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Black leaders teach history they made |
February 16, 2001
Montogomery --- The Montgomery bus boycott --- and the spirit and stories of the civil rights movement that it set in motion 45 years ago --- must not be allowed to fade into history, warned a distinguished panel discussing the boycott at Alabama State University on Thursday.
Cornel West, a professor of black studies at Harvard University, said some in "the hip-hop generation" try to preserve and carry on the civil rights spirit. "But there are some who have no connection to their history and find (it) more and more distant and far-fetched in their lives."
Among those helping the student audience at ASU remember the past were Coretta Scott King and Juanita Abernathy of Atlanta --- widows of civil rights icons the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph David Abernathy, who helped lead the Montgomery boycotts. They appeared on the panel as part of the Montgomery premiere of HBO's new movie "Boycott." The film based on the events surrounding the arrest of Rosa Parks for refusing to surrender her bus seat to a white person will air nationally Feb. 24.
Other panelists were Tuskegee, Ala., lawyer Fred Gray, who defended Parks; Henry Louis Gates Jr., chairman of Harvard's Afro-American Studies; and Taylor Branch, historian and author of "Parting the Waters: America During the King Years 1954-63."
Abernathy and King, in a rare joint appearance, recalled volunteers who owned cars ferrying boycotters from 5 a.m. until nighttime, donations flooding in so churches could buy station wagons for car pools, elderly women walking miles a day "for my grandchildren," as they called it. And the constant threat of violence.
Gates said that he and West will launch a four-year oral history project to preserve the stories. It will originate in Harvard's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research, of which Gates is director. It should be ready online or in CD format by 2006, the boycott's 50th anniversary, he said.
Abernathy recalled typing boycott leaflets on a Royal manual and "paying little boys" to distribute carbon copies through the city. She remembered the tyranny of bus drivers, who often forced black passengers who had paid their fare in the front of the bus to walk around to the back door to board the bus.
She remembered, too, the abusive calls from whites at home after the boycott began --- when blacks "sacrificed a segregated, abusive ride for their dignity."
"They'd hired a woman who called me all day," she said, dismissively. "And then a man came on about 7 p.m. and he kept on until about 1 or 2."
King, whose late husband went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize, remembered the threatening calls, too, and the bombing of her Montgomery home.
But she also spoke of looking out at the street with her husband on that first day of the boycott, "and bus after bus was empty."
Abernathy, King and Gray credited the Women's Political Caucus with spurring the creation of the Montgomery Improvement Association and the boycott, and pushing the movement along.
"The boycott was carried on by women," said Abernathy. "We led in the background. (The men) just didn't know it."
The experience transcended all others, said King. "Even compared to the Nobel Peace Prize," she said. "There's something special about what happened here in Montgomery."