To Walk in Dignity

King's sense of the historical importance of the Montgomery bus boycott was remarkable, given that it had just begun the morning of his speech. Although boycott leaders were not sure at first that they should seek desegregation on the city's buses rather than simply better treatment, King correctly understood that the Montgomery protest concerned more far-reaching goals and ideals. “We are determined here in Montgomery to work and fight until justice runs down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream,” he announced at the first mass meeting of the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) held on Monday, December 5, 1955, four days after Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man (2). Because he was selected to head the MIA, King became the best known of the boycott's participants and his Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (1958) has remained the most widely read narrative of the protest. Yet, a King-centered perspective of the Montgomery movement is misleading in ways that also distort understanding of the subsequent decade of southern African American struggles. As we approach the boycott's fiftieth anniversary, it is vital that we see what happened in Montgomery as a social justice struggle that was sustained by many grassroots leaders apart from King. Although King played a crucial role in transforming a local boycott into a social justice movement of international significance, he was himself transformed by a movement he did not initiate. Like other sustained mass movements, the Montgomery bus boycott should be understood as the outgrowth of a long history of activism by people from different educational backgrounds and economic classes. Unlike King, who had arrived in Montgomery little more than a year before Parks's arrest, nearly all the other key participants in the boycott were longtime residents. They were self-reliant NAACP stalwarts who acted on their own before King could lead

Ancient history · Art · Battle · Boycott · Grassroots · Literature · Media studies · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Sociology · White (mutation · American History and Culture · American Political and Social Dynamics · Race, History, and American Society · History · Law

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