[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 important victories,
horrific backlash, and the importance of remembering both.
The Montgomery
Bus Boycott ended with a pair of court decisions that were in their own way
just as important to the early Civil Rights Movement as Brown v. Board. On June 5, 1956, a federal district court ruled in Browder
v. Gayle that Alabama’s racial segregation on buses was
unconstitutional; the state appealed the decision, and on November 13th of the same
year (the anniversary which inspired this entire week’s series of posts)
the United States Supreme Court upheld the ruling. Perhaps the precedent of Brown would have inevitably, eventually
undermined racial segregation in all areas and forms—but given that prior
decision’s education-specific focus, it’s at least fair to say that subsequent
cases which addressed racial segregation more broadly were necessary and
crucial in the lead up to the 1964
Civil Rights Act. And given the central significance of transportation to
both the rise of Jim Crow segregation and the Supreme
Court’s support for that discriminatory system, it’s quite poetic that it
was buses which provided the vehicle for this crucial legal victory.
Buses also
became one of many sites of immediate and horrifically violent white
supremacist backlash to these legal victories, however. Desegregated buses
began operating in the city on December 20th, and over the following
week snipers shot at multiple buses; the first shootings apparently and
fortunately yielded no casualties, but on December 28th
snipers badly wounded 22 year old Rosa Jordan, a pregnant African American
woman traveling on an integrated bus. That violence was complemented by other
domestic terrorist attacks in the city over the same period, including a December
23rd shotgun blast through Martin Luther King Jr’s front door
and the January
10th, 1957 bombings of four Black churches and the homes of both
Ralph Abernathy and Reverend
Robert S. Graetz, one of the city’s most prominent white allies of the
boycott. The Montgomery City Commission suspended all bus service for three
weeks after those bombings; while the integrated buses eventually resumed operation,
the white supremacist violence likewise continued, including the January 23rd
lynching of 24 year old Willie Edwards by members of the city’s Ku Klux
Klan.
Beyond the
simple and crucial fact that they all happened, there’s another reason to
better remember both these victories and these horrors in the aftermath of the
boycott: they complicate a pair of overly simplified and interconnected
narratives of the Civil Rights Movement. One of those narratives boils the
movement down to singular figures and moments—especially MLK
and “I Have a Dream,” but also for example Rosa Parks (and an inaccurate
vision of her at that, as I highlighted Tuesday). The other emphasizes too
fully the inspiring and unifying sides to those figures and moments, and in so
doing downplays the ongoing backlash, violence, and domestic terrorism with
which white supremacist America met the movement, in its own era and for the
half-century since. The harder and more meaningful truth of the Montgomery
Bus Boycott and the Civil Rights Movement alike was that its victories were
hard-won and multi-layered, fraught and fragile, part of the longstanding and
evolving battle between inclusion
and exclusion, mythic
and critical patriotism, the best and worst of America. We’re not gonna get
anywhere until we can remember all those layers to our histories, and the
Montgomery Bus Boycott is a vital case in point.
Special post
this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Sides to this history or histories like it you’d highlight?
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