-Jack Selzer
After our tour of Montgomery, Randall Williams took us to a dinner at Bistro B along with a number of other Montgomery citizens: veterans of the bus boycott (e.g., Nelson Malden, MLK's barber), local community activists (e.g., Robert James), others involved with the movement (e.g., Deborah Carr).
Reverend Charlie Croskery was at our table. Eighty years old now and a 40-year board member of the Montgomery Improvement Association, Rev. Croskery was hard to hear because his voice is giving out and because the acoustics in our bistro weren't very good. But what he had to say spoke very loudly. We asked him to recall the period of the bus boycott in 1955-1956, and when he indicated that he was there when Dr. King spoke to the community at Holt Street Baptist Church early in December, 1955, the hair stood up on my neck. It was like hearing from someone who had listened to "The Gettysburg Address." Rev Croskery was in his early 20s at the time, and he (like many in the community) had never heard of Dr King before that evening, since Dr King was new to Montgomery and just 26 years old. Rev Croskery came to the meeting expecting not to be a supporter of the boycott--after all, the black community was fragmented into small churches that had their own agendas (he said); the boycott was going to inconvenience a great many people; he had no knowledge of Mrs Rosa Parks. He said the whole community was similarly skeptical. But by the end of Dr King's great extemporaneous speech as leader of the new Montgomery Improvement Association, Rev Croskery was fully convinced and a ready supporter; he still recalled with great animation Dr King's delivery and message and the electricity that he generated. More than that, he was now inspired to enter the ministry himself, and he's still very active in the ministry of his Zion Hill Baptist Church on Rosa Parks Avenue in Montgomery. Rev Croskery told us other stories about the terrorism of the Klan in the 1950s, about the fact that Green's Department Store downtown was quite friendly to black shoppers in 1955, and about other details related to the bus boycott.
In his remarkable "Holt Street Address" in 1955 Martin Luther King Jr predicted that "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, [with] 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.'" His prediction certainly has come true, and I left our dinner feeling that I was fortunate indeed to have met some of those great American heroes--one of them Reverend Charlie Croskery.
After our tour of Montgomery, Randall Williams took us to a dinner at Bistro B along with a number of other Montgomery citizens: veterans of the bus boycott (e.g., Nelson Malden, MLK's barber), local community activists (e.g., Robert James), others involved with the movement (e.g., Deborah Carr).
Reverend Charlie Croskery was at our table. Eighty years old now and a 40-year board member of the Montgomery Improvement Association, Rev. Croskery was hard to hear because his voice is giving out and because the acoustics in our bistro weren't very good. But what he had to say spoke very loudly. We asked him to recall the period of the bus boycott in 1955-1956, and when he indicated that he was there when Dr. King spoke to the community at Holt Street Baptist Church early in December, 1955, the hair stood up on my neck. It was like hearing from someone who had listened to "The Gettysburg Address." Rev Croskery was in his early 20s at the time, and he (like many in the community) had never heard of Dr King before that evening, since Dr King was new to Montgomery and just 26 years old. Rev Croskery came to the meeting expecting not to be a supporter of the boycott--after all, the black community was fragmented into small churches that had their own agendas (he said); the boycott was going to inconvenience a great many people; he had no knowledge of Mrs Rosa Parks. He said the whole community was similarly skeptical. But by the end of Dr King's great extemporaneous speech as leader of the new Montgomery Improvement Association, Rev Croskery was fully convinced and a ready supporter; he still recalled with great animation Dr King's delivery and message and the electricity that he generated. More than that, he was now inspired to enter the ministry himself, and he's still very active in the ministry of his Zion Hill Baptist Church on Rosa Parks Avenue in Montgomery. Rev Croskery told us other stories about the terrorism of the Klan in the 1950s, about the fact that Green's Department Store downtown was quite friendly to black shoppers in 1955, and about other details related to the bus boycott.
In his remarkable "Holt Street Address" in 1955 Martin Luther King Jr predicted that "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, [with] 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.'" His prediction certainly has come true, and I left our dinner feeling that I was fortunate indeed to have met some of those great American heroes--one of them Reverend Charlie Croskery.