KIM LAWTON, correspondent: Although the social revolution led by Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. grew out of the black church, from even the earliest days of the movement there were white foot soldiers, too. King initially came to national prominence while leading the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, where he was serving in his first job as a local pastor, and working closely with him there was a young white pastor named Robert Graetz.

REV. ROBERT GRAETZ: We were here because God brought us here, and in a very real sense this changed the character of the movement here, because it was not totally black then from that point on.

LAWTON: Graetz is now 82 years old and still active in the Montgomery community.

GRAETZ: Fifty years ago we were a praying people…

LAWTON: On this day, he’s participating in the unveiling of a new sign marking a site that was important during the bus boycott. He and his wife, Jean, still work for civil rights, reconciliation, and a vision that began more than 50 years ago, a vision they shared with King called “the beloved community.”

GRAETZ: We are all different, but we are still all together in this one relationship, and the key to that kind of a relationship was respect, which means I look at you and I say, you know, “I know that you have value. God put value in you.” You look at me and you say the same thing.

LAWTON: Graetz had grown up in an all-white Lutheran community in West Virginia. While he was in college in Ohio, he become aware of the injustices faced by African Americans and had what he calls his “race relations awakening.” Graetz and his wife got involved in ministries in black communities, and when he finished seminary, Lutheran officials asked him to pastor an all-black congregation in Montgomery.

GRAETZ: We had very few black pastors because we require the seminary training for all pastors. That’s why they needed some white pastors like me to serve in largely black congregations.

LAWTON: The young Graetz family arrived in Montgomery in 1955 and began their work at Trinity Lutheran Church. They soon met a neighbor named Rosa Parks.

GRAETZ: When we got into town she was one of the first people outside of the congregation that we met. She was the adult advisor to the NAACP youth council which met in our church, so we saw her regularly.

LAWTON: Graetz was also introduced to another new pastor, King, who had arrived the year before.

GRAETZ: I decided that anybody who sounded as smart as he was and was articulate as he was, and had the name Martin Luther, I had to get to know him better.

LAWTON: He also came to know the struggles of his congregation because of segregation and discrimination on every front, including the public transportation system.

GRAETZ: If you wanted to find one aspect of life here in Montgomery, and probably many other cities in the South, where people were really troubled about the way they were treated, it would be the buses. Everybody either experienced bad treatment on the buses or knew people who had been treated badly.

LAWTON: Several local activists, including the Women’s Political Council, had been talking about staging a boycott. Then came the final catalyst: the arrest of Rosa Parks for refusing to give up her seat. When a boycott was called for the following Monday, Graetz says he faced an ethical dilemma because of concerns about what his denominational leaders might think.

GRAETZ: The church officials knew that I had been involved in things like this, and they said, “We want you to go to Montgomery, but you have to promise not to start trouble,” and so the question was, would my taking part in the bus boycott be starting trouble? Jeannie and I prayed about that a lot and finally decided the only way that I could continue to be the pastor here was to take part in the activities that our members were taking part in, and from that point on we were totally a part of what was happening.

LAWTON: On Sunday morning, Graetz stood before his church and expressed full support for the boycott.

GRAETZ: And I said, “I want you all to stay off the buses. I’ll be out in my car all day long. If you need a ride, I’ll be glad to come and take you wherever you need to go.” So I spent the whole day just driving people around, picking people up on the street, whatever.

LAWTON: Community leaders formed the Montgomery Improvement Association to oversee the boycott. King was the chairman, and executive committee members included Rev. Ralph David Abernathy, as well as one white member—Robert Graetz. Graetz says it was exhilarating to be part of it all.

GRAETZ: The feeling among the people across the community was that we were doing something that was changing the world.

DR. HOWARD ROBINSON (Archivist, National Center for the Study of Civil Rights and African-American Culture at Alabama State University): The Graetzs were really like one of the very few white people in Montgomery who took a very overt, obvious position in support of the boycott, and they suffered because of it.

LAWTON: The Graetz family became targets of the Ku Klux Klan.

GRAETZ: People would call us up and say, “I see your children out in the yard there. Are you sure they’re okay out there?” And the children would be in the yard, so that we knew that there were people who were looking at what was going on.

JEAN GRAETZ: I was scared to go out and take the trash out, because I knew that these people had been around our house and put sugar in the gas tank and slashed our tires, and I didn’t feel safe outside at night.

LAWTON: Their parsonage next to the church was bombed twice, once while no one was home, and once in the middle of the night when everyone was sleeping, including their nine-day-old baby. The house sustained some damage, but no one was injured. Supporters later planted a tree in the crater where the bomb went off. Graetz says he and his wife wrestled over the impact on their children.

GRAETZ: It was okay for Jeannie and me to put our lives in danger, but did we have the right to put our children through that? And we finally decided that we couldn’t control that—that God had brought us here, the children were in God’s hands, and if God wanted them to be protected, that would be his job.

LAWTON: Jean Graetz says African-American friends and sympathetic white supporters gave them strength.

JEAN GRAETZ: I felt that the Lord had put a circle of love around us, because we had wonderful friends, and I knew God’s love was around us, and I just pictured this circle around us so that the hate from the people that didn’t like us couldn’t get through.

LAWTON: Graetz says the civil rights movement had a strong spiritual underpinning. The weekly mass meetings held in support of the boycott were basically worship services, full of prayer, sermons, and lots of singing of traditional hymns.

GRAETZ: These hymns oftentimes took on new significance because of how they related to how people related to one another in the movement. Bible verses which we would think of—oh, that’s a nice thought—became deeply moving to us because of what we were going through here.

LAWTON: Graetz says this reflected the theological tone set by King.

GRAETZ: In effect, the church in the black community was reinterpreting what the Bible said about how human beings ought to treat one another, so that it was the black Christians teaching white Christians what it meant to be Christian.

LAWTON: After about a year, the boycott ended when courts struck down the bus segregation laws. At the last mass meeting, Graetz read the Scriptures—I Corinthians 13, the well-known passage about love.

GRAETZ: And I got up and started reading and in the middle of the reading, again, loud applause, and I thought, they’re not letting me finish. And I looked down at what I was reading and realized that what I had just read was, “When I became a man I put away childish things.” And people knew that we had matured in this process. We were different people.

LAWTON: The Graetzs have remained active in many civil rights causes. They are now consultants at Alabama State University’s National Center for the Study of Civil Rights and African-American Culture. http://www.lib.alasu.edu/natctr/ They give tours and discussions about justice and the work that still needs to be done in order to achieve their vision of the beloved community.

GRAETZ: People will say to us, “We really appreciate what you did,” and our response always is it wasn’t just us. It was 50,000 black people who stood together, who walked together, who worked together, who stood up against oppression. If it had not been for this whole body of people working together, this would not have happened.

LAWTON: And that’s a story they want to keep alive.

I’m Kim Lawton in Montgomery, Alabama.

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What spiritual legacy did the civil rights movement give to the United States?

The civil rights movement of the ’60s imbues the American community with a spirit that is still with us today. Many of us that got caught up and involved in the civil rights movement saw our involvement as an extension of our faith. We would sing songs … in Mississippi, in Alabama, in Georgia, in little churches: “I’m gonna do what the spirit said do.” If the spirit said sit in, if the spirit said march, if the spirit said walk, if the spirit said picket — “I’m gonna do what the spirit said do.” Without our faith, we wouldn’t have been able to succeed. On many occasions, before we’d go out on a sit-in, before we went on the freedom ride, before we marched from Selma to Montgomery, we would sing a song or say a prayer. Without our faith, without the spirit and spiritual bearings and underpinning, we would not have been so successful. Without prayer, without faith in the Almighty, the civil rights movement would have been like a bird without wings.

On many occasions, when we had been beaten, arrested, in jail, you had to call upon something, some force, some power much larger, much greater, and much more powerful. In my estimation, the civil rights movement was a religious phenomenon. When we’d go out to sit in or go out to march, I felt, and I really believe, there was a force in front of us and a force behind us, ’cause sometimes you didn’t know what to do. You didn’t know what to say, you didn’t know how you were going to make it through the day or through the night. But somehow and some way, you believed — you had faith — that it all was going to be all right.

You talk about the music of the movement. I’ve heard recordings from some of those meetings, where people took simple Sunday school songs and made them relevant to what was happening. What was the power of that music?

On many occasions, people would be so inspired, so moved … they would start singing some of the gospel songs or some hymn of the church. And they would improvise; they would make it current, or make it so powerful, that you knew somehow and some way that you had to go. You had to go and sit in. You had to go and march, because it was the power of the message, of the words of a song — the beat, the rhythm. And on some occasions, it was just like being in church on a Sunday morning. It was like being at a prayer meeting. And whether it was a sit-in, or whether it was on the freedom ride, or the march from Selma to Montgomery, I felt on many occasions like it was a very deep religious experience.

Are you concerned that the religious aspects of the movement are being lost the further we get from those days?

I’m deeply concerned that many people today fail to recognize that the movement was built on deep-seated religious convictions, and the movement grew out of a sense of faith — faith in God and faith in one’s fellow human beings. From time to time, I make a point, trying to take people back, and especially young people, and those of us not so young, back to the roots of the movement. During those early days, we didn’t study the Constitution, the Supreme Court decision of 1954. We studied the great religions of the world. We discussed and debated the teachings of the great teacher. And we would ask questions about what would Jesus do. In preparing for the sit-ins, we felt that the message was one of love — the message of love in action: don’t hate. If someone hits you, don’t strike back. Just turn the other side. Be prepared to forgive. That’s not anything any Constitution say anything about forgiveness. It is straight from the Scripture: reconciliation. So the movement, the early foundation, the early teaching of the movement was based on the Scripture, the teaching of Jesus, the teaching of Gandhi and others. You have to remind people over and over again that some of us saw our involvement in the civil rights movement as an extension of our faith.

Were there tensions between those of faith and those in the movement who were social progressives but perhaps didn’t have any religious beliefs? Were there tensions between those two wings?

At times, you had what I would call a schism, maybe a small conflict between those who said, “This is the right thing to do. We do it because it is not in keeping with the Constitution; it is not in keeping with the Declaration of Independence, [with] our Bill of Rights.” But then others were saying, “I’m doing it, I’m standing up because [of] my faith, my belief in God the Father, in the Holy Spirit, in Jesus Christ, or in the teaching of all the great religions of the world, that this is the thing to do.”

But those tensions didn’t hinder the movement?

These tensions between sort of the social and the spiritual, it didn’t hinder. I think people felt the movement was so right and so necessary that we could not let the tension between the social and the spiritual interfere with the success of the movement.

How did Rev. King influence you spiritually, in the development of your own spiritual journey?

I grew up in rural Alabama, 50 miles from Montgomery, in a very loving, wonderful family, wonderful mother, wonderful father. We attended church; we went to Sunday school every Sunday. But one Sunday I heard Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. preach on the radio. I was 15 years old, in the 10th grade. He was talking about Paul’s letters. And he turned it around and talked about Paul’s letters to the Christians in America. And I felt he was talking to me. The words of Dr. King were so inspiring I wanted to find a way to get involved in the civil rights movement. I heard Dr. King say things like, “We must not just be concerned about the pearly gates and the streets made out of milk and honey, but we have to be concerned about the streets in Montgomery, Alabama.”

A few years later, I had the opportunity to meet him, and it changed my life. I felt like he was doing the work of the Master. That he was saying in effect that our hands, our feet, our minds must be the hands, the feet, and mind of God Almighty. That we must do the work, and whatever we do it must be in keeping with the building of what he called the Beloved Community, of what some of us may call the kingdom of God here on earth.

You were so young. That must have been key to your spiritual development.

Martin Luther King Jr. had a major impact on my search for truth, on my search to become a better human being and try to do what I consider the will of God. When you heard Martin Luther King preach, whether it was at a pulpit in Montgomery, Alabama, at some little church in the backwoods of Mississippi or southwest Georgia, or from his church in Atlanta, it was a message that was so moving and so powerful that you had to be willing and prepared to act according to that message.

As you look at your life now, how do you see all of that?

When I look back and even consider where I am today, if it hadn’t been for the teaching and preaching of Martin Luther King Jr., for getting that early foundation in the church, I probably wouldn’t be here. I don’t know where I would be. I probably would’ve got lost maybe in a sea of despair, maybe become very bitter and hostile. But, in a sense, the movement, Martin Luther King Jr., and these other religious leaders who led the civil rights movement, they not only rescued many of us but they also saved us and made us better human beings.

You went through so much. How did you move beyond that without becoming paralyzed by hatred?

At a very early stage of the movement, I accepted the teaching of Jesus, the way of love, the way of nonviolence, the spirit of forgiveness and reconciliation. The idea of hate is too heavy a burden to bear. It’s better to love. When we were involved in the sit-ins, in the freedom ride, on the march from Selma to Montgomery, we were not struggling against people but against customs, traditions, a bad way of life, and we were trying to win people over and be reconciled to each other. I think I had maybe what I call an executive session with myself, and maybe an executive session with God Almighty, and said, “I’m not going to hate. I don’t want to go down that road. I’ve seen too much hate, seen too much violence. And I know love is a better way.” You feel so different, and you feel so much better. You sleep better. You rest better. When you don’t have any ill feelings, you don’t have any hate or malice to people who maybe arrested you, beat you, jailed you, or tried to kill you. We all are brothers and sisters, we’re all a part of the same family, we all live in the same house — the house of faith.

But was it a struggle to get to that point?

You know, life is a struggle, it is a battle, and we cannot do it alone, we cannot do it alone. We were not able to do it alone. We had the help of God Almighty. Sometimes when I look back and think about it, you know, how did we do what we did? How did we succeed? We didn’t have a Web site. We didn’t have e-mail. We didn’t have a fax machine. We didn’t have a cellular telephone. But I felt when we were sitting in at those lunch counter stools, or going on the freedom ride, or marching from Selma to Montgomery, there was a power and a force. God Almighty was there with us.

When you look today at the nation and some of the issues we are battling, how are the religious communities and leadership rising to the challenges?

On so many occasions during the past two years I wished and prayed and somehow want to go back 40 years ago when the ministers, priests, rabbis, nuns, bishops, and others stood up. And sometimes I feel today that maybe, just maybe, the religious leaders are too quiet. They need to make a little noise. Need to push and to pull and [need] to be prophets. You know, Dr. King and others had the ability, had the capacity to rally people, to get people together. I will never forget, after Bloody Sunday in Selma in March of 1965, after we had been beaten and tear-gassed and trampled by horses, two days later, more than a thousand religious leaders — priests, rabbis, nuns, ministers — came there. Not just to Selma, but they got in the streets of almost every city in America, at the Department of Justice, at the White House, preaching the good news.

Today on some of the big issues, moral issues, [it] seems like we been so silent. Somehow we need to find a way to reclaim our position as people of faith. We don’t need to sort of give up, or give out or in, or get lost in a sea of despair, become discouraged; we just need to get out there. When I was growing up, my mother and father and grandparents used to tell us, “Don’t get in trouble. Don’t get in the way.” But during the ’60s, the religious community got in trouble. We got in the way. And it’s time again for the religious community to get in the way. To get in trouble. Good trouble, necessary trouble.