The Courage of Robert Graetz
On Monday night, December 5, 1955, the Rev. Robert Graetz worked his way through a dense crowd of 6,000 at Holt Street Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. The church was so filled that Graetz had to stand in the crowded fellowship hall and listen to the meeting taking place upstairs; loudspeakers were set up outside so onlookers could hear.
The meeting began with the singing of “Onward Christian Soldiers” and “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.” Graetz sang along downstairs, awed by “a mighty ring like the glad echo of heaven itself.” One minister offered a prayer, and another read passages from Psalm 34: “The righteous cry, and the Lord heareth, and delivereth them out of all their troubles.”
Then the slow, articulate words of one youthful minister brought on a deafening attentiveness. “We are not wrong,” Martin Luther King, Jr., preached. “If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong.” He added, “We are determined here in Montgomery to work and fight until justice runs down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
When the meeting ended, Graetz was filled with the glory of a good cause. “I was now part of a movement destined to launch the modern civil rights movement,” he recalled.
Earlier in the day, Graetz left his home and drove around Montgomery. The day had arrived: Black citizens were boycotting the buses in protest of Rosa Parks’ arrest just four days earlier for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger.
The morning of December 5, Graetz saw people “striding along as if they didn’t have a care in the world, their heads held high, their faces covered with smiles.” In support, Graetz drove many walkers to work and to the store. “A new day had dawned in Montgomery,” he recalled. “We didn’t know it at the time, but a new day had dawned for America as well.”
For the next several weeks, Graetz drove his black neighbors to work from six to nine every morning. He and wife, Jeannie, and their children lived in a black neighborhood, and were neighbors and close friends of Rosa Parks. His support made him popular, at least in the black community.
But Graetz’s steadfast support of the Montgomery Bus Boycott came at a cost. As the only white minister in Montgomery to stand with King and the movement, Graetz and his family were treated as traitors by their white peers. Angry phone calls were common, as were threatening letters (one writer suggested that Graetz be hanged like John Brown). One day the tires on the family car were slashed and sugar poured into the gasoline tank.
But that was only the beginning. Graetz was harassed by local police; the sheriff tried to charge him for illegally operating a taxi service, but a judge found no legal grounds. Instead, the sheriff lectured Graetz on the error of his ways and released him. Later, Graetz was indicted along with King. Klansmen drove intimidatingly past his house.
Then his home was bombed, not once but twice. In the second bombing, a larger bomb—with enough dynamite to flatten the house—failed to explode. As with the Kings, had one child been in the front room of the Graetz house, they would have died or been seriously injured.
Like Daniel, Graetz was in the lion’s den. But the “misguided” white pastor pressed on undeterred. “We don’t want people to think we’ve started to get panicky,” Graetz told the public after the second bombing. “We have not moved, and we do not intend to.”
When the Supreme Court ruled bus segregation unlawful in Browder v. Gayle, Graetz and King each rode the first ever desegregated buses in Montgomery. “It was a victory for all of us.”
In 1958, the Graetz family moved to Columbus, Ohio. Before they left, the Kings visited and said goodbye. In Graetz’s autographed copy of King’s memoir of the boycott, King wrote, “In appreciation for your genuine goodwill, your unswerving devotion to the principle of freedom and justice, and your willingness to suffer and sacrifice in order to make Montgomery’s stride toward freedom a lasting inspiration. Martin.”