THE MECHANICS OF THE BUS BOYCOTT

A young white minister clad in the vestments of the Lutheran Church stood in his pulpit on a Sunday last month and calmly urged his congregation to give its fullest support to the Negro boycott of Montgomery buses.

He told of his plans to make his own car available to a "share the ride" pool organized to transport Negroes unable to afford taxis, and indicated he was about to assume an active part in the conduct of the boycott. He said: "Let's try to make this boycott as effective as possible, because it won't be any boycott if half of us ride the buses and half don't ride. So if we're going to do it, let's make a good job of it." Then he began his prepared sermon, "The Blessings Of God's Covenant," taken from the 31st chapter of Jeremiah.

Startling as they seem, Pastor Robert S. Graetz remarks fell on no shocked ears and no one stamped from the room indignantly. On the contrary, there was enthusiastic approval from the 210 members who make up the congregation of the Trinity Lutheran Church on Cleveland Avenue. It is an all-Negro congregation. Graetz is their pastor - one of only two Lutheran ministers so situated in Alabama (the other is in Birmingham).

POOL OF 250 TO 350 AUTOS

In the days following his Dec. 4 sermon Graetz put in as much as 16 hours a day carrying on his church duties and helping to organize what was to become a crippling boycott of buses by Negroes.

Greatz hauled passengers in his new Chevrolet from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m., pausing only to load or discharge passengers or to gas his car. As a member of a transportation committee, he helped organized a pool of 250 to 350 private cars and established pickup and dispatch points for transporting Negroes to and from work.

He dashed off a letter to other white ministers on his much-used mimeograph machine, acquainting them with "certain facts" concerning the boycott and concluding "Please consider this matter prayerfully and carefully, with Christian love. Our Lord said, "inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me." Some of Greatz stationery carries the biblical quotation "And the Angel of the Lord spake unto Phillip saying: 'Arise, go toward the South.' Acts 8:26."

In the evenings, he attended mass meetings where boycott leaders made progress reports and passed the plate to raise money for operational expenses - mostly gasoline. The meetings are held Tuesdays and Thursday, rotating from church to church.

In short, Bob Graetz did as much as any Negro minister or layman to make the boycott effective and to rise some $7,000 to support it.

SPONTANEOUS DEMAND

By last week, as the boycott moved into its second month, the young minister had slackened his pace somewhat. He no longer serves on the committee and he attends few meetings - in order, he says, to press his "natural advantage" as a minister. He fears his presence at mass meeting might be a stigma that would lessen his effectiveness in gaining support for the Negroes.

He was still, however, a far from inactive "first lieutenant," working with other ministers and staying in contact with "the general," who seems to be the Rev. M. L. King, pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church and a policy-maker leader of the boycott. (Graetz has had "little influence" on the planning leaving that to others.)

It didn't take Graetz long to get thoroughly wrapped up in the Negro affairs after arriving in Montgomery in late June. By the time the boycott developed, he already was acquainted with most of the principals, including Rosa Parks.

He says: "She must have figured that, if the Lord wanted to make her the goat, she was willing."

Graetz, a boyish-looking 27, of medium build, first heard of the arrest "at about third hand" on Saturday, Dec. 3, a day or two after it happened. At about the same time, he began to get word of an impending protest movement. He thought at first it involved boycotting the buses for just one day and that its purpose was to protest the arrest of Rosa Parks. But he was told later that the principle grievance was over previous "abuses" of Negro bus patrons and that the protest was aimed directly at the bus company.

When the first mass meeting was held at Holt Street Baptist Church on the Monday night following the arrest, Graetz said there was a "spontaneous demand" for a boycott of indefinite duration and Negro leaders, caught unprepared, hastily drafted a resolution to that effect. It urged all citizens "regardless of race" to refrain from riding the buses and called for the cooperation of employers and car owners to help in transporting the protesting bus riders.

$200 A DAY A CAR

It was then that Graetz took the transportation committee assignment. An executive committee was organized to run the campaign. Both groups were made up almost entirely of ministers "because it's almost impossible to bring pressure" against them.

Dispatch stations were established in all predominantly Negro areas to furnish transportation between 6 a.m. and noon each day. Homeward-bound workers were given a prepared list of pickup stations where they could wait for private cars.

Ministers urged their congregations to make special offerings to buy gasoline for the car pool - a heavy expense. It costs about $200 a day to keep the cars running. On the first Sunday, about $1,800 was raised. More money rolled in from churches in other cities - New York, Philadelphia, Mobile, Tuscaloosa, Tuskegee - and from "anonymous white friends." Altogether, Graetz said nearly $7,000 had been collected "at least report" and that was a "rather sizable balance."

While most of the money was spent for gasoline, some of it was used for legal aid. Some was spent to buy advertising to give "our side" of the protest ("Protest" is the right word, says Graetz, it isn't a boycott.)

THE HIGH SHERIFF

Graetz hauled as many as 40 or 50 passengers a day, while driving some 50 miles. When he was offered money, he carefully decline to accept it, suggesting that the passenger "multiply the number of rides by 10c" and contributed that amount at the mass meetings. It was during this period that Graetz had his brush with the law.

As he tells the story, Graetz had been driving about two and one-half hours on the morning of Dec. 19 when he parked by a meter near Dean's Drug Store on Monroe Street to pick up five Negroes going to Normandale. He was careful not to park in a nearby taxi zone.

As he crossed Dexter Avenue, a siren sounded from the car behind him and he pulled to the curb. A man who Graetz said he later learned was Sheriff Mac Sim Butler walked up and said, "What are you doing - running a taxi?"

Graetz explained the Negroes were "friends and not passengers. Butler accused him of picking up passengers in a taxi zone and ordered Graetz to follow him to the county jail.

There, Graetz was placed in a room marked "deputy sheriff" and left alone for a few minutes. "For which I was very grateful." Graetz says, "I had a little prayer session."

NO, SAID THE JUDGE

Another man who Graetz assumed was a deputy came in and lectured him on religion, politics and patriotism. "We like things the way they are here," he said. "We don't want anybody trying to change them."

Shortly, Graetz said, Butler returned from the courthouse and said he had tried to charge the minister with running a taxi and hauling Negroes in violation of segregation laws but "the judge wouldn't let him."

He was not threatened, says Graetz, but "they were very rough and gruff."

He was released after about a half hour "under the definite impression they didn't like what I was doing," he recalls wryly.

NATIVE OF WEST VIRGINIA

Graetz is a native of Charleston, W. Va., and went to high school there. He became interested, but not very active in inter-racial activities during that period. Once, he planned to arrange a meeting of young white members of the Lutheran League with some young Negroes. But he "just never got around to inviting anybody."

It was at the Lutheran Capital University and Seminary in Dayton, Ohio that Graetz began to work with Negroes in earnest. He organized a campus race relations club made up of white and Negro students who met regularly to bear speeches. Once, Graetz was introduce to the late Walter White, the NAACP agitator, and heard the NAACP founder say that race relations were improving because of the large number of whites involved in the movement.

"Naturally, I just beamed." Graetz says, "because that really fit me."

In debating clubs, his arguments contained a broad socialistic strain but no one was concerned. His father, an engineer for Libby-Owens-Ford Glass Co. at Charleston, told his son that "someone once said that a young college man who doesn't become a socialist at some time before he is 25 has no heart, and one who clings to that view after 25 has no brain." "I'm past that stage now," says Graetz. "In fact, I'm a capitalist with 30 shares of Libby-Owens-Ford."

CAME HERE 2 YEARS AGO

The one time that he voted was in a West Virginia Democratic primary four or five years ago and all his candidates lost. He considers himself an Eisenhower Democrat.

Graetz came to Montgomery after two years as an "intern minister" at a predominantly Negro Church in Los Angeles. The American Lutheran Church, knowing his views on race relations, suggested him for the Cleveland Avenue congregation as a successor to a Negro minister, the Rev. Nelson Trout, who by a coincidence, went to the same Los Angeles church that Graetz had left three months earlier.

With his wife and two children, Graetz moved into an unfinished parsonage next door to the church. The six-room ranch-style home was finally competed in November. The children, Margy, 3 and Bobby, 2, play in the picker-fenced backyard. Mrs. Graetz, 26, expects another child this month.

Because of Graetz' many activities - he also preaches at Clanton and Wetumpka - he and his wife have had little time for "social life," but his defiant stand on racial matters has left him no shortage of friends. "We have many high class friends among both Negroes and white - pastors and lawyers and just plain citizens." Says Graetz. "I have made a new friend every day since the boycott began."

For relaxation, he and Mrs. Graetz play "some kind of game every night," no matter how late it is when Graetz finishes his day's work. Usually it's gin or rummy or crokinola, a game Mrs. Graetz gave him for Christmas.

A MOTHER'S CONCERN

Though not the only white person active in the boycott, Graetz is the only one who makes no secret of his activities. Graetz knows of one white who drives a carload of Negroes to work every morning and there are numerous reports" of white women who have told their maids not to worry if late for work because it's "understandable."

What do his parents think of Graetz' part in the boycott? His mother called Christmas and told him to be careful. She also inquired anxiously if Dr. Lechleitner knew what Graetz was doing. Dr. R. D. Lechleitner is executive secretary of the Board of American Missions of the American Lutheran Church and, as a matter of fact, he doesn't know of Graetz's activities. But he will shortly. Graetz has just mailed him a full report. (If Dr. Lechleitner happened to read the Dec.22 edition of the national Negro magazine Jet, he does know something about it. That edition carried a picture of Graetz and a story about him.

If his parents share Graetz' views on racial matters, it s unlikely that his great-grandfather would have approved his namesake's activities. Robert Graetz I came to America from Berlin to tend the German Lutheran flocks in parts of New York and Ohio. And it was to them alone that he ministered.

"He wouldn't even talk to Swedish Lutherans." Graetz says laughingly. He felt the Swedish ministers should look out for the Swedes and Catholics for Catholics. He wasn't much of a missionary. Besides, he had his hands full with the Germans."

SOUL AND SOLE

Graetz doesn't think the boycott will end until something "really satisfactory" is agreed upon. The Negroes, he says have endured abuses for too long to rush back to patronizing the bus company. With the car pool working well, few of them have suffered any great inconvenience. Some even get better service now, he says - they're picked up near their home and delivered closer to their work. And besides, they're downright enjoying themselves.

Graetz says one 72-year-old man who had ridden the bus for30 or 40 years sits on his front porch and laughs heartily every time a bus drives by. A woman reported gleefully that the buses were driving by her house "as naked as can be."

Some are more serious. A Negro woman "who had walked halfway across town" was given a ride by a minister who asked if she was tired. She replied: 'Well, my body may be a bit tired, but for many years now my soul has been tired. Now my soul is resting. So I don't mind if my body is tired, because my soul is free."

Graetz thinks of himself as a radical although not as much as he once was. ("I was really radical in college.") He uses another vague word - "reactionary" - in describing the Southern viewpoint. It is doubtful, though, if Graetz is as radical as he likes to think. His strongest expression on segregation is that the process should be speeded up some but should occur gradually. He is not given to florid, incendiary speeches of the uplifting variety, but it is clear that he is intensely interested in the welfare of individual Negroes.

ACKNOWLEDGES IGNORANCE

It is also clear that the South is not what Graetz ignorantly envisioned it to be. "I thought Negroes were shot if they walked down the street," he says. So what is responsible for his taking a stand that makes him a marked man in a white Southern community? Perhaps that question is best answered by a few excerpts from some of his recent writing and conversations:

"The reactionary element in the South will stop at nothing to maintain their strangle-hold on the Negro population whom they still hold in virtual economic slavery."

"I have been told that I am a kind of symbol to my people. Many of them had long ago concluded that it was scarcely possible for a white person to be a Christian. But now they know that, with some of us, Christianity is more than pious profession of the lips."

"Sometime ago I read that the first requisite of a successful missionary was that he become color blind. I figured that the same was true of my work here."

"I know that I shall be criticized for my stand. I may ever suffer violence. But I cannot minister to souls alone. My people also have bodies."