SIX 

THE MONTGOMERY BUS BOYCOTT

TO HISTORIANS OF the civil rights movement, the Montgomery bus boycott is like the Civil War for nineteenth-century American historians; it is the most studied event of the movement. It provides a case study of how a social movement starts, develops, and grows. Such movements begin with a concrete, precipitating event but are usually the result of known or shared incidents on the part of the participants. If the movement is to grow and succeed, it must use certain mechanisms. It must continue agitation, foster fellowship, sustain morale, and develop tactics. The Black citizens of Montgomery did all these things.

As we look at Montgomery—and at Albany, Birmingham, Selma, and other movements that seem confined to a single city or state—remember that, taken together, they constitute a series of events that are called the civil rights movement, a drive to eliminate racial segregation and win equal rights. When these are considered individually, each reflects the efforts of the Black people of a town or state to achieve local aims. Looking at the collected whole—the national movement—we see the important roles played by larger-than-life figures like Martin Luther King and presidents. The local movements show us how important unknown figures, men and women, were to making the movements that preceded and produced the larger, nationally known persons and events. These lesser-known leadership figures built the movements that built the reputations of Kings and presidents. We do not diminish Martin Luther King when we study these others; we see, instead, how countless people helped to make the larger movement a success.

The people and events we will study are only examples; there are many, many other personalities, places, and times that could profitably occupy our attention. There are numerous heroes and heroines, brave and cowardly men and women, Black and white scoundrels and devils we have chosen to pass by. What follows is the struggle to achieve democracy in the middle of twentieth-century America and some of the people who helped and hindered along the way.

“By the 1950s,” sociologist Aldon Morris writes, “Southern whites had established a comprehensive system of domination over blacks. This system of domination protected the privileges of white society and generated tremendous human suffering for blacks.” The system controlled Blacks economically, politically, and personally. Morris calls it a “tripartite system of domination.”¹ Economic oppression kept Blacks in the lowest-paid, dirtiest jobs. Political oppression excluded Blacks almost absolutely from any participation in public affairs, including the most important, voting. Personal oppression reinforced the other two. It included laws separating Blacks from whites, relegating Blacks to the worst housing, schools, and other public facilities, denying Blacks protection by police. It included customs that proscribed human behavior; thus, Emmett Till’s mother advised him to kneel before whites if he must. It was supported by terror, both state-sponsored and private, random and planned, including ritual human sacrifice, carried out by the forces of the state and by private citizens.

This system of oppression created, as a reaction, an environment of protest and collective strength, especially in the urban South. Black churches, colleges, and businesses thrived in the segregated city; Black social and civic organizations and institutions grew as well. These kept alive a tradition of protest that can be traced forward from slave rebellions to the Underground Railroad to the Garvey movement to the March on Washington movement.

Central to the protest community were what Morris calls “movement halfway houses.”² These are organizations that, despite a lack of prominence, played important roles in the civil rights movement. He describes them as a “group of organizations . . . only partially integrated into the larger society because its participants are actively engaged in efforts to bring about . . . change.” They are distinctive, he writes, in “their relative isolation from the larger society and the absence of a mass base.”³ They lack broad support and a visible platform. But halfway houses are valuable to emergent organizations and movements—like the Montgomery bus boycott, the sit-ins, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. They can provide resources, skilled and experienced activists, tactical training, protest songs, educational programs, and publicity.

There are many such halfway houses; Morris concentrates on three and the roles they play in the movement. These three also play important roles—usually behind the scenes—in the Montgomery bus boycott and beyond:

The Highlander Folk School was founded in Monteagle, Tennessee, in 1932. Highlander’s philosophy was that oppressed people best know the answers to their problems and that solutions would only arise from the experiences and imagination of the group. It brought potential leaders together to identify and analyze common problems and to return to their communities to replicate this process. In the 1930s, its focus was on union organizing; in the 1940s, it widened its focus to encourage Black and white Southerners to struggle against racial discrimination. Over the years it attracted people who would become important leadership figures in the civil rights movement.

The Fellowship of Reconciliation, organized in England in 1914 and the US in 1915, though small, became the major pacifist organization in the US and a training ground for the architects of nonviolent protest in America, including A. J. Muste, Bayard Rustin, James Farmer, James Lawson, and Glenn Smiley. The FOR gave birth to the Congress of Racial Equality in 1942 and provided training for the Montgomery bus boycott.

The Southern Conference Education Fund, which grew from the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, founded in 1938 by liberal Southerners, was dedicated to labor reform and ending discrimination. Internal and external problems, chiefly red-baiting, caused SCHW to collapse in 1948—only SCEF, its tax-exempt arm, survived. SCEF was a non-membership organization dedicated to assisting Blacks in overthrowing all forms of racial discrimination in the South.

These halfway houses and others will appear as our story goes on.

Every Southern town or city had Black leadership; a few of the leaders were energetic and bold; most were powerless, and many were self-selected or chosen by whites to speak for Blacks. A crisis in a community—like Rosa Parks being arrested—could put the passions of the Black community into the hands of the dynamic leadership, making them spokespersons, pushing them forward into the light.

In the middle 1950s, recent events had shaken white Montgomery. The Supreme Court’s May 1954 ruling against segregated schools and the hiring of the city’s first Black policemen caused great consternation among the city’s white, predominately segregationist population.

In April 1954, twenty-five-year-old Martin Luther King Jr. preached his first sermon as the official pastor of Montgomery’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. He could not have known that in nine years he would be the most famous Black American, speaking at the March on Washington to the largest gathering of civil rights supporters in the nation’s history. And he could not have imagined that in fourteen years he would be dead.

Ten days after that first sermon, the French colonial empire in Indochina collapsed; a faraway garrison called Dien Bien Phu was overrun. No one thought then that 58,000 Americans would lose their lives in Vietnam or that the war fought there would define the limits of American power for a generation.

MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.

Martin Luther King Jr. was born in Atlanta, Georgia, on January 15, 1929, and named after his father, Martin Luther King Sr., pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, active with the Atlanta NAACP and a member of the boards of Morehouse College and the local Black bank.

Young Martin King attended segregated public schools and spent his seventh- and eighth-grade years at the private Laboratory High School of Atlanta University. When it closed, he transferred to Booker T. Washington High School. There he skipped the ninth and twelfth grades and entered Atlanta’s Morehouse College in 1944 at age fifteen. He spent the summers of 1945 and 1947 working in the Connecticut tobacco fields, his first taste of life beyond the Cotton Curtain. He quit a 1946 summer job because the foreman insisted on calling him “nigger.” He first considered becoming a doctor or lawyer. By 1947, he had decided on the ministry; he was ordained and made assistant pastor of his father’s church.

He graduated from Morehouse in 1948 and entered Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, graduating in 1951. He then entered Boston University’s doctoral program in theology. While in Boston, he met a politically minded student at the New England Conservatory of Music, Coretta Scott of Marion, Alabama; in 1953, they were married.

King’s early years were spent in the comfortable shelter of middle-class Black Atlanta, protected from the rigors of the segregated city. His father was a powerful figure in Black Atlanta who demanded the respect of whites—young King recalled his father insisting on being called “Reverend,” not “boy,” in downtown stores and refusing to accept second-class treatment. His teachers at Morehouse College altered his skeptical, cynical view of his father’s profession and made it more attractive—”the shackles of fundamentalism were removed” there, and his Morehouse experience also began to shape his views on race.⁴ He was active in the campus NAACP and in intercampus interracial organizations with white students from other Atlanta schools.

He blossomed academically at Crozer, read Marx for the first time, heard lectures on pacifism and Gandhi’s success with nonviolence in India, and took courses on the “social gospel,” which insisted the institutionalized church must be involved with real human problems, not just with the hereafter. He served as a student pastor in a church in Elmhurst, New York, in the fall of 1950; the pastor gave him low marks for exhibiting a “snobbishness which prevents his coming to close grips with the rank and file of ordinary people.”⁵

At Boston University, his intellectual development continued. His teachers tried to interest him in an academic career, but he felt his future lay with the church. The senior King promoted an invitation to join the Morehouse faculty, but King Jr. demurred.

He preached a trial sermon at Chattanooga’s First Baptist Church and then heard that a church in Montgomery, Dexter Avenue Baptist, had dismissed its pastor, the controversial and outspoken Vernon Johns. King agreed to preach a trial sermon at Dexter Avenue, and in March 1954 the church voted to offer him the pulpit.

Dexter Avenue was small compared to Ebenezer, its congregation largely middle class, many of them teachers and administrators at Alabama State and in Montgomery’s segregated schools. King spent his early months at Dexter Avenue seizing control of the church and reorganizing its internal structure, including a new social and political action committee. He joined the Montgomery NAACP and attended meetings of the only interracial organization in Montgomery, the Alabama Council on Human Relations. In August 1955, he received a letter from the secretary of the NAACP, Rosa Parks, telling him he had been named to the NAACP’s executive committee. In November, he considered running for the presidency of the local NAACP branch but rejected it in favor of family and church duties.

According to the 1950 census, the small city the new King family settled into reflected the economic realities of the mid-century segregated South. Seventy percent of all working Black males were unskilled, and 70 percent of all working Black females were private household maids or service workers. Only 3 percent of Black men were classified as “professional” or “managers”; most of these were teachers, school administrators, or clergymen.

CORETTA SCOTT KING

King’s new wife was reluctant to go to Montgomery, although it was less than one hundred miles from her home. She was born on a farm ten miles from Marion, Alabama, and wanted to escape from the segregated South. Her father, through hard work, had accumulated several hundred acres of farmland. As a girl, she had chopped and picked cotton and scrubbed clothes in a washtub. She and her siblings left the farm to attend private Lincoln High School in town, which was established by Congregational Church missionaries after the Civil War. The school, with an integrated faculty, provided a superior education, which enabled her to follow her older sister to Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. At Antioch, she was active in the campus NAACP and a race relations committee and supported Henry Wallace’s third-party bid for president, attending the 1948 Progressive Party convention as a student delegate. She graduated in 1951 and entered the New England Conservatory of Music that fall.

Unlike her husband-to-be, Coretta Scott had to work to support herself in school, despite a one-time scholarship she received from the State of Alabama, intended to keep Alabama’s graduate schools all white. On their first date, Martin Luther King Jr. told Coretta Scott, “You have everything I have ever wanted in a wife. . . . The four things that I look for in a wife are character, intelligence, personality and beauty. And you have them all. I want to see you again. When can I?”⁶

They were married on June 18, 1953. She had decided years earlier that she would not follow the marriage ceremony’s promise to “obey” her husband; Reverend King Sr., who presided, reluctantly agreed. The couple spent their wedding night at the home of a family friend who was an undertaker in Marion; no decent hotel that would admit Black people was closer than Montgomery.

The newlyweds spent the rest of that summer living in his parents’ home in Atlanta. He served as assistant pastor of his father’s church; she worked as a clerk in Atlanta’s Black bank.

They returned to Boston in the fall; he, to finish residency requirements and to begin his thesis, “A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman,” and she, to finish her degree in music education. King commuted to Montgomery from Boston through the summer of 1954. In June 1955, he received his PhD from Boston University.

RALPH DAVID ABERNATHY

While at Morehouse, King had befriended a Montgomery minister who was studying at Atlanta University, Ralph David Abernathy. Abernathy, born in 1926, was raised on his father’s five-hundred-acre farm in Linden, Alabama. Drafted into the US Army in 1944, he rose to sergeant but fell ill and was discharged before seeing combat. Returning to Alabama, he entered Alabama State College in Montgomery and in his first year led a successful campus-wide boycott of the school cafeteria and a protest against poor housing at the school for veterans.

In 1948, he decided to become a minister. After graduating from Alabama State in 1950, Abernathy spent a summer working as an insurance salesman and entered Atlanta University seeking a master’s degree in sociology. After gaining his master’s in 1951, he returned to Montgomery to become dean of men at Alabama State and the pastor of a small church in Demopolis, Alabama. At twenty-six he became the pastor of First Baptist Church in Montgomery—until the great migration of 1917, the largest Black church in the United States. In August 1952, he married Juanita Odessa Jones, a schoolteacher and, like Coretta Scott, a native of Perry County, Alabama, who also insisted the preacher drop the word “obey” from their ceremony.

While a graduate student in Atlanta, Abernathy had briefly met Martin Luther King; in Montgomery in 1954, their friendship grew, and soon the two became inseparable.

BUS SEGREGATION

In Montgomery, as in every Southern town and city, buses were segregated by law, as was every other aspect of daily life. It was even illegal for Blacks and whites to play checkers together.⁷ Under a 1900 law, all city transportation had to “provide equal but separate accommodations for white people and Negroes . . . by requiring the employee in charge thereof to assign passenger seats . . . in such a manner as to separate the white people from the Negroes where there are both whites and Negroes on the same car.” An exception allowed Black nurses caring for white children or “sick or infirm white persons” to sit with their wards in the white sections. Bus drivers had “the power of a police officer.” In 1955, there were fourteen different bus routes, several nearly all-Black or all-white. On some Black lines, the company ran “special” buses for Blacks only.⁸

In 1955, sixty-two buses traversed fourteen routes carrying thirty thousand to forty thousand Black passengers and as many whites. Each bus had thirty-six seats. The first ten—two bench seats facing each other at the front and the first row of parallel seats—were reserved for whites, even if there were no whites on the bus. In theory, the ten seats at the very rear—the bench seat across the rear and two bench seats facing each other—were similarly reserved for Blacks, but this reservation was much less rigorously enforced.

On the thirty-six total bus seats, Blacks were seated from the rear forward and restricted to the ten rear seats; whites had the first ten seats in the front, with a “no man’s land” separated by a “dead line” in between, which adopted the racial character of those who sat in it. When more whites boarded the bus than there were “white” seats, the driver would “equalize,” the seats and the line separating the races moved backward. If there were more Black riders than there were Black seats, Blacks could not sit in empty seats in the white section. The seats in the rear were located over the engine and in summer were especially uncomfortable.

Additionally, Black passengers were required to buy their tickets at the front and then disembark and board the bus through the rear door. Frequently drivers would speed away, leaving the Black passenger who had paid standing on the street; other drivers would accelerate suddenly as a Black passenger was making her way toward the rear. Discourtesy was normal treatment—calls of “nigger bitch,” “whore,” “cow,” and “heifer” were common.⁹

Segregated public transportation was a special form of torment for Black Southerners, who knew whites did not mind physical closeness when Blacks were maids, cooks, nurses, farmhands, or other servants, or when illicit sex was demanded. Whites objected to proximity only when it suggested equal status, as in side-by-side seating on a bus or train. As Blacks became an urban population, their dependence on public transportation grew; in most Southern cities, Blacks were the majority of streetcar or bus riders. But no Southern city employed Black drivers.

Black people had long objected to segregated transportation. In his 1850 autobiography Frederick Douglass mentions the “mean, dirty and uncomfortable car set apart for colored travelers called the ‘Jim Crow’ car” and his efforts to physically resist being forced to sit in it. Blacks in Philadelphia carried on a successful battle of several years, beginning in 1864, to be permitted to ride the streetcars of that city.¹⁰

In 1865, Mississippi passed laws forbidding “any freedman, negro or mulatto to ride in any first-class passenger cars, set apart, or used by and for white persons.” According to C. Vann Woodward, in 1865, “Florida prevented whites from using cars set apart for Negroes and Negroes from using cars for whites.” In 1866, Texas required all railroad companies to “attach to passenger trains one car for the special accommodation of freedmen.”¹¹

By the end of the nineteenth century, Blacks had boycotted streetcar lines in more than twenty-seven cities. Blacks protested segregation on railroads and steamships too. W. E. B. Du Bois—then at Atlanta University—and other Black Atlantans protested an 1899 law that segregated railroad sleeping cars. In 1904, Du Bois and Booker T. Washington planned a lawsuit against the Pullman Company, but it never materialized. That same year, the editor of Richmond, Virginia’s Black newspaper, The Planet, led an unsuccessful yearlong boycott of the city’s segregated streetcars.

In 1890, Louisiana passed the Separate Car Law to ensure passenger “comfort” by ordering railroads to provide “equal but separate” cars for Blacks and whites. No member of one race could occupy seats in a car reserved for the other. In 1891, a group of Louisiana Blacks formed a committee to test the law, hired a lawyer, and then had Homer G. Plessy sit in the white-only railroad coach. He refused to move when ordered to do so and was arrested. The state argued that separating the races was legal, as long as the facilities were equal. In 1896, in Plessy v. Ferguson, the US Supreme Court agreed, giving federal approval to separate but equal that would stand until 1954.

Blacks in Montgomery conducted a two-year boycott of the city’s streetcars that lasted from 1900 to 1902. They won the right to keep their seats, if an open seat wasn’t available—but that city ordinance was not enforced.

The first National Negro Conference, meeting in 1909, protested against Jim Crow railroad laws, and the NAACP made removal of segregated trains and streetcars part of its early agenda. On August 23, 1917, the men of the all-Black Third Battalion of the Twenty-Fourth Infantry Regiment defended themselves against a white mob angered by a dispute over bus seating in Houston, Texas. When the air cleared, seventeen whites were dead and nineteen Black soldiers were hanged for mutiny and forty-one jailed for life.

Twentieth-century Southern streetcar and bus company files and police records are full of reports of Black passengers throwing the signs that separated the white and Black sections out of the bus window; arguments, often violent, between Black passengers and white drivers and passengers over refusals to move to accommodate whites; Blacks refusing to pay or objecting to being insulted by drivers or white passengers.

During World War II, there were also instances of white drivers shooting and killing Black passengers. In July 1942, a Black army private in Beaumont, Texas, who refused to vacate a bus seat reserved for whites, was arrested and shot while in police custody. In 1944, army lieutenant Jackie Robinson, future Hall of Fame baseball player, refused an order to move to the back of a segregated army bus. He was arrested and court-martialed but acquitted.

In 1943, fourteen-year-old Martin Luther King Jr. and his high school teacher were returning to Atlanta from an oratorical contest in South Georgia when the bus driver ordered them to surrender their seats to white passengers. Young King refused but finally complied. Twenty years later he said, “It was the angriest I have ever been in my life!”¹²

The bus, after all, was one place where Southern Blacks and whites could see each other being segregated under the same roof. Whites saw Blacks standing over empty seats and did and said nothing. Blacks saw the empty seats as they stood, and their anger grew.

THE BATON ROUGE BUS BOYCOTT

In March 1953 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Black leaders requested first-come, first-served seating within the segregated system. The city council agreed and passed an ordinance to that effect. But the all-white bus drivers’ union refused to permit any alteration of the segregated system and ordered Blacks not to sit in the front. When the city insisted on its new rule, the drivers conducted a four-day strike, and Louisiana’s attorney general declared the city ordinance illegal, in conflict with state segregation laws.¹³

Like Blacks in Montgomery and every other Southern city, Baton Rouge’s Blacks had a long history of maltreatment on the city’s buses. In June they began a boycott in protest. Revered T. J. Jemison became the boycott’s leader. Pastor of Mount Zion Baptist Church, he was a graduate of Alabama State and Virginia Union University and had studied at New York University. He had moved to Baton Rouge in 1949. He had served one term as president of the Baton Rouge NAACP and was active in the Baton Rouge Community Group, a local civic organization.

Baton Rouge’s Black leadership constructed an umbrella organization to direct the boycott, the United Defense League (UDL). The UDL organized a carpool, Operation Free Lift, raised money to finance it, held nightly mass meetings of 2,500 to 3,000 people, and reduced Black patronage of the bus company by 90 percent. On the sixth day, the city suggested a compromise: the two side seats of each bus would be reserved for whites, the long back seat reserved for Blacks; all other riders would sit on a first-come, first-served segregated basis. A mass meeting attended by eight thousand Blacks approved the compromise, although a sizeable minority wanted the boycott to continue, apparently unaffected by Jemison’s promise that the question of bus segregation would be settled by a court decision.

The Baton Rouge protest proved that segregation could be challenged by mass action. The compromise victory wasn’t won by middle-class Blacks seeking integration; few of them rode buses anyway. This was a triumph for the bus-riding public, the working class. Like the Montgomery bus boycott that would follow in two years, the Baton Rouge bus boycott drew on Black churches for participants, communication, and fundraising. Like Martin Luther King, Jemison was an educated, articulate leader. Like King, he was a newcomer with few obligations to existing patterns of political behavior. He was too new to have engendered any distrust within his own community. Like King, he was both novice and privileged insider—a leader in the community’s most stable and independent organization, the Black church.

News of the Baton Rouge boycott quickly spread through the organizational networks of Black America. Jemison’s father had been president of the National Baptist Convention, the largest organization of Blacks in America, for twelve years, and Jemison became secretary of the Baptist Convention in 1953. Future boycott leaders—including King and Abernathy in Montgomery, Reverend K. C. Steele in Tallahassee, Reverend A. L. Davis in New Orleans—were all members of the Baptist Convention and in communication with Jemison when they organized boycotts in their own cities.

THE WOMEN’S POLITICAL COUNCIL

In Montgomery, a group of Black women was poised to boycott the city’s buses. They were members of the Women’s Political Council, an organization founded in 1946 by Dr. Mary Fair Burks, chair of the English Department at Alabama State. Modeled on the League of Women Voters, which was closed to Blacks, WPC members were professional women, largely schoolteachers and administrators from Alabama State and the city’s public schools. By 1955, the WPC had grown to three chapters of one hundred members each, spread throughout Black Montgomery.¹⁴

An increasing concern of the council was the mistreatment of Blacks on city buses, especially Black women. In 1945, a woman was arrested for not having “correct change” and for talking back to the white driver. In 1949, two women and two children from New Jersey, unused to segregation, were arrested for refusing to give up their seats to white riders. In 1950, police shot and killed a Black man who had argued with a bus driver. In 1953, a woman was beaten by a driver and arrested for disorderly conduct, one of thirty complaints received by the WPC that year alone.¹⁵

JO ANN GIBSON ROBINSON

In 1950, the presidency of the WPC passed from Dr. Burks to Jo Ann Robinson. Born on a farm near Macon, Georgia, Robinson received a BS from Georgia State College at Fort Valley, an MA from Atlanta University, and in 1949 accepted a position in the English Department at Alabama State. On her first day at Alabama State, she met Dr. Burks and joined the WPC. She also joined Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.

Like so many Blacks in Montgomery, Jo Ann Robinson had a traumatic experience with racism on the city’s buses. In December 1949, a driver ordered her to move to let a white passenger sit down. When she did not move fast enough, he ordered her from the bus. Like with King the experience was searing. Thirty-seven years later she wrote: “In all these years I have never forgotten the shame, the hurt of that experience. The memory will not go away.”¹⁶

Under Robinson’s leadership, the WPC initiated meetings with Mayor W. A. “Tacky” Gayle and the city’s other two commissioners, or aldermen, and began to monitor meetings of the city commission. By 1954, the WPC had begun to discuss plans for a bus boycott. After the Brown decision came down, Robinson wrote to the mayor demanding action on the buses or people would organize a citywide boycott.

E. D. NIXON

Another group that had complained about the mistreatment of Blacks was the Progressive Democratic Association, headed by E. D. Nixon.

Edgar Daniel Nixon was born in Montgomery on July 12, 1899, the fifth of eight children. He received the equivalent of a third-grade education and at fourteen left school for a lifetime of hard work and service to his community. In 1924, he became a Pullman porter. He was one of “thousands of black men who punched pillows, lifted bags, shined passengers’ shoes and prepared their berths.”¹⁷ Because the owner of the Pullman Company was George Pullman, they were called “George Pullman’s boys”—or usually just “George.” Porters were said to have the best job in the Black community and the worst job on the train. Still it was an attractive job for many. Morehouse College president Benjamin Mays, NAACP lawyer and Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall, NAACP executive director Roy Wilkins, and Matthew Henson, who reached the North Pole with Admiral Robert Peary in 1906, all spent time as Pullman porters.

Nixon tried to organize his fellow porters in 1925 and 1926, inspired by A. Philip Randolph. He heard Randolph speak in St. Louis in 1928. “After the meeting,” Nixon wrote later, “I put a dollar in the collection plate, and . . . shook hands with him, and he said, ‘Where are you from, young man?’ I told him, ‘Montgomery, Alabama.’ He said, ‘We need a good man down there.’ So I joined the Brotherhood.”¹⁸

Nixon organized the Montgomery NAACP in 1928 and served as its first president. In the 1930s he and Myles Horton of the Highlander Folk School tried to unionize cotton pickers. In 1934, Nixon organized the Montgomery Welfare League to help Blacks hurt by the Depression, forcing fairer administration of New Deal programs in Montgomery.

Randolph and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters won recognition from the Pullman Company in 1937; in 1938, Nixon founded the Montgomery Division of the Brotherhood and was its president for the next twenty-five years. In 1940, he and others organized the Montgomery Voters’ League. In 1944, Nixon and the league led a march of 750 Blacks to the board of registrars, demanding they be allowed to register. In November 1955, Nixon invited New York congressman Adam Clayton Powell to Montgomery; Powell met with Nixon, King, Rosa Parks, and others and told a mass meeting at Alabama State about his leadership of consumer boycotts in Harlem, including a 1944 bus boycott. He argued that economic pressures would change patterns of segregation.

In 1955, Mr. Nixon was fifty-six years old. He was a past president of the Montgomery NAACP and served in 1955 as president of the State Conference of NAACP Branches. He had been president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in Alabama for seventeen years. Some middle-class Blacks in Montgomery looked down on the uneducated Nixon, put off by his grammar and his manner, but when Montgomery’s Blacks were in trouble with the police, it was Nixon whom they called. His employment with the Pullman Company gave him an independence most Montgomery Blacks did not have; his paycheck came from Chicago, and his work schedule gave him time to immerse himself in civic affairs. When Martin Luther King expressed interest in becoming president of the Montgomery NAACP, Nixon politely let him know that he supported another candidate.

The WPC spoke to city officials about conditions on the city’s buses, accompanying a delegation of ministers, including Montgomery newcomer Martin Luther King. WPC members, including Robinson, also met with the manager of the bus company, who maintained he was powerless to change the pattern of segregation. Finally, members of the WPC testified against a fare increase before the city commission, arguing that the rude and cruel service tendered Blacks did not merit an increase in the fare.

Then, on March 2, 1955, an incident occurred that heightened tensions in Black and white Montgomery. A fifteen-year-old high school honor student and NAACP Youth Council member, Claudette Colvin, was arrested for refusing to give up her seat, handcuffed and dragged, kicking and screaming, from the bus. News of Colvin’s arrest spread quickly, and Nixon thought he had a candidate for a suit against the city’s bus lines.

But when Nixon investigated Colvin more closely to see if she was a good candidate to personify the mistreatment on Montgomery’s buses, his support waned. During the scuffle that led to her arrest, she was charged with disorderly conduct and assault and battery as well as violating the bus segregation law. Colvin was convicted on the assault charge, but the segregation and disorderly conduct charges were dismissed, leaving little grounds for a segregation challenge. Seen as “feisty” and “emotional,” the fifteen-year-old Colvin would not do.¹⁹

At subsequent meetings with city and bus company officials, Black leaders argued that neither the Montgomery city segregation law nor state statutes required anyone to give up a seat to accommodate a member of another race and urged adoption of a segregated first-come, first-served seating plan, such as Mobile already employed. The white officials angrily refused.

One of the people who had fundraised for Colvin was Mrs. Rosa Parks.

ROSA LOUISE MCCAULEY PARKS

Rosa Louise McCauley was born in Tuskegee on February 14, 1913. Her father was a carpenter; her mother had been a schoolteacher. Young Rosa was educated in a rural school. “By the time I was six, I was old enough to realize that we were not actually free.” At eleven she enrolled in the private Montgomery Industrial School for Girls, run by white women from Massachusetts. When it closed, she attended segregated Booker T. Washington Junior High School and then Alabama State Teachers College High School, but her grandmother’s illness and death prevented her from finishing the eleventh grade. She finished high school in 1933 at age twenty. She had childhood memories of segregated trolleys in Montgomery. “When we black people got on,” she wrote, “we had to go as far back in the car as we could.”

She married Raymond Parks, a barber, in 1932. Parks had less formal education than his new wife, but he was a proud, political man and active in the NAACP. He was, Mrs. Parks remembered, “the first man of our race, aside from my grandfather, with whom I actually discussed anything about the racial conditions.”²⁰ Rosa and Raymond Parks worked together in defense of the “Scottsboro Boys,” nine young Black men—fourteen to nineteen—falsely accused of raping two white women in Scottsboro, Alabama, in 1931.

Mrs. Parks was no stranger to Montgomery’s buses. On one occasion she had boarded the bus in the front, paid her fare, and walked through a group of Blacks standing at the division line between Black and white seats. The driver ordered her to get off the bus and reboard through the back door. She replied that she was already on and saw no need to exit and reboard, especially since Black passengers were already squeezed into the stairwell. The driver (the same driver who would arrest her twelve years later) responded that if she couldn’t go through the back door she would have to get off the bus. “I stood where I was,” she remembered. “He came back and took my coat sleeve” to escort her from the bus. On the way out, she dropped her purse and sat on a front seat to retrieve it. The driver bent over her.

“Get off my bus,” he said. Mrs. Parks replied, “I will get off.” The driver looked as if he might strike her. She said to him, “I know one thing. You better not hit me.”²¹

In 1954, she started sewing on the side for Virginia and Clifford Durr, one of Montgomery’s few civil rights–supporting white families, when she helped prepare the trousseau for a Durr daughter. In 1955, Rosa Parks was secretary of the Montgomery Branch of the NAACP, secretary of the State Conference of NAACP Branches, and advisor to the NAACP Youth Council. She had become active in the NAACP a dozen years earlier after seeing a newspaper photograph of a classmate, NAACP activist Mrs. Johnnie Carr. Mrs. Parks had not known women worked with the NAACP until she saw Mrs. Carr’s photo; that motivated her to visit the branch offices in December 1943 to visit her friend. Instead, she was the only woman present at the annual election of officers, and, when her dues were paid, she was chosen secretary. Few women had been active in civil rights work in her youth, Mrs. Parks recalled. Once while working with Mr. Nixon, he told her, “Women don’t need to be nowhere but in the kitchen.”

“What about me?” she questioned. He replied: “But I need a secretary and you are a good one.”²²

In 1955, she was working as a tailor’s assistant at Montgomery Fair Department Store. That summer, at Virginia Durr’s suggestion, Mrs. Parks attended a two-week workshop at Highlander Folk School on implementing desegregation, where she met and was inspired by activist and former teacher Septima Clark. She came back further resolved to work with her NAACP Youth Council to find ways to challenge segregation.

TWO MONTHS LATER, in October 1955, a white woman asked a bus driver to make eighteen-year-old Mary Louise Smith get up from her seat. Smith refused and was arrested. Again, Montgomery’s Black leadership seemed poised for action, and again their hopes were frustrated. Nixon decreed that Smith was no better suited than Claudette Colvin had been to carry Black Montgomery’s fight forward. Smith’s father was rumored to be an alcoholic, and the family lived in a rural shack; Smith, they believed, would not be able to stand the rigors of the publicity that would follow a suit against the segregated system.²³

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 1

On the late afternoon of December 1, 1955, Mrs. Parks left work and boarded the Cleveland Avenue bus for her regular ride home. She sat in the aisle seat on the front row of the middle section with three other Black riders; within a few blocks, the bus was filled, with twenty-two Blacks seated from the rear and fourteen whites seated from the front.

At the third stop, a white man boarded, and driver J. P. Blake called out, “Let me have those seats.” Blake, who had ejected Mrs. Parks from a bus in 1943, meant that the four Blacks sitting in the most-forward Black row, including Mrs. Parks, should get up so a lone white man could sit down. All four Blacks had to move to provide space for one white man; the law did not permit Blacks and whites to occupy separate seats in the same row. Furthermore, the etiquette of white supremacy insisted Blacks and whites could not share any facility equally; to do so was to diminish the white person’s advantaged position, both actual and psychological.

When nothing happened, Blake stood up and said in a louder voice with a threat clearly implied: “You all better make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats.”

The man sitting next to the window on Mrs. Parks’s side of the row got up, and Mrs. Parks let him cross in front of her into the aisle and the rear of the bus; two Black women sitting on the other side of the aisle did the same. Blake asked her again if she was going to move, and Mrs. Parks replied, “No, I’m not!”

“Well,” he said, “if you don’t stand up I’m going to call the police and have you arrested.”

“You may do that,” Mrs. Parks said.

Blake fetched two policemen. One asked Mrs. Parks if the driver had asked her to move, and she replied that he had. He said: “Why don’t you stand up?”

She answered, “Why do you push us around?”

He answered, “I do not know but the law is the law and you’re under arrest.”²⁴

Even before Mrs. Parks was arraigned, word of her arrest had begun to spread through Black Montgomery. Unlike Colvin and Smith, Mrs. Parks was well known in Black Montgomery for her civic activism. Word quickly passed from witnesses on the bus to Nixon.

From the jail, Parks called home. Her mother answered, whose first question was standard: had her daughter been beaten? “No. Put Raymond on,” Mrs. Parks said.

Nixon’s first call was to attorney Fred Gray, a new lawyer in Montgomery, who had represented Claudette Colvin. Gray was away. Nixon then called the city jail to ask what charge was lodged against Mrs. Parks. He was told it was none of his dammed business. Nixon then called attorney Clifford Durr. Durr, a white Alabaman, had been a New Dealer and FCC commissioner who had resigned his post to represent early victims of the Truman loyalty program. Durr had next to no law practice because of his politics, but he had conferred with Gray on the Colvin case.

The police told Durr that Parks was charged with violating the segregation law. Nixon drove to the Durr home, picked up Clifford and Virginia, and the three of them drove to the jail where Nixon signed a bond and Mrs. Parks was released.

Nixon believed he had found his symbol. Rosa Parks was everything Claudette Colvin and Mary Louise Smith were not; her demeanor, the respect she commanded throughout Black Montgomery, her history of civil rights activism and bravery made her the ideal candidate to carry the fight against bus segregation. Nixon and the Durrs went back to the Parkses’ apartment in Cleveland Courts to talk about what would come next. Both her mother and husband were frightened. “The white folks will kill you, Rosa,” Raymond pleaded. He worried that the Black community wouldn’t stick with her, as had happened with Claudette Colvin.

“If you think it will mean something to Montgomery and will do some good, I’ll be happy to go along with it,” she said.

Later that evening, attorney Gray began returning the calls he had missed during the day. One of the calls was from Rosa Parks, whom he knew well from the NAACP. She asked him to be her lawyer. He said yes.

Another was from Jo Ann Robinson. Gray was born in Montgomery in 1930 and received a BA from Alabama State, where Jo Ann Robinson had been his teacher. Black people were not allowed to attend law school in Alabama; instead, the state paid for him to get a law degree from Case Western Reserve in Ohio. He practiced law with Charles Langford and was assistant pastor at the Holt Street Church of Christ.

After agreeing to represent Parks, Gray called Robinson. She told him the Women’s Political Council was thinking of calling for a one-day boycott on Monday, December 5, the day of Mrs. Parks’s trial. Robinson wrote out a leaflet at home. It read:

Another Negro woman has been arrested and thrown in jail because she refused to get up out of her seat on the bus for a white person to sit down. It is the second time since the Claudette Colvin case that a Negro woman has been arrested for the same thing. This has to be stopped. Negroes have rights too, for if Negroes did not ride the buses, they could not operate. Three-fourths of the riders are Negroes, yet we are arrested, or have to stand over empty seats. 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. This woman’s case will come up Monday. We are, therefore, asking every Negro to stay off the buses Monday in protest of the arrest and trial. Don’t ride the buses to work, to town, to school, or anywhere on Monday. You can afford to stay out of school for one day if you have no other way to go except by bus. You can also afford to stay out of town for one day. If you work, take a cab or walk. But please, children and grownups, don’t ride the bus at all on Monday. Please stay off all buses Monday.²⁵

Robinson called the chairman of the Business Department at Alabama State; he had access to the school’s mimeograph machine. When Robinson told him her plans, he said he too had been mistreated on the city buses. Robinson and two of her students met him in the school’s duplicating room. By 4:00 a.m. they had duplicated 52,500 leaflets, with three messages on each page, and spent until 7:00 a.m. mapping distribution routes. By 8:00 a.m. the bundles of leaflets were stashed in their cars, and Robinson and her two students were in her 8:00 a.m. class.²⁶

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 2

After class, Robinson called the WPC membership, alerting them to the boycott plans and explaining the leaflet distribution system. She and the two students drove to prearranged street corners where WPC members waited. Other bundles were dropped off at “business places, storefronts, beauty parlors, beer halls, factories, barber shops and every other available place.”²⁷

Rosa Parks’s arrest was reported at the bottom of page 9 of the December 2 Montgomery Advertiser. The headline said, “Negro Jailed Here for ‘Overlooking’ Bus Segregation.”

When Robinson returned to the campus for her 2:00 p.m. class, the president demanded to see her. After quizzing her on the origin of the leaflet and extracting a promise that the WPC would pay for the mimeograph paper she had used and that the college would not become embroiled in the proposed boycott, he gave her his hesitant endorsement.

Nixon, whom Robinson had called in the middle of the night, had been trying since 5:00 a.m. to line up clerical support for the boycott. His first call was to Ralph Abernathy, secretary of the Baptist Ministers’ Alliance; then to his own minister, Reverend H. H. Hubbard, the alliance president; and then—at Abernathy’s urging—to Martin Luther King, to seek King’s support and to ask if a meeting could be held at the most convenient location, King’s downtown church. King, a newcomer in Montgomery, the father of a new baby, and the busy new pastor of a church, hesitated. He supported the boycott’s aims; he did not want additional responsibilities. “Brother Nixon,” he said, “let me think about it a while and call me back.” Nixon said he had already told several ministers—and Abernathy was telling others—to meet at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church that evening. King agreed. One drop-off spot for Robinson’s leaflets had been the regular Friday morning meeting of the Montgomery Black clergy; many knew before Abernathy or Nixon called them that a boycott was in the works.

Nixon also called Joe Azbell, city editor of the Montgomery Advertiser, and asked that they meet at the train station before Nixon left on his weekly trip. He promised him “the hottest story you’ve ever written.” They met—Nixon wearing his white coat and porter’s cap. Nixon handed Azbell one of the leaflets and left on his weekly Montgomery–Atlanta–New York–Atlanta–Montgomery run.

That night, seventy Black leaders gathered in Dexter’s basement meeting room. Abernathy and Nixon had agreed that the Reverend Roy Bennett, president of the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance would preside. Refusing to allow either debate or discussion, Bennett droned on for over half an hour, so long that over half of those present left. One told King, “This is going to fizzle; I’m leaving.” King replied, “I would like to go too, but it’s my church.” Finally, Abernathy seized the floor and insisted that those remaining be allowed to speak.²⁸ Parks spoke, laying out her tiredness with segregation, the circumstances that had led to her arrest, and the need for collective action. And then Robinson took the floor and demanded that all those present endorse a boycott for Monday and a mass meeting on Monday night. A new leaflet would be prepared, adding the announcement about the mass meeting, and those present would meet on Monday afternoon to plan the meeting’s format.

Abernathy and King remained at Dexter Avenue until midnight, mimeographing a new leaflet.

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 3

Early Saturday morning, leaflet distribution continued. Montgomery’s eighteen Black taxi companies agreed to carry passengers on Monday for the ten-cent bus fare. The first news of the upcoming boycott appeared in Montgomery’s smaller newspaper, the Alabama Journal, that afternoon.

Reverend Robert Graetz, the white pastor of the all-Black Trinity Lutheran Church, heard rumors on Saturday about an arrest and boycott, but his own congregation could not—or would not—give him the details. Finally, he called his best friend outside his own congregation, a woman who used his church as a meeting place for the NAACP Youth Council. “Mrs. Parks,” he said, “I just heard that someone was arrested on one of the buses Thursday.”

“That’s right, Pastor Graetz,” Parks replied.

“And that we’re supposed to boycott the buses on Monday to protest.”

“That’s right, Pastor Graetz.”

“Do you know anything about it?”

“Yes, Pastor Graetz.”

“Well, who was it?”

There was a moment of silence.

Then in a quiet voice she replied, “It was me, Pastor Graetz.”²⁹

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 4

That morning the Montgomery Advertiser carried a front-page story by Azbell headlined: “Negro Groups Ready Boycott of Bus Lines.” The main news in the Sunday paper was the story of a riot by Georgia Tech students at the Georgia State Capitol, angered over their governor’s refusal to let Tech play in the Sugar Bowl against the University of Pittsburgh. The governor had forbidden Tech to play because Pitt had one Black player, a reserve back, and Sugar Bowl officials had agreed Pitt’s fans could be seated on a nonsegregated basis. The boycott story announced that a “secret meeting” of Montgomery Blacks, who planned to boycott the buses on Monday, would be held Monday evening at the Holt Street Baptist Church.

The Sunday story insured that nearly everyone in Montgomery, including Blacks who had not seen a leaflet or read the Saturday story in the Alabama Journal, knew about the Monday boycott, trial, and mass meeting. A number of ministers trumpeted the announcement from their pulpits too—Graetz, Abernathy, King, and other pastors urged their congregations to stay off the buses and attend the meeting Monday night.

City police commissioner Clyde Sellers, a white supremacist, announced on radio and television that Black “goon squads” had been organized to keep Montgomery Blacks off the buses and that the city’s policemen were ready to help Blacks ride the buses peacefully. Sellers’s announcement further spread news of the boycott and helped to frighten any Blacks who may have planned to ride.

Nixon was overjoyed at the publicity the boycott had received; the news media with their front-page story and the city’s promise to send police were unwittingly serving to ensure the one-day boycott’s success.

MONDAY, DECEMBER 5

Nixon and the Kings were up early Monday morning. The South Jackson line was called the “Maid’s Special,” and as it rolled by the King home it was empty. So were the next buses. King got in his car and drove around for several hours and saw only eight Black riders.

Another Advertiser story by Azbell on Monday morning reinforced the boycott. “Negro goon squads reportedly have been organized here to intimidate Negroes who ride Montgomery City Line buses today,” it began. Police cars followed some buses, further terrifying potential Black riders, and, as the boycott’s success became evident, it offered further proof to the police that the “goon squads” were larger than they had believed. The police finally arrested Fred Daniels, a nineteen-year-old college student helping an elderly Black woman into his car; he was the only “goon” police arrested that day.

At Mrs. Parks’s trial that morning, the prosecutor replaced the city charge with a state charge. The city law required that a passenger could be asked to move only if another seat was available, the argument Montgomery’s Blacks had been making to city and bus company officials for several years. The state law required segregation and gave bus drivers the power to enforce it. After testimony from driver Blake and two white witnesses, and an argument from attorney Gray that the law was unconstitutional, the judge declared Parks guilty and imposed a ten-dollar fine and four dollars in court costs. The trial took little more than five minutes.

Parks and Nixon had been shocked by crowds gathered outside the courthouse to support her that morning. When Nixon left the courtroom to post an appeal bond for Mrs. Parks, he was shocked to see over five hundred Blacks waiting in the corridors, overflowing the halls, and spilling into the street, as nervous policemen carrying shotguns looked on. He promised he would produce Mrs. Parks, unharmed, as soon as her bond was signed; someone shouted that the crowd would storm the courthouse if Nixon and Parks did not soon appear.³⁰

Abernathy and Reverend Edgar N. French of Hilliard Chapel AME Church were in the crowd; they met at Nixon’s downtown office to plan a strategy for the afternoon leadership meeting and the mass meeting that night. The success of the one-day boycott and the crowd that had gathered at the courthouse meant that Black Montgomery was ready—was eager— for more. The men agreed to seek a continuation of the boycott until three concessions were met: (1) the adoption of the first-come, first-served seating plan Robinson had been urging for over a year; (2) courtesy from all drivers, and bus company discipline against those who did not comply, and (3) opening bus-driver jobs to Blacks.

Other leaders separately agreed that Bennett was a disaster as a presiding officer of the boycott and that Nixon, uneducated and rough, would be an equally poor choice. Independently, one suggested that his minister, King, would be the best choice; he was well educated and could appeal to Montgomery’s middle class, whose support was important even though most did not ride the buses and had little experience with the kind of indignities suffered by working-class Blacks. He was a minister and could help bring other clergymen into the protest.

At the afternoon meeting which neither Parks nor Robinson was invited to, Abernathy planned to give Nixon the floor; Nixon would yield to French, who would list the three grievances and their proposals for organizing the protest. Bennett refused to recognize Abernathy, and when the president of the NAACP charged that there were “stool pigeons” in the meeting, fear struck the crowd. For security’s sake, an eighteen-person executive committee was selected to meet in the pastor’s study. En route, Abernathy got Bennett to agree to recognize him, and Abernathy told King that he would propose an organizational structure at the smaller meeting. At this smaller meeting, the grievances were quickly adopted, and a name—the Montgomery Improvement Association—suggested by Abernathy, was chosen.

One minister, reminding the others that reporters would be present at the mass meeting and that their names might appear in the next day’s newspaper, suggested that the three grievances should be mimeographed and distributed to the mass meeting crowd; they could then vote on them without any public discussion, thereby keeping anyone from being publicly identified as a supporter of the boycott. The pastor of Holt Street Baptist said reporters had been calling him and that several would attend the meeting.

Nixon exploded: “I am just ashamed of you. You said that God has called you to lead the people and now you are afraid and gone to pieces because the man tells you that the newspaper men will be here and your pictures might come out in the newspaper. How do you think you can run a bus boycott in secret? Let me tell you gentlemen one thing. You ministers have lived off these wash-women for the last 100 years and ain’t never done nothing for them.”³¹ He called them cowards who let women bear the brunt of poor treatment on the buses while they hid like “little boys.” “We’ve worn aprons all our lives,” he said. “It’s time to take the aprons off. . . . If we’re gonna be mens, now’s the time to be mens.” King spoke quickly: “Brother Nixon, I’m not a coward. I don’t want anybody to call me a coward.”³²

A call quickly followed for the nomination of officers. Longtime Montgomery activist and Alabama State faculty Rufus Lewis quickly nominated his pastor, Martin Luther King, in part to forestall the nomination of his rival, E. D. Nixon. Someone swiftly seconded the nomination. King said, “Well, if you think I can render some service, I will.” When an attempt was made to organize the evening’s program, panic ensued again. King said he had a conflict and could not attend the entire meeting, but he would “give his blessings to the occasion.” Bennett said he couldn’t preside. One minister said he was hoarse but would read the scripture. It was agreed that if the proposals were enthusiastically received, the boycott would go forward; if not, the threat of another boycott could be used to wring concessions from whites.

King returned home with less than an hour to prepare to speak at the mass meeting that night. Elliot Finley, a friend from Morehouse, picked him up for the drive to the church, but the crowds that surrounded it made it impossible for them to park nearby. “You know something, Finley,” King said as they left the car, “this could turn into something big.”³³

Clifford and Virginia Durr never got closer than three blocks away.

The newspapers—hostile to the protest from the first—estimated the crowd at five thousand. Blacks thought it was three times larger. Reverend Graetz was the only friendly white face inside.

As the meeting began, ministers who had earlier that afternoon insisted they were too busy or too ill to take part in the program now told King and Abernathy they were eager to offer their support.

The meeting opened with two hymns: “Onward, Christian Soldiers” and “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.” A minister offered a prayer, another read scripture, and then the pastor of the Holt Street Baptist Church called Martin Luther King to the pulpit.

King’s speech summarized what the boycott—one day old—was all about.

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, where they experience the bleakness of nagging despair. . . . And I want to say that we are not here advocating violence. . . . The only weapon that we have in our hands this evening is the weapon of protest. . . . My friends, don’t let anybody make us feel that we are to be compared in our actions with the Ku Klux Klan or with the White Citizens Council. . . .

And we are not wrong, we are not wrong in what we are doing. (Well) if we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong. If we are wrong, Jesus of Nazareth was merely a utopian dreamer that never came down to earth. If we are wrong, justice is a lie. . . . And we are determined here in Montgomery to work and fight until justice runs down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream.

Highlighting the “Americanness” of the boycott and protest, almost as if to protect the boycott from red-baiting charges, he reminded the audience that what happened to Mrs. Parks had happened time and time again, but now, we are tired of taking it, and we’re not going to take it anymore. But we are going to be peaceful—we’re not going to act like the Klan or the White Citizens’ Council.

We aren’t wrong, he says, because if we are wrong: the Supreme Court is wrong, the Constitution is wrong, and God is wrong. God, of course, is never wrong, at least not at the Holt Street Baptist Church. He uses a phrase he will use over and over again: “until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.” He asks Black Montgomery to stick together and is rewarded with an outpouring of support. He reasserts that they have the right to protest for right. And in a prescient statement, he closes by saying, “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 . . . 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.”³⁴

FOLLOWING KING’S SPEECH, Rosa Parks and Fred Daniels were presented to the crowd, and Abernathy read the three demands for the meeting’s overwhelming approval. King left the mass meeting to keep a previously scheduled speaking engagement at a YMCA banquet. Later that night King and Abernathy sent the bus company an unsigned copy of the three demands.

That first mass meeting began the process of creating a movement. All the ingredients were present. A concrete, precipitating incident had occurred: Mrs. Rosa Parks, a well-known, respected figure, had been arrested for refusing to stand up so a white man could take her seat. Her experience was not unique. It had happened to Jo Ann Robinson, to Martin Luther King as a schoolboy, and those Blacks in Montgomery who had not been personally subjected to such indignity on the buses but had seen it happen to others.

The mass meeting collection that night raised over two thousand dollars. At future mass meetings, two groups of women competed to see which could raise the largest amount of money for the MIA. Georgia Gilmore, a cook who had been arrested on a city bus headed one, the Club from Nowhere. Through cake and pie sales the club made weekly donations to the MIA and was soon in friendly competition with the Friendly Club, run by Inez Ricks. Now the movement was developing a fellowship.³⁵

Sometime that week, Virginia Durr wrote to a friend: “Something wonderful is happening in Montgomery!”

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 6

The next morning, the Montgomery Advertiser reported on the first mass meeting of the brand-new Montgomery Improvement Association. King met with reporters for the first time. He emphasized that the boycott’s aims were not integration of the seating system but fair treatment within the strictures of segregation: “We are not asking for an end to segregation. That’s a matter for the legislature and the courts. . . . All we are seeking is justice and fair treatment in riding the buses. We don’t like the idea of Negroes having to stand when there are vacant seats. We are demanding justice on that point.” The boycott would continue, King said, until it gained “concrete results.”³⁶

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 7

On Wednesday, the MIA’s executive board met for the first time. Its membership showed how decisively the city’s Black clerical leadership had taken control of the boycott from the Women’s Political Council and Nixon, who had begun it. In addition to King as president, ministers were chosen as vice president, recording secretary, corresponding secretary, and parliamentarian. Nixon was treasurer. Ministers enjoyed a degree of financial independence from white Montgomery and were used to filling leadership roles; indeed, most of them expected it. Their major purpose was to organize committees to manage the boycott most had thought would not last beyond one day.

At the board meeting that day of the Alabama Council on Human Relations, members made plans to bring the boycott leadership and the city and bus company to the negotiating table.

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 8

The next morning the two sides met. King, Abernathy, Gray, Robinson, and eight others represented the MIA. The three city commissioners and several lawyers represented the city and the bus company. King told the gathering, “We are not here to change the segregation laws.” The MIA, King said, had “a plan that can work within the laws of the state”—the equally segregated system in use in Mobile and Huntsville, Alabama, that the Women’s Political Council had earlier requested. King also mentioned that the MIA wanted “better treatment and more courtesy” toward Black riders, and Black drivers hired. “We are merely trying to peacefully obtain better conditions for Negroes,” he said.³⁷

The bus company spokesman replied by saying that the seating plan the MIA proposed was contrary to state law. If there were specific complaints against drivers, they would be reprimanded. The time was not right for Black drivers, even on all-Black lines; instead the bus company would make every other bus on predominately Black lines an all-Black “special” with no white riders; on the “special,” Blacks could have all the seats. His argument reflected a common view that where there were no whites to resent a challenge to their superior status, Blacks could sit anywhere they chose. He explained the whites’ position: “If we granted the Negroes these demands, they would go about boasting of a victory they had won over the white people.”³⁸

The whites refused to surrender; the Blacks were astounded. “We thought that this would all be over in three or four days,” Abernathy remembered later. “Since our demands were moderate,” King remembered later, “I had assumed they’d be granted with little question.”

Discouraged, the MIA sent a letter to National City Lines of Chicago, the owner of the Montgomery company, asking them to send someone to Montgomery to negotiate.

Whites were worried too. A few buses had been fired upon, and someone fired into a Black policeman’s home. The chief of police announced that armed policemen would follow some buses, and the bus company’s manager, admitting that patronage was down 75 percent, announced that service on some lines might be discontinued.

That threat prompted a call from King to Reverend T. J. Jemison in Baton Rouge. Jemison told King about the organization of Baton Rouge’s boycott and carpool. It was important, Jemison said, to have one set of pickup points for people going to work in the morning and another set of pickup points for people returning home in the evening. What had been done in Baton Rouge could be done in Montgomery, Jemison said, if enough cars were volunteered and if coordination between cars and pickup points were maintained.

Thursday night the MIA’s second mass meeting was held at St. John AME Church. Following a pattern that would be repeated at each meeting that would follow, King told the crowd about the failed meeting with city and bus company officials, the letter sent to Chicago, and his conversation with Jemison.

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 9

On Friday, the organization of the carpool was underway. The city announced it would require cabs to charge the minimum fare—forty cents— in an attempt to break the boycott (bus fare was then ten cents), and the bus company announced it would discontinue two Black routes on Saturday, December 10. Removing bus lines forced even reluctant boycott supporters into active participation; riding a bus in defiance of the boycott was no longer an option.

MONDAY, DECEMBER 12

At the mass meeting on the first-week anniversary of the boycott, the MIA announced that a carpool would begin the next day, December 13. The transportation committee established forty-two morning stations and forty-eight evening ones; a Black owned parking lot in downtown Montgomery would serve as the central command post. More than two hundred volunteer drivers had been recruited; middle-class Montgomerians donated their cars or drove them in the carpool. Over time the organization was able to buy fifteen station wagons to supplement the volunteer cars.

The morning stations—Black churches, funeral homes, and stores— were open from 6:00 a.m. until 10:00 a.m.; hourly service was instituted from then until 1:00 p.m. when domestic workers—maids, cooks, and nurses—began to leave work. Afternoon pickup stations were downtown locations frequented by whites and Blacks; the afternoon service continued until 8:00 p.m. In time, the transportation committee employed fifteen dispatchers (Rosa Parks served as a dispatcher briefly) and twenty full-time drivers six days a week, providing ten thousand to fifteen thousand rides per day. There were seventy-four part-time unpaid volunteer drivers. Dispatchers were stationed at the downtown parking lot.³⁹

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 13

On Tuesday, cracks between local (MIA) and national (NAACP) interests began to appear, caused by the MIA’s requests for equal treatment within the segregated system versus the NAACP’s desire for integration, and by the NAACP’s legalistic approach versus the direct-action boycott technique of the MIA.

As we shall see later, this local-national conflict will reappear again and again when Martin Luther King brings his troops into a Southern town and his national goals conflicted with more limited local aims. But in Montgomery in 1955, King was the local leader. The visitor was W. C. Patton, the NAACP’s director of voter registration, based in Birmingham. Patton reported to NAACP executive secretary Roy Wilkins, “King assured me” that the MIA’s “ultimate goals are the same as those of the NAACP.”⁴⁰

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 15

At Thursday night’s mass meeting, transportation committee chairman Rufus Lewis reported that 215 volunteer drivers were making the transportation system a success. The carpool and the weekly mass meetings helped create and cement movement strength and solidarity. The carpool eased class divisions among Montgomery’s Blacks as professionals shared their cars with domestic servants. The mass meetings’ ability to combine church services with political education and testimony from boycotters insured that all shared the boycott experience; each triumph was a success story participated in and shared by all.

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 17

At their next negotiating session, King reiterated the MIA’s goals and relaxed one. The MIA would settle for the bus company’s receiving applications from Black drivers; they would not have to be immediately hired. The mayor announced he had appointed a special “citizens committee” of eight whites and two Blacks; the Blacks were the mayor’s choices, his invitees to the meeting, and were not a part of the MIA. The MIA, he said, could have three representatives on the committee. The mayor, of course, was following a long-established practice of white leadership—selecting Black leaders for the Black community. When Jo Ann Robinson objected to the handpicked candidates, the mayor named six MIA representatives—King, Abernathy, Robinson, Reverend Hubbard, and attorneys Gray and Charles Langford. The “special committee” was able to agree only on a resolution calling for courtesy on the buses toward everyone.

MONDAY, DECEMBER 19

As the committee met again, King spotted a new face among the whites, the secretary of the Montgomery Chapter of the White Citizens’ Council. King objected to his presence and was told that the mayor had chosen him and added a non-voting white woman as recording secretary. King protested that the White Citizens’ Council secretary was biased; the whites responded by charging that King himself was biased. For whites like the mayor, the White Citizens’ Council and the NAACP—the only Black organization they knew of—were simply two different interest groups. King favored integration and the White Citizens’ Councils opposed it, they were opposite equals. Abernathy came to King’s rescue, saying King spoke for all the Blacks present. Again, no agreement could be reached.

The MIA was taken aback by the refusal of the city and bus company to agree to the slightest modification of segregated seating. They began to reassess their approach, and while attorney Gray told reporters that the MIA was not asking “for an abolition of segregation at this time,” the editor of the Birmingham World reported, “plans are being made for a 12-month campaign.”⁴¹

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 22

The MIA’s executive board met and expressed disappointment with the negotiations and decided not to meet with the city again until some concessions were forthcoming. In an attempt to explain their position to all of Montgomery, they prepared a detailed statement—printed in the Advertiser on Christmas Day—outlining past grievances suffered on the city’s buses and repeating their proposal for separate-but-equal seating.

The bus company reduced the number of routes it served, announced that all bus service would be canceled for several days over the holiday period, and warned that the lack of business might call for a fare increase early in 1956.

In his mass meeting speeches, King began to mention Gandhi and nonviolence more frequently. The MIA’s newspaper ad read, “This is a movement of passive resistance, depending on moral and spiritual forces. We, the oppressed, have no hate in our hearts for the oppressors, but we are nevertheless determined to resist until the cause of justice triumphs.”⁴²

White Montgomery had tried to pick the representatives for Black Montgomery and had tried to pack the negotiating committee with an admitted racist; now they tried to undermine King’s growing status in the community. They spread rumors that “outside agitators” were responsible for the boycott, that King was stealing from the MIA, that he occupied a leadership position that should have gone to an older, more established preacher. In response, the MIA and Black Montgomery closed ranks around him. On December 30, 1955, a Montgomery policeman told a local FBI agent he had been instructed “to uncover all the derogatory information he could” about King; two Montgomery policemen traveled to Atlanta to investigate King but concluded “he was clean as a hound’s tooth.” This was the beginning of a long FBI campaign to discredit King.⁴³

From New York, NAACP executive secretary Roy Wilkins wrote to W. C. Patton that the organization could not help with Mrs. Parks’s legal appeal; the NAACP could not associate itself with the MIA “on any other basis than the abolition of segregated seating on the city buses.” NAACP lawyers were already pursuing a case to integrate city buses in Columbia, South Carolina; they could not enter another case “asking merely for more polite segregation.”⁴⁴ Wilkins was being disingenuous; the NAACP could easily have supported the legal suit, which attacked the segregation law, without agreeing to a continuation of segregation.

JANUARY 1956

The Montgomery City Bus Lines, admitting that the boycott was 100 percent effective, announced it was losing twenty-two cents every mile a city bus traveled and faced bankruptcy; it asked the city for a 100 percent fare increase, from ten cents to twenty cents. The city agreed to raise the adult fare to fifteen cents.

FRIDAY, JANUARY 6

A letter to the editor of the Montgomery Advertiser suggested the boycott violated the state’s anti-union boycott law. The evening of January 6, the city commissioner in charge of police announced to a 1,200-person rally of whites that he had joined the White Citizens’ Council. The Advertiser noted, “In effect, the Montgomery police force is now an arm of the White Citizens’ Council.” He told the crowd, “I wouldn’t trade my Southern birthright for a hundred Negro votes.”⁴⁵

MONDAY, JANUARY 9

Once again the two sides met; once again the MIA presented its polite segregation plan; once again the city and bus company refused. King noted the effect of the boycott: “Either the bus company will have to meet our demands or fold up.” But he also tried to separate the MIA’s moderate seating requests from the lawsuit appealing Mrs. Parks’s conviction: “We are fighting the question of segregation in the courts.”

During the week, the Reverend Robert Graetz’s car was vandalized, and King announced on January 15 that mass meetings would be conducted six nights a week instead of two. The movement was taking steps to strengthen its support, to counter the city’s intransigence. King announced that the MIA’s “separate but equal” seating demand had cost the MIA the support of the NAACP. “Frankly,” he said, “I am for complete integration. Segregation is evil, and I cannot, as a minister, condone evil.” On January 17, Police Commissioner Sellers told the Junior Chamber of Commerce, “We must at all costs strive to preserve our way of life.”⁴⁶

On January 9, the Montgomery Advertiser published a story titled “Rev. King Is Boycott Boss.” This was not just white Montgomery’s first look at King; it was their first serious look at anything Black, the first time the newspaper had given any consideration to the Black community—or a Black figure. Prior to this, the paper had profiled the minister many whites thought was the brains behind the protest—the white Lutheran minister Robert Graetz.

SATURDAY, JANUARY 21

On Saturday, the mayor met with three Black ministers, none of them members of the MIA, and announced to the press that a boycott settlement had been reached. The announcement would be printed in the Sunday Advertiser, an obvious collaborator in this fraud. The Associated Press sent a story out on its national wire that the Sunday paper would announce that unnamed “prominent Negro ministers” had agreed to a plan that would retain the present system of ten seats reserved for each race.

A reporter for the Minneapolis Tribune named Carl Rowan read the story; he had been in Montgomery two weeks earlier, and now he called King to ask him what he knew of the agreement. When King said he knew nothing, Rowan called Gray, and when the MIA’s lawyer was unable to confirm the statement, Rowan called the Associated Press to tell them the story was false. He then called Commissioner Sellers, who refused to name the ministers who had agreed to end the boycott, but conceded they were not members of the MIA. Rowan told King what Sellers had said, and King called the MIA leadership to his home. They decided to awaken every Black minister in Montgomery to tell them the lie the morning newspaper would tell and urge them to repudiate it from their pulpits. King and another group went into Montgomery’s bars and nightclubs.

The boycott held.

THURSDAY, JANUARY 26

King was arrested for going thirty miles per hour in a twenty-five-mile-an-hour zone while transporting boycotters. Several dozen Blacks arrived at the jail upon hearing of King’s arrest; he was released on a signature bond.

FRIDAY, JANUARY 27

On Friday night, sitting in his kitchen, King experienced a religious moment setting him on the path that would consume the rest of his life. A year after he arrived in Montgomery, he had been thrust into the leadership of a boycott most had believed would last a few days, but which had continued for almost two months. Whites in Montgomery were painting King as the major obstacle to settling the boycott and asking older, established Blacks why King, the new man, was in charge, why they had ceded their rightful position of power to this upstart, who probably was stealing money from the movement.

“I almost broke down under the continual battering,” King said.⁴⁷ But Montgomery’s Black community was beginning to appreciate his leadership, and the community’s leaders recognized his diplomatic skills. He was achieving national and international recognition. Telephoned threats against him were numerous and growing; Montgomery’s white power structure seemed determined not to give in, even to the moderate demands of the MIA. That night another telephone call had awakened him. The caller said: “Nigger, we are tired of you and your mess. 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.” Unable to go back to sleep, he sat in his kitchen and made a cup of coffee. Eleven years later, speaking in Chicago in 1967, he remembered how he had felt in his Montgomery kitchen.

It was around midnight. You can have some strange experiences at midnight.

. . . And I got to the point that I couldn’t take it any longer. I was weak. Something said to me, . . . “You’ve got to call on that something in that person that your Daddy used to tell you about, that power that can make a way out of no way.” And I discovered then that religion had to become real to me, and I had to know God for myself. And I bowed down over that cup of coffee. . . . And it seemed at that moment that I could hear an inner voice saying to me, “Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth. And lo I will be with you, even until the end of the world.” . . . I heard the voice of Jesus saying still to fight on. He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone. No never alone. He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone.

Almost at once, my fears began to go. My uncertainty disappeared.⁴⁸

POLICE OFTEN SAT at the pickup stations giving MIA drivers dozens of tickets. Jo Ann Robinson got seventeen tickets in just a short time. As the city’s response became more and more hostile, some MIA members suggested that the organization should organize its own transportation system with a city franchise. A city license would let the MIA charge its passengers, something it could not do with the car-pool system. Costs for gas, oil, tires each week were huge and supported entirely from the mass meeting collection plate. Mrs. Parks’s appeal through the state courts would be subjected to delays. Because there had been no other seat available to her, her conviction might be overturned without disturbing the segregation laws. Her attorneys agreed that a frontal attack, based on the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, would have to be mounted. Gray, with the help of NAACP lawyer Robert Carter, began to draw up a lawsuit.

MONDAY, JANUARY 30

While the MIA Monday night meeting was in progress at Ralph Abernathy’s First Baptist Church, a dynamite bomb blew the front porch off King’s house. Coretta Scott King and a friend heard a bump and footsteps running away from the house; they had just moved into a back room when the bomb exploded. By the time King got home, several hundred Blacks surrounded his house, all of them angry, many threatening the police who were frightened themselves. Commissioner Sellers, a new member of the White Citizens’ Council, asked King to calm the crowd. From the bombed porch, with Sellers on one side and Mayor Gayle on the other, King spoke: “Everything is all right. It is best for all of you to go home. The police are investigating, nobody has been hurt, and everything is under control.”

He then spelled out what the movement’s response to violence would be—this night and in the future: “We are not advocating violence. We want to love our enemies. I want you to love our enemies. Be good to them. This is what we must live by. We must meet hate with love.”

“I did not start this boycott,” he continued. “I was asked by you to serve as your spokesman. I want it 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.”⁴⁹

After the mayor and police commissioner spoke to the crowd, promising to do all they could to find the bombers, King again asked the crowd to disperse. “Go home and sleep calm. Go home and don’t worry. Be 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.”⁵⁰

Thereafter King and Abernathy decided to carry guns for their own and their families’ protection. The two ministers visited the one white Alabama political figure who was a potential ally, Governor James “Big Jim” Folsom, to ask for help in obtaining pistol permits, but a request to the county sheriff for permits was denied. The men of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church organized dusk-to-daylight shifts of armed guards to protect their pastor’s home.

FEBRUARY 1–2

On February 1, the MIA filed a suit in federal court seeking an injunction against segregated bus seating and an end to harassment of the carpool. The plaintiffs were all women—Claudette Colvin, Mary Louise Smith, Susie McDonald, and Aurelia Browder—who had suffered harassment or worse on the city’s buses. Gray had also wanted a minister to be part of the case, but none was willing.

Nixon’s home was bombed on the evening of February 1; he was away, and little damage was done. Ralph Abernathy’s home was bombed also.

On Tuesday, February 2, under a court order won by the NAACP, the University of Alabama admitted its first Black student, Autherine Lucy. Students rioted against her on February 7, and she was suspended. She was expelled on February 29 for making “untrue” and “outrageous” statements about university officials.⁵¹

HARASSMENT INTENSIFIES

Jo Ann Robinson saw a uniformed Montgomery policeman throw a rock through a plate glass window of her home; later someone threw acid on her car. Other cars were vandalized; paint was thrown on homes. Fred Gray’s draft board removed his ministerial exemption and classified him 1-A; he was later indicted on a trumped-up charge of barratry.

Not all whites in Montgomery were as hostile to the movement as the city’s leaders; a group of thirty-seven white businessmen, the Men of Montgomery, made an attempt to settle the boycott. By February 20, the MOM group had managed to convince the city to offer a plan reserving ten seats for each race but insuring no one would have to stand over an empty seat, the least possible modification of the present seating plan. The bus company urged agreement to keep it from bankruptcy. Reverend Ralph Abernathy presented the plan to the regular Monday mass meeting; from the several thousands gathered at St. John AME Church, only the Reverend Roy Bennett and his assistant pastor voted to accept it.

The next morning, February 21, a grand jury indicted almost 115 members of the MIA under the state anti-boycott law. Rumors of the indictments had circulated through Black Montgomery for more than a week. When they came, the MIA organized a mass surrender at the courthouse to demonstrate that this latest effort would fail to stop the boycott or intimidate its leaders. A Black Montgomery businessman who had been one of the Blacks selected by Mayor Gayle to sit on the negotiating committee provided bail money. Four thousand people attended the mass meeting that night. So did thirty-five reporters from across the country.

Only 89 of the 115 indicted were actually arrested. In mid-February, Mrs. Virginia Durr wrote to friends:

I thought I would write you and tell you what is going on down here and how exciting and thrilling it is. . . . [Mrs. Parks] is so brave and so intelligent and so determined. So as the Negroes said when they “messed with her they messed with the WRONG ONE” and the whole Negro community united overnight, and with each stupid and vicious attack on them they get madder and madder and more determined, and instead of a handful you now have forty or fifty thousand simply determined to stick it out until Hell freezes over.

To arrest all of their leaders was the very thing that was needed to make them more determined, and especially to arrest their preachers. I have picked up and carried numbers during the boycott, and they all express the same determination. . . .

But there is another side to the story. . . . The White Citizens Council grew apace day by day and there is real blackmail going on. They work the blocks and the buildings and ask each one to join, and if they don’t—well there is no doubt you get on a blacklist.⁵²

The mass indictments insured the Montgomery bus boycott and its young leader a place in the news across the country. Both the New York Herald Tribune and the New York Times carried front-page stories; network television began to cover the boycott and King. Others were paying attention to what was happening there too. One was Bayard Rustin.

BAYARD RUSTIN

Bayard Rustin was born in 1910 into a family of caterers in West Chester, Pennsylvania. As a young boy, he adopted an English accent, which he kept throughout his life. Poverty and the Depression interrupted his college education, and he moved to New York’s Harlem, worked at odd jobs, including backup singer for folksingers Leadbelly and Josh White, attended free night classes at City College, and joined the Young Communist League.

For several years he was a successful Communist Party organizer and recruiter, but when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the party ordered him to close down his anti-segregation activity. They intended to use all their energies fighting foreign Nazis, not domestic ones. He resigned and found a temporary job with A. Philip Randolph’s March on Washington movement. When the March on Washington was halted by Roosevelt’s capitulation, Randolph got Rustin an appointment to see A. J. Muste at the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and Rustin became FOR’s youth secretary. FOR, an international Christian-based nonviolent organization, was founded in England in 1914. One of Rustin’s tasks was helping a new organization that FOR helped to organize, the Congress of Racial Equality.

In 1943, Rustin refused to be drafted and renounced his right to conscientious objector status and noncombatant work as a Quaker. He spent the rest of World War II in Lewisburg Penitentiary, emerging after twenty-seven months in 1946 just as World War II had ended and the Cold War begun. In 1947, he joined a CORE-sponsored bus ride through the Upper South to test a new Supreme Court decision that Black passengers on interstate buses could not be forced to sit in rear seats. He was beaten and arrested and served time on a South Carolina chain gang. Other arrests followed. Rustin was a gay man, and he was arrested on a morals charge in 1953, for which he served thirty days in jail.⁵³

THREE YEARS LATER, traveling on money raised by Randolph, Rustin arrived in Montgomery on a Tuesday just as the indictments were being issued and went to Abernathy’s home. He soon met Nixon, joined the indictees at the courthouse lawn on Wednesday, and had a friend wire him five thousand dollars, which he gave to Nixon to use for bail bonds. He attended a mass meeting and an MIA transportation committee meeting, met with the executive director of the Alabama Council on Human Relations, and heard King preach on Sunday. He had his first long talk with King, beginning a friendship that would last until King died. Some of the out-of-town reporters recognized Rustin; he did not help by introducing himself as a representative of Le Figaro and the Manchester Guardian. Worried about being linked with a former Communist, homosexual pacifist, MIA officials soon persuaded Rustin to leave town. He continued to advise King, over the years, spending hours discussing nonviolence. He wrote an article for King’s signature, describing the Montgomery movement as a refutation of stereotypical notions of Blacks, printed in Liberation magazine, the first writing published under King’s name. In countless conversations, Rustin enlarged King’s rudimentary understanding of nonviolence and mass organizing. He once said: “King couldn’t organize vampires to go to a bloodbath.”⁵⁴

Gandhi’s nonviolence and his struggles against British colonialism were attractive to Black Americans, especially intellectuals. He identified himself as a Black man and was fighting a powerful white nation. Among Gandhi’s early Black admirers were Howard Thurman, the chapel dean at Boston University when King was a student there, and Dr. Benjamin Mays, Morehouse College president when King was a Morehouse student.

NONVIOLENCE

Nonviolence is widely misunderstood.

“Self-defense” against racist violence had always been practiced in African American communities. For King, under Rustin’s tutelage, nonviolence became an alternative to wanton violence. For him, it was courageous, not cowardly. It was active resistance to evil, not passive acceptance of it. It led toward the creation of what he came to call “the beloved community.” It attacked an evil system, not the evildoers themselves. It eradicated not only physical violence but “the violence of the spirit.” It used love as a lever, tilting the majority toward justice and equality.

After the bus boycott, as we shall see, and beginning with the 1960 sit-ins, many came to believe nonviolence and self-defense were not mutually exclusive and could be used by the same people in different situations. Self-defense was neither the opposite of nonviolence nor the equivalent of violence. Many believed nonviolence might succeed on the picket line, but few were willing to embrace it in their private lives. King’s argument that nonviolence could wear down and defeat any enemy ran counter to the common sense of most Blacks. For some it was debasing. It might have limited tactical utility but not personal application.⁵⁵

King himself grew to understand and articulate distinctions in the nonviolence/violence construct—he believed there were three categories of behavior: pure nonviolence, self-defense, and “the advocacy of violence as a tool of advancement, as in warfare, deliberately and consciously.”⁵⁶ Like Gandhi, King understood the militancy of direct action, not passive or acquiescent. And like Gandhi, King sanctioned self-defense for those unable to adopt and accept pure nonviolence. “When the Negro uses force in self-defense,” he said, “he does not forfeit support—he may even win it, by the courage and self-respect which it reflects.”⁵⁷

ON MONDAY, FEBRUARY 27, Rustin’s replacement arrived, the Reverend Glen Smiley, a white Texan. Rustin managed to introduce King to Smiley before he left. For the next four years, Smiley was in and out of Montgomery, attending the movement’s strategy sessions and running workshops in nonviolence. His white face and Southern accent allowed him to move among Montgomery’s whites, who were still convinced local Blacks were incapable of running the successful protest.

STRUGGLE AND VICTORY

Conducting the boycott was expensive. Birmingham attorney Arthur Shores, the senior Black lawyer in the state, had agreed to represent the indicted MIA members for one hundred dollars apiece. The carpool cost three thousand dollars a week; the MIA now had several paid employees working from the MIA office located in Rufus Lewis’s Citizens Club. Roy Wilkins wrote King to say the NAACP would bear the full costs of the MIA defense, the suit against the bus segregation laws, and Rosa Parks’s appeal as well.

The anti-boycott trials were set to begin on Monday, March 19. King would be tried first. The state intended to prove that the MIA had begun and maintained the boycott illegally—without “just cause or legal excuse.” As expected, King was found guilty and fined. Attorney Shores announced he would appeal and posted a thousand-dollar bond.

Then, on April 23, the US Supreme Court upheld a lower court decision striking down segregated seating on buses in Columbia, South Carolina. The Montgomery City Bus Lines announced that its drivers would no longer enforce segregated seating on the city’s buses. But Mayor Gayle announced that even if the bus company wouldn’t, the city would, and the city would arrest any bus driver who failed to do so. King announced that the boycott would go on, and, at a mass meeting, three thousand people shouted affirmation of a resolution continuing the boycott until at least May 11, when the federal suit filed by Fred Gray would be tried in Montgomery.

At the May 11 trial, the Black female plaintiffs and Mayor Gayle and Commissioner Sellers testified. When Claudette Colvin testified, she was asked who the leader of the boycott was. She answered, “Our leaders is just we, ourselves.”⁵⁸

The three-judge panel voted 2 to 1 to strike down Montgomery’s segregation law. Because the city appealed to the US Supreme Court, the boycott remained in effect.

The State of Alabama struck against the NAACP on June 1. Alabama attorney general John Patterson, arguing that the New York–based organization was “organizing, supporting, and financing an illegal boycott by Negro residents of Montgomery,” obtained a court order banning most NAACP activities within the state. When the NAACP resisted an order to turn over its membership rolls and contributors’ lists to the state, the judge imposed a $100,000 fine. It would take eight years and several trips to the US Supreme Court to win the right to operate in Alabama again.

In late August, Reverend Robert Graetz’s home was bombed, and on September 8 the insurance policies on seventeen of the MIA’s station wagons were canceled. Only the intervention of a Black Atlanta insurance executive with Lloyd’s of London allowed the carpool to continue. In October, the city of Montgomery asked a state judge to issue an injunction against the carpool as a violation of the bus company’s franchise. A hearing was set for November 13. King sat in the courtroom, sure that the judge would outlaw the carpool, effectively ending the transportation system that had allowed the boycott to succeed. During a recess, an Associated Press reporter gave King a story datelined Washington, DC, that the Supreme Court that morning had affirmed the lower court decision outlawing segregation.

King announced that Montgomery’s Blacks would return to the buses as soon as the Supreme Court’s order reached Montgomery. That night, ten thousand Blacks gathered to celebrate their victory. Despite the Supreme Court ruling, the state judge issued an order declaring the carpool illegal, ending the transportation system that made the boycott a success.

The City of Montgomery, however, petitioned the Supreme Court for a rehearing, further delaying the issuance of the final order and, with it, an end to the boycott. Without the carpool, the MIA organized a neighborhood-based “share-the-ride” system that kept the boycott intact.

While they waited for the order, the MIA put together a weeklong Institute on Nonviolence and Social Change to help Black Montgomery adjust to riding integrated buses. King was the first speaker at Holt Street Baptist Church, where the boycott had begun a year before. In his speech, King said the boycott had taught six lessons:

(1) We have discovered that we can stick together for a common cause; (2) Our leaders do not have to sell out; (3) Threats and violence do not necessarily intimidate those who are sufficiently aroused and nonviolent; (4) Our church is becoming militant, stressing a social gospel as well as a gospel of personal salvation; (5) We have gained a new sense of dignity and destiny; and (6) We have discovered a new and powerful weapon: nonviolent resistance.⁵⁹

Finally, on December 17, the Supreme Court rejected the city’s last appeal; the order arrived in Montgomery on December 20. At two mass meetings that night, King reminded the crowds to follow the suggestions for riding integrated buses they had received: to maintain “a calm and loving dignity” telling riders, “Do not deliberately sit by a white person, unless there is no other seat.”⁶⁰

On December 21, Montgomery City Bus Lines resumed service on all of its routes. That morning, King, Abernathy, Smiley, and Nixon boarded a bus and took a front seat. Mrs. Parks had decided to stay home, but Look magazine came to find her, insisting that she ride so they could get a picture. She posed sitting in front of UPI reporter Nicholas Chriss, and the iconic bus boycott photograph was created.⁶¹ During the photo shoot, one of the drivers was none other than James Blake, but the reporter missed the significance. Three hundred and eighty-two days after it began, the boycott was over.

In the days that followed, forty carloads of Klansmen paraded through Montgomery; this time, Blacks left their homes and stood in the streets as the Klansmen rode by. Some followed the procession, jeering and laughing. The Klan slunk away.

BOYCOTT AFTERMATH

Despite the drama and emotion of the boycott, Montgomery remained a segregated city; even the buses remained voluntarily segregated, as few Blacks chose to take front seats. The violence also continued. Someone fired a shotgun at King’s home. There were other incidents—on January 10, bombs damaged five Black churches and Reverend Graetz’s home. Eight months after the boycott’s end, still facing death threats and unable to find work, the Parks family was forced to leave Montgomery for Detroit, where Mrs. Parks’s brother and cousins now lived.

THE BOYCOTT PROVED one standard assertion of Southern whites—that Blacks and whites could solve their disputes without outside interference—absolutely wrong. The refusal of whites to consider the smallest of alterations of segregation and their refusal to even discuss the issue with Blacks left Blacks no alternative except seeking outside assistance, and they found it in the federal courts. Whites learned a fatal lesson— great political gains, however temporary, could be won by rejecting Black requests for changes in the racial status quo. But, as white resistance stiffened, Black aggressiveness increased.

The Montgomery bus boycott’s greatest effect may have been beyond Montgomery. It introduced Martin Luther King to the nation and the world, and his articulation of nonviolence struck a spark in the minds of Blacks across the South. One hundred years earlier, Frederick Douglass had said: “The struggle for freedom is a struggle to save Black men’s bodies and white men’s souls!”⁶² Now in Montgomery, King had preached the same message, couched in the common evangelical Christianity of Southern Blacks and whites. His message in 1955 and 1956 was restoration and redemption, rejection of evil. Just as the South had rejected slavery, it could reject segregation too, King argued, and although few whites in Montgomery listened, he had struck a theme that would eventually resonate among whites and Blacks.

For the national news media, the boycott’s dramatization of Southern Blacks’ strength, determination, and solidarity was a new phenomenon. The story of “good Negroes” and “bad white racists” was irresistible, and it drew more journalists to the region. In 1956, news magazine coverage of civil rights issues tripled from the previous year. Life magazine carried one civil rights story in 1955; the next year it ran thirty-five. In 1957, its sister publication, Time magazine, put Martin Luther King Jr. on the cover.⁶³

White hostility toward the media insured journalists’ sympathies would lie with the Black victims of violence. The immediate white response was disappointment, disapproval, and anger. For some, the anger flowed from a feeling of betrayal, as if an old and trusted family retainer had absconded with the family jewels.

Much as we today hear denunciations of programs designed to strike down discrimination, perversely described as creating and widening the division they were intended to heal, in Montgomery and its aftermath, as Black demands quickened, white Southerners argued that federal court orders and Black aggressiveness drove a wedge between the races, upsetting the historical myth of benign race relations that many whites—and no Blacks—deeply cherished.