Right here in Montgomery, when the history books are written in the future, somebody will have to say, ‘There lived a race of people, a black people, fleecy locks and black complexion, a people who had the moral courage to stand up for their rights. And thereby they injected a new meaning into the veins of history and of civilization.’
MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
Just before nine thirty on the evening of Monday 30 January 1956, a light-coloured car pulled up outside the white, wooden-framed parsonage at 309 South Jackson Street in Montgomery, Alabama. The modest residence, built in 1912, was home to Rev. Dr Martin Luther King, Jr, the twenty-seven-year-old pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, his wife Coretta and their two-month-old daughter, Yolanda. According to an eyewitness, the car stopped briefly before moving away ‘in a terrific hurry’.1 Coretta was in the living room, chatting with a family friend, when she heard a ‘heavy thump on the concrete porch outside’. Nervous following a recent series of menacing phone calls, she immediately ushered her companion towards the rear of the house. A few seconds later, there was a ‘thunderous blast’, followed by ‘smoke and the sound of breaking glass’.2 A half-stick of dynamite had exploded on the south side of the porch, ripping a hole in the floor and damaging the roof. The windows at the front of the house also shattered, leaving shards of glass scattered across the living room, den and music room.3
As worried neighbours began to arrive Coretta phoned the First Baptist Church, where her husband, a leading figure in the eight-week-old boycott of the city’s segregated buses, was addressing a mass meeting. She reported that the house had been bombed and asked that people be sent over straight away, but did not think to mention that they were all unharmed.4 Earlier that evening, King, president of the recently formed Montgomery Improvement Association, had delivered a speech to a packed audience of two thousand. Now, with the meeting drawing to a close, he was standing on a platform at the front of the church, presiding over the collection.5 From his vantage point, King spotted an usher talking animatedly with Ralph Abernathy, the church’s pastor and a good friend. Then Abernathy darted downstairs, only to reappear a few minutes later with an anxious look on his face. It was clear that something was wrong, and King soon called Abernathy over, to be told, ‘Your house has been bombed.’ When King enquired whether his family were all right, Abernathy responded grimly, ‘We are checking on that now.’6
Just a few days earlier, King had experienced a profound personal and spiritual crisis. On Thursday 26 January he had been pulled over by two motorcycle officers for allegedly travelling at thirty miles per hour in a twenty-five-mile-per-hour zone. After spending several hours in a squalid jail cell, King was released. But the unpleasant experience had unnerved him – it was the first time that he had been arrested and on the way to the prison he had, briefly, feared that he might be lynched.7 The following day, King returned home late after an MIA meeting, to be greeted by the latest in a series of threatening phone calls: ‘Nigger, we are tired of you and your mess now. And if you aren’t out of this town in three days, we’re going to blow your brains out, and blow up your house.’8 That night, unable to sleep, he sat at his kitchen table in despair. King was, he later admitted, on the verge of giving up: ‘With my cup of coffee sitting untouched before me I tried to think of a way to move out of the picture without appearing a coward.’ Around midnight, anxious and exhausted, he placed his head in his hands and prayed out loud. King later wrote that ‘the words I spoke to God that midnight are still vivid in my memory’:
‘I am taking a stand for what I believe is right. But now I am afraid. The people are looking to me for leadership, and if I stand before them without strength and courage, they too will falter. I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left. I’ve come to the point where I can’t face it alone.’ At that moment, I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never experienced Him before. It seemed as though I could hear the quiet assurance of an inner voice saying: ‘Stand up for righteousness, stand up for truth; and God will be at your side forever.’ Almost at once my fears began to go. My uncertainty disappeared. I was ready to face anything.9
The bombing of his home, just three days later, would test King’s newfound resolve. On receiving word of the attack, King relayed the news to the audience, explained that he had to leave straight away and suggested that they disperse quietly to their homes. ‘Let us keep moving’, King said, ‘with the faith that what we are doing is right, and with the even greater faith that God is with us in this struggle.’10 On arriving home, still unsure whether his wife and baby were safe, King was greeted by chaotic scenes. The traffic in the road was snarled up, a crowd of several hundred African Americans had surrounded the house and the police were struggling to maintain order. Jo Ann Robinson, an English teacher at Alabama State College and a leading community activist, described how the police ‘tried in vain to move the crowd from the bombed area. The crowd was dangerously quiet, and the air was tense. One of the policemen called out, “Please go home, folks, nobody is hurt.” Not a soul moved; no one spoke. The silence was accusing, maddening, threatening . . .’11 One black man even suggested a shootout, telling a police officer, ‘I ain’t gonna move nowhere. That’s the trouble now; you white folks is always pushin’ us around. Now you got your .38 and I got mine; so let’s battle it out.’ With a number of men and older youths carrying knives and broken bottles, a full-scale riot was a very real possibility. Hardly surprising, then, that Mayor W. A. Gayle and Police Commissioner Clyde Sellers, who had arrived at the parsonage shortly after the bombing, were ‘deathly pale’.
Striding across his damaged front porch, King entered the house and headed into the bedroom. On seeing his wife and child uninjured, he was overcome with relief.12 Then the young preacher walked back onto the porch and appealed for calm. ‘In less than a moment’, he would later recall, ‘there was complete silence.’ After explaining that his wife and baby daughter were safe, he urged the crowd to be peaceful: ‘We believe in law and order. Don’t get panicky . . . Don’t get your weapons. He who lives by the sword will perish by the sword. Remember that is what God said. We are not advocating violence. We want to love our enemies.’ King continued, ‘I did not start this boycott. I was asked by you to serve as your spokesman. I want it to be known the length and breadth of this land that if I am stopped this movement will not stop. If I am stopped our work will not stop. For what we are doing is right. What we are doing is just. And God is with us.’ The crowd responded with cries of ‘Amen’ and ‘God bless you, brother King.’ Years later, Coretta described the emotional response to her husband’s extraordinary speech. ‘Many people out there were crying. I could see the shine of tears on their faces . . . they were moved, as by a holy exaltation.’ It had certainly been a remarkable performance, under intense pressure. Then, as Clyde Sellers attempted to address the crowd, a chorus of loud, angry boos rang out, forcing King to intervene: ‘Remember what I just said. Hear the commissioner.’ Sellers’s assurance of ‘police protection for the King family’ and his condemnation of the violence was followed by Mayor Gayle’s announcement that he would ‘work with my last breath if necessary to find and convict the guilty parties’. He also offered a $500 reward. King then urged everyone to ‘go home and sleep calm’. ‘Go home and don’t worry,’ he said. ‘Be as calm as I and my family are. We are not hurt and remember that if anything happens to me, there will be others to take my place.’13 Robinson recalled that, when King finished speaking, the crowd began to move away, ‘as a great surge of water rolls quietly, calmly, obediently downstream’. As they did so a white policeman was overheard exclaiming, ‘If it hadn’t been for that nigger preacher, we’d all be dead.’14
In 1956, the United States was the most powerful and most prosperous country in the world. A post-war boom, driven by consumerism, military spending and technological advancement, had delivered unprecedented increases in GDP (it rose by 72 per cent between 1950 and 1959), full employment and rising living standards. Americans rushed to buy the latest consumer goods – including cars, fridges, televisions and washing machines – and millions of families carved out a middle-class life in the new suburban developments that sprang up across the nation. Automation and increases in productivity, together with the growth of the service and consumer sectors, meant that the United States became the world’s first ‘post-industrial’ economy – and in 1956 ‘white-collar’ workers (those in professional, managerial or administrative roles) outnumbered ‘blue-collar’ (or manual) workers for the first time.15 The United States had also shaken off the isolationism of the 1930s to become the world’s first superpower. Backed by considerable military muscle (including a vast network of overseas bases and a substantial fleet of nuclear bombers), the US affirmed its unshakeable commitment to democracy as it led the free world’s response to the international Communist threat during the early years of the Cold War.16 Yet for all her power and wealth, and her proud boasts, the United States harboured an ugly secret: millions of her own people lived as second-class citizens, cut off from the nation’s economic prosperity and democratic promise. ‘Jim Crow’, an entrenched system of white supremacy that operated across the South, subjected African American men, women and children to countless petty injustices and humiliations. And nowhere were these daily insults more bitterly resented than in Montgomery, Alabama.
Located on a bluff overlooking the Alabama River, in the heart of the rich, fertile land of the Black Belt, Montgomery had once been a thriving centre for the sale of cotton and slaves. During the Civil War, the city served as the first capital of the Confederacy – on 18 February 1861 Jefferson Davis had taken the presidential oath of office on the portico of the imposing state capitol building.17 In the mid-twentieth century, Montgomery’s economy was heavily dependent on the surrounding agricultural counties (it had developed lumber, furniture and fertiliser industries) and two nearby US air force bases.18 Like communities across the American South, the city’s African Americans were politically and economically disenfranchised and subjected to degrading segregation. Although African Americans made up over a third of Montgomery’s population of 120,000 in 1955, they constituted only about 8 per cent of the electorate. Many thousands of potential black voters were kept off the voting rolls, thanks to the combination of legal restrictions (to be eligible to vote, ownership of property worth at least $500 was required), a literacy test (administered, unfairly, by white officials), and economic coercion and intimidation.19 The city’s African Americans also suffered economically: black median family income, which stood at around $1,000 a year, was half that of the city as a whole, and a majority of black adults were ‘working poor’. Most blacks found employment in the service sector or as agricultural labourers, and more than half of the black women who worked did so as domestic servants for wealthy whites.20
A rigid and comprehensive system of racial segregation, undergirded by law and supported by custom, left virtually no area of life untouched. Schools, hospitals, parks, restrooms, hotels, theatres, restaurants, public transport – and even drinking fountains – were all segregated.21 Although justified by the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’, which had been upheld by the US Supreme Court in 1896, the Jim Crow laws were clearly intended to reinforce white supremacy. Black facilities, where they existed, were inferior, and African Americans were subjected to humiliating treatment. One black woman, who grew up in Montgomery during the 1940s and 1950s, recalled that when she had to have her tonsils removed, the black ward of St Margaret’s Hospital took the form of a small house behind the main buildings. When she returned for follow-up visits, she discovered that the ‘colored’ waiting room also served as a janitor’s closet.22
The system of bus segregation that operated in Montgomery was particularly iniquitous. The buses, which were run by Montgomery City Lines, had the first ten seats reserved for whites and the last ten (which sat above the engine) for African Americans. The sixteen seats in the middle section were assigned according to need. In the event that the white section became full, black passengers could be ordered by the bus driver to vacate these seats, and even an entire row, to make room for a white passenger. No black person was permitted to sit next to, or alongside, a white. The arrangement meant that as many as four black passengers might be required to stand in order to accommodate a single white traveller. Moreover, the white section at the front was completely off limits to blacks – they could not sit there even if all other seats on the bus were full and not a single white passenger was on board. Indeed, they were not even permitted to pass through it: after paying the driver at the front of the bus black passengers, often weighed down with heavy shopping bags, had to climb back off – whatever the weather – and enter at the rear. It was not unknown for particularly vindictive drivers to drive off before the black passengers had reboarded.23 Jo Ann Robinson explained that ‘there were literally thousands of times when Negroes were made to stand up over seats “reserved” for whites. In many instances not one white passenger was aboard . . . Yet thirty or forty black riders jammed the aisles where men and women, old and young, mothers with babies in their arms, or women with huge packages, stood swaying or falling over those empty seats . . .’24 African Americans were also subjected to discourteous and offensive treatment by white bus drivers. As one black woman explained, black passengers were treated ‘as rough as can be. I mean not like we are human, but like we was some kind of animal.’25
Montgomery’s African Americans had made some progress in the decade following the Second World War: educational attainment had increased, a black hospital and public library had opened, the (modest) number of black voters had doubled, and, following a concerted campaign by the city’s major black organisations, several African Americans were hired as police officers (joining a force that had a grim record of physical and sexual violence against blacks).26 When it came to the hated system of bus segregation, though, there was little sign of change. In October 1952, black leaders had suggested that the city adopt the system that operated in Mobile, a city 160 miles south-west of Montgomery, where blacks were seated from the back and whites from the front, with the racial dividing line dependent on where the passengers met.27 At a series of meetings with the City Commission during 1953 and early 1954, the Women’s Political Council – a middle-class civic group that enjoyed a growing reputation for championing black rights – joined with other black organisations to press for a more flexible system of segregation.28 They also raised concerns about the poor treatment of black passengers and complained that buses stopped less frequently in black neighbourhoods. Additional stops in those areas were promised and, following an appeal from the mayor, the behaviour of bus drivers improved – temporarily. However, no concessions were made on the seating arrangements.29
On 21 May 1954, just four days after the historic Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka, Kansas that segregated schooling was ‘inherently unconstitutional’, Robinson wrote to Mayor Gayle on behalf of the WPC, reiterating demands for a more flexible seating policy and calling for black passengers to be allowed to board the bus at the front. Robinson pointed out that the patronage of African Americans, who made up three quarters of the bus passengers, was critical to the profitability of the bus company, and explained that ‘more and more of our people are already arranging with neighbors and friends to ride to keep from being insulted and humiliated by bus drivers’. Although Robinson assured the mayor that the WPC remained committed to securing ‘agreeable terms’ in a ‘quiet and unostensible manner’, she also warned that ‘even now plans are being made to ride less, or not at all, on our buses’.30
The election of Clyde Sellers to the City Commission in the spring of 1955 doomed Robinson’s hopes of quiet and agreeable progress. Sellers, a businessman and former director of the State Highway Patrol, decided that he could defeat his opponent – a racial moderate who had been elected two years earlier – by appealing to white prejudice.31 Dismissing any talk of modifying bus segregation as ‘illegal’, Sellers set himself firmly against any further concessions to African Americans: ‘I will not’, he declared, ‘compromise my principles’ or ‘violate my Southern birthright . . . I will not be intimidated for the sake of a block of negro votes.’32 The strategy worked brilliantly and Sellers won a crushing victory.33
Sellers’s success coincided with fresh controversy on Montgomery’s buses. On 2 March Claudette Colvin, a fifteen-year-old student at Booker T. Washington High School and a member of the local youth council of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), was arrested for refusing to give up her seat.34 Colvin recalled telling the bus driver that ‘I was just as good as any white person and I wasn’t going to get up’.35 After the police were called, Colvin still refused to move and was dragged – kicking and scratching – from the bus.36 On learning of Colvin’s arrest, Robinson and E. D. Nixon (a black labour organiser and political activist) considered using the incident to launch a legal challenge to the bus segregation law. However, the allegation that Colvin had resisted arrest, and the subsequent discovery that she was several months pregnant, meant that the idea was shelved.37 But Colvin’s conviction on 18 March outraged the black community, and for several days many blacks refused to ride the buses, in an apparently spontaneous protest.38
At about five thirty on the evening of Thursday 1 December 1955 a middle-aged black woman left the Montgomery Fair department store in which she worked as an assistant tailor. Having visited a nearby drug store, where she purchased some aspirin, toothpaste and a few Christmas gifts, she boarded the bus for her journey home. Rosa Parks took one of the few remaining seats immediately behind the section at the front of the bus that was reserved for whites. After making several stops, the driver noticed that a number of whites were now standing and requested that the first row of black passengers vacate their seats. But, as Parks explained later, ‘didn’t any of us move’. ‘You all make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats!’ exclaimed the driver, at which the man sitting beside Parks and the two black women in the seats opposite all stood up. Parks stayed put. Asked whether she was going to stand up, she responded, ‘No, I’m not.’ The driver warned her that he would call the police. Parks remained in her seat. A few minutes later, two police officers boarded the bus, arrested Parks and took her to the local police station, where she was booked and placed in a cell.39
Born in Tuskegee in 1913, to a carpenter father and schoolteacher mother, Rosa was raised on her grandparents’ tenant farm, south of Montgomery, before moving to the city in 1924 to live with cousins, so that she could attend the Montgomery Industrial School for Negro Girls (known as ‘Miss White’s School’ after its founder). At Miss White’s, Rosa became skilled at stenography, typing and sewing, and also developed a strong sense of racial pride and self-worth. She subsequently enrolled at Alabama State College’s laboratory high school, eventually graduating (following a break due to her mother’s ill health) in 1933. A year earlier she had married Raymond Parks, a barber ten years her senior. Aged forty-two at the time of her arrest, Rosa Parks was an integral member of Montgomery’s black leadership class. In 1943 she had joined the local NAACP branch, serving as its secretary, and the following year had led the campaign to investigate the gang-rape of a young black woman by six white men.40 In 1948 she was elected secretary of the state-wide conference and four years later agreed to serve as an adult adviser to the Montgomery NAACP youth council. As a result of her civil rights work, Parks became acquainted with key figures including E. D. Nixon, Ella J. Baker, the NAACP’s director of branches, Robert L. Carter, one of the Association’s leading lawyers, and the white progressives Clifford and Virginia Durr, Montgomery residents who had been prominent supporters of Franklin Roosevelt.41 The Durrs, with whom Parks became quite friendly, had encouraged her to attend an interracial training workshop at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, during August 1955. Parks was inspired by her experiences at Highlander – which was committed to interracial democracy and grassroots organising – telling its director, Myles Horton, that ‘I found out for the first time in my adult life that this could be a unified society, that there was such a thing as people of differing races and backgrounds meeting together in workshops and living together in peace and harmony.’ While she remained pessimistic about the prospects for change in Montgomery, believing the black community to be ‘timid’ and unable to ‘stand together’, she had, she said, ‘gained . . . strength to persevere in my work for freedom’.42
Parks shared with many of her black neighbours a deep antipathy to the system of bus segregation operated by Montgomery City Lines: she recalled that ‘having to take a certain section because of your race was humiliating, but having to stand up because a particular driver wanted to keep a white person from having to stand was, to my mind, most inhumane’.43 Over the years Parks had been involved in a number of altercations with bus drivers and in the winter of 1943 she had been thrown off a bus by Fred Blake, the very same driver who ordered her to vacate her seat on 1 December 1955.44
Rosa Parks had not intended to stage a protest that cold, dark evening. She was tired and not feeling particularly well, and, as she explained later, ‘simply decided that I would not get up’. Parks was, though, fired by a clear sense of injustice. In an April 1956 interview she explained that ‘the time had just come when I had been pushed as far as I could stand to be pushed . . .’45
Parks’s refusal to yield her seat gave the city’s black leaders their chance to implement long-mooted plans for a one-day boycott of the city’s buses. When word of her arrest reached E. D. Nixon, he contacted the police station for more information, only to be told it was none of his business. He immediately turned to Clifford Durr, who, as a qualified attorney, was able to ascertain the details. Nixon, along with Clifford and his wife, Virginia, then headed to the city jail to post Parks’s bail, which had been set at $100. On the way, they discussed using Parks as a test case to challenge bus segregation. Parks’s self-confidence, composed demeanour and high standing in the local community made her an ideal candidate. After securing her release the discussions resumed, over coffee, at Parks’s home. Parks was initially sceptical, and her husband was worried about possible white reprisals, but she eventually agreed: ‘If you think it is all right, I’ll go along with you.’46 Meanwhile, the city’s leading black attorney, Fred Gray, had contacted Jo Ann Robinson to discuss the possibility of staging a boycott of the buses on Monday 5 December – the date set for Parks’s trial. After further discussions, it was decided that Robinson would publicise the planned protest, while Nixon organised a meeting of the city’s black leaders.47
That night, Robinson did not sleep. Instead, she drafted a leaflet and persuaded a colleague to open up the mimeograph room at Alabama State College. Joined by two of her most trusted students, she worked until 4 a.m. producing tens of thousands of leaflets. These explained how ‘another Negro woman has been arrested and thrown into jail because she refused to get up out of her seat on the bus for a white person to sit down’, warned that ‘if we do not do something to stop these arrests, they will continue. The next time it may be you, or your daughter, or mother’, and called on blacks to stay off the buses on Monday.48
Once the leaflets had been printed, Robinson and her students spent several hours drawing up a distribution schedule and, after teaching her 8 a.m. class, she called some two dozen contacts to explain the plans and recruit volunteers to hand out the flyers. Over the next few hours, tens of thousands of leaflets were dropped off at schools and black-owned businesses (including beauty parlours, barber shops and stores). ‘By two o’clock’, Robinson later recalled, ‘practically every black man, woman, and child in Montgomery knew the plan and was passing the word along.’49
Meanwhile, Nixon had arranged for about seventy of the city’s influential black preachers to meet in the basement of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. The meeting, though, did not go well. Rev. L. Roy Bennett, who had been asked to preside, embarked on a lengthy monologue and, as the frustration built, ministers began to drift away. Eventually, Ralph Abernathy, the twenty-nine-year-old pastor of First Baptist Church, persuaded Bennett to give way and allow a discussion. Although some remained wary, the ministers endorsed the proposed boycott and agreed to hold a mass meeting on the evening of 5 December to discuss extending the protest.50 Martin Luther King and Abernathy then drew up new leaflets to publicise the boycott and the mass meeting:
Don’t ride the bus to work, to town, to school, or any place Monday, December 5.
Another Negro Woman has been arrested and put in jail because she refused to give up her bus seat.
Don’t ride the buses to work, to town, to school, or any where on Monday. If you work, take a cab, or share a ride, or walk.
Come to a mass meeting, Monday at 7:00 P.M. at the Holt Street Baptist Church for further instruction.51
Thousands of leaflets were distributed over the weekend, and a committee persuaded the city’s black taxi companies to charge black passengers the standard bus fare of ten cents on Monday.52 On Saturday evening, King and other ministers visited local bars and nightclubs to build support and the following morning, in black churches across the city, preachers urged their congregations to support the one-day boycott and to attend the mass meeting.53
Assistance in spreading the word also came from the white press. On Friday 2 December, Nixon met secretly with Joe Azbell of the Montgomery Advertiser. A ‘lanky, stoop-shouldered young man from Vernon, Texas’ who ‘looked like the clichéd tough-guy reporter on the cover of a 1950s pulp-fiction paperback’, Azbell had earned his stripes on his local paper before joining the Advertiser in 1948.54 Nixon informed him about the plans for the boycott and the mass meeting, and predicted that Monday 5 December would be a truly historic day.55 On Sunday 4 December the front page of the Advertiser carried the scoop. Azbell reported that a ‘top secret’ meeting was planned for Monday evening to help prepare an ‘economic reprisal campaign’ to protest bus segregation. ‘Negro sections’ of town had, he wrote, been ‘flooded with thousands of copies of mimeographed or typed leaflets asking Negroes to refrain from riding city buses Monday’.56 Azbell’s story was quickly picked up by local television and radio news, spreading the word to those black citizens who may have not heard about the protest. It also drew an official response from the city authorities: Police Commissioner Clyde Sellers took to the airwaves to promise that his officers would protect black passengers from the ‘goon squads’ that, he claimed, were being organised to enforce the boycott.57
That Sunday evening, Martin Luther King and his wife discussed the prospects for the boycott’s success. Even though news of the action had reached every part of the city, and despite the support from local ministers, he ‘still wondered whether the people had enough courage to follow through’. He retired to bed that night ‘with a strange mixture of hope and anxiety’.58 The Kings were up and dressed by five thirty the following day, eager to observe the early morning buses. The first three that rolled past their parsonage, which would normally have been filled with black domestics, contained not a single African American passenger. Then King jumped into his car and drove around the city, nervously examining every passing bus. Over the course of the next hour, during the height of the morning traffic, he spotted ‘no more than eight Negro passengers riding the buses. By this time I was jubilant.’59 It was the same story across the city: Robinson recalled that ‘all day long empty buses passed, trailed by white-capped city cops’, whose presence probably deterred any wavering blacks. Ninety per cent of black passengers supported the boycott.60 Several hundred African Americans, including King and Abernathy, also gathered at the courthouse that morning in an unprecedented show of support for Rosa Parks – who was found ‘guilty’ by the judge and fined $10. Her lawyer, Fred Gray, immediately declared that the decision would be appealed.61
The remarkable show of mass support had convinced many black leaders that the protest should continue until the city granted meaningful concessions. As they met to discuss the mass meeting that was scheduled to begin at Holt Street Baptist Church at 7 p.m., it was agreed to form a new organisation, the Montgomery Improvement Association, to undertake the detailed planning needed to sustain the boycott. When discussion turned to the leadership of the new group, Rufus Lewis – a Second World War veteran and Alabama State College football coach – immediately proposed Martin Luther King, the pastor of his own church, as president. Lewis acted partly to block E. D. Nixon, a long-standing rival, but he also understood that King, who embodied black middle-class respectability and was an educated and eloquent preacher, might win the support of Montgomery’s more conservative African Americans. As a relative newcomer (he had arrived at Dexter Avenue on 1 September 1954), King had also not yet been drawn into the factional squabbles and personal rivalries that bedevilled the city’s black leadership. The nomination was quickly seconded and endorsed unanimously. After a short pause, King agreed: ‘Well, if you think I can render some service, I will.’ He later recalled that ‘it had happened so quickly that I did not even have time to think it through. It is probable that, if I had, I would have declined.’ Indeed, King had turned down a request to run for the presidency of the local NAACP branch a few weeks earlier, preferring to focus on his new job as pastor of Dexter Avenue and fulfil his parental responsibilities. After the rest of the MIA leadership was formalised and the agenda for the evening’s meeting agreed, it was decided that the continuation of the boycott would be put to a popular vote. Finally, King was charged with delivering the keynote speech.62
King returned home, where he informed a surprised Coretta of his new role before retreating to his study. King usually took about fifteen hours to write his weekly sermon; that evening, he had less than twenty-five minutes to prepare what would be his first major public address. Feeling somewhat overwhelmed by the task at hand, King turned to prayer. Calmed, he began to prepare his remarks, but was soon wrestling with a new dilemma – how to rouse the people to action while containing their fervour within acceptable and Christian bounds. With little more than an outline sketched out in his head, King set off for the meeting.63 It was immediately apparent that black Montgomery was out in force: around the church, cars were lined up on both sides of the street, as far as the eye could see.64 In his report for the Advertiser, Joe Azbell described how, as he made his way ‘along Clevelend Avenue en route to the Holt Street Baptist Church . . . I could see Negroes by the dozens forming a file, almost soldierly, on the sidewalk . . .’65 The church itself was packed long before 7 p.m. and thousands of boycott supporters were surrounding the building. Speakers were strung up to relay the meeting to the crowds, and police officers struggled to maintain order.66 It took King more than fifteen minutes to make his way through the throng to the sanctuary of the pastor’s study; the meeting eventually began half an hour late. It was abundantly clear that, as King put it, ‘the question of calling off the protest was now academic. The enthusiasm of these thousands of people swept everything along like an onrushing tidal wave.’67
Following a few words of introduction, the meeting began with a thunderous rendition of the hymn ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’.68 King recalled that ‘when that mammoth audience stood to sing, the voices outside swelling the chorus in the church, there was a mighty ring like the glad echo of heaven itself’.69 After a prayer and a reading from Scripture, King stepped forward to deliver his speech. Speaking without notes, he began by explaining that they were there for ‘very serious business’: ‘First and foremost’, he said, ‘we are American citizens and we are determined to apply our citizenship to the fullness of its meaning.’ Conscious of the wider Cold War struggle, in which the United States claimed leadership of the ‘free world’ against Communist tyranny, and eager to neuter any charges that the boycott was inspired by Communists, King declared that they were ‘here because of our love of democracy, because of our deep-seated belief that democracy transformed from thin paper to thick action is the greatest form of government on earth’. Then, after outlining the long-standing problems with the city’s buses and praising Rosa Parks as one of Montgomery’s most upstanding citizens – a ‘fine Christian person’ of integrity and character – King declared:
There comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression. There comes a time, my friends, when people get tired of being plunged across the abyss of humiliation . . . There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life’s July and left standing amid the piercing chill of an alpine winter.
King was also at pains to emphasise that the movement was peaceful, and that they did not advocate violence of any kind: ‘I want it to be known throughout Montgomery and throughout this nation that we . . . believe in the teachings of Jesus. The only weapon that we have in our hands is the weapon of protest.’ It was a remarkable speech, punctuated by calls of ‘That’s right’, ‘Yeah’, and ‘Yes sir, Teach’, as well as frequent bursts of applause.70 One observer recalled how ‘Reverend King prayed so hard that night . . . you had to hold people to keep them from gettin’ to him.’71
After a standing ovation for Rosa Parks, Abernathy presented the resolutions, which called on ‘every citizen in Montgomery’ to ‘refrain from riding’ the buses ‘until some arrangement has been worked out’ between the MIA and the bus company. Azbell reported that as the assembled crowd rose to their feet in a show of unanimous support for the resolution, there was a ‘wild whoop of delight. Many said they would never ride the bus again.’ He concluded by noting that the mass meeting ‘proved beyond any doubt there was a discipline among Negroes that many whites had doubted. It was almost a military discipline combined with emotion.’72
Buoyed by the success of the one-day boycott and the extraordinary scenes at the mass meeting, the MIA leaders sought to press their advantage. They notified the city commission and the bus company officials of their three core demands:
Courteous treatment by bus drivers.
Seating of Negro passengers from rear to front of bus, and white passengers from front to rear on ‘first-come-first-serve’ basis with no seats reserved for any race.
Employment of Negro bus operators in predominantly Negro residential sections.73
On Thursday 8 December, when the MIA leaders, city commissioners and bus company officials met for the first time, the black leaders were optimistic that a satisfactory resolution would be reached in a matter of days.74 But while the authorities agreed to support the demand for greater courtesy, they refused to yield any ground on the substantive issues. The bus company’s attorney was particularly intransigent, making it clear that Montgomery City Lines had no plans to hire black drivers and arguing forcefully that any changes to the seating arrangements would violate state law.75 Revealingly, he also warned that ‘if we granted the Negroes these demands they would go about boasting of a victory over the white people; and this we will not stand for’.76 Four hours of talks failed to make any progress, and further meetings proved similarly dispiriting.77
On Christmas Day, a frustrated MIA took out a half-page advertisement in the Sunday Advertiser and Alabama Journal that documented their long-standing grievances, outlined their proposals and offered assurances about the nonviolent and democratic nature of the movement.78 In the advertisement, the MIA leadership made it clear that they were not seeking an end to segregation: ‘At no time, on the basis of this proposal, will both races occupy the same seat.’79 Just a few days later Roy Wilkins, executive secretary of the NAACP, wrote privately that the Association would not be prepared to offer its support to any effort that asked ‘merely for more polite segregation’.80 By the end of January 1956, however, the boycott of Montgomery’s buses had been transformed into an all-out assault on bus segregation. Although, on one level, this reflected the deeper desire of the city’s blacks for equal treatment, the continuing refusal of the city authorities to offer any meaningful concessions, and the sustained and intensifying campaign by white segregationists to destroy the boycott – which culminated in the bombing of King’s house on 30 January and that of E. D. Nixon two days later – had forced the MIA’s hand.81
As we will see, stubbornness was a character trait that southern segregationists shared with many of their white counterparts in the colonial world.
Guy Mollet, the French prime minister, holed up in the Palais d’Été, Algiers, February 1956.
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