Daughter of the Boycott: Carrying On a Montgomery Family's Civil Rights Legacy by Karen Gray Houston

Abstract

Reviewed by: Daughter of the Boycott: Carrying On a Montgomery Family's Civil Rights Legacy by Karen Gray Houston Jonathan L. Entin Daughter of the Boycott: Carrying On a Montgomery Family's Civil Rights Legacy. Karen Gray Houston. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2020. ISBN 978-1-64160-303-4. 241 pp., cloth, $27.99. The Montgomery bus boycott was a pivotal chapter in the history of the civil rights movement. That 382-day protest, which culminated in a landmark Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation in public transportation, helped to make Rosa Parks a national icon and launched the public career of Dr. Martin Luther King. In Daughter of the Boycott, longtime journalist Karen Gray Houston provides important new insights into events that have attracted considerable scholarly and popular attention. The author has a unique perspective: her uncle, Fred Gray (whom she affectionately calls Uncle Teddy), represented Parks and King as well as numerous other civil rights activists and the victims of the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment. Her father, the late Thomas Gray, played an important behind-the-scenes role in the boycott both as a driver in the car pool that enabled black residents to avoid the buses and as a board member of the Montgomery Improvement Association, which coordinated the protest. The book has a significant Ohio connection: her uncle attended law school at Case Western Reserve University before returning home to Montgomery to fulfill his goal of "destroying everything segregated [he] could find" (33). And her father moved to Cleveland not long after the successful conclusion of the boycott to attend law school, so the author grew up mostly in Cleveland and graduated from Ohio University. Because Ms. Houston was a preschooler when the boycott occurred, the book is only partly a memoir but also a work of long-form journalism that reflects her desire to learn more about those events as well as to assess their long-term impact. To be sure, she does provide a wealth of family perspectives. But she begins by telling the story of Hilliard Brooks, a black war veteran who was killed by a Montgomery police officer on a segregated bus more than five years before Rosa [End Page 159] Parks got arrested. And while she provides plenty of family-related details about the origins and implementation of the boycott, her book contributes important new details of this key historical episode through contemporary interviews with people who lived through the events, or their descendants. One chapter focuses on Claudette Colvin, a teenager who had been arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a segregated Montgomery bus several months before Rosa Parks was taken to jail, but whose story was largely forgotten until recently. Houston tracked down Colvin at her New York home a few years ago and obtained her reflections. That same chapter features interviews with other black women who were plaintiffs in the Supreme Court case after having run afoul of the bus segregation rules. Those women (and in the case of the deceased lead plaintiff, Aurelia Browder, her children) had not gotten a chance to tell their stories until now. Other chapters focus on Robert Graetz, a white minister who actively supported the boycott, and his wife, Jeannie; Sally Mosher, the daughter of the Montgomery police commissioner during the boycott; and Sara Jo Bagley, whose father-in-law was the manager of the Montgomery bus company at the time. Houston's reporting offers some hitherto unknown details that even specialists will find illuminating. But the book also provides valuable insights on racial issues in Ohio. Because Houston's father came to the North for law school, she spent much of her childhood in the Glenville section of Cleveland and then in the Ludlow community that straddles Cleveland and Shaker Heights. The family was among the first blacks to move into Ludlow, and Houston recounts some of the controversy (and violence) that resulted, as well as efforts by the neighborhood association to promote stable residential integration. Unlike her uncle Teddy, Thomas Gray stayed here for most of the rest of his legal career and was deeply engaged in civil rights issues in the Cleveland area. So the book offers...