By Patrick N. Allitt, Emory University
Martin Luther King, Jr., became famous for his leadership in the Montgomery bus boycott, which began in December 1955, and went on for almost an year. The buses in Montgomery, Alabama, were segregated, and Rosa Parks, a black woman and local NAACP member, agreed that she’d challenge the local segregation laws. She would do so by sitting in an area that was reserved for white passengers.
Rosa Parks
Rosa Parks, protesting against local segregation laws, sat in the bus on seats reserved for white passengers. Sure enough, she was arrested for violation of the town’s laws. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), arranged a protest meeting that called for the boycott.
They appointed Martin Luther King, Jr., a Baptist minister who’d been in town for just about a year, to lead it.
Regular church meetings of the boycott people maintained community solidarity during the yearlong boycott. Two or three times a week, they’d have big prayer services, get together, sing evangelical songs, and Martin Luther King, Jr., would preach passionate sermons, most of whose content was religious, but just with a political message at the end. It was that which kept the movement going, and kept the boycott successful.
This is a transcript from the video series A History of the United States, 2nd Edition. Watch it now, on Wondrium.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
King himself endured death threats, people fired guns at his house, a bomb threat, and so on. He also helped to organize car pools to enable black workers who worked far from their homes to be shipped from one place to another as an alternative to the buses. In his speeches, he said:
Our method will be that of persuasion, not coercion. Our actions must be guided by the deepest principles of our Christian faith. Love must be our regulating ideal. Once again, we must hear the words of Jesus, echoing across the centuries. “Love your enemies. Bless those that curse you, and pray for them that despitefully use you.”
After the successful conclusion of the Montgomery bus boycott, the city agreed to desegregate the buses. Clearly, all through it, King’s own religious faith had sustained him and he saw it as a Christian movement.
The Power of Publicity
In the following years, civil rights groups mounted campaigns wherever they thought it was likely that they were going to be able to get a confrontation with the defenders of segregation, so that there would be conflict and press coverage and publicity.
In other words, they didn’t want to waste their energy in campaigns that were going to be routine and wouldn’t get any news. They understood that the power of the media to spread the word of what was going on was central to their cause. Sit-ins at lunch counters began in Greensboro, North Carolina, trying to desegregate areas of stores, which at the moment were racially segregated; the ‘freedom rides’ on interstate buses that provoked white aggression by supporters of segregation.
Every time of one these events was going to take place, a sit-in or one of the “freedom rides”, the organizers would call journalists ahead of time, both the print and the visual media, so that when confrontation came, the journalists could witness the white segregationists’ violence against the demonstrators.
Practicing Nonviolence
King’s own organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and others—the Congress of Racial Equality, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—all practiced nonviolence. They’d have training sessions where their members learned how to encounter racist violence without fighting back, however severe the provocation became.
They were borrowing the insights of Mohandas Gandhi, and the Indian independence movement, which had won independence from the British Empire ten years previously.
Bible to the Rescue
Additionally, King’s Christian rhetoric and his use of the Bible was very skillful as it was a Bible that both black and white people honored, for the most part.
Consequently, when King would quote a Bible passage, and then interpret it, very often the members of his white audience were forced to agree with him as well, and to look at the issue in a new way, through this shared language of the Bible that they had.
Crucially, because nonviolence was maintained, for the most part, in these demonstrations, the demonstrators were able to maintain the moral high ground.
If we look at who the leaders were, we will find they were nearly all evangelical clergymen: Ralph Abernathy, King himself, Fred Shuttlesworth, a little bit later Andrew Young, Jesse Jackson, and so on.
Atlanta: ‘The City Too Busy to Hate’
In the city of Atlanta, the politicians realized what the Civil Rights movement was doing. They were provoking confrontations in order to get publicity. As a result, Mayor William Hartsfield of Atlanta, gathered together black and white community leaders and worked out a peaceful desegregation plan. In fact, Atlanta was able to take advantage of desegregating itself peacefully, as a way of promoting its own image nationwide.
Atlanta called itself ‘The City Too Busy to Hate’. On the day that Atlanta’s public schools were desegregated, busloads of journalists from all over the country were invited to Atlanta and at the city’s expense were taken around some of the new schools and institutions that were being peacefully desegregated as a way of showing they know how it can be done and that too, peacefully.
Needless to say, it was all done with very careful preparation, of course, in the schools, in the police force, and everywhere else.
Common Questions about Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Montgomery Bus Boycott
Rosa Parks, protesting against local segregation laws, sat in the bus on seats reserved for white passengers. Sure enough, she was arrested for violation of the town’s laws.
After the successful conclusion of the Montgomery bus boycott, the city agreed to desegregate the buses.
Martin Luther King, Jr.‘s own organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and others—the Congress of Racial Equality, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—all practiced nonviolence.
