50 Years On, Voices of Bus Boycott Heard

By: Miki Johnson Staffers at the Montgomery (Ala.) Advertiser are quick to emphasize how important coordination and teamwork were to the 1955 boycotts that put Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement on the map. Perhaps that's because they've learned the same lesson while organizing the paper's slew of special projects commemorating the boycott's half-century anniversary this month.

The 48,097-circulation Advertiser (57,223 Sundays) launched a Web site this fall designed as a public resource about the boycotts. The site, at www.montgomeryboycott.com, includes about 500 articles from that time, video interviews with some involved, photo galleries, a timeline, and a historical overview.

For Dec. 1 ? 50 years to the day since Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white rider ? the paper's plans included a 56-page insert complementing and fleshing out much of the online material. The paper also is offering a book, They Walked to Freedom, recounting the boycotts from the perspective of the Montgomery Advertiser, and a teacher's guide.

In Rosa Parks' hometown, where her death on Oct. 24 was front-page news for nearly a week, reminders are everywhere of the 381-day boycotts that finally won blacks the right to ride unsegregated buses. "They still talk about it today as if it happened yesterday, the excitement in their voices, the pride in their eyes," lead reporter Jannell McGrew says.

No wonder Wanda Lloyd and members of the task force she headed to coordinate the paper's anniversary project decided from the outset they had to think of their audience as participants, not just consumers. This is evident even in the name of the insert, "Voices of the Boycott," which is anchored by interviews with people who made the effort possible, both on a large and small scale.

When the task force was created about a year ago, the staffers first educated themselves about the boycott. After compiling a list of "must-have" interviews, the paper advertised for people with stories to tell. Faced with few whites coming forward, Lloyd entreated readers of her column for anecdotes from both sides of the color line.

Although Lloyd says she would been happy for the "balance" more whites' stories would have provided, she understands that the same reasons people hid their involvement 50 years ago still hold sway today.

"We want to help readers understand where we are now in terms of black-white relations," said Lloyd, the Advertiser's executive editor, about stories both in and outside the special section. Montgomery today is split about evenly between blacks and whites, with the paper's readership at 42% minority, Lloyd says.

As work began on the book, another problem surfaced: The paper possessed only a few images of the boycott. Troy University's Rosa Parks Library helped fill in a few gaps, as did the paper's multi-media philosophy. A video crew from the paper filmed interviews for the Web site, and Ken Hare, the Advertiser's editorial page editor and a lead organizer of the book project, captured participants' ephemera with a portable scanner.

Hare says the primary goal was to find some of the images from boycott participants that are getting lost: "We are trying to capture some of the memories of those people who are still alive."

Opening up archived stories to the public also could potentially draw some hard looks from a more "politically correct" contemporary audience, but Hare points out that the editorial page during the boycotts did call for a compromise and Lloyd calls the old stories "straightforward." At the time, the Advertiser also ran a "Negro News" page, reported largely by Inez Baskin, who still lives in Montgomery and was interviewed for the special section. Baskin started out as a typist and, following her coverage of her town's unrest, became a stringer for Jet magazine and, by extension, for the American Negro Press wire service.

Fifty years hence, not only has the paper's language changed, but also its format. During local mourning for Parks, the Advertiser's print and online material referenced back and forth, driving traffic and readership. Lloyd promised that model would be followed again in this project.

"I look at this whole thing as we are recording history again," Lloyd says. "And no one is better positioned to record history again because we did it the first time."