Alabama, Up We Come
ON December I, 1955, a bus-driver in Mont- gomery. Alabama. tried to make Rosa Parks give up her place to a white man. She sat tight. And round this handsome, cheerful. unbudgeably seated woman gathered a row which became a scandal and then a storm and 'Marty an extra- ordinary mass boycott which opened the counter- offensive of the Southern Negro and led on towards Little Rock and the main battle for educa- tional and political integration which is now in its early stages. When MN. Parks decided to stay in her seat, the judgment of the Supreme Court against school segregation lay portentous and still unrealised, but the vigour with which the Negroes of Montgomery set out to desegregate their buses seems to show that for the first time since Recon- struction they felt that a fight was worth while. The Reverend Martin Luther King, their leader, says humbly that Mrs. Parks 'had been tracked down by the Zeitgeist.' But it was his own leader- ship and strategy which kept the ghost walking once it had arrived. Against all prediction, the bus boycott materialised and was observed by 50.000 men and women for a year until the Supreme Court finally declared segregation on the Mont- gomery buses to be illegal. This is the wonthrful story of how it was maintained, and of King's own struggles to maintain his creed of non-violence against bombings, Klan ridings and murder threats. His best ally here was his own godly, bouncy dynamism. The two poles of horror to him are on the one hand the violence of the race riot, and on the other the traditional passivity of the Negro under degradation, of the old guitarist he knew in Atlanta who used to sing : 'Ben down so long that down don't bother me!' The minister and his people are on the way up now, sure that they have found the right technique : 'if the negro is to achieve the goal of integration, he must organise himself into a militant and non-violent mass movement.' Faced with such good sense, the opposition is so scared, in Mr. Orson Welles's words, that it has to pull a white sheet over its
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