Abstract
Following the Supreme Court’s decision in Browder v. Gayle, the case that emerged out of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Thurgood Marshall famously remarked, “All that walking for nothing. They might as well have waited for the Court decision.”1 What Marshall’s analysis missed was the crucial role that protest and organizing played in advancing the case outside the courtroom. In particular, the mass participation of Montgomery’s citizens was necessary to maintain local momentum and generate national support, both of which were crucial in keeping the case alive as it wound its way through the judicial system.2 Moreover, Marshall’s comments revealed a misunderstanding of the Montgomery movement’s goals. To be sure, black citizens wanted to end segregation on the buses. But what was equally, if not more vital, was creating the conditions through which black citizens were empowered to address a wider range of concerns. Merely changing the law was not a recipe for meaningful change.
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Notes
Quote taken from James Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974 (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1996). Patterson cites Nicholas Lemann, “The Lawyer as Hero,” New Republic, September 13, 1993, 36–21.
On the Montgomery Bus Boycott, see J. Mills Thornton, Dividing Lines; Stewart Burns, Daybreak of Freedom. On the relationship between the legal process and protest, see David J. Garrow, “Hopelessly Hollow History: Revisionist Devaluing of Brown v. Board of Education,” Virginia Law Review, Vol. 80, No. 1 (February 1994): 151–160.
For discussion of the steel industry cases in particular, see Stein, Running Steel, Running America, especially Chapters 6 and 7; Ruth Needleman, Black Freedom Fighters in Steel: The Struggle for Democratic Unionism (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003);
Nancy MacLean, Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).
Norrell, “Caste in Steel: Jim Crow Careers in Birmingham, Alabama,” Journal of American History, Vol. 73, No. 3 (December 1986): 680–681.
On the NDPA see Hardy T. Frye, Black Parties and Political Power: A Case Study (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980).
On this point see Peter Irons, A People’s History of the Supreme Court (New York: Viking Press, 2000);
Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality (New York: Vintage Books, 1975); Garrow, “Hopelessly Hollow History.”
I first encountered the phrase “when the marching stopped” in the Hanes Walton book of the same name. It was also the title of a conference sponsored by the Urban League in 1972, a fact that supports the notion that by the early 1970s there was a growing, if flawed, consensus that the protest days of the civil rights movement had come to an end. Hanes Walton, When the Marching Stopped: The Politics of Civil Rights Regulatory Agencies (New York: State University of New York Press, 1988); “When the Marching Stopped: An Analysis of Black Issues in the ‘70s,” Collected Works published by National Urban League, 1973.
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© 2013 Robert W. Widell, Jr.
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Widell, R.W. (2013). Staying Active and Branching Out. In: Birmingham and the Long Black Freedom Struggle. Contemporary Black History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137340962_4
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