The Story of Jones in Martin Luther King and The Montgomery Story
Cover to Martin Luther King and The Montgomery Story (Art by Sy Barry)
The Montgomery Bus Boycott was not only a major victory in the Civil Rights movement of the twentieth century, but it also established Dr. Martin Luther King as a leader of the movement, but into the national spotlight as a central figure for the movement. This victory and its leader were so important to the movement that the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) decided the story needed to be told to the masses, and to others in the fight for civil rights. FOR’s chosen medium for telling this story? A comic book.
Comic book writer and political advisor Andrew Aydin calls Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story “the comic that changed the world.” Going to press in December 1957, less than a year after the bus boycott ended, Aydin says that it serves as an origin story for Dr. King and a primer for Gandhi’s method of nonviolent resistance.
What is particularly important is the way the comic structures its narrative in a personal struggle. At the beginning of the comic we are introduced to the main character, “Jones,” who is intended to serve as a representative for any Black person in the U.S., and especially the U.S. South at the time living with the constant threat of violence under Jim Crow. Jones, a citizen of Montgomery, states, “My name doesn’t matter. But my story’s important for you as well as me. We’re all caught up in it in one way or another!”
The narrative arc of the comic is Jones’s internal conflict of deciding whether or not to use violence in response to the violence imposed on him. We learn that Jones owns a gun, and believes he will have to use it someday to defend himself, his family, and his community. But then the Montgomery Bus Boycott begins and Jones sees King and other leaders, such as Reverend Ralph Abernathy, teach and deploy a nonviolent response to the bombings and police brutality that took place during the boycott, which inspires him to respond in kind.
When the boycott achieves its goal of desegregating buses in Montgomery, Jones decides to throw his gun away, having come to trust the nonviolent methods of Dr. King.
The comic also never shies away from the intensity of the violence enacted upon civil rights demonstrators in Montgomery, as it highlights the presence of the Ku Klux Klan, and church and house bombings. But it demonstrates in the narrative how King’s nonviolent method was able to defeat these various forms of violence.
In its epilogue, “How the Montgomery Method Works,” the comic provides an illustrated outline for how to use the nonviolent resistance method deployed by the participants of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, so that readers could put the method into practice in their own communities in the continued fight for civil rights across the country
Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story would inspire several other Civil Rights comics with similar calls to action, such as The Street Where You Live (1960) from the NAACP, encouraging voter participation for Black citizens as a way to impact meaningful community change.
As a comic book writer and Civil Rights historian, it is inspiring to see how the medium of comics was used not only to teach a method of nonviolent resistance and call people to action but to tell a meaningful story about the evil and violence people face, and how as the characters learn to fight back in new ways, they themselves experience change in their personal struggles. In agreement with Andrew Aydin, comics can change the world.
