The Movement

    The Black Man of the early fifties was a man deluded by what historian Lerone Bennett Jr., described in Confrontation: Black and White, as an "optative mode [which] bridges past and future, giving men time to count their winnings, leading them on to absurd exaggerations of their gains, preparing them unwittingly for the next period of excruciating disappointment".   

     That mood was broken on December 1, 1955, when a mild-mannered Montgomery, Alabama, Seamstress, Mrs. Rosa Parks, made the momentous decision not to give up her seat to a white man.  She was tired from a long day’s work and she was tired of the debilitating effects of Jim Crow.  It was a time in the South when separate facilities for black and white were a reality, and if whites were not satisfied with their facilities, the black man was required to move or gave way.   

     Naturally, Mrs. Parks was arrested, but her decision helped to change the course of black history.  After the arrest, a group of black women asked the ministers and civic leaders to call a boycott on December 5, the day of Mrs. Parks’s trial.  One of the ministers who responded to the call was a twenty-six-year-old doctor of philosophy, Martin Luther King Jr., an Atlanta native and pastor of Montgomery’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church….