Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story

"Stride Toward Freedom is Martin Luther King’s personal account of the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955, which lasted for 381 days. During segregation, in some areas of the South, black people, who paid the same fares as white riders, were forced to sit in the back of the bus and give up their seats to white passengers if there weren’t enough. Rosa Parks sparked the boycott. But an incredibly bright and articulate 26 year old man known as Martin Luther King emerged as a leader of the protests. He incorporated Gandhi’s principles of nonviolence, which he learned from other leaders. He went on to galvanise the civil rights movement and win the Nobel peace prize. Progressives need to read and reread this book because if you want to know anything about advancing progressive values, you need to know about the best example of progressive success in the last 100 years, the American civil rights movement. It is an example within the memory of many people in which ordinary citizens took on the system, with dignity and unity, and won. People were killed, people were bombed, people were blasted with hoses and yet they prevailed. I’d recommend this book to anyone who wants to know how to press for change and for anyone who doubts that things do change and ordinary people can change them. They’re the heart and soul of it. We take all colours, all cultures and all faiths. We take you as you are. We accept you as a person with dignity, without regard to whether you have a disability, without regard to whether you’re an immigrant, without regard to whether you’re gay or lesbian or Muslim or anything. We embrace the diversity of America. We embrace this idea of liberty and justice for all. So the struggle that converted our society from a racial hierarchy into a truer democracy – you can’t be a progressive and be ignorant about it. In the 21st century, we’ve got to make sure that new Americans are treated with respect – so we’re fighting for immigration reform. We’re also standing against some of the xenophobia that has emerged. We want to make sure that America remembers how much new Americans contribute to our society. Then, there’s the fact that the gay community is still subject to hate crimes, mistreatment, discrimination and bullying that leads to suicides. This is something that we’ve got to stand up to as a society. Then, of course, a lot of anti-Muslim stuff has flared up, including ethnic profiling and this recent ridiculous myth that American Muslims want to impose their religious law on others. Not one city, one state or one Muslim has attempted to institute sharia law in the United States, yet we’ve got laws passed to ban it. These are attempts to make it illegal to be Muslim, despite our constitutional commitment to freedom of religion. We still have good old American racism. We still have racial disparities in health, in sentencing. If you listen to the Southern Poverty Law Center , the people who are most often the target of hate crimes are still black Americans. And anti-semitism still rears its ugly head. We’ve got a lot to fight."