"ON THE ROAD TO MONTGOMERY AND BETHLEHEM"

 "ON THE ROAD TO MONTGOMERY AND BETHLEHEM"

        Caroline and I were in Montgomery, Alabama for a couple of days last week.  I did a presentation on Ida Wells and did a book signing at the Read Herring Bookstore in downtown Montgomery.  Montgomery is a complex and complicated place.   It was the first capital of the Confederacy.  It is where newly elected governor George Wallace made his infamous "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever" speech at his inaugural in 1963.  Yet, it also has some of the most powerful civil rights museums in the country.  We did not have a lot of time to explore Montgomery on this trip, though we had already been a couple of times to the moving National Lynching Museum.

        On Thursday afternoon we went to the Freedom Rides Museum, located in the former Greyhound Bus Station where the original Freedom Riders were attacked and beaten in 1961.  It was powerful to stand in that same space, to read the narratives of those who participated in the Freedom Rides.  There were people who dedicated themselves to civil rights who rode these buses, but there were also "ordinary" citizens who volunteered to take these rides.  When the first Riders made their trips and were beaten and arrested, instead of shutting down the movement, that courage in the face of violence and repression opened wide the gates.  When the Kennedy administration and the governors of Alabama and Mississippi and the organizers of the Rides had made deals to negotiate the release of those who had been arrested, many thought that the Rides were paused for a while, if not completely over.  

    But, others heard the call and took up the cause.  Diane Nash and James Lawson in Nashville organized carloads of Nashville students and citizens to go down to ride the buses.  It was such a bold move that Attorney General Robert Kennedy asked one of his deputies "Who the hell is Diane Nash?" But not just Nashville responded - small groups of citizens all over the East coast started integrating and riding the buses together down South.  There was no main organizing group at that point - only the Holy Spirit calling people to serve justice and their country.

        That same Thursday, December 1, was also the 67th anniversary of Rosa Parks' refusal to move out of her seat in the white section of the Montgomery bus.  On Friday we went to the Rosa Parks Museum, located at the very spot where the white bus driver stopped the bus on that day in 1955.  He ordered Rosa Parks to get up out of her seat so that white people could sit in it.  She refused and was arrested right there at the spot on which the Museum in her name is now located.  The Museum had a powerful presentation, and we doubly benefitted because we tagged onto an all Black boys group that was also touring the Museum.  

        Rosa Parks' decision did not come in a vacuum.  She was a member of the NAACP, and in the summer of 1955, she had attended Highlander Folk School in Tennessee.  There she had come under the tutelage of Septima Clark, an organizer and teacher from South Carolina. Clark helped her to see the necessity of resistance to the unjust laws of segregation, and Parks also discovered that there were white allies available.  In that same year in late August, Emmett Till had been kidnapped and lynched in Money, Mississippi, and his brutal murder was on the mind and heart of Rosa Parks on that December day when the Holy Spirit spoke to her.  It led to the Montgomery bus boycott, which changed the course of American history, and which also brought Martin Luther King, Jr to the public and national eye. Her actions were one of the four in the 1950's that motivated the determination that led to the changes of the Civil Rights Movement:  the Brown v. Board SCOTUS decision of 1954, the torture and murder of Emmett Till, the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56, and the Little Rock Nine (led by Daisy and LC Bates) of 1957.

        As we enter the Advent and Christmas season, we are joining Mary and Joseph on the road to Bethlehem.  There are many similarities between the road to Bethlehem and the road to Montgomery.  The neo-slavery of white supremacy was strong in Montgomery in the 1950's, just as the oppressive power of Rome was great on the road to Bethlehem.  Indeed, according to Luke's gospel, Mary and Joseph were going to Bethlehem under the order of Rome.  In this season, we are invited to consider our own journey and where we might be traveling - what will be born in our hearts in this season?