MLK Jr.'s "Montgomery Story" Fascinating 50 Years Later

Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story by Martin Luther King, Jr.
Hardcover, 230 pages
Publisher: Harper & Row
Published: 1958

This boook review was originally published in MotherTown in January 2004.

Martin Luther King, Jr., was 29-years-old when he wrote Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story. Yet, the story King chronicles—the bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala.; his philosophy of nonviolence; and his ideas on race relations—took place three years earlier when he was only 26, two years into his marriage and father to a baby girl, Yolanda. It is extraordinary that a man so young could possess such an acute understanding of society's ills, know in which direction to move to cure them, and be brave enough to act as spokesman for a social movement that would forever alter one small city in the segregated South and affect the world at large.

Stride Toward Freedom, King's first book, begins in 1954, when King was at a crossroads in his career. Having just completed his doctoral studies at Boston University, King was torn between the desire to teach and the inclination to preach. With job offers in both fields—most in the North; one in the South—he and his wife, Coretta, whom King had met in Boston, pondered over their decision. Leaving the North, with its less visceral racism, to return to their Deep South homeland, with its Jim Crow laws, segregation, and intolerance, was a difficult matter to decide.

Growing up in Atlanta, King knew how the shackles of segregation strangled. "The first time that I had been seated behind a curtain in a dining car, I felt as if the curtain had been dropped on my selfhood," King writes. "[S]eparation did something to my sense of dignity and self-respect . . . . Can I return to a society that condones a system I have abhorred since childhood?" A system that "forever stares the segregated in the face, saying: 'You are less than . . .' 'You are not equal to . . .' "

Feeling morally obligated to return, desirous to do something about segregation and sensing that something remarkable was emerging in the South, the Kings moved to Montgomery, in 1954, where Rev. King took on the pastorate at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.

At that time, Montgomery, the "Cradle of the Confederacy," was thought to be an easygoing, even peaceful town. But, beneath that atmosphere, a "slow fire of discontent" burned. Montgomery's black citizens were fed up with segregation's indignities, inequities, and humiliations. And riding Montgomery's buses was one aspect of segregated living that was taking its toll. Many white drivers spewed ugly insults at their black passengers. Many made riders pay at the front of the bus, then forced them to board at the rear. The policy of white-section and black-section seating fostered long-standing humiliation among black passengers, so that when Rosa Parks refused to relinquish her seat to a white man, this act of will ignited the black community and emboldened them with a "new spirit of courage."

King recounts the process of protest. He reveals how the decision to boycott city buses was made; how the movement was organized, carried out, and how it gathered momentum; and how the newly formed resistance group, the Montgomery Improvement Association, of which King was president, countered Montgomery's ever-increasing opposition—behavioral, legal, and lethal. It is fascinating reading.

The Montgomery bus boycott would not have succeeded without the influence of religion. But, King saw that religion alone could not maintain people's allegiance. The church must be concerned not only about men's souls, but also about the social and economic conditions that scar that soul. If the protest was to be a success and garner real social change for the people of Montgomery, a shared philosophy was needed. King combined the teachings of Christian faith with the principles of social justice, particularly the Christian doctrine of love and Mahatma Gandhi's concept of nonviolence resistance. These became the boycott's guiding force.

Reading Stride Toward Freedom from a vantage point of 50 years, you are looking back at a significant period in American history. Given that time span, you might think that King's concepts and convictions would be out-of-date or applicable only to a 1950s society. That assumption would be wrong. King's writings have kept their deep and vital importance throughout the decades. They are as precise and full of foresight today as they were in 1958.

Take King's view on violence: "if the American Negro and other victims of oppression succumb to the temptation of using violence in the struggle for freedom, future generations will be the recipients of a desolate night of bitterness, and our chief legacy to them will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos." Or, King's remarks on hatred: "Along the way, someone must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate. This can only be done by projecting the ethic of love to the center of our lives."

Stride Toward Freedom is written with wisdom and intellect of awesome proportion. Amazement overtakes you as you read about the heroism, serenity, and genius of a people dedicated to the cause of freedom. You also get glimpses of the unmatched revolutionary Martin Luther King Jr., will become soon after 1958.

A disquieting sadness emerges while reading King's story. Progressing through King's most meaningful chapters—"Pilgrimage to Nonviolence," "The Violence of Desperate Men," and "Where Do We Go From Here?"—you are reminded that many of society's injustices, which King pinpointed as constraints on freedom and this nation's glory, are still with us. And that the man who had the power to "[inject] new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization" is not.