“Daughter of The Boycott,” An exciting new side of The story of The Civil Rights Movement In Alabama

Black History Month is a nice time of year, twenty-eight days to be exact, to celebrate the history of African Americans. However, since I’ve been an adult, I’ve come to feel that celebrating our heritage is a 365 days a year job. For all of us. If you are Polish, be proud and celebrate your heritage. If you are Jewish, be proud and celebrate your heritage or faith. If you are Irish, celebrate, and of course, if you come from the Motherland of Africa, hold your head high like the Kings and Queens who were our Ancestors, and be proud. Celebrate and claim your culture as one of my former News Directors, Karen Warrington used to say. If you were born here in America, however, you understand and acknowledge that your roots are tied to the Motherland, that’s something to be exhilarated about. Claim it.
I acknowledge that I am an African American woman, and I’m proud of it. I believe my roots to be from Western Africa. I also know that based on the history my mother’s mother gave me, my grandmother, Sophia Abney, I acknowledge we have some native Indian blood in our veins. I also strongly suspect that in my bloodline there is some European American, as in Slave Owners. All you have to do is look at the photos of my father’s mother, my fraternal grandmother, and look at her five sisters. All of them were very fair-skinned, so pale. Truly they looked like white women. All of them had grey, green or hazel-colored eyes, and all of them had long silky hair that hung down to their buttocks. Again, I’m guessing here, but I’m thinking probably my great-great-great-grandmother was probably raped by her white Slave Master, and that’s where all that fair skin on my father’s side of the family came from. Bottom line, treasure your heritage and the skin you’re in.
Now, for “Daughter of the Boycott,” Carrying On A Montgomery Family’s Civil Rights Legacy, written by Karen Gray Houston, is a Black history book you will treasure if you read it. There are many things I enjoyed about the book as I read it, but certainly, one of the things that excited me is learning about new, important figures in the Bus Boycott movement of Montgomery, Alabama, that you never read about in history books, or hear people talk about. Maybe the people in Montgomery, Alabama, talk about their local history. In fact, I’m sure they do, but everyone across the United States and beyond should know about all the “moving parts,” if you will, that helped to make the Montgomery, Alabama Boycott a success at the end of the process.
To set the stage, the author of the book has readers go back to the year 1950, before the Montgomery, Alabama Bus Boycott. This was also pre-Rosa Parks bus action.
A man named Thomas Gray was the father of the author of “Daughter of the Boycott.” When a friend of his he had played football with was murdered by a white police officer–for no real reason, that was the fire that ignited the spirit in Thomas Gray to become a Civil Rights Activist. It wasn’t a “label” that he put on himself, but that is what he was. After the murder of that friend, Hilliard Brooks, He led a march through downtown Montgomery, encouraging people to register to vote and stand up against police brutality.
Fast-forward to 1955 and Thomas Gray found himself leading another protest, this time against the idea of segregated busing. Thomas Gray had all kinds of threats hurled at him, including threats to bomb his home.
Thomas Gray would ultimately go on to become an attorney at law, but even before he got there, his brother Fred D. Gray had already earned his law degree, and he represented Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, and another woman, whose name gets left out when the story of the Montgomery Boycott is told, Claudette Colvin. She was one of the plaintiffs in the case that forced Alabama to change its ways and desegregate its bus system.
Karen Gray Houston is an award-winning broadcast journalist whose career has spanned more than four decades, including twenty years as a local news reporter for Washington, D.C.’s WTTG-TV, Fox 5. She was a correspondent for NBC News covering the Regan White House and the U.S. Capitol, an anchor for the ABC Radio Network, and a reporter/anchor for WTOP news radio in D.C. and WHDH-AM Boston.
The daughter of Madame CJ. Walker, A’Lelia Bundles, had this to say about the book, “Everything Karen Gray Houston accomplished as a journalist prepared her to tell this story in a truly authentic and masterful way, as no one else can tell it.”
To say anything more about “Daughter of the Boycott,” would be to take away from the enjoyment of reading the book and learning the history. Google Karen Gray Houston’s name, and that will lead you to how to purchase the book or ask for it next time you go to your area bookstore.