Montgomery, Alabama was the Crucible of the Civil Rights Movement

It's where Martin Luther King, Jr. started as a preacher; where history was made that would change America

On this date 60 years ago, August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his most famous speech, the “I Have Dream” address, to a crowd of a quarter of a million people in Washington, D.C. 

King's career began nine years earlier in Montgomery, Alabama when he accepted the position of minister at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. 

Montgomery played a central role in the birth of the Civil Rights Movement and, long before then, as a major slave trade center, and later as capital of the Confederacy during the Civil War. Today, it is the site of an important civil rights museum and a memorial to the thousands of Black American citizens lynched by their fellow white American citizens. I recently visited Montgomery.

Martin Luther King, Jr., in San Francisco, 1964, photo credit: geoconklin2001

I arrived in Montgomery, Alabama in mid-afternoon on a brutally hot summer day. The city of nearly 200,000 baked under a summer sky that was like a dome of blinding light and broiling heat. Downtown was compact, clean and tidy. It was Saturday and there was almost no one on the streets and only a few cars on the road. The residential area I passed through was just as empty. There was a convenience store. The remains of what was once a gas station. A barbecue shack with a huge rusting metal cooker beside it had an Open sign in the window but definitely was not. Everywhere, it was so profoundly quiet, it was actually like a noise. It was the sound of silence. 

Montgomery, located in the middle of the state, is Alabama’s capital. It later became the first capital of the Confederate States of America when Alabama left the Union in 1861. It was known as the Cradle of the Confederacy. That was a source of local pride. I would guess there are people who are still proud of that.

State Capitol, Montgomery

Today, Montgomery is a city haunted by ghosts. You just have to look for them. You’ll find them. They’re everywhere. 

They’re in the small park that was one of the four slave depots where shackled Black slaves were held before being taken to Court Square to be bought and sold like livestock. 

Site of one of four slave depots in Montgomery

They’re at the top of the grand marble staircase that runs up toward the main entrance to the State Capitol. It was there in 1861 that Jefferson Davis was sworn in as president of the Confederacy. It was right there too that in 1963, beside the six majestic columns of the west portico, the state’s newly-elected governor delivered his inaugural address. Gov. George C. Wallace declared, “Segregation today. Segregation tomorrow. Segregation forever.” Years later, a white newspaper reporter who was there would liken his tone to the hissing of a rattlesnake.

Dexter Avenue King Baptist Church, as it is now know

There are more ghosts inside the 19th-century, red brick Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, just a few hundred yards away.

I attended Sunday services and it turned out to be Youth Day, so several teenagers led most of the service. A church member had previously told me the congregation is shrinking as it ages and isn’t being replaced by young people. Attendance was sparse. I had the sense it wasn’t unusual. But it was a rousing service and the music was wonderful. They sang songs I dimly recalled from many years ago and songs I didn’t. O, How I Love Jesus. God’s Got A Blessing. Won’t He Do it. And, from the movie, Selma, Glory.

It was here, in January 1954, just before his 25th birthday that Martin Luther King, Jr. first auditioned for the open minister position at Dexter Avenue. At first, the church leadership was skeptical because King was too young. But his trial sermon impressed them so much they offered him the job and he accepted it. He would officially start that fall and remain the church's pastor until the autumn of 1959.

Rosa Parks after her arrest for refusing to move to the back of the bus, photo credit: rbanks

There are ghosts on the downtown street where Rosa Parks, a seamstress and secretary of the local NAACP, boarded a city bus in 1955 and refused to give up her seat to a white passenger and move to the back. 

King, though new to Montgomery, was recruited to help lead the protest. Early on, according to the outstanding new King biography by Jonathan Eig, he tried to negotiate what he felt was a reasonable compromise. The offer: that white passengers still sit up front, but Black passengers would be seated from the back forward as seats were available instead of the front section reserved for white passengers even if there were none. The local Black leaders weren’t even asking that the bus be integrated. They also had a second issue they wanted addressed. They wanted white bus drivers to be more respectful to Black passengers. 

King was surprised that city officials wouldn’t agree to the compromise. Instead of backing down, the protest leaders raised their target. They would demand full integration of the bus lines and, to do so, asked Black people to boycott the bus system. 

The boycott lasted a year. It ended when a court ordered the buses to be integrated and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to intervene. The episode is now recognized as the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement. The national media attention it drew also launched the career of King as a “Negro leader.” It would be his future and his doom.

Oak Park

There are more ghosts in Oak Park, the city’s largest. 

“It was the jewel of Montgomery, more than 40 acres of meandering paths, pristine lawns and burbling streams, with a swimming pool, six tennis courts, a Ferris wheel, picnic areas, playground equipment and a zoo,” wrote Eig.

 

But Oak Park was reserved for whites only.

On October 7, 1957 — nearly a year after the buses were integrated — a 17-year-old boy named Mark Gilmore walked through Oak Park on his way to his job at a hospital. A white police officer stopped him. Gilmore was beaten, arrested and charged with disorderly conduct.

Montgomery’s prominent Black citizens, but this time including women who were normally excluded from leadership roles in the civil rights struggles, called on the city to open up Oak Park to everyone. 

Montgomery’s city officials were outraged. They responded by closing Oak Park and every other public park in Montgomery, the seven other white parks and two for Blacks. As if that wasn’t punishment enough, they intentionally mutilated Oak Park. They fenced it off. The burbling streams were filled in. The zoo was closed. The swimming pool was torn up. Maintenance of the park was discontinued - why bother? - so it was soon overgrown with grass and weeds. If it also meant white people no longer had a park to go to, so be it. 

Oak Park would remain closed for six years.

I drove through Oak Park. It’s nice, but nothing as it had once been described, before the city wrecked it rather than allow Black people access. The day I was there, there were a handful of picnickers. All of them were Black.

There ghosts too at the street corner where Dexter Avenue dead ends at Bainbridge Street, at the bottom of the Capitol staircase. There, in March 1965, King  stood at a podium on a flatbed truck at the conclusion of the march from Selma. 

The first attempt by demonstrators to walk from Selma to Montgomery had ended on a bridge in Selma when state troopers viciously attacked the protesters. This time, with federal law enforcement providing security, they made it. 

As a jubilant crowd of thousands - mostly Black, but whites too - gathered around him, King exhorted, “However difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long because the truth crushed to earth will rise again.

“How long? Not long because no lie can live forever. 

“How long? Not long: truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne. Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown, standeth God within the shadow keeping watch above his own.

“How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice…”

There are ghosts even among the rush of cars speeding along Interstate 85 as it slices through Montgomery. The route was chosen with a special purpose. Local planners placed it in a Black neighborhood. At one point, it was drawn up so it would require demolishing the home of one of the city’s Black leaders, Rev. Ralph Abernathy, who would go on to be one of King’s closest friends and lieutenants.

“Abernathy send a telegram to President Kennedy saying that he believed the routing of the highway was meant to dislodge the Black voters that lived there at the time,” says Rebecca Retzlaff, an Auburn University professor who had studied race and the location of the two interstates that run through Montgomery.

Ultimately, Abernathy’s home was spared - barely. The highway now cuts right next to the Abernathy house. Others weren’t so fortunate. Their homes were razed. A Black neighborhood was wiped off the map.

Up on a hill overlooking the city center, there are still more ghosts. This is the site of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. I went there directly from the church service, so I was still wearing a suit. I removed my tie, but that provided little relief. The sun and heat pounded down. Within seconds, my shirt was soaked with sweat and plastered, wet and uncomfortably, to my skin. 

I paid the $5 entry fee and entered the memorial grounds. I immediately came upon a bronze sculpture that jolted me. It depicted life-size Black slaves - children, men, women - in chains, their expressions tortured and agonized. It was horrible to look at and yet I could not look away. To not look felt like a denial. Or a betrayal.

To my left, a spread of lush grass spread up toward a mass of ochre colored slabs in orderly rows beneath a canopy. I went there. The rectangular slabs had metal poles protruding from the tops connecting them to the ceiling of the canopy. On each was etched the name of a county and state, and one or more names, each with a date below it.

They are the names of Black people who were lynched by whites.

I looked at one closely. It read,

Monroe County

Alabama

Burrell Jones

10.12.1892

Jim Packard 

10.12.1892

Moses Jones

10.12.1892

Unknown

10.12.1892

Allen Parker

10.29.1892

I wondered what happened that day in October 1892 that drove a murderous frenzy that claimed the lives of five people. Burrell Jones. Jim Packard. Moses Jones. Allen Parker. Someone else whose name is now lost forever. Who were you? 

The farther into the memorial site you go, the more is revealed. Deeper within, around a patch of grass, the slabs drop from the ceiling, suspended by the poles. They hang. Along one corridor, in the bright sunlight, they cast a line of eerie shadows on the floor. The shadows, like the slabs, dangle in the air. Along the wall, there are brief descriptions of what led to the murders.

Benjamin Little was lynched near Mt. Pleasant, Texas, in 1885 after he was accused of “slandering a respectable white family.”

A lynch mob of more than 1,000 men, women, and children burned Zachariah Walker alive in Coatsville, Pennsylvania, in 1911.

John Stoner was lynched in Doss, Louisiana, in 1909 for suing the white man who killed his cow.

There are more than 4,000 names here.

It seems almost wrong to describe the memorial as beautiful because of the horrors it forces you to contemplate, but it really is beautiful. Its greatest beauty is in its serenity and reverence.

The ghosts of Montgomery teach the story of America. Our history is a chronicle of our glories and triumphs. But if it is to have any real value, it must also include our failures and our crimes. It can remind us of our inspirational heroic myths, but it must also expose the lies so many Americans turn away from or even deny. Because no lie should be allowed to live forever. 

The ghosts of Montgomery reveal painful truths. But you have to look for them.