[November 13th marked the 65th anniversary of a key moment in the unfolding history of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of layers to that Civil Rights Movement activism, leading up to a weekend post on 21st century legacies and echoes!]
On a more
specific and a more overarching significance to Martin Luther King
Jr’s first book.
As I shared
earlier in this week’s series, I’ve written a couple
different pieces for my Saturday
Evening Post Considering History column about the Montgomery
bus boycott, and my central goal in both has been to push beyond some of
the most familiar collective memories of that moment and early Civil Rights
Movement activism. Certainly there’s more to the story of Rosa Parks than the
familiar narratives generally capture; but similarly, the boycott is often
framed as an early example of King’s leadership, while in truth his
role was entirely that of a supporting figure, arriving to bolster the
already underway and impressive efforts of local leaders like Parks and her
colleagues (many of them women, as I also highlighted in those pieces). King
did give an early December speech at the city’s Holt
Street Baptist Church that powerfully expressed the boycott’s origins and
goals, but (to reiterate one of my main points from Monday’s post and really
for this whole week’s series) to focus too much of our attention on that speech
is to miss quite a bit of the more multi-layered histories of this crucial
event.
Interestingly,
one of the texts that can most effectively help us push beyond those more
narrow and partial histories of the boycott was also authored by King: his 1958
book Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story.
Because King had become so closely associated with the boycott, publishers
began approaching him to write a book about it, and in October 1957 he signed a
contract with Harper & Brothers for the manuscript that would become Stride. Although by 1957-8 King was
already hugely prominent as an individual voice and leader of the evolving movement,
he saw this first book of his as far more of a collective history than a personal
memoir, calling it in its Preface “the chronicle of 50,000 Negroes who took to
heart the principles of nonviolence, who learned to fight for their rights with
the weapon of love, and who in the process, acquired a new estimate of their
own human worth.” As such, Stride is
a text that help us understand not just the details and stages of the boycott,
but also some of the ways in which those who organized and took part in it
perceived their efforts, making it a striking and significant combination of a
primary and a secondary source.
That specific
historical and analytical lens makes King’s book well worth a read, but it’s
not the only significant layer to Stride
Toward Freedom. Roughly halfway through, in the book’s sixth chapter
“Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” King takes a step back to consider his own arc and
influences when it comes to that philosophy of nonviolent activism and civil
disobedience, writing publicly for one of the first times about such what he
had learned from figures as Henry
David Thoreau, Mohandas Gandhi,
and others. As with every other aspect of King’s life and legacy, his ideas
about those topics have been at best simplified and often misrepresented over
the years since, especially by conservatives
who seek to claim that they are the true descendants of King and his
movement. Fortunately, King left a rich archive through which we can engage his
own perspective and ideas, about specific histories like the bus boycotts, overarching
concepts like nonviolence and civil disobedience, and most every other aspect
of his work and the movement, and this chapter in Stride represents an early and important piece within that
collection.
Last bus boycott
layer tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Sides to this history or histories like it you’d highlight?
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