Let My People Go! The Miracle of the Montgomery Bus Boycott (review)

J A N U A R Y 2 0 0 9 75 Fenians dreamed of a republic and not a worker state. While maintaining class privilege generally animated southern whites, it was subsidiary to the rediscovery of the political power that military defeat in 1865 had taken away. In charting the parallel and overlapping connections of these three groups, Snay has made a major contribution to the historiography. Snay presents a fine study by drawing upon a rich range of primary sources, newspapers, and periodicals, and by locating the study within a large and complex historiography, which he ably marshals. While Fenians, Freedman, and Southern Whites has many achievements, one aspect stands out: the rediscovery of Irish Americans who previously have been afforded very little space in the history of postbellum America. This important book deserves a wide readership and will earn a place of note in the vibrant history of the Reconstruction Era. DONALD M. MACRAILD University of Ulster Let My People Go! The Miracle of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. By Robert J. Walker. Lanham, Md.: Hamilton Books, 2007. x, 358 pp. $47.00. ISBN 978-0-7618-3706-0. An educator at Alabama State University, Robert J. Walker views his book as a corrective to the “often overlooked fact that God was the true initiator of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Civil Rights Movement” (p. 6). While historians have long recognized religion’s inspirational role in the movement, for Walker the movement was “an act of divine intervention” (p. 6) and African Americans were God’s chosen people for redeeming the nation. Walker regards slavery, segregation, and racism as evils inspired by Satan and challenges to them evidence of God’s intervention in history. While offering a detailed narrative account of the boycott, Walker claims “this book is more inspirational than anything else. When you finish reading, you will be inspired to activism” (p. 6). Clearly, then, this is not, and is not intended to be, a conventional history , with the historian’s focus on long and short-term causative factors, and the role of chance and accident. God is referred to on almost every page. Most chapters begin with an extensive biblical quotation and end with conversational invitations to relax, take a break, enjoy the story, or, when appropriate, reflect on Walker’s often vivid descriptions of the damage wrought by segregation and racism. T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 76 Walker is a former fifth-grade teacher in the Jackson, Mississippi, public school system, and he writes in a style intended to enable ready understanding by fifth graders and above. An African American from Columbus, Mississippi, who grew up in the segregated South, Walker finds “it interesting that most of the books written today on the Civil Rights Movement are written by white historians” (p. 28). He warns that “100 years from now white historians may attempt to rewrite the history of the Montgomery Bus Boycott” and cast Rosa Parks, whose arrest for refusing to give up a seat to a white person sparked the boycott, “as a sympathetic middle-aged white woman who decided to sit in the colored section to point out the injustice of the Montgomery Bus Segregation laws” (p. 28). Walker relies heavily on nonarchival primary materials, including memoirs, contemporary and retrospective newspaper stories, and a few interviews by himself and others. The result is narrative-driven history, rich in detail but lacking analytical thrust and new insights. The bibliography omits key secondary works, such as J. Mills Thornton’s “Challenge and Response in the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-1956” (Alabama Review 33, July 1980), David J. Garrow’s Bearing the Cross (New York, 1986), Adam Fairclough’s To Redeem the Soul of America (Athens, Ga., 1987), and Taylor Branch’s Parting the Waters (New York, 1988). Nevertheless, Walker recognizes the complexity and diversity of Montgomery’s African American and white communities. He gives due weight to the crucial role of black women in the boycott, discusses the contribution of sympathetic whites, and notes conflict among organizers and opponents. Although he attributes the protesters’ victory to God, Walker...