Montgomery bus boycott - 20 January 1995

In reply to a constant query, how about Washington DC? Well, when the victorious American rebels had beaten the British and invented a nation, the first Congress looked around for a place to call the capital and eventually agreed to set up a neutral zone, a hundred square miles, a peninsula between two rivers, which would be ceded to the new federal government by the states the rivers ran through, Maryland and Virginia.

It was to be called the District of Columbia, subsequently George Washington's name was added as an honorific. It was to be independent of the states, to have a mayor and a local government but its budget would be controlled by the Congress. It still is, to the chagrin of some residents who would like to have the district declared the 51st state. But most citizens of Washington DC don't mind overmuch, since most of them, literally over 50 per cent, are government employees anyway and since their bread and butter come from the Congress, they rightly feel that the money to pay for it should come from the same source.

One of the district's privileges, some say grievances, is that it's the only American territory for which the president and Congress can legally designate a public holiday. There are in this country, legally, no national holidays. Such proclamations are left up to the legislatures and/or governors of the 50 states. In practice, there are 10 holidays, starting with New Year's Day and ending with Thanksgiving and Christmas. Of the other seven, only two bear the names of American heroes or say, historic American figures. Washington, right, all agreed. Jefferson, no, Lincoln, no. For many decades after the Civil War the Southerners were not disposed to honour their detested conqueror and, in general, Lincoln's birthday is not celebrated in the South.

The other hero's birthday has been declared a public holiday by 49 states. New Hampshire, for some unexplained reason, has never passed an Enabling Act and last Monday there was a troop of angry protesters outside the State House. The name is one that 40 years ago was unknown to the entire white population of the United States. In that year, 1954, a 27-year-old Baptist parson, a black, finished up his theological studies up north, at Boston University and took up his first ministry in Montgomery, Alabama, up to then known in history as the cradle of the Confederacy. It was where the South set itself up as a separate nation. So, that young black man could not have gone to a town more sacred to the white population of Alabama or one less receptive to anybody about to stir up trouble, especially racial trouble, The young man, as anyone who tried to of business in this country last Monday will already have guessed, was the Reverend Martin Luther King.

The mad, the wild suggestion back then in the early '50s, that this 27-year-old black would become the only one of his race, the only other American throughout American history, whose birthday would become a national holiday, is inconceivable and even now it's bizarre and wonderful to me, who as it happened got in on the start of the rebellion in Montgomery, that became first a local protest, then a Southern black movement, then a national movement of blacks and whites, as powerful as abolitionism had been, in the slavery years. A movement that always swirled around this one young parson, whose words would in the next 30, 40 years, sound a battle cry to black populations throughout the Americas, the West Indies and in Africa itself.

How did this come about? How did Martin Luther King, national leader, hero, martyr come about? I suspect that a quick unannounced quiz of the great majority of Americans would produce the rather nervous response that the Reverend King, as they say in the South, was a Civil Rights protester after the Second World War, led protest marches in the South, was murdered and on the eve of his assassination made a speech, played over all the time on television with the ballad refrain, "I have a dream".

It all began, as I say, in a scruffy part of town in the capital city of Montgomery, Alabama, about 40 years ago. I'd heard and read about a bus boycott that had been going on for five months, so in the spring of 1956, I took a train down there to see what it was all about and soon had an outline of the story from several sources on the spot, white and black. On a day then in early December, four negroes, as we said then and as I shall say throughout this, which is a period story, four negroes went aboard a city bus and sat in its forward section, a flexible area marked off by cards that snapped on to central poles according to the ratio of blacks and whites aboard. The bus driver asked them to move back into the so-called coloured section. Three of them complied, a woman, a seamstress in her early 40s, refused. The driver acted in accordance with a city law which could be flouted only at the loss of the bus company's working franchise. He asked her again, then he called in two policemen, who arrested this anonymous and later to be immortal, Rosa Parks.

That afternoon, thousands of printed handbills dropped on the doorsteps of coloured homes, urging a boycott of all the buses to start two days later. Am I saying the scene on the bus was a set-up and the boycott organised months before? Of course. The organiser, a parson name of King, flew in and out a couple of times a week, having bought station wagons from neutral outlanders.

I'd not read anything about the bus company's side of the story, so I thought it a good idea to go and talk to the city line's manager. I found him in his office at the depot, south of the railroad tracks, alongside a patch of negro shacks. Long lines of empty buses were gleaming in the sun. He said he'd been in the business 38 years and I've known all the coloured families hereabouts that long. His name was Bagley. His account tallied with what I'd heard but carried it a little further. Once the boycott started, the mayor composed a committee of negroes and bus company officials. The negroes wanted four things âmore courtesy, abolition of the white and coloured markers, a policy of first come, first served and some coloured bus drivers. The company said yes to first come, first served and urged an immediate change in the law.

The city council refused, then the district attorney moved in, a grand jury was called, it indicted the leaders of the conspiracy, that is the organisers of the boycott and they were subsequently convicted. They, three coloured parsons were now out on bond pending an appeal. Twice a week they held rallies for morale at the Mount Zion African Episcopal Methodist Church, in a very shambling coloured section of town. I went into this church that evening and found five or six hundred negroes crooning their old gospel harmonies and heaving in rhythm. From time to time a brother or sister would rise and begin to testify, improvising a prayer from a string of King James Bible sentences and sometimes chanting through strangulated quarter tones. An old man who was an elbow away from me suddenly got up and shouted: "Oh Lord, stay close at hand, when my time has come".

For over an hour this crooning and swaying and humming and testifying went on until a powerful baritone gave the cue for a battle cry and at once the whole huge chorus sang Old Time Religion. There was a rustle of gowns at a side door and out came the leaders, the convicted three âthe Reverend Simms, the Reverend Hayes, the Reverend Powell. One of the Reverends lifted an arm and proclaimed the coming of the leader. God looked down, he boomed in a bass voice, worthy of an Old Testament prophet. God looked down and chosen a man, young, dynamic, wise and Christian. There was another fuss or rustle at the side door and there appeared the chosen one, a young, slim, bland man with solemn good looks. The entire church rose at him and the enormous shout might have signified the second coming. He was the Reverend Martin Luther King.

Immediately the boycott started, after the first of the rallies, there was some violence, a couple of coloured homes were burnt, but then the whites accepted the rallies like revival meetings, which in form and feeling, they truly were. So out of this small, inconclusive scramble and the bi-weekly church rallies, grew the rise of other protests in other states and defiances, murderous retaliations, marches, police dogs, jail for most leaders, including the man who got cut and scraped at the head of many marches, the Reverend King. And over 20, 30 years, vast changes in the life, education, status, political power, the whole self-image of the blacks. Never vast enough for honest egalitarians and so long as the ratio of white to black is nine to one, not likely to be enough. Great changes nevertheless over a continent, it sprang from Rosa Parks and the boycott of Mr Bagley's buses.

Out of all this there's one picture I cannot erase from my memory. Just before the first of the negro rallies, Mr Bagley was warned not to let his son, a war veteran, go ahead and open up a petrol station on the edge of the coloured section of town. Mr Bagley, as he said, paid the man no heed. On the contrary, he got a coloured friend to suggest to the Reverend King that he might, at one of the rallies, announce the new ownership. So he did and the negroes rolled up in droves to christen the new pump. When I left Montgomery, the pumps business was 80 per cent with coloured folk, filling up their tanks to give glory to God to help young Mr Bagley and to maintain the boycott of his father's buses.

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