Jean Graetz, White Supporter of Civil Rights in Alabama, Dies at 90
With her husband, Robert, Mrs. Graetz became a friend of Rosa Parks and supported the Montgomery bus boycott, despite threats to her life.
Jean Graetz, who was among the few white people in Montgomery, Ala., to participate in the city’s civil rights movement in the 1950s — pushing forward even as she faced slashed tires, obscene phone calls and multiple bombings — died on Wednesday at her home in Montgomery. She was 90.
The cause was lung cancer, said Kenneth Mullinax, a family friend. She died just three months after her husband, Robert, with whom she had partnered in her civil rights efforts.
“Bob and Jeannie were just one of those couples, like Romeo and Juliet,” Mr. Mullinax said. “One could not survive without the other.”
The couple arrived in Montgomery in 1955 after Mr. Graetz, a newly minted Lutheran minister trained in Ohio, was assigned to a predominantly Black church. Black Lutherans were rare in Alabama, and it was even more rare for a white minister to preach to them, let alone to live in their neighborhood as the Graetzes did.
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Although Mr. Graetz was the headliner of the couple, preaching to his flock every Sunday, Mrs. Graetz played an equal part behind the scenes, organizing events and building connections with members of the city’s civil rights movement.
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“My mother didn’t like to look at them as a team,” her daughter Carolyn Graetz Glass said in a phone interview. “She was happy to let our dad shine. But there was no Bob without Jeannie, and no Jeannie without Bob.”
Rosa Parks, one of their neighbors, used a room in the church, Trinity Lutheran, to hold meetings of the local N.A.A.C.P. chapter. When Mrs. Parks was arrested in 1955 for refusing to give up her seat on a segregated bus, Mrs. Graetz was among the women who began planning what turned into a yearlong boycott of the city’s public transportation. The boycott would propel the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who emerged as its leader, into the international spotlight.
While her husband used his pulpit to spread the latest news about the boycott, Mrs. Graetz dived into the endless organizational tasks, like arranging for child care, preparing lunches and lining up interviews between the boycott’s leaders and the retinue of reporters who descended on Montgomery. An empty lot behind the Graetzes’ house was used to hold the many cars lent to the bus boycott by sympathizers.
White people who worked with Black congregations already walked a fine line in Montgomery, afforded a limited dispensation according to “the same social calculus that allowed doctors to visit a brothel in a medical emergency,” the historian Taylor Branch wrote in “Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63.”
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The backlash from the white community for violating those limits was immediate, and virulent. Mrs. Graetz received scores of threatening phone calls. She found sugar poured into the gas tank of their car, and the tires slashed.
In August 1956, while the couple was with Mrs. Parks in Tennessee at the Highlander Folk School, a civil rights training center, a bomb exploded in their front yard. Five months later, another bomb hit their house, shattering windows and breaking a door, this time while they were asleep inside with their newborn son, David. Another, much larger bomb failed to detonate; a neighbor who had been trained in explosives in the Army came over to help disarm it.
Mrs. Parks came over as well, and helped Mrs. Graetz sweep up the broken glass while Mr. Graetz dealt with the police. Several suspects were arrested. An all-white jury acquitted them.
The Graetzes, never flinching, went right back to their civil rights work.
“There are nice fuzzy liberals, and then there are the Graetzes,” Jeanne Theoharis, a professor of political science at Brooklyn College and the author of “The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks” (2013), said in an interview. “It’s not a one-off resolve. To do what they did requires doing it every day.”
Mr. Graetz received a new assignment, to a church in Ohio, in 1956. He declined the offer. But he could not do the same two years later. The couple moved back north, and Mr. Graetz served in a series of churches in Ohio and Washington, D.C.
But the Graetzes returned to Montgomery several times, often with their children — they ultimately had seven — including for the last leg of the march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965 in support of the Voting Rights Act.
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They also became active in civil rights and other movements in Ohio. Their first arrest — but not their last — was in 2000, when they blocked a parking garage as part of a protest for L.G.B.T.Q. rights in Cleveland; they were later arrested after taking part in similar protests in Washington and Indianapolis.
“They always taught us to be protective of the ones being bullied and picked on,” said their daughter Meta Ellis, who with her wife leads an L.G.B.T.Q. rights organization in Montgomery.
Jean Ellis was born on Dec. 24, 1929, on a farm in East Springfield, Pa., near the state’s border with Ohio. Her parents, Marshall and Marian (Smith) Ellis, were farmers.
In addition to her daughters Ms. Ellis and Ms. Glass, Mrs. Graetz is survived by two other daughters, Diann and Katherine Graetz; two sons, David and Jonathan Graetz; four sisters, Ruth Warner, Lola Mitchell, Kathleen Iamaio and Mary Maxwell; 26 grandchildren; 17 great-grandchildren; and one great-great grandson. A son, Robert S. Graetz III, died in 1991.
Mrs. Graetz met her husband at Capital University in Columbus, Ohio, where she was studying elementary education and he was studying theology. They married in 1951. When he graduated that same year, two years ahead of her, and received his first preaching assignments — Los Angeles, followed by Montgomery — she left school to follow him.
After the Graetzes returned to Montgomery in 2005, she went back to school to complete her studies, attending Alabama State University, a historically Black college. She graduated in 2015.
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The couple, often dressed in color-coordinated outfits of her choosing, became a fixture in Montgomery’s activist community, helping to run the National Center for the Study of Civil Rights and African-American Culture at Alabama State.
In 2018, a handwritten note by Mrs. Parks documenting their friendship came up for auction. Mr. and Mrs. Graetz, never wealthy, bought it for $9,375. They immediately donated it to the university.
“Sacrifice is something they did their entire life,” said Mr. Mullinax, the couple’s friend. “So it really doesn’t surprise me that they would sacrifice financially at the end of their life. It ties it all up in a bow.”
