensive travels, he staged his own sit-ins at restaurants, single handedly desegregating at least one. He was once beaten by four police officers for refusing to move from the front of the bus, and when he was taken to jail to be beat some more, he instead guided the officers into a calm discussion and was released. While serving two years in prison for refusing military service during World War II, he successfully desegregated the athletics program, the dining hall, and the education programs within the prison.

Bayard Rustin had helped to found a number of organizations dedicated to the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi, and was invited to India shortly after Gandhi’s assassination in 1948. Gandhi’s disciples were deeply impressed by Rustin. In the chaos following Gandhi’s death, they believed that Rustin’s expertise would help keep the spirit of Gandhi alive in India, and invited him to spend a year there. Rustin was tempted by the invitation, but unable to accept. He travelled to Africa, speaking with leaders of decolonization movements, and offering advice on building nonviolent independence struggles. By the time Bayard Rustin was sent to advise Martin Luther King, he was a globally recognized leader of nonviolent resistance.

When Rustin visited King, guns were scattered throughout the house. Rustin asked if having guns was compatible with the philosophy of nonviolence, and King replied that yes, it was. He intended to harm no one and would only use the guns in self-defense. Rustin cautioned King, telling him: “If, in the flow and heat of battle, a leaders house is bombed, and he shoots back, that is an encouragement to his followers to pick up guns. If, on the other hand, he had no guns around him, and they all know it, they will rise to the nonviolent occasion.” The point was not that King’s followers might be inspired to shoot if King started shooting: the point was that King’s followers might be inspired to shoot if they thought that shooting was even a possibility.

Rustin told King a story that night: when he had gone to India, it became clear to him that the masses of Indians did not have a deep belief in nonviolence. They were ordinary people who believed in the basic right to defend themselves. Many also believed that violence was justified if using violence could solve a problem. Whereas Gandhi viewed nonviolence as a way of life that you lived and breathed at every moment, most Indians viewed it as a strategy to be used only when it was effective. This meant that, as soon as nonviolent resistance did not seem effective, that many Indians would abandon it.

However, they didn’t abandon it because Gandhi, by accepting nonviolence as a complete way of life, ensured that his followers would never have reason to doubt what kind of action he might take. They could have complete faith that he would always reject violence. In this way, Mahatma Gandhi turned himself into a powerful symbol of nonviolence that the people of India could have great faith in… a symbol that could inspire a mass movement. If King was to become such a symbol, he would have to adopt nonviolence not only as a strategy, but as a way of life as well.

King had been inspired by a lecture on Gandhi while in college, and reportedly purchased half a dozen books about the great Indian freedom fighter afterwards. A friend remembered that as a graduate student, King would stay up late at night debating with those who believed that violence was necessary to overthrow oppressive conditions. King had transitioned smoothly from studying Gandhi in college to putting Gandhi’s teachings into action, leading a nonviolent movement for over two months by the time Bayard Rustin arrived to council him. And yet, Rustin later said, “The fact of the matter is, when I got to Montgomery, King had very limited notions about how a nonviolent protest should be carried out.” Other experienced nonviolent activists felt similarly. When it came to the details of how to build a movement, King had a lot to learn.

Rustin did everything he could to support King. He mentored King in nonviolent strategy and philosophy. He helped to shape King’s image in the media. He introduced King into the vast network of nonviolent activists that he had spent twenty years building. During the boycott, Bayard Rustin wrote the first article ever published under King’s name. And when King later wrote a book about the Montgomery bus boycott, called Stride Towards Freedom, Rustin had a major influence on the book. And yet, the book never mentions Rustin: the insights that Rustin helped Martin Luther King gain were presented as if they came directly from King himself. And this was exactly as Bayard Rustin had wanted: it turned King into a more powerful symbol.

However, Bayard Rustin needed to stay invisible for another reason: he was an openly gay man living in an age when many people considered homosexuality to be immoral, or even criminal. King’s allies worried that any association with Rustin would open King up to charges that he was taking advice from “immoral” people, or perhaps engaging in “immoral” practices himself. King ignored their advice and continued to rely on Rustin. Rustin understood that his sexual orientation was a threat to the movement, and made his visit to Montgomery as brief as possible, doing most of his work for King from New York City. When the two men needed to talk personally, King would meet with him secretly outside of Montgomery. Rustin’s invisibility would not last forever though: in 1963, despite the protests of his colleagues, King hired Bayard Rustin to organize the famous March on Washington. The job was far too big to keep a secret, and after its incredible success, Bayard Rustin became the most famous openly gay man in the nation.

Mass Arrests

 Bayard Rustin arrived in Montgomery at the perfect time – February 21, the day that a grand jury called for the arrest of one hundred and fifteen boycott leaders. When the previous intimidation had failed to stop the boycott, the city dug up an old law from 1903 that had outlawed boycotts in response to the streetcar protests a half-century earlier. Rustin counseled the Montgomery leaders to not allow the city to humiliate them with images of being arrested and dragged off by police. They should instead dress in their finest clothes and proudly present themselves at the jail. They took his advice, and a huge crowd gathered outside. In Rustin’s words, the Black community was “thrilled to see their leaders surrender without being hunted down.”

The mass arrests were an incredible mistake on the part of White Montgomery: they turned the boycott from a primarily local affair into an international media sensation. Although the bombing of King’s home had gained significant media attention, major newspapers like the New York Times still relied on southern reporting, which was obviously biased. With the mass arrests, reporters from around the country flooded into Montgomery, and the boycott became front-page news for the first time. Along with the outside attention came the desperately needed outside financial support that allowed for the continuation of the boycott.

White Montgomery’s efforts to destroy the boycott backfired again when Martin Luther King was placed on trial. A stream of Black Americans took to the stand, describing the terrors they faced on the bus. One woman described how her husband, after getting into an argument with a bus driver, had been shot and killed by a police officer. Another woman described how her husband had been dragged by the bus when he was forced to enter through the back door, which closed on his leg as he began to enter and then sped away. When Martin Luther King was found guilty of organizing an illegal boycott, he posted bail and walked outside to a cheering crowd, telling them: “We will continue to protest in the same spirit of nonviolence and passive resistance, using the weapon of love.” Headlines across the nation the following day portrayed King not as a guilty criminal, but as the American Gandhi.

 The tide had turned. It had taken three months, but the world was now watching, and it had taken the side of the boycotters. Financial assistance poured in, allowing Black Montgomerians to make it through the remaining nine months of the boycott, which only ended when the Supreme Court ruled that Montgomery’s segregated bus practices were unconstitutional.

The Development of King’s Philosophy

Martin Luther King’s early philosophy developed over the course of the Montgomery bus boycott, and is beautifully expressed in his first book, Stride Towards Freedom: The Montgomery Story. While his philosophy matured over the years, Stride Towards Freedom offers an excellent portrayal both of King’s early philosophy, and of the principles that would guide him for the rest of his life.

In Stride Towards Freedom, King describes love as a revolutionary force. In defining what kind of love was revolutionary, he turned to the ancient Greeks, explaining that they had different terms for different kinds of love, such as eros for romantic love, or philia for the love one has for ones friends. Revolutionary love – the love that was necessary for nonviolent resistance – was agape: the love for all humanity. Unlike eros or philia, agape was not a kind of love that hoped for anything in return, such as friendship or romance. It was not a love that was focused on ones own self. Agape was a love that desired the best for all people, near or far, known or unknown, friend or enemy. King referred to it as “the love of God operating in the human heart.”

King believed this love was revolutionary because true love of humanity would not tolerate injustice, and thus demanded resistance… a resistance, however, that hurt no one, that healed divisions rather than increased them: a nonviolent resistance. King believed that racism had shattered the human community, and wrote that “…if I respond to hate with a reciprocal hate I do nothing but intensify the cleavage in broken community. I can only close the gap in broken community by meeting hate with love.”   “Love, agape, is the only cement that can hold this broken community together. When I am commanded to love, I am commanded to restore community, to resist injustice, and to meet the needs of my brothers.”

King wrote that whereas other forms of resistance created winners and losers and pushed the sisters and brothers in the human community further apart, “The aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community.” He emphasized that nonviolent resistance “does not seek to defeat or humiliate the opponent, but to win his friendship and understanding.” It attacks forces of evil rather than “persons who happen to be doing evil. It is the evil that the nonviolent resister seeks to defeat, not the persons victimized by evil.”

During the Montgomery bus boycott, it was the forces of segregation that were under attack… not the White people who supported segregation, who were, in King’s words, people who had been “victimized by evil” by the fact that they had been raised in a society that made it nearly impossible for them not to become racist. In order to emphasize that the bus boycott had no intention of hurting Whites, King decided to not even use the term “boycott” to describe the Montgomery movement. Understanding that many people associated that word with the economic retaliation of the White Citizens Council, which used boycotts to harm Black Americans and their supporters, King instead spoke of noncooperation with evil. The outcome of noncooperation with evil did not involve anyone getting hurt: the outcome was justice. In the case of the Montgomery bus boycott, the just outcome was the desegregation of buses. White people may not have liked it, but it didn’t hurt them.

Nonviolent resistance was also revolutionary because it created what King called a “permanent, positive peace,” rather than a “negative peace.” As he told a White man who accused of him of destroying the “peaceful and harmonious race relations” in Montgomery: “Sir, you have never had real peace in Montgomery. You have had a sort of negative peace in which the Negro too often accepted his state of subordination. But this is not true peace. True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice. The tension we see in Montgomery today is the necessary tension that comes when the oppressed rise up and start to move forward toward a permanent, positive peace.” Negative peace was created when conflicts were not resolved, but pushed beneath the surface where they could be easily ignored by the dominating side in a conflict. It was a form of peace that required someone’s defeat and subordination. Nonviolent resistance was able to create a “permanent, positive peace” because it did not solve conflicts through dominating and defeating people, but by healing broken community.

Nonviolent resistance needed to avoid “not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit.” Internal violence, such as hatred of the oppressor, was always at risk of turning into physical violence. In King’s words, overcoming internal violence “can only be done by projecting the ethic of love to the center of our lives.” It was no easy task to help an oppressed community keep their focus on love, when it was so natural to hate those that hurt you. During the most difficult times of the boycott, King called for massive community meetings on a daily basis in order to bring the people together and keep their energy focused on the dignity and righteousness of their cause. All speakers were asked to focus their words on nonviolence and on love in order to strengthen the resolve of the Black community.

However, King emphasized that the love they spoke of – of agape – did not mean having the warm feelings associated with other kinds of love. In his words, “It would be nonsense to urge men to love their oppressors in an affectionate sense. Love in this connection means understanding.” What needed to be understood was that it was not the nature of White people to be racist and oppressive, but that they had been born into a society that made them that way, and that this could change. It was this understanding that allowed Black Americans to manage the “internal violence” that was naturally felt towards ones oppressors, and to stay true to the nonviolent resistance that would eventually heal the broken human community.

King’s message that a true love of humanity demanded nonviolent resistance made sense to many White people outside of the South. Many had previously viewed resistance to oppression as a form of aggression, or as something that they did not need to become involved in because they were not oppressed themselves. More importantly, King’s steadfast focus on using the “weapon of love” to overcome oppression led many White Americans to feel a sense of shame… just as it was intended to. In King’s words, nonviolent resistance worked only because of its power “to awaken a sense of moral shame in the opponent.” Only the painful emotional pressure of feeling shame had the power to turn enemies into friends.

Although King often spoke of turning enemies into friends, he understood that hardcore enemies were usually set in their ways. The true target of shame was ordinary White Americans. It was through forcing them to feel shame that Black Americans could gain a broad base of support… support in the form of financial donations, in the form of positive media portrayals, in the form of political pressure at the voting polls, and in the form of active White allies struggling side by side with Black Americans. When King wrote that “he who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it,” he framed resistance to oppression as the natural activity of all decent people. His message forced many ordinary White Americans to wrestle with their conscience, and to support the Black American freedom struggle.

Rosa Parks After the Boycott

As for Rosa Parks, her story was no simple, civil rights fairytale with a clean-cut happy ending. She and her husband both lost their jobs over the boycott. In retaliation to their activism, the landlord raised their rent, and they found it impossible to make ends meet. The boycott had taken a serious toll on their health: Raymond Parks, constantly fearing for his wife, slept with his gun, suffered a nervous breakdown, and began drinking heavily. Rosa Parks had suffered from severe sleeplessness and developed a heart condition. This was the harsh reality of activism… a story that would be repeated thousands and thousands of times as the civil rights movement swept the South.

Eight months after the end of the boycott, Rosa and Raymond Parks abandoned Montgomery and moved north to Detroit. Although continuing to live in poverty, Rosa Park’s activism never ceased. In Detroit she worked on issues of housing discrimination and police brutality. She saw Malcolm X deliver some of his most famous speeches, including “Message to the Grassroots,” “The Ballot or the Bullet,” and what came to be known as his “Last Message,” delivered a week before his death. Following that last talk, Rosa and Malcolm fell into a long conversation. His house had just been bombed and he still smelled of smoke.

Although Rosa and Malcolm appeared so different on the surface, they were similar in many ways and enjoyed each other’s company. Parks later surprised interviewers by telling them that Malcolm X was her greatest hero. His position on self-defense reminded her of her grandfather, and she expressed that she felt that King may be asking too much of Blacks: “We shouldn’t be expected not to react to violence,” she told a reporter. “It’s a human reaction and that’s what we are, human beings.” She also admired Malcolm’s international perspective. Like him, she viewed the Black American freedom struggle as just one part of the larger, global freedom struggles being waged by colonized peoples during the civil rights era. Although Martin Luther King shared this perspective as well, Parks may have admired the fact that Malcolm X worked to build solid alliances with racially oppressed people around the world.

In 1964, Rosa Parks played an essential role in the election of the Black congressman John Conyers. He immediately hired her onto his staff, ending her long period of poverty. The office of John Conyers became a hotbed of Black political activism, and because he was often in Washington D.C., Rosa Parks played a major role in running the Detroit office. She not only met with the many people who poured into the office, she travelled all over the city, meeting with people at schools, hospitals, senior citizens homes, and community meetings. She listened to what the people needed and reported back to the congressman.

Just as Rosa had supported young activists in Montgomery in the years before the boycott, she became a major supporter of the young people who became involved in the civil rights movement. She cherished the “Black is Beautiful” culture that developed in the late 1960s, viewing it as an act of self-love that was essential not only for personal happiness, but for effective resistance to injustice. She supported the calls of the younger generation for Black Power. Indeed, Rosa Parks had long been familiar with the essence of Black Power, as was Martin Luther King: at a mass meeting during the Montgomery bus boycott, King had explained that “…until we as a race learn to develop our power, we will get nowhere. We’ve got to get political power and economic power for our race.”

Racial integration was only meaningful if it led to an actual share of power, and the young militants who Rosa Parks supported did not feel that that was happening. Rosa Parks was calm and soft-spoken, but like the youth, she was impatient. As historian Jeanne Theoharis writes, her “impatience was rooted in a tenderness toward people’s suffering that made it impossible for her and many others in the Black Power movement to rest easy in the face of continuing injustice.”

Young Black militants did not view Rosa Parks as a civil rights icon whose day had passed, but as a fellow freedom fighter. They thrilled at being able to spend time with her. Although Parks was portrayed to the world as the very opposite of the stereotype of the angry, Black militant, the militants themselves knew better. As Rosa Parks’ biographer Jeanne Theoharis writes, “In the popular imagination, black militants do not speak softly, dress conservatively, attend church regularly, get nervous, or work behind the scenes.  Fundamentally, they are the opposite of a middle-aged seamstress who spoke softly and slowly.  And yet there were many militants like Mrs. Parks who did just those things.”

As one of Rosa’s friends put it: “She’s quiet – the way steel is quiet.”

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Bibliography

D’Emilio, John. Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003).

Garrow, David J. Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: Vintage Books, 1986).

Jackson, Thomas F. From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Struggle for Economic Justice (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).

King, Martin Luther, Jr. Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1958).

McGuire, Danielle L. At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance – a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power. (New York: Vintage Books, 2010).

Parks, Rosa. My Story (New York: Puffin Books, 1992).

Robinson, Jo Ann Gibson. The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1987).

Theoharis, Jeanne. The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (Boston: Beacon Press, 2013)

Additional Resources

For teachers: excellent primary source based lesson from the Stanford History Education Group; an assortment of resources including lessons, academic materials and children’s books  from the Zinn Education Project; a collection of activities from Teaching Tolerance, and a Resource for Teaching Rosa Parks page by her biographer, Jeanne Theoharis.

From Stanford’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute: Description of the boycott with links to tons of primary sources, characters, and events.  The Institute has many biographies, including Jo Ann Robinson; Bayard Rustin; Rosa Parks; and E.D. Nixon.

Brother Outsider; a documentary about Bayard Rustin.

From montgomeryboycott.com: interviews and conversations with the boycott’s participants, biographies, newspaper and photo archives, and more.

From NPR: Meet The Fearless Cook Who Secretly Fed — And Funded — The Civil Rights Movement.

From the National Museum of African American History and Culture: Recy Taylor, Rosa Parks, and the Struggle for Racial Justice.

Historian Danielle McGuire on her process of investigating the rape of Recy Taylor.

Black Perspectives: Rosa Parks and the Image of Respectability.

Black Perspectives: Rosa Parks on Police Brutality: The Speech We Never Heard.

Rosa Parks hired as a secretary to US Representative John Conyers

From Parks’ brilliant biographer Jeanne Theoharris, writing for The Smithsonian: Get Reintroduced to Rosa Parks as a New Archive Reveals the Woman Behind the Boycott.

Questions

  1. Thinking About Connections Across Time: Although slavery had been destroyed fifty years before the birth of Rosa Parks, she was part of a generation of Black Americans whose elders had once been slaves. How do you think being raised amongst ex-slaves might have influenced the perspectives of young children like Rosa Parks?
  2. Making Connections Between Past and Present: Rosa Parks’ grandfather looked White, but because he had African ancestry, he was thought of as Black, and was thus made a slave. Back then, this was known as the “one drop” rule: even if a person was 99% White, if they had “one drop” of African ancestry, they were defined as Black. Do you think that this way of defining “White” and “Black” still exists today, or have things changed?

The Beginning of Rosa’s Activism

  1. Thinking About Strategy: What strategies did White Southerners use to prevent Black Americans from voting? What strategies did Black Americans – like Rosa Parks and E.D. Nixon – use to gain the vote?

The History of Busing in Montgomery

  1. Thinking About Global Context: Why did World War II make Black Americans even more determined to fight for their freedom?
  2. Thinking About Local Context: How did the local context of Montgomery – specifically, the fact that it had two air-force bases – contribute to that city later staging a bus boycott?

Events Leading Up to the Boycott

  1. Thinking About National Context: In what way did the Supreme Court outlawing segregated schools in 1954 contribute to the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955?
  2. Thinking About Strategy: Why did E.D. Nixon feel that Claudette Colvin was not the right person to build a legal case around?

Organizing the Boycott

  1. Thinking About Strategy: Describe the role that Jo Ann Robinson and the Women’s Political Council played in starting the boycott, and why they were able to be so effective.
  2. Thinking About Strategy: Why did E.D. Nixon think that the ministers needed to be organized to make the boycott successful? Why did he offer Martin Luther King an important role in organizing the ministers?

The First Day of the Boycott

  1. Thinking About Strategy: Describe the strategy of Rosa Parks’ lawyer.
  2. Thinking About Gender: Why were the ministers, rather than Rosa Parks and Jo Ann Robinson, chosen to become the leaders of the boycott?
  3. Thinking About Public Presentation: Describe the image of Rosa Parks that was presented to the public, and why this image was chosen.

The White Backlash

  1. Thinking About Strategy: Describe the strategies used by the White Citizens Councils to enforce racial oppression, including why they disagreed with the Ku Klux Klan, and how they prevented White people from helping Black Americans.

The Entrance of Bayard Rustin

  1. Thinking About Strategy: Why did Bayard Rustin tell King that it was important that he didn’t arm himself, even for protection? According to Rustin, why did King need to adopt nonviolence as a complete way of life?
  2. Thinking About Public Presentation: Describe two reasons why Bayard Rustin, despite being a major influence on Martin Luther King, kept his role invisible to the public.

Mass Arrests

  1. Thinking About Strategy: How did the Black community prevent themselves from looking like “guilty criminals” to the eyes of the world when they were arrested? Why were the mass arrests a major strategic error on the part of White Montgomery?

The Development of King’s Philosophy

  1. Thinking About Strategy: Why did Martin Luther King believe that agape was a revolutionary kind of love?
  2. Imagine You Were There: Imagine you were in the crowds listening to Martin Luther King speaking about revolutionary love. How would you have reacted? Would you have agreed with him? Why or why not?
  3. Thinking About Strategy: Why did King choose to use the term “noncooperation with evil,” instead of the term “boycott”? What was positive about one term, and negative about the other?
  4. Making Connections Between Past and Present: What did Martin Luther King mean by “negative peace” and “positive peace?” Do you think “negative peace” exists in your community today? Please explain.
  5. Thinking About Strategy: What did Martin Luther King mean by “internal violence of spirit?” Why did the Montgomery movement need to prevent this “internal violence,” and how did they prevent it?
  6. Thinking About Strategy: Why did Martin Luther King feel it was important for White Americans to feel a sense of shame?

Rosa Parks After the Boycott

  1. Thinking About Strategy: In what ways did Rosa Parks disagree with Martin Luther King, and why?
  1. Thinking About Perspectives: What did Rosa Parks think of the phrases “Black is Beautiful” and “Black Power?”