What Are You Reading?( continued)
job stress, it’ s surprising that the percentage of provider burnout isn’ t higher.
Alabama v. King. Dan Abrams and Fred D. Gray with David Fisher. Hanover Square Press, 322 pages. Subtitle: Martin Luther King and the Criminal Trial that Launched the Civil Rights Movement.
The setting for this very meaningful story is the trial of 27-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1956. Dr. King was then pastoring the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery AL. It was the first public exposure for the young preacher and coincided with the Founding of the Montgomery Improvement Association, led by E. D. Ford, in the wake of the historic bus boycott in defiance of state a city laws.
Rosa Parks, seamstress by trade, was but one of the catalysts whose defiance of segregated seating made her the iconic figure that she ultimately became. Recent resolve for the bus boycott dated to 1949, when Jo Ann Robinson, an Alabama State College for Negroes professor, similarly protested the back of the bus seating laws.
At the time, it was illegal for a bus boycott to be staged. The case heralded in the book title was a test of the grip that institutionalized segregation held over the city’ s Black citizenry. The MIA was fully aware of the implications of the trial, and the motivations of the segregationists to achieve a guilty verdict to set a precedent for permanent de jure segregation.
But the landmark ruling in Brown vs. School Board of Topeka two years prior resoundingly upset that apple cart. The ruling opened the landscape for myriad types of legal challenges regarding the denial of access for African Americans to a wide variety of social institutions. The legal team in the Montgomery case was a group of disciples of Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense team, who were well versed in strategy that would pinpoint the inadequacies of the case to maintain the status quo.
Co-author Fred Gray was an eyewitness to the unfolding events. Himself a young man who was one of the miniscule few Black lawyers admitted to the Alabama Bar. Gray served as co-counsel to Rosa Parks. Attorney Gray later played a significant role in bringing to light the horrors of the Tuskegee syphilis case.
A total of 89 defendants, including Dr. King, were charged. The case was a bench trial. It was heard by Judge Eugene Carter, a segregationist patriarch with power to issue the final verdict.
The scuttlebutt amongst the white establishment was that the case against MLK and the MIA-related defendants was a dead bang certainty for conviction. They were arrogant about their unbridled power. Dr. King was called“ King” by the plaintiffs’ attorneys, sounding to the crowd of African Americans jammed into the courtroom as one more undignified insult to them all; as if the lawyers were calling MLK“ boy”.
Prior to the boycott, approximately 50,000 African Americans rode the bus every workday. During the boycott, the Montgomery Improvement Association organized a wildly successful system of carpooling that broke the financial back of the bus company. Many white employers created their own carpooling to ferry their employees to work, angering the bus system and Mayor W. A. Gayle.
Many Black witnesses were called to the stand who surprised Judge Carter and the plaintiff attorneys with their astuteness. The witnesses acknowledged the proper protocol for a Black person to testify in court, but they used such tactics as answering key questions truthfully but in an indirect manner, and selective memory regarding the meetings held at the MIA office and what was discussed, as well as who led the key boycott strategy. The racists had very little evidentiary testimony to build a case.
In his turn to testify and defend himself, MLK was his usual eloquent self. The whites were left with very little fodder to pursue the case. But this was not a case of pursuing justice, this was a case of preserving an old and corrupt system that had spawned the white defense organizations such as the KKK and the White Citizen’ s Council – of which the Mayor Gayle and Police Commissioner Clyde Sellers admitted they proudly belonged to.
The proceedings attracted press coverage from the major US news outlets as well as correspondents from all over the world visiting Montgomery. The whole world watching; and the rest literally is history.
CDU College of Medicine | PG. 42