US News and world report, 1956 article on Rosa Parks (pro/con)
(main title: Remembering Rosa Parks on Her 100th Birthday)
Alabama's Bus Boycott: WHAT IT'S ALL ABOUT
For eight months Negroes in Montgomery, Ala., have maintained a boycott against that city's buses because races are segregated in seating. This has become one of the nation's major tests on the issue of segregation.
In the texts presented here, this boycott is discussed and evaluated by two men on opposite sides of the dispute. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a Baptist minister in Montgomery, states the Negro side, and Grover C. Hall, Jr., editor in chief of The Montgomery Advertiser, answers Dr. King.
The questions they raise, however, go far beyond the Montgomery bus boycott. Dr. King describes the bus dispute as only a part of a continuous and growing struggle by Negroes for full equality. In this struggle, he says, Negroes "cannot afford to slow up."
Mr. Hall calls the boycott a "supreme folly" on the part of the Negroes. He says the result is a hardening of attitude among the whites, who dare not yield on buses "lest they lie routed in the schools."
http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/press-past/2013/02/04/remembering-rosa-parks-on-her-100th-birthday
CON: Remarks Opposing the Montgomery Bus Boycott
By Grover C. Hall, Jr.
One way or the other, whites will continue to ride segregated. Negroes will continue to ride in a pool of 200 cars and 14 station wagons, so long as the sumptuary ardor of Northern citizens maintains a flow of $5,000 a week to the car pool. This could go on for years, with the whites hurting not at all, except for the bus line that is largely a Negro utility. There is absolutely no pressure whatever to lift the boycott. So, for Dr. King, the "lone and level sands stretch far away."
In Dr. King's hortatory emissions, he explains that "He who lives by the sword shall perish by the sword." Perhaps, as time goes on for the young man, he will have occasion, in lapses of euphoria, to ponder another wise saw, secular but arresting: "Who draws his sword upon a prince must throw away the scabbard."
This way or that, the whites are going to ride. There isn't going to be any desegregation of buses for, before that, the bus line would be abolished. The question for Dr. King is, therefore, how long he can maintain his jitney transportation for his 50,000 followers. If, a year or two from now, the Negro car pool strips its gears and conks out—well, Dr. King is in charge of the Contingency Division of the bus boycott, and I will not intrude.
But meanwhile, everybody is riding to work on one of the two bus lines, and Montgomery continues to get its share of the world's work done without loss of efficiency. Whites no longer talk about the bus boycott. That Negroes do not ride the buses in Montgomery is established as a virtual folkway. We white devils are offering passive resistance, though we do not talk quite so much about "love" as Dr. King.
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