Interpreting the Discursive Field of the Montgomery Bus Boycott: Martin Luther King Jr.'s Holt Street Address

2005 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 299-326 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kirt H. Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Martin Luther ◽  
Montgomery Bus Boycott ◽  
Bus Boycott ◽  
Street Address ◽  
Discursive Field ◽  
Martin Luther King

The Role of Law in the Civil Rights Movement: The Montgomery Bus Boycott, 1955–1957

1991 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Jerome Glennon
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
African American Community ◽  
Montgomery Bus Boycott ◽  
Nonviolent Resistance ◽  
Bus Boycott ◽  
Martin Luther King

Accompanying the national move to create a holiday honoring Martin Luther King, Jr., and the commemoration of anniversaries of important episodes in the modern civil rights movement, has come a welcome literature by historians, political scientists, sociologists, journalists, and movement participants analyzing and interpreting the movement. Considerable attention has naturally focused on the Montgomery bus boycott that signaled the start of the modern civil rights movement in December, 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to go to the back of the bus. These recent works have reaffirmed the traditional interpretation of the boycott: Led by Martin Luther King, Jr., and sustained by the sacrifices of the thousands who refrained from using public buses, the boycott proved that, by acting collectively, an African-American community could demand and obtain an end to segregation. The technique of nonviolent resistance to oppression, it is said, successfully integrated Montgomery buses.

scholarly journals Martin Luther King, Jr.

2004 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 329-347 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOHN A. KIRK
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
50Th Anniversary ◽  
The United States ◽  
Montgomery Bus Boycott ◽  
Bus Boycott ◽  
Southern Christian Leadership Conference ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Martin Luther King

Early histories of the civil rights movement that appeared prior to the 1980s were primarily biographies of Martin Luther King, Jr. Collectively, these works helped to create the familiar “Montgomery to Memphis” narrative framework for understanding the history of the civil rights movement in the United States. This narrative begins with King's rise to leadership during the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott in Alabama, and ends with his 1968 assassination in Memphis, Tennessee. Since the 1980s, a number of studies examining the civil rights movement at local and state levels have questioned the usefulness and accuracy of the King-centric Montgomery to Memphis narrative as the sole way of understanding the civil rights movement. These studies have made it clear that civil rights struggles already existed in many of the communities where King and the organization of which he was president, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), ran civil rights campaigns in the 1960s. Moreover, those struggles continued long after King and the SCLC had left those communities. Civil rights activism also thrived in many places that King and the SCLC never visited. As a result of these local and state studies, historians have increasingly framed the civil rights movement within the context of a much longer, ongoing struggle for black freedom and equality, unfolding throughout the twentieth century at local, state and national levels. More recently, a number of books have sought to place the civil rights movement within the larger context of international relations. As we approach the 50th anniversary of the Montgomery bus boycott next year, the event that launched King's movement leadership, it seems an appropriate point to return to the existing literature on King and to assess what has already been done, as well as to point to the gaps that still need to be filled, in what remains important field of study.

Moral Leadership of the World

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Azaransky
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Moral Leadership ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Nuclear Testing ◽  
Montgomery Bus Boycott ◽  
The People ◽  
Bus Boycott ◽  
Freedom Movement ◽  
New Generation ◽  
Martin Luther King

In the 1950s, Cold War politics made anticolonial alliances between Africans, Asians, and black Americans suspect, as the demands of governing—as opposed to coordinating a freedom movement—redirected energies and attention. Yet India and Ghana, in particular, remained concrete examples for the network at the center of this book. Benjamin Mays returned to India in 1953 to witness the world’s largest democracy composed of people of color. Bayard Rustin went to Ghana in 1959 to coordinate an international antinuclear and antiimperial protest of French nuclear testing in the Sahara desert. Mays and Rustin were both instrumental to the success of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which inaugurated Martin Luther King Jr. as a civil rights leader. The decade closed with a new generation of activists and intellectuals taking lessons from the people at the center of this book to spur a mass, nonviolent American freedom movement.

scholarly journals Closing Ranks: Montgomery Jews and Civil Rights, 1954–1960

1998 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 463-481 ◽  
Author(s):  
CLIVE WEBB
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Public Transportation ◽  
Supreme Court Decision ◽  
Promised Land ◽  
Montgomery Bus Boycott ◽  
Bus Boycott ◽  
Martin Luther King

The arrest of Rosa Parks on 1 December 1955 provided the spark which ignited the long smouldering resentments of black Montgomerians. For 381 days they waged a boycott of the city bus lines, frustrating the opposition of white authorities and financially crippling the local transit company. More profoundly it resulted in a Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation on public transportation. Equally momentous was the emergence of the man who would serve as the spiritual figurehead of the civil rights movement: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.In the wake of the Montgomery bus boycott, one national black newspaper acclaimed King as “Alabama's Modern Moses.” Since the darkest days of slavery African-Americans had sought spiritual salvation by comparing their own condition to that of God's Chosen People, the Israelites of the Old Testament. Throughout their years of enslavement they prayed for the Moses who would deliver them from their suffering unto the Promised Land. During the boycott, the black citizens of Montgomery had similarly sustained their morale by singing the old slave spirituals, raising their voices at the nightly mass meetings in rousing renditions of “Go Down Moses, Way Down in Egypt Land.” “As sure as Moses got the children of Israel across the Red Sea,” King exhorted the black community, “we can stick together and win.” Others too drew the analogy between the historical experience of Jews and the contemporary predicament of African-Americans. Looking back on the boycott, white liberal activist Virginia Durr evoked the spectre of Nazi Germany in describing the strength of racist opposition.

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