#there were riots in every city when MLK jr. was in jail

[diaryofamadsunwukongfan]

Ok but seriously

The writers sound like Kyle Rittenhouse

[anniekoh]

public transit boycotts and civil rights activism

Kirt H. Wilson. Interpreting the Discursive Fields of the Montgomery Bus Boycott: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Holt Street Address,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 8 (2005): 299-326.

Wilson’s article focuses on MLK Jr.’s rhetorical framing but also provides a detailed recounting of the Montgomery bus boycott. Thinking through the histories of activism is useful for thinking through contemporary crises. What does it mean to act together, sacrifice together, walk together? Emphases added.

The morning of December 5 was not conducive to walking. A cold wind and the threat of rain accompanied the Montgomery dawn, and Coretta and Martin King were worried as they peered out of their front window, waiting to see if the call for a bus boycott could compete with the prospect of hiking across town on a chilly Monday morning. When the South Jackson line passed by, the young couple was ecstatic to see that it was empty. They sipped coffee and discussed the day’s schedule as a second and third empty bus followed. King, “astonished and overjoyed,” jumped into his car and drove around town to witness a monumental event in the city’s history. Despite fear, previous disunity, and the chilly weather, Montgomery’s black residents had obeyed the requests of the Women’s Political Council and the ad hoc boycott committee; they had stayed off the buses. As King drove, he saw blacks walking along the streets and sidewalks while others accepted transportation from friends or complete strangers. They took taxicabs driven by cabbies who asked only for the ten-cent fare that the passenger would have paid if she had ridden the bus. As the day progressed, young kids chased the buses, mocking the drivers and laughing at the strange sight of empty buses moving past crowded sidewalks. The entire community seemed transfixed in a shared experience of joy and revelation.

Weeks after the first mass meeting, an elderly woman known as Mother Pollard thanked King for everything he was doing for the community. She told him that she had been walking since the boycott began, and she would continue to walk until it was over. King asked her, “But aren’t your feet tired?” She replied, “Yes, my feets is tired, but my soul is rested.” Mother Pollard, like Rosa Parks, represented the “driving force” of the boycott. She was part of the “thousands of African-American women, middle class and working class, active in churches, clubs, and sororities” who endured discomfort, intimidation, and financial strain to secure better conditions on the Montgomery bus system. King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” repeats Mother Pollard’s statement, calling attention to its “ungrammatical profundity” to illustrate the power of nonviolent protest when embraced by an “old, oppressed, battered” black woman. King’s imitation of Pollard is not surprising, since the mind/body duality in her remarks—physical exhaustion versus spiritual renewal—was at the heart of King’s Holt Street speech and the protest he asked his audience to perform.

... the racism of Jim Crow affected the lives of every black resident, but it did not affect everyone equally. King was part of the city’s black professional class; consequently, he had only limited experience with the texture of discrimination that working- and lower-class African Americans endured daily. After his speech in remarks that followed the passage of the MIA’s resolutions, King admitted, “I’ve never been on a bus in Montgomery. But I would be less than Christian if I stood back and said, because I don’t ride the bus, I don’t have to ride a bus, that it doesn’t concern me.”

The unity that King wanted his audience to embrace required two specific actions. First, everyone had to sacrifice something. Some would sacrifice comfort, because they would walk even when the weather made it difficult. Those who owned a car were encouraged to donate it; King promised the use of his car and all of its gas to help people without transportation. Everyone should prepare to face intimidation and even death, King warned. Second, unity meant that members of the audience should stop thinking of themselves only as laborers and maids, ministers and business professionals, “Ph.D.s and no Ds.” King invited his audience to enact the personae of a U.S. citizen and a Christian “brother.”

Also in my reading pile is this book about earlier organizing efforts against segregation on public transit.

Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson Blair L. M. Kelley (2010)

Through a reexamination of the earliest struggles against Jim Crow, Blair Kelley exposes the fullness of African American efforts to resist the passage of segregation laws dividing trains and streetcars by race in the early Jim Crow era. Right to Ride chronicles the litigation and local organizing against segregated rails that led to the Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896 and the streetcar boycott movement waged in twenty-five southern cities from 1900 to 1907. Kelley tells the stories of the brave but little-known men and women who faced down the violence of lynching and urban race riots to contest segregation.

Focusing on three key cities--New Orleans, Richmond, and Savannah--Kelley explores the community organizations that bound protestors together and the divisions of class, gender, and ambition that sometimes drove them apart. The book forces a reassessment of the timelines of the black freedom struggle, revealing that a period once dismissed as the age of accommodation should in fact be characterized as part of a history of protest and resistance.