After King Leaves

In 1955, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., led the first great non-violent struggle in the modern "era of integration." The Montgomery bus boycott lasted several weeks; in the end after King's home was bombed and demonstrators were jailed, the Negroes won the right to sit in the front of the buses.

Today there no longer remains an integration struggle in Montgomery. Negroes can still ride in the front of the buses, but the schools, the lunch counters, the hiring-practices of businessmen and all the other aspects of Montgomery life remain segregated. Parking rates are two cents for half an hour so that whites can avoid the "indignity" of using the public transportation on equal terms with Negroes.

King came to Albany, Georgia, in 1961 and aroused a mass movement for integration, Negroes were beaten and jailed, and their churches were burned, before they finally won an agreement from the city council to desegregate certain areas of Albany life. And then King left.

Today there no longer remains an integration struggle in Albany. The city council repudiated most of its concessions, and legalized Jim Crow prevails.

Montgomery and Albany are only two examples of a weakness which has plagued all the efforts of the integration movement: a failure to create community-based organizations that can continue the struggles initiated by outside groups or specific leaders, notably King. Whether or not King and others are actually to blame for these failures is a difficult question to answer. The important point is that the integration leaders must share their responsibilities and train others to assume their roles when they leave a community.

Birmingham, the Pittsburgh of the South, may be facing the problems of Montgomery and Albany in just two or three months. At that time some provisions of the desegregation pact are to go into effect. If the white businessmen back down on their agreements, and the Negroes lack the organizations to force compliance, Birmingham will be just another failure in the non-violent integration movement. This can only be prevented if King, Shuttlesworth, Abernathy. and the other leaders act now to create a Birmingham Committee for integration with active executives and members from Birmingham.

The potential new leaders are already in the churches, the steel unions, and the present Birmingham movement. The active members have already shown themselves by demonstrating, at the risk of arrest, in the city's streets. What remains now is to make the potential into the real.