Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story

Martin Luther King's Stride Toward Freedom

April 4, 2018, marked the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. With the annual January holiday dedicated to his memory and the commemoration of his death, King is receiving a great deal of attention this year. Among new books examining King is an anthology "To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr" (2018), (edited by Tommie Shelby and Brandon Terry) in which philosophers concentrate on King's books and other writings to try to understand the nature of King's political thought. The book is far from exhaustive, and, even so, shows many different perspectives.

These considerations, particularly reading the new anthology, made me want to read or revisit King's books to try to look for myself more closely at King's thinking. I began with King's first book "Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story", originally published in 1958 and reissued in 2010 as part of a collection of King's writings called "The King Legacy". This book tells the story of the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama. A young King became the leader of this movement, and it catapulted him quickly to national and international attention and to a leadership role in the civil rights movement.

On December 1, 1955, Mrs. Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus, under Montgomery's segregation ordinance. She was arrested and fined. Parks' arrest and conviction set the stage for the Montgomery bus boycott. King, a young minister who had been in Montgomery for about a year was chosen to lead the boycott. After a difficult boycott of over a year, the Montgomery buses were desegregated. There is still disagreement about whether the boycott or a decision of the Supreme Court invalidating segregation on the buses, was primarily responsible for the result. Undoubtedly both were important.

King's book is written crisply and passionately and tells the story of the boycott. He examines racial relations in Montgomery just before the boycott, Rosa Parks' action in refusing to give up her seat, the organization of the African American community, attempts at negotiation with the city, and the violence that erupted during the boycott and thereafter. The history has subsequently been told many times in greater detail than King provides. (Some critics find that King underplayed the role of women in the Montgomery bus boycott.) King's account remains invaluable as his own-first hand story.

The book includes much more than a history of the boycott. It gives a good deal of autobiographical information, including King's own understanding of his intellectual development and his commitment to civil rights and the philosophy of non-violence. King discusses books he read and authors he found important during his years in college and in the seminary. Among many other writers, he has important things to say about Thoreau, about the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and about the philosophy of personalism or personal idealism. Of the latter, King writes:

"I studied personalistic philosophy -- the theory that the clue to the meaning of ultimate reality is found in personality. This personal idealism remains today my basic philosophical position. Personalism's insistence that only personality -- finite and infinite -- is ultimately real strengthened me in two convictions: it gave me metaphysical and philosophical grounding for the idea of a personal God, and it gave me a metaphysical basis for the dignity and worth of all human personality."

King further explains how relatively late in his studies he came in contact with the work of Gandhi and non-violence. King explains the importance he placed on non-violence and on peaceful resistance as opposed to violence and hatred. Much of King's history of the boycott revolves around his efforts to keep the protests and the boycott peaceful in the face of violence and threats. King's home, and the homes of other civil rights leaders, were bombed during the course of the boycott, and King and other leaders of the movement were arrested, briefly jailed, and tried and convicted of crimes.

Autobiographical, philosophical, and historical elements are combined in King's history of the Montgomery boycott. In the final lengthy chapter of the book, "Where do we go from here?" King puts the rising civil rights movement in a historical perspective. He talks about factors that gave the civil rights movement an impetus following WW II and of the resistance by segregationists. King adopts an exhortatory tone which tries to unite various groups, including northern liberals, well-meaning southerners, trade unions, people of faith, and African Americans themselves into a commitment to non-violent pursuit of a society based upon racial equality. In an age of secularism, King's own thinking was predominantly religious and Christian.

This book helped me in my understanding of King, his philosophical and religious thought, and the civil rights movement. It is worthwhile, fifty years after his death, with so much written and said, to approach King by reading his own words.

Robin Friedman