The Unlikely World of the Montgomery Bus Boycott: Solidarity Across Alabama, the United Kingdom, and South Africa by Cole S. Manley

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Unlikely World of the Montgomery Bus Boycott: Solidarity Across Alabama, the United Kingdom, and South Africa by Cole S. Manley Jonathan L. Entin The Unlikely World of the Montgomery Bus Boycott: Solidarity Across Alabama, the United Kingdom, and South Africa. By Cole S. Manley. Montgomery: NewSouth Books, 2021. 122 pp. $14.95. ISBN 978-1-5883-8452-2. The Montgomery bus boycott represented an iconic chapter of the Civil Rights Movement. The story is familiar: Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a segregated bus; thousands of local Blacks reacted by staying off the buses for over a year; the protest propelled a previously obscure young minister named Martin Luther King, Jr., into worldwide prominence; and a Supreme Court decision invalidating the segregation ordinance vindicated the protest. The details of this familiar story have been filled in by such scholars and journalists as David Garrow and Taylor Branch, as well as participants, including Parks, King, and Fred Gray, the legendary civil rights lawyer who represented both of them and many others over the years. Although the bus boycott resonated beyond this country, the voluminous literature does not really address the boycott’s international impact. Nor do the books by Mary Dudziak [Cold War, Civil Rights (Princeton, NJ, 2000)] and Thomas Borstelmann [The Cold War and the Color Line (Cambridge, MA, 2003)], which address the nation’s racial problems as a diplomatic challenge for the federal government during the Cold War without deeply investigating the global implications of Montgomery. Cole Manley has begun to fill this void by looking at how the bus boycott reverberated overseas, primarily in South Africa and the United Kingdom. Manley emphasizes the role of the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) in promoting the boycott overseas. In particular, FOR created and distributed a comic book that explicitly linked Dr. King and India’s Mohandas Gandhi as leaders of nonviolent resistance movements. The comic book circulated among activists in South Africa, which helped to promote ties between opponents of apart-heid there and of segregation in Alabama. In addition, Manley examines a 1963 bus boycott in Bristol, England, that was apparently inspired by the Montgomery protest. The precipitating incident did not involve segregated seating but [End Page 262] rather the bus company’s refusal to hire Black drivers. Also unlike Montgomery, the boycott kept only a minority of Black passengers off the buses and did not enjoy broad clergy support. Still, the Bristol campaign gained support from white university students as well as from several prominent British parliamentarians, including soon-to-be Prime Minister Harold Wilson, which helped to pressure the company into abandoning its discriminatory hiring policies. To his credit, Manley avoids overstating the relationship between the Montgomery boycott and overseas events. He acknowledges the lack of direct evidence of a connection. For example, the FOR’s comic book was published in December 1957, whereas a boycott protesting bus fare increases in South Africa’s Transvaal took place earlier in the year. The Transvaal campaign started shortly after Montgomery authorities desegregated their buses, but there was a history of other bus protests in South Africa dating back more than a decade. Moreover, Manley recognizes the lack of clarity about how the comic book was distributed in that country, though he cites evidence of its impact there. Similarly, the author concedes that it is not clear how Paul Stephenson, the principal organizer of the Bristol boycott, became aware of the Montgomery protest but suggests that the campaign there significantly influenced Stephenson’s thinking about how to deal with racial discrimination where he lived. At the same time, Manley does not hesitate to offer criticism. In particular, he faults FOR for making Dr. King the center of the movement at the expense of Parks and Jo Ann Robinson, whose prodigious organizational work as leader of the Women’s Political Council made the boycott possible. Further, he observes that British politicians who supported the Bristol protest also endorsed immigration restrictions that targeted people of color. Manley might have noted in this connection that those barred by those restrictions included Jagdish Rai Chadha, who won a landmark Supreme Court case after coming to...