Daybreak of Freedom

Daybreak of Freedom . Daubreak of The University of North Carolina Press Chapel Hill and London Freedom The Montgomery Bus Boycott Edited by Stewart Burns © 1997 The University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved. Manufactured in the United States of America. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Daybreak of freedom : the Montgomery bus boycott / edited by Stewart Burns, p cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-8078-2360-0 (alk. paper) — ISBN 0-8078-4661-9 (pbk.: alk. paper) i. Montgomery (Ala.)—Race relations—Sources. 2. Segregation in transportation—Alabama— Montgomery—History—20th century—Sources. 3. Afro-Americans—Civil rights—Alabama- Montgomery—History—2oth century—Sources. I. Title. F334-M79N39 *997 97~79°9 3O5.8'oo976i47—dc2i CIP 01 oo 99 98 97 54321 THIS BOOK WAS DIGITALLY MANUFACTURED. For Claudette Colvin, Jo Ann Robinson, Virginia Foster Durr, and all the other courageous women and men who made democracy come alive in the Cradle of the Confederacy This page intentionally left blank We are here in a general sense because first and foremost we are American citizens, and we are determined to apply our citizenship to the fullness of its meaning. We are here also because of our love for democracy, because of our deep-seated belief that democracy transformed from thin paper to thick action is the greatest form of government on earth. And you know, my friends, there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression. .. But the great glory of American democracy is the right to protest for right. We are not wrong in what we are doing. If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong. If we are wrong, Jesus of Nazareth was merely a Utopian dreamer that never came down to earth. If we are wrong, justice is a lie. Love has no meaning. And we are determined here in Montgomery to work and fight until justice runs down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream. We, the disinherited of this land, we who have been oppressed so long, are tired of going through the long night of captivity. And now we are reaching out for the daybreak of freedom and justice and equality.. Right here in Montgomery, when the history books are written in the future, somebody will have to say, "There lived a race of people, a black people, fleecy locks and black complexion, a people who had the moral courage to stand up for their rights. And thereby they injected a new meaning into the veins of history and of civilization."—Martin Luther King Jr., December 5,1955, Montgomery I believe that God is using Montgomery as his proving ground. It may be that here in the capital of the Confederacy, the birth of the ideal of freedom in America and in the Southland can be born. —Martin Luther King Jr., March 22,1956, Montgomery This page intentionally left blank Contents. Preface: The Spirit of Montgomery xi Acknowledgments xv Overview: The Proving Ground i Chronology 39 Editorial Practices 53 Abbreviations for Collections and Archives 55 1 Prelude 57 2 December 81 3 January m 4 Interlude 137 5 February 147 6 Interlude 177 7 March 195 8 Interlude 221 9 Spring 235 10 Summer 263 11 Fall 281 12 Winter: Return of the Light 307 Selected Bibliography 349 Index 351 Maps and Illustrations Map of Alabama xviii Map of Montgomery, Alabama xix A section of illustrations follows page 136 x... Contents Preface . The Spirit of Montgomery The Montgomery bus boycott looms as a formative turning point of the twen- tieth century: harbinger of the African American freedom movement, which in turn inspired movements for freedom around the globe; springboard for the leadership of Martin Luther King Jr. in civil rights, human rights, and peace- making; launching pad for the worldwide era of upheaval known as the "six- ties," which lasted nearly two decades and dominated the rest of the century; marker of the midcentury divide between modern and postmodern. The bus boycott stands for all times as one of humankind's supreme democratic mo- ments, a monumental struggle to actualize the American dream of freedom, equality, and constitutionalism. The nonviolent uprising of 1955 and 1956 represented a new founding of American democracy that pushed the nation a quantum leap closer to keeping faith with its parchment principles. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution gave birth to the United States as a promise of freedom, something new in the eighteenth- century world. At that time American freedom meant independence from Great Britain and liberties for propertied Anglo-Saxon men. It remained an unfulfilled promise for nine out often inhabitants of the new world. African Americans, white women, wage workers fought to make their birthright real. They constructed a handle on freedom that they called "equal rights," a rallying cry that ascended from hush arbor and soap box, pulpit and tea table, penny press and fiery tract, to the Capitol and the White House. Abraham Lincoln crystallized the nation's second founding halfway through the holocaust of Civil War when he emancipated slaves and spoke the incantation of Gettysburg. The Gettysburg Address gathered the "full measure" of the war's death and devastation—hauntingly reflected by the awful battlefield backdrop—to illuminate and consecrate the watchword of .. .xi equality that had been raised up for a generation by abolitionists black and white, transcendentalists, women's rights activists, and other disturbers of the peace. Just as the Declaration of Independence had been concretized by the Constitution, so Lincoln's linking of liberty and equality was incorporated in the three Civil War amendments that abolished slavery, gave citizenship and legal rights to African Americans, and enfranchised black men. But the un- folding of freedom was far from finished. For the freed people freedom and equal rights, even the very words, were twisted into new forms of enslavement and exploitation. The Jim Crow caste system of segregation, at first an expedient and then a whole culture and way of life, persisted for nearly a century, empowered by the systematic disem- powerment of black men and women (and poor whites) by force, fraud, and reform. Black protests were sporadic, isolated, and short. Federal court deci- sions began undoing segregation slowly, in measured paces. Then in the mid-1950s a newly urban community of African Americans in the Alabama capital rose up to challenge Jim Crow. Organizing and mobilizing their people for over a year, black citizens dramatized in everyday life the popular sovereignty envisioned by the Declaration of Independence and the Constitu- tion's preamble. They injected the energy and spirit of democracy—living grassroots democracy—into their bittersweet inheritance of freedom and equality. The actions of Montgomery's black citizenry, along with the words leaders spoke from pulpits that ennobled and immortalized the mass protest, con- stituted the nation's third founding—the first in Philadelphia, the second at Gettysburg, the third in the "Cradle of the Confederacy." The Montgomery bus boycott made democracy tangible and heartfelt for those who took part in it and for wider circles swayed by its ripples—a shared communal awakening that commingled politics, emotion, and spirituality. Montgomery's democratic moment was its own, unique, unrepeatable, and far from flawless, but its vital elements took hold as standards for the epic black freedom movement that grew from it—and to some degree in later struggles for liberation, from South Africa to Prague to Tienanmen Square. Montgomery showed that democracy cannot bloom without community. The richer the communal soil, the stronger its democratic shoots. The bus boycott exemplified an unparalleled unity across class lines that black movements have dreamt about since. The driving force of it all was thousands of African American women, middle class and working class, active in churches, clubs, and sororities. They transplanted democracy from their sheltered sanc- tuaries to public streets and squares. They turned faith, and friendship from the healing balm of survival into the fire of defiance and transformation. xii. Preface Blocked from voting by and large, lacking representation in the political arena, Montgomery's black citizens understood that, like their nineteenth- century forebears who fought slavery, democracy meant that they "must themselves strike the blow." They must act as their own agents of change. They came to believe, as their preeminent leader told them, that "the great glory of democracy is the right to protest for right." Just as they and their ancestors had tilled hard soil, planted seeds, harvested crops, hewn wood, repaired tools, cooked food, sewn clothes—for whites but also for themselves—so democracy, they found, was something palpable to hold and mold in their own hands, to carry forward step by step. Democracy too had its seasons and cycles. The journey mattered. Democracy was more than a right, more than a respon- sibility. It was a pantheon of hope and faith. These citizens' reach for democracy was rooted in the churches, scriptures, and spirituals that tied them to their divinity and to generations past and not yet born. They made Montgomery a praying movement, a testament to their faith in God and, through God, faith in themselves. A testament to God's grace. Their Bibles and preachers taught them that they were God's chosen people like the children of Israel.

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