The self-defense patrols were established by the Techwood Homes Tenant Association because of police failure to stop the murders and disappearances of Black children. As of March 24, twenty children have been killed and three more are missing. The cops have made no arrests.

On March 20 the association organized twenty-five people in patrols. Most were armed with baseball bats painted in the Black liberation colors, red, black, and green. The bats are also known as “Hank Aaron Crime Stoppers.”

Mayor Maynard branded the patrols “vigilantes” and declared that if patrols did not work with the police “they will not be tolerated.”

Tenants reacted angrily to the charges. Techwood Homes leader Marian Green said, “The Klan has armed camps and they don’t get labeled vigilantes. We get labeled because we are Black and lower income.”  
 
April 2, 1956
MONTGOMERY, Ala., March 22—This city tonight saw the climax of four turbulent days that shook the South. A vast, militant throng of Negro freedom fighters jammed the Holt Street Church to demonstrate their solidarity behind Rev. M. L. King, a leader of the Montgomery Improvement Association just convicted in circuit court of “conspiring to hinder” the local bus operations.

I have seen nothing like the rank and file outpouring of grievances here since my days in the rising union movement of the Thirties [reported Farrell Dobbs]. Now as then, a deep well of resentment has been tapped. A burning desire to seek redress has arisen. A growing determination to get action has taken hold.

Evidence piled up showing that many Negroes had begun their own individual protests long before the mass protest action got under way. An elderly woman quit riding the bus in 1945 after she was put off for refusing to stoop down and pick up a penny from the floor.

How the Negro people of Montgomery reached the boiling point was put plainly and simply by one witness. “I was ordered to get up and give my seat to a white man,” she said. “I got off and walked. The farther I walked the madder I got. So I just kept on walking.”  
 
April 1, 1931
The Lawrence strike ended suddenly in a compromise, but the twelve-day demonstration of the textile workers there had a nation-wide significance. It was heard from one end of the country to the other like a thunder-clap in a dead calm, warning of a coming storm. There is no doubt that it had a heartening influence on the conscious sections of the workers everywhere, stirring them with the thought that the signal for struggle had been sounded by an authoritative voice.

The masters of America, sitting uneasily on a volcano of working class misery in the crisis, were no less alarmed than the workers were inspired by the strike. This was shown by the feverish attempts to get it settled before it could consolidate its organization and extend its scope. The frenzied persecution of the strike leaders was prompted by their terror, as also were their concessions to the strikers, offered so soon after the strike began—a procedure quite unusual in the textile industry.  
 
 
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