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63 years since bus boycott, lawyer urges similar path today

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MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — As did the Montgomery Bus Boycott meetings, recognition of the 63rd anniversary of the start of those meetings on Dec. 3 began with the reading of scripture, the singing of hymns and a prayer, blessed by the near-200 people in attendance at the First Baptist Church on Ripley Street.

It was the first Monday of December 63 years ago that 5,000 people gathered at the Holt Street Baptist Church, sparking “one of the most revolutionary social movements of the United States,” Dorothy Autrey told the crowd.

The program chair of the National Center for the Study of Civil Rights and African-American Culture at Alabama State University, Autrey listed the details of the boycott that eventually led to the desegregation of Montgomery’s city buses and what many consider the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement.

For 382 days, participants of the boycott chose not to ride the buses, walking or carpooling, despite long hours, long commutes and consistent backlash from a community largely not supportive of the participants’ desire for equality.

Back then though, anniversary keynote speaker Fred Gray said, they did not call it a boycott, but rather a protest — already aware of the law officials would use against participants. Regardless, 89 were charged under a boycotting statue.

Gray, who has made a name for himself nationally as a civil rights attorney, taking on some of the most famous civil rights cases, recalled the fear he felt when he was indicted due to his participation in the boycott. A conviction would mean disbarment, and he had already secretly committed himself to fighting everything segregated he could find.

The success of the boycott, Gray said, was because the African-American community acknowledged the problem they were having with the segregated Jim Crow buses, they talked about it, they made plans and they acted.

“We didn’t know how things would go, but we started,” Gray said.

The problems, he said, would not have gone away on their own and nor will today’s.

“I had hoped when we started in 1955 that the conditions would be improved greatly and they have improved greatly,” Gray said before the event. But, “I am disappointed that we have not made as much progress as we should.”

Listing off facts from a National Urban League report, Gray said the struggle for equal justice continues.

African-Americans are twice as likely as whites to be unemployed, three times as likely to live in poverty and 16-times as likely to be incarcerated, the report states.

“We still have some serious problems in this country. They’re not all based in race, but all started from race,” Gray said. “We had to get out of slavery; had to go through reconstruction; go through Jim Crow; go through Civil Rights Movements; and still, we’re having to fight some of the same battles and if we are not careful we will lose some of the gains we have made.”

To the crowd, after addressing the national crisis of inequality, Gray pointed to local problems in local communities that need to be solved as well.

“Our children are killing our children,” he said. “What are we going to do to try and solve these problems?”

Circling back to the success of the bus boycott and how Montgomery’s African-American community came together in order to achieve the desegregation of buses, Gray urged the crowd to take a similar path on both the local and national fronts.

Address the problem, talk about the problem, make plans to solve the problem and implement those plans.

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