Daybreak of Freedom: The Montgomery Bus Boycott

Daybreak of Freedom: The Montgomery Bus Boycott. Edited by Stewart Burns. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. xvii, 359 pp. $45.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-8078-2360-0. $17.95 (paper). ISBN 0-8078-4661-9.

Daybreak of Freedom complements Birth of a New Age, December 1955December 1956 (Berkeley, Calif., 1997), the most recent volume of The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., edited by Clayborne Carson. Birth of a New Age provides an essentially "King-centric" record of the dramatic events in Montgomery that followed the arrest of Rosa Parks on December 1, 1955. Stewart Burns, who helped produce Birth of a New Age, now offers "a more complex and multidimensional" version of "the epic story of the Montgomery movement" (p. xiv)-although there is some unavoidable duplication of the materials contained in the Carson volume.

Dr. King's contributions to the bus boycott are properly acknowledged but placed in context: King entered an African American community with a long tradition of grassroots activism. Only after the boycott movement gained momentum did King bring "together [A. Philip] Randolph's Gandhian mass action with black social gospel to create a synthesis of visionary but pragmatic nonviolent politics. Like blues or jazz this was a fundamentally African American concoction that injected black intellectual and cultural elements into the larger American cultural and political mosaic and reshaped it" (p. 23).

In an "Overview" of events, issues, and personalities in Montgomery during the 1940s and 1950s, Burns observes that most of its African American citizens worked in service jobs or as laborers and that over half of black women worked as domestics. There was also a small black middle class, including school teachers and the faculty of Alabama State College, which drew material benefits from segregation but protested against its most degrading practices, notably the mistreatment of black passengers on the city's buses. Four days after the Supreme Court's Brown decision of May 17, 1954, the Women's Political Council (WPC), led by Jo Ann Robinson, wrote to Mayor "Tacky" Gayle, warning him that a number of black organizations were considering a bus boycott unless conditions were improved.

Burns properly identifies E. D. Nixon as Montgomery's most visible African American political activist and trade union leader; Nixon had long campaigned for black voter registration and would play a prominent role in the bus boycott. In February 1955 Nixon's Progressive Democratic Association presented candidates for the city's three commission seats and compiled a list of the "Negroes' Most Urgent Needs," which included the amelioration of conditions on buses, representation on the Parks and Recreation Board, improved sanitation, paving and lighting in black residential areas, and civil service jobs for qualified black applicants. Candidate Clyde Sellers, a former state representative and head of the Alabama Highway Patrol, flatly rejected these demands, stating that he would "not be intimidated for the sake of a block [sic] of negro votes" (ps 78).

White supporters of the bus boycott-reporter Joe Azbell, librarian Juliette Morgan, attorney Clifford Durr, and his redoubtable wife, Virginia-are represented here along with Lutheran minister Robert Graetz, who wrote to Time magazine on December 22, 1955: "If you want to look at the way a one-race press and a one-race police force band together to discredit fifty thousand people who are tired of being treated like animals on the city busses, and who are registering their feelings by refraining from riding those busses, then I urge you to send a reporter to Montgomery as soon as possible" (p. 105) . Another white Montgomerian, Will T. Sheehan, wrote to the Advertiser, protesting the brutal treatment of black passengers by white bus drivers, and asked rhetorically: "Would any responsible businessman permit his employees to insult his customers in such ways and expect to remain in business?" (p. 113).

There is also the testimony of Montgomery's African American domestics, not all of whom were wedded to the principle of nonviolence, who were interviewed by Willie M. Lee, a Fisk University researcher. One respondent vividly recounted her response to a bus driver's vulgar verbal abuse: "I got mad and I put my hand on my razor. I looked at him and told him ' . . . if you so bad, git up outta that seat.' I rode four blocks, then I went up to the front door and backed off the bus, and I was jest hoping he'd git up. I was going to cut his head slamp off, but he didn't say nothing" (pp. 125-26).

The sensational challenge to the boycott's black leadership by the Reverend Uriah J. Fields receives detailed documentation. Fields, pastor of Bell Street Baptist Church, resigned as secretary of the Montgomery Improvement Association because of alleged "misappropriation of funds." The reflections of Rufus A. Lewis, Bayard Rustin, and Lillian Smith on the significance of events in Montgomery are also included.

Combining a variety of primary source materials into a well-crafted narrative, Burns also offers some trenchant observations of his own. The boycott witnessed a mobilization of the city's two "racial communities [but] only the black community effectively organized. For this the women leaders and black churches were mainly responsible" (p. 282). Echoing other commentators, he notes that the dynamics of the boycott made a court challenge to the constitutionality of bus segregation inevitable. But it was Montgomery's intransigent and implacable white officials who "delegitimized their own segregation laws when they refused to implement them fairly, yet hid behind and manipulated them to preserve the unsustainable status quo" (p. 147). Such comments and carefully chosen documents make Daybreak of Freedom an engaging, valuable compendium.

JOHN WHITE

University of Hull

United Kind

Copyright University of Alabama Press Oct 1999
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved