DAUGHTER OF THE BOYCOTT

A reporter recalls her family’s part in the landmark 1955 Montgomery, Alabama, boycott that desegregated buses and brought fame to Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr.

Journalist Houston was born into a remarkable family at the center of an event that changed U.S. history. She was 4 years old when, to protest segregated seating, black passengers stopped riding city buses in Montgomery, galvanized by Parks’ arrest and by a Gandhi-inspired call for nonviolent protest from King, the new pastor of Montgomery’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. The author's father, Thomas Gray, helped organize the 382-day boycott, arranging carpools and taxi rides for the thousands of black residents who normally took buses; before it ended, her uncle, Fred Gray, had become the lead counsel in Browder v. Gayle, the U.S. Supreme Court case that eventually forced Montgomery to desegregate its buses. In her debut memoir, the author warmly recalls her kin and deals matter-of-factly with the appalling Jim Crow–era injustices they faced: Houston was born in a hospital for black patients because “Negroes were either denied admission to white hospitals or accommodated in segregated, subpar units, sometimes in basements or attics.” The author also chronicles her interviews with relevant figures such as the daughter-in-law of the targeted bus line’s manager and a son of Browder plaintiff Aurelia Browder Coleman, who laments that Parks—though not a litigant in that watershed case—has eclipsed his mother and others (“a lie has become history”). Houston’s real coup, however, is a rare at-home interview with Browder plaintiff Claudette Colvin, who refused to give her seat to a white rider months before Parks did and disputes popular accounts of her story: “I wasn’t kicking and scratching like they say I was.” Arriving at a time when racial injustices regularly lead to tragedy, this modest book is a welcome reminder that profound social changes can also result from the quiet heroism of people with unshakable commitment to nonviolence.

A daughter’s fond memoir of her father and the pioneering civil rights activists in his circle.