Montgomery 40 years later: 381 days that shook America

Ebony, Feb, 1996 by Kevin Chappell

Black and White female clerks ooze with Southern hospitality as they work side by side checking in weary travelers at the six-floor Madison Hotel. A charcoal-colored man buying a gallon of low-fat milk laughs with a red-faced cashier at the local Winn-Dixie before heading to his rusty old Ford pickup. And Blacks and Whites leaving their jobs mix and mingle on a bright tangerine city bus as it rumbles down Perry Avenue.

Look around and it's obvious that, on the surface, Montgomery, Ala., is a much different city today than it was in 1955 when it gave birth to a 381-day bus boycott that forever changed the color of the South and of America. Now nearly one-half of all key elected government officials are Black, commissions and boards reflect the diversity of the city more than ever and Blacks are excelling in business and moving beyond the boundaries of the inner city to integrated suburbs.

It was these gains, 40 years after the Montgomery Bus Boycott, that prompted movement survivors and others who have only heard about the boycott to make a pilgrimage back to the symbolic city to celebrate the past struggles and to plan for the future.

But the week-long events in Montgomery, commemorating one of the most important events in Black history, ended with a mass meeting at Holt Street Baptist Church--the same church where the bus boycott began 40 years ago--with the same conclusion reached in 1955: There is still much work to be done.

Montgomery City Councilman Joe L. Reed attempted to put the city's future challenges into a historical perspective. "Martin once preached that segregation was on its deathbed and was about to be buried" in Montgomery, says Reed, who became the first elected Black councilman in 1975 and before that worked with King during the boycott. "Well, Mr. Segregation had an offspring, and his name was Mr. Discrimination. And he doesn't dress like his daddy did, with a sheet over his overalls. Mr. Discrimination wears a suit over his sheet."

Unfortunately, Reed says, Mr. Discrimination will be as tough, or tougher, to defeat than his daddy.

As every schoolboy knows, December 1, 1955, was the day ordinary people in Montgomery rose and began to do extraordinary things. On that cold, overcast afternoon, quiet department-store seamstress Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a city bus to a White man. She was arrested in front of the Empire Theater after the White bus driver flagged down two burly White police officers. Edgar Daniel Nixon, a Pullman Porter, stepped forward and bailed Parks out of jail. Five days later, King, a 26-year-old, third-generation Baptist minister, was elected president of the Montgomery Improvement Association and led what would become more than a year-long boycott of city buses. King's leadership from his Dexter Avenue Baptist Church pulpit, a stone's throw from the state capitol, modilized more than 30,000 Black riders--75 percent of the transit system's customers--to peacefully boycott buses by carpooling and walking.

"It was one of the most fulfilling experiences of my life, being a part of the Montgomery movement," King's widow, Coretta Scott King, said at the commemoration ceremony. "The thousands of people, just ordinary people, who put their lives on the line day by day, and the courage they showed."

Because the right people were in the right place at the right time, the boycott was successful, says Juanita Abernathy, widow of Rev. Ralph Abernathy, who pastored the First Baptist Church from 1952 to 1961. "I call it 'that Montgomery style.' There was a warmth, a love, a concern and a camaraderie that you can't find anywhere."

Both Mrs. Abernathy and Mrs. King said the support given to their families by the Blacks of Montgomery, made them unafraid, even in the face of death threats, attacks and constant bombings.

"It was just a beautiful fellowship I don't know if we could have found anywhere else," Mrs. King said to a packed congregation at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where her husband pastored for four years before returning to Georgia to take up a national and international struggle for civil rights. "What happened here was revolutionary... We had a non-violent revolution. And those persons who were involved were transformed and their lives were transformed and that transformation ran throughout the country."

Fred Gray, the attorney who represented Parks and other Blacks during and after the bus boycott, took it an additional step. The events in Montgomery "created a human rights tidal wave that changed America and has washed upon the shores of such far away places as the Bahamas, China, South Africa and the Soviet Union," he said. "It all started on a bus."

What started on that 36-passenger lime-colored bus ended in executive orders, congressional bills and Supreme Court decisions outlawing bus segregation and laying the groundwork for similar protest movements around the world.

But the struggle for racial equality in the new Montgomery is far from over.

While Blacks no longer have to ride in the back of buses, drink from separate water fountains, attend different schools, live in segregated neighborhoods and ask permission before trying on clothes in White-owned department stores, racism, they say, has taken a different form. In fact, many Black Montgomerians continue to refer to their city as "the most racist city in America."