Margaret Bonds conceived The Montgomery Variations during a thirteen-state Southern tour in the spring of 1963 – a tour that took her not only to Montgomery, Alabama (a fiercely contested battleground in the ongoing Civil Rights Movement), but also to Birmingham in the same state – the latter at the beginning of Dr. Martin Luther King’s difficult Birmingham campaign. Of her experiences there was born a programmatic composition that used the spiritual “I Want Jesus to Walk with Me” as the basis of a symphonic variation set that drew on models including J. S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations and Richard Strauss’s Don Quixote and Death and Transfiguration to trace the history of the Civil Rights Movement from the Montgomery bus boycott (1955–56) through the Sixteenth-Street Baptist Church bombing (Birmingham, 1963), with a radiant “Benediction” evidently born in the wake of the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. This chapter situates The Montgomery Variations in the personal, professional, and societal developments traced in Chapter 1 and analyzes the music and program to explore how Bonds used it to advance her activist agenda.

The discourse against Jim Crow segregation, discrimination and racism in the 20th century also had important legal successes, such as the work of Thurgood Marshall in the famous Brown vs. Board of Education case in 1954. After the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott, sparked by Rosa Parks, the Civil Rights Movement in many ways resisted segregation, e.g. as led by Martin Luther King. Radical writers and speakers criticized black integration in dominant white society, as was the case in the discourses of Malcolm X and Stokeley Carmichael.