During Black History Month, we lift up the advances in the struggle for racial justice and accomplishments of Black people in our nation’s history. Yet we risk minimizing these advances and accomplishments if we do not also lift up the forms of unjust and often violent backlash that accompanied each step forward toward greater levels of justice. For example Rosa Parks’ arrest for refusing to give up her seat to a white person on a Montgomery city bus on December 1, 1955 is one of the most familiar stories of the modern Civil Rights Movement. It was the catalyst for the famous Montgomery bus boycott that resulted in the desegregation of city buses. However Rosa Parks’ legal struggles did not end with her well known arrest on the bus. Less than two month later in February 1956, she was arrested again along with around seventy other boycott organizers including twenty ministers. They were accused on trumped up charges of violating a 1921 Alabama law that made it illegal to participate in a boycott without a “just cause.” The white legal authorities refused to recognize the just cause of the bus boycott, because it violated their “way of life.” The famous pictures posted above of Rosa Parks being fingerprinted and the mug shots of several major boycott leaders come from these February 1956 arrests. In addition to the backlash by the legal authorities, boycott participants faced regular verbal and physical abuse by people opposed to their struggle for desegregated public transportation. The backlash faced by Rosa Parks and her husband Raymond was so severe that they were forced to leave Montgomery and move to Detroit.
When we celebrate the successes of the famous campaigns of the modern Civil Rights Movement, it is essential to remember the inevitable backlash that accompanied each campaign success. In the face of unrelenting opposition, it took intentional faith and perseverance to continue the struggle. The following words of Martin Luther King, Jr. summarize that faith and perseverance which are essential to celebrating Black history and to continuing that legacy in our time:
To meet hate with retaliatory hate would do nothing but intensify the existence of evil in the universe. Hate begets hate; violence begets violence; toughness begets toughness. We must meet the forces of hate with the power of love; we must meet physical force with soul force. Our aim must never be to defeat or humiliate the white man, but to win his friendship and understanding. (From “An Experiment in Love”)
