Bob Ingram

By Alvin Benn
Montgomery Advertiser

Bob Ingram reported on the Montgomery Bus Boycott for the Montgomery Advertiser. (Alvin Benn, Montgomery Advertiser)

It was a Saturday afternoon in early December of 1955 and Bob Ingram was just settling in at the Montgomery Advertiser when City Editor Joe Azbell summoned the rookie political reporter.

Azbell held up a flier announcing a boycott of city buses on Monday-the same day Rosa Parks was scheduled to be tried for violating an ordinance calling for segregated seating.

"Joe showed the flier to me and said, 'This is going to be in the paper tomorrow,'" Ingram recalled. "Sometime later, Dr. Martin Luther King told me that 'Joe and the Advertiser printing that on the front page on Sunday morning was a greater impetus for the success of the boycott than anything before.'"

The reason King said that, Ingram learned, was a problem spreading the word within Montgomery's black community about a protest that eventually would take on a life of its own and become not only a national story, but the start of the modern civil rights movement.

Southern newspapers were as segregated as city buses in those days and the Advertiser was no exception. Papers across Dixie devoted a page once or twice a week to news involving black communities. That's as far as it went.

The decision by Azbell to put the boycott story on the front page of the Montgomery Advertiser on the most important publishing day of the week was warmly received by black leaders who were looking for a way to get public support.

"Here it was all over the front page," Ingram said. "It was a heck of a story. They didn't have enough volunteers to go door-to-door and what we did helped them tremendously."

Ingram, who started with the Advertiser in the summer of 1953, covered politics from the state Capitol, but he soon began to learn more about the budding civil rights movement.

Born and raised in the north Alabama community of Centre in Cherokee County, Ingram had little reason to mingle with the few black families in the county.

When he arrived in Montgomery to cover politics, he couldn't help but notice the large number of black residents and the discontent surrounding their treatment in the Capital City.

Parks' arrest for refusing to give up her seat on a city bus to a white passenger was reported in the Advertiser but Ingram said he did not recall it creating "much of a ripple" in the city.

"None of us knew where it was going to lead," he said. "None of us had any idea of what this might trigger."

It wasn't long before Ingram and other reporters at the newspaper learned the magnitude of the bus boycott. He soon found himself helping big city newspapers in the North who called with questions about the growing protest movement.

"I hate to say this, but the rest was history," said Ingram, who turned 79 this year and continues to write political columns for weekly newspapers throughout Alabama.

When the protests heated up, Ingram was assigned to cover some of the mass meetings, as they were called, at black churches in Montgomery. It was there that he had a chance to hear King's call for nonviolent demonstrations in the city.

One of his first meetings was at Holt Street Baptist Church. As he looked around the church, he came to a quick conclusion that he didn't exactly look like most of the people inside.

"It was somewhat unnerving at first," he said. "At times, mine was the only white face in the church. Other times, the wire services covered those church meetings."

Ingram credits Montgomery's black Baptist ministers with being the catalysts for change as the bus boycott extended through 1956.

"Those preachers represented the heart and soul of the civil rights movement in Montgomery back then," he said. "I was astonished by King's voice. His eloquence was beyond belief."

Ingram continued to pitch in and help out with the civil rights protests when he wasn't covering the Capitol. Later, he branched out as a syndicated columnist, television commentator and popular author.

He hasn't forgotten those first few days of December 1955, however. They remain imbedded in his memory. He and other reporters who covered the bus boycott knew they were involved in something special.

"It was a well-organized protest movement and reporters were in the middle of it," he said. "It was a time that will stay with me forever."