On the Road to Freedom by Charles E. Cobb Jr

Author:Charles E. Cobb Jr.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2008-06-13T16:00:00+00:00

MONTGOMERY

On December 1, 2005—the fiftieth anniversary of the arrest of Rosa Parks—I could not quite get a fix on my feelings while standing on the front lawn of the Alabama State Capitol (600 Dexter Avenue). The Capitol grounds are on a rise below which broad Dexter Avenue rolls into the heart of old downtown Montgomery. Part of the reason why I was fumbling for my feelings was because I remembered that everything around me was once hostile territory. To get to where I was now standing, I had walked along one side of the Capitol, where all of the Confederate flags, including the Confederate battle flag, were fluttering in the wind. The December air was crisp, and I shivered a little in my light jacket—perhaps not so much from the temperature as from the sight of some three thousand young people, black and white, marching down Dexter Avenue toward the building on a “Montgomery Children’s Walk.” They had begun at the corner of Montgomery and Lee Streets, where Mrs. Parks was arrested in 1955. Most were teenagers, some were younger, celebrating Mrs. Parks and the approaching anniversary of the bus boycott her arrest had triggered.

When they reached the Capitol, the young marchers began softly singing “We Shall Overcome” and were joined by many in the crowd of onlookers, and—strangely to me, only because some part of me was, once again in the 1960s—a couple of the city officials were singing, too. Policemen—they were white and black—had blocked the side streets feeding into Dexter Avenue, not to prevent marchers from reaching the Capitol building, but to create an unobstructed corridor for them. Some of them joined in singing the civil rights movement anthem, as well.

From a platform provided for speakers, a second grader—a white second grader—read aloud the leaflet written by Alabama State College (now University) English professor Jo Ann Robinson calling for a boycott after Rosa Parks’s arrest: “Negroes have rights too, for if Negroes did not ride buses, they could not operate . . . please, children and grownups, don’t ride the bus at all on Monday.” Transformed by the young voice, these words of urgent appeal become a poignant reminder that you can never tell where one defiant, righteous act will lead. From the opposite end of the age spectrum, ninety-five-year-old Johnnie Carr stepped forward to speak. A wise and tough voice from the past, and a good friend of Rosa Parks’s, on this day Carr brought her considerable historical weight to bear on the future. “Look back but move forward,” she declared. “I beg you, I admonish you to look around and see what has happened in the past but then march forward for the future.” That ending phrase was taken up and briefly became a chant, a soulful voiced drumbeat from the crowd. “Look back, march forward!”

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