equality that had been raised up for a generation by abolitionists black and
white, transcendentalists, women's rights activists, and other disturbers of the
peace. Just as the Declaration of Independence had been concretized by the
Constitution, so Lincoln's linking of liberty and equality was incorporated in
the three Civil War amendments that abolished slavery, gave citizenship and
legal rights to African Americans, and enfranchised black men. But the un-
folding of freedom was far from finished.

For the freed people freedom and equal rights, even the very words, were
twisted into new forms of enslavement and exploitation. The Jim Crow caste
system of segregation, at first an expedient and then a whole culture and way
of life, persisted for nearly a century, empowered by the systematic disem-
powerment of black men and women (and poor whites) by force, fraud, and
reform. Black protests were sporadic, isolated, and short. Federal court deci-
sions began undoing segregation slowly, in measured paces. Then in the
mid-1950s a newly urban community of African Americans in the Alabama
capital rose up to challenge Jim Crow. Organizing and mobilizing their peo-
ple for over a year, black citizens dramatized in everyday life the popular
sovereignty envisioned by the Declaration of Independence and the Constitu-
tion's preamble. They injected the energy and spirit of democracy--living
grassroots democracy--into their bittersweet inheritance of freedom and
equality.

The actions of Montgomery's black citizenry, along with the words leaders
spoke from pulpits that ennobled and immortalized the mass protest, con-
stituted the nation's third founding--the first in Philadelphia, the second at
Gettysburg, the third in the "Cradle of the Confederacy." The Montgomery
bus boycott made democracy tangible and heartfelt for those who took part in
it and for wider circles swayed by its ripples--a shared communal awakening
that commingled politics, emotion, and spirituality. Montgomery's demo-
cratic, moment was its own, unique, unrepeatable, and far from flawless, but
its vital elements took hold as standards for the epic black freedom movement
that grew from it-and to some degree in later struggles for liberation, from
South Africa to Prague to Tienanmen Square.

Montgomery showed that democracy cannot bloom without community.
The richer the communal soil, the stronger its democratic shoots. The bus
boycott exemplified an unparalleled unity across class lines that black move-
ments have dreamt about since. The driving force of it all was thousands of
African American women, middle class and working class, active in churches,
clubs, and sororities. They transplanted democracy from their sheltered sanc-
tuaries to public streets and squares. They turned faith and friendship from
the healing balm of survival into the fire of defiance and transformation.

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