A Season for Change

By: Gerald Elwood

            There were five seasons in Montgomery Alabama in the year 1955. The winter’s cold crisp air gave way to a more frigid wind called segregation. Americans, dressed in coats, shawls and gloves, were waiting for the wind to change and blow in their direction. The fifth season was the arctic winter of inhumane treatment caused by segregation.  The winds were changing, the northerly winds of winter were howling to the Negro its now or never.

            Several people heard the winds blowing in their ear. Mrs. Rosa Parks was one of the first, and a very key member in the change that  was imminent.  Mrs. Parks had grown tired of the indignation shown her and all Negroes, merely because she was Black.  After a long tedious and tiring day at work, while riding the city bus Mrs. Parks was asked to give up her seat to a White man. Mrs. Parks had lived her entire life relinquishing her civil rights, but her human rights would be attacked for the last time.  She told the bus driver “no”,  she was not giving up her seat.  Behold, the movement began.

            The Montgomery Improvement Association was formed.  The association consisted of mainly clergyman in the Montgomery area.  Clergymen were the most respected men in the community.  The American Negro had no other leader they could call upon in perilous times.  They also needed someone that would garner a listening ear from the White man. But to no avail, the leaders of the community would not submit to any demands from an organization consisting of Negroes.

            The initiation of a one day boycott ensued, that would ultimately last over a year.  The White community’ s disdain for the boycott perplexes me till this day.  The Negro refused to ride the buses and the enthusiasm in which they supported the boycott infuriated the white community. They used intimidation, they fire bombed houses, beat and stomped innocent women and children in the sordid name of honor, tradition and gentility.  The White man’s sense of superiority was eroding before his very eyes.  The genesis of defiance was permeating among the Negro  community, as the White man had never seen before.  Within this small semblance of defiance by the Negro came a sense of their manhood and civil rights.

            The more educated White man knew better than the Negro, just what the Negro meant to the country and the everyday existence of the White man. It was the Negro woman who cleaned so many of the homes of Whites, who were the nannies of their children, and who looked after their old and infirmed relatives.  The Negro subjected to subordinate  for so long, blanketed his sense of self worth, there by reducing him to squandering pigs accepting anything that Whites threw his way.  The south rejected the notion of freedom for slaves because they knew the economic depravation they would encounter.  Negroes would soon be growing their own crops, tending their own livestock and creating their own inventions.

           This boycott was not just a bus boycott, but became a boycott on the way of life that the Negroes knew for too long.  The winds are continuing to blow in the Negro direction ever so slightly, always whispering change.

Source: HBO movie “Boycott”. Released 2001

Written while taking a course in advanced composition.