"The Children Coming On Behind Us": Freedom Walkers: The Story of the Montgomery Bus Boycott by Russell Freedman

It has been 52 years today since the Montgomery bus boycott began on a chilly December dawn as, one by one, city buses rolled by usually crowded stops, now empty of their African American riders.

In many ways that time seems so long ago, an ancient time to the grandchildren of those who lived through it, actually or vicariously through the television news and newspaper reports that flooded the nation's consciousness. The Birmingham city bus that I rode back and forth to school that very day had those notorious movable WHITE/COLORED signs on the seat backs, and I clearly recall bus drivers getting out of their seats to move those signs to open up seats for us students as we climbed aboard to ride home. We energetic schoolkids thoughtlessly piled into those seats while African American adults, young or old, who had already finished their workday, moved to stand at the back of the bus. The injustice of that scene stings after all these years, and it is for this reason that Russell Freedman's award-winning Freedom Walkers: The Story of the Montgomery Bus Boycott (Holiday House, 2006) is recommended reading for all young Americans. "The children coming on behind us ought to know the truth about this," said E. D. Nixon, a local leader. "The truth will set you free."

Freedman tells the story of the Montgomery bus boycott with due attention to the raw heroism of those participants who risked their well-being, their jobs, and their very lives to end a degrading and unfair practice that came to be the very symbol of Jim Crow segregation. Heroes they were, from the earlier arrested African American women, Professor Jo Ann Robinson and teenagers Claudette Colvin and Mary Louise Smith, who preceded Rosa Parks in their protests, to the leaders, Martin Luther King, Ralph Abernathy, and white Lutheran minister Robert Graetz, whose homes were bombed, and the many ordinary citizens who were insulted, arrested, and beaten just for taking part in the boycott or riding the buses in its aftermath.

Freedman also tells another story, the story of the leadership which made the boycott a success. The same Jo Ann Robinson, who had earlier been ordered off an almost empty bus for sitting in the fifth row, risked her professorship at Alabama State College to run the college mimeograph machine all night to produce the flyers which spread the word of the boycott through Montgomery. She and the members of their Women's Political Council spent the weekend before December 5 delivering the leaflets and urging ministers and community leaders to support their efforts.

Through the leadership of the WPC and ministers King, Abernethy, Seay, Graetz, and so many others, the boycott was almost immediately universal. They and the hastily organized Montgomery Improvement Association first persuaded Black cab owners to ferry riders to work at ten cents a ride. When the city forced them to charge full fares, the leaders organized extensive carpools, with volunteered cars, a contingent of volunteer drivers, and a dispatching system which was a wonder in a time without CB radios or cell phones. When the city shut the carpools down as an "unauthorized transit system, they eventually raised funds to purchase a fleet of station wagons to carry passengers where they had to go, all the while holding rallies and supporting the thousands of daily walkers who lasted out the 381-day boycott. While this local effort sustained the movement, having found in Rosa Parks the person of impeccable decency and determination, the legal leaders mounted a challenge to the city and state laws which finally ended when the Supreme Court overturned Alabama's Jim Crow public transportation laws.

Looking back through Russell Freedman's skillful retracing of events, we can see how close we came to a racial holocaust in those early days. It was surely "the best of times and the worst of times," a crucible of will which literally turned on the moment when, having rushed to his bombed home where his wife and baby were unharmed only by chance, King turned to the armed and angry crowd of African American supporters milling about on his lawn and urged them to go home peacefully. "We must meet hate with love," he said. King made many more choices in his later life, some better than others, but this one decision probably allowed all the achievements that came later. There were none of the predicted "Negro goon squads," no Black mobs lynching thousands of outnumbered whites. Eventually, the whole country responded to the plea for fairness and justice that began in Montgomery.

Newbery medalist Russell Freedman instills new life into the well-known story and brings forth many lesser known players in the history of the early Civil Rights movement, letting their voices tell their own story. Although some of the well-reproduced black-and-white photos are familiar, others, such as Rosa Parks' and Martin Luther King's mug shots from their arrests in the February roundup of boycott leaders, are new. Full chapter notes, an extensive bibliographic essay, and a full index make this admirable account a valuable holding for any library and an enlightenment to those "children coming on behind" this turning point in our history.