Daughter of the Boycott by Karen Gray Houston

Author:Karen Gray Houston
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2020-02-11T11:38:56+00:00

My parents with Rev. Bob and Jeannie Graetz in Columbus, Ohio, where the Graetzes moved and lived for years after the Ku Klux Klan kept bombing their parsonage in Montgomery.

* * *

In the days spent at Highlander, Bob and Jeannie and Rosa Parks lived in a universe totally unlike the one in Montgomery. Bob says Parks “liked that there was no discrimination at Highlander. People were people. White and black people sat together in meetings and roomed together. They ate together.”

A sense of pride glowed over the Graetzes like a halo as they remembered their involvement with a woman who became a legend. After her first workshop there before the boycott, Bob says, “Mrs. Parks was telling us, she thought about this arrangement and thought this is the way it ought to be everywhere. She decided one of the things she could do when she came back was that she would never give up her seat on the bus.”

In his own way, Pastor Graetz was a radical too. “The day before the boycott went on, I urged our congregation to stay off the buses. I told the members I would be driving my car all the next day, driving people to work or wherever they needed to go.”

Despite his resolve and devotion to the cause, Graetz wasn’t originally a member of the hastily organized Montgomery Improvement Association. But eventually, by the spring of 1956, he was invited to become a member, and like my father took his instructions from the association’s transportation committee.

“In the beginning, it was all haphazard. Anybody who had a car just got on the street, drove around looking for people who were walking and picking them up. No organization to it at all. Within a few days, I got a phone call in the middle of the night, saying, ‘OK, starting tomorrow morning, you’re on from six to nine o’clock in the morning. You’re supposed to report in at Dean’s Drug Store downtown. You’ll be given an assignment for driving people to work.’”

Reverend Graetz and my father were both picking up black passengers and driving them to work. Both were involved with the planning in MIA meetings—how to raise money; where to get cars, station wagons, or funeral hearses; coordinating the pickup of passengers. They became fast friends, as did Jeannie and my mother. Unaware at the outset that they were eyewitnesses to history, they were all proud of how the boycott was evolving.

“First of all,” Reverend Graetz explained to me, “Dr. King had studied Gandhi and was impressed by Gandhi’s use of nonviolence, of standing steadfast against oppression, yet doing it in a totally nonviolent manner, in such a way as to dare the oppressors to continue with their oppression. And with some of the campaigns in India, where people would march forward and stand in front of the troops and get beaten down, and they would be pulled out of the way and another line would step forward again to be beaten down by the police, by the troops.

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