By Rabbi Ben Kamin
OCEANSIDE, California — Sixty years ago today, on December 1, 1955, a diminutive but mighty seamstress named Rosa Parks refused to stand up and move from her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, city bus. She was arrested for taking the position of a white rider. “I was just tired of standing,” she told the press. The incident was not entirely spontaneous yet was undoubtedly the launch of the American civil rights movement.
A new, twenty-six-year-old Baptist preacher in town named Martin Luther King, Jr. had recently assumed the pulpit of the Dexter Avenue Church. He took the post to get away from the shadow and sternness of his father, Martin Luther “Daddy” King, Sr. of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.
The other black ministers in Montgomery sensed in King a special gift for oratory. Besides, he was too new in town to have earned the traditional hostility of the white establishment. So they elected him the president of the “Montgomery Improvement Association,” and King stepped into history.
In Montgomery, the bus boycott sparked by Rosa Parks’s refusal to get up after another long day’s work dragged along for months. With tenacity and an aroused clergy-leadership, carpools were formed, people just walked, and Montgomery’s businesses began to feel the impact. Local and state authorities refused to buckle even as the nonviolent protest began to captivate the nation. Like Rosa Parks, other black folks had just become sick and tired.
The only problem, vexing and persistent, was the fact that the Montgomery Improvement Association was running desperately low on funds. White philanthropists were, at best, not interested; at worst, downright hostile. Black people were generally too poor to contribute but, in Montgomery, they gave with their feet, grit, and faith.
A gifted and intuitive black activist Bayard Rustin, the fiery and flamboyant New Yorker, was on the scene and recognized the historicity of this flash-point in history. The concurrent, gruesome murder of 14-year old Emmett Till in Mississippi at the hands of white thugs added a sense of urgency to the mix.
Like the community ministers in Montgomery, Rustin recognized in young Martin King a remarkable, almost messianic aura. His oratory was rhapsodic—as the featured rally speaker at Holt Street Baptist Church spurring the community to pick up where Rosa Parks had left off, King even surprised himself with the power of his speech to move the crowd: “There comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression. . . . If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong!”
The Montgomery bus boycott continued for 381 days. At its zenith, 90 per cent of the city’s blacks stayed off the buses. It was grueling hard work, walking long miles in rain and ice or steaming heat, taking in fewer wages, organizing car pools, suffering through the emotional and physical bullying of many whites.
In November, 1956, the Supreme Court upheld a prior district court ruling citing segregation on city buses as unconstitutional. On December 20, King formally declared the end of the boycott. The next morning, he and three other local leaders boarded an integrated bus. King told reporters: “We came to see that, in the long run, it is more honorable to walk in dignity than ride in humiliation. So we decided to substitute tired feet for tired souls, and walk the streets of Montgomery.”
The only reason King was able to speak up was because Rosa Parks refused to stand up.
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Rabbi Kamin is an author who specializes in the history of the Civil Rights Movement. He may be contacted via ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com. Any comments in the space below should include the writer’s full name and city and state of residence, or city and country for non-U.S. residents.