Bearing Witness to History: A Conversation with Civil Rights Activist Dr. Valda Harris Montgomery

Civil rights activist Dr. Valda Harris Montgomery experienced many firsthand accounts of racism and segregation. But when asked when she first realized the full extent of it growing up in the south in the 1950s, she points to the irony of religion that was not lost on her as a child as a defining moment when it became clear how unjust things really were. 

“I think the first time I felt like I was being wronged so to speak, even though I was growing up in segregated times and we have all of these barriers…but it really hit me when we had a Catholic hospital across the street from where I lived and we couldn’t go because they didn’t treat black people. And yet I am Catholic and I am going to Catholic school everyday, and we are being taught to love one another, and I couldn’t go to that hospital,” said Montgomery as she addressed the school at a recent Thursday assembly.

Montgomery was in elementary school at the time, but it was then that she realized that these barriers and laws were fundamentally unjust and eventually as she became a little older, she knew in a visceral way she had to activate and become a part of the movement. “If you ask me, why did somebody say, do you want to join [the Freedom Army]? Do you think you can do this? No. It just came from within that I got to do something about these injustices,” she said.

Montgomery grew up in Montgomery, Alabama, alongside many of the Freedom Riders who were working to integrate the city’s bus system after the south refused to acknowledge the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision that segregated buses were unconstitutional. Her neighbors included Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and future U.S. Representative John Lewis, whom she recalls showing up beaten and bloodied in her home in the middle of the night seeking refuge after he was ambushed by a white mob in 1961. 

Dr. Shakita Brooks Jones interviewed Montgomery at the assembly. Jones is the 

the founder of the Central Alabama Alliance Resource and Advocacy Center, and is also the Community Engagement Coordinator at Crescent Dexter in Monte Maria, Alabama. Students from Boston Latin were also in attendance. 

A student in Bezan Chair for Community and Inclusion Julian Braxton’s Politics of Identity class introduced the assembly’s speakers by sharing the first question they were asked in class: What is race? 

“It’s a question that might seem simple for a group of people that chose this elective. But we were stumped,” said Lynanne Luu ’25, as she introduced Montgomery to her peers at the assembly. “We eventually concluded that race is a social construct. But then the question followed, If race is a social construct, why does it matter? What gives it so much power? The answer is history…and the impact it has on people’s lives and what makes race, a social construct, into a critical topic in our daily lives, the economy, and America’s political atmosphere. ”

These conversations inside the classroom are an important part of an education, but when you get to hear from a civil rights icon like Montgomery discuss firsthand accounts of learning how to protest non-violently as bombings and other violent incidents against blacks were unfolding around them, it makes these historic accounts that much more palpable. 

“You had to learn basically how not to respond or react to any negative things that were being told to you in your ears, being shoved and pushed and all of this,” said Montgomery, who was 16 when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed.

When Brooks asked Montgomery about the day Dr. King passed, someone who was not only a prominent civil rights leader, but a family friend to Montgomery, she said she was a 20-year-old college student in Nashville when the news broke. “It was the first time I felt hate in my heart,” she said, and went on to explain that students in her dormitory were so enraged that they made molotov cocktails, which they eventually opted not to hurl into crowds as Nashville and cities nationwide erupted into protests. “Luckily, we didn’t do it. But it was that feeling inside of me, because you have killed somebody that I have known since I was six years old… And that feeling of hate, [in] today’s time, we understand the mindset of a rioter when they destroy so much, and they don’t have anywhere else to go.”

As the assembly was coming to a close, Dr. Montgomery was asked by Dr. Brooks what students can do to train to be a leader, or how to continue to be active within the social inequities that still face our society. “Well, I think you’re in training right now because you’re educating yourself. You’re sitting here and you’re listening and [I hope] you’re absorbing something that we’re saying, and hopefully I’ll be able to answer some questions, but it’s absolutely necessary that you educate yourself,” she said. 

A sweet note to end the assembly was when Dr. Montgomery specifically called out the members of Gen Z who filled the seats inside the theater. 

“Just one quick shout out. How many [members of] Gen Z do I have in here? I love you all. Let me say that. Give yourselves a hand. To me, when I think about what we went through and the decisions we made, I’m handing the baton over to you because you’re going to be our savior, our salvation”—a sentiment met with enthusiastic applause.