THE ONLY WHITE MINISTER TO JOIN THE MONTGOMERY BUS BOYCOTT
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 decided to send 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 and preaching to a small, majority-Black congregation in Los Angeles as an intern. 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 and bombs from Ku Klux Klan members who targeted his home, he still believed he had kept his promise.
“We did not start that trouble,” he often said. “We joined the trouble.”
Graetz, who devoted his ministry to battling poverty and discrimination and to building what his colleague the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. called “the Beloved Community,” was 92 when he died Sept. 20 at his home in Montgomery. He had Parkinson’s disease, said his wife, Jeannie Ellis Graetz.
From its earliest days in December 1955, the Montgomery bus boycott marked a turning point in what was increasingly recognized as a national civil rights move
ment. Rosa Parks’s refusal to give up her bus seat to a White man, in defiance of a city ordinance and state law, sparked a protest that lasted 381 days, turning
Parks into a founding symbol of the struggle and establishing King as the movement’s charismatic young leader.
It also transformed Graetz into a symbol of White support for Blacks in Montgomery and into a target for Klansmen and other white supremacists. Segregationists found the idea of a White man’s actively cooperating with the boycott “astonishing and outrageous,” according to civil rights historian Mills Thornton’s book “Dividing Lines” (2002), and twice bombed his parsonage.
Graetz was “the only White visibly active in the protest,” said David Garrow, another civil rights historian.
Robert Sylvester Graetz Jr. was born in Clarksburg, W.Va., on May 16, 1928, and grew up in the state capital, Charleston.
His father was a glasscompany engineer, his mother a homemaker, and the family was filled with Lutheran preachers, leading Graetz to join the ministry.
He received a bachelor’s degree in 1950 from Capital University, a Lutheran school outside Columbus, Ohio, where he was doing research on anti-Semitism when he began to learn the history of anti-Black discrimination. “I in my Whiteness didn’t know anything about it,” he later said. “It was as if I had discovered a new country.”