What White People Can Do

              We think now about the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr., and wonder what he would do.  I think now, too, about what white people might do that would be truly helpful.  Here is a reflection I wrote some time ago about the Montgomery Bus Boycott. It was Martin Luther King’s first entry into leadership of the civil rights movement.           

           

 The year was 1954. Things in Alabama had started to change. The determined action over a very long time of a large number of people who were tired of Jim Crow laid the foundation for what started when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus. 

Some of those were white people.  There was Myles Horton, founder and director of the Highlander Folk School.  There was Robert Graetz, the Lutheran minister who, with his wife and two small children, served the small Trinity Lutheran parish, ran its school for Negro children, and lived in its parsonage in the Negro neighborhood.  There was Clifford Durr, a white lawyer and Rhodes Scholar from a prominent Alabama family.  Durr had been influential in the founding of the Highlander Folk School, and he had important connections in government circles in Washington, DC.

            The Highlander Folk School was widely regarded in conservative white circles as suspect, and indeed it was having a radical impact on those who participated, bringing people of different races together for conversation and training.  It became the subject of Congressional hearings during the McCarthy era, and Clifford Durr defended it vigorously, with the result that he lost all his white clients in Montgomery.  He and his family paid a high price for advocating change.  But they did it anyway.

            Myles Horton, at Highlander, lived in isolation deep in rural Tennessee, and even though a community formed around the school, it was risky to be such a small island of tolerance in a vast sea of Southern racism.  People simply disappeared sometimes in those days.  Fires sometimes mysteriously burned people's homes. It could have happened at any time to the Hortons, but they did it anyway.

            Robert Graetz, the idealistic young Lutheran pastor from the North, found that he and his family simply had to live as if they were black, partly because they were so completely unaccepted in white society, and partly because it was their choice to do it that way. When they went to the movies, the Graetzes chose to sit in the Negro balcony.  Since is was illegal for the cashiers to sell white tickets to black people or black tickets to white people, the theater staff just let them in for free.  The Graetzes, too, paid a price for their commitment to racial justice.  All of them did it anyway.

            It remains a mystery that the mass movement in Montgomery was not stamped out, that its leaders were not immediately killed or scared out of town, that the longstanding, usual repression was not quickly brought to bear, as had happened so many times in so many places throughout the South for so long. There was constant danger of death.  Stories are still coming to light of those who gave their lives to the work of opposing racial oppression in the South.  Rosa Parks herself was forced to leave town in order to live without fear for her life when it was all said and done.  Black churches continue to be burned from time to time, just because…. 

There was no reason to believe at the outset that this boycott in Montgomery was going to be any different than the protests that had been made elsewhere.  Perhaps the most remarkable thing is that the black community in Montgomery just went ahead, knowing what the odds were, prepared for the heavy-handed response they knew all too well from long experience. 

The white families whose names are recorded in relation to the Montgomery Bus Boycott did five things we would do well to remember.

            The Graetzes went to live and minister with the black community, fully committed to being with black people as equals.  In the struggle for economic justice, some middle-class people can go live and work among the hardworking poor as equals.

            The Durrs used their money and influence to bring a liberalizing institution into existence, and fought for its survival, fully committed to making resources available for black and white people to get to know each other and learn how to work together.  Some of us can do that.  We can support organizations that work with those who are struggling and cannot get ahead, and fight for the survival of those organizations. 

            Clifford Durr put his professional expertise as a lawyer and his important connections at the disposal of the cause.  Some of us can do that.

            And the Hortons put their lives on the line to lead a school that advocated peaceful change by empowering people to speak for themselves.  Some of us might do that.

            All three families retained connections to the white world and shared their stories in the white community.  We can do that -- create the bridges of understanding between the people hardest hit by this economy of injustice and the rest.

            So in honor of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., let us do these things.  Let us make a commitment to be with all people equals, to use our money and influence to assure the availability of liberalizing institutions, to use our professional expertise to help in the struggle, to participate in programs that advocate peaceful change, and to share our stories.  

Highlander Folk School