The great cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead once said “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
To understand the wisdom of her words, one needs look no further than the recent celebration held in Montgomery, Alabama this month in honor of the 60th anniversary of the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
Beginning December 5th 1955 and for 382 days after that, almost the entire African-American population of Montgomery, Alabama, refused to ride on segregated buses. It was a turning point in the American civil rights movement.
The boycott brought national and international attention to the civil rights struggles of an entire class of Americans by illuminating the violent persecution and discrimination African Americans had to endure every single day, nearly 100 years after the end of slavery.
Just as important, the organizers of the boycott shrewdly used the conflict to draw international attention – during the height of the Cold War – to the rank hypocrisy of America’s self-professed claims of being a “beacon of democracy” while oppressing and denying the most basic rights of citizenship to its own people.
Most of us are familiar with the names of the high profile leaders who emerged and became household names during that transformative moment in our nation’s history. This includes people such as Rosa Parks whose refusal to give up her seat on December 1st, to a white man and go to the back of the bus was the catalyst for the boycott. And of course, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. whose was a very young preacher chosen to as the president and spokesman for the Montgomery Improvement Association and the already legendary Thurgood Marshall, the lead attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
However, this fight for freedom also took the courageous action of many lesser known, but equally vital individuals. They played critically important roles in breaking down Montgomery and Alabama’s gruesome segregation laws, and thus, building up democracy in America.
Even as we fondly remember and embrace the legacies of the likes of Parks, King and Marshall, we must also pay homage to these lesser known heroes and sheroes of the movement. It was their strategic and tactical brilliance, courage and sacrifice which made these civil rights icons successes possible.
Few, if any, were as important as the civil rights attorney Fred Gray. Although outside of Alabama and civil rights circles he is not as well-known as Marshall, Gray arguably was the most critical lawyer in the civil rights movement. He not only represented Dr. King, Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Improvement Association, he also successfully argued the Montgomery Bus Boycott case in federal court. In fact, he would later go on to represent the civil rights marchers who attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama and families of the victims of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment.
What makes him all the more remarkable is that at the time he took Mrs. Parks case, he was only 24-years-old and fresh out of Case Western University Law School. But Gray was astute enough to reached out to the indomitable Marshall for assistance from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
It should be noted that while Rosa Parks’ arrest ignited the Montgomery bus boycott, she was not a plaintiff in the case that led to the Supreme Court’s decision overturning bus segregation.
Gray told me in a recent interview that he wanted a direct ruling from a federal court on the constitutionality of Alabama’s state statutes and Montgomery’s city ordinances requiring the segregation of the races on public transportation. He feared if he joined Parks’ case to a similar case he was already adjudicating in U.S. District Court — Browder v. Gayle — it would provide the state and city an excuse for raising technical legal issues that could harm that case.
Browder v. Gayle involved Claudette Colvin, a 15-year-old girl arrested nine months earlier than Parks for refusing to give up her seat on a city bus. However, numerous people involved in the boycott, including the Rev. E.D. Nixon, a bold union organizer and pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, who also served as the president of the Montgomery Chapter of the NAACP, were concerned Colvin was not a good subject for such a test case. Her age, the fact she was not very sophisticated at the time and pregnant was seen as huge liabilities. Other women were ultimately added – Aurelia Browder, Susie McDonald and Mary Louise Smith – as plaintiffs because of the discrimination they had been subjected to by the Montgomery bus system.
Parks however, remained the public face of the boycott. As an NAACP leader, she was highly regarded in the community and proved to be an enduring symbol of integrity, dignity and defiance.
Besides Gray and Marshall, other lawyers involved in that case and other major civil rights cases of that era included, Oliver Hill, Spotswood Robinson, Harold Flowers, Jack Greenburg and women lawyers such as Constance Baker Motley, Frankie Muse Freeman, Annie Kennedy and Sadie T. M. Alexander.
Ultimately, the seminal work of these amazing lawyers and ordinary citizens paved the way for expanded human and citizenship rights for not only for African-Americans, but all racial, ethnic and religious minorities as well as women, the LGBT community, those with various forms of ability, the elderly, and even children.
Indeed, the success of the U.S. civil rights movement has been the inspiration for human rights struggles from South America to South Africa.
Margaret Mead, one of the most enlightened and progressive American social scientist of the 20st century would be proud.
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