Book stop:

Freedom Walkers

by Marcia Brink

The oldest form of human transportation—putting one foot in front of the other. In 1955–1956, the black citizens of Montgomery, Alabama, put one foot in front of the other for several months to protest bus segregation. They walked all the way to one of the major civil-rights victories of the 20th century.

You probably think you know all you need to know about the Montgomery bus boycott. A blustery winter evening. A white passenger boards a full city bus. A black seamstress, Rosa Parks, refuses to give up her seat. She’s arrested. The black community, led by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., protests by boycotting the city bus system. Result: a major legal victory for integration, and the makings of the modern civil rights movement.

Except, of course, it wasn’t that simple.

Historian Russell Freedman describes what really happened before, during, and immediately after the Montgomery bus boycott. In his book Freedom Walkers, Freedman turns the spotlight on the thousands of citizens and behind-the-scenes organizers who pulled off a remarkable, year-long campaign.

He introduces us to heroes whose names most of us have never heard. People like seven- and nine-year-old sisters Bernice and Rosetta Robertson. Twice a week they walked more than eight miles round trip to their piano lessons, month after month during the bus boycott.

Freedman also brings bigger-than-life legends back down to earth. Did you know that King was only 26 years old when Rosa Parks was arrested? That he, with his young wife and newborn baby, had just moved to Montgomery to start a new ministry? That he was elected to lead the boycott at least partly because he was the new kid in town?

Freedman gives readers the legal and political context leading up to the boycott. Rosa Parks, for example, was just one of several women of color in the South arrested for the “crime” of sitting in the wrong seat on a bus.

The majority of Montgomery’s black population had relied on the public bus system. Not all of them could suddenly walk everywhere they needed to go. Relatively few owned cars. How did 40,000 boycotters get to work and church and school and the grocery store and the doctor’s office, day after day for 381 days?

The city used one tactic after another to break the boycott. Many law-abiding black citizens and some white supporters were arrested, indicted, jailed, and worse. How did the boycotters maintain their resolve, not knowing what or when the final outcome would be?

Freedman shows us the initially violent aftermath of the Supreme Court ruling. How, then, did nonviolence become a primary tool of the civil rights movement for more than a decade?

Freedom Walkers is an unsentimental trek through the Montgomery bus boycott. The real story is a heck of a lot more amazing than most of us know.