When Rosa Parks made her choice of civil disobedience to protest a law that she felt was unjust, the black community leaders in Montgomery Alabama supported her action with a one-day boycott of the segregated city buses.

Five days later, on Dec. 5, 1955, Martin Luther King, a new minister in Montgomery was asked to be the leader of a longer boycott. He was 26 years old and was chosen partly because he had not been in town long enough for the city’s white leaders to know who he was.

It was a wise choice. Some of the words he spoke that first night set the tone for what became the civil rights movement in 20th century America. He said..

The only weapon we have in our hands this evening is the power of protest”.

For the next year, the almost 50,000 members of the black community who relied on public transit stayed off the buses. They organized car pools where they could, but many walked, usually many miles to and from their jobs as maids, cooks and janitors. That this many people, disenfranchised from the main stream of their own country banded together in a common effort to change the law was an extremely powerful and courageous act.

The reaction in the white community resulted in arbitrary arrests, harassment and bombings.

Through it all, Dr. King and other ministers led nightly mass meetings at Montgomery churches, where the will and courage of the people was reinforced, where they shared the common experience of segregation and found a path out of living in fear. Dr King’s peaceful, yet forceful words led these average hard-working people to stick together as a non-violent group who believed in a just cause and were willing to sacrifice to see their goal attained.

I light the chalice in memory of all the common hard working citizens who were inspired by his words during that long year, to be rewarded for their sacrifice with a Supreme court decision that declared bus segregation illegal in America. They set an example of peaceful protest and non-violence.

I’ll end with a quote from an interview Dr. King gave after someone tried to bomb his home during the boycott.

“The consequences for my personal life are not particularly important, it is the triumph of the cause that I am concerned about. I have always felt that ultimately along the way of life, an individual must stand up and be counted, and be willing to face the consequences, whatever they are. If he is filled with fear, he cannot do that”

His words are still true today.