Lessons from Montgomery bus boycott can be applied today, author Karen Gray Houston says

Lessons from the historic, year-long bus boycott that began in Montgomery, Ala., in 1955 apply to the civil rights protests underway in U.S. cities, veteran journalist Karen Gray Houston said Thursday at a National Press Club virtual book rap.

Houston, who explores the “unsung heroes” of the civil rights movement in her book, “Daughter of the Boycott: Carrying on a Montgomery Family’s Civil Rights Legacy,” said she hopes her book will start a conversation about whether the nation is “going to learn lessons from history that will help us make some changes.”

The 1955-56 boycott was a pivotal moment that “kickstarted the modern civil rights movement,” Houston told Club President Michael Freedman who moderated the webcast conversation. Before the boycott African Americans were forced to sit in the back of the bus and give up their seats to white people. 

The boycott, she said, was the “one direct action movement” that gave courage to other Black people to participate in additional acts of civil disobedience, such as lunch counter sit-ins and Freedom Rides.

Among the organizers was Houston’s father Thomas Gray, who began leading protests five years earlier, following the death of a school friend, Hilliard Brooks, 22, who was shot on Aug. 12, 1950 by a white police officer after he allegedly caused a disturbance on a bus.

The boycott began, Houston said, with “a community of people who decided they wanted to make some drastic changes and wanted to seek racial, social justice.” That community came together to create a strategy for the boycott, which lasted 382 days. “Extraordinary results can come from the effort of ordinary people,” she said.

The Black Lives Matter protests now underway began May 25 with the death of George Floyd, 46, who was arrested in Minneapolis by white police officers including one who knelt on Floyd's neck until he suffocated. 

That death and the near daily protests since then add up to a “moment of reckoning that we are not just going to stop,” she said. “The reason people are on the street is because the same things keep happening over and over again."