Episode 9: MY FEET IS TIRED, BUY MY SOUL IS RESTED and 
Episode 10: ROCKING THE CRADLE

Discussion Questions for the Week

Episode 9: MY FEET IS TIRED, BUY MY SOUL IS RESTED

1. What sustained the bus boycott?  Why did the citizens who boycotted the buses stick with it for so long?  How were they able to do so? 

2. What were the most important contributions Dr. Martin Luther King made to the bus boycott?

3. What legal steps did the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) take?  What was the result of those steps?

Episode 10: ROCKING THE CRADLE

1. What was different in Montgomery after Dr. Martin Luther King left?

2. Why did CORE believe it was necessary to organize a bus of blacks and whites to ride through the Southern states in 1961?

3. What did the Freedom Rides demonstrate:

   1. About the riders?

   2. About police protection in the South?

   3. About federal protection?

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Words of the week

Episode 9: MY FEET IS TIRED, BUY MY SOUL IS RESTED

1. countered.  What does it mean? 
   

2. Grand Jury investigation.  What does it mean to order a grand jury investigation?  Who serves on the grand jury?  (Who served in Montgomery in 1956?)
   

3. boycott.  What does it mean? At the beginning of the episode, the Narrator says, “The city commissioners countered the Montgomery Improvement Association's federal lawsuit with a grand jury investigation. If the boycott was not ended immediately, the leaders would be arrested under an obscure 1921 law prohibiting boycotts.”
   
4. indicted.  What does it mean?  How is it pronounced? The Narrator says, “One hundred and fifteen participants in the boycott were indicted for breaking the law.”
   
5. injunction.  What is it? The Narrator states, “Then in November, 1956, the state court issued an injunction against the MIA car pool. Johnnie Carr was called to testify in court.” Then Rev. Bob Graetz states, “They got an injunction to stop the functioning of the car pool.”
   
6. The Supreme Court.  What is it?  Where is it?  When does a case get decided by the Supreme Court?
   
7. unconstitutional.  What does it mean when a case is declared unconstitutional? Fred Gray says, at the end of the episode, “It was a good feeling because it was the first time that the principles laid down in Brown v. the Board of Education which declared separate but equal is unconstitutional. We were able to get the court to extend that document to transportation. And of course from that point some years later almost everything else where there was segregation was declared unconstitutional.”
   
8. Brown vs. the Board of Education.  What did this decision allow? 
   
9. nonviolent protest; passive resistance. Martin Luther King states, early in this episode:“This is a nonviolent protest. We are depending on moral and spiritual forces, using the method of passive resistance. Even if we have to receive violence, we will not return violence.”
   
10. reconciliation. Describe what protesters did when they used this approach. What did Dr. King mean when he stated, after the bus boycott was won, “We must now move from protest to reconciliation”? 

Episode 10: ROCKING THE CRADLE

1. rift.  Rev. G. Murray Branch says, “I doubted anybody would have predicted Montgomery. It was the most unlikely place. Not only was there this deep rift between blacks and whites in Montgomery, there were deep rifts among blacks.”
   
2. “Rocking the Cradle”. Study the title for this episode. What does this phrase refer to?  (clue:  Recall the title for Episode 6.)
   
3. apathy.  What does it mean?  Give an example from this episode.
   
4. police protection.  What is it?  How do you rely on it in your life now, and in your community now?  What does it mean not to have it?
   
5. 1964 Civil Rights Act.
   
6. de-energizing.
   
7. cohesion.  What is it?  Can you use it in a physical sense?  In an emotional sense?  How is it like glue? How is it like togetherness?
   
8. protracted  What does it mean?  How is this meaning related to the tool used in advanced math, a “protractor”?  Ivanhoe Donaldson talks of gaining civil rights through a “protracted struggle.”  What does he mean by this?
   
9. organizing.  Find out where the term came from. How was it connected with what movement?  Where?  When?  Who was organizing whom? And for what reasons?

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Quotes of the Week

Here are some lines spoken by the people in this week’s episodes.  Choose one that you believe states a main message of these episodes. Tell why you selected it.

Episode 9: MY FEET IS TIRED, BUY MY SOUL IS RESTED

I think it was the masses, the people who were not teachers and preachers—they weren’t, say, people who had had formal education—who kept the morale going, because their need was the greatest.
–Alfreida Dean Thomas

115 participants in the boycott were indicted for breaking the law.
–Narrator

The Lord spoke to me, and I said, “Let’s all go to jail. We go together with Martin to jail.  If he goes, we all will go.” And thank God, people may never know it, but that was the turning point in the movement, and I’ll tell you why.  We all confessed to boycotting and 91 black people went to jail.  Twenty-seven of them were black preachers.  And my God, when it did that—it shook the nation.
–The Rev. Solomon Seay

There is a trite expression and I don’t use them very often, that you either stand for something or you fall for anything.  The ministers made up their minds that at this particular time—they thought that there would be safety in numbers, so to speak.
–Inez Baskin

Black people were afraid of going to jail, always was. . . . When you get people where they are not afraid to go to jail for a cause, when you get people where they’re not afraid to die for a cause—you’ve got somebody to deal with.  And that’s what happened.  We had finally to get enough black people to not to be afraid of going to jail, not to be afraid of dying, if necessary.
–Rev. Solomon Seay

Episode 10: ROCKING THE CRADLE

“We’ve come a long ways.  But you see, the young black today doesn’t realize from whence all of this came, the suffering, the deaths.  They tell you that ‘I don’t owe you anything. I didn’t tell you to march.’”
–Robert Nesbit

I ended up being the coordinator of the Selma-Montgomery march with a guy named Hosea Williams from SCLC. In fact, SNCC wasn’t even interested in the march.  They thought it was a terrible idea.  SNCC was one of those organizations that was not captured into these sort of mobilizing national public demonstrations.  They thought that they were de-energizing, took away the focus to what was going on, made people think that you’re some kind of a super hero.  You went into their town; they wanted [??] you to change things overnight.  And, as an organizer, you don’t want that kind of visibility.  You want to kind of blend in and recognize the struggle as protracted.  You gotta work at it.  You gotta organize people.
–Ivanhoe Donaldson

A lot of SNCC people were really against the march.  We just felt like the way it was done didn’t call for the most cohesion.  And that it was going to get a lot of people hurt because nothing was in place.  And it did just that.
–Faye Bellamy

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“Making It Real” Activities

1. Different groups make different contributions in a mass movement. What does the opening speaker, Rufus Lewis, mean when he says:

2. “The backbone of the MIA [Montgomery Improvement Association] was the poor people.  There’s the power, right in there”

3. Later in the episode, Rev. Solomon Seay says, “People may never know it, but that was the turning point in the movement. . . [when] 91 black people went to jail, and 27 of them were black preachers.”  What is his main point in saying so?

4.   Recall a time when you and your peers or family worked together intensely for a period of time on a project, or when you had to undergo suffering for a period of time.  What happened at the end of that intense time?  How did people react to each other?  Describe the intensity of your work or suffering, and then, in contrast, describe your response afterwards. How does that experience help you understand the moods and attitudes of the citizens of Montgomery at the end of the bus boycott, and when Dr. Martin Luther King left Montgomery?

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Outside Research Activities

Who and Where?

Some of these people are speakers in this episode. Some are mentioned by speakers. Find out all you can about them: Where did they live? When? What was their work (what job did they do)? Are they in your history textbook telling the story of the Civil Rights Movement? Do they belong there? Why? or why not?

1. John Lewis
2. Rev. Solomon Seay, Sr.
3. Floyd Mann
4. John Seigenthaler
5. Robert Kennedy. What role did he play in the period of this episode?
6. Gwen Patton
7. The Edmund Pettus Bridge. Where is it? Why is it important as a physical landmark? As a symbol, what does it symbolize to you?
8. George Wallace

Freedom Rides

Using "outside" sources in print and on the internet find out all you can about the "Freedom Rides."

1. What were they?
2. Who went on them?
3. What groups organized them?
4. Where did they go? Using a map of the southern states, show the route the buses took.

How did each state and city respond to them?

Did they come through or close to your city or town? Did your town or city's newspaper cover them? If so, find the news stories.

Key Organizations

The following organizations are referred to in this episode. Find out all you can about them: When were they started? What did they want to do? Where? Why were they important to Montgomery? Who were their members, and what did they believe?

Would you want to join if you were living in that time? Why, or why not? What other important organizations did you learn about in this episode?

Choose three organizations that you believe are the most important to understanding the Civil Rights Movement, and tell why you chose them. Are they in your history textbook? Do you think they should be?

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Collecting Oral Histories

Find local people who can serve as sources for your learning about the period.

1. There were two Selma marches. The second one had national news coverage and drew participants from all over the nation. Can you find someone in your community who participated in one of the Selma to Montgomery marches? Can you fine someone who marched in another Civil Rights Movement march? Can you find someone who remembers hearing or reading about the Selma to Montgomery marches and the affect that news had on her(him)or the community? Invite that person to your group. Prepare a list of questions to help your visitor tell the story she(he) experienced.
2. Find a person in your community who was living during that time; ask that person to visit your group. Prepare a list of questions that will form the framework for the visitor's interview.

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