In honor of MLK’s birthday, this year I’m choosing to remember him in his fist victory rather than in death. The Montgomery Bus Boycott began in December, 1955. The boycott went on for eleven long months. Martin Luther King Jr. was a young man and a leader of the movement. On November 13, 1956 the United States Supreme Court declared segregation on buses unconstitutional. A unanimous ruling.
Here a very young Martin Luther King Jr. announces to the crowd that they will begin riding buses again:
In 1964, I went to visit a friend I had made at summer camp. She lived in a little town about an hour south of Atlanta. That was my first (and only) time to see "Whites only" signs. I didn't understand what they meant and had to ask my friend.
ReplyDeleteI really can't describe how shocked I was. Indianapolis was hardly a bastion of civil rights and integration but I went to school with black kids and our family store (where I worked on weekends and holidays) was in an integrated neighborhood. Nothing in my kid-seen world prepared me for anything so starkly stated, so unfair, and so casually accepted. It changed my view of the world forever.
The way the world was at the beginning of my life compared to the way the world is now ... no doubt life is better. But we still have a long way to go.
DeleteYeah we've made a lot of progress but Obama's election was a pretty good object lesson in how far we have to go. It's been sad to see how much just-below-the-surface racism there was just waiting for a catalyst to float it to the top.
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