Today is the anniversary of Rosa Parks’ defiant refusal to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Her sit-in was not spontaneous. It was all orchestrated. The movement was waiting for just the right moment to kick-start a campaign to challenge Jim Crow. They boycotted city buses. Black churches became dispatch centers. Carpools were immediately organized, providing more than 15,000 rides a day. They responded to constant police harassment with nonviolence. Dozens of residents got arrested.
Every Monday and Thursday night, those participating in the boycott gathered for prayer meetings. They called on a Power greater than Jim Crow. They repeated together, “It is an honor to go to jail for a just cause.” White-owned businesses downtown paid a price because it became too inconvenient for Black folks to get there. Those white business owners started treating their Black customers with more respect.
Most white people refused to support the boycott. They conveniently believed that racial equality was a Communist idea. The tension was too much for white liberals like Nobel-prize winning author William Faulkner. He wrote to the NAACP urging them to “stop now for a moment.” Historically, this is how it goes. When things get heated, white liberals stay out of the fire and advise the protestors to accept the injustice, exploitation and indignity for a little while longer.
However, in Montgomery, there were a few white allies, like Robert and Jeannie Graetz, who threw in with Black churches. They committed three hours every morning driving people to their jobs. Their participation in the boycott was more than enough to make them a target of the Ku Klux Klan. Their house was firebombed twice. Somehow, Robert, Jeannie and their young children were not injured. A third bomb thrown at their house was enough to kill them all. Fortunately, it did not detonate.
Robert, who was an ordained Lutheran pastor, once described the boycott, which lasted for 381 days, like this:
It was the people of God putting into practice their understanding of what God meant for their lives to be like. In Montgomery, it was black Christians teaching white Christians how to be Christian.
I am absolutely convinced that if a critical mass of white Christians let Black Christians teach them what it truly means to be Christian, American culture would be radically transformed.
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The late Grace Lee Boggs once wrote that the Montgomery Bus Boycott was the first struggle by an oppressed people in Western society committed to what she called “a two-sided transformational process.” The Black residents of Montgomery, and their few white allies, made it crystal clear from the get-go that their goal was not to replace one set of rulers for another, but to transform the system and themselves. They desegregated the buses and built a beloved community at the same time.
Boggs, a political thinker and community organizer who lived and worked with her spouse Jimmy on Detroit’s eastside, used to say this:
We can transform the world
if we transform ourselves – and
we can transform ourselves
if we transform the world.
Boggs believed that this two-sided transformation is rooted in partnerships and groups, most of them small and barely visible, that cultivate in us the moral clarity and political courage we need to break rank with supremacy stories and create new ways of being and living. When two or three are gathered in the name of love, justice, compassion, truth and humility, Something Else is always present.
Grace Lee Boggs lived for exactly one hundred years and one hundred days. When she was in her nineties, she wrote a paragraph that I keep coming back to. In the wake of our latest electoral conundrum, I believe that it is more relevant than ever:
The next American Revolution, at this stage in our history, is not principally about jobs or health insurance or making it possible for more people to realize the American Dream of upward mobility. It is about acknowledging that we Americans have enjoyed middle-class comforts at the expense of other peoples all over the world. It is about living the kind of lives that will not only slow down global warming but also end the galloping inequality both inside this country and between the Global North and the Global South. It is about creating a new American Dream whose goal is a higher Humanity instead of the higher standard of living dependent on Empire.
In this window between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, there's no better moment to be reminded that American society makes up 5% of the world’s population and takes up 25% of the world’s resources. Our middle-class lifestyle is totally dependent upon other people's suffering. What if the basis for our spirituality and politics was a serious commitment to addressing this brutal reality?
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This week, the queer Black poet Saul Williams laid this down:
The true shit that we need
cannot be purchased,
is never on sale and
does not come without
principled struggle.
We cannot do this alone. Our two-sided transformation depends on deepening our connection with a few kindreds we know who, like Boggs and the bus boycotters, are down to swap out what's on sale for principled struggle.
We can boycott what the protectors of the status quo say we are supposed to do with our lives.
We can divest from celebrity culture.
We can study the work and witness of Harriet Tubman, Ida B. Wells, Howard Thurman, Rosa Parks, Malcolm, Martin, Fred Hampton and Fannie Lou Hamer.
We can commit to reading credible news sources that scrutinize empire (like Black Agenda Report, Democracy Now, Hammer & Hope, Bad Faith, Truthout, Boston Review and Mondoweiss).
We can covenant to breaking rank with colonial codes of conduct.
We can swap notes on the ways we are healing our trauma and recovering from our addiction and codependency.
We can let down and have fun with the little ones and elders we are tending.
The more we cultivate intimacy, spiritual depth, moral clarity and political courage together, the more we will learn that going solo and going big are two bogus options. All we have to do is turn our will and our lives over to Something Else, asking this Love supreme to grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can and the wisdom to know the difference.
