Montgomery Bus Boycott Research Articles

Second-Graders’ Historical Reading, Thinking, and Writing About Rosa Parks

Second-graders engaged in complex reading, writing, and thinking about Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Close readings of secondary and primary sources situated students to discover incongruencies between what is reported within trade-books and what is revealed within historical documents. Scaffolding directed students’ scrutiny of secondary sources for historical gaps and of primary sources for historical significance. The scaffolding was differentiated for both text-based and visually oriented primary sources. The assessment—creation of a faux primary source—was discipline-specific and completed through peer- and teacher-led review. Students demonstrated historical literacy, thinking, and argumentation during different phases of this guided inquiry. Teachers and researchers can gain rich, nuanced understandings from examining classroom-based learning.

Seeing Again: On Erin Pineda's Seeing Like an Activist

Seeing Like an Activist is a profound—and profoundly political—book. Skillfully distilling complex historical evidence into a vivid narrative and advancing a compelling theoretical argument, Pineda unsettles conventional accounts of the civil rights movement to ask what we can learn about the nature and limits of civil disobedience “by reconsidering the example we already think we know so well” (3). One of the book's key contributions is its analysis of political practices that constituted the “short civil rights movement”—the decade of southern protest bookended by the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955–56 and the Selma March in 1965. “The civil rights movement (and its multitude of activists),” Pineda observes, “operates between the lines of theory as an object lesson—a ready-made example that proves the moral purchase of the theory, rather than a live source of novel theoretical insights and political claims” (48). As object lesson, the movement is often recruited to police or criticize forms of protest that are said to fall short of the disciplined nonviolence of the past. This view of history, Pineda contends, enables theorists of civil disobedience like John Rawls to use the example of civil rights activism to affirm the liberal constitutional order. Offering incisive critiques of Rawls, Michael Walzer, and Hugo Bedau, Pineda exposes the unearned ease with which political theories that do not take racial injustice as a central concern or focus on Black theoretical practices have conscripted the civil rights movement in service of their arguments.

Views From West Africa

In the 1950s, many Ghanaians identified with African Americans as they read about events involving American racial violence in Ghanaian newspapers. Yet the transnational connections appearing in those periodicals varied in depth, intensity, and sincerity depending on their political or commercial connections. This study analyzes the reactions in key Ghanaian newspapers, such as those affiliated with Kwame Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party, the British-owned Daily Graphic, and the Ashanti Pioneer, to key moments in 1950s American race relations, including the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the events in Little Rock, and the infamous ‘Orange Juice’ incident involving discrimination against the Ghanaian minister of finance. By demonstrating that the Pioneer more often covered the personal angles of such events, while the tones of CPP-affiliated papers and even the Daily Graphic vacillated based on changing political needs, this study both shows the complicated nature of transnational racial identifications as they flowed west across the Atlantic and reveals the promises and limits of Ghanaian connections to members of the African diaspora during the decolonizing period in Ghana.

‘It Was Just the Club from Nowhere:’ The Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Gastro-Politics of Black Domestic Women, and Liberation Theology Futures

This article posits Georgia Gilmore and the “Club to Nowhere”—a crucial fundraising arm of the Montgomery Bus Boycott—as a critical vector in a larger tradition in the U.S. In Black movements for Black liberation, food and food production are engaged as a communal pedagogy for constructing agency, behavioral reform, economic power, resistance, and sustainable social transformation. While Montgomery preachers made speeches, activists strategized, and male leaders debated the place of women in the Black liberation project, Gilmore and her cadre of Black women domestics secured thousands of dollars to fund the movement by selling soul food staples. Through their labor, “The From Nowhere” transformed the socio-political and epistemological positionality of Black domestic women into a valuable intellectual resource for generating a movement for social change. Consequently, Gilmore reminds contemporary and future liberation theologians that interrogating and re-envisioning our epistemologies is essential to sustainable revolutionary social praxes. Working at the juncture of history, ethics, and critical theory, I look to Gilmore and “The Club from Nowhere” for historical reflection on the intersections of food, race, gender, and the future of liberation theologies.

Black Dignity: The Struggle against Domination, by Vincent W. Lloyd

Black Dignity: The Struggle against Domination, by Vincent W. Lloyd

Servants of the Times: Process-Relation and Complexity in Servant First Leadership

A bus seat in the first Colored row, an unusual flood of White commuters, a testy bus driver, a recently minted young minister, and a U.S. court order for desegregation, none of these are static items. Each is a happening in itself. Each is the product of a precipitating flood of moments leading up to an event or more than an event, a protracted event that history has dubbed the Montgomery Bus Boycott. On the other side of the 381-day ordeal Martin Luther King Jr. emerged as the nationally recognized leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC) (Williams, 1996/2009). Common turns of phrase refer to the metal of such leaders suggesting their stance against the turbulence of the times is wrought from an ore deep within, implying that King was all he needed to be for that moment long before it arrived. Ella Baker, who worked closely with King in the SCLC, saw it differently. In her words “the movement made Martin rather than Martin making the movement” (as cited in Williams, 1996/2009, p. 13). I cite Baker from Lea E. Williams’ prestigious volume because of Williams’ reflection on those words and on the leaders that grace her pages: “The confluence of unpredictable events created leaders appropriate for the times” (p. 13). The distinction in phase is perhaps subtle enough for a reader to overlook the seismic shift between those two ways of viewing leadership. If not apparent yet, by the end of this article I hope it is evident that Williams’ statement arises from a completely different ontology than the colloquial, “he rose to the occasion.” Instead of would be leaders stepping up to their moment on a timeline with cause and effect efficiency adding their desired effect to the cause, a confluence of unpredictable events is involved in a continual flow of time that at once encompasses profound bits of past, the very edge of the present, and the virtuality of what is yet to be. Williams (1996/2009) called her tome Servants of the People in reference to a leadership approach articulated by Robert K. Greenleaf in the years shortly following King’s assassination. Greenleaf (1977/2002) identified this approach in terms of what comes first: “It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first, then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. That person is sharply different from one who is leader first” (p. 27). Hints throughout Greenleaf’s works on Servant-Leadership reveal his perspective on the nature of time and of being that suggests not only is a servant first leader a servant of people, but I dare even to say a “servant of the times.” My hypothesis is that those who endeavor to be servant first leaders, not only as servants of people but as servants of the times, benefit significantly from: (1) adopting process-relational ways of viewing time and reality, (2) accepting that primary experience in social interaction continually shapes their identity, and (3) applying complexity theories from the physical and biological sciences to the social sphere of their leadership endeavor.

Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Legacy of Boston Personalism

Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Legacy of Boston Personalism

Review: Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance, by Mia Bay

Review: <i>Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance</i>, by Mia Bay

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

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...

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

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...

“Keep Remembering”

“Keep Remembering”

God will meet you at the jailhouse: Christianity and gender in the Fellowship of Reconciliation’s civil rights comic book

ABSTRACT In 1957, the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), a pacifist Christian group, published a comic book entitled Martin Luther King and The Montgomery Story. This document has received some attention in recent years in light of Congressman John Lewis’ recent comic series March, which was inspired by this 1957 work. While there has been some discussion of its creation, there has been less discussion about the comic book as a format for promotion of particular views of Christian activism and movement gender roles. FOR was founded in the WWI era, and advocated for Christian pacifist views in both of the World Wars. In the United States, it worked to help conscientious objectors and to build labor and social movements. Members of FOR, such as James Farmer, were significant in the formation of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). In the postwar era, FOR became active in civil rights. Members associated with the organization often worked on civil rights campaigns including the Montgomery bus boycott. It was as a result of this involvement that FOR published the comic book on King’s life. The comic book serves to solidify the movement’s adherence to Christian principles and to nonviolence. The work also emphasizes the importance of the church as an institution, particular versions of ministry, loving one’s neighbor, an image of God as the ultimate defender and protector as well as provides the readers with gendered examples of respectable activism.

Good Trouble: Pioneering the Power of Protest

30 | BLACK HISTORY BULLETIN VOL. 84, NO. 1 84 No.1 GOOD TROUBLE: PIONEERING THE POWER OF PROTEST By Andrew Jezisek Introduction The right to protest is enshrined in the Constitution of the United States of America. It is the bedrock of democracy, granted to all citizens of the United States regardless of race, gender, or ethnicity. However, the power of protest has been employed by African Americans for generations. From the local level to the federal level and even on the world stage, African Americans have demonstrated the power of protest in order to forward their cause for social justice. Since the three Reconstruction Amendments were added to the US Constitution, African Americans have struggled for social change despite systemic and stigmatic obstacles at every turn. Nonetheless, they have steeled themselves by mobilizing alongside their allies in protests that have shaped the history of the United States of America. Blueprints for Action In 1954, the battle for integration began. The United States Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren struck down the “separate but equal” precedent established by the controversial Plessy v. Ferguson case in 1896. The ruling in the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education declared that school segregation policies directed against African Americans were unconstitutional.1 However, pro-segregation southern politicians had no intention of toeing the new line. A struggle between African Americans and white supremacists was inevitable. African American civil rights leaders such as John Lewis and Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. had a roadmap to the goal of equality drawn out. The vehicle to get to that ultimate goal was nonviolent civil disobedience as a form of protest. John Lewis, the chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and future representative of Georgia’s Fifth Congressional District, referred to this practice as getting into “good trouble.”2 Civil rights leaders planned to mobilize in activities that would potentially elicit legal penalties and violent retaliation. Marches, sit-ins, freedom rides, and boycotts were the manifestations of “good trouble.” Many of these nonviolent tactics had been implemented before the American Civil Rights Movement in countries that were colonized by large European empires. Most notably, India was led to independence from the British Empire in the 1940s by nonviolent protests spearheaded by Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi’s nonviolent movement gained a large following, especially from bystanders who witnessed the British’s violent opposition to the Indian Independence Movement.3 Drawing from the tactics of Gandhi, African American civil rights leaders such as Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. reinvented the meaning of protest in the United States in order to overturn the Jim Crow status quo.4 “Good Trouble” in Practice Nonviolent protests by African Americans continued after the success of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the establishment of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1956. Jim Crow was beginning to lose footing from 1956 to 1960 as boycotts and sit-ins organized by civil rights groups forced local communities to do away with segregation on buses and in businesses.5 These acts of nonviolent civil disobedience achieved success at the federal level after local efforts were successful. The Supreme Court declared segregated busing and segregated counters in businesses unconstitutional by 1960. Yet cities in states that ignored Supreme Court rulings on segregation, particularly Alabama, still enforced discriminatory laws.6 Additionally, African American votes were suppressed by pro-segregation politicians who sought to cling to both power and the past. As a result, the same tactics of participating in “good trouble” were employed against these more entrenched discriminatory policies. At every sit-in, every march, and every freedom ride, protestors were met with brute force from white supremacy. Alabama became a central battleground in the Civil Rights Movement as one of the most segregated states in the country, an assertion that was reinforced in 1963 by its newly elected governor, George Wallace, who proclaimed his oppositiontointegrationinhisinauguraladdress.Nonetheless, massive grassroots nonviolent protests were organized by the SCLC in Birmingham in April of 1963. As the protests persisted into May, the authorities in Birmingham drastically escalated their response; Birmingham Public Safety Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor allowed the police to arm themselves with nightsticks, fire hoses, and attack dogs...

Boycotts Past and Present: From the American Revolution to the Campaign to Boycott Israel by David Feldman

Reviewed by: Boycotts Past and Present: From the American Revolution to the Campaign to Boycott Israel ed. by David Feldman Kathy M. Newman Boycotts Past and Present: From the American Revolution to the Campaign to Boycott Israel. Edited by David Feldman. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. 352 pages. $39.68 (paper). In the 1880s, a British émigré to Ireland named Captain Charles Boycott became the target of a widespread community campaign to have him shunned. Captain Boycott was a British military drop-out who had migrated to Ireland and was working as a rent collector for Lord Erne in County Mayo. Captain Boycott ran afoul of an activist group called the Land League when he refused to lower rents and then evicted 11 of Lord Erne's tenants. The Land League subsequently urged Boycott's employees to go on strike and to shun him from the community. Shun him they did, so much so that Captain Boycott could not get his mail delivered or find anyone to sit next to him at church. It got so bad that Boycott had to appeal to the British government for laborers to save his crops. The story of Boycott's shunning spread to America, and Boycott's name would forever be yoked to the tactic that had been used against him. [End Page 430] David Feldman, Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London, and the editor of this collection, reminds us of the shunning of Captain Boycott in his introductory essay. He uses the story to show that boycotts have long been "expressive" as well as "instrumental." Boycotting is a strategic tactic, but it is also a highly emotional one, often rooted in the withdrawal of various forms of patronage from the intended target with the larger goal of hurting that target's reputation and possibly even trying to destroy the target altogether. This collection shows that the history of the boycott is surprisingly long—extending as far back as the eighteenth century. In Michael L. Miller's essay, titled, "In Defense of the Nation: Protectionism and Boycotts in the Habsburg Lands, 1844–1914," we learn about the theories of the nineteenth century economist Friedrich List, a proponent of trade protectionism, whose influence was evident in a series of "buy national" campaigns in nineteenth century Europe, such as the "each to his own" campaign in Czechoslovakia and the "buy only from Germans" campaign in Germany. Many of these "buy national" campaigns had an antisemitic component as Jews were often excluded as members of the nation. In a series of detailed and fascinating essays we also learn about the anti-Jewish boycotts staged in early twentieth century Poland (Grzegorz Krzywiec, "The Enemy Within: The Anti-Jewish Boycott and Polish Right-Wing Politics in the Early Twentieth Century"), Zionist boycotts against Palestinians between World War I and World War II (Hizky Shoham, "Zionist 'Buy National' Campaigns in Interwar Palestine"), Nazi sponsored antisemitic boycotts in Germany (Christoph Kreutzmüller, "Picketing Jewish-Owned Businesses in Nazi Germany: A Boycott?"), and boycotts staged by the radical-left in postwar West Germany, including boycotts against the newly formed state of Israel (Alexander Sedlmaier, "Boycott Campaigns of the Radical Left in Cold-War West Germany"). When we think about boycotts we are most likely to think about those organized by the powerless to put pressure on the [End Page 431] powerful so they will be persuaded to change their actions and policies. As many civil rights scholars have shown, for example, civil rights boycotts were effective in isolating local business elites from purely racist elites, thus leading to positive changes in corporate and civic policies on discrimination. In this collection we see the story of a few such boycotts, including the Baton Rouge Bus Boycott of 1953, considered by many to be a failure because the settlement that ended the boycott did not result in the complete integration of the Baton Rouge buses. However, Derek Charles Catsam argues that the Baton Rouge boycott was an important precursor to the successful and ultimately iconic Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 in his essay, "The Onward March of a People Who Desire to Be Totally Free." In another example, Lori A. Flores argues...

The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Racial Basis for Interstate Highways and Urban Renewal

This article analyzes how Interstate Highways were used in Montgomery, Alabama, to maintain racial hierarchies during the civil rights movement, how the routing of Interstate Highways through Montgomery changed over time, and the connections between Interstate Highway routing and the racially volatile political environment after the Montgomery Bus Boycott. To address these issues, the article analyzes the planning of the Interstate Highways and the Urban Renewal areas in the city. The article concludes that highway engineering in Montgomery took a more racially motivated turn after the Bus Boycott with the rise of a racially charged political environment in 1959.

Desegregating Birmingham’s Buses: African Americans’ Protracted Struggle and White “Civil” Resistance

Desegregating Birmingham’s Buses: African Americans’ Protracted Struggle and White “Civil” Resistance Sarah Frohardt-Lane (bio) Recounting his experiences as a part of the civil rights struggles in Birmingham, Alabama, James Roberson described the intense emotion he felt when he rode a city bus in defiance of segregation rules. As a teenager in the 1950s, Roberson participated in collective actions to desegregate Birmingham’s buses, knowing that he was risking his safety in doing so. Forced by law to sit or stand behind the white seating section, black riders potentially faced humiliation, verbal abuse, physical assault, and arrest if they refused to comply. “The first time I defied the segregation of the bus, there was fear,” Roberson recalled. “The only way I could describe it [is] if I had a brown bag and had something in it that was alive and told you it was a rattlesnake and sat it on your lap. You didn’t know if it was going to strike or what was in it. That’s the kind of fear that gripped me when I first violated the rules and sat up front.”1 Roberson was among hundreds of African Americans who took direct action in an attempt to bring about bus desegregation in Birmingham. On two occasions—once in 1956 and again in 1958—their efforts were coordinated attempts to bring attention to the issue of segregated buses and to provoke an arrest that could be used as a test case to challenge the legality of Birmingham’s bus statutes. At other times throughout the late 1950s, individuals’ decisions not to comply with municipal segregation statutes and bus company policies were personal initiatives rather than components of a systematic desegregation strategy. This article tells the story of black Birminghamians’ years-long fight to desegregate the Birmingham Transit Company’s buses and of the forms of resistance that white residents and city leaders pursued to prevent it. [End Page 283] As African Americans challenged bus segregation in Birmingham through lawsuits, pressure on officials, boycotts, and acts of civil disobedience, white Birminghamians responded with equally varied tactics to prevent the integration of the city’s buses. At first, white riders demanded, and public officials embraced, an outright defense of bus segregation as legal and moral. Then, in the face of mounting evidence that courts would interpret municipal bus segregation as disregarding federal law, the city’s leaders abandoned the explicit legal endorsement of racially segregated public conveyances and crafted a new statute intended to maintain white supremacy without explicitly invoking race. Even when civil rights activists successfully challenged the new coded statute in court, white opponents continued to undermine bus desegregation. Bus drivers harassed black riders, and city officials publicized the bus company’s right to discipline riders who were found to engage in “disorderly conduct.”2 By the time black activists successfully defeated the last legal vestiges of bus segregation, many white residents who were opposed to the idea of integrated buses in Birmingham could simply avoid the bus altogether. Far from being a decisive moment of integration, desegregating Birmingham’s buses, as this article argues, was a protracted struggle with an ambiguous end point as white rejection of black equal access to buses morphed into a rejection of the bus itself. The history of bus desegregation in Birmingham has been eclipsed by the dramatic bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, less than a hundred miles to the south. Scholarly attention to the thirteen-month Montgomery bus boycott of 1955–1956 has produced a rich understanding of the organizing and local conditions that made that boycott possible; of its gender dynamics, including the carefully crafted narrative of Rosa Parks’s involvement; of the rise to prominence of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; of police repression and economic backlash; and, ultimately, of the successful legal challenge that prompted the protesters to end the boycott when they could ride desegregated buses. Historians’ focus on this milestone in civil rights history and “formative turning point of the twentieth century” has overshadowed examination of how bus desegregation unfolded in other locales.3 In [End Page 284] this understanding, the Montgomery bus boycott suggests a watershed moment from which bus desegregation...

“Down Where the South Begins”: Black Richmond Activism before the Modern Civil Rights Movement, 1899–1930

“Down Where the South Begins”: Black Richmond Activism before the Modern Civil Rights Movement, 1899–1930

Desegregation of City Parks and the Civil Rights Movement: The Case of Oak Park in Montgomery, Alabama

This article analyzes the history of desegregation of city parks in Montgomery, Alabama. The article chronicles the sixteen-year legal battle to desegregate parks in Montgomery and the efforts of city officials to keep parks segregated, including closing all of the parks for seven years, contracting with the Montgomery YMCA to operate segregated private recreation facilities, and allowing only segregated schools to use the parks. The article explores the connection between park segregation and the Montgomery Bus Boycott and school segregation, and questions why public officials fought to keep parks segregated after other public facilities began court-ordered desegregation, and why the story of park desegregation in Montgomery is largely unknown. The article concludes with a call to confront the history of park segregation in Montgomery.

The Praxis of Prophetic Voice: Martin Luther King, Jr. and Strategies for Resistance

ABSTRACTAs an exemplar of American prophetic voice, Martin Luther King Jr. illustrates a dynamic breadth of public advocacy amidst shifting power dynamics. In this essay, I outline three vital communication practices that support prophetic voice for social change: standpoint, strategic interaction through facework, and co-cultural resistance. I shape these practices in conversation with communication theorists Sandra Harding, Erving Goffman, Stella Ting-Toomey, and Mark Orbe. I additionally pair standpoint, strategic interaction, and co-cultural resistance with three examples from King’s struggle for justice: (1) Proximal Power and Standpoint: Montgomery Bus Boycott; (2) Intermediate Power and Strategic Interaction: Selma to Montgomery March; (3) Peripheral Power and Co-cultural Resistance: Sermon at Riverside Christian Church. King’s prophetic voice matured from the courage of standpoint, to the courage of strategic interaction, to the courage of cultural resistance. This maturation of prophetic voice and advocacy is now so desperately needed among all allies for racial justice.

Reconsidering Palmer v Thompson

Reconsidering Palmer <scp>v</scp> Thompson