Blocked from voting by and large, lacking representation in the political
arena, Montgomery's black citizens understood that, like their nineteenth-
century forebears who fought slavery, democracy meant that they "must them-
selves strike the blow." They must act as their own agents of change. They
came to believe, as their preeminent leader told them, that "the great glory of
democracy is the right to protest for right." Just as they and their ancestors had
tilled hard soil, planted seeds, harvested crops, hewn wood, repaired tools,
cooked food, sewn clothes--for whites but also for themselves--so democracy,
they found, was something palpable to hold and mold in their own hands, to
carry forward step by step. Democracy too had its seasons and cycles. The
journey mattered. Democracy was more than a right, more than a respon-
sibility. It was a pantheon of hope and faith.

These citizens' reach for democracy was rooted in the churches, scriptures,
and spirituals that tied them to their divinity and to generations past and not
yet born. They made Montgomery a praying movement, a testament to their
faith in God and, through God, faith in themselves. A testament to God's
grace.

Their Bibles and preachers taught them that they were God's chosen peo-
ple like the children of Israel. The bus boycott consummated this faith, made
it surge alive in mass meetings, car pools, and weary soulful walking. Every
day they were moving toward the Promised Land. The mass church-based
protest exalted them as makers of history, bearers of God's will. The sense of
divine mission catapulted their self-esteem, their dignity, their collective self-
confidence. They believed that they were building, through toil, sacrifice, and
sharing, a "new Jerusalem" in Montgomery and "a new heaven and a new
earth" in the dispirited South. In this land of fulfilled promises, justice would
"roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream." Every person
would be revealed as a child of God.

Black people of Montgomery believed that they were breaking a new day.

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