why was the montgomery bus boycott successful essay

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Why was the Montgomery Bus Boycott so successful?

On December 1, 1955, a single act of defiance by Rosa Parks against racial segregation on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus ignited a year-long boycott that would become a pivotal moment in the Civil Rights Movement.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott, led by a young Martin Luther King Jr., mobilized the African American community in a collective stand against injustice, challenging the deeply entrenched laws of segregation in the South.

This historic protest signaled the power of nonviolent resistance and grassroots activism in the fight for racial equality.

Here is how it happened.

What were the causes of the boycott?

Before the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the city of Montgomery, Alabama, like much of the American South, enforced strict racial segregation laws, known as Jim Crow laws, which mandated separate public facilities for white and black citizens.

Public transportation was no exception, with buses segregated by race and black passengers often subjected to humiliating treatment.

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks , a seamstress and a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery bus, as was required by law.

Her arrest for this act of civil disobedience sparked outrage within the African American community.

In response, black leaders in Montgomery, including a young pastor named Martin Luther King Jr. , organized a meeting at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church to discuss a course of action.

They formed the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) to oversee the boycott and chose King as its president, recognizing his leadership potential and oratorical skills.

How did the Montgomery Bus Boycott work?

The Montgomery Bus Boycott officially began on December 5, 1955, the day of Rosa Parks' trial.

In preparation, flyers were distributed and announcements were made in black churches throughout the city, calling for African Americans to avoid using the buses on that day.

The response was overwhelming, with an estimated 90% of Montgomery's black residents participating in the boycott on the first day.

The boycotters' demands were simple: courteous treatment by bus drivers, first-come-first-served seating with blacks filling seats from the back and whites from the front, and the employment of black bus drivers on predominantly black routes. 

The success of the initial boycott led to a meeting at the Holt Street Baptist Church, where more than 5,000 black residents gathered to discuss the possibility of extending the protest.

With Martin Luther King Jr. emerging as a leading voice, the community decided to continue the boycott until their demands for fair treatment on the buses were met.

The boycott, initially planned to last for just one day, stretched on for 381 days, severely impacting the city's transit system and drawing international attention.

How did the authorities respond?

The city's response was initially dismissive, and the boycotters' resolve was met with resistance from white officials and citizens.

The city government and the bus company refused to negotiate, and legal and economic pressure was applied to try to break the boycott.

Despite these challenges, the black community's commitment to the boycott remained strong. 

They organized carpool systems, and many walked long distances to work, school, and church. 

The city's legal system targeted the boycott with injunctions and lawsuits, aiming to cripple the movement by arresting its leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr., on charges related to the boycott.

Economic pressure was also applied, as many black workers, who were participating in the boycott, faced threats of job loss or actual termination. 

King's eloquence and conviction were evident in his speeches and sermons, which he used to articulate the goals of the boycott and to call for unity and perseverance.

His home and the churches where he spoke became targets for segregationist violence, with his house being bombed in January 1956. 

Why did the boycott end?

The successful conclusion of the boycott, with the Supreme Court ruling in Browder v. Gayle that segregation on public buses was unconstitutional, was a testament to the effectiveness of coordinated, nonviolent protest. 

This Supreme Court ruling not only desegregated buses in Montgomery but also set a legal precedent that would be used to challenge other forms of segregation.

The boycott also propelled Martin Luther King Jr. into the national spotlight, establishing him as a prominent leader of the Civil Rights Movement. 

The Montgomery Bus Boycott had a profound impact on the Civil Rights Movement, setting a precedent for nonviolent protest and serving as a catalyst for future civil rights actions.

The successful boycott demonstrated the power of collective action and the effectiveness of nonviolent resistance, inspiring similar protests and boycotts across the South.

It also brought national and international attention to the struggle for civil rights in the United States, highlighting the injustices of segregation and racial discrimination.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott is often seen as the beginning of a new phase in the Civil Rights Movement, one that focused on direct action and mass mobilization.

It laid the groundwork for future campaigns, such as the sit-ins , Freedom Rides , and the March on Washington, which further advanced the cause of civil rights and social justice in America. 

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Montgomery Bus Boycott

December 5, 1955 to December 20, 1956

Sparked by the arrest of Rosa  Parks  on 1 December 1955, the Montgomery bus boycott was a 13-month mass protest that ended with the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that segregation on public buses is unconstitutional. The  Montgomery Improvement Association  (MIA) coordinated the boycott, and its president, Martin Luther King, Jr., became a prominent civil rights leader as international attention focused on Montgomery. The bus boycott demonstrated the potential for nonviolent mass protest to successfully challenge racial segregation and served as an example for other southern campaigns that followed. In  Stride Toward Freedom , King’s 1958 memoir of the boycott, he declared the real meaning of the Montgomery bus boycott to be the power of a growing self-respect to animate the struggle for civil rights.

The roots of the bus boycott began years before the arrest of Rosa Parks. The  Women’s Political Council  (WPC), a group of black professionals founded in 1946, had already turned their attention to Jim Crow practices on the Montgomery city buses. In a meeting with Mayor W. A. Gayle in March 1954, the council's members outlined the changes they sought for Montgomery’s bus system: no one standing over empty seats; a decree that black individuals not be made to pay at the front of the bus and enter from the rear; and a policy that would require buses to stop at every corner in black residential areas, as they did in white communities. When the meeting failed to produce any meaningful change, WPC president Jo Ann  Robinson  reiterated the council’s requests in a 21 May letter to Mayor Gayle, telling him, “There has been talk from twenty-five or more local organizations of planning a city-wide boycott of buses” (“A Letter from the Women’s Political Council”).

A year after the WPC’s meeting with Mayor Gayle, a 15-year-old named Claudette Colvin was arrested for challenging segregation on a Montgomery bus. Seven months later, 18-year-old Mary Louise Smith was arrested for refusing to yield her seat to a white passenger. Neither arrest, however, mobilized Montgomery’s black community like that of Rosa Parks later that year.

King recalled in his memoir that “Mrs. Parks was ideal for the role assigned to her by history,” and because “her character was impeccable and her dedication deep-rooted” she was “one of the most respected people in the Negro community” (King, 44). Robinson and the WPC responded to Parks’ arrest by calling for a one-day protest of the city’s buses on 5 December 1955. Robinson prepared a series of leaflets at Alabama State College and organized groups to distribute them throughout the black community. Meanwhile, after securing bail for Parks with Clifford and Virginia  Durr , E. D.  Nixon , past leader of the Montgomery chapter of the  National Association for the Advancement of Colored People  (NAACP), began to call local black leaders, including Ralph  Abernathy  and King, to organize a planning meeting. On 2 December, black ministers and leaders met at  Dexter Avenue Baptist Church  and agreed to publicize the 5 December boycott. The planned protest received unexpected publicity in the weekend newspapers and in radio and television reports.

On 5 December, 90 percent of Montgomery’s black citizens stayed off the buses. That afternoon, the city’s ministers and leaders met to discuss the possibility of extending the boycott into a long-term campaign. During this meeting the MIA was formed, and King was elected president. Parks recalled: “The advantage of having Dr. King as president was that he was so new to Montgomery and to civil rights work that he hadn’t been there long enough to make any strong friends or enemies” (Parks, 136).

That evening, at a mass meeting at  Holt Street Baptist Church , the MIA voted to continue the boycott. King spoke to several thousand people at the meeting: “I want it to be known that we’re going to work with grim and bold determination to gain justice on the buses in this city. And we are not wrong.… If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong” ( Papers  3:73 ). After unsuccessful talks with city commissioners and bus company officials, on 8 December the MIA issued a formal list of demands: courteous treatment by bus operators; first-come, first-served seating for all, with blacks seating from the rear and whites from the front; and black bus operators on predominately black routes.

The demands were not met, and Montgomery’s black residents stayed off the buses through 1956, despite efforts by city officials and white citizens to defeat the boycott. After the city began to penalize black taxi drivers for aiding the boycotters, the MIA organized a carpool. Following the advice of T. J.  Jemison , who had organized a carpool during a 1953 bus boycott in Baton Rouge, the MIA developed an intricate carpool system of about 300 cars. Robert  Hughes  and others from the Alabama Council for Human Relations organized meetings between the MIA and city officials, but no agreements were reached.

In early 1956, the homes of King and E. D. Nixon were bombed. King was able to calm the crowd that gathered at his home by declaring: “Be calm as I and my family are. We are not hurt and remember that if anything happens to me, there will be others to take my place” ( Papers  3:115 ). City officials obtained injunctions against the boycott in February 1956, and indicted over 80 boycott leaders under a 1921 law prohibiting conspiracies that interfered with lawful business. King was tried and convicted on the charge and ordered to pay $500 or serve 386 days in jail in the case  State of Alabama v. M. L. King, Jr.  Despite this resistance, the boycott continued.

Although most of the publicity about the protest was centered on the actions of black ministers, women played crucial roles in the success of the boycott. Women such as Robinson, Johnnie  Carr , and Irene  West  sustained the MIA committees and volunteer networks. Mary Fair Burks of the WPC also attributed the success of the boycott to “the nameless cooks and maids who walked endless miles for a year to bring about the breach in the walls of segregation” (Burks, “Trailblazers,” 82). In his memoir, King quotes an elderly woman who proclaimed that she had joined the boycott not for her own benefit but for the good of her children and grandchildren (King, 78).

National coverage of the boycott and King’s trial resulted in support from people outside Montgomery. In early 1956 veteran pacifists Bayard  Rustin  and Glenn E.  Smiley  visited Montgomery and offered King advice on the application of Gandhian techniques and  nonviolence  to American race relations. Rustin, Ella  Baker , and Stanley  Levison  founded  In Friendship  to raise funds in the North for southern civil rights efforts, including the bus boycott. King absorbed ideas from these proponents of nonviolent direct action and crafted his own syntheses of Gandhian principles of nonviolence. He said: “Christ showed us the way, and Gandhi in India showed it could work” (Rowland, “2,500 Here Hail”). Other followers of Gandhian ideas such as Richard  Gregg , William Stuart  Nelson , and Homer  Jack  wrote the MIA offering support.

On 5 June 1956, the federal district court ruled in  Browder v. Gayle  that bus segregation was unconstitutional, and in November 1956 the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed  Browder v. Gayle  and struck down laws requiring segregated seating on public buses. The court’s decision came the same day that King and the MIA were in circuit court challenging an injunction against the MIA carpools. Resolved not to end the boycott until the order to desegregate the buses actually arrived in Montgomery, the MIA operated without the carpool system for a month. The Supreme Court upheld the lower court’s ruling, and on 20 December 1956 King called for the end of the boycott; the community agreed. The next morning, he boarded an integrated bus with Ralph Abernathy, E. D. Nixon, and Glenn Smiley. King said of the bus boycott: “We came to see that, in the long run, it is more honorable to walk in dignity than ride in humiliation. So … we decided to substitute tired feet for tired souls, and walk the streets of Montgomery” ( Papers  3:486 ). King’s role in the bus boycott garnered international attention, and the MIA’s tactics of combining mass nonviolent protest with Christian ethics became the model for challenging segregation in the South.

Joe Azbell, “Blast Rocks Residence of Bus Boycott Leader,” 31 January 1956, in  Papers  3:114–115 .

Baker to King, 24 February 1956, in  Papers  3:139 .

Burks, “Trailblazers: Women in the Montgomery Bus Boycott,” in  Women in the Civil Rights Movement , ed. Crawford et al., 1990.

“Don’t Ride the Bus,” 2 December 1955, in  Papers  3:67 .

U. J. Fields, Minutes of Montgomery Improvement Association Founding Meeting, 5 December 1955, in  Papers  3:68–70 .

Gregg to King, 2 April 1956, in  Papers  3:211–212 .

Indictment,  State of Alabama v. M. L. King, Jr., et al. , 21 February 1956, in  Papers  3:132–133 .

Introduction, in  Papers  3:3–7 ;  17–21 ;  29 .

Jack to King, 16 March 1956, in  Papers  3:178–179 .

Judgment and Sentence of the Court,  State of Alabama v. M. L. King, Jr. , 22 March 1956, in  Papers  3:197 .

King, Statement on Ending the Bus Boycott, 20 December 1956, in  Papers  3:485–487 .

King,  Stride Toward Freedom , 1958.

King, Testimony in  State of Alabama v. M. L. King, Jr. , 22 March 1956, in  Papers  3:183–196 .

King to the National City Lines, Inc., 8 December 1955, in  Papers  3:80–81 .

“A Letter from the Women’s Political Council to the Mayor of Montgomery, Alabama,” in  Eyes on the Prize , ed. Carson et al., 1991.

MIA Mass Meeting at Holt Street Baptist Church, 5 December 1955, in  Papers  3:71–79 .

Nelson to King, 21 March 1956, in  Papers  3:182–183 .

Parks and Haskins,  Rosa Parks , 1992.

Robinson,  Montgomery Bus Boycott , 1987.

Stanley Rowland, Jr., “2,500 Here Hail Boycott Leader,”  New York Times , 26 March 1956.

Rustin to King, 23 December 1956, in  Papers  3:491–494 .

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Montgomery Bus Boycott

In March 1955, Claudette Colvin , a 15-year-old high school junior, refused to give up her bus seat to a white person. She was arrested for violating the segregated seating ordinances and mistreated by police. This angered the black community and sparked a brief, informal boycott of buses by many black residents. In August, Montgomery’s black community was shaken by the brutal lynching of 14-year-old Chicago native Emmett Till in Mississippi. Two months later, 18-year-old Mary Louise Smith, a house maid, was arrested for refusing to give up her seat. African Americans in Montgomery felt beleaguered.

Although Parks did not plan her calm, determined protest, she recalled that she had a life history of rebelling against racial mistreatment. She believed that she had been “pushed as far as [she] could stand to be pushed.” Parks was arrested and then bailed out that night by friend E. D. Nixon , a Pullman car porter who had headed the local and Alabama state branches of the NAACP, and by two white friends, attorney Clifford Durr and his activist wife, Virginia Durr . The Durrs and Nixon persuaded Parks to allow her arrest to be used as a test case for the constitutionality of bus segregation.

At the outset white officials and opinion leaders believed that the bus boycott would collapse quickly and that blacks were not capable of a long-term protest campaign. The white community solidified in opposition, spurred by growth of the local White Citizens’ Council , but a few brave white citizens, such as Virginia and Clifford Durr and city librarian Juliette Hampton Morgan , supported the civil rights effort.

In June 1956, halfway through the boycott, the federal court in Montgomery ruled in Browder v. Gayle that Alabama’s bus segregation laws, both city and state, violated the Fourteenth Amendment and were thus unconstitutional. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld that decision in November, and MIA members voted to end the boycott. At the same moment, the city’s belated injunction shut down the carpool system by making it illegal, but those who had driven joined those who had been walking all along. After the city government lost its final appeal in the Supreme Court, black citizens desegregated Montgomery’s buses on December 21, 1956. White extremists fired on buses and bombed churches, but the year-long bus protest ended in victory over the city’s Jim Crow laws.

Additional Resources

Boycott. DVD, directed by Clark Johnson. Los Angeles: Home Box Office, Inc., 2001.

Burns, Stewart, ed. Daybreak of Freedom: The Montgomery Bus Boycott . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

Eyes on the Prize: Awakenings (1954-1956). DVD, directed by Henry Hampton. Boston: Blackside, 1987.

Gray, Fred D. Bus Ride to Justice . Montgomery: Black Belt Press, 1994.

King, Martin Luther, Jr. Stride Toward Freedom . New York: Harper, 1958.

Robinson, Jo Ann Gibson. The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It . Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987.

Thornton, J. Mills III. Dividing Lines . Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002.

External Links

• Civil Rights Digital Library
• Troy University Rosa Parks Museum
• Justice Without Violence – Alabama Public Television

Stewart Burns Williams College

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By: History.com Editors

Updated: February 20, 2024 | Original: November 9, 2009

Rosa Parks (1913—2005) helped initiate the civil rights movement in the United States when she refused to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, Alabama bus in 1955. Her actions inspired the leaders of the local Black community to organize the Montgomery Bus Boycott . Led by a young Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. , the boycott lasted more than a year—during which Parks not coincidentally lost her job—and ended only when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that bus segregation was unconstitutional. Over the next half-century, Parks became a nationally recognized symbol of dignity and strength in the struggle to end entrenched racial segregation .

Rosa Parks’ Early Life

Rosa Louise McCauley was born in Tuskegee, Alabama , on February 4, 1913. She moved with her parents, James and Leona McCauley, to Pine Level, Alabama, at age 2 to reside with Leona’s parents. Her brother, Sylvester, was born in 1915, and shortly after that her parents separated.

Did you know? When Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat in 1955, it wasn’t the first time she’d clashed with driver James Blake. Parks stepped onto his very crowded bus on a chilly day 12 years earlier, paid her fare at the front, then resisted the rule in place for Black people to disembark and re-enter through the back door. She stood her ground until Blake pulled her coat sleeve, enraged, to demand her cooperation. Parks left the bus rather than give in.

Rosa’s mother was a teacher, and the family valued education. Rosa moved to Montgomery, Alabama, at age 11 and eventually attended high school there, a laboratory school at the Alabama State Teachers’ College for Negroes. She left at 16, early in 11th grade, because she needed to care for her dying grandmother and, shortly thereafter, her chronically ill mother. In 1932, at 19, she married Raymond Parks, a self-educated man 10 years her senior who worked as a barber and was a long-time member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( NAACP ). He supported Rosa in her efforts to earn her high-school diploma, which she ultimately did the following year.

Rosa Parks: Roots of Activism

Raymond and Rosa, who worked as a seamstress, became respected members of Montgomery’s large African American community. Co-existing with white people in a city governed by “ Jim Crow ” (segregation) laws, however, was fraught with daily frustrations: Black people could attend only certain (inferior) schools, could drink only from specified water fountains and could borrow books only from the “Black” library, among other restrictions.

Although Raymond had previously discouraged her out of fear for her safety, in December 1943, Rosa also joined the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP and became chapter secretary . She worked closely with chapter president Edgar Daniel (E.D.) Nixon. Nixon was a railroad porter known in the city as an advocate for Black people who wanted to register to vote, and also as president of the local branch of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters union .

December 1, 1955: Rosa Parks Is Arrested

On Thursday, December 1, 1955, the 42-year-old Rosa Parks was commuting home from a long day of work at the Montgomery Fair department store by bus. Black residents of Montgomery often avoided municipal buses if possible because they found the Negroes-in-back policy so demeaning. Nonetheless, 70 percent or more riders on a typical day were Black, and on this day Rosa Parks was one of them.

Segregation was written into law; the front of a Montgomery bus was reserved for white citizens, and the seats behind them for Black citizens. However, it was only by custom that bus drivers had the authority to ask a Black person to give up a seat for a white rider. There were contradictory Montgomery laws on the books: One said segregation must be enforced, but another, largely ignored, said no person (white or Black) could be asked to give up a seat even if there were no other seat on the bus available.

Nonetheless, at one point on the route, a white man had no seat because all the seats in the designated “white” section were taken. So the driver told the riders in the four seats of the first row of the “colored” section to stand, in effect adding another row to the “white” section. The three others obeyed. Parks did not.

“People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired,” wrote Parks in her autobiography, “but that isn’t true. I was not tired physically… No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”

Eventually, two police officers approached the stopped bus, assessed the situation and placed Parks in custody.

Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott

Although Parks used her one phone call to contact her husband, word of her arrest had spread quickly and E.D. Nixon was there when Parks was released on bail later that evening. Nixon had hoped for years to find a courageous Black person of unquestioned honesty and integrity to become the plaintiff in a case that might become the test of the validity of segregation laws. Sitting in Parks’ home, Nixon convinced Parks—and her husband and mother—that Parks was that plaintiff. Another idea arose as well: The Black population of Montgomery would boycott the buses on the day of Parks’ trial, Monday, December 5. By midnight, 35,000 flyers were being mimeographed to be sent home with Black schoolchildren, informing their parents of the planned boycott.

On December 5, Parks was found guilty of violating segregation laws, given a suspended sentence and fined $10 plus $4 in court costs. Meanwhile, Black participation in the boycott was much larger than even optimists in the community had anticipated. Nixon and some ministers decided to take advantage of the momentum, forming the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) to manage the boycott, and they elected Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.–new to Montgomery and just 26 years old—as the MIA’s president.

As appeals and related lawsuits wended their way through the courts, all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court , the Montgomery Bus Boycott engendered anger in much of Montgomery’s white population as well as some violence, and Nixon’s and Dr. King’s homes were bombed . The violence didn’t deter the boycotters or their leaders, however, and the drama in Montgomery continued to gain attention from the national and international press.

On November 13, 1956, the Supreme Court ruled that bus segregation was unconstitutional; the boycott ended December 20, a day after the Court’s written order arrived in Montgomery. Parks—who had lost her job and experienced harassment all year—became known as “the mother of the civil rights movement.”

Rosa Parks's Life After the Boycott

Facing continued harassment and threats in the wake of the boycott, Parks, along with her husband and mother, eventually decided to move to Detroit, where Parks’ brother resided. Parks became an administrative aide in the Detroit office of Congressman John Conyers Jr. in 1965, a post she held until her 1988 retirement. Her husband, brother and mother all died of cancer between 1977 and 1979. In 1987, she co-founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development, to serve Detroit’s youth.

In the years following her retirement, she traveled to lend her support to civil-rights events and causes and wrote an autobiography, Rosa Parks: My Story . In 1999, Parks was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest honor the United States bestows on a civilian. (Other recipients have included George Washington , Thomas Edison , Betty Ford and Mother Teresa.) When she died at age 92 on October 24, 2005, she became the first woman in the nation’s history to lie in honor at the U.S. Capitol.

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The montgomery bus boycott.

Years before the boycott, Dexter Avenue minister Vernon Johns sat down in the "whites-only" section of a city bus. When the driver ordered him off the bus, Johns urged other passengers to join him. On March 2, 1955, a black teenager named Claudette Colvin dared to defy bus segregation laws and was forcibly removed from another Montgomery bus.

Nine months later, Rosa Parks - a 42-year-old seamstress and NAACP member- wanted a guaranteed seat on the bus for her ride home after working as a seamstress in a Montgomery department store. After work, she saw a crowded bus stop. Knowing that she would not be able to sit, Parks went to a local drugstore to buy an electric heating pad. After shopping, Parks entered the less crowded Cleveland Avenue bus and was able to find an open seat in the 'colored' section of the bus for her ride home.

Despite having segregated seating arrangements on public buses, it was routine in Montgomery for bus drivers to force African Americans out of their seats for a white passenger. There was very little African Americans could do to stop the practice because bus drivers in Montgomery had the legal ability to arrest passengers for refusing to obey their orders. After a few stops on Parks’ ride home, the white seating section of the bus became full. The driver demanded that Parks give up her seat on the bus so a white passenger could sit down. Parks refused to surrender her seat and was arrested for violating the bus driver’s orders.

Organizing the Boycott

Montgomery's black citizens reacted decisively to the incident. By December 2, schoolteacher Jo Ann Robinson had mimeographed and delivered 50,000 protest leaflets around town. E.D. Nixon, a local labor leader, organized a December 4 meeting at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church , where local black leaders formed the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA)to spearhead a boycott and negotiate with the bus company.

Over 70% of the cities bus patrons were African American and the one-day boycott was 90% effective. The MIA elected as their president a new but charismatic preacher, Martin Luther King Jr. Under his leadership, the boycott continued with astonishing success. The MIA established a carpool for African Americans. Over 200 people volunteered their car for a car pool and roughly 100 pickup stations operated within the city. To help fund the car pool, the MIA held mass gatherings at various African American churches where donations were collected and members heard news about the success of the boycott.

Roots in Brown v Board

Fred Gray, member and lawyer of the MIA, organized a legal challenge to the city ordinances requiring segregation on Montgomery buses. Before 1954, the Plessy v. Ferguson decision ruled that segregation was constitutional as long as it was equal. Yet, the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education U.S. Supreme Court decision outlawed segregation in public schools. Therefore, it opened the door to challenge segregation in other areas as well, such as city busing. Gray gathered Aurelia Browder, Susie McDonald, Claudette Colvin and Mary Louise Smith to challenge the constitutionality of the city busing laws. All four of the women had been previously mistreated on the city buses because of their race. The case took the name Browder v. Gayle. Gray argued their 14th Amendment right to equal protection of the law was violated, the same argument made in the Brown v. Board of Education case.

On June 5, 1956, a three-judge U.S. District Court ruled 2-1 that segregation on public buses was unconstitutional. The majority cited Brown v. Board of Education as a legal precedent for desegregation and concluded, “In fact, we think that Plessy v. Ferguson has been impliedly, though not explicitly, overruled,…there is now no rational basis upon which the separate but equal doctrine can be validly applied to public carrier transportation...”

The city of Montgomery appealed the U.S. District Court decision to the U.S. Supreme Court and continued to practice segregation on city busing.

For nearly a year, buses were virtually empty in Montgomery. Boycott supporters walked to work--as many as eight miles a day--or they used a sophisticated system of carpools with volunteer drivers and dispatchers. Some took station-wagon "rolling taxis" donated by local churches.

Montgomery City Lines lost between 30,000 and 40,000 bus fares each day during the boycott. The bus company that operated the city busing had suffered financially from the seven month long boycott and the city became desperate to end the boycott. Local police began to harass King and other MIA leaders. Car pool drivers were arrested and taken to court for petty traffic violations. Despite all the harassment, the boycott remained over 90% successful. African Americans took pride in the inconveniences caused by limited transportation. One elderly African American woman replied that, “My soul has been tired for a long time. Now my feet are tired, and my soul is resting.” The promise of equality declared in Brown v. Board of Education for Montgomery African Americans helped motivate them to continue the boycott.

The company reluctantly desegregated its buses only after November 13, 1956, when the Supreme Court ruled Alabama's bus segregation laws unconstitutional.

Beginning a Movement

The Montgomery bus boycott began the modern Civil Rights Movement and established Martin Luther King Jr. as its leader. King instituted the practice of massive non-violent civil disobedience to injustice, which he learned from studying Gandhi. Montgomery, Alabama became the model of massive non-violent civil disobedience that was practiced in such places as Birmingham, Selma, and Memphis. Even though the Civil Rights Movement was a social and political movement, it was influenced by the legal foundation established from Brown v. Board of Education.

Brown overturned the long held practice of the “separate but equal” doctrine established by Plessy. From then on, any legal challenge on segregation cited Brown as a precedent for desegregation. Without Brown, it is impossible to know what would have happened in Montgomery during the boycott.

The boycott would have been difficult to continue because the city would have won its challenge to shut down the car pool. Without the car pool and without any legal precedent to end segregation, the legal process could have lasted years. Those involved in the boycott might have lost hope and given up with the lack of progress. However, the precedent established by Brown gave boycotters hope that a legal challenge would successfully end segregation on city buses. Therefore, the influence of Brown on the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Civil Rights Movement is undeniable. King described Brown’s influence as, “To all men of good will, this decision came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of human captivity. It came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of colored people throughout the world who had had a dim vision of the promised land of freedom and justice . . . this decision came as a legal and sociological deathblow to an evil that had occupied the throne of American life for several decades.”

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(1955) martin luther king jr., “the montgomery bus boycott”.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott speech reprinted below is one of the first major addresses of Dr. Martin Luther King.   Dr. King spoke to nearly 5,000 people at the Holt Street Baptist Church in Montgomery on December 5, 1955, just four days after Mrs. Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to relinquish her seat on a Montgomery city bus.  That arrest led to the first major civil rights campaign in the Deep South in half a century. In this speech King urges the audience which has just voted to boycott the buses to continue that campaign until they achieve their goal of ending the humiliation and intimation of black citizens there and elsewhere in Montgomery or to use his words, “..to gain justice on the buses in the city.”  

My FRIENDS, we are certainly very happy to see each of you out this evening. We are here this evening for serious business. We are here in a general sense because first and foremost we are American citizens and we are determined to apply our citizenship to the fullness of its meaning. We are here also because of our love for democracy, because of our deep-seated belief that democracy transformed from thin paper to thick action is the greatest form of government on earth.

But we are here in a specific sense, because of the bus situation in Montgomery. We are here because we are determined to get the situation corrected. This situation is not at all new. The problem has existed over endless years. For many years now Negroes in Montgomery and so many other areas have been inflicted with the paralysis of crippling fears on buses in our community. On so many occasions, Negroes have been intimidated and humiliated and impressed-oppressed-because of the sheer fact that they were Negroes.  I don’t have time this evening to go into the history of these numerous cases. Many of them now are lost in the thick fog of oblivion but at least one stands before us now with glaring dimensions.

Just the other day, just last Thursday to be exact, one of the finest citizens in  Montgomery not one of the finest Negro citizens, but one of the finest citizens in Montgomery-was taken from a bus and carried to jail and because she refused to get up to give her seat to a white person. Now the press would have us believe that she refused to leave a reserved section for Negroes but I want you to know this evening that there is no reserved section. The law has never been clarified at that point.   Now I think I speak with, with legal authority-not that I have any legal authority, but I think I speak with legal authority behind me -that the law, the ordinance, the city ordinance has never been totally clarified.

Mrs. Rosa Parks is a fine person.  And, since it had to happen, I’m happy that it happened to a person like Mrs. Parks, for nobody can doubt the boundless outreach of her integrity. Nobody can doubt the height of her character nobody can doubt the depth of her Christian commitment and devotion to the teachings of Jesus. And I’m happy since it had to happen, it happened to a person that nobody can call a disturbing factor in the community. Mrs. Parks is a fine Christian person, unassuming, and yet there is integrity and character there. And just because she refused to get up, she was arrested.

And you know, my friends, there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression. There comes a time, my friends, when people get tired of being plunged across the abyss of humiliation, where they experience the bleakness of nagging despair. There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life’s July and left standing amid the piercing chill of an alpine November. There comes a time.

We are here, we are here this evening because we’re tired now.  And I want to say that we are not here advocating violence. We have never done that. I want it to be known throughout Montgomery and throughout this nation that we are Christian people. We believe in the Christian religion. We believe in the teachings of Jesus.  The only weapon that we have in our hands this evening is the weapon of protest.  That’s all.

And certainly, certainly, this is the glory of America, with all of its faults. This is the glory of our democracy. If we were incarcerated behind the iron curtains of a Communistic nation we couldn’t do this. If we were dropped in the dungeon of a totalitarian regime we couldn’t do this.  But the great glory of American democracy is the right to protest for right. My friends, don’t let anybody make us feel that we are to be compared in our actions with the Ku Klux Klan or with the White Citizens Council. There will be no crosses burned at any bus stops in Montgomery. There will be no white persons pulled out of their homes and taken out on some distant road and lynched for not cooperating. There will be nobody amid, among us who will stand up and defy the Constitution of this nation. We only assemble here because of our desire to see right exist. My friends, I want it to be known that we’re going to work with grim and bold determination to gain justice on the buses in this city.

And we are not wrong, we are not wrong in what we are doing. If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong.  If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong.  If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong. If we are wrong, Jesus of Nazareth was merely a utopian dreamer that never came down to earth. If we are wrong, justice is a lie.  Love has no meaning. And we are determined here in Montgomery to work and fight until justice runs down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream.

I want to say that in all of our actions we must stick together.  Unity is the great need of the hour, and if we are united we can get many of the things that we not only desire but which we justly deserve. And don’t let anybody frighten you. We are not afraid of what we are doing because we are doing it within the law. There is never a time in our American democracy that we must ever think we’re wrong when we protest. We reserve that right. When labor all over this nation came to see that it would be trampled over by capitalistic power, it was nothing wrong with labor getting together and organizing and protesting for its rights.

We, the disinherited of this land, we who have been oppressed so long, are tired of going through the long night of captivity. And now we are reaching out for the daybreak of freedom and justice and equality. May I say to you my friends, as I come to a close, and just giving some idea of why we are assembled here, that we must keep-and I want to stress this, in all of our doings, in all of our deliberations here this evening and all of the week and while—whatever we do, we must keep God in the forefront. Let us be Christian in all of our actions. But I want to tell you this evening that it is not enough for us to talk about love, love is one of the pivotal points of the Christian face, faith. There is another side called justice. And justice is really love in calculation. Justice is love correcting that which revolts against love.

The Almighty God himself is not the only, not the, not the God just standing out saying through Hosea, “I love you, Israel.” He’s also the God that stands up before the nations and said: “Be still and know that I’m God, that if you don’t obey me I will break the backbone of your power and slap you out of the orbits of your international and national relationships.” Standing beside love is always justice, and we are only using the tools of justice. Not only are we using the tools of persuasion, but we’ve come to see that we’ve got to use the tools of coercion. Not only is this thing a process of education, but it is also a process of legislation.

As we stand and sit here this evening and as we prepare ourselves for what lies ahead, let us go out with a grim and bold determination that we are going to stick together. We are going to work together. Right here in Montgomery, when the history books are written in the future somebody will have to say, “There lived a race of people a black people, ‘fleecy locks and black complexion’, a people who had the moral courage to stand up for their rights. And thereby they injected a new meaning into the veins of history and of civilization.” And we’re gonna do that. God grant that we will do it before it is too late. As we proceed with our program let us think of these things.

But just before leaving I want to say this. I want to urge you. You have voted [for this boycott], and you have done it with a great deal of enthusiasm, and I want to express my appreciation to you, on behalf of everybody here. Now let us go out to stick together and stay with this thing until the end. Now it means sacrificing, yes, it means sacrificing at points. But there are some things that we’ve got to learn to sacrifice for. And we’ve got to come to the point that we are determined not to accept a lot of things that we have been accepting in the past.

So I’m urging you now. We have the facilities for you to get to your jobs, and we are putting, we have the cabs there at your service. Automobiles will be at your service, and don’t be afraid to use up any of the gas. If you have it, if you are fortunate enough to have a little money, use it for a good cause. Now my automobile is gonna be in it, it has been in it, and I’m not concerned about how much gas I’m gonna use. I want to see this thing work. And we will not be content until oppression is wiped out of Montgomery, and really out of America. We won’t be content until that is done. We are merely insisting on the dignity and worth of every human personality. And I don’t stand here, I’m not arguing for any selfish person. I’ve never been on a bus in Montgomery. But I would be less than a Christian if I stood back and said, because I don’t ride the bus, I don’t have to ride a bus, that it doesn’t concern me. I will not be content. I can hear a voice saying, “If you do it unto the least of these, my brother, you do it unto me.”

And I won’t rest; I will face intimidation, and everything else, along with these other stalwart fighters for democracy and for citizenship. We don’t mind it, so long as justice comes out of it. And I’ve come to see now that as we struggle for our rights, maybe some of them will have to die. But somebody said, if a man doesn’t have something that he’ll die for, he isn’t fit to live.

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Josh Gottheimer ed., Ripples of Hope Great American Civil Rights Speeches (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2003).

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"Montgomery Bus Boycott at a Glance"

Author:  Alabama Council on Human Relations (ACHR)

Date:  December 1, 1955 to December 31, 1955

Location:  Montgomery, Ala.

Genre:  Report

Topic:  Montgomery Bus Boycott

Source: ACHRP, Alabama Council on Human Relations Papers.

©  Copyright Information

A blog of the U.S. National Archives

Pieces of History

The Montgomery Bus Boycott

In commemoration of the anniversary of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, today’s post comes from Sarah Basilion, an intern in the National Archives History Office.

Sixty years ago, Rosa Parks, a 42-year-old black woman, refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery, Alabama, public bus.

On December 1, 1955, Parks, a seamstress and secretary for the Montgomery chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), was taking the bus home after a long day of work.

The white section of the bus had filled, so the driver asked Parks to give up her seat in the designated black section of the bus to accommodate a white passenger.

She refused to move.

When it became apparent after several minutes of argument that Parks would not relent, the bus driver called the police. Parks was arrested for being in violation of Chapter 6, Section 11, of the Montgomery City Code, which upheld a policy of racial segregation on public buses.

Parks was not the first person to engage in this act of civil disobedience.

Earlier that year, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus. She was arrested, but local civil rights leaders were concerned that she was too young and poor to be a sympathetic plaintiff to challenge segregation.

Parks—a middle-class, well-respected civil rights activist—was the ideal candidate.

Just a few days after Parks’s arrest, activists announced plans for the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

The boycott, which officially began December 5, 1955, did not support just Parks but countless other African Americans who had been arrested for the same reason.

E. D. Nixon, president of the local NAACP chapter, called for all African-American citizens to boycott the public bus system to protest the segregation policy. Nixon and his supporters vowed to abstain from riding Montgomery public buses until the policy was abolished.

Instead of buses, African Americans took taxis driven by black drivers who had lowered their fares in support of the boycott, walked, cycled, drove private cars, and even rode mules or drove in horse-drawn carriages to get around. African-American citizens made up a full three-quarters of regular bus riders, causing the boycott to have a strong economic impact on the public transportation system and on the city of Montgomery as a whole.

The boycott was proving to be a successful means of protest.

The city of Montgomery tried multiple tactics to subvert the efforts of boycotters. They instituted regulations for cab fares that prevented black cab drivers from offering lower fares to support boycotters. The city also pressured car insurance companies to revoke or refuse insurance to black car owners so they could not use their private vehicles for transportation in lieu of taking the bus.

Montgomery’s efforts were futile as the local black community, with the support of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., churches—and citizens around the nation—were determined to continue with the boycott until their demand for racially integrated buses was met.

The boycott lasted from December 1, 1955, when Rosa Parks was arrested, to December 20, 1956, when  Browder v. Gayle , a Federal ruling declaring racially segregated seating on buses to be unconstitutional, took effect.

Although it took more than a year, Rosa Parks’s refusal to give up her seat on a public bus sparked incredible change that would forever impact civil rights in the United States.

Parks continued to raise awareness for the black struggle in America and the Civil Rights movement for the rest of her life. For her efforts she was awarded both the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor given by the executive branch, and the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest honor given by the legislative branch.

To learn more about the life of Rosa Parks, read Michael Hussey’s 2013  Pieces of History  post Honoring the “Mother of the Civil Rights Movement. ”

And plan your visit to the National Archives to view similar documents in our “ Records of Rights ” exhibit or  explore documents in our online catalog .

Copies of documents relating to Parks’s arrest submitted as evidence in the Browder v. Gayle case are held in the National Archives at Atlanta in Morrow, Georgia.

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Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Montgomery Bus Boycott

Written by: Stewart Burns, Union Institute & University

By the end of this section, you will:.

• Explain how and why various groups responded to calls for the expansion of civil rights from 1960 to 1980

Suggested Sequencing

Use this narrative with the Jackie Robinson Narrative, The Little Rock Nine Narrative, The Murder of Emmett Till Narrative, and the Rosa Parks’s Account of the Montgomery Bus Boycott (Radio Interview), April 1956 Primary Source to discuss the rise of the African American civil rights movement pre-1960.

Rosa Parks launched the Montgomery bus boycott when she refused to give up her bus seat to a white man. The boycott proved to be one of the pivotal moments of the emerging civil rights movement. For 13 months, starting in December 1955, the black citizens of Montgomery protested nonviolently with the goal of desegregating the city’s public buses. By November 1956, the Supreme Court had banned the segregated transportation legalized in 1896 by the Plessy v. Ferguson ruling. Montgomery’s boycott was not entirely spontaneous, and Rosa Parks and other activists had prepared to challenge segregation long in advance.

On December 1, 1955, a tired Rosa L. Parks left the department store where she worked as a tailor’s assistant and boarded a crowded city bus for the ride home. She sat down between the “whites only” section in the front and the “colored” section in the back. Black riders were to sit in this middle area only if the back was filled. When a white man boarded, the bus driver ordered four African American passengers to stand so the white passenger could sit. The other riders reluctantly got up, but Parks refused. She knew she was not violating the segregation law, because there were no vacant seats. The police nevertheless arrived and took her to jail.

Parks had not planned her protest, but she was a civil rights activist well trained in civil disobedience so she remained calm and resolute. Other African American women had challenged the community’s segregation statutes in the past several months, but her cup of forbearance had run over. “I had almost a life history of being rebellious against being mistreated because of my color,” Parks recalled. On this occasion more than others “I felt that I was not being treated right and that I had a right to retain the seat that I had taken.” She was fighting for her natural and constitutional rights when she protested against the treatment that stripped away her dignity. “When I had been pushed as far as I could stand to be pushed. I had decided that I would have to know once and for all what rights I had as a human being and a citizen.” She was attempting to “bring about freedom from this kind of thing.”

Perhaps the incident was not as spontaneous as it appeared, however. Parks was an active participant in the civil rights movement for several years and had served as secretary of both the Montgomery and Alabama state NAACP. She founded the youth council of the local NAACP and trained the young people in civil rights activism. She had even discussed challenging the segregated bus system with the youth council before 15-year-old Claudette Colvin was arrested for refusing to give up her seat the previous March. Ill treatment on segregated city buses had festered into the most acute problem in the black community in Montgomery. Segregated buses were part of a system that inflicted Jim Crow segregation upon African Americans.

In 1949, a group of professional black women and men had formed the Women’s Political Council (WPC) of Montgomery. They were dedicated to organizing African Americans to demand equality and civil rights by seeking to change Jim Crow segregation in public transportation. In May 1954, WPC president Jo Ann Robinson informed the mayor that African Americans in the city were considering launching a boycott.

The WPC converted abuse on buses into a glaring public issue, and the group collaborated with the NAACP and other civil rights organizations to challenge segregation there. Parks was bailed out of jail by local NAACP leader, E. D. Nixon, who was accompanied by two liberal whites, attorney Clifford Durr and his wife Virginia Foster Durr, leader of the anti-segregation Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF). Virginia Durr had become close friends with Parks. In fact, she helped fund Parks’s attendance at a workshop for two weeks on desegregating schools only a few months before.

The Durrs and Nixon had worked with Parks to plot a strategy for challenging the constitutionality of segregation on Montgomery buses. After Parks’s arrest, Robinson agreed with them and thought the time was ripe for the planned boycott. She worked with two of her students, staying up all night mimeographing flyers announcing a one-day bus boycott for Monday, December 5.

Because of ministers’ leadership in the vibrant African American churches in the city, Nixon called on the ministers to win their support for the boycott. Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., a young and relatively unknown minister of the middle-class Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, was unsure about the timing but offered assistance. Baptist minister Ralph Abernathy eagerly supported the boycott.

On December 5, African Americans boycotted the buses. They walked to work, carpooled, and took taxis as a measure of solidarity. Parks was convicted of violating the segregation law and charged a $14 fine. Because of the success of the boycott, black leaders formed the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) to continue the protest and surprisingly elected Reverend King president.

Rosa Parks, with Martin Luther King Jr. in the background, is pictured here soon after the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

After earning his PhD at Boston University’s School of Theology, King had returned to the Deep South with his new bride, Coretta Scott, a college-educated, rural Alabama native. On the night of December 5, 1955, the 26-year-old pastor presided over the first MIA mass meeting, in a supercharged atmosphere of black spirituality. Participants felt the Holy Spirit was alive that night with a palpable power that transfixed. When King rose to speak, unscripted words burst out of him, a Lincoln-like synthesis of the rational and emotional, the secular and sacred. The congregants must protest, he said, because both their divinity and their democracy required it. They would be honored by future generations for their moral courage.

The participants wanted to continue the protest until their demands for fairer treatment were met as well as establishment of a first-come, first-served seating system that kept reserved sections. White leaders predicted that the boycott would soon come to an end because blacks would lose enthusiasm and accept the status quo. When blacks persisted, some of the whites in the community formed the White Citizens’ Council, an opposition movement committed to preserving white supremacy.

The bus boycott continued and was supported by almost all of Montgomery’s 42,000 black residents. The women of the MIA created a complex carpool system that got black citizens to work and school. By late December, city commissioners were concerned about the effects of the boycott on business and initiated talks to try to resolve the dispute. The bus company (which now supported integrated seating) feared it might go bankrupt and urged compromise. However, the commissioners refused to grant any concessions and the negotiations broke down over the next few weeks. The commissioners adopted a “get tough” policy when it became clear that the boycott would continue. Police harassed carpool drivers. They arrested and jailed King on a petty speeding charge when he was helping out one day. Angry whites tried to terrorize him and bombed his house with his wife and infant daughter inside, but no one was injured. Drawing from the Sermon on the Mount, the pastor persuaded an angry crowd to put their guns away and go home, preventing a bloody riot. Nixon’s home and Abernathy’s church were also bombed.

On January 30, MIA leaders challenged the constitutionality of bus segregation because the city refused their moderate demands. Civil rights attorney Fred Gray knew that a state case would be unproductive and filed a federal lawsuit. Meanwhile, city leaders went on the offensive and indicted nearly 100 boycott leaders, including King, on conspiracy charges. King’s trial and conviction in March 1956 elicited negative national publicity for the city on television and in newspapers. Sympathetic observers sent funds to Montgomery to support the movement.

In June 1956, the Montgomery federal court ruled in Browder v. Gayle that Alabama’s bus segregation laws violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equality and were unconstitutional. The Supreme Court upheld the decision in November. In the wake of the court victories, MIA members voted to end the boycott. Black citizens triumphantly rode desegregated Montgomery’s buses on December 21, 1956.

A diagram of the Montgomery bus where Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat was used in court to ultimately strike down segregation on the city’s buses.

The Montgomery bus boycott made King a national civil rights leader and charismatic symbol of black equality. Other black ministers and activists like Abernathy, Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, Bayard Rustin, and Ella Baker also became prominent figures in the civil rights movement. The ministers formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to protest white supremacy and work for voting rights throughout the South, testifying to the importance of black churches and ministers as a vital element of the civil rights movement.

The Montgomery bus boycott paved the way for the civil rights movement to demand freedom and equality for African Americans and transformed American politics, culture, and society by helping create the strategies, support networks, leadership, vision, and spiritual direction of the movement. It demonstrated that ordinary African American citizens could band together at the local level to demand and win in their struggle for equal rights and dignity. The Montgomery experience laid the foundations for the next decade of a nonviolent direct-action movement for equal civil rights for African Americans.

Review Questions

1. All of the following are true of Rosa Parks except

• she served as secretary of the Montgomery NAACP
• she trained young people in civil rights activism
• she unintentionally challenged the bus segregation laws of Montgomery
• she was well-trained in civil disobedience

2. The initial demand of those who boycotted the Montgomery Bus System was for the city to

• hire more black bus drivers in Montgomery
• arrest abusive bus drivers
• remove the city commissioners
• modify Jim Crow laws in public transportation

3. The Montgomery Improvement Association was formed in 1955 primarily to

• bring a quick end to the bus boycott
• maintain segregationist policies on public buses
• provide carpool assistance to the boycotters
• organize the bus protest

4. As a result of the successful Montgomery Bus Boycott, Martin Luther King Jr. was

• elected mayor of Montgomery
• targeted as a terrorist and held in jail for the duration of the boycott
• recognized as a new national voice for African American civil rights
• made head pastor of his church

5. The Federal court case Browder v. Gayle established that

• the principles in Brown v. Board of Education were also relevant in the Montgomery Bus Boycott
• the Montgomery bus segregation laws were a violation of the constitutional guarantee of equality
• the principles of Plessy v. Ferguson were similar to those in the Montgomery bus company
• the conviction of Martin Luther King Jr. was unconstitutional

6. All the following resulted from the Montgomery bus boycott except

• the formation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)
• the emergence of Martin Luther King Jr. as a national leader
• the immediate end of Jim Crow laws in Alabama
• negative national publicity for the city of Montgomery

Free Response Questions

• Explain how the Montgomery Bus Boycott affected the civil rights movement.
• Describe how the Montgomery Bus Boycott propelled Martin Luther King Jr. to national notice.

AP Practice Questions

Rosa Parks being fingerprinted by Deputy Sheriff D. H. Lackey after her arrest in December 1955.

1. Which of the following had the most immediate impact on events in the photograph?

• The integration of the U.S. military
• The Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson
• The Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education
• The integration of Little Rock (AR) Central High School

2. The actions leading to the provided photograph were similar to those associated with

• the labor movement in the 1920s
• the women’s suffrage movement in the early twentieth century
• the work of abolitionists in the 1850s
• the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s

3. The situation depicted in the provided photograph contributed most directly to the

• economic development of the South
• growth of the suburbs
• growth of the civil right movement
• evolution of the anti-war movement

Primary Sources

Burns, Steward, ed. Daybreak of Freedom: The Montgomery Bus Boycott. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

Garrow, David J, ed. Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It: The Memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson . Nashville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1987.

Greenlee, Marcia M. “Interview with Rosa McCauley Parks.” August 22-23, 1978, Detroit. Cambridge, MA: Black Women Oral History Project, Harvard University. https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/drs:45175350$14i

Suggested Resources

Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63 . New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988.

Brinkley, Douglas. Rosa Parks . New York: Penguin, 2000.

Rosa Parks Museum, Montgomery, AL. www.troy.edu/rosaparks

Williams, Juan. Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965 . New York: Penguin, 2013.

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Montgomery Bus Boycott

The Montgomery Bus Boycott started in December 1955. What happened in Montgomery is seen as a pivotal point in the whole civil rights story and brought to prominence a seamstress called Rosa Parks .

The structure of southern society pre-1955 ensured that black Americans were very much second class citizens. Southern states had white only restaurants, white only rest zones in bus centres etc. In Montgomery, Alabama, buses were segregated (as was common elsewhere in the South) with specific areas on a bus reserved for white customers and other seats for black customers.

The story behind the bus boycott seems simple – yet, as always, there is more to the story than first appears. After a full day’s work, Rosa Parks got a bus home. The bus was ‘full’ in the sense that all the seats for white Americans were in use. Parks was seated in a seat for black Americans. A white man got on board and found that all the ‘white’ seats were full. The bus driver told four black Americans to move further down the bus. Three complied but Parks refused to give up her seat and was arrested.

In protest, a boycott of the buses by black Americans in Montgomery began. It was probably the first example of the economic clout that the community had because eventually, the bus company had to desegregate their buses or face serious financial difficulties as very many black Americans used the buses. Without their economic input via fares, the bus company of Montgomery faced probable bankruptcy.

However, there is more to the story. Many believe that the act by Rosa Parks was a reaction after a hard day’s work and that it was not pre-planned. The evidence possibly suggests that the whole issue of a bus boycott had been some while in the planning. As early as 1954, twenty-five local associations in Montgomery had informed the city’s mayor, W A Gayle, that a city-wide boycott of the city’s buses was being planned. The city’s Women’s Political Council was planning a boycott in 1955. To give their movement more impetus, they needed a respected member of the community to be arrested for violating city bus law.

Even before the arrest of Rosa Park’s , a fifteen year old student, Claudette Colvin, was arrested on March 2nd 1955 for refusing to give up her ‘white’ seat. However, her case was not pursued by the NAACP as one of the charges against Colvin was assault. What the NAACP wanted was a case that was simply one involved with segregation with no other issue that might cloud the case. The state of Alabama dropped the segregation issue against Colvin and simply pursued a case of assault and battery.

It was Colvin’s case in Browder v Gayle that was to end up in a federal court in February 1956 and it was around this case that the Supreme Court declared bus segregation unconstitutional in December 1956. Many feel that Colvin has not received the credit she merits for her part in the civil rights movement.

On December 1st 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus. Ironically, she got on the bus at the same stop as Claudette Colvin had done on March 2nd 1955. However, Parks had suffered from bus segregation before. In 1943, Parks had paid her fare to a bus driver who told her to get on the bus by its rear door as ‘black’ seats were always at the back of a bus. While Parks moved to the rear door, the bus drove off.

Who was Rosa Parks? She is invariably portrayed as someone who had reached the end of her patience after a hard day’s work and refused to leave her seat on the bus, preferring to rest her feet. While this is almost certainly true, there is more to the story. Rosa Parks had been a life-long worker for the NAACP and she had taken a special interest in the Claudette Colvin case. At the time of her arrest, Parks had just finished a course on race relations in Monteagle, Tennessee. She became a seamstress simply because that was all she could find to do in the segregated society of Montgomery. However, Parks had been educated at the all-black Alabama State College.

When Parks was arrested, the NAACP asked the police why they had done this. E D Nixon of the NAACP was told that “it was none of your damn business.” After finding out the reason for her arrest, Nixon posted the bond required for her release. The Parks case had none of the potential complications of the Colvin case. The NAACP asked Parks if they could pursue her case with regards to the legality of segregation.

A one-day boycott of the city’s buses was organised for Monday 5th December. It proved to be highly successful. A 26 year old minister at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church saw empty bus after empty bus drive down his road. He was Martin Luther King. He would later write that

Those who had organised the one-day boycott created an organisation called the Montgomery Improvement Association. King was elected its president. MIA had to decide whether to continue with the boycott or to bask in the success of the one-day boycott. Though some wanted to end the boycott after just one day, the vote taken that night showed that the majority wanted the boycott to continue.

City officials in Montgomery tried to undermine the boycott. Black cab drivers had charged the same as the buses in an effort to get black people to work in lieu of there being no buses. However, city officials declared that the minimum fare that a cab driver could charge was 45 cents – so the 10 cents being paid was effectively made illegal. To get around this, MIA introduced a private taxi plan whereby those blacks who owned their car picked up and dropped off people at designated points. This overcame the 45 cents fare issue.

When MIA met with officials from the bus company, they got nothing.

The white community of Montgomery tried to use local newspapers to convince the black community that the boycott had been resolved by printing a story that stated this. MIA had to do a lot of work in a short space of time to convince as many as was possible that the story was a hoax. On January 30th 1956, King’s home was bombed. Men driving the private taxi cabs were frequently arrested for the most minor of traffic violations. Insurance firms withdrew their insurance for the vehicles. King only got round this by getting insurance underwritten by Lloyd’s of London. On February 21st, King along with 88 other people was arrested for organising a boycott which violated an obscure law. He was ordered to pay $500 as a fine with $500 costs.

The boycott badly hit shops in Montgomery as far fewer blacks were coming into the city centre. While shop keepers were opposed to integration, they faced losing their livelihood if the boycott continued.

MIA also used the courts to fight their case for an end to desegregation. By a 2 to 1 majority a federal court deemed segregation on buses to be unconstitutional. The city authorities had argued that integration would lead to violence – an argument rejected by two of the judges.

The black community of Montgomery started using the buses again on December 21st 1956. However, the argument used by the city’s leaders in court came true. Buses were shot at, four churches were bombed, and a bomb was found on the porch of Martin Luther King’s home. Seven white men were arrested for these but no-one was ever found guilty – a deal was done whereby those blacks arrested under the anti-boycott laws had their charges dropped while the seven men had their charges dropped (though King still had to pay his $500 fine).

The violence did end and the integration of the buses in Montgomery went ahead with relative success. On January 10th and 11th 1956, ministers in MIA met in Atlanta other ministers who worked in the south. The result of this meeting was the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Martin Luther King was elected its president. It wanted to build on the success on the civil rights movement in areas such as transport and education but in a non-violent way.

Civil rights activist Rosa Parks refused to surrender her seat to a white passenger on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama, sparking the Montgomery Bus Boycott that eventually ended racial segregation on public transportation.

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Quick Facts

Childhood, family, and education, montgomery bus boycott, life after the bus boycott, outkast song controversy, awards, tributes, and movie, who was rosa parks.

Born in February 1913, Rosa Parks was a civil rights activist whose refusal to give up her seat to a white passenger on a segregated bus in 1955 led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Her bravery led to nationwide efforts to end racial segregation on public transportation and elsewhere. Parks was awarded the Martin Luther King Jr. Award by the NAACP, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the Congressional Gold Medal. She has been described as the “Mother of the Civil Rights Movement.” She died in October 2005 at age 92.

FULL NAME: Rosa Louise McCauley Parks BORN: February 4, 1913 DIED: October 24, 2005 BIRTHPLACE: Tuskegee, Alabama SPOUSE: Raymond Parks (1932-1977) ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Aquarius

Rosa Parks was born Rosa Louise McCauley on February 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Alabama. Her parents, James and Leona McCauley, separated when Parks was 2. Parks’ mother moved the family to Pine Level, Alabama, to live with her parents, Rose and Sylvester Edwards. Both of Rosa’s grandparents were formerly enslaved people and strong advocates for racial equality.

The family lived on the Edwards’ farm, and this is where Rosa spent her youth. She experienced chronic tonsillitis as a child that often left her bedridden. After undergoing a tonsillectomy in the fifth grade, she experienced temporary blindness, but her health improved soon afterward, according to Rosa Parks: A Life in American History by Darryl Mace.

Early in life, Rosa experienced racial discrimination and activism for racial equality. Once, her grandfather Sylvester stood in front of their house with a shotgun while Ku Klux Klan members marched down the street.

Young Rosa often fought back physically against bullying from white children, noting: “As far back as I remember, I could never think in terms of accepting physical abuse without some form of retaliation if possible,” according to The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks by Jeanne Theoharis.

Taught to read by her mother at a young age, Rosa attended segregated schools throughout her education. The one-room school in Pine Level where she went often lacked adequate school supplies such as desks. Black students were forced to walk to the first through sixth-grade schoolhouse, while the city provided bus transportation as well as a new school building for white students.

At age 11, Rosa began at the Industrial School for Girls in Montgomery, Alabama. She moved onto a laboratory school for secondary education led by the Alabama State Teachers College for Negroes. In 1929, Rosa left the school in the 11 th grade to help both her sick grandmother and mother back in Pine Level.

For a time, she worked at a shirt factory in Montgomery, but Rosa did eventually earn her high school degree in 1933. This was a significant accomplishment for a young Black woman in the mid-1930s, during a time when eight out every 10 Black children of high school age in southern states weren’t even enrolled in secondary schools, according to Rosa Parks: A Biography by Joyce A. Hanson.

In 1932, at age 19, Rosa met and married Raymond Parks, a barber and an active member of the NAACP as well as the League of Women Voters. The couple never had children, and their marriage lasted until his death in 1977.

Raymond was involved with the Montgomery labor rights movement and led a national pledge drive to support the legal defense of the Scottsboro Boys, nine Black teenagers falsely accused in Alabama of raping two white women in 1931. As Rosa’s own interest in civil activism rose, Raymond discouraged her from actively participating in the Scottsboro Boys defense efforts due to the dangers involved. Rosa said her husband believed, “It was hard enough if he had to run... He couldn’t leave me, and I couldn’t run as fast,” according to The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks . She didn’t let that stop her.

After graduating high school with Raymond’s support, Rosa became actively involved in civil rights issues by joining the NAACP’s Montgomery chapter in 1943, serving as its youth leader as well as secretary to NAACP President E.D. Nixon . She held the post until 1957.

During her time at the NAACP, she was involved in investigating the gang rape of Recy Taylor , a Black woman in Henry County, Alabama. Parks also attended meetings to discuss the murder of Emmett Till , a Black teenage who was tortured and lynched after being accused of offending a white woman in Mississippi in 1955.

After a long day’s work at a Montgomery department store, where she worked as a seamstress, Parks boarded the Cleveland Avenue bus for home on December 1, 1955. She took a seat in the first of several rows designated for “colored” passengers.

The Montgomery City Code required that all public transportation be segregated and that bus drivers had the “powers of a police officer of the city while in actual charge of any bus for the purposes of carrying out the provisions” of the code. That meant drivers were required to provide separate but equal accommodations for white and Black passengers by assigning seats. A line roughly in the middle of a bus separated white passengers in the front from Black passengers in the back. When an African American passenger boarded the bus, they had to get on at the front to pay their fare, then get off and reboard the bus at the back door.

As the bus Parks was riding continued on its route, it began to fill with white passengers. Eventually, the bus was full, and driver James F. Blake noticed that several white passengers were standing in the aisle. Blake stopped the bus and moved the sign separating the two sections back one row, asking four Black passengers to give up their seats. The city’s bus ordinance didn’t specifically give drivers the authority to demand a passenger to give up a seat to anyone, regardless of color. However, Montgomery bus drivers had adopted the custom of moving back the sign separating Black and white passengers and, if necessary, asking Black passengers to give up their seats to white passengers. If the Black passenger protested, the bus driver had the authority to refuse service and could call the police to have them removed.

Three of the other Black passengers on the bus complied with the driver, but Parks refused and remained seated. Blake demanded, “Why don’t you stand up?” to which Parks replied, “I don’t think I should have to stand up.” He called the police and had her arrested. Parks later said of the incident : “When that white driver stepped back toward us, when he waved his hand and ordered us up and out of our seats, I felt a determination cover my body like a quilt on a winter night.”

The police arrested Parks at the scene and charged her with violation of Chapter 6, Section 11, of the Montgomery City Code. She was taken to police headquarters, where, later that night, she was released on bail.

Parks’ protest made her the public face of what later became known as the Montgomery Bus Boycott . The evening that Parks was arrested, E.D. Nixon began forming plans to organize a boycott of Montgomery’s city buses. Members of the Black community were asked to stay off city buses on Monday, December 5, 1955—the day of Parks’ trial—in protest of her arrest. People were encouraged to stay home from work or school, take a cab, or walk to work. Ads were placed in local papers, and handbills were printed and distributed in Black neighborhoods.

In fact, Parks wasn’t the first to push back against segregated busing practices. A 15-year-old nurse aid and activist named Claudette Colvin had similarly refused to surrender her bus seat to a white passenger nine months before Parks had done so, but the NAACP felt Parks was the better candidate to highlight for the public, and so Colvin’s actions remained relatively little-known. Colvin later said she wasn’t publicized because she was a pregnant teen and because Parks was more fair-skinned and had the look that “that people associate with the middle class.”

On the morning of December 5, a group of leaders from the Black community gathered at the Mt. Zion Church in Montgomery to discuss strategies and determined that their boycott effort required a new organization and strong leadership. They formed the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), electing Montgomery newcomer Martin Luther King Jr. as minister of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. The MIA believed that Parks’ case provided an excellent opportunity to take further action to create real change.

When Parks arrived at the courthouse for trial that morning with her attorney, Fred Gray, she was greeted by a bustling crowd of around 500 local supporters, who rooted her on. Following a 30-minute hearing, Parks was found guilty of violating a local ordinance and was fined $10, as well as a $4 court fee.

Inarguably the biggest event of the day, however, was what Parks’ trial had triggered. The city’s buses were, by and large, empty. Some people carpooled and others rode in Black-operated cabs, but most of the estimated 40,000 African American commuters living in the city at the time had opted to walk to work that day—some as far as 20 miles.

Due to the size and scope of, and loyalty to, the boycott, the effort continued for several months. The city of Montgomery had become a victorious eyesore, with dozens of public buses sitting idle, ultimately severely crippling finances for its transit company. With the boycott’s progress, however, came strong resistance.

Some segregationists retaliated with violence. Black churches were burned, and both King and Nixon’s homes were destroyed by bombings. Still, further attempts were made to end the boycott. The insurance was canceled for the city taxi system that African Americans used. Black citizens were also arrested for violating an antiquated law prohibiting boycotts.

In response, members of the Black community took legal action. Armed with the Brown v. Board of Education decision, which stated that separate but equal policies had no place in public education , a Black legal team took the issue of segregation on public transit systems to the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama, Northern Division. Parks’ attorney, Fred Gray, filed the suit.

In June 1956, the district court declared racial segregation laws, also known as “Jim Crow laws,” unconstitutional. The city of Montgomery appealed the court’s decision shortly thereafter, but on November 13, 1956, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the lower court’s ruling, declaring segregation on public transport to be unconstitutional.

With the transit company and downtown businesses suffering financial loss and the legal system ruling against them, the city of Montgomery had no choice but to lift its enforcement of segregation on public buses, and the boycott officially ended on December 20, 1956, after 381 days. The combination of legal action, backed by the unrelenting determination of the Black community, made the Montgomery Bus Boycott one of the largest and most successful mass movements against racial segregation in history.

Although she had become a symbol of the Civil Rights Movement , Parks suffered hardship in the months following her arrest in Montgomery and the subsequent boycott. She lost her department store job, and her husband was fired from his barber job at Maxwell Air Force Base after his boss forbade him to talk about his wife or their legal case. The couple began receiving constant death threats, and Raymond started sleeping with his gun for protection as a result, according to The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks .

Unable to find work, they eventually left Montgomery and moved to Detroit with Parks’ mother. There, Parks made a new life for herself, working as a secretary and receptionist in U.S. Representative John Conyer’s congressional office. She also served on the board of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Parks remained involved in activism throughout her life, speaking out against housing discrimination and police abuse. She also befriended Malcolm X , considering him her “personal hero.”

In 1987, a decade after her husband’s death, Parks founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development with longtime friend Elaine Eason Steele. The organization runs “Pathways to Freedom” bus tours, introducing young people to important civil rights and Underground Railroad sites throughout the country.

In 1992, Parks published Rosa Parks: My Story , an autobiography recounting her life in the segregated South. In 1995, she published Quiet Strength , which focuses on the role that religious faith played throughout her life.

In 1998, the hip-hop group Outkast released a song, “Rosa Parks,” which peaked at No. 55 on the Billboard Hot 100 music chart the following year. The song featured the chorus: “Ah-ha, hush that fuss. Everybody move to the back of the bus.”

In 1999, Parks filed a lawsuit against the group and its label alleging defamation and false advertising because Outkast used Parks’ name without her permission. Outkast said the song was protected by the First Amendment and didn’t violate Parks’ publicity rights. In 2003, a judge dismissed the defamation claims. Parks’ lawyer soon refiled based on the false advertising claims for using her name without permission, seeking over $5 billion.

On April 14, 2005, the case was settled. Outkast and co-defendants SONY BMG Music Entertainment, Arista Records LLC, and LaFace Records admitted no wrongdoing but agreed to work with the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute to develop educational programs that “enlighten today’s youth about the significant role Rosa Parks played in making America a better place for all races,” according to a statement released at the time.

On October 24, 2005, Parks quietly died in her apartment in Detroit at the age of 92. She had been diagnosed the previous year with progressive dementia, which she had been suffering from since at least 2002.

Parks’ death was marked by several memorial services, among them, lying in honor at the U.S. Capitol Rotunda in Washington, where an estimated 50,000 people viewed her casket.

Parks was the first woman and only the second Black person—after Jacob Joseph Chestnut, a U.S. Capitol police officer killed in 1998—to lie in the Capitol , which is considered the “most suitable place for the nation to pay final tribute to its most eminent citizens.” City officials in Montgomery and Detroit reserved the front seats of their buses with black ribbons in honor of Parks.

Parks was interred between her husband and mother at Detroit’s Woodlawn Cemetery, in the chapel’s mausoleum. Shortly after her death, the chapel was renamed the Rosa L. Parks Freedom Chapel. Speaking during her funeral, then–Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said, “I can honestly say that without Mrs. Parks, I probably would not be standing here today as secretary of state.”

Parks received many accolades during her lifetime, including the Spingarn Medal, the NAACP’s highest award, and the prestigious Martin Luther King Jr. Award. On September 15, 1996, President Bill Clinton awarded Parks the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor given by the United States’ executive branch. The following year, she was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest award given by the U.S. legislative branch. Time magazine named Parks on its 1999 list of “The 20 Most Influential People of the 20 th Century.”

In 2000, Troy University created the Rosa Parks Museum , located at the site of her arrest in downtown Montgomery, Alabama. In 2001, the city of Grand Rapids, Michigan, consecrated Rosa Parks Circle, a 3.5-acre park designed by architect Maya Lin , who is best known for designing the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington.

A biographical movie starring Angela Bassett and directed by Julie Dash, The Rosa Parks Story , was released in 2002. The movie won the 2003 NAACP Image Award, Christopher Award, and Black Reel Award.

On February 4, 2013—which would have been Parks’ 100th birthday—a commemorative U.S. Postal Service stamp was released called the Rosa Parks Forever stamp, featuring a rendition of the famed activist.

Also in February 2013, President Barack Obama unveiled a statue, designed by Robert Firmin and sculpted by Eugene Daub, honoring Parks in the nation’s Capitol building. He remembered Parks by saying: “In a single moment, with the simplest of gestures, she helped change America and change the world,” Obama said during the dedication ceremony . “And today, she takes her rightful place among those who shaped this nation’s course.”

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• At the time I was arrested, I had no idea it would turn into this. It was just a day like any other day. The only thing that made it significant was that the masses of the people joined in.
• I have learned over the years that when one’s mind is made up, this diminishes fear; knowing what must be done does away with fear.
• People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired... the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.
• Each person must live their life as a model for others.
• I would like to be remembered as a person who wanted to be free... so other people would be also free.
• I’d see the bus pass every day... the bus was among the first ways I realized there was a black and white world.
• When I thought about Emmett Till, I could not go to the back of the bus.
• My only concern was to get home after a hard day’s work.
• The time had just come when I had been pushed as far as I could stand to be pushed.
• I had decided that I would have to know once and for all what rights I had as a human being and a citizen, even in Montgomery, Alabama.
• My resisting being mistreated on the bus did not begin with that particular arrest. I did a lot of walking in Montgomery.
• My desires were to be free as soon as I learned that there had been slavery of human beings.
• As I look back on those days, it’ s just like a dream, and the only thing that bothered me was that we waited so long to make this protest and to let it be known, wherever we go, that all of us should be free and equal and have all opportunities that others should have.
• God has always given me the strength to say what is right.
• There were times when it would have been easy to fall apart or to go in the opposite direction, but somehow, I felt that if I took one more step, someone would come along to join me.
• When I made that decision [to refuse to surrender my seat] , I knew I had the strength of my ancestors behind me.
• I am always very respectful and very much in awe of the presence of Septima Clark , because her life story makes the effort that I have made very minute. I only hope that there is a possible chance that some of her great courage and dignity and wisdom has rubbed off on me.

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Martin Luther King and the Montgomery bus boycott for Leaving Cert History #625Lab

What was the contribution of martin luther king to the montgomery bus boycott and to other aspects of us life.

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Martin Luther King, Jr. was a well-known civil rights leader and activist who had a great deal of influence on American society in the 1950s and 1960s. He contributed greatly to the events of the Montgomery bus boycott and to other aspects of US life through his non-violent actions. In 1954 in America, the US Supreme Court removed the legal basis for segregation in education. However, in the southern states Jim Crow laws continued to enforce segregation and discrimination in housing, transport and various public facilities.

In Montgomery, Alabama, a southern city with a long history of racial tension, segregated seating was present on buses. African American people could only sit at the back for the bus and had to stand up for a white people if the front seats were occupied. On the evening of 1 December 1955, an African American seamstress Rosa Parks got on a bus in downtown Montgomery. When asked to move to let a white person sit down, she refused. The police were called and minutes later, Rosa Parks was arrested. Parks was well known and respected in the African American community in Montgomery, and she has been secretary of the Montgomery NAACP. From jail she phoned Daniel Nixon, leader of the NAACP in Alabama. He agreed to pay her bail and decided that they could go the Supreme Court with this case, and boycott the bus. Nixon knew that challenging racism in the supreme courts would require the support of other African American leaders. He contacted the reverend Ralph Abernathy and the reverend Martin Luther King, a popular young baptist minister. King’s popularity in the community gave this case credibility.

A one day bus boycott for December 5, 1955 was organised by the women’s political committee, the day parks was due in court. Meanwhile, threats of violence against bus drivers were present in the African American community. In order to prevent violence, on 2 December Nixon , Abernathy and King called a meeting in King’s church. Over 40 religious and civic leaders from the African American community agreed to support the boycott. Their message was one of non co-operation. Organisers hoped that 60% of the community would back the boycott but it turned out to be almost 100%. King attended Rosa Parks’ trial that day where she was found guilty, and fined $14. Nixon called for an appeal.

The elders of the boycott met up and set up a permanent organisation for the boycott as they had already decided that it should last more than one day. They called it the Montgomery improvement association. Martin Luther King was unanimously elected leader of the group. That evening he addressed a huge crowd at a meeting held by the MIA. He urged them to follow non-violent Christian principles, to use persuasion, not coercion. The MIA wanted segregation on buses to end, black people to be treated with courtesy by bus drivers and for black drivers to be employed on the buses. King closed the meeting by calling on all those in favour to stand. Everybody stood. This was the grinning of King’s important contribution to the Montgomery bus boycott.

King was a dedicated and popular minister at the Dexter Anne Baptist church in Montgomery and was active in the local branch of the NAACP. He was young, energetic and a brilliant public speaker. King and the other leaders held meetings to plan strategy and set up a transportation committee to raise funds and organise alternative transport for African Americans. After Christmas 1955, when it became clear that the African American community were determined it continue the boycott, some white people began to use measures aimed at forcing them to give up. On 22 January the city announced that the boycott was over and that a settlement had been reached. King shut down these rumours by responding quickly and telling the African Americans to ignore these reports. It was quick thinking like this by King that ensured that the bus boycott was a success. He was also arrested for breaking an old law which prohibited boycotts. His arrest and trial made headlines and international news, bringing more publicity to the movement.

On 13 December, the US Supreme Court declared that segregated seating on public buses was unconstitutional. The Supreme court’s decision was to come into operation on 20 December 1956. On 21 December , in a symbolic gesture, King and a white minister, Glenn Smiley, sat together in what was previously a whites-only section on a bus. King and his associates had successfully made segregation on public transport illegal. He had successfully contributed to both the Montgomery bus boycott and to the Black Civil rights movement in America.

In 1957, King helped to set up the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Its aim was to continue working for change, using non-violent tactics. In 1958 the SCLC began its crusade to double the number of African- American voters in the South by 1960. In 1960, some African-American students began ‘sit-ins’ at segregated lunch counters. King supported them and was arrested in October 1960. This brought publicity to the protest. By the end of the year the peaceful sit-in campaign by over 50,000 young people had succeeded in desegregating public facilities in more than 100 cities in the south.

In April 1963, King organised a protest march in Birmingham, Alabama – a big industrial city known for its racial prejudice. The marchers filled the streets day after day, singing ‘We shall Overcome’. King was arrested, and his ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ was one of the most effective documents of the civil rights movements. On 8 May, six thousand African-American children marched through Birmingham. On the following day the police chief, Eugene O’Connor, ordered is men to use water houses, electric cattle prods and dogs against the protesters. Crucially, these events were broadcast live on national television and shocked audiences, winning widespread white support for King. The president sent officials to negotiate with he city authorities. The violence ended and the protestors were granted most of their demands. Kennedy brought in a civil Rights Bill providing for an end to all discrimination and an extension of voting rights for African Americans. This bill was delayed by congress, but King still contributed greatly to the progression of civil rights for African Americans with this protest march.

One of Martin Luther’s most famous contributions to the Black civil rights movement occurred in August of 1963, when King led a march on Washington, D.C to demonstrate for ‘jobs and freedom’. Over 200,00 protestors joined the march and he made his famous ‘I have a dream speech’ . Kennedy feared that the march would make it difficult to get his civil rights bill passed but it was peaceful and orderly, and helped to get the bill passed a year later. The bill was passed in 1964, and it banned discrimination in all public accommodation, outlawed job discrimination and reduced the power of local voter registration boards to disqualify African Americans from voting. This was yet another victory for King and the movement. Martin Luther King condemned the Vietnam war. King said that the war wastes lives and misuses American resources. The Vietnam war went against hi non-violent agenda. This public condemnation contributed to public outcry concerning the war.

In 1964, small-scale violence erupted in Harlem. In August 1965, five days after the civil rights bill was signed by the President, a huge riot broke out in Watts, an African-American ghetto in Los Angeles. For six days, looting and fighting between African-American youths and police raged. The riot greatly upset King and he moved the SCLC headquarters to Chicago, determined to shift his focus from the south to the northern ghettos and the problems of jobs and housing. During the summers of 1966 and 1967, further rioting took place in the north . In 1967, 83 people were killed in 164 different riots, causing over $100 million in damages to property. The civil rights movement became divided as king appealed for calm and denounced the violence and insisted that militants only represented a minority of African Americans. In April 1968, King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. His death seemed to destroy any hope of resolving the race problem.

Martin Luther King made enormous contributions to both the Montgomery bus boycott and to US life by progressing the Civil rights movement through non-violent means. He started a progression towards equality that ultimately resulted in the legal equality between black and white people in America in today’s society. He is remembered to this day as an iconic figure in the civil rights movement , both in America and internationally.

Feedback : This essay is a really good length and answers the question well. Your paragraphs are detailed and full of relevant historical fact, with lots of statistics. You use a few short quotations, but it would be better to incorporate a few more. Your introduction does its job well and the conclusion is good as it doesn’t just summarise, it also ties the topic into the present day. The way you use the order of importance in some of your key sentences, like “ One of Martin Luther’s most famous contributions ”, is good as it adds an extra layer to your judgement.

Cumulative Mark: For your cumulative mark, this would definitely achieve the maximum 60 out of 60 marks, as there are enough well-written paragraphs to accumulate this mark.

Overall Evaluation Mark: For Overall Evaluation, I’d give this about 25 marks out of 40. This is a really good mark, but you can improve it if you want by including some more quotation, doing some extra reading or by providing some more detailed analysis of the facts you present.

Total Mark: 85/100

Why did the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1956) take place, how was it carried out, and to what extent was it successful? (2015)

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Although the American Constitution of 1791 declared that “all men were created equal… they are endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights”, this was a far cry from the reality reflected in society in the first half of the twentieth century. This was particularly true for states like Alabama in the Deep South where Jim Crow laws were enforced, which promoted a “separate but equal” treatment of the races. Alabama’s capital was Montgomery, a city with 50,000 blacks and 70,000 whites. The city’s bus company followed the pattern of segregation and harsh penalties were enforced on anyone who dared to question the status quo. In the middle of the twentieth century, however, this would change as a result of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a tremendous statement of defiance which would change the face of America.

It could be argued that the origins of the boycott have their roots in 1943, when a black seamstress named Rosa Parks paid for her bus fare and then watched the bus drive off as she tried to enter the bus through the blacks-only rear door. Like many black women at the time, Parks was working in a low-paid job and was now starting to question the treatment her race was receiving. The seed had been sown for the next episode in her career as an activist.

On Thursday 1st December 1955, she boarded a city bus on the way home from work and when the bus became full with white passengers and the driver demanded that four black passengers move back one row to make room, Parks refused. She iconically said “I don’t think I should have to” before being promptly arrested. Parks was a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, so naturally E.D. Nixon, the organisation’s leader, took an interest in her case. He had been looking for somebody to test out his boundaries in the courts in the hope of getting Jim Crow laws declared as constitutional. He had been curious about the similar case of fifteen year-old Claudette Colvin months before, but when it was revealed that she was pregnant he lost interest as he needed to be certain that he “had somebody [he] could win with”. On the other hand, Parks was respectable, had been educated at the Laboratory School in Alabama State College and attended church regularly. After discussing the risks with her husband and mother, Rosa Parks agreed to be the figurehead of the campaign. This episode catalysed the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

The boycott was organised by the MIA (Montgomery Improvement Association) with the aid of the Womens’ Political Council of Montgomery, led by Jo Ann Robinson, and the black ministers of Montgomery such as Martin Luther King. King was a great orator, and it was written that “as King spoke in a singsong cadence, his followers would cry and clap and sway, carried away by the magic of his oratory. With his help, 35,000 leaflets advertising the boycott were distributed at services the next Sunday.

In court on Monday the 5th of December Rosa Parks was fined $10 for civil disobedience and this coincided with the start of the boycott. It was met with great success, with most of the city’s black population complying. It was decided that the boycott would continue for as long as the City Council kept withholding the following: employment of black drivers on the buses, allocation of seats on a first come, first served basis, and the right to courteous treatment by drivers for all passengers, regardless of colour.

The leaders of the boycott collected money to buy station wagons for a private taxi service. Some of the money came from local black workers, the NAACP, the United Auto Workers’ Union and the Montgomery Jewish community, among other minorities. A carpool system was organised whereby people gathered at churches and waited to be collected by others to get to work in order to undermine the attitude of the boycott’s critics, who were adamant that the buses would be full again the next rainy morning. However, the boycotters’ tenacity was clearly underestimated and the boycott continued for a total of 381 days, until December 21st 1956, This was thanks to public donations, dedication and $30,000 being raised by the church.

The boycotters met fierce resistance. The Ku Klux Klan became active and the likes of burning crosses were planted in King’s garden. Acid was poured on the cars of the boycotters and the homes of King and other leaders were bombed. King was arrested for doing thirty miles per hour in a twenty five miles per hour zone and in February 1956, eighty nine blacks including King were arrested under an old law banning boycotting. Twenty four ministers were also arrested throughout the year for cooperation.

At the same time the NAACP’s lawsuit was advancing through the courts, and on the 13th of November 1956 the Supreme Court in Washington DC ruled that the segregation laws were unconstitutional. The boycott was eventually called off and on the 21st of December 1956, King and his supporters boarded a Greyhound bus for the first time in 381 days. For the first time ever they sat at the front. Their tenacity had earned them victory.

The boycott was classified as a roaring success, not only because the boycotters achieved their aims with regard to Rosa Parks’ specific case, but also because the boycott ended segregation on Montgomery’s buses completely. It also introduced the idea of non-violent protest, an approach take that would later be used by King and others in order to progress the civil rights movement even further. The episode paved the way for the likes of the freedom riders and the lunch counter sit-ins. It also gave rise to institutions like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference which would be instrumental in the next steps toward an egalitarian society. Overall it was a massive success that changed the face of American society in a new and unprecedented way. In the words of Joseph Lowery, “the Montgomery Bus Boycott was an era of self-determination”.

Feedback : This is a really great essay in that it answers the question without being repetitive. It shows a good understanding of the material, and you provide good commentary as well, such as making comments on the tenacity of the boycotters. You also make good use of quotations. Your introduction is good as it gives some background as well as laying out the topic of the essay, and your conclusion is strong too as it is more than just a summary of the essay. For future essays that require you to answer several parts, maybe watch out to be clear in what part you’re answering with each paragraph and try to ensure that all sections are given somewhat equal attention. 

Cumulative Mark : while this is a really well-written essay, the fact that there are only 9 paragraphs means that you might not hit the maximum of 60 cumulative marks – you would need at least 6 marks on each paragraph, and while you could achieve this, it would be safest to add an extra paragraph or two just to be certain that you can hit 60. It is possible that this particular essay could achieve 60/60.

Overall Evaluation : for Overall Evaluation, I’d give this around 30/40 as your treatment of the question is very good.

Total : 90/100

• Post author: Martina
• Post published: December 21, 2018
• Post category: #625Lab History / History

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Home — Essay Samples — Social Issues — Social Movements — Montgomery Bus Boycott

Essays on Montgomery Bus Boycott

The Montgomery Bus Boycott is a significant event in history that sparked the civil rights movement in the United States. Writing an essay about the Montgomery Bus Boycott can help you learn about the courage and determination of the people involved and the impact it had on society.

When choosing a topic for your essay about the Montgomery Bus Boycott, consider focusing on specific aspects such as the key figures involved, the impact on civil rights, the role of community activism, or the lasting effects on public transportation. You can also explore the social, political, and economic factors that led to the boycott and its significance in the larger context of the civil rights movement.

For an argumentative essay about the Montgomery Bus Boycott, you can explore topics such as the role of nonviolent resistance, the effectiveness of boycotts as a means of protest, or the relationship between segregation and public transportation. For a cause and effect essay, you could examine the catalysts that led to the boycott and its aftermath, or the long-term consequences on racial segregation and equality. In an opinion essay, you can express your personal views on the impact of the boycott and its relevance in today's society. And for an informative essay, you can delve into the historical background, key events, and the broader implications of the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

For a thesis statement on the Montgomery Bus Boycott, you can focus on topics such as the defiance against segregation, the power of grassroots movements, or the role of civil disobedience in creating social change. In the of your essay, you can provide context about the events leading up to the boycott, the key players involved, and the significance of the boycott in challenging racial segregation. In the , you can summarize the key points of your essay and reflect on the lasting impact of the Montgomery Bus Boycott on civil rights and social justice.

Writing an essay about the Montgomery Bus Boycott allows you to explore a pivotal moment in history and its relevance to contemporary issues. Whether you choose to argue a point, explore causes and effects, express your opinion, or provide information, there are many engaging topics to consider when writing about the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

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Law Related Education

Martin Luther King Jr. Day: A Different Perspective on the ‘Legacy’ of MLK Jr. From Civil Rights Attorney Vernon Jordan

2021 and THE MLK JR. HOLIDAY: 

•  What it has meant through the decades,  
• DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE on the ‘LEGACY’ of MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. from Civil Rights attorney VERNON JORDAN, and, perhaps due to lessons learned from the PANDEMIC, and
• AN ENHANCED APPRECIATION of the need for RACIAL EQUALITY to become THE ‘NORM’*   

When Was the MLK Jr. Holiday Established and Why?

First, before turning to a discussion of Dr. King’s legacy and what it means, let’s review how a holiday in his memory was established.  Are you surprised to learn that serious controversy arose in 1983 when Congress moved to create a national holiday to honor Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and commemorate his legacy?   It did, from southern legislators as well as from President Ronald Reagan who opposed any national observance for Dr. King who was variously described as “an outside agitator” (by Senator Strom Thurmond in 1968 following King’s assassination), and as someone who “welcomed collaboration with Communists” (by North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms).  To express his resistance that year, Helms led a sixteen-day filibuster of the MLK Holiday bill but then finally voted for it in exchange for Congress’ approval of his tobacco bill.  Despite this opposition, the bipartisan vote in favor of the bill handily won the day, possibly because many Republicans may have believed they needed to show the public their support for civil rights.

And did you know or do you recall that Dr. King died before he even reached the age of forty, having been assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4 of 1968 when he was in the midst of preparing to lead a protest march in support of the City’s striking sanitation workers?  Yet in his short lifetime, Dr. Martin Luther King accomplished the unimaginable, especially for a black man from the South and one advocating for peaceful integration.  Thus, this year as in every previous year the holiday has been observed, people all over our country—and beyond—will pay homage to this great man, preacher, and acknowledged leader of the civil rights movement in America that has defined for generations what our country must  acknowledge and address in order to eliminate racism in our society.

Dr. King’s Early and Relevant Education

Even before he stepped onto the national ‘stage’ and ignited a widespread movement for peace, justice and racial equality through his electrifying voice and powerful words invoking hope for the dreamers in his audiences, Dr. King had achieved many impressive goals.  At an early age, and in short order, Dr. King proved the belief that he was bright, articulate and driven by earning a B.A. in Sociology from Atlanta’s Morehouse College when he was only nineteen, a B.A. in Divinity just three years later, and then, in 1955, a Doctorate in Systematic Theology from Boston University.  Those studies and his degrees both reflected his interest in canonical teachings and grounded him in the power of oratory of a spiritual nature that would engage his listeners and move them to action. 

How Rosa Parks’ Courage Helped Inspire Dr. King’s Early Activism and Advocacy for the Oppressed and Dispossessed

Also in 1955, Dr. King was chosen by local civil rights activists to lead a one-day boycott of the buses in Montgomery, Alabama.  Their protest was spurred by area residents upset when Rosa Parks, a black woman, was arrested and fined on the bus she was taking home from work for violating the City’s segregation laws. Parks had refused the order of the bus driver to give up her seat to a white man who had been standing on the crowded bus.  Under local law governing public accommodations, he was entitled to preferential seating because of his race.  That single day turned into a year which is how long it took Montgomery to desegregate the buses.

By persisting in its defense of racial segregation within its public transportation system, the City not only faced legal and financial challenges but it also, perhaps unwittingly, simply stoked the flames of a significant and growing national civil rights movement.  That movement, which engendered many other battles for racial equality, was borne of one black woman’s using her voice to demand equal access to public services. Ms. Parks later explained that she claimed her seat that fateful day, not because she was physically tired but because she was “tired of giving in”.  For more about Rosa Parks, who was lauded for her courage, wrote two compelling memoirs, and lived into her nineties, see https://www.biography.com/people/rosa-parks . 

Etched Forever in Our Collective Memories: Dr. King’s Compelling Words

Events in the sixties related to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. are forever etched in our memories and in America’s history.  On August 28, 1963, King delivered perhaps his most stirring and memorable speech, one that has come to be known as the “I Have a Dream” speech.  To the 250,000 participants in that day’s organized march to D. C.,  King pronounced: “ I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.’”  In that same speech he made the dream personal when he stated: “ I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a  nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character. ”  The theme of non-judgmental equality and respect for human rights and opportunity for all without regard to color resonated with many individuals besides the marchers, which is what King intended: that his message of hope would take hold across the nation and trigger needed changes in the law.

In the Face of Many Threats to Him and His Family and All His Detractors, Dr. King Received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964

The era of the sixties was also witness to the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Dr. King—in 1964.  In the presentation to King, Nobel Committee Chairman Gunnar Jahn described the Reverend as an “undaunted champion of peace” who had distinguished himself by showing that “a struggle can be waged without violence”.  Mr. Jahn also praised Dr. King for never abandoning his faith despite his having been subjected to numerous imprisonments and bomb threats, as well as repeated death   threats against him and his family.  Although detractors continued to attack Dr. King’s teachings, much progress had been made toward the goals of equality, justice and peace that King was preaching.  As notable examples, in the middle of the sixties, Little Rock High School and the University of Mississippi were integrated, Congress enacted the 24th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution, and President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Dr. King’s Assassination: A Dark Day for All, and Its Aftermath

Sadly, as we all know, that decade didn’t end well. Dr. King’s good fortune, and possibly the momentum toward a more civil and just society, took a tragic turn on April 4, 1968 when Dr. King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee and it seemed the world had come to a stop.  By that time, many who questioned his motives and his means to achieving peace and equality had begun to appreciate the import of his messages and his work on the ground toward implementation of his mission—even though some believed Dr. King was espousing more aggressive actions to bring about the change he wanted.  While his death left a terrible void, his legacy as a ‘champion of peace’ has continued to move us forward toward a more just society, even if slowly and with ‘bumps’ in the road in recent years.  Still, we all need to keep vigilant to make sure we don’t lapse in our efforts or allow prejudice, anger and distorted perspectives to further divide us as a nation into separate and unequal factions.  And this is where Vernon Jordan enters the scene and shares a somewhat different and thus refreshing view of how to best honor the work done and progress achieved by Dr. King.

Who Is Vernon Jordan and What Does He Have to Say About MLK Jr.?

Vernon Jordan, who is African-American, graduated from Howard University Law School in 1960 and joined the firm of a prominent civil rights attorney in Atlanta as a law clerk earning $35 a week, eventually becoming a well-known civil rights advocate in his own right.  As a new lawyer, Jordan was part of an NAACP team  representing a young black man who, in a mere 48 hours, had been arrested, arraigned, indicted, tried, convicted and sentenced to death by electrocution.  That was a time when ‘colored’ people had to find outlying black-only motels when transacting business in the courts—or anywhere.  And because they were banned from restaurants, they had to buy food at a grocery store and eat in their car.

Mr. Jordan’s firm, which included Constance Motley, 1 sued the University of Georgia in Federal Court, alleging that its restrictive admission policies constituted racial discrimination.  Despite challenges and a stay that was reversed, the case concluded successfully for the plaintiffs in 1961 with the Court Order directing that the two named African American plaintiffs be admitted to the University.  (See Holmes v. Danner , 191 F. Supp. 394 (M. D. Ga. 1961.)  In 1970, having left his firm, Jordan became the executive director of the United Negro College Fund, and in 1971 he assumed the presidency of the National Urban League, a position he held until 1981 when he resigned to become legal counsel in the Washington, D.C. law office of a Texas firm. 

Aside from serving as a presidential advisor and a consultant to other high level government officials, and in demand for appointment to the boards of multiple corporations, Jordan has recently held the position of senior managing director for an investment banking firm.  He has also authored two books, most recently (2008) Make It Plain: Standing Up and Speaking Out , a collection of his public speeches with commentary.  The title certainly makes plain what Jordan has fought for all of his life and career.  This indefatigable humanitarian has continuously used his legal and oratory skills and his talent for advocacy to help move the dial forward on the task of eliminating racial injustice.

Vernon Jordan’s Characteristic ‘Call to Action’ as a Means to Change

It is on the stage before attentive audiences such as college graduates that Jordan is most effective.  In June of 2015, speaking to Stanford’s graduating class at a multi-faith celebration for the students and their families, he minced no words, instead urging the audience to be ‘ disturbers of the unjust peace ’.  Using a question from the prophet Isaiah: “Who will go, and whom shall we send?” as a basis for his message that day, Jordan said he prays the answer is “Here am I. Send me.”  He continued on: “ Send me to help clear the rubble of racism still strewn across this country.  Send me to be one of the bulldozers on behalf of equality and in the cleanup crews against injustice.  Send me to ‘disrupt’ injustice.  Send me to ‘hack’ bias and bigotry.  Send me to ‘lean in.”      

And now, ‘fast tracking’ right to 2018: Vernon Jordan, at 83 years of age, was invited by Dr. Otis Moss III, the young and engaging Senior Pastor of the Trinity United Church of Christ in the Washington Heights Community on Chicago’s South Side, to give the guest sermon at the Church’s September 30, 2018 Sunday morning service focused on ‘Honoring Our Elders’.  How did I learn about this meaningful event?  Attorney Juan Thomas , a member of the ISBA’s Standing Committee on Racial and Ethnic Minorities and the Law, had invited his REM colleagues—which includes me—to this special church service, and I decided to attend-with my husband Noel.  Besides being quite touched by the warm welcome we received from the congregants that day in a venue where we were two of just a handful of white people in attendance, we were moved by Pastor Moss’ sermon and by Mr. Jordan’s compelling insights.

The primary message Jordan conveyed is simple: While it is important to honor MLK Jr. for his accomplishments and celebrate his storied career as a civil rights activist, we cannot, must not, stop there as we often do, assuming it is enough to pay a yearly tribute to Dr. King as our means of supporting racial, ethnic and gender equality.  Instead, we have to keep King’s DREAM alive by working to achieve the goals he pursued.  In other words, we should consider ourselves the heirs of his legacy and take on the tasks he left to us—unfinished—until they are finished.              

What Can We Do to Make a Difference ‘Going Forward’?

For us to stay on track toward achieving justice for all, we must have strong leadership in our local, state and federal governments and in the private sector, as well as great teachers in our schools.  It is through the polls at each election and, of course, through our political discourse and educational systems, that we can encourage each new generation to attain a better understanding as to the positive outcomes when diverse communities live and work together in mutual respect for their differences.  We must also do what we can to assure that equal opportunities for achievement are available to all.  Part of this equation is having the will to speak up when we see imbalances and inequities.  It is especially important that, as lawyers, we also use our knowledge, our words, and our penchant for persuasion to convince others to join the movement and commit to action toward a more fair and just treatment of those groups in our communities who have no voice, no advocates, and waning hope.      Meanwhile, let’s not forget the upcoming 2021 Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday to be observed on Monday, January 18, 2021 . We hope you will join in the tributes likely taking place all over Chicago—especially in our public schools and in other public arenas, as Chicago is a City that particularly and warmly embraced King and to which he had many close ties.  Between 1956 and 1966 Dr. King gave three speeches at the University of Chicago’s well-known Rockefeller Chapel, all of which became famous for his inspiring messages and brought him to the attention of the public.

Resources for learning more:  If you wish to read more about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his legacy, check out the University of Chicago’s website at http://mlk.uchicago.edu/ which offers significant material about the subject, what the University is doing to pay tribute to Dr. King this year, and how to pursue ‘civic engagement’ toward increasing diversity and inclusion.  Much historic detail is available on the website for the National Park Service’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial located in Washington, D.C.  That site, though unable to provide continuing updates due to the current ‘shutdown’ of the Federal Government that is severely affection the NPS’s ability to take care of its various sites, is nevertheless at least accessible at: https://www.nps.gov/mlkm .  Teachers will also find many resources for observing the Holiday at www.MLKDay.gov .  For the young and older, participating in a ‘Day of Service’ as part of the MLK, Jr. Holiday is a way to help preserve Dr. King’s legacy and keep the torch of equality burning.

One additional reference is The Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta, Georgia, which Mrs. Coretta Scott King established in tribute to her husband, not as a ‘dead monument’ but as a living testimonial that would engage and empower visitors.  The King Center, a 23-Acre National Historic Site that invites and enables visitors to embark on a self-guided tour, includes a Library and an Archive and, as of last year, it had initiated a project for an “innovative digital strategy and conference series”.  Check it all out at http://thekingcenter.org .

1. Constance Motley , widely known as an early civil rights activist, was born in 1921, the ninth of twelve children, to parents who emigrated from the West Indies. At the age of 15, having been inspired by reading about civil rights heroes, Motley decided she wanted to be a lawyer—and ultimately became the second black woman to graduate from Columbia Law School where she met Thurgood Marshall, chief counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund where Motley worked while a law student.  She later clerked for Supreme Court Justice Marshall, became chief counsel herself of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and wrote the draft complaint for Brown v. Board of Education.  As a practicing attorney, Motley argued before the Supreme Court, winning nine out of her ten cases.  As lead counsel, Motley was also successful in defending protestors arrested in the early sixties for taking part in the Freedom Rides, and for helping James Meredith gain admission to the University of Mississippi in 1962.   Ultimately turning to the political arena, Motley became the first black woman to serve in the New York State Senate.  In another first for an African American woman, Motley became a federal judge when President Lyndon Johnson appointed her to the Manhattan Federal District Court in 1966.  After a very full and productive life, Constance Motley died in 2005 at the age of 84.    

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Article Contents

Introduction, postcolonial critiques of realism’s “race amnesia”, morgenthau’s quest for racial justice in mid-twentieth-century america, racial justice in morgenthau’s conception of the national interest, the national interest and racial justice in contemporary classical realist thought, fifth debate on race: an invitation.

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Toward IR’s “Fifth Debate”: Racial Justice and the National Interest in Classical Realism

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Haro Karkour, Felix Rösch, Toward IR’s “Fifth Debate”: Racial Justice and the National Interest in Classical Realism, International Studies Review , Volume 26, Issue 2, June 2024, viae030, https://doi.org/10.1093/isr/viae030

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This article addresses growing calls for a fifth debate on international relations’ (IR) “race amnesia.” The central argument is two-fold. First, contrary to conventional wisdom, racial justice was not omitted in “orthodox” scholarship—in particular Morgenthau’s realism. On the contrary, classical realists repeatedly critiqued the lack of racial justice throughout their careers. Second, racial justice was not only a concern for Morgenthau but also integral to his conception of the national interest, particularly in the Vietnam War. To Morgenthau, the national interest failed in Vietnam because the United States failed to define its purpose at home. Fundamental to its purpose was the question of racial justice. Morgenthau’s conception of the national interest has an enduring impact on contemporary realist scholarship. This scholarship engages with issues that are relevant to postcolonial IR, such as the pursuit of primacy in the War on Terror, the backlash in the form of Trumpism, and the Black Lives Matter protests. Morgenthau’s work provides the intellectual roots that sustain these arguments. For a fifth debate on race in IR to materialize, it is thus this neglected dimension in Morgenthau’s writing that postcolonial scholarship needs to engage with.

Este artículo aborda los crecientes llamamientos con relación a un quinto debate sobre la «amnesia racial» dentro de las RRII. La principal hipótesis se basa en dos puntos. En primer lugar, y en oposición a la creencia convencional, el mundo académico «ortodoxo», y en particular el realismo de Morgenthau, no omitió la justicia racial. Por el contrario, los realistas clásicos criticaron repetidamente la falta de justicia racial a lo largo de sus carreras. En segundo lugar, la justicia racial no sólo era una preocupación para Morgenthau, sino también representaba una parte integral de su concepción del interés nacional, particularmente en lo referente a la guerra de Vietnam. Para Morgenthau, el interés nacional fracasó en Vietnam porque Estados Unidos no supo definir sus propósitos a nivel interno. La cuestión de la justicia racial era fundamental para sus propósitos. La concepción del interés nacional por parte de Morgenthau tiene un impacto duradero en el campo académico realista contemporáneo. Este campo académico aborda temas que son relevantes para las RRII poscoloniales, como la búsqueda de la primacía en la Guerra contra el Terrorismo, la reacción violenta en forma de trumpismo y las protestas en el marco del movimiento « Black Lives Matter » (las vidas negras importan). El trabajo de Morgenthau proporciona las raíces intelectuales que sustentan estas hipótesis. Para que pueda materializarse un quinto debate con relación la raza en las RRII, es necesario que el campo académico poscolonial aborde esta dimensión, descuidada en los escritos de Morgenthau.

Cet article répond au nombre croissant d'appels à un cinquième débat sur « l'amnésie de la race » des RI. L'argument central est double. D'abord, contrairement à la sagesse populaire, la justice raciale n'a pas été omise dans la recherche « orthodoxe », en particulier dans le réalisme d'Hans Morgenthau. Au contraire, les réalistes classiques ont régulièrement critiqué l'absence de justice raciale tout au long de leur carrière. Ensuite, la justice raciale ne se contentait pas de préoccuper Hans Morgenthau : elle faisait partie intégrante de sa conception de l'intérêt national, notamment vis-à-vis de la guerre du Vietnam. Pour lui, l'intérêt national n'a pas prévalu au Vietnam parce que les États-Unis n'avaient pas défini la finalité de cette guerre au niveau national. La question de la justice raciale était déterminante pour sa finalité. Les effets de la conception d'Hans Morgenthau de l'intérêt national sont encore visibles sur la recherche réaliste contemporaine. Cette recherche traite de problématiques pertinentes pour les RI postcoloniales, comme la recherche de primauté dans la lutte contre le terrorisme, le retour de bâton sous la forme du trumpisme et les manifestations Black Lives Matter. Le travail d'Hans Morgenthau fournit les racines intellectuelles qui nourrissent ces arguments. Pour qu'un cinquième débat sur la race en RI voit le jour, il faut donc que la recherche postcoloniale s'intéresse à cette dimension négligée des écrits d'Hans Morgenthau.

In a recent article, Hobson (2022 ) urgently calls for a fifth great debate in international relations (IR). Unwittingly, he argues, large parts of the discipline provide an “apologia for racism” ( Hobson 2022 , 1) by not engaging with the racialized origins and nature of the discipline and world politics at large. However, Hobson is far from convinced that this necessary debate will take place anytime soon. He writes that

while a fifth great debate concerning the Eurocentric racism of orthodox international relations/international political economy is long overdue, unfortunately the chances of it occurring are slim to zero. This is partly because intradisciplinary dialogue between international relations’ orthodox and critical wings has completely broken down and partly because a simmering “white silence” of denial is the most likely response. ( Hobson 2022 , 16)

With the aim to address this concern and provide a productive starting point for this debate, this article reflects on the role of race in classical realist thought. This is because it is one of the earliest theories to have had an impact on the discipline as we know it today. What is more, in many contributions to postcolonial IR and critical IR at large, classical realism is perceived to be an antithesis to their scholarship because it represents an orthodox IR that has omitted race from its scholarship. To use Hobson’s (2022 , 13) words, “We find an evacuation and naturalization of Western empire in the classical realist work of Hans Morgenthau ... and other realists.” However, recent IR scholarship has shown that classical realism precisely can offer a base to (re-)start an intradisciplinary dialogue between orthodox and critical wings of the discipline. Solomon (2012 ), for example, was one of the first to show in the International Studies Review that classical realists considered emotions like love in their work, and reconsidering them offers fresh perspectives for the study of emotions in IR. Furthermore, Foulon and Meibauer (2020 ) have shown that realism can complement efforts to globalize IR by providing a historization and contextualization of state behavior and offering global case studies. Behr and Shani (2021 ) constructed a space for a pluriversal dialogue between different cosmologies based on their reading of mid-twentieth-century émigré scholars that are often linked to classical realism. Similarly, Karkour and Giese (2020 ) demonstrated that classical realist scholarship can serve as a bulwark against ideological camps in IR and rejuvenate a pluralist dialogue in the discipline. Finally, amongst others, Rösch and Watanabe (2017 )demonstrated that realism is not exclusively a Western constellation of theories, but their methods have been employed and their questions have been asked across time and space.

Inspired by this scholarship, we argue that the question of racial justice was important for classical realist scholarship and that a reconsideration of some of their concepts—in particular, the national interest—will help to get a fifth great debate in IR off the ground. For, not only were classical realist scholars informed in their own thought by considerations for racial justice, but they have also inspired contemporary contributions to IR in reconsidering (foreign) policymaking. In other words, the present article responds to Acharya’s (2014 , 650) urge to “rethink their [so-called orthodox or mainstream theories like realism] assumptions and broaden the scope of their investigations” not only by looking beyond what is commonly associated with realist scholarship but also by reflecting on the very core of classical realism. To provide evidence to our argument, we focus on arguably the most prolific classical realist scholar: Hans J. Morgenthau. Repeatedly, Morgenthau has been called out for being the archetypical representative of orthodox IR by perpetuating a conservative and even reactionary worldview that provided the ground to sustain and further incorporate racism into the fabric of the discipline and world politics. However, as Rosenberg et al. (2023 , 7; italics in the original) recently maintained, while “realism has functioned as the commonest target of critique ..., realism itself has functioned as a language of critique.” Demonstrating realism as a language of critique in terms of racism will help us to initiate this new great debate, as it reconsiders and rewrites the history of IR by gaining a different perspective of some of its core post-World War II representatives.

In doing so, we do not intend to offer a hagiographic reading of Morgenthau and his work but aim to demonstrate that questions of racial justice significantly informed his scholarship in an environment—academic and beyond—that had normalized racism and anti-Semitism. It is for this reason that we focus on two important events in which questions of racial justice can be most prominently distilled for Morgenthau’s thought: the civil rights movement in the United States and the Vietnam War. There are several reasons that justify this choice. First, it demonstrates that Morgenthau did not separate domestic from foreign affairs, as both realms influence and co-constitute each other. This will be particularly relevant for our discussion of Morgenthau’s national interest. Second, both were not singular events but were ongoing for much of Morgenthau’s career in the United States. What is more, as archival research and a longitudinal analysis of his entire work reveal, his stance on racial justice during these two events was informed by his earlier thought on the political during his European years and his own personal experiences of racism and forced migration in the 1930s. Finally, our choice highlights that, while Politics among Nations is Morgenthau’s most well-known work, he was a prolific writer, and his thought is most vividly expressed in essays and papers that he regularly published in newspapers, magazines, and journals but which have been until today hardly ever considered. Consequently, the argument in this paper is based on the study of Morgenthau’s most important academic contributions, such as Politics among Nations, The Purpose of American Politics , and Politics in the Twentieth Century , as well as on contributions intended for a wider audience and personal letters.

This paper proceeds in four steps. First, we summarize postcolonial critiques of classical realist scholarship before contextualizing Morgenthau and his work into mid-twentieth-century United States. In doing so, we particularly reflect on his stance toward the American civil rights movement and on the Vietnam War. Third, we zoom in onto Morgenthau’s concept of the national interest and unearth to what extent considerations of racial justice played a role for him in conceiving of it because, as Shilliam (2023 , 38) writes, “Hans Morgenthau identified domestic racism as a fundamental challenge to the national interest in the United Sates.” Finally, we consider how Morgenthau’s national interest and racial justice have informed IR scholarship to date and to what extent they can be seen as an invitation to start this fifth great debate.

For more than two decades, postcolonial IR has elaborated on how the discipline has (unwittingly) omitted race as a fundamental category of analysis of world politics. This “amnesia” about race according to postcolonial scholars—for example, Persaud and Walker (2001 ), Davis et al. (2020 ), Biswas (2021 ), Shilliam (2011 ), and  Vitalis (2000 )—was reflected in the silence about imperial violence against racial minorities in Western democracies and the former colonies. As Sankaran Krishna writes,

IR discourse's valorisation, indeed fetishisation, of abstraction is premised on a desire to escape history, to efface the violence, genocide, and theft that marked the encounter between the rest and the West in the post-Columbian era. Abstraction, usually presented as the desire of the discipline to engage in theory-building rather than in descriptive or historical analysis, is a screen that simultaneously rationalises and elides the details of these encounters. By encouraging students to display their virtuosity in abstraction, the discipline brackets questions of theft of land, violence, and slavery - the three processes that have historically underlain the unequal global order we now find ourselves in. ( Krishna 2001 , 401–2)

Similarly, Barder (2017 , 510) writes that “the concepts of race, racial hierarchy, and conflict received scant attention until very recently. Since the end of World War II, the previous century's concern with imperialism and anxieties over race have largely been forgotten or occluded.” Due to such an “escape” from history and neglect of questions of imperial and racial violence, postcolonial IR scholarship brands realism, classical and structural, as, at best, silent about racism. At worst, as racist. For example, in The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics , Hobson (2012 , 84) originally argued that realism, again both classical and structural, engaged in “subliminal Eurocentrism” by which he meant the theories sought “to sanitise or whitewash Western imperialism from the historical record of world politics.” “This move,” Hobson (2012 , 186) adds, “allows its representatives to speak a language that has appeared to be more socially acceptable in the post-Nazi/postcolonial era.” In particular, the language employed “conceptions of formal or informal hierarchy and gradated sovereignty” that left the West “the pioneering agent or subject of world politics while the East is portrayed as a passive object of the diktat of the Western great powers” ( Hobson 2012 , 186). Indeed, as Morcillo Laiz (2022 ) has shown, it was not only the language of IR that has been affected, but realist scholarship was also used to shape non-Western educational institutions and disciplinary boundaries to replicate the ones of the West. More recently, Hobson (2022 ) conceded that such Eurocentrism is, in fact, racism.

Henderson (2013 ) advances a similar claim to Hobson, linking, in a first step, classical and structural realism to anarchy and, in a second step, anarchy to racism and imperial violence. Thus, Henderson (2013 , 70) “examines the extent to which realism (and liberalism) are oriented by racist—primarily, white supremacist—precepts that inhere within their foundational construct, namely, anarchy.” “While realism and idealism converge on a white supremacist logic that has been evident since the establishment of the field of IR,” Henderson (2013 , 85) argues, “not only was this racism present at the creation of the field, but it continues to inform the major paradigms, primarily—though not uniquely—through their conceptions of anarchy.” Realism “roots its conception of anarchy in the Hobbesian view of the state of nature” ( Henderson 2013 , 80). The Hobbesian state of nature, however, does not describe “the general state of mankind”; instead, it is applicable to “non-Whites.” Thus, “a non-white people, indeed the very non-white people upon whose land his fellow Europeans were then encroaching, is [Hobbes’] only real-life example of people in a state of nature” ( Mills 1997 , 65). Henderson therefore concludes,

the concerns among realists and idealists with anarchy are grounded in a racist discourse that is concerned with the obligations of superior peoples to impose order on the anarchic domains of inferior peoples in order to prevent the chaos presumed to be endemic in the latter from spilling over into the former's territories or self-proclaimed spheres of interest. Similarly, the realist and idealist concern with power was grounded in a racist discourse concerned largely with the power of whites to control the tropics, subjugate its people, steal its resources and superimpose themselves through colonial administration. ( Henderson 2013 , 85)

In our view, the problem with these postcolonial critiques of realism is one of false generalization. The first generalization is with regard to the association of realism with Hobbesianism. In a letter to International Affairs , Morgenthau explicitly rejected Martin Wight’s Hobbesian interpretation of his work:

To say that a truth is “hidden” in an “extreme” dictum can hardly be called an endorsement of the dictum. To call a position “extreme” is not to identify oneself with the position but to disassociate oneself from it … I was trying to establish the point, in contrast to Hobbes's, that moral principles are universal and, hence, are not created by the state. ( Morgenthau 1959 , 52)

Our point here is not that Morgenthau simply critiqued Hobbes, but that he rejected Hobbesian thinking. 1 Hobbesian thinking reinforces a “racist dualism” that distinguishes between the realm of whites/civilization from the realm of non-whites/barbarism. The state of nature and/or anarchy apply only to the latter to rationalize colonial administration. As Morgenthau’s reply to Wight demonstrates, he rejected the idea that there is one set of moral principles for so-called civilized society and another for the realm of “anarchy” (that is to say, beyond the state). This rejection is also evident in the fact that anarchy is central to structural realism but not classical realism. 2 “The term anarchy is mentioned in Politics Among Nations only three times; and when Morgenthau refers to it, it is in a critical dissociation from Hobbes,” as Behr and Heath (2009 , 332) write. As the rest of our paper demonstrates, there is a lack of evidence from Morgenthau’s writings that he accepted “Hobbesian thinking.” Or, more specifically, that he rationalized “the construction of a hierarchical racial order to be imposed upon the anarchy allegedly arising from the tropics, which begged for rational colonial administration from whites” and/or “supported white racial domination through racial discrimination against non-white minorities at home” ( Henderson 2013 , 85). The evidence instead shows that Morgenthau was, in contrast, a critic of those who provided such rationalization and/or failed to address racial discrimination at home.

These generalizations are problematic because they lead to a gross misrepresentation of Morgenthau’s thought on the national interest and its relation to racial justice in America. In the next section, we contextualize Morgenthau’s quest on racial justice within the civil rights movement in mid-twentieth century America. After this, we outline in detail how Morgenthau incorporated his thought on racial justice into his conception of the national interest.

In the mid-1950s, Morgenthau reflected in a lengthy piece published in the Review of Politics on the state of his discipline. In it, and this deserves to be quoted at length to begin this section, Morgenthau (1955a , 446–7) summarized what in his opinion the task of political science would be

true to its moral commitment [political science] ought at the very least to be an unpopular undertaking. At its very best, it cannot help being a subversive and revolutionary force with regard to certain vested interests – intellectual, political, economic, social in general. For it must sit in continuous judgment upon political man and political society, measuring their truth, which is in good part a social convention, by its own. By doing so, it is not only an embarrassment to society intellectually, but it becomes also a political threat to the defenders or the opponents of the status quo or to both; for the social conventions about power, which political science cannot help subjecting to a critical – and often destructive – examination, are one of the main sources from which the claims to power, and hence power itself, derive.

Being critical of the socio-political status quo and challenging the vested interests that maintain it meant for Morgenthau that as an academic one is never solely a scholar but always also has to be an activist, to use a contemporary term. Around the same time that the Review of Politics paper was published, Morgenthau reiterated this point in a letter to Paul H. Nitze from February 12, 1955 ( Morgenthau 1955c , HJM Papers, Box 44). He wrote that “[p]olitical theory is both theory and action. It is action in that it identifies itself with a particular point of view. It is a theory in that it provides a rational demonstration of that particular point of view.” Being Jewish, having experienced the rise of fascism, and having been forced to migrate more than once, it was clear to Morgenthau since his days in Europe that as a scholar one has to counteract developments that threaten democracy and the peaceful cohabitation of people. Just before taking up a position in Geneva in the early 1930s, for example, Morgenthau left a lecture at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt disillusioned. Theoretical talks there about a “free-floating intelligentsia” seemed futile to him if they did not take notice of the Nazi henchmen on the streets and the dangers that they entailed for the Weimar Republic ( Morgenthau 1984 , 14). Later in the United States, he again faced developments that had the potential to threaten democracy at large from anti-Semitism and xenophobia in academia and beyond to radical-right political movements like McCarthyism. As was the case in Europe, he used his voice to raise concerns publicly about these developments, from teaching at Jewish community centers and adult education institutions to speaking nationally on TV and radio. 3

Specter (2022a , 162–3) is therefore right to argue that Morgenthau’s Haltung also evolved in the United States, but his was far from merely being conservative, as Levine (2013 ) implied, or even reactionary and racist. This is because having had these experiences, Morgenthau regularly stressed the importance of minorities for democracy—both as a dissenting voice and a corrective for the majority as well as the necessary other to gain understanding about the self in an ever-evolving process of becoming—in his work and as an activist. For example, he supported the careers of foreign academics in Chicago from the Austrian Gerald Stourzh to the Chinese Tsou Tang. Throughout his career in the United States, Morgenthau also criticized American governments for supporting fascist regimes in the name of anti-Communism. For example, after the CIA had supported a coup d'état against Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973, Morgenthau (1974 ) not only spoke in a letter to the editor of the New York Times against American support but went even further to argue that since World War II, the United States intervened “on behalf of ... fascist repression against ... radical reform” “with unfailing consistency.” He concluded that the United States “has become the foremost counterrevolutionary status quo power.” He was equally not convinced about the prospects of a “grand theory” for IR. This is because people speak with different tongues and through them, they give voice to different aspirations, emotional reactions, and values. Even if they would speak one language, the expression of their experiences would differ ( Morgenthau 1948 , 201–2). Consequently, no single theoretical endeavor can capture the diversity of political thought around the world ( Rösch 2022 , 209). In fact, all attempts in IR to develop such a theory thus far prioritized Western perspectives over others. In other words, Morgenthau spoke against a grand theory on similar grounds as Hobson (2022 , 9) brought forward. Trying to develop one would “manifest cultural racism,” as it “deploy[s] a heavily polarized Western-filtered lens” that would not appreciate “the non-West ... on its own terms.”

To further explicate the context that had normalized cultural racism and reflect on Morgenthau’s stance on racial justice, this paper now draws attention to Morgenthau’s reaction to two crises that he experienced after his forced migration to the United States in 1937: racial segregation and the civil rights movement as well as the Vietnam War. As mentioned, both crises highlight that for Morgenthau, the artificial separation of domestic and foreign politics did not do justice to the multiplicities of human relations and only would lead to a distorted understanding of reality. What is more, Morgenthau fervently argued for racial justice during these crises, as they had the potential to threaten American democracy at large ( Morgenthau 1970 , 32).

Racial Segregation, Civil Rights Movement, and the Crisis of American Democracy

The first issue that Morgenthau identified as an existential threat for American democracy was racial inequalities. With the end of World War II, the civil rights movement in the United States gained momentum, not least because many Black Americans had served in the armed forces to fight Nazism in Europe and the Japanese in the Asia-Pacific in the name of peace and democracy. Now, they also demanded equal opportunities at home. A watershed moment occurred in 1954, when the US Supreme Court declared in Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka racial segregation in schools as unconstitutional. Shortly thereafter, Rosa Parks became a national symbol of the civil rights movement in the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955–1956) for refusing to surrender her seat to a White person. A first culmination of the civil rights movement took place in August 1963, when Martin Luther King Jr. marched with approx. 250.000 people to Washington to demand jobs and freedom.

During this time, Morgenthau, then not yet the “national figure” ( Arendt and McCarthy 1995 , 217) that he became in the mid-1960s for publicly criticizing the Vietnam War, regularly advocated for racial justice. Trying to foster a public debate, this happened mainly in articles written for a wider non-academic audience in magazines like the Chicago Review, New Republic , or Commentary . Back then, the latter was not yet a neoconservative mouthpiece, but was still promoting ideas of the Jewish left. In these writings, Morgenthau (1970 , 210) criticized that the continued racial segregation was in fact at odds with “the distinctive characteristic of American society: equality in freedom.” Claiming to be a democracy, the US government needed to provide equal opportunities to all their citizens for them to pursue their social and economic aspirations ( Shilliam 2023 , 50). However, the situation was far from it because ruthless politicians securitized Black Americans to conceal the failure of their economic policies to address unemployment and poverty for American society at large in the mid-twentieth century. As a result, Morgenthau (1970 , 213) cautioned that resentments would grow and cause “anew the enmity of races and jeopardizing the ability of the government to govern without the continuous use of violence.” Furthermore, racial segregation not only had the potential to lead to more violence domestically, but Morgenthau also feared its impact on America’s standing in the world. Treating Black Americans as inferior to White Americans would undermine “the effectiveness of the ideological policies which it [the United States] pursues toward the native population of Africa” ( Morgenthau 1955b , 321; also Shilliam 2023 , 52). Eventually, he argued that it would not be America’s foreign affairs that would trigger a domino effect in which major non-aligned countries in Africa and elsewhere would opt to support the Soviet Union and fall for Communism, as then President Dwight D. Eisenhower claimed in the 1950s, but their domestic racial inequalities.

For Morgenthau, therefore, these inequalities affected the entire socio-political fabric of the United States. Racism “is a metastasized cancer to be treated by more complex and uncertain means” ( Morgenthau 1970 , 211). Enforcing policies “by legal enactment” ( Morgenthau 1970 , 210) would not solve these inequalities, as they would not do away with the underlying racist ideologies. Here, Morgenthau (2012 ; also Scheuerman 2008 ; Chas 2023 ) makes a similar point to one from more than 30 years earlier in his European writings. Settling for a way to live together in a society and how to balance its diversities is a constantly evolving process that involves all society members. In other words, it cannot be solved by legal means alone but requires a political solution. Only in a political sphere can the aforementioned equality in freedom be established. This is because freedom results “from the interplay of the totality of social forces, opposing, checking, supporting each other ... in ever changing configurations” ( Morgenthau 1958 , 122). By securitizing Black Americans and thereby politicizing their bodies and lives, however, a depoliticization of American society took place. The United States were no longer a “marketplace of ideas” ( Morgenthau 2004 , 69) that would capture American society in all its diversities because not all people could express their interests and opinions freely to an extent that they feel satisfied of having contributed to an ever-evolving understanding of the common good. Rather, for Morgenthau, continued racial segregation would eventually cause a clash of irreconcilable interests that breaks society into “neo-communities,” to use a term that the sociologist Reckwitz (2020 ) recently coined, meaning that particularistic, exclusionary discussions would evolve that no longer involve all society members. However, not engaging with others reduces the ability of people to restrain themselves, as they no longer encounter different perspectives that not only challenge but also invite them to reflect on and potentially revise their own perspectives. Hence, as Hom and Steele (2010 , 279) have shown, “restraint is the most reliable means to limit excesses,” and if restraint is missing, it may indeed lead to violence between these different neo-communities. In terms of racial injustice, mass violence had happened before Morgenthau arrived in the United States like the Tulsa Race Massacre (1921) and he had to witness them himself like the Newark Riots (1967). Transcending racial segregation was therefore for Morgenthau essential to protect democracies from imploding, causing even more disruption and violence, as only in democratic political spheres racism could be curtailed.

Morgenthau was unsure, however, if the nation-state constituted the right form of sociation to address racial inequalities and if liberal modernity in which nation-states were embedded was in fact causing these inequalities. Much has been written about Morgenthau promoting the idea of a global form of sociation that transcends the nation-state (e.g., Scheuerman 2011 ; Kostagiannis 2014 ; Karkour 2022a ). Often, these contributions focus on Morgenthau’s concern about states having the ability to destroy humanity altogether since the nuclear bomb was invented. However, when recent readings of Morgenthau identify a “tragic” ( Lebow 2003 ) and even “apocalyptic” ( McQueen 2018 ) streak in his work, it was also because of pressing concerns about racial inequalities and societal frictions created through the very existence of the nation-state. National narratives of homogeneity and uniqueness, which are the essence of the nation-state for Morgenthau, always entail the creation of otherness. However, othering people forfeit at the same time the raison d'être of the nation-state to be able to secure freedom for its people. This is one of the reasons that turns the nation-state into a “blind and potent monster,” of which he warned during the early 1960s ( Morgenthau 1962a , 61). A few years later, in the essay collection Truth and Power , he further elaborated on what he meant by that, arguing that “[a] government possessed of unprecedented power [through weapons of mass destruction] appears to be impotent in the face of the threat of social disintegration and the promise of social justice” ( Morgenthau 1970 , 32). As Morgenthau witnessed himself, not trying to address these inequalities, potentially even furthering them to secure the status quo, might not only disintegrate the affected states through violent domestic outbursts but might also pave the way for fascism or other forms of totalitarian governments ( Morgenthau 1970 , 37).

Vietnam War, Colonialism, and the Crisis of Ethics

The second event that highlighted for Morgenthau an existential threat to American democracy caused by a lack of racial justice was the Vietnam War. It is by now well known that Morgenthau fiercely opposed this war for which he paid a personal price. According to his own accounts ( Morgenthau 1970 , 16; see also Molloy 2020 , 330), the FBI operated a “Project Morgenthau,” 4 during which his tax revenues were scrutinized for inconsistencies, to search for material to incriminate him. While the existence of such a project has not been conclusively confirmed, the Department of Defense indeed never again consulted his expertise, and numerous letters addressed to Morgenthau have been preserved in his archive at the Library of Congress that tell a grim story of personal attacks against him. In a letter to Walter Lippmann from May 6, 1965 ( Morgenthau 1965a , HJM Papers, Box 36), he consequently reports that “I receive every day letters with xenophobic, red-baiting, and anti-Semitic attacks, not to speak of anonymous telephone calls at all hours of the day and night.”

In recent years, a substantial body of literature has emerged that provided IR with in-depth knowledge about Morgenthau’s anti-Vietnam War stance (e.g., See 2001 ; Zambernardi 2011 ; Klusmeyer 2016 ; Karkour 2018 ; Reichwein 2021 ; Kirshner 2022 ). While these writings could help to question interpretations of Morgenthau simply opposing the war due to military and political misjudgments, Morgenthau’s concerns about racial justice were equally a stimulus for his critique and have yet to be considered in more detail. In fact, the Vietnam War had convinced him that American foreign policy was involved in the enforcement of a paternalistic, even racist worldview. Critically employing Aristotle’s distinction between master and slave, Morgenthau discussed with his students in the early 1970s how American foreign policy was a continuation of Western imperialism that had subjugated other people for centuries based on racialized worldviews of Western superiority.

The paternalistic conception of the justification of slavery was based upon the Aristotelian principle; that is, to take good care of the slave was regarded as a moral principle. The master took care of the slave because the slave couldn't take care of himself. So you have here an assimilation of the relationship between a father and a child … If you look at the justification for colonialism in Great Britain you find a very similar conception. If you read for instance the essay of John Stuart Mill on nonintervention, you'll find it the most fantastic ideological justification of British policy … Mill makes a point that Britain has never interfered in the affairs of other nations, and when it has as in the case of India, it was only for the good of the barbarians. Here were again people who could not take care of their own affairs and were in a semi-barbaric state. The British would bring the enlightened principles of human life to those disadvantaged barbarians. ( Morgenthau 2004 , 34) 5

In other words, Morgenthau criticized in these lectures American foreign policy for operating on racial inequalities that did not acknowledge the agency of other, particularly non-Western people to pursue their own political goals. However, sharing his concerns about American foreign policy with his students was not on the spur of the moment, but was the result of a prolonged reflection on what kind of foreign policy would be needed for the United States in an age of decolonization and in the context of the Vietnam War. Several years before the seminars on Aristotle’s distinction between master and slave took place in late 1971, Morgenthau (1969 ) conceived of A New Foreign Policy for the United States . In this book, he had already elaborated on a critique of John Stuart Mill and his notion of non-intervention to highlight the misguided American intervention in Vietnam ( Morgenthau 1969 , 114–8).

We therefore disagree with the claim that Morgenthau did not critique America’s involvement due to anti-imperialism (e.g., Guilhot 2014 ; Specter 2022a ). In fact, this is precisely what Morgenthau did. The United States had misjudged for Morgenthau the conflict in Mainland Southeast Asia. The Vietnamese did not rise against the French to establish a communist regime—not least because of their historical opposition to the main communist country in the region, China—but they fought an anti-colonial war for “national liberation” ( Morgenthau 1965b , 25). Communism only served the Vietnamese as a vehicle to achieve independence from France, and their communism differed from the ones in the Soviet Union or China, as they all pursued their own goals in their own contexts ( Morgenthau 1968 , 30; 1969 , 132). In addition to the Vietnam War, Morgenthau’s critique of American foreign policy objectifying non-Western people and what Hobson (2022 , 13; italics in the original) calls “benign liberal imperialism of Britain and America” can be seen in his stance toward foreign aid. As he stressed on several occasions, foreign aid is not only a technical operation to provide food, shelter, or skillsets but depends “upon the existence of a political and social environment conducive to it” ( Morgenthau 1962b , 267). Morgenthau received much criticism for it, as exemplified in a letter from a resident of Washington on May 21, 1976: “You white people, with your condescension, and paternalism, and I suspect racism too, are sickening” ( Fort 1976 , HJM Papers, Box 20). However, criticizing US foreign policy as paternalistic for not granting agency to others also meant that Morgenthau would criticize governments in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere for not using their agency to pursue a common good that had evolved out of discussions involving the whole of society but to satisfy their own vested interests. In other words, demanding racial justice entailed for Morgenthau not only equal opportunities but also was part of a wider “ethic of responsibility” ( Klusmeyer 2009 , 344; Stullerova 2021 , 120).

As recent contributions to the discipline have shown (e.g., Long and Schmidt 2005 ; Isaac 2012 ; Specter 2022a ), the United States pursued such paternalistic, racist foreign policies already before World War II. For Morgenthau, however, arriving in the United States with very little knowledge about the country prior to his forced migration, it was particularly since the end of the war that such a worldview came to dominate its foreign policy. In the United States, Morgenthau (1958 , 176) argued, a new form of nationalism had emerged that was “in its truth a political religion, a nationalistic universalism which identifies the standards and goals of a particular nation with the principles that govern the universe.” Narratives of uniqueness in combination with a positivistic faith in the prospects of science turned into what Morgenthau (2004 , 36) referred to his students as “cultural blinders” and what Hobson (2022 , 4–5) called an “apparently neutral cultural rhetoric.” These blinders were so pervasive, dominating people’s (world) political imaginaries, that they concealed the structural racism that was woven in the social fabric of the United States. Consequently, foreign policymakers also approached external relations with “ethnocentric arrogance” ( Winsor 1969 , 7), as Morgenthau once called it in an interview, rather than considering socio-political and cultural contexts that would have provided them with a more intricate understanding of the issues the United States was engaged in ( Devetak 2018 ). Being an émigré scholar helped Morgenthau (1960b ) to identify these blinders because his “great advantage is that ... he can look at it [the United States] from within and also with the critical objectivity of an outsider. So he knows where the foundations, emotional and social, are weak,” as put in an Indian review of his work. Many high-ranking politicians of that time, by contrast, recognized this—if at all—only in hindsight. Former US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, for example, remarked in the 2003 documentary The Fog of War that the insight information provided by Llewellyn Thompson, who previously had been US ambassador to the Soviet Union, helped to deescalate the Cuban Missile Crisis. McNamara also realized that this expert knowledge on Vietnam was missing and caused the United States to intervene in this anti-colonial war. 6

Instead, political problems were solved through seemingly “technically self-sufficient and ... simple, clear-cut solutions” ( Morgenthau 1965b , 70). It is for this reason that Morgenthau considered American foreign policy during the Vietnam War inadequate because it did not consider the specific historical Vietnamese context but tried to response to what happened there with policies that were successful in Europe more than 20 years earlier. However, “the problems Americans are facing in Asia are utterly different from those they successfully dealt with in Europe two decades ago, and the political world they were facing in Europe has been radically transformed” ( Morgenthau 1968 , 30; similar 1969 , 130). In a letter to Irving Kristol, then the editor of the anti-Stalinist British magazine Encounter , from August 20, 1956 ( Morgenthau 1956 , HJM Papers, Box 34), Morgenthau had already outlined that “nationalism ... [in] Europe is entirely different from [the one] ... in Asia and Africa, a difference which we are unable to see because we project our conception of nationalism and our experience with it onto Asia and Africa.” This demonstrates that reflexivity was a key trait for Morgenthau to avoid essentializing one’s own position and neglecting racial and other differences in public opinion-making, 7 as carefully elaborated by Molloy (2020 ) in more detail. To return to the lengthy quote of Morgenthau at the beginning of this section, “[d]issensus and healthy debate characterize genuine democracy for Morgenthau who was perturbed by what he perceived to be a worrying concern with conformity and consensus among the political and academic elites of Vietnam War era America” ( Molloy 2020 , 321).

Building upon the previous section that showed Morgenthau’s quest for racial justice in the mid-twentieth century in America, an element of his work that has been largely unacknowledged in IR so far, this section focuses on one of Morgenthau’s misunderstood concepts—the national interest—to highlight how Morgenthau incorporated racial justice in his conception of the national interest.

While ultimately Morgenthau wanted to transcend a world of nation-states and argued for a new world order ( Scheuerman 2011 ; McKeil 2023 ), he argued in The Purpose of American Politics that America cannot define its national interest without a clear sense of its national purpose. Morgenthau defined America’s national purpose as “equality in freedom.” Writing in 1960, Morgenthau noted that America was not capable of coming to a consensus over its national interest due to its failure to define this sense of purpose. To define the nation’s purpose, Morgenthau argued, each generation of Americans needed to ask themselves anew: What does equality in freedom mean in the present historical context? In the context of his writing, such definition could not omit a key problem in American society: racial equality. “When we speak of equality in freedom in America and pride ourselves on its achievement,” Morgenthau (1960a , 306) wrote, “we cannot ignore what has been a hindrance to its full achievement—that is, the denial of racial equality.” America’s national interest, therefore, ought to involve a spatio-temporal negotiation of its basic principles of equality and freedom. “The unequal condition of the black American,” Morgenthau (1970 , 209–10) wrote a decade later in Truth and Power , “has been an endemic denial of the purpose for the sake of which the United States of America was created and which, in aspiration and partial fulfillment has remained the distinctive characteristic of American society; equality in freedom.” “Less than thirty years ago,” Morgenthau added, “I had to deal with American consuls who considered it their patriotic duty to violate the law in order to prevent the immigration of Jews; once I was here, I could not find a place to sleep in the White Mountains of New Hampshire until I registered under my wife's maiden name.” Racial justice was therefore integral to Morgenthau’s thinking about the American national interest. The national interest could not be devoid from the transcendental standards that American society seeks to achieve, albeit cannot realize fully once and for all. Instead, each generation of Americans held a responsibility to redefine it; provide “equality in freedom” a concrete spatio-temporal meaning.

Morgenthau’s critique of American society, as the events in Vietnam were unfolding, was precisely in that it failed to negotiate its sense of purpose and grapple with the reality of racial injustice. Resonating with his earlier European discussions of the concept of the political ( Morgenthau 2012 ), such failure was ultimately the reason why America could not find consensus on its national interest. Morgenthau’s understanding of the national interest therefore is different from how structural realists would conceptualize it later on, simply in terms of the balance of power abroad. While considerations of the balance of power are important, they were not sufficient according to Morgenthau ( Molloy 2013 ; Karkour 2022b ). Without a higher sense of purpose, equality in freedom defined in terms of racial justice at home and abroad, Morgenthau castigated the transformation of America into “a soulless giant, armed to the teeth and producing abundantly, but for no other end than to stay ahead of the Russians” ( Morgenthau 1960a , 299). By contrast, Morgenthau (1960a , 299) argued that “our national purpose is not to stay ahead of the Russians quantitatively ... but to be different from, and superior to, them in those qualities which are peculiarly our own.” The key quality that America possesses is ensuring that “equality in freedom still has a home in America and still worthy of emulation” ( Morgenthau 1960a , 299). Nor is “equality in freedom” a question to be settled at home alone, but rather “the new significance of America as a model of equality” pertains also to “the nations emerging from colonial and semi-colonial status” ( Morgenthau 1960a , 301). In other words, racial justice at home ought to also represent a model for America to become a model for racial justice abroad. In failing to achieve this, Morgenthau noted, “What an irony it would be if the majority of mankind were to achieve the American purpose for itself in opposition to America!” ( Morgenthau 1960a , 307). Morgenthau’s concern in this regard is epitomized in a letter to Senator Joseph S. Clark from January 7, 1967 ( Morgenthau 1967 , HJM Papers, Box 9) in which he complained about a Department of Defense sponsored propaganda movie distributed to schools that omitted Vietnamese anti-colonial struggles from its narrative. He concluded the letter, claiming that “I don't need to point to the ominous meaning that such a development [the ideological interference of the Department of Defense in public opinion-making] could have for the future of American democracy.” Morgenthau saw the struggle for racial justice at home as integral to America’s support for the global movement against colonialism and racial inequality abroad: “the racial minorities of America are in the process of merging into that vast movement of non-white peoples, comprising four fifth of mankind who demand equality” ( Morgenthau 1960a , 307). This means that the anti-colonial struggles for racial justice are not antithetical to America’s national interest but rather integral to it: “These peoples have undertaken to achieve for themselves and in relation to the white man what American has offered to the world as its purpose: equality in freedom” ( Morgenthau 1960a , 307).

Morgenthau’s articulation of America’s purpose as fundamental to its national interest is well grounded in his classical realist theory. Upon closer reading, in his famous “six principles of political realism,” Morgenthau already argued that the national interest does not have a set meaning once and for all: “the kind of interest determining political action in a particular period of history depends upon the political and cultural context within which foreign policy is formulated” ( Morgenthau 1978 , 9; also Morgenthau 1952 , 972). Racial justice was an obvious question in the political and cultural context of 1960s America. Morgenthau argued that it was not only contrary to America’s sense of purpose, equality in freedom, to fail to address it domestically and expand its horizon internationally, but also a threat to “‘the very survival of America”’ ( Morgenthau 1960a , 299). America’s purpose, thus, is not just “a matter of social justice” but “the survival of America depends on it” ( Morgenthau 1960a , 300). 8 This is because, first, it would leave America on the wrong side of history; “alone in a hostile world” ( Morgenthau 1960a , 300). Secondly, due to the advent of nuclear weapons, this failure will potentially bring an end to humanity itself. The monumental task of expanding the horizon of equality in freedom, to Morgenthau, was thus a steppingstone to “build the foundations for a supranational order that will take the control of nuclear weapons out of the hands of the nation state” ( Morgenthau 1960a , 310). Morgenthau’s call here to expand the horizon of equality in freedom as a precondition for a supranational order may seem like a contradiction with his realist theory. Morgenthau, however, remains consistent with his theory: “The failures of Wilson, of foreign aid and liberation” Morgenthau writes, “teach us that neither the export of American institutions nor verbal commitments without deeds will serve our purpose” ( Morgenthau 1960a , 310). In line with his critique of the “crusading spirit” in his “six principles of political realism,” Morgenthau rejects America’s imposition of foreign rule or institutions. Instead, Morgenthau argues for the restoration of democracy in America and the defense of freedom at home ( Morgenthau 1960a , 311–23). In other words, America must lead by example at home, and it is this example, “established in the eyes of the world by deeds”’ that ought to one day be the foundation on which “‘the worldwide influence of America must rest” ( Morgenthau 1960a , 310).

This reading contradicts postcolonial critiques of Morgenthau in Vietnam. Nicolas Guilhot (2014 , 714), for example, writes that “Morgenthau's 1965 denunciation of US policy in Vietnam, is not based on a principled opposition to imperialism, but on a clear discernment of what constitutes, at a given historical moment, the national interest of the United States.” Morgenthau’s analysis, thus, “is the same analysis that sustains recent realist critiques of US ventures in Iraq or Afghanistan, such as John Mearsheimer's” ( Guilhot 2014 , 714). In light of the war in the Ukraine and Mearsheimer’s claim that the West had forced Russia into attacking the Ukraine, the critique of realism as enabling imperialism once again resurfaced. Specter (2022b , 71; italics in the original) highlights in a recent piece for Dissent , a magazine in which also Morgenthau published during the Vietnam War, that there is a “larger story of realism's imperial investments. Realism was not born in the 1930 s but the 1880 s and ‘90 s, a period when both the terms ‘geopolitics’ and Lebensraum (living space) were first coined.” In The Atlantic Realists , Specter (2022a , 3) adds that “[r]ealism,” Morgenthau included, offers “an ideological justification for empire.” We have in contrast demonstrated that Morgenthau was a critic of those who rationalized imperialism based on paternalistic views that characterize others as “children” and/or “barbarians.” We have also demonstrated, again in contrast to Guilhot and the wider postcolonial scholarship, that the national interest according to Morgenthau meant something fundamentally different from structural realists, such as Mearsheimer, whose primary consideration was American hegemony pursued via a strategy of “offshore balancing” ( Mearsheimer 2018 ; Mearsheimer and Walt 2016 ). While “a plethora of neo-realists became cooks in the ‘kitchen of power,’” Politics Among Nations originated as a reflexive attempt to critique the ideological rationalization of power, as Behr and Heath (2009 , 345). Rather than an instrument of “offshore balancing,” Morgenthau’s national interest was more a “critical device” for a reflexive analysis of foreign policy ( Behr 2013 ). By “reflexive,” it is meant here an analysis that is aware of the self-deceptive nature, and thus limitation of, power ( Morgenthau 1959 ; also Cozette 2008 ; Scheuerman 2010 ; Rösch 2014 ; Behr and Williams 2017 ; Molloy 2020 ). The national interest entails a critique of power—including the blind pursuit of military and economic power without transcendental moral standards that address issues such as racial justice in America and the former colonies.

Morgenthau saw that increased militarism abroad and America’s failure to define its national interest, on the one hand, as representative of a failure of democracy at home. On the other hand, this failure risked eroding US democracy further. It led to an “imperial presidency” and eroded trust in government, opening the path for “someone else, more likely than not a demagogue or demagogic elite catering to popular emotions and prejudices who will create a public opinion in support of a certain policy more likely than not to be unsound and dangerous” ( Morgenthau 1960a , 264). Foreign and domestic policies in Morgenthau’s realism therefore were inextricably linked. Foreign policy did not begin where domestic policy has ended. Rather, failure to define America’s purpose at home, in terms of racial equality, also has a bearing on its failure to recognize this purpose and the national interest abroad. “Anarchy” did not intervene, as with structural realists, to separate liberalism at home from power politics abroad ( Bessner and Guilhot 2015 ).

There is a range of emerging classical realist literature in IR today that employs Morgenthau’s understanding of the national interest, its link to democracy, and racial justice at home. This literature shows that Morgenthau’s thought on racial justice and its relation to the national interest remains relevant to the discipline, in particular to current debates on US militarism in light of the War on Terror and the domestic backlash, in the form of Trumpism and the recent Black Lives Matter protests. A fifth debate on race in IR, if there is to be one, requires engagement with this neglected dimension in Morgenthau’s writing and its contemporary applications.

Racial justice remains relevant to the contemporary classical realist conceptions of the national interest. The critique that classical realist works present of US foreign policy in this regard remains distinct from structural realism. As with Morgenthau’s analysis of the failure of US policy in Vietnam, contemporary classical realist literature does not perceive foreign and domestic policy as separate realms. Rather, US militarism abroad on one hand, and racial justice and democracy at home on the other, are closely intertwined.

In their recent work, David Blagden and Patrick Porter present an analysis of US military involvement in the Middle East that draws on some of the concerns that Morgenthau earlier presented in Vietnam. “Realists,” Blagden and Porter argue, “worry about the domestic consequences of an overmilitarized and expansive foreign policy.” Indeed, Morgenthau was concerned that the excessive use of force in Vietnam would not only lead to policy failure but also threaten democracy at home by giving demagogues an opportunity to capitalize on the consequences of such failure ( Morgenthau 1960a , 264–5). Similarly, Blagden and Porter (2021 , 33) point out that “two decades of conflict in the name of combating global terrorism and defeating alien enemies accentuated the rise of an unhealthy, xenophobic, and paranoid populism.” The Global War on Terror created a narrative of national security “around dangerous fanatical foreigners’ that “inadvertently heightened xenophobia... increased toxic and potentially violent identity politics and racial divides” ( Blagden and Porter 2021 , 39). The consequence was a heighted national security state and surveillance of racial minorities at home. As Bali (2020 , para. 1) put it in light of the Black Lives Matter protests, Trump described “purported lawlessness in cities like Portland and Chicago as ‘worse than Afghanistan.’” Battlefields abroad served as laboratories “for counterinsurgency methods that are imported back into domestic policing” ( Bali 2020 , para. 3), while furnishing “a new enemy within” based on racial categories. “Military adventures,” Morefield and Porter (2020 , para. 12) write, created “a global battle space that ... ‘boomeranged’ back on the US, loosening restraint on the use of military violence at home.” In short, as with Morgenthau, contemporary classical realist works account for the relationship between the national interest on the one hand, and the question of racial justice and democracy on the other. Militarism abroad, caused by a failure of America to define its national interest in terms of its sense of purpose and equality in freedom, remains intertwined with American democracy and the deterioration of race relations at home.

Due to this close interconnection between foreign policy and democracy at home, the aforementioned scholars argued that there was a need to reform US foreign policy. Recent works inspired by Morgenthau’s writing took the task of presenting this reform. For example, to address the problem of mistrust in government elites that Morgenthau identified, scholars inspired by Morgenthau called for democratizing US foreign policy. Influenced by Morgenthau’s (2004 , 75) and other realists’ like Hannah Arendt admiration for American town hall meetings, current scholarship seeks ways to rejuvenate them. Karkour (2022a ) argued for the establishment of local branches of Think Tanks beyond the major cities to offer avenues for deliberation over the national interest in light of America’s sense of national purpose. Behr (2019 ) has shown that in deciding upon a (foreign) policy strategy, politicians’ decisions have to take the contingency and ephemerality of the national interest into account. To achieve this, Behr argued that it would be irresponsible to enact policies with irreversible outcomes. Rather, politicians need to consider the reversibility of their decisions, as the national interest is always in flux and continuously changes due to changing circumstances. This scholarship challenged the common misconception in the discipline that Morgenthau was cynical about democratic control of foreign policy ( Ripsman 2002 , 34). Rather, the latest scholarship clarified that, according to Morgenthau (1960a ), the government needs to play a leadership role in the debate over the national interest, namely to present a narrative over the nation’s purpose, equality in freedom, and let the citizens deliberate over how it ought to be defined in the present spatio-temporal context. Democratizing American foreign policy is a policy tool today to address challenges not only posed by American foreign policy but also the failure of democracy and the question of racial justice at home, both of which were undermined by continuous militarism abroad. This dynamic, as noted in the works of Porter, Blagden, Morefield, Karkour, Behr, and others, contributed to the rise of demagoguery in the form of Trumpism and the deterioration of race relations by the targeting of racial minorities, as Morgenthau predicted over half a century ago. As Karkour (2022a , 586) concludes, “the democratization of US foreign policy is essential, on the one hand to empower the individual through enabling political engagement, and on the other to divert foreign policy from demagoguery and popular prejudices.”

In sum, the literature outlined in this section shows that Morgenthau’s thought on racial justice and its relation to the national interest remains relevant to the discipline, in particular to current debates on militarism in US foreign policy and its interlink with democracy and racial justice at home.

Our central argument in this article was two-fold. First, contrary to conventional wisdom in postcolonial IR (and IR more generally), racial justice was not omitted in “orthodox” scholarship—in particular Morgenthau’s realism. On the contrary, classical realists repeatedly critiqued the lack of racial justice throughout their careers, not least because political developments in Europe and later in the United States required them to do so. This is because they were often also targets of racial abuse. Second, and importantly, racial justice was not only a concern for Morgenthau but also integral to his conception of the national interest, particularly with regard the Vietnam War. To Morgenthau, the failure in Vietnam was not simply a failure to assess the balance of power or follow what later realists refer to as a strategy of “offshore balancing” to maintain it. Rather, the national interest failed abroad because the United States failed to define its purpose at home. Fundamental to its purpose was the question of racial justice. The United States thus embarked in an anti-colonial war. Imperial violence in the former colony was a reflection of racial violence against minorities at home. Militarism abroad reflected the failure of democracy at home, and the longer the war lasted the further democracy at home eroded.

Morgenthau’s conception of the national interest, which links foreign policy to domestic politics, has an enduring impact on contemporary realist scholarship. Examples of this scholarship, as summarized in the last section of the article, engage with issues that are relevant to postcolonial IR, such as the pursuit of primacy and militarism in the War on Terror, the recent backlash in the form of Trumpism and populism at large as well as the Black Lives Matter protests ( Shilliam 2023 ). Morgenthau’s work provides the intellectual roots that sustain these arguments and their contemporary policy solutions to democratize foreign policy. If postcolonial scholars, such as Hobson, Henderson, and others, wish to engage in a fifth debate on race in IR, it is thus this neglected dimension in Morgenthau’s writing that this scholarship should take into account. On many occasions, such as with questions of race, social equality, and colonialism, postcolonial scholarship would find a kindred spirit in classical realist scholarship. As Steele (2009 , 357) wrote 15 years ago in this journal, “We may be coming to a point in the field of International Relations theory ... where the seeds of a pluralism planted some twenty years ago are reaping a mighty harvest.” He added that “[w]hat the trailblazers ... could not envision was that ... the pluralist infusion would allow today's IR scholars to engage classical realist texts in a critical and insightful manner.” As of yet, however, this envisioning has hardly happened as we still do not listen “to other campfire tales” ( Sylvester 2013 , 621) in IR. While we do not expect postcolonial scholarship to agree with Morgenthau’s reasoning and conclusions, we believe that outlining them not only would increase IR’s harvest more widely but also present a suitable starting point to launch this much-needed debate in the discipline.

We thank one of our reviewers for raising this distinction between the critique of Hobbes and Hobbesian thinking.

Indeed, Henderson (2013 , 84–8) who presents this critique engages primarily with Waltz and presents no evidence that anarchy was fundamental to Morgenthau.

See, for example, leaflets and transcripts in Hans J. Morgenthau Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Boxes 3, 87, and 91.

In a letter to Martin F. Herz from May 14, 1969, Morgenthau spoke of an “Operation Morgenthau.” See Hans J. Morgenthau Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Box 26.

In addition to the British Empire, Morgenthau also specifically criticizes the Spanish Empire and the American annexation of the Philippines.

McNamara recounts these episodes in the first lesson on “Empathize with your enemy.” For a digital copy, see https://bit.ly/3O7oAyz (accessed August 8, 2023).

Morgenthau (2004 , 36) particularly mentioned gender inequalities in his Aristotle-Lectures. In this sense, Morgenthau’s critique of racism resonates with recent attempts to conceptualize race as a material and spatio-temporal relation of power ( Harper-Shipman et al 2021 ).

For Morgenthau, survival is the minimum requirement of the national interest: “The survival of a political unit, such as a nation, in its identity is the irreducible minimum, the necessary element of its interests vis-a-vis other units” ( 1952 , 973). The “balancing mechanism,” whose aim is to preserve the nation’s survival, would only clash with America’s purpose if by defending racial justice, America would jeopardize its own existence. We use the term “would” here because the statement is hypothetical. Morgenthau considered the opposite to be the case in 1960s America: not addressing racial justice was the threat to the national interest’s minimum requirement, America’s survival. We thank one of our reviewers for raising this question on the clash between balancing mechanisms and the national purpose.

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