One of the strongest weapons used by the black citizens of Montgomery to stage the Montgomery Bus Boycott was unity. While the black community in Montgomery presented a united front in support of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, nothing approaching that sort of unity existed in the white community to oppose it.

This is not to say that many whites openly supported the boycott; the majority either opposed it or at least acquiesced to the city’s official opposition. Many in the business community, led by an economic development group called the Men of Montgomery, initially worked for a compromise, although they were eventually shouted down by more reactionary voices, including those affiliated with the openly racist White Citizens Council.

But a handful of whites played key roles in the boycott, and a few courageous whites raised their voices to support fairer treatment for blacks. In almost every case, those whites who spoke out to defend blacks suffered retaliation ranging from outright violence to loss of business to social ostracism.

For instance, the Rev. Robert Graetz, who led the all-black congregation at Trinity Lutheran Church on Cleveland Avenue (now appropriately renamed Rosa L. Parks Avenue), was the only white member of the board of the Montgomery Improvement Association. Graetz and his wife, Jeannie, received almost routine anonymous threats of violence, and their home was bombed twice.

In his book, A White Preacher’s Memoir: The Montgomery Bus Boycott, Graetz wrote of sugar being placed in the gasoline tank of his car. When he had it towed to be repaired, a white mechanic called him aside and, asking for his warning to be confidential, told him that his tires had been cut on the inside so that the cuts wouldn’t show. The cuts didn’t go all the way through, causing Graetz to assume that the vandals meant for the tires to blow out after they heated up while he was driving. When Graetz discussed the damage with his insurance agency, the agent warned him that if he made the claim his insurance would likely be canceled, He paid for the damage from his own pocket, but his insurance was canceled anyway.

Also chief among the Montgomery whites who lent their support to the boycott efforts were attorney Clifford Durr and his wife, Virginia, who helped to bail Rosa Parks out of jail after her arrest. Even though he remained behind the scenes in helping with boycott-related legal work , Clifford Durr saw his law practice suffer, and Virginia Durr felt she was socially ostracized.

Shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Alabama’s bus segregation laws, Virginia Durr wrote to a friend about their treatment by other whites: “We are no more unpopular than we have been, and actually we are not so unpopular personally as we are ‘suspect’ as being heretics. We are no longer members of the tribe, and those are penalties attached to that ... mostly economic ones, but so far we survive, and that is a real triumph.”

One of the ironies of the Montgomery Bus Boycott is that a movement so closely affiliated with black churches received so little support from white ministers in the community (although many national church organizations supported the boycott and even contributed funds). Author Donald E. Collins sheds light on one reason why in his book on the Methodist Church’s role in the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama, wonderfully titled When the Church Bell Rang Racist.

Collins tells of the Rev, Ray Whatley, minister of St. Mark Methodist Church and president of the Montgomery chapter of the Alabama Council on Human Relations. After Whatley wrote a letter to the mayor supporting a settlement with the boycott organizers, officials of his church requested that he be reassigned. The Methodist bishop moved Whatley to the small Alabama town of Linden, but his troubles followed him. Some members of his Linden congregation withdrew financial support from the church and demanded he be moved again. The bishop complied after a year.

Police identified another white Methodist minister, the Rev. Joe Neal Blair, as he attended one of the mass meetings in a black church during the bus boycott. Forty years later, Blair told his Sunday school class at Dalraida United Methodist Church in Montgomery that for at least two decades after the boycott, officials of new churches to which he was assigned would quiz him about that incident and his later attempts to bring the races together.

One of the more poignant stones arising out of the boycott involved a Montgomery librarian , Juliette Morgan. Long before the Montgomery Bus Boycott, this quiet librarian from one of Montgomery’s socially prominent families had written letters to the editor of the Montgomery Advertiser criticizing the treatment of blacks. She even started a mini-bus boycott of her own, pulling the stop cord and leaving buses herself when she saw a black person abused by a bus driver in some way. Until the bus boycott began in December 1955, other whites usually Just laughed at her actions and her letters.

But on December 12, Just a week after the boycott started, Morgan again wrote the Advertiser, this time comparing the Montgomery Bus Boycott to the movement in India inspired by Mohandas Gandhi. This stand aroused reactionary whites, who called for her firing from the city library. Library officials refused to fire her, but asked that she stop writing letters to the editor. She agreed, but reneged by agreeing to let the Tuscaloosa News publish a letter in 1957 that renewed calls for her firing. Again library officials stood behind her, but White Citizens Council members organized a boycott of the library. A cross was burned in her yard. The mayor threatened to eliminate her job.

On July 15, 1957, this librarian later described by the Rev, Martin Luther King Jr. as “sensitive and frail,” resigned from the library and committed suicide by taking sleeping pills.

But her 1955 letter to the Advertiser helped show the community that not all whites were unsympathetic to the Montgomery Bus Boycott. She compared the boycott to Gandhi’s “Salt March” to the sea, and wrote:

“One feels that history is being made in Montgomery these days, the most important in her career. It is hard to imagine a soul so dead, a heart so hard, a vision so blinded and provincial as not to be moved with admiration at the quiet dignity, discipline, and dedication with which the Negroes have conducted their boycott…

“I am all for law and order, the protection of person and property against violence, but I believe the Constitution and Supreme Court of the United States constitued the supreme law of the land. I find it ironical to hear men in authority who are openly flouting this law speak piously of law enforcement.

“I also find it hard to work up sympathy for the bus company. I have ridden the buses of Montgomery ever since they have been running. I have ridden them from once to four times a day for the past 14 years until this October ... I have heard some bus drivers use the tone and manners of mule drivers in their treatment of Negro passengers. (Incidentally Negroes pay full fare for fourth-class treatment.) Three times I’ve gotten off the bus because I could not countenance treatment of Negroes. I should have gotten off on several other occasions. Twice I have heard a certain driver with high seniority mutter quite audibly, “Black ape.” I could not tell whether the Negro heard or not, but I did and felt insulted ...

“Instead of acting like sullen adolescents whose attitude is ‘Make me,’ we ought to be working out plans to span the gap—between segregation and integration to extend public services—schools, libraries, parks—and transportation to Negro citizens. Ralph McGill’s (the editor of the Atlanta Constitution.) is the best advice I’ve heard: ‘Segregation is on its way out, and he who tries to tell the people otherwise does them great disservice. The problem of the future is how to live with the change.”