National Post (National Edition)
Minister joined Montgomery bus boycott
White civil rights supporter was target of bombs
The Rev. Robert Graetz was 27, recently ordained in the Lutheran Church, when he received his first full-time assignment. It was 1955, and with a shortage of African-American ministers, Lutheran officials sent him to a predominantly Black church in Montgomery, Ala.
Graetz, who was white, had demonstrated a growing interest in civil rights, joining the NAACP while in college. Before sending him to Alabama, church elders asked him to promise not to “start any trouble.”
Years later, after Graetz had become the only white minister to participate in the Montgomery bus boycott and long after he had confronted death threats from Klansmen, he still believed he had kept his promise.
“We did not start that trouble,” he said. “We joined the trouble.”
Graetz was 92 when he died Sept. 20 at his home in Montgomery, of Parkinson's disease.
The Montgomery bus boycott marked a turning point in what was increasingly recognized as a national civil rights movement. Graetz was a friend and neighbour of Rosa Parks, whose refusal to give up her bus seat to a white man sparked a protest that lasted 381 days.
It transformed Graetz into a symbol of white support for Blacks in Montgomery and into a target for Klansmen and other white supremacists. Segregationists twice bombed his home.
Graetz was the only white person on the board of the Montgomery Improvement Association, the Black community group formed to co-ordinate the boycott.
Graetz ultimately drove some of Montgomery's 40,000 Black residents to and from work each day and helped oversee fundraising efforts to support the makeshift taxi service. He also sought to enlist other white ministers in the cause. None heeded his call.
Robert Sylvester Graetz Jr. was born in Clarksburg, W.Va., on May 16, 1928. He spent most of his career as a minister in Ohio, aside from several years when he worked in Washington, helping organize a Lutheran street ministry and handing out food in the aftermath of the 1968 riots ignited by the assassination of his old colleague, Martin Luther King Jr.