Prathia Hall Lecture centers the everyday heroines behind the Montgomery Bus Boycott

LOUISVILLE — During her Prathia Hall Lecture at Princeton Theological Seminary last week, Dr. Danielle McGuire shared the behind-the-scenes work required to organize and carry out the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott. McGuire wrote “At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape and Resistance — a new History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power.” View her lecture and a question-and-answer session that followed here.

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McGuire’s research on the Montgomery Bus Boycott touched on some of the same themes that have been explored by David LaMotte and others. The boycott “is often told … as a simplistic tale of an aged woman with tired feet who tiptoed into history,” McGuire said. “Statues in her honor show her sitting on a bus alone, as if any one person can change the world by sitting still.”

McGuire highlighted events that led to the boycott, including the gang rape of Recy Taylor of Abbeville, Alabama, in September 1944. The Montgomery chapter of the NAACP sent its best investigator, Rosa Parks — “already a seasoned activist,” McGuire noted — to conduct interviews “and document acts of brutality.”

“People would say, ‘Rosa will talk to you. Go talk to Rosa,’” McGuire said.

Five years later, two white Montgomery police officers picked up Gertrude Perkins, age 25, as she walked home from a party. They drove her to the edge of town and sexually assaulted her.

Perkins found her way to her minister’s house, recounting what had happened to her. He wrote it all down, got the document notarized, and sent it to the syndicated columnist Drew Pearson, who told his radio listeners what had happened. That story had to be taken outside the state, McGuire said, “to get any traction on it.”

In 1951, Flossie Hardman, a 15-year-old Black girl, accused her white employer, Sam Green, of sexual assault. Green owned a grocery store used mainly by Black customers. An all-white jury took five minutes to return a not guilty verdict.

Hardman’s family reached out to community activists, who organized a boycott of Green’s store. Two weeks later, he was out of business.

“They sent a message about the power they had as a community,” McGuire said. “This was a huge victory. It established the boycott as a weapon for justice.”

At the time of the boycott, Montgomery bus drivers “had police powers. They carried blackjacks and guns, assaulting and sometimes killing Black passengers who defied their orders,” McGuire said. In 1953, passengers filed 30 complaints of abuse and mistreatment. “It was a big deal to file a complaint,” McGuire said, since the complaint also included the person’s name, address and employer. “Almost all of them came from Black women who had no choice but to ride the buses” to get to work. Black women domestics comprised 80% of the Montgomery ridership.

In the spring of 1955, police arrested, beat and jailed a 15-year-old Black girl, Claudette Colvin, for refusing to give up her seat to a white man. “People forget she was on the NAACP Youth Council, and Rosa Parks was her mentor,” McGuire said.

On Dec. 1, police arrested Parks, the secretary of the NCCCP chapter, who later said, “There had to be a stopping place, and it seemed to be the place for me to stop being pushed around. I decided I had to know once and for all what rights I had as a human being and as a citizen.”

As for her tired feet, Parks said later, “The only tired I was was tired of giving in.”

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McGuire told the story of Jo Ann Robinson organizing the overnight copying and distribution of 52,000 flyers announcing a one-day bus boycott for Dec. 5. “It was much easier, not to mention safer, for Black women and girls to stop riding the buses than it was to bring their assailants like bus drivers, police officers and employers to justice,” McGuire said.

The one-day boycott was “a huge success,” she said. “Now community activists had to figure out what to do with all that energy and excitement.” A full-scale campaign carried “very real risks,” and none of the established Black leaders in town, nor Montgomery’s ministers, “were truly eager to take on the white power structure. They figured, because they were rational and had been around for a long time in America, that it would be a short-lived and very dangerous exercise.”

So they turned to “the new guy in town,” the 26-year-old minister of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “His decision to accept that challenge despite his family saying, ‘uh-uh, not a good idea,’ would fundamentally change his life — and, of course, American history,” McGuire said.

“While Dr. King became the public face of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, it was always Black women like Rosa Parks, Jo Ann Robinson and thousands of others who truly made the movement,” McGuire said. “Their shared experiences of exploitation propelled Black women and girls into every conceivable aspect of the bus boycott. They were the chief strategists and negotiators of the boycott, they ran its day-to-day operation and they helped staff the elaborate carpool system … Today we call it Uber.”

“By walking hundreds of miles for more than a year to protest humiliation, they reclaimed their bodies and demanded the right to be treated with dignity and respect,” McGuire said. Finally, after 381 days of walking, it was four female plaintiffs — Colvin, Aurelia Browder, Susie McDonald and Mary Louise Smith — who filed and won the Supreme Court case, Browder v. Gayle, that actually made segregation illegal on public transportation, overturning the 1896 Supreme Court decision made in Plessy v. Ferguson.

Including the experiences and testimonies of Black women and girls makes the Montgomery Bus Boycott “more than a campaign for civil rights,” McGuire said. “It becomes a kind of spiritual declaration that Black women and their bodies were not expendable, that their pain mattered, that God was present not only in the churches but on the buses and in the streets and in the thousands of quiet acts of refusal that ultimately helped to reshape a nation.”

When we teach the past “as a simplistic fable, it’s truly impossible to see ourselves as change agents and movement makers,” McGuire said. A more robust and honest history “provides plenty of important lessons that we can use to change our present and our shared future.”

The boycott teaches us at least four important lessons, she said:

• It takes only one person to stand up and be brave. Others will be inspired, and soon enough, “you have a little committee or a network. Then you might have an organization, and then a community,” she said. “Together you have a fighting chance.”
• The bus boycott “was built by ordinary people just like us” who “did not like what was happening in their community,” McGuire said. They worked at changing things bit by bit. “Over time, they made a massive change, and they did it with the strategy and tactic of nonviolent direct action.”
• Leadership comes in many forms. There’s of course King’s charismatic leadership, but there’s also the organizing that Robinson provided, brave legal plaintiffs and lawyers, longtime community activists like Parks and “ordinary folks who just stayed off the buses and decided to walk,” McGuire said. “There’s church singers, whose songs were a balm to activist hearts and souls.” There were women who sold lunches to white people and used the proceeds to fund the movement. “Every one of these people played a leadership role in the movement for change,” McGuire said, “and so can you.”
• The bus boycott and the civil rights movement as a whole “teaches us that that hope and faith are powerful things, necessary things,” McGuire said. “Who among the bus boycotters saw an actual end to systemic white supremacy, endemic throughout the power structure?” King joined the movement “despite what his rational brain and his family and friends told him,” she said. Dr. Prathia Hall called that quality his “freedom faith.”

Hall and others “understood the past is not a collection of distant memories. It’s an active force shaping our lives today, shaping who we are and who we can become,” McGuire said. “She used the past and the people who powered it to give her hope and direction that shaped her freedom faith, which empowers and inspires all of us to fight for freedom and justice today.”

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Dr. Keri L. Day, Princeton Seminary’s Elmer G. Homrighausen Professor of Constructive Theology and African American Religion, joined McGuire for a question-and-answer session following the lecture.

Day mentioned three important themes she heard in McGuire’s presentation:

• Centering Black women “helps us understand more deeply our own historical inheritances.”
• Faith communities were central to the movement. “What you show is these women were a part of local organizations and congregations, which were connected and foundational to what was going on,” Day said.
• Rosa Parks and others understood bodily autonomy and integrity as both a civil right and a human right. Bodily autonomy in regard to health care, for example, “is a fight that persists, that we’re waging” today, Day said.

“What I found was that Black women used testimony when there was a possibility for justice and they used silence when it made sense to protect themselves from the pain of potential consequences,” McGuire said. “It was about the politics that was possible.”