Robert Graetz, the white Lutheran pastor who supported the Montgomery Bus Boycott, has died at 92. His role in the Black-led freedom struggle that catalyzed the civil rights movement is an important reminder that white folks can always choose to be anti-racist...

Rev Graetz joined the NAACP in college & learned that it had been started in 1909 by Black & white folks together. When he came to pastor the church around the corner from Rosa Parks’ apartment, she was already hosting NAACP Youth Council meetings there.

Graetz never convinced any other white clergy to join the boycott (they didn’t even support him when his home was bombed). But he wasn’t the only white person in the struggle. Clifford & Virginia Durr had been agitating in Montgomery for years.

In fact, they’d encouraged Rosa Parks to attend a workshop on desegregation at the Highlander Folk School, a popular education center run by their friend, Myles Horton. Parks said it was 1st time in her life she woken up to the smell of bacon & it was white folks cooking it.

Highlander was connected to other experiments in resisting Jim Crow. Horton’s friends Clarence & Florence Jordan had started an integrated farming co-op, Koinonia Farm, in rural GA in the 40s. When the state shut down their integrated summer camp, Highlander hosted it.

Meanwhile back in Montgomery, when the leadership of Parks & King & the Black community built a movement, a white college student, Bob Zellner, got in trouble for just showing up to write a sociology paper about it.

This circle of white folks who’d spent their lives learning to be anti-racist took Bob under their wing, and he went on to intern at Highlander & become the 1st white field secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

All of this in Montgomery, the cradle of the Confederacy, under Jim Crow. These white folks weren’t perfect & they weren’t the leaders of the movement they joined. But they’ve taught me that white folks have a role to play & that anti-racism is always about our freedom too.