Harvey Perlman, Chancellor
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
On October 25, 2001, an internet auction commenced with 900 items for sale including a guitar from John Lennon, a Studebaker once owned by Mickey Mantle, and the shell of a GMC "Coach Division" Pontiac bus, Type TDH-3610. The bus had been originally sold in 1948 to the National City Lines of Chicago and then assigned to one of its metropolitan bus lines. It was a 36-passenger, diesel, with hydraulic (automatic) transmission. For 30 years prior to the auction it had been used as a storage shed on the farm of Hubert Summerford. It was rusted, the tires were decayed, the seats were gone, and many of the windows had been broken. In the mid 1950's, the bus line that owned it had ordered it destroyed but two bus line employees, Charles Friday and Charles Cummings, sold it to Summerford for $500. Its most distinguishing feature was the number 2857 stenciled above the driver's seat and next to the front door.
James F. Blake was born in 1913. He served in the Army in Europe during World War II. When the war was over he returned to become a bus driver until he retired in 1974. His wife, Edna, characterized him as "a good man". His son said "he was just a dedicated employee that did his job and retired after many years of service." We know that whenever James Blake was assigned to the Cleveland Avenue Route he drove bus number 2857.
Frank Minis Johnson, Jr. was born in Haleyville, Alabama, in 1918, as the oldest of seven children. Haleyville was a small town in the hills of northwest Alabama in Winston County. During the civil war, Winston County rejected slavery, tried to secede from the state of Alabama and remained neutral in the war. Frank graduated from the University of Alabama Law School along with his classmate, George Wallace, the same George Wallace who eventually became Governor. Frank joined the army, won a bronze star at Normandy and was wounded twice with Patton's army. By 1952 he was in charge of the Alabama Veterans for Eisenhower and was rewarded for his service by being appointed United States Attorney for Northern Alabama. In 1955, largely at the urging of a Nebraskan, Attorney General Herbert Brownell, Frank Johnson, at the age of 37, became the youngest member of the Federal judiciary.
Fred Gray was born in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1931. When he was 12 he traveled to Tennessee to attend the Nashville Christian Institute and he was such a good student that the school's president hired him to travel the countryside raising money and recruiting students. He finally returned to Montgomery hoping to enter the ministry or to become a teacher. In his junior year of college he saw conditions that caused him to want to be a lawyer. Unlike Frank Johnson, Fred Gray could not enroll in the University of Alabama law school because he was black. So he traveled to Cleveland and graduated from Case Western Reserve Law School. In September of 1954, at the age of 23, Fred Gray returned to Montgomery and was admitted to the Alabama Bar. As he opened his office he pledged to himself to "destroy everything segregated that he could find."
Fourteen days before Fred Gray took his oath as a lawyer, a young 25-year-old minister arrived in Montgomery to begin his ministry at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. He had just received his Ph.D in Systematic Theology at Boston University. A native of Atlanta, he had some experience as an associate pastor in his father's church, but this was his first head ministry.
In 1913 in Tuskegee, Alabama, a baby girl was born to James McCauley, a carpenter, and Leona McCauley, a teacher. Her parents soon separated. At age 11 when she entered the Montgomery Industrial School for Girls she remembered her mother's advice: "take advantage of the opportunities, no matter how few they are." After graduating from Alabama State Teachers College she settled in Montgomery, married a barber, and began work as a seamstress at a local department store.
The year 1955 was coming to a close as she waited after work at the corner in front of the Empress Theater for the Cleveland Avenue bus. The Empress might have been showing the Oscar winning movie "Marty" for which Ernest Borgnine won best actor. The top two songs of that year were "Rock Around the Clock" by Bill Haley and the Comets and "Love and Marriage" by Frank Sinatra. Television was well established and the best shows of 1955 included the Phil Silvers Show, the Ed Sullivan Show, Lassie, and Your Hit Parade. Disneyland opened in Anaheim, California, Ford Motor Company introduced the Thunderbird, Eisenhower held the first televised presidential news conference, and two fast food chains, McDonalds and Kentucky Fried Chicken, opened their doors to the public.
In the sports world the Dodgers beat the Yankees in the World Series, the Huskers finished 5-5 under coach Bill Glassford (followed by a 4-6 season under Pete Elliott and a 1-9 season under Bill Jennings). The University of Alabama football team lost all ten of its games in 1955, failing to score in 4 of them and losing to Auburn 26-0. Two more losing seasons set the stage for the hiring of Paul "Bear" Bryant in 1958.
The Cleveland Avenue bus, like the Alabama football team, was segregated. The Supreme Court had decided in the Brown decision in 1954 that separate but equal schools were unconstitutional and in 1955 that segregated schools should be eliminated "with all deliberate speed," but these rulings applied only to schools. A Montgomery ordinance required segregated buses with blacks relegated to the back seats and whites to the front. Blacks were forced to pay their fare at the front door but could only then enter the bus from the back. And if whites ran out of front seats, blacks were obligated to make room. In 1954 the Women's Political Council, a group of black professional women, had petitioned the mayor of Montgomery to moderate these rules but no change was made.
The first bus that stopped in front of the Empress Theater was full but the second bus, number 2857 driven by James Blake, was not. Rosa Parks paid her fare but failed to notice that Blake was the driver who several weeks before had taken her fare at the front door and then had driven off before she could enter the back door. This time, after the bus filled, he asked her to stand and give her seat to a white man. She refused.
A simple act. One interaction between two individuals, John Blake and Rosa Parks, set in the context of its time. Blake said he was just following the law and doing what he was supposed to do. Rosa said she was tired, not physically tired, but "tired of giving in." Neither could have guessed the consequences to follow. But you know the story. Rosa Parks was arrested and the African-American community began a boycott of the Montgomery buses that would last 380 days. The ministers of Montgomery formed the Montgomery Improvement Association to keep the boycott going and elected as its first President, the fresh young pastor, now starting his second year, the Reverend Martin Luther King, because "he was so new to Montgomery and civil rights work that he hadn't been there long enough to make any strong friends or enemies."
Fred Gray acting on his pledge to destroy segregation wherever he found it defended Rosa, got her off with a $10 fine, and then brought a separate action seeking to declare segregated transportation unconstitutional. The case came before Frank Johnson and two other judges and Johnson wrote the opinion declaring the law unconstitutional - the first time Brown vs. Board of Education was applied outside of education. This was later upheld by the Supreme Court.
John Blake died quietly of a heart attack at his home in 2002 at the age of 89. His minister said: "I know that a lot of people make a big deal out of it, but Mr. Blake grew with the times and he loved everybody." Frank Johnson died in 1999 at the age of 80. He was one of those "activist" judges who applied the law, as he understood it, to prohibit segregation in Alabama. He was initially ostracized by his neighbors and friends and his mother's house was fire-bombed. He is regarded today as one of the most celebrated and courageous judges of the 20th Century.
Fred Gray, in 1970, became one of the first two blacks elected to the Alabama legislature after reconstruction, and, in 2004, was awarded the Thurgood Marshall Award by the American Bar Association.
Rosa Parks became the "mother of the civil rights movement," was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Gold Medal, and on her death in 2005 at the age of 92, became the first woman to lie in state at the U.S. Capitol. We celebrate each year, as we do today, the career of Martin Luther King. And bus 2857? Bus 2857 was purchased at auction by the Henry Ford Museum for over $400,000 and is being restored.
What lessons are we to learn from these events that occurred fifty years ago, in a time so different from our own? By different routes and happenstance the individuals I have described were present in Montgomery, Alabama, on that December evening fifty years ago, and helped propel a simple act of courageous defiance into a thunderbolt that changed the country and the world. As we pursue our own mundane existence, we should remember that injustice, intolerance, and threats to human rights continue and that their solution depends, not alone on the acts of our leaders or our legislatures, or our judges, but also on our own individual willingness to see the new and continuing threats to liberty and to become "tired of giving in."
