This week marks the 70th anniversary of two milestones of the modern Civil Rights Movement. On December 1, 1955 Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery, AL city bus. Four days later on December 5, the famous Montgomery Bus Boycott began. While most Americans know the name of Rosa Parks, the story of her resistance to racial injustice and the subsequent bus boycott have been either mythologized or relegated to a few paragraphs in books on American history.
While it is impossible to capture the depth of these momentous events in this short reflection, I want to lift up three words as a foundation for your own exploration of this part of our nation’s history and how it relates to the ongoing struggle for racial justice today: Commitment, Courage, and Community.
The sanitized myth of Rosa Parks is that she was just too tired to give up her seat on the bus on that fateful day seventy years ago. The deeper reality is her longstanding commitment to racial justice decades before December 1, 1955. She and her husband Raymond were active in both the local and national chapters of the NAACP. At the time of her arrest, she was the secretary of the Montgomery chapter as well as the advisor for the youth council. Just months before, she attended the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee where she was trained in nonviolent direct action. Underlying all this was her deep commitment to faith in Jesus Christ and her membership in the African American Episcopal Church.
With his foundation, it took great courage to resist the harsh injustice of the Jim Crow system of racial oppression. Looking back on her decision to stay in her seat on the bus, Rosa Parks said that she thought of the lynching of Emmett Till just months before and the courage of his mother Mamie in exposing the horror of racial violence. It took courage to face the aftermath of her action on the city bus. Rosa and her husband Raymond both lost their jobs, regularly received threats, and eventually were forced to move out of Alabama to Detroit.
The story of Rosa Parks would have been a minor footnote if not for the response of the Black community. Through the leadership of Jo Ann Robinson and other members of the Women’s Political Council, a one day bus boycott took place on the day of Rosa’s trial – December 5. It was such a success that a mass meeting was held that night at Holt Street Baptist Church. The main speaker was the young pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Martin Luther King, Jr. The result of the meeting was the historic decision to continue the boycott instead of making it a one time symbolic event. Little did anyone know at the time that the boycott would go on for 381 days as thousands of Black people persevered in their refusal to ride the city buses. The result was a Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation in local transportation. This was just the beginning of the Civil Rights campaigns over the next decade targeting other aspects of racial injustice. The first video posted below provides a brief summary of the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
As we commemorate the events of 70 years ago in Montgomery, AL, the same qualities of commitment, courage, and community are essential in the ongoing struggle for racial justice today. The racial profiling, abduction, and detention of people of color in cities across the nation is a recent manifestaion of this struggle. Just this week, President Trump made offensive and racist remarks about Somali immigrants and citizens in Minneapolis referring to these people as “garbage.” The second video posted below featuring the situation in Minneapolis comes from a local news. channel.
The best way to honor the lives and sacrifices of those in Montgomery, AL 70 years ago is to demonstrate the same qualities of faith based commitment, courage, and community today and in the days ahead.