A Highway Up From Darkness

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A Highway Up From Darkness
On the road to civil rights.

By Milton Bagby


	Now renamed Dexter Avenue-King Memorial Baptist, the church offers regularly scheduled tours.

"How long shall my enemy
triumph over me?
Look upon me and answer me,
O Lord, my God."
—Psalm 13

I grew up along the fault line. Not a geologic fault line—the social fault line of race, which erupted during the 1950s and '60s across the state of Alabama. Now I've come home, not to the peaceful suburbs of Birmingham where I spent my childhood, but to see those seismic places where the earth heaved and split a third of a century ago, where shouts mingled with hymns, and prayers with curses, as a people stood up and asked, "How long?"

For a while—arbitrarily 1954 to 1965—there was something called the Civil Rights Movement. It began with a Supreme Court decision—Brown v. Board of Education—that struck down school segregation and ended with a stroke of the president's pen—the Voting Rights Act. Three great campaigns of the movement occurred in Alabama. While thousands fought in the struggle, one remarkable man emerged to give the movement its rationale, its cohesion, and its heart. In a real sense, I am retracing his steps. This April, he will have been dead 30 years.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., son of a legendary Atlanta preacher, was a promising young minister in 1954, the year he became pastor of historic Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery.

Perhaps Montgomery is a political town where everyone is treated as a constituent.

Driving south today on Interstate 65, I watch Montgomery rise out of the river flats like a toy city. Cotton, corn, and soybean fields line the approach. In the distance, the Capitol dome, which once dominated the skyline, is now boxed in by a scattering of elephantine new state office buildings, each marked with bizarre decoration and a dizzying teal roof. Montgomery was different in the mid-1950s. State government was mostly a seasonal business. The bureaucracy was smaller. And it was virtually all-white. Blacks in Montgomery—for that matter, anywhere in the South—couldn't have just any job. They couldn't eat in the same restaurants as whites, nor use the same restrooms, drinking fountains, swimming pools or city parks. Rarely could they vote. Black schools, shabby and underfunded, were never the equal of white schools. It was all so unfair. It was also perfectly legal.

On the books were Jim Crow laws, legislation de-signed to enforce a segregated society. One of those laws required that blacks ride in the back of the bus when white passengers were present, yielding any seats in the middle to whites.

On Thursday, December 1, 1955, a black woman named Rosa Parks refused to get up when bus driver J.F. Blake demanded she give her seat to a white passenger. Police hauled her off the bus and took her to jail.

Parks, an officer of the Montgomery chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the NAACP, had planned for this moment. Across town, the Women's Political Caucus, a group that encouraged black women to register to vote, took Parks' arrest as a signal. Overnight, WPC's Jo Ann Robinson, a professor at Alabama State, had volunteers blanket Montgomery with leaflets urging blacks to boycott the bus system for one day. Longtime local NAACP leader E.D. Nixon began calling black ministers at dawn Friday, seeking their support for the WPC boycott. His third call was to the new minister at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.

Driving up Capitol Hill, I park my car on the street directly across from King's old church, marveling that the parking meter delivers an hour for only a dime. Perhaps Montgomery is a political town where everyone is treated as a constituent. Standing on the corner in front of the salmon-colored brick church, I can look up the street one short block to the Alabama State Capitol, the same building where, in 1861, the Confederate States of America were born. Open to the public, the recently restored Capitol Building is filled with murals, paintings and period furnishings. I step out of the way as a family from Michigan poses for a picture in front of the church. Now renamed Dexter Avenue-King Memorial Baptist, the church offers regularly scheduled tours. Inside, a mural depicts the highlights of King's life and ministry. It was here that young Martin began to emerge from the lengthy shadow of his famous father. Rosa Parks and Jo Ann Robinson had started something that would propel King to national prominence.

That Monday, virtually all of Montgomery's black population stayed off the buses. When Rosa Parks made bail that afternoon, some 500 supporters waited for her outside. Such open displays of defiance by blacks in the Deep South were unheard of.

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Milton Bagby is a Nashville screenwriter whose article on Andrew Jackson's Tennessee home, the Hermitage, appeared in our November 1997 issue of Historic Traveler.