Reply #77: don't boycott the buses in Montgomery! [View All]

[William Z. Foster]

What about the employees of the bus line?

Do you know who pressured the British government not to recognize the Confederacy? The workers in the textile mills in England whose jobs were threatened by the Union blockade of cotton.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott a year-long protest in Montgomery, Alabama, that galvanized the American Civil Rights Movement and led to a 1956 decision by the Supreme Court of the United States declaring segregated seating on buses unconstitutional.

In December 1955, 42,000 black residents of Montgomery began a year-long boycott of city buses ( Montgomery Bus Boycott ) to protest racially segregated seating. After 381 days of taking taxis, carpooling, and walking the hostile streets of Montgomery, African Americans eventually won their fight to desegregate seating on public buses, not only in Montgomery, but throughout the United States.

The protest was first organized by the Women's Political Council as a one-day boycott to coincide with the trial of Rosa Parks, who had been arrested on December 1, 1955, for refusing to give up her seat to a white man on a segregated Montgomery bus. By the next morning, the council, led by JoAnn Robinson, had printed 52,000 fliers asking Montgomery blacks to stay off public buses on December 5, the day of the trial. Meanwhile, labor activist E. D. Nixon, who had bailed Parks out of jail, notified Ralph Abernathy, minister of the First Baptist Church, and Martin Luther King Jr., the new minister at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, of Parks's arrest. A group of about 50 black leaders and one white minister, Robert Graetz, gathered in the basement of King's church to endorse the boycott and begin planning a massive rally for the evening of the trial. Graetz offered his support from the pulpit of his predominantly white Lutheran church. The Montgomery Chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which had been looking for a test case for segregation, began preparing for the legal challenge.

more...

http://www.africanaonline.com/montgomery.htm

By July 1862 the supply of raw cotton to Britain had dwindled to one third of its pre-war level. Three quarters of the cotton mill workers were unemployed or on short time, and charity and the dole could not ward off hardship and restiveness in many Lancashire working class districts. The Chancellor of the Exchequor, Willian E Gladstone, feared there would be an outbreak of rioting unless something was done to relieve the distress. Gladstone favoured a British intevention to stop the war, thus improving the flow of cotton across the Atlantic.

Despite the hardships however, rather surprisingly, the attitute of British textile workers was not in general opposed to the conflict. An American Minister, Charles Adams, writing in December 1862, commented that whilst "the great body of the aristocracy and commercial classes are anxious to see the United States go to pieces", there was still a lot of sympathy among the middle and lower classes towards the struggle against slavery. There were, it must be admitted, a few demonstrations by the working classes but these seem to be aimed more at the British Government for the poverty and unemployment being suffered rather then against the Americans themselves. Support for the Union came also from leading radicals like Karl Marx and John Bright who saw the conflict as a Class struggle, and from Liberal interlectuals who saw the Southern states as a "power of evil" and an "enemy of progress".

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070722104033AAYJUHM

In Britain, the textile industry had come to a virtual standstill due to the Union blockade of the South’s cotton exports. Yet, the working people of Britain rebuffed the attempts of demagogues to direct their anger against the North.

Guelzo writes: "Between January and March 1863, a series of mass demonstrations in Manchester and London cheered Lincoln and his proclamation. Lincoln replied that they would have the 'admiration, esteem and the most reciprocal feelings of friendship among the American people'"

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/jun2004/linc-j02.shtml