Desegregation of City Parks and the Civil Rights Movement: The Case of Oak Park in Montgomery, Alabama

2019 ◽  
pp. 009614421987763
Author(s):  
Rebecca Retzlaff
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Public Officials ◽  
City Parks ◽  
Segregated Schools ◽  
Public Facilities ◽  
Montgomery Bus Boycott ◽  
Bus Boycott ◽  
History Of ◽  
Legal Battle

This article analyzes the history of desegregation of city parks in Montgomery, Alabama. The article chronicles the sixteen-year legal battle to desegregate parks in Montgomery and the efforts of city officials to keep parks segregated, including closing all of the parks for seven years, contracting with the Montgomery YMCA to operate segregated private recreation facilities, and allowing only segregated schools to use the parks. The article explores the connection between park segregation and the Montgomery Bus Boycott and school segregation, and questions why public officials fought to keep parks segregated after other public facilities began court-ordered desegregation, and why the story of park desegregation in Montgomery is largely unknown. The article concludes with a call to confront the history of park segregation in Montgomery.

Deferred Dreams, Defiant Struggles

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Church ◽  
African Ancestry ◽  
Washington Dc ◽  
Montgomery Bus Boycott ◽  
Bus Boycott ◽  
The Many ◽  
Southern City

Deferred Dreams, Defiant Struggles interrogates Blackness and illustrates how it has been used as a basis to oppress, dismiss and exclude Blacks from societies and institutions in Europe, North America and South America. Employing uncharted analytical categories that tackle intriguing themes about borderless non-racial African ancestry, “traveling” identities and post-blackness, the essays provide new lenses for viewing the “Black” struggle worldwide. This approach directs the contributors’ focus to understudied locations and protagonists. In the volume, Charleston, South Carolina is more prominent than Little Rock Arkansas in the struggle to desegregate schools; Chicago occupies the space usually reserved for Atlanta or other southern city “bulwarks” of the Civil Rights Movement; diverse Africans in France and Afro-descended Chileans illustrate the many facets of negotiating belonging, long articulated by examples from the Greensboro Woolworth counter sit-in or the Montgomery Bus Boycott; unknown men in the British empire, who inverted dying confessions meant to vilify their blackness, demonstrate new dimensions in the story about race and religion, often told by examples of fiery clergy of the Black Church; and the theatres and studios of dramatists and visual artists replace the Mall in Washington DC as the stage for the performance of identities and activism.

White Evangelical Protestant Responses to the Civil Rights Movement

2009 ◽  
Vol 102 (2) ◽  
pp. 245-273 ◽  
Author(s):  
Curtis J. Evans
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Skin Color ◽  
Black Activism ◽  
Government Action ◽  
Social Patterns ◽  
Montgomery Bus Boycott ◽  
Bus Boycott ◽  
Black Employees ◽  
Heart And Mind

In his first book, Stride Toward Freedom (1958), Martin Luther King, Jr. reflected on the future struggle of African Americans after their successful Montgomery bus boycott. Among the “forces of good,” King saw the indispensable assistance of the federal government, cautioning critics and sympathizers that though government action was “not the whole answer,” it was an “important partial answer.”1 King was addressing one of the most common criticisms of black activism for civil rights. White conservative Protestants, in the South and North, insisted that race relations would worsen because agitation would only stoke the fears and hatreds of whites and that government action on behalf of blacks was only a form of coercion. King rejected this reasoning by noting that “morals cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated.” He argued that it was true, for example, that laws could never make employers love their black employees, but they could prevent them from refusing to hire blacks because of their skin color. King conceded that society ultimately must depend on “religion and education to alter the errors of the heart and mind,” but he emphatically argued that “it is an immoral act to compel a man to accept injustice until another man's heart is straight.”2 He added that the law was a form of education in that it instructed citizens about what society regarded as right and appropriate. King asserted that in any case the “habits if not the hearts of people have been and are being altered every day by federal action” and that it would be wrong to undervalue the efficacy and force of law in altering human behavior and social patterns.

scholarly journals Travelers, Strangers, and Jim Crow: Law, Public Accommodations, and Civil Rights in America

2005 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. K. Sandoval-Strausz
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Equal Opportunity ◽  
Black People ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Civil Rights Act ◽  
Montgomery Bus Boycott ◽  
Bus Boycott ◽  
Just Society ◽  
Supreme Court Rulings

Public accommodations—hotels, trains, restaurants, steamboats, theaters, buses, motels, and the like—were for more than a century located at the epicenter of legal and political struggles for racial equality. From the age of Reconstruction to the civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century, civil rights in public places stood alongside voting rights, school integration, and equal opportunity in employment and housing as conditions that black people and their allies claimed as necessary attributes of a just society. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 and the Supreme Court rulings in theCivil Rights Casesand especially inPlessy v. Fergusonwere critical episodes in the career of Jim Crow in the nineteenth century, followed in the twentieth by the Montgomery bus boycott, the sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The Upheaval: Interposition and Moderation

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Kyle Day
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Supreme Court Decision ◽  
Board Of Education ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
Montgomery Bus Boycott ◽  
Socioeconomic Changes ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Bus Boycott

This chapter narrates the dramatic socioeconomic changes occurring in the former states of the Confederacy after World War II. The changes culminated with the Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which declared public school segregation unconstitutional, as well as the early events in the American Civil Rights Movement, including the Emmitt Till Lynching and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The chapter then analyses the response of white southerners to these transformative events. The white South’s response channelled into two recognized programs. Southern leaders either outright refused to implement Brown, which became known as Interposition or, called for a gradual or piecemeal implementation, which became known as moderation.

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.

The Social-Psychological Origins of the Montgomery Bus Boycott: Social Interaction and Humiliation in the Emergence of Social Movements

2013 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Doron Shultziner
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Social Interactions ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Bus Drivers ◽  
Montgomery Bus Boycott ◽  
New Findings ◽  
Bus Boycott ◽  
Brown Decision ◽  
The Impact

This study advances a new explanation of the Montgomery bus boycott, the constitutive event of the U.S. civil rights movement. It introduces new findings to demonstrate that Montgomery, Alabama, was unique in its segregation system, and that unrest among blacks emerged in the narrow time period between late 1953 and 1955. I trace the motivational origins of the boycott in worsening social interactions that caused a sense of abuse and humiliation in black passengers due to three main factors: changing ratios of black and white passengers on the public buses; labor-related issues that frustrated the bus drivers; and the impact of the 1954 Brown decision on the bus drivers. This study calls for a framework that conceptualizes and connects lived experiences and real contentious social interactions with the emergence of protest motivations and social movements. Accordingly, I stress the importance of distinguishing between causes that explain the emergence of movements and factors that explain the momentum and success of movements.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Racial Basis for Interstate Highways and Urban Renewal

2020 ◽  
pp. 009614422091747
Author(s):  
Rebecca Retzlaff
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Urban Renewal ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Political Environment ◽  
Highway Engineering ◽  
Interstate Highways ◽  
Montgomery Bus Boycott ◽  
Bus Boycott ◽  
Racial Hierarchies ◽  
The City

This article analyzes how Interstate Highways were used in Montgomery, Alabama, to maintain racial hierarchies during the civil rights movement, how the routing of Interstate Highways through Montgomery changed over time, and the connections between Interstate Highway routing and the racially volatile political environment after the Montgomery Bus Boycott. To address these issues, the article analyzes the planning of the Interstate Highways and the Urban Renewal areas in the city. The article concludes that highway engineering in Montgomery took a more racially motivated turn after the Bus Boycott with the rise of a racially charged political environment in 1959.

Our Aims Are High and Our Determinations Deep

2019 ◽  
pp. 101-132
Author(s):  
Jelani M. Favors
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Student Activism ◽  
College President ◽  
Deep South ◽  
State University ◽  
New Negro ◽  
Montgomery Bus Boycott ◽  
Bus Boycott

This chapter discusses the history of Alabama State University during the crucial period between the New Negro Era and the rise of the modern civil rights movement. It was during this period that Montgomery, Alabama became a launching point for one of the most important protests in American history – the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Yet few understand the crucial role that Alabama State University played in sowing the seeds of that movement by training the leadership that helped to carry it out, and generating a spirit of resistance long before the boycotts took place. It was the members of the Women’s Political Council, a group of educators teaching at ASU, that designed the ideas for a massive boycott, and it was their leadership on campus, alongside the college president Harper Councill Trenholm, that transformed that campus into one of the most militant centers for student activism in the deep south. The campus soon came under the watchful eye of Jim Crow legislatures who controlled the purse strings and held the keys to the institution, but not before the communitas of ASU summoned the vision and the will to carry out their own sit-in protests in downtown Montgomery.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document