Independent. On one occasion a bundle of papers was returned from a small town called Covington, and someone had scribbled the words “Nigger Ben, we don’t allow this paper in this town stirring up trouble among our niggers. Keep it out of here and stay out of here yourself.”
The elder Davis refused to be intimidated by the Ku Klux Klan; a few weeks later he set off for Covington, where he had arranged to give a talk on the Constitution. That subject entitled the black people of the area to secure a room in the Covington courthouse. Young Davis accompanied his father. A group of two hundred black people and fifty whites awaited their arrival. On entering the courthouse, all the black men removed their hats, but the whites did not. Ben Davis remembered the tense atmosphere, and the pockets of men, black and white, bulging with firearms.
“My father rose to speak, and my heart was in my mouth. ‘Fellow citizens,’ he began, ‘white and black. I am glad to see that my people respect this courthouse by removing their hats.’
“That was the challenge and my father had boldly chosen the issue—it was an audacious one. We looked around at the audience. Naturally, our eyes fell on the white men standing around the wall with their hats on. What would they do?
“My father paused a full minute, awaiting the reaction to the blow he had struck. As he later explained, he wanted to see whether the whites hated the Negroes so much that they would not respect their own courthouse.
“The next move was up to the badly outnumbered whites slumped along the walls. After about two minutes, one removed his hat. Then another followed suit. One of them walked out. Slowly and sullenly, as if they realized they were beaten, all who remained removed their hats.
“The tension relaxed.”18
Not only did he win the moment, but the senior Davis won subscriptions as well. His son went on to become a councilman from Harlem, the first member of the Communist Party to hold such a position. He was jailed for his beliefs during the McCarthy period. His activism took a different political course from his father’s Republicanism, but like his forebears—and like his client Angelo Herndon—he remained crazy for freedom.
At about the time Ben Davis was getting out of federal prison, Rosa Parks started the modern civil rights movement by refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus. In Montgomery, black bus riders were exposed to a degree of humiliation and danger that is nearly unimaginable, considering—from the perspective of our times—that blacks were consumers paying for a public service. Astounding as it may seem, bus drivers, as enforcers of segregation, were given free reign in abusing the black passengers:
• Blacks couldn’t sit in the first rows of seats reserved for whites, even if there were no whites on the bus—even if there were no whites on the bus route!
• If the white section of the bus became full, black people were expected to give up their seats to the white people—and not simply the seat needed for the person, but to vacate the row of seats so that the white person might sit in a “white row.”
• Blacks were forced to pay at the front of the bus, then dismount and enter via the rear entrance. It was not uncommon for black people to be left behind, even though they had paid their fares.
• Angry bus drivers could—and frequently did—throw blacks off the bus, have them arrested, yell at them in a humiliating manner, and hit them. In some cases this led to the permanent injury and even death of the black bus rider.
The black community of Montgomery, dependent on the buses for transportation, was thoroughly and repeatedly traumatized by these racist practices. They had tried to meet with the city and the bus company to win courteous treatment. One brief interlude of peace was won, but matters quickly reverted to the high levels of abuse and traumatization.
Jo Ann Robinson and other members of the local Women’s Political Council, frustrated by the failure of their efforts to negotiate with the bus company, had agreed years before to boycott the buses when the time was right. They had even worked out some fundamental logistics, such as how to spread the word throughout the black community.
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, who was known to all as a “respectable seamstress,” was arrested for refusing to give up her seat in the “colored” section to a white man. Jo Ann Robinson and her colleagues agreed the time had come. Rosa Parks was a beloved woman and dedicated community leader. She was one of the “best people” in the community. This led people to ask themselves, “If they can do that to Rosa Parks, what will they do to me?”
Telephones rang all over the city and children raced from house to house, spreading the word. By the next morning, Jo Ann Robinson and coworkers had run off enough leaflets to reach the fifty thousand people in the community, and the Women’s Political Council’s network was passing them out door-to-door and in stores, beauty parlors, beer halls, factories, and barbershops—as well as at Hilliard Chapel AME Church, where a group of Montgomery’s black ministers were meeting. They, like everyone else, embraced the idea of the one-day boycott, called for December 5, 1955.
Everyone who was in Montgomery on that day has testified that it was nerve-racking waiting for the first buses to pass by. Would the black community stand together? Would this effort fizzle out as others had before it? Could people make the sacrifice?
The answer—and we cannot cease to marvel at this—was that not only could and would people make the sacrifice, but they would do it for thirteen months, against great brutality, enjoying every minute of the assertion of their right to respect. The true, mass nature of the boycott was revealed in many ways, among them, the testimony of Gladys Moore, given during the March 1956 conspiracy trial of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Asked to explain why she had stopped riding the buses on December 5, Gladys Moore replied:
MOORE: I stopped because we had been treated so bad down through the years that we decided we wouldn’t ride the buses no more.
JUDGE: What do you mean “we”?
MOORE: All the fifty thousand Negroes in Montgomery.
JUDGE: When did you all decide?
MOORE: Well, after so many things happened. Wasn’t no man started it. We all started it overnight.19 (emphasis added)
Jo Ann Robinson wrote in her memoir, “Our first day did everybody good, for the angry ones had released pent-up emotions. The maladjusted, frustrated ones ‘walked off’ the feeling during the day’s routine and felt better. Those who suffered from inferiority complexes felt important. So there was definitely no stopping it now . . . The one day of protest against the white man’s traditional policy of white supremacy had created a new person in the Negro. The new spirit, the new feeling did something to the blacks individually and collectively, and each liked the feeling. There was no turning back! There was only one way out—the buses must be changed!”20
The stresses and strains of those thirteen months were managed collectively by the Montgomery Improvement Association, but it was Martin Luther King, Jr., who gave the boycott the character of redemptive love, and planted the first seeds of the idea of the Beloved Community.
That fifty thousand people shared a common torture, that they shared networks via which messages might spread at lightning speed, that they had a vast concern for preserving one another, that they had a common religious history and moral tradition: these are the ingredients of what we might call the “Beloved Neighborhood,” the urban ghetto that was built by migrants from the rural South, hoping to find a better life in the cities. The “better” that they found was not good enough, so they began to work, to organize,
