Bronze roundels memorialize boycott foot soldiers

All Americans associate Rosa Parks and the Rev. Martin Luther king Jr. with the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955-56).

Some, especially Montgomerians, might also associate Aurelia Browder, Susie McDonald, Claudette Colvin, Mary Louise Smith, Edgar D. Nixon, Clifford and Virginia Durr, Fred Gray, Ralph Abernathy, E.N. French, Rufus Lewis, Joe Ann Robinson, Johnnie Carr, Irene West, Bayard Rustin, Glenn Smiley, Georgia Gilmore, Mother Pollard, T.J. Jemison, Robert Hughes, E.L. Posey, Willie Edwards and Robert Graetz with the boycott.

The non-violent, civic disobedience, however, would not have been successful without the participation of thousands of largely unknown Montgomerians, the boycott foot soldiers. Just as the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery marches would be a decade later, the boycott was a mass movement, and one that was sustained for 381 days. Some participants, such as the military wives from Maxwell Air Force Base who helped with carpooling, have almost been lost to the historic record.

The Montgomery Street façade of the Rosa Parks Library and Museum has 10 bronze bas-relief roundels titled “Tribute to Montgomery’s ‘Foot Soldiers.’ ” The roundels highlight 10 events: Rosa Parks’ Arrest (being fingerprinted), The Lone Passenger (one passenger on a bus), Mass Meeting (at a church), Protesting Injustice (marching with boycott signs), Car Pooling (E.L. Posey’s parking lot), Refusing to Ride (two women passing a bus with its door open), Empty Parked Buses, Police Surveillance (of Posey carpool parking lot), Foot Soldiers Sharing a Ride (blacks boarding a bus), and Victory Ride (Rosa Parks with a white man seated behind her).

Troy University Montgomery planned some outdoor memorial to the Bus Boycott. After all, Rosa Parks refused to get up and relinquish her seat to a white man at this very spot on Montgomery Street. Consequently, in 1999 the Rosa Parks Library and Museum was designed with an open arcade facing the street.

In 2006, Hyundai Motor Manufacturing of Alabama provided an $80,000 grant for a Bus Boycott monument. Winfred Alan Hawkins, who had created a portrait of Rosa Parks that was given to her at the dedication of the library in 2000, was commissioned to design the 10 bas-relief roundels. It took a year to complete casting the bronze, three-foot diameter roundels.

Hawkins, a native of Montgomery, began drawing as a child. At Booker T. Washington Magnet High School, his artwork was conventional. At the Savannah College of Art and Design, from which he graduated in 2007, his work began to shift to the avant-garde. (His 10 bronze bas-relief roundels, however, are examples of a centuries-old form, not avant-garde at all, but then he began to work on them in high school.)

His work today is anything but conventional — a contemporary Surrealism. Several years ago, nerve damage forced the left-hander to learn to work with his right hand and to use Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustration. Hawkins’ artistic talents go beyond drawing, watercolor painting and graphic design: he writes poetry and, before the nerve damage, played guitar and bass.

In late October, his work, including banners and small sculptures, can be seen in the gallery of Alabama State University’s Fine Arts Building. His work also can be seen online by Googling “artistry of Winfred Hawkins.” The multitalented young artist is a graphic designer at Auburn Montgomery.

The boycott itself was narrowly focused on ending the policy of racial segregation on Montgomery’s public buses. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Alabama and Montgomery laws requiring segregated buses were unconstitutional. The court ordered the state to desegregate the buses. The city passed an ordinance allowing black bus passengers to sit where they chose.

White backlash was almost immediate. A shotgun was fired through the front door of Martin Luther King’s parsonage. White men attacked a black teenager as she got off a bus. Two buses were fired on, and a pregnant woman was hit in both legs. Five black churches and a parsonage were destroyed by bombs. (Although seven men were charged with the bombings, all were acquitted.) The city suspended bus services for several weeks. After bus services were resumed, klansmen lynched a black man.

Ironically, by 1963, after having exercised their right to sit where they pleased, most Montgomery blacks gravitated to the back of the bus. Over time, whites eventually deserted the buses.

Yet, the Montgomery Bus Boycott was a stone thrown into a pond. It helped set in motion a national civil rights movement.

Historian Benton writes from Montgomery.