8

PART OF A GREAT STRUGGLE ALL OVER THE WORLD

Now this determination on the part of the Negro to struggle and to struggle, until segregation and discrimination have passed away, springs from the same longing for human dignity that motivates oppressed peoples all over the world.

MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR

On the evening of 17 May 1956, Martin Luther King, Jr, preached the sermon at the Cathedral Church of St John the Divine, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Work on the magnificent neo-Gothic structure had begun in December 1882, yet the building remained – and remains today – a work in progress (it is known to locals as ‘St John the Unfinished’). Nevertheless the church, with its six-hundred-foot-long nave, intricate stone carvings, vaulted ceilings, imposing west doors (made from three tons of bronze) and Great Rose Window, offered an inspiring setting for the ecumenical service of prayer and thanksgiving that was being held to commemorate the second anniversary of the Brown school desegregation ruling.¹

When the service began at half past seven, twelve thousand people had packed into the aisles to hear the rising young star of the black freedom struggle. King began his sermon with a disquisition on evil – which was, he said, ‘a stark, grim, and colossal reality’ that projected its ‘nagging, prehensile tentacles into every level of human existence’. ‘In a sense’, King explained, ‘the whole history of life is the history of a struggle between good and evil.’ But, fortified by his faith, the MIA president reminded the congregation that evil was ‘ultimately doomed by the powerful, insurgent forces of good’. After all, while Good Friday might ‘occupy the throne for a day’, it ultimately had to ‘give way to the triumphant beat of the drums of Easter’. Referring to the struggle of the ancient Israelites against the Egyptians, King noted that God had parted the waters of the Red Sea, enabling the Israelites to escape from slavery and leaving their oppressors vanquished. The MIA president then drew a striking parallel with the contemporary world, declaring that ‘good, in the form of freedom and justice’ was battling ‘evil, in the form of oppression and colonialism’. The ‘great struggle of the twentieth century’, King stated, was between the ‘exploited masses’ of Africa and Asia who were ‘questing for freedom’ and the old colonial powers who sought to maintain their domination. Gradually, he explained, the ‘forces of freedom and justice’ were winning. Turning his attention to the United States, King argued that African Americans’ struggle to overcome the vicious and cruel system of segregation would prove similarly triumphant. Jim Crow was, King asserted, ‘caught in the rushing waters of historical necessity. Evil in the form of injustice and exploitation cannot survive.’

King ended his sermon with a message of love and forgiveness, arguing that segregationists could be redeemed, since ‘man, by the grace of God, can be lifted from the valley of hate to the high mountain of love’. He also commanded those struggling against evil to ‘have love, compassion and understanding goodwill for those against whom we struggle, helping them to realise that as we seek to defeat [evil] we are not seeking to defeat them but to help them, as well as ourselves’. The ultimate prize, as King described it, was a ‘world where all men will live together as brothers’ in dignity and mutual respect.2

Back in February, when the MIA had filed a federal lawsuit seeking an injunction against bus segregation in Montgomery, the fate of the protest had effectively been placed in the hands of the courts. Some within the movement, including King himself, had briefly wondered whether or not to continue with the boycott. But asking the city’s African Americans to return to the segregated buses and await a court ruling would have been a grievous affront to their dignity and handed a moral victory to their opponents. Moreover, the organisational potential of the MIA would have been squandered, as would any hopes of attracting national attention and political support, or of using the example of Montgomery to encourage sustained black protest elsewhere in the South. In reality, the strength of support among the rank and file meant that the question was almost certainly academic. As Jo Ann Robinson put it, ‘The leaders couldn’t stop it [even] if they wanted to.’3

As the MIA dug in for a protracted legal battle, the boycott was sustained by the hard and often mundane work of grassroots organisers. In addition to the mass meetings that were held to boost morale and maintain unity, MIA volunteers helped to raise money to fund, and undertook the complex day-to-day operation of, the car pool that transported black residents of the city to and from their places of work. They published and distributed a regular newsletter, wrote press releases, operated a speakers’ bureau and contributed to the running of an office – where there was a constant need to answer correspondence, complete paperwork and stay on top of the bookkeeping. The MIA also organised a block-by-block canvassing effort as part of a campaign to increase black voter registration in the city. The organisation, along with the NAACP, provided legal representation for boycott supporters and fought the Montgomery City Commission’s efforts to have the car pool declared illegal. MIA volunteers formed a welfare committee, largely run by women, which offered assistance, including food, clothes and money, to supporters who faced economic reprisals (typically eviction or dismissal from their jobs).⁴

It is fair to say that Martin Luther King did not possess a great love for administration; he was more than happy to delegate the day-to-day running of the boycott to others.⁵ His most meaningful contributions to the struggle flowed, instead, from his role as the boycott’s principal spokesperson. Over the years much ink has been spilled in justified praise of King’s mighty oratory, which proved such a formidable weapon for the civil rights movement. Virginia Durr, for example, reported that ‘my wash lady tells me every week about how she hears angel’s wings when he speaks, and God speaks directly through him . . .’6 King’s charismatic leadership certainly helped to empower tens of thousands of Montgomery’s African American citizens, encouraging them to believe that they could make a difference and that they would succeed.

As his sermon at St John the Divine demonstrates, one of the ways that King sought to do this was by framing the boycott as a battle between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ in which, with God on their side, the forces of ‘justice’ would ultimately prevail. King also argued that the struggle in Montgomery had a significance that resonated well beyond the city itself; that it promised no less than a rebirth of American democracy, and offered an inspiration to people around the world. As King put it at one of the regular MIA mass meetings, ‘We want it to be known throughout the length and breadth of this land – to Asia and Africa – let the world know – that we are standing up for justice.’ The Lord, said King, was ‘using Montgomery as his proving ground’ and ‘It may be that here in the capital of the Confederacy . . . the ideal of freedom in America and in the Southland can be born.’⁷

King’s conviction that the bus boycott represented a key moment in world history was shaped by his keen sense of contemporary international affairs. During his very first speech as MIA leader, he had drawn a contrast between the ‘great glory’ of American democracy, where the ‘right to protest for right’ was sacrosanct, and the grim reality of life behind the Iron Curtain. He had also roused the audience that night by claiming that, in standing up for their rights, they would inject a ‘new meaning into the veins of history and of civilization’.⁸ As the boycott progressed, King expanded upon this theme by drawing repeated parallels with the struggle against colonialism in Asia and Africa.

In the years since the end of the Second World War a number of countries – including India, Pakistan, Burma, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Egypt – had secured their independence from European rule, and pressure was building precipitously elsewhere, particularly across Africa, for an end to control by foreign powers. In April 1955, delegates from twenty-nine countries from across Asia and Africa, representing half of the world’s population, had met in Bandung, Indonesia, in a striking display of the growing power of the newly independent, non-white nations. Challenging the bipolar framework of the Cold War, these ‘nonaligned’ states (they offered allegiance to neither Washington nor Moscow) denounced racial discrimination, called for the peaceful resolution of disputes and affirmed the right of all peoples to self-determination and national independence.9 Like countless other African Americans, King took heart from these events. He was drawn especially to the successful fight against British rule in India and the struggle to end colonialism in the Gold Coast/Ghana.¹⁰ Black leaders throughout the twentieth century, most notably Marcus Garvey and W. E. B. Du Bois, had sought to connect the question of civil rights in the United States with the global struggle of people of colour for dignity and self-determination, and King followed enthusiastically in this tradition. Indeed, one of his key contributions to the freedom movement was to anchor the bus boycott firmly within the global context. As King pointed out, the overwhelming majority of the world’s people were non-white and, until very recently, most of them had been exploited by European colonialism. But ‘today many of them are free . . . And the rest are on that road.’ ‘We’, said King, ‘are part of that great movement.’¹¹ In July, at a gathering of Baptists in Green Lake, Wisconsin, King explained that African Americans’ determination to fight on until segregation and discrimination were swept away ‘springs from the same longing for human dignity that motivates oppressed peoples all over the world. This is not only a nation in transition, but this is a world in transition.’ All across Africa and Asia, King noted, those who had previously been ‘exploited economically, dominated politically, segregated and humiliated by some other power’ were in the process of gaining their freedom. The struggle of African Americans for first-class citizenship rights was, declared King, ‘a part of this great struggle all over the world’.12

Internationalising the bus boycott in this way did not simply help inspire Montgomery’s black citizens during their long, tiring months of protest against segregation. It also provided a marvellous opportunity to exploit America’s position as the self-styled ‘leader of the free world’ in its struggle against Soviet Communism. King, like other black leaders, was well aware that segregation and racial discrimination in the South threatened to undermine America’s international reputation, and provided the USSR with invaluable propaganda with which to discredit her claims to support ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’. The Cold War also offered civil rights activists a chance to rebut segregationist claims that they were little more than Communist dupes. In fact, in King’s skilful hands the boycott actually became a valuable weapon in America’s fight against Communism. In an article published in June, King argued that in Montgomery it was not simply the dignity of African Americans that was at stake, but the very reputation of the United States itself. The ‘deep rumblings of discontent from Africa and Asia’, King explained, ‘are at bottom expressions of their determination not to follow any power that denies basic human rights to a segment of its citizens. So in order to save the prestige of our nation and prevent the uncommitted peoples of the world from falling into the hands of a communistic ideology we must press on.’¹³ The boycott, then, was a profoundly patriotic act. As King put it, ‘Because of our love for America, we cannot afford to slow up.’¹⁴

The Montgomery bus boycott certainly achieved significant international attention. As well as widespread coverage in the foreign press, supporters from around the world wrote to King offering encouragement and advice.15 In May, for example, Bishop Henri Varin de la Brunelière, of the Caribbean island of Martinique, gave his assurance that ‘the colored people of the USA and you especially, Reverend dear Pastor, have our deepest sympathy’ in ‘your heroic struggle’.¹⁶ As they learned of foreign newspaper accounts of the boycott or received letters from overseas, King and his associates took considerable comfort from the fact that their protest was resonating with people all over the world.¹⁷ The boycott’s international dimensions were not lost, either, on American commentators. On the evening of Friday 24 February, in a television broadcast for ABC news, the award-winning journalist Edward P. Morgan argued that what was happening in Montgomery ‘thrusts beyond the city limits, girdles the globe and comes home again’. The US government, he noted, was about to stage an exhibition in India to showcase the virtues of America’s economic, social and political system. While acknowledging that it ‘may arouse interest there’, he explained that ‘another exhibit has preceded it: the press accounts of the Montgomery story. It needs no prophet to foretell which . . . will make the deeper impression on the disciples of Gandhi who have now become the free citizens of India.’¹⁸

Morgan’s reference to Gandhi draws attention to another of King’s signal contributions: the adoption of nonviolence as the central weapon in the struggle for civil rights. King had, of course, stressed the Christian beliefs of the boycott’s supporters, as well as their commitment to peaceful, democratic forms of protest, from the very start of his leadership of the MIA. On the evening of 30 January, when his own house was bombed, he had offered a powerful example of his personal commitment to peaceful methods – defusing a volatile and potentially violent situation by urging his supporters to put away their weapons, imploring them to love their enemies and reminding them of the teachings of Jesus: ‘He who lives by the sword will perish by the sword.’19 But at this point King had neither adopted nonviolence as a way of life nor developed a systematic and coherent ideology of nonviolent resistance. Just two days after the attack on his home, he applied (unsuccessfully) for pistol permits for the guards who had been organised to protect the parsonage. Astonishingly, given his later reputation, he even suggested that it might be ‘good to shed a little blood’. In confidential remarks, King raised the possibility that if one or two white men lost some blood then the federal government might well feel compelled to intervene.²⁰ During the spring of 1956, though, King came to fully embrace philosophical nonviolence and endorse key Gandhian principles, including: an insistence that the means of protest should be as pure as the ends; that nonviolence had to be practised spiritually, as well as physically; and that activists’ willingness to endure violence and abuse in service of a just cause would help to achieve a greater good.

On his journey to nonviolence, King received invaluable assistance from Bayard Rustin and Glenn Smiley, veteran pacifists and longtime exponents of nonviolent protest. Rustin, who was African American, was a chain-smoking, guitar-playing, folk-singing Quaker, a homosexual and a socialist, who had, during the 1930s, been a member of the Young Communist League. He served a prison term as a conscientious objector during the Second World War and, together with fellow members of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (an anti-war and social justice organisation founded in 1915), pioneered the use of nonviolent methods in the struggle for civil rights during the 1940s. In 1948, he spent several weeks in India, learning more about nonviolent resistance from some of Gandhi’s associates. On 21 February 1956, the forty-three-year-old Rustin had arrived in Montgomery, excited by the possibilities that the nascent protest offered for mobilising mass nonviolent action across the South. Although he would go on to have a long and fruitful association with King, Rustin was persuaded to leave Montgomery after little more than a week, amid growing fears that his presence there might be used by segregationists to discredit the movement – though he continued to offer advice from afar.21

Rustin’s sojourn overlapped briefly with that of his friend and colleague Glenn Smiley. A white native of Texas and a Methodist minister, the forty-five-year-old Smiley, who served as FOR’s national field secretary, was committed to developing local nonviolent actions, promoting greater understanding of nonviolent theory and emphasising interracial reconciliation. Smiley had arrived in Montgomery on 27 February and, in his first meeting with the MIA leader, had asked King about his familiarity with the teachings of the Mahatma.²² King, who had studied Gandhi briefly while a college student, ‘was very thoughtful, and he said, “. . . I know who the man is. I have read some statements by him, and so on, but I will have to truthfully say . . . that I know very little about the man.”’ Smiley, who had noted the presence of weapons in King’s house, emphasised that a central precept of the Gandhian approach was an absolute refusal to retaliate in the face of evil and handed King some relevant literature. Soon after, he wrote to colleagues, conveying his belief that King had been called by God to ‘lead a great movement here and in the South’ and had the potential to become a ‘Negro Gandhi’.²³ Yet Smiley also noted that King was ‘young and some of his close help is violent’. The MIA president accepted the presence of bodyguards, for example, and his home was ‘an arsenal’. King ‘saw the inconsistency, but not enough. He believes and yet he doesn’t believe. The whole movement is armed in a sense, and this is what I must convince him to see as the greatest evil.’ Smiley was certain that if King could ‘really be won to a faith in non-violence’, then there was ‘no end to what he can do’.²⁴ Smiley continued to tutor King in the nonviolent method, in late-night discussions that were often accompanied by plates of soul food (pig’s ear sandwiches became a particular favourite), as the MIA leader sought to discover whether or not he was truly able to ‘apply nonviolence to my heart’.25

King’s greater understanding of nonviolent resistance was not simply an intellectual odyssey; the accumulated experience of everyday protest also proved vital. ‘As the days unfolded’, he recalled, ‘I came to see the power of nonviolence more and more.’ The lived experience of a nonviolent protest was itself transformative: ‘Nonviolence became more than a method to which I gave intellectual assent; it became a commitment to a way of life.’ Theoretical questions, meanwhile, were resolved through the business of decision-making and practical action.²⁶ King also took heart from the ways in which those around him developed a deeper appreciation of this protest technique. In a letter to Lillian Smith, the acclaimed southern novelist and white liberal, King confessed that it was ‘gratifying to know how the idea of non-violence has gradually seeped into the hearts and souls of the people’.²⁷

At the outset of the boycott, King had talked in very general terms about how the movement was dependent on spiritual or moral forces, and had described activists as walking with love in their hearts.²⁸ But during the spring, in a series of published writings and speeches, King addressed the concept of nonviolence with increasing sophistication. In an article published in the May edition of Fellowship, FOR’s official journal, King explained that love – which he defined as ‘understanding, good will toward all men’ – was the movement’s principal weapon. ‘No matter what sacrifices we have to make’, he said, ‘we will not let anybody drag us so low as to hate them.’ Whereas retaliatory violence would simply ‘intensify the existence of evil and hate in the universe’, love constituted a ‘transforming power that can lift a whole community to new horizons of fair play, good will and justice’.²⁹ Speaking at San Francisco’s Civic Auditorium on 27 June, during the NAACP’s annual convention, King told his audience that the essence of nonviolent resistance was a refusal to ‘cooperate with the evil of segregation’. Rejecting retaliatory violence on the grounds that it would be both impractical and immoral, he instead advocated the use of Christian love: ‘a love that seeks nothing in return . . . a love that loves the person who does the evil deed, while hating the deed that the person does’. Central to the nonviolent approach was a conviction that ‘the universe is on the side of right and righteousness’. ‘We have this strange feeling down in Montgomery’, King explained, ‘that in our struggle we have cosmic companionship.’30

A few weeks later, King elaborated further on many of these themes, emphasising in particular that nonviolent protest, which was frequently dismissed by its critics as merely ‘passive’, was neither submissive nor a method of surrender. ‘The nonviolent resister’, King insisted, ‘is just as opposed to the evil he is protesting against as a violent resister.’ While ‘passive physically’, the method was ‘aggressive spiritually’, not least because practitioners were seeking actively to persuade their segregationist opponents to change their ways. The ultimate goal of nonviolent protest was not to defeat or humiliate the oppressor but to win his understanding, and even friendship, through a process of reconciliation. The key to nonviolence – its ‘regulating ideal’, as King put it – was Christian love, which, through its redemptive qualities, had the power to change not merely individuals but social systems, and even entire nations.³¹

King drew on the Indian independence movement to illustrate this latter claim. Simplifying the long and ultimately successful struggle against the Raj just a little, King explained that a ‘little brown man’ had ‘looked out at the British empire’ with its ‘vast and intricate military machinery’ and decided to confront it with ‘soul force’. This method, claimed King, had enabled Mohandas K. Gandhi to ‘free his people from the political domination, the economic exploitation, and the humiliation that had been inflicted upon them’. Truly, nonviolence was a ‘powerful weapon’ and ‘we’, King declared, ‘must be willing to use it’.³² He predicted that it would provide the key to destroying segregation right across the American South.33

King would be proved spectacularly right. Nonviolent resistance would be at the heart of the civil rights movement’s signature campaigns during the decade that followed. To be sure, King was not the first civil rights leader to advocate the nonviolent approach. During the 1940s, for instance, the black labour leader A. Philip Randolph had sought to promote ‘Non-Violent Good Will Direct Action’, while the Congress of Racial Equality had experimented with nonviolent protests to challenge racial discrimination at a number of restaurants in Chicago.³⁴ But King’s historic achievement was to popularise nonviolence. Before the Montgomery bus boycott, support for Gandhian nonviolence was restricted to a small band of militant pacifists and socialists. In the skilful hands of King, though, an idea that had operated in the margins of American political culture became respectable – even mainstream. This shift owed much to King’s ability to ground nonviolent theory firmly in Christian teaching and to fuse it with patriotic rhetoric and symbolism. The MIA president readily acknowledged that he had himself come to Gandhi ‘through Jesus’. ‘Christ furnished the spirit and motivation’, King explained, and ‘Gandhi furnished the method.’³⁵ Drawing on Christian teaching, in particular Jesus’s command to ‘Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you’, King couched nonviolent resistance in terms that his deeply religious southern black audiences understood readily. This message of love and forgiveness also resonated strongly with northern white liberals, whose political support would prove vital.³⁶ King further strengthened its appeal by arguing forcefully that nonviolence was being used to realise America’s founding promise of freedom and equality. Nonviolent resistance to Jim Crow segregation, then, provided a means of strengthening American democracy.³⁷

Even at the height of the civil rights movement in the early 1960s, only a small (albeit influential) minority of activists embraced nonviolence as a way of life. Most civil rights protesters appear to have adopted it, instead, as a tactic. While prepared to use nonviolence, particularly in public, so long as it proved effective, these activists were also willing to use other methods, including armed selfdefence, as and where appropriate.38 Moreover, not everyone in the movement was convinced by nonviolence in any form. Even some of King’s closest colleagues in Montgomery remained sceptical. E. D. Nixon, who had done so much to launch the boycott, ‘never agreed with it . . . I told Rev. King, “There isn’t any use in your telling me that if a man slaps me, I’m not to slap him back. I know that before I could think about what you said, I’m going to have knocked the guy’s block off.”’ Nixon, who was regularly targeted by white supremacists, even took to sitting on his front porch with a Winchester rifle, in order to protect his home and family from further attack.³⁹ Nevertheless, the public use of nonviolent tactics and the projection of a nonviolent image – both within the United States and to the world – enabled civil rights activists to present a compelling moral case and to win widespread, and decisive, public and political support.

By the summer of 1956, King had developed an unshakeable belief in both the righteousness and the revolutionary potential of nonviolent resistance. Convinced that violent methods could only ever result in bitterness and bloodshed, he viewed nonviolence not just as the solution to the problem of segregation in the United States but as the key to defeating injustice and tyranny everywhere. Fired by this faith, King urged oppressed peoples the world over to wage their struggle with the weapon of love.⁴⁰ In the months ahead, though, those seeking to win their freedoms outside the United States would turn more readily to the gun than to Gandhi.