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The Thunder of Angels: The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the People Who Broke the Back of Jim Crow
The heroism of those involved in the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott is presented here in poignant and thorough detail. The untold stories of those, both black and white, whose lives were forever changed by the boycott are shared, along with a chilling glimpse into the world of the white council members who tried to stop them. In the end, the boycott brought Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to prominence and improved the lives of all black Americans. Based on extensive interviews conducted over decades and culled from thousands of exclusive documents, this behind-the-scenes examination details the history of violence and abuse on the city buses. A look at Martin Luther King, Jr.'s trial, an examination of how black and white lawyers worked together to overturn segregation in the courtroom, and even firsthand accounts from the segregationists who bombed the homes of some of Montgomery's most progressive ministers are included. This fast-moving story reads like a legal thriller but is based solely on documented facts and firsthand accounts, presenting the compelling and never-before-told stories of the beginning of the end of segregation.
- GenresHistoryNonfiction
320 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2005
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March 2, 2021
It had been a busy and tiring day for Mrs. Raymond A. Parks, an NAACP activist and a tailor's assistant at the Montgomery Fair department store; her neck and shoulders were very sore after all the work. On that December 1, 1955, the buses were especially crowded, and when she boarded one, a single row of seats – the row immediately behind the first ten seats that always were reserved for whites only – had any vacancies. She took a seat with a black man on her right next to the window, and two black women in the parallel seat across the way. As more whites boarded the bus, one white man was left standing, so the driver, J. F. Blake, demanded that Mrs. Parks and her three colleagues vacated their seats. While the two women and the man rose and moved to the rear, Mrs. Parks only shifted to the window side of the seat. Blake, who could see that she hadn't stood up, said, "Look, woman, I told you I wanted the seat. Are you going to stand up?" At that, Rosa Parks uttered her first word to him: "No". Blake threatened to have her arrested, but she calmly replied he could go ahead, and remained seated. The driver promptly got off the bus and proceeded to call the police. Mrs. Parks, however, was neither angry nor frightened, even when two police officers arrived and arrested her. As she later recalled, she was tired and felt she was being mistreated, and the only way to communicate her feelings to others was "to do just what I did – resist the order."
The very night of Rosa Parks's arrest, Montgomery's leading civil rights activist, E. D. Nixon, telephoned King, who'd already become a local celebrity for his preaching, and asked him to join in supporting a boycott of the city's bus lines to begin the following week. In his brief pastoral career, King had come to the realization that "the right word, emotionally charged, could reach the whole person and change the relationships of men,", yet at first he hesitated to accept Nixon's invitation. When he finally agreed, he had set a condition: he should not be required to do any organizing. However, within days, as the boycott got under way with resonating success, King found himself the sole person nominated "to lead the crusade," as head of the newly created MIA (Montgomery Improvement Association). At a mass meeting King intoned, ". . . You know, my friends, there comes a time, when people get tired of being thrown across the abyss of humiliation, where they experience the bleakness of nagging despair. . . ."
And so it went on, month after month, as King preached and prodded, and the boycott dragged on, supported by an elaborate carpool system in which two hundred volunteer drivers supplied some twenty thousand rides a day. "The fight here," said King, "is between light and darkness." Soon enough, though, the darkness threatened to overwhelm him: there was a bomb threat, then an actual bomb at his house, then a shotgun blast that blew open his front door. Yet, as he prayed aloud at the kitchen table one night, he found inner peace, realizing that he must stand for justice and righteousness no matter what happened.
While Martin Luther King, Jr. had achieved inner peace, the Montgomery establishment remained stubbornly impervious in negotiations to end the boycott, until finally, with the help of the NAACP, the boycott's leaders filed suit in federal court. The powers of Montgomery retaliated with a mass local indictment of the MIA leadership and a request that a state court grant an injunction against the carpool system as an unlicensed transportation network. Just when things looked the most inauspicious, however, after nearly a year, the U.S Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling that segregation of the buses was illegal. Weeks later, the city government finally enacted an ordinance allowing blacks to sit virtually wherever they wanted.
If a weary black seamstress had not been ordered to surrender her seat to a white passenger and then been arrested for her refusal to do so, there probably would have never been any sit-ins or Freedom Rides. And if a reluctant but gifted Martin Luther King, Jr. had not been willing to assume the leadership of a mass movement to integrate Montgomery's buses in the wake of Mrs. Parks's protest, there maybe would not have been any fateful marches, and fire hoses, and bombs in Birmingham, "the country's most segregated city". The boycott's impact reached far beyond Montgomery. Through the press and interested racial activists from all over the United States, it made civil rights a national moral cause, and Martin Luther King, Jr. an international figure, who would meet with President Eisenhower, visit India and Ghana, and make it to the cover of Time magazine.
The very night of Rosa Parks's arrest, Montgomery's leading civil rights activist, E. D. Nixon, telephoned King, who'd already become a local celebrity for his preaching, and asked him to join in supporting a boycott of the city's bus lines to begin the following week. In his brief pastoral career, King had come to the realization that "the right word, emotionally charged, could reach the whole person and change the relationships of men,", yet at first he hesitated to accept Nixon's invitation. When he finally agreed, he had set a condition: he should not be required to do any organizing. However, within days, as the boycott got under way with resonating success, King found himself the sole person nominated "to lead the crusade," as head of the newly created MIA (Montgomery Improvement Association). At a mass meeting King intoned, ". . . You know, my friends, there comes a time, when people get tired of being thrown across the abyss of humiliation, where they experience the bleakness of nagging despair. . . ."
And so it went on, month after month, as King preached and prodded, and the boycott dragged on, supported by an elaborate carpool system in which two hundred volunteer drivers supplied some twenty thousand rides a day. "The fight here," said King, "is between light and darkness." Soon enough, though, the darkness threatened to overwhelm him: there was a bomb threat, then an actual bomb at his house, then a shotgun blast that blew open his front door. Yet, as he prayed aloud at the kitchen table one night, he found inner peace, realizing that he must stand for justice and righteousness no matter what happened.
While Martin Luther King, Jr. had achieved inner peace, the Montgomery establishment remained stubbornly impervious in negotiations to end the boycott, until finally, with the help of the NAACP, the boycott's leaders filed suit in federal court. The powers of Montgomery retaliated with a mass local indictment of the MIA leadership and a request that a state court grant an injunction against the carpool system as an unlicensed transportation network. Just when things looked the most inauspicious, however, after nearly a year, the U.S Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling that segregation of the buses was illegal. Weeks later, the city government finally enacted an ordinance allowing blacks to sit virtually wherever they wanted.
If a weary black seamstress had not been ordered to surrender her seat to a white passenger and then been arrested for her refusal to do so, there probably would have never been any sit-ins or Freedom Rides. And if a reluctant but gifted Martin Luther King, Jr. had not been willing to assume the leadership of a mass movement to integrate Montgomery's buses in the wake of Mrs. Parks's protest, there maybe would not have been any fateful marches, and fire hoses, and bombs in Birmingham, "the country's most segregated city". The boycott's impact reached far beyond Montgomery. Through the press and interested racial activists from all over the United States, it made civil rights a national moral cause, and Martin Luther King, Jr. an international figure, who would meet with President Eisenhower, visit India and Ghana, and make it to the cover of Time magazine.
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