Ramsey: Walking with the Wind (12/11/2025)

1 By the end of that year, I was chewing myself up with questions and frustration and, yes, anger—anger not at white people in particular but at the system that encouraged and allowed this kind of hatred and inhumanity to exist. I couldn’t accept the way things were, I just couldn’t. I loved my parents mightily, but I could not live the way they did, taking the world as it was presented to them and doing the best they could with it. In a lot of ways I saw them as far stronger than I would ever be. It’s simple to criticize people of another time for not acting as we would today. It’s easy to judge the past, looking through the filter of the present. But that is a mistake. No one can truly know what it was like to be faced with the challenges and realities of a certain time and place unless he or she has actually lived through it. There was no weakness in the way my parents and others of their generation shouldered the burden of their time and made the best of it. Fighting back was hardly an option for them. Fight back against whom? With what? My parents, and millions of other black men and women just like them, bore their load through an age of unbelievable oppression with a grace and a dignity I could only hope to come close to. Theirs was not a time nor a place for turning and facing the system.

2 But as I began to come of age in the mid-1950s, the landscape had begun to shift. The time had come. I could feel it. I could see it. I saw it up north, in the rulings that were coming down from the courts. I saw it at home, in the South, where the lines of white backlash and violence were being drawn in response to those rulings. And, in December of that landmark year, 1955, I saw it just up the highway, in Montgomery, where that man, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., took the words I’d heard him preach over the radio and put them into action in a way that set the course of my life from that point on. With all that I have experienced in the past half century, I can still say without question that the Montgomery bus boycott changed my life more than any other event before or since.

3 My parents didn’t know Rosa Parks, but they knew plenty of women like her. More than a few of the wives and mothers in Carter’s Quarters often worked in Montgomery, doing the same kinds of domestic work Rosa Parks did. Some of them may well have occasionally ridden the same bus Mrs. Parks regularly rode, the one on which she was arrested the first day of that December for refusing to give up her seat to a white man. But whether any of us knew her or not before that day, we all felt that we knew her after it.

4 Montgomery was just fifty miles away. I’d been there only once myself, on a day trip I took by train with an uncle my seventh-grade year. But my parents and my neighbors knew Montgomery. Our minister lived there. Most of my teachers were from there. Even though we lived far out in the Alabama woods, we were connected to Montgomery in many ways. We were part of the place. And when that young minister, the Reverend King, in his role as the president of a group called the Montgomery Improvement Association, launched a black boycott of those buses, we felt we were a part of that as well.

5 It went on for more than a year, and I followed it almost every day, either in the newspapers or on radio. This was riveting. This was real. I’d hear firsthand accounts of what the mood was like over in Montgomery from the grown-ups who lived or worked there. They’d describe buses normally full of black passengers now riding up and down the city streets with no one inside them. This wasn’t just talk. This was action. And it was a different kind of action from anything I’d heard of before. This was a fight, but it was a different way of fighting. It wasn’t about confrontation or violence. Those 50,000 black men and women in Montgomery were using their will and their dignity to take a stand, to resist. They weren’t responding with their fists; they were speaking with their feet.

6 There was something about that kind of protest that appealed to me, that felt very, very right. I knew nothing about the philosophy of nonviolence or passive resistance—not yet—but I’d always had a visceral aversion to violence of any sort. I was just born that way. It had nothing to do with fear or cowardice. The only things I was afraid of in this world were lightning and snakes. But violence of any sort sickened me. One of my earliest memories—I couldn’t have been older than four—was of my mother pleading with my father one afternoon not to leave the house. He had a shotgun in his hand, his face was full of anger, and he was trying to push past my mother toward the door. I don’t know to this day what it was about, what had happened out there, beyond that door. But I knew what I saw in my mother’s face. It had anguish and terror written all over it. “Don’t do it!” I remember watching her plead with my father as she pushed her body full-up against his. “Buddy, please don’t do it!”

7 I have never heard my mother beg for anything from anyone my entire life, but she was begging my father that day. And I’ve never forgotten it. My brothers all grew up hunting, just like my father. They still love to hunt, every one of them. But I have never been hunting in my life, never fired a gun, never even held one in my hands until I visited the Middle East in 1993. The reason, I’m sure, has much to do with my inborn nature. But there’s no question that that scene between my parents had a profound impact as well.

8 Just as profound was watching the Montgomery boycott play itself out. My parents would talk about “that young preacher” who was leading this thing, and I could sense a mixture of both awe and disapproval in their voices. As for me, there was no question. I saw 50,000 black people refusing to ride segregated buses, and the reason, more than any other single factor, was the words and inspiration of one man, that young preacher Martin Luther King.