Living Legacies
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Living Legacies

Literary Responses to the Civil Rights Movement

Laura Dubek, Laura Dubek

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eBook - ePub

Living Legacies

Literary Responses to the Civil Rights Movement

Laura Dubek, Laura Dubek

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About This Book

In this timely and dynamic collection of essays, Laura Dubek brings together a diverse group of scholars to explore the literary response to the most significant social movement of the twentieth century. Covering a wide range of genres and offering provocative readings of both familiar and lesser known texts, Living Legacies demonstrates how literature can be used not only to challenge the master narrative of the civil rights movement but also to inform and inspire the next generation of freedom fighters.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2018
ISBN
9781351603768

1

FROM ALABAMA TO TAHRIR SQUARE

Martin Luther King and The Montgomery Story Comic as Civil Rights Narrative
J. Michael Lyons
On February 4, 1960, four African American college students walked into a Woolworth’s store in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina, prepared to protest. Like many stores across the American South, the lunch counter at the Greensboro Woolworth’s was segregated. Blacks were prohibited from sitting in the “whites only” section, a manifestation of Jim Crow laws in the South (and as far west as Kansas and Oklahoma) that proliferated after the 1896 separate- but-equal ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson. Despite contemporaneous news reports that this and other sit-ins had been spontaneous acts, the Greensboro Four had, in fact, been prepared.1 The young men planned to sit at the counter and when refused service and asked to leave, remain seated in an act of nonviolent protest. Contrary to some popular and scholarly reports of this best known of the sit-ins during the classical phase of the civil rights movement, these men were very familiar with the techniques of nonviolent protest. They had heard about the bus boycott four years earlier in Montgomery, Alabama, led by a charismatic preacher named Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and at least one of them had read a comic book published in late 1957 that told the story of the Montgomery boycott and the nonviolent approach King endorsed.2 Martin Luther King and The Montgomery Story, a sixteen-page, four-color comic book, connected Montgomery, Alabama to India’s struggle for national independence less than ten years earlier; it also encouraged further movement by explaining the underlying philosophy of nonviolent protest and including a step-by-step guide on how to start a campaign using “The Montgomery Method.” That method would manifest fifty-three years later in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. In 2011, Egyptians and others could follow (the) movement in real time via Facebook and Twitter; included in the circulating mix of information was the same comic book, translated into Arabic, that had been read during the early years of the US civil rights movement. The Montgomery Story had also been circulated in apartheid South Africa, Latin America, and even Vietnam, its various translations a testament to the popularity of a narrative told in the simple but effective form of a comic book.3
Archives, anecdotal accounts, and the comic book itself provide a triangulated and rich history of how civil rights movement actors created and shared narratives in a way that propelled (the) movement forward. The Montgomery Story appears only briefly in popular histories and memoirs of the civil rights movement. Much of the evidence of its reception is thus anecdotal. The comic book is mentioned in one popular documentary history of the movement, Eyes on the Prize, the script of which implies that it was a factor in the decision of the Greensboro Four to sit at that Woolworth’s lunch counter. The book that accompanies the film series includes a sidebar on the comic book.4 This chapter provides the first extensive scholarly examination of The Montgomery Story and archival documents associated with it housed at Swarthmore College’s Peace Collection as part of the records of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), a pacifist Christian organization that helped King and others spread the message of nonviolent protest and civil disobedience throughout the South in the late 1950s and early 1960s (Figure 1.1).
images
FIGURE 1.1 Since 1957, The Montgomery Story has appeared in many translations, encouraging freedom movements around the globe. The Spanish version is on display at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC.
The first instance of The Montgomery Story affecting the civil rights movement can be traced to sit-ins that precede Greensboro, though the comic was most likely misidentified. In the spring of 1958, led by the Wichita Youth Council of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), activists began training for sit-ins by enacting social dramas in a church basement. In one organizer’s account, they used a comic book that, although not mentioned by name, was The Montgomery Story. Similarly, in Oklahoma City, there is anecdotal evidence that the NAACP’s Youth Council used the comic book as it prepared to launch sit-ins at five businesses. This first documented use of the comic in the context of protest is a telling illustration of its distribution over subsequent years. While scant evidence exists to tell us about the reception of the comic book in rural areas or among less-educated people, the book was clearly popular among educated activists, particularly college students in the South.5 Georgia Congressman John Lewis, a college student and activist in Nashville when the book was published, has provided much of what we know about its reception. The Montgomery Story affected Lewis so much that from 2009 to 2016, he collaborated with Andrew Aydin and Nate Powell on the March trilogy, an award-winning memoir in comic book form that chronicles Lewis’s participation in the civil rights movement.6
Historians have helped us understand the role of the press and broadcast media during the classical phase of the civil rights movement (1954–1965), but little has been written about the role of other forms of mass media and their impact on the diffusion of protest tactics or the philosophical foundations that helped guide them.7 The Montgomery Story offers insight into the narratives and stories designed to buttress, and in many cases counter, characterizations of civil rights actors and aims published in press reports.8 In this chapter, I describe the production; distribution; and, to a lesser extent, reception of The Montgomery Story and provide insight into the construction of narrative by historical actors themselves as they devised a print publication—complete with plot and characters—that appealed to a young generation of civil rights activists both in the US, particularly among black college students in the South, and abroad, including those fighting apartheid in South Africa.
The Montgomery Story is an exemplar of a movement narrative that uses a mass media form—the comic book—to tell a story efficiently, with a blend of strategic details and omissions. Through the frugal use of words and images, comic book writers and artists can quickly guide readers through complex social issues and emotions, what comic book artist and scholar Scott McCloud calls “amplification through simplification.”9 Other texts on the Montgomery boycott were available to disseminate to prospective activists, including broadcast reports, press articles, pamphlets, and even films, but The Montgomery Story in particular was embraced, remembered, and reprinted in the US and abroad. Why? A simple answer might be that the comic book, designed to diffuse a church-centered, nonviolent protest of Jim Crow laws, was a provocative piece of propaganda. A close examination of both the book’s contents and associated archives, however, yields a more nuanced explanation. I will argue that The Montgomery Story, as a civil rights narrative, functioned in three important and related ways. First, it provided civil rights organizers, including King, with a movement narrative that allowed activists to talk about their work using a common vocabulary and with a common set of iconic moments and characters. Second, it provided an origin story for the modern movement and also for King himself. And third, the comic book’s production and distribution illustrate its value as a nodal text, a work that served as a junction and contained a shared vision that represented the social justice aspirations of many different organizations and individuals.

“The Die Has Been Cast”: FOR and the Civil Rights Movement

The New York-based FOR began in 1915 as a Christian pacifist organization that promoted nonviolent methods for resolving conflicts. Embracing nonviolence regardless of religious affiliation, FOR opposed US entry into World War I; supported Gandhi’s efforts in India; and, in 1947, helped establish the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). In 1955, FOR sent Glenn Smiley, a white Southern minister, to offer organizing and educational assistance to civic and spiritual leaders interested in nonviolent protest of Jim Crow laws in the South. Smiley had attended some rallies in Montgomery soon after the bus boycott started in December 1955, and in late February, he met King, who had recently finished his doctoral degree at Boston University and accepted the pastor position at Montgomery’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. In a letter to his friend, Methodist leader Heil Bollinger in Nashville, Smiley sensed the importance of the struggle in Montgomery and described his first meeting with King:
The die has been cast, [sic] there is a crisis of terrifying intensity and I believe God has called Martin Luther King to lead a great movement here in the South. But why does God lay such a burden on one so young, so inexperienced, so good? King can be a Negro Gandhi, or he can be made into an unfortunate demagogue destined to swing from a lynch mob’s tree
.Of his own free will, he has sought counsel from some of us. May he burst, like a fruit out of season, into the type of leader required this hour.10
Soon after that first meeting with King, Smiley appeared on the schedule of speakers for FOR-sponsored nonviolent workshops intended to teach the nonviolent tactics employed in Montgomery as well as Orangeburg, South Carolina and Tallahassee, Florida. King and his close friend and associate Ralph Abernathy were also on the schedule.11
Back in Nyack, New York, FOR’s executive secretary, Columbia University-educated journalist and life-long pacifist Alfred Hassler, conceived of publishing a comic book as a way to get the story of the Montgomery boycott to “masses of people who cannot be reached by various other forms of pamphleteering.” Six months into the boycott, in May 1956, Hassler wrote to the Fund for the Republic, a non-profit that supported civil rights activities, stating that he was convinced of the “efficacy of the comic book” as a popular medium that would accurately distill the essence of boycott. In a brief outline of his ideas for the book, Hassler wrote that Montgomery’s story would be “simply but movingly told” to convey in “human terms with a Christian orientation” the importance of events there and “the importance of dealing with the whole struggle in nonviolent, Christian, potentially reconciling terms rather than with violence and bitterness.” Hassler also described a section that would include King telling Gandhi’s story, which FOR officials saw as an important precursor to events in the South, and a final section that emphasized the “key ingredients,” in narrative form, of a “successful campaign of this sort.”12 Hassler later reinforced this point to Benton Resnik, the comic book’s author. Blacklisted by the Committee on Evaluation of Comic Books, Resnik had submitted a draft copy of the script for Hassler to review.13 In his review, he wrote that the script was “too heavy and literary for our purposes.” The primary purpose of the comic, Hassler continued in a letter to Resnik, “is ge...

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