Why We March

Today is the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination in Memphis. He is associated with the struggle for civil rights for African Americans, but his true cause was the plight of the poor and disenfranchised around the world.

The establishment tolerated him, barely, when he spoke of civil rights for blacks. They killed him, though, three weeks before a planned march to Washington, D.C., on behalf of the poor. He intended to put pressure on Congress to pass laws regarding employment and housing. Those plans ended on the balcony of the Lorraine Hotel.

Dr. King’s legacy is not one man’s struggle, but the struggle of a movement. He led, but his power came from the masses behind him, who faced struggles and consequences of their own for supporting the movement. The movement’s power came from the people’s unity.

Dr. King’s public life was bookended by two watershed events which show the power of a people united.

Montgomery Bus Boycott

The horrid injustice of the Jim Crow laws was very evident to the people in Montgomery, even before they welcomed their new 25-year-old pastor. Busses were divided into thirds: front seats for whites, back seats for blacks, and middle seats filled in from the back with blacks, and from the front with whites. If the seats were full, the bus driver would direct a row of blacks to stand when a new white passenger boarded. Black folks had to pay their fare to the driver, get off the bus, and board from a door in the rear. Sometimes bus drivers, who were all white, would take the fare then drive away before the black person could board.

One such driver was James F. Blake, who regularly terrorized black passengers. One of his passengers was Rosa Parks, known as a seamstress, but was also a secretary for the NAACP, and a woman with keen political instincts. On December 1, 1955, Parks boarded Blake’s bus, sat in the front row of the middle section, and refused to give up her seat when Blake directed her. Later, she dismissed the common narrative that she was old and tired. She was only 42, “and the only tired I was, was tired of giving in… The more we gave in, the more we complied with that kind of treatment, the more oppressive it became.”

Driver Blake’s direction came with the force of law. Chapter 6, section 11 of the Montgomery City Code empowered Blake to direct Parks to give up her seat, and imposed criminal penalties on her for refusing.

The situation was already untenable, and the black community was ready to fight it. They were buoyed by the recent Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education, which promised to desegregate public schools. Nine months earlier, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin refused to give up her seat, and was arrested. Black leaders chose not to take up her case, because she was pregnant and unmarried.

Parks was different, she was beyond reproach. On refusing Blake, she was arrested. Rev. E.D. Nixon, a prominent Montgomery minister, took her case to the NAACP. They retained attorney Fred D. Gray to challenge the Montgomery bus ordinance.

In the meantime, local black women formed the Women’s Political Council (WPC), and called for a boycott of the bus system on the day of Parks’ trial. The bus system was owned and operated by Montgomery City Lines, a private company managed locally by J.H. Bagley. Blacks constituted 75% of the bus system’s ridership, their fares represented the bulk of the line’s business.

Parks’ trial was set for Monday. The night before, Jo Ann Robinson, a member of the WPC, stayed up all night, mimeographing 35,000 flyers announcing the boycott. On Sunday, the boycott, was announced on pulpits at black churches throughout the city. The local newspaper, the Montgomery Advertiser ran a story.

That Monday, December 5, 1955, Parks was convicted and given a $14 fine. Her lawyer filed an appeal. That evening, over 5,000 blacks met at the Mt. Zion AME Zion Church to discuss the boycott. Rev. Ralph Abernathy led the meeting. By acclamation, the gathering decided to continue the boycott. The group founded the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) composed of religious leaders and prominent members of the black community. They voted as its leader, the new pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, 25-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr.

He was chosen for his eloquence, and because he was young. He had not yet succumbed to intimidation by the white city establishment.

The boycott continued for 382 days. Black residents of Montgomery refused to ride the buses. They walked, they carpooled, they rode bicycles. Black taxi drivers gave residents ten cent rides, the cost of a bus ticket, and faced fines for doing so. Sympathetic white employers picked up their black employees. As word of the boycott spread, people from all over America sent shoes to replace those worn out by walking.

In the meantime, the black leaders of the MIA negotiated with city and Montgomery City Lines representatives, without result.

Litigation proved to be the key to resolving the problem. As Parks’ case was wending its way through the Alabama state courts, Fred Gray and Clifford Durr, a white attorney, filed a federal challenge to the Montgomery ordinance. On June 13, 1956, the federal court ruled in Browder v. Gayle, that the Montgomery ordinance was unconstitutional.

The boycott continued as the federal appeals process continued. On November 13, 1956, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the ruling. On December 20, 1956, when the lawyers received the Supreme Court’s mandate, the ordinance was officially nullified.

The next day, Montgomery’s bus system was desegregated, and the boycott ended.

March From Selma to Montgomery

The Montgomery bus boycott was an unqualified success because the black community endured having no public transportation for over a year. Their unified commitment brought results. The results were not the court holdings, but rather a national groundswell of energy directed at social injustice.

The results would compound. Eisenhower signed a law making it a crime to prevent people from voting. Lunch counter sit-ins put pressure on segregation in public facilities. In 1963, the March on Washington put pressure on Congress to pass what would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

But Alabama remained a welter of Jim Crow injustice. Dallas County, which was 50% black, had intimidated blacks from registering to vote, despite federal laws preventing them from doing so. In 1965, only 2% of Dallas County’s registered voters were black.

On February 18, 1965, James Orange, a 26-year-old activist, was arrested in Marion for enlisting people to help register voters. There were fears that Orange would be lynched, so a group of blacks went to the courthouse to protect him, standing at the entrance singing hymns. Jimmie Lee Jackson was there with his mother and 82-year-old grandfather. Marion police showed en masse. They shot out the streetlights and beat the people with truncheons. Jackson, who was trying to protect his mother and grandfather, was shot in the stomach by Officer James Fowler.

Jimmie Lee Jackson died of his wounds.

Officer Fowler was not indicted by a grand jury in 1965. Instead, he was transferred to the Alabama state police, and promoted. In 2007, he was charged and tried for murder. He did five months’ time.

The outrage following Jackson’s death led James Bevel, voting rights director of the Selma branch of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), to call for a march from Selma to Montgomery, to demand the right to vote.

On Sunday, March 7, 1965, over 500 people assembled on the west shore of the Alabama River, at the foot of a bridge in Selma, to begin the fifty-mile march along Route 80, to Montgomery. The bridge was named for Edmond Pettus, Confederate general, and grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan.

Joining Bevel were Amelia Boynton, John Lewis, and the Rev. Hosea Williams. As the protesters reached the crown of the bridge, they saw what Lewis described as “a sea of blue.” Dallas County Sheriff Jim Clark had ordered that all white males over the age of 21 report to the courthouse to be deputized. Commanded by Major Jim Cloud, the police and their deputies were joined by Alabama state troopers, standing in a line crossing Route 80. They were armed, carrying truncheons, bullwhips, and tear gas. Some were mounted on horses.

The marchers continued. Rev. Williams asked Lewis if he could swim. “I said no.”

As the lines converged, Major Cloud announced, “This is an unlawful march. It will not be allowed to continue.” They were given three minutes to return home and, after one minute, Cloud commanded, “Troopers advance!”

The police met the marchers and pushed them back. As the marchers resisted, the police became more violent. Lewis was hit with a truncheon, his skull was cracked. Boynton was beaten unconscious. Photographs of her were seen across the world.

The police pursued the protesters through the day, not relenting even when they were back in their homes. It would come to be known as “Bloody Sunday.”

The international response was overwhelming. President Johnson issued an immediate statement “deploring the brutality with which a number of Negro citizens of Alabama were treated…”

Seeing this, Dr. King became involved. The SCLC organized a second march, calling on clergy across the country to join them two days later. The SCLC attempted to obtain a restraining order against the police, but instead got an injunction against the march. As marchers gathered, the Johnson administration negotiated a compromise with King and the SCLC. The march began, and then stopped. The leaders said a short prayer, and then called it off. Marchers were confused and agitated. It would be called “Turn Around Tuesday.”

Still, KKK members attacked visiting white clergy. Unitarian minister James Reeb was killed. While his death stirred national outrage, local protesters were outraged that he got more publicity than Jimmie Jackson, and worse, that they were not involved or informed about the compromise King struck with the Johnson administration.

Then, the federal judge who had initially issued the restraining order against the march, Frank Minis Johnson (a University of Alabama classmate of Governor George Wallace), reversed himself, and determined that the marchers had a first amendment right to petition their government for redress of grievances. He withheld his order until he got a firm commitment from the Johnson administration that they would enforce his order, providing the marchers with protection.

On Sunday, March 21, 1965, a third march was convened in Selma. This time, they had the protection of federal troops. The marchers were mostly black, but were joined by clergy from across the world.

The march took four days. Under the terms of Judge Johnson’s order, there was a limit of 300 marchers for the second and third days, which took them through Lowndes Country, where Route 80 narrowed to two lanes.

On the fourth day, the marchers were joined by 25,000 people, who presented a petition to Governor Wallace, demanding their right to vote. Dr. King delivered his well-known “How Long, Not Long” speech.

The march was a success. On August 6, 1965, President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law, putting states that hampered voting rights under direct federal supervision.

The Lesson

The Montgomery bus boycott and the Selma to Montgomery march were not the product of one man’s actions. They were the product of unity. These events demonstrated that, when they come together, the people have vast power.

Dr. King was a great man, but it was the tens of thousands of committed people he led that were the real power of the movement. And, although the path was neither smooth nor straight, change did come.

Social justice is only part of Dr. King’s legacy. After 1965, he turned to economic justice. He was in Memphis to support sanitation workers’ attempt to unionize. He was also planning a poor people’s campaign, to pressure Congress into passing laws protecting workers’ jobs and housing. Further still, Dr. King called on the United States to end its war in Vietnam.

Demanding civil rights did not bother the country’s establishment. But demanding economic rights, and peace, was quite another thing. We know that James Earl Ray pulled the trigger in Memphis, but we’ll never know if someone else gave the order.

Dr. King spoke with power because he had moral authority. Although he was a Christian, he spoke about universal truths, universal values, such as social justice, economic justice, and peace. Unfortunately, today, the people who speak the loudest about god preach the gospel of greed, their doctrine is division.

Surely there are religious people who think otherwise. What if religious people of many faiths came together and discussed how those three core values: social justice, economic justice, and peace, are addressed in their traditions. Perhaps they could make a unified ecumenical statement. Perhaps we can take back the moral authority that the false prophets claim. Perhaps we can reclaim the moral high ground, and carry on Dr. King’s work.