Root Shock. Mindy Thompson Fullilove
Parks, what will they do to me?”
Telephones rang all over the city and children raced from house to house, spreading the word. By the next morning, Jo Ann Robinson and coworkers had run off enough leaflets to reach the fifty thousand people in the community, and the Women’s Political Council’s network was passing them out door-to-door and in stores, beauty parlors, beer halls, factories, and barbershops—as well as at Hilliard Chapel AME Church, where a group of Montgomery’s black ministers were meeting. They, like everyone else, embraced the idea of the one-day boycott, called for December 5, 1955.
Everyone who was in Montgomery on that day has testified that it was nerve-racking waiting for the first buses to pass by. Would the black community stand together? Would this effort fizzle out as others had before it? Could people make the sacrifice?
The answer—and we cannot cease to marvel at this—was that not only could and would people make the sacrifice, but they would do it for thirteen months, against great brutality, enjoying every minute of the assertion of their right to respect. The true, mass nature of the boycott was revealed in many ways, among them, the testimony of Gladys Moore, given during the March 1956 conspiracy trial of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Asked to explain why she had stopped riding the buses on December 5, Gladys Moore replied:
MOORE: I stopped because we had been treated so bad down through the years that we decided we wouldn’t ride the buses no more.
JUDGE: What do you mean “we”?
MOORE: All the fifty thousand Negroes in Montgomery.
JUDGE: When did you all decide?
MOORE: Well, after so many things happened. Wasn’t no man started it. We all started it overnight.19 (emphasis added)
Jo Ann Robinson wrote in her memoir, “Our first day did everybody good, for the angry ones had released pent-up emotions. The maladjusted, frustrated ones ‘walked off’ the feeling during the day’s routine and felt better. Those who suffered from inferiority complexes felt important. So there was definitely no stopping it now . . . The one day of protest against the white man’s traditional policy of white supremacy had created a new person in the Negro. The new spirit, the new feeling did something to the blacks individually and collectively, and each liked the feeling. There was no turning back! There was only one way out—the buses must be changed!”20
The stresses and strains of those thirteen months were managed collectively by the Montgomery Improvement Association, but it was Martin Luther King, Jr., who gave the boycott the character of redemptive love, and planted the first seeds of the idea of the Beloved Community.
That fifty thousand people shared a common torture, that they shared networks via which messages might spread at lightning speed, that they had a vast concern for preserving one another, that they had a common religious history and moral tradition: these are the ingredients of what we might call the “Beloved Neighborhood,” the urban ghetto that was built by migrants from the rural South, hoping to find a better life in the cities. The “better” that they found was not good enough, so they began to work, to organize, to struggle, to make the “better” better, the real New Jerusalem.
What did they want? Dr. King offered, in answer to that question, a vision of total relatedness. Religious scholars Kenneth L. Smith and Ira Zepp have pointed out, “Behind King’s conception of the Beloved Community lay his assertion that human existence is social in nature. ‘The solidarity of the human family’ is a phrase he frequently used to express this idea. ‘We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality,’ he said in one of his addresses. This was a way of affirming that reality is made up of structures that form an interrelated whole; in other words, that human beings are dependent upon each other. Whatever a person is or possesses he owed to others who have preceded him. As King wrote, ‘Whether we realize it or not, each of us lives eternally “in the red.”’ Recognition of one’s indebtedness to past generations should inhibit the sense of self-sufficiency and promote awareness that personal growth cannot take place apart from meaningful relationships with other persons, that the ‘I’ cannot attain fulfillment with the ‘Thou.’”21
During the Montgomery bus boycott, the people of that place used the linkages they had forged to create a better place. They gained, and passed on, a vision of an even better place: one in which the color of one’s skin did not matter, in which all people were invested in the well-being of other people, and, one might hope, all living beings on the planet.
Jo Ann Robinson explained, “At the beginning, black bus boycotters had learned to hate, and they had hated ‘with a vengeance.’ But they learned one thing: hate does more harm to the hater than to the hated. The body, the state of mind of the one hating responds to the hate, and, like an illness, the hate begins a deterioration of that body, that mind. Illness, even death, can result.
“All boycotters learned this lesson. Dr. King had taught them that love is redemptive. That is why, though they had continued to boycott, they had dismissed the bus drivers from their thinking. They learned to guide their thoughts to pleasant things. This was why they stopped ‘hating whitey,’ why they laughed so much as they walked, why they could boycott for thirteen months while still working at their jobs and keeping their children in school, their bills paid, and their bodies well. Hate destroys, but love revitalizes!”22
Jo Ann Robinson pointed out that, prior to the boycott, the stress of riding the buses had contributed to violence in Montgomery families. The boycott was so effective in changing people’s state of being that hospitals reported many fewer injuries related to family anger. King’s fundamental thesis was that racism hurt whites as much as it hurt blacks. Though blacks were the ones fighting to make Montgomery a better place, the victory was not for themselves alone, but for all of the city.
This is the nature of neighborhood: the way of life evolves over time, as each effort at problem resolution becomes part of the collective memory and the collective foundation for problem solving. In such a way, living for millennia in a place, the aboriginal people of Australia mastered the subtle signs of the bush country, and the Inuit invented names for many kinds of snow. “Generational knowledge,” Roanoke reporter Mary Bishop called it, and I think that is an excellent name for the information which belongs to a community that has lived together for a long time. This is the essence of the ghetto neighborhoods that evolved over several generations. It is, we learn from the story of the Montgomery bus boycott, the ghetto, rooted in place, that is the material basis for Martin Luther King’s Beloved Community—the slaves’ dream of New Jerusalem, the highest expression of people living together in justice and compassion.
To Dwell or Not: The Uncertain Future of the Ghetto
A dilemma was embedded in the effort to defeat segregation. It was segregation that had made the ghetto. The ghetto, in turn, had made the archipelago state and its local representative, the neighborhood. The alteration—if not the death—of the neighborhood-based community was planted in the death of segregation. Segregation—and the accompanying violence and maltreatment—was intolerable. But what was to become of the ghetto once segregation was defeated?
Among the leaders who faced this issue was my father, Ernest Thompson, who, in the mid-1950s, was a nationally recognized trade union leader. He had been part of the Great Migration, leaving the oppression of rural Maryland in 1922 to make a better life in New Jersey. He immediately took up the struggle for better working conditions. Against great odds he worked to form unions and threw himself wholeheartedly into the union drives that took off after the 1932 election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
The union movement, he often pointed out, was a coalition among the workers of different nationalities who worked together in the same plants. The union movement was neither of the ghetto nor in the ghetto. Under the onslaught of McCarthyism, many unions retreated from progressive positions on rights for black people. My father realized that the leadership for the struggle for Negro freedom would come from the ghetto itself. “The Negro must embrace the ghetto like a mother her child,” my father said, as he turned his efforts toward organizing the political power of the ghetto.23 His was not