To the Mountaintop

1955–1957

Strange fruit.

Jeremiah Reeves, seventeen years old, was a popular student at Booker T. Washington High School in Montgomery, Alabama. He played drums in a rhythm-and-blues band. Like his father he drove a delivery truck. One of his stops was a house in a white neighborhood. The housewife, attracted to the handsome, dark-skinned boy, invited him in one day. They began having an affair. Neighbors took notice. Someone peeked in the window, saw them undressing, called the police. Reeves was accused of rape. He spent the rest of his short life behind bars.

Despite diligent efforts by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Reeves was convicted of sexual assault and sentenced to death. Upon turning twenty-one, he was electrocuted. Reeves was one of countless black men murdered by law or lynching for the most grievous sin against white supremacy: sex with a white woman.

During his trial a young friend of his, ninth-grader Claudette Colvin, took up collections and showed movies to raise money for his defense. His conviction made her bitter. She grieved about his wasting away on death row. “I knew I had to do something,” she recalled. “I just didn’t know where or when.”¹ She wanted to become a lawyer to help her people who were being railroaded in the racist courts.

The smart young girl lived in the rundown King Hill neighborhood surrounded by railroad yard, stockyard, and junkyards. Her mother worked as a maid. Her father mowed lawns. She had hated segregation for as long as she could remember. Her first memory of anger, when she was nine or ten, “was when I wanted to go to the rodeo. Daddy bought my sister boots and bought us both cowboy hats. That’s as much of the rodeo as we got. The show was at the Coliseum, and it was only for white kids.”

Her mind “got pricked” by a ninth-grade history teacher, Geraldine Nesbitt, who impressed on her the importance of self-worth, and to “think for ourselves” about what rights they had. Colvin tried to get her classmates to talk about how they could change things, but they “looked at me like I was from another planet.”²

Nesbitt, tall and the color of dark chocolate, took pride in her blackness. “Do you feel good about yourselves?” she asked her students. “You feel good inside?” She insisted that “you won’t let anything stop you, regardless of your complexion.”

She assigned essays about how her students felt about being black. Colvin wrote about the indignities of segregation. “I felt clean,” she wrote, “and I didn’t see why we couldn’t try on clothes in the store. Furthermore, why do we have to press our hair and straighten our hair to look good?”

Nesbitt read her essay to the class. “Oh, Claudette! You’re crazy,” her friends said. Showing the courage of her convictions, she refused to straighten her hair from that day on and wore kinky braids. Friends taunted her. Her boyfriend broke up with her. She felt it important to set an example.³

Two years later, on March 2, 1955, Colvin’s yen for simple justice caused Montgomery’s racial cauldron to overflow. As usual, the fifteen-year-old eleventh-grader rode city buses home from school. Carrying a heavy load of schoolbooks to prepare for tests, the straight-A student waited for her transfer on Dexter Avenue. Before it came she did something out of the ordinary. While her friends were shopping, she walked into Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where her teachers worshiped, and prayed.

“Something spiritual just came over me. I said, ‘How is it You don’t love Your children?’ I said it again: ‘How is it the Lord doesn’t love the black children?’ ”⁴

She boarded the bus. It stopped at Court Square, where during slave auctions girls as young as she had been shown off bare breasted to rapacious buyers. Several white passengers got on, filling up the bus. The driver demanded that Colvin and her schoolmates give up their seats. They were sitting in the unreserved middle section near the back door. Her friends got up. Colvin did not move. A black girl said, “She knows she has to get up.” Another said, “She doesn’t have to. Only one thing you have to do is stay black and die.”

The driver walked back to her seat. “If you are not going to get up I will get a policeman.” He came back with a traffic cop.

“Why are you not going to get up?” the cop asked her. “It is against the law here.” Still she did not move.

“I didn’t know,” she replied, “that it was a law that a colored person had to get up and give a white person a seat when there were not any more vacant seats and colored people were standing up. I said I was just as good as any white person and I wasn’t going to get up.” The cop left to get reinforcements to deal with the skinny schoolgirl weighing under a hundred pounds.

Two patrolmen pulled up in a squad car, lights flashing. As they approached Colvin, a white girl told them she was right “because there is no room for them in the back.” Another white girl disagreed: “Make them stand up because after a while they will try to take over.”⁵

One of the cops asked Colvin, who was crying, “Aren’t you going to get up?”

“No, sir,” she said, and explained her defiance in a storm of words. “That was worse than stealing,” she recalled, “talking back to a white person.” Her mother liked to say that “she can out-talk forty lawyers.”

The cop was unpersuaded. “I will have to take you off.” He kicked her with his heavy boots and knocked the books out of her arms.

“One got on one side of me and one got the other arm and they just drug me out.” As they pulled her roughly from the bus she called out in her high-pitched voice, “It’s my constitutional right to sit here! You have no right to do this.” She had learned about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights from Mrs. Nesbitt. Her constitutional understanding was correct in light of the Supreme Court’s nine-month-old Brown decision, although it applied to school segregation. She must have known too about the city’s “separate but equal” bus law, which required a Negro to give up a seat only if a vacant one was available.

“It really hurt me,” she recalled, “to see that I have to give a person a seat, when all those colored people were standing and there were not any more vacant seats.”

They shoved her in the back of the patrol car and handcuffed her through the window. A motorcycle cop said he was sorry.⁶ She was interrogated at the police station.

“What happened to this black bitch?” one cop asked. “This is a black whore. Take her to Atmore [state prison] and get rid of her.” The desk sergeant warned her: “I am going to make it hot for you in the morning.”⁷ She was taken to the city jail, locked in a small cell. Her pastor at Hutchinson Street Baptist Church bailed her out. Police threw the book at the traumatized girl, charging her with violating the segregation code, disorderly conduct, and assault and battery on a police officer.

To defend their daughter Colvin’s parents called a family friend, Fred Gray, twenty-four, one of Montgomery’s two black lawyers, who had grown up in the city, graduated from Alabama State College, and just earned his law degree from Case in Cleveland. An ordained minister, Gray had decided to pursue law because he was determined to help destroy segregation. Colvin’s arrest might be the case he was looking for to upset its constitutionality in public transportation. He knew her already because she was involved in Young Alabama Democrats, a group he had started.

Gray persuaded Colvin to attend the local NAACP Youth Council, run by Rosa Parks, forty-two, a longtime NAACP activist who as a young girl had played with Colvin’s mother. Parks organized a legal defense fund for Colvin.

Her arrest galvanized the black community like nothing else in recent memory. It occurred amid a city election in which black concerns, and black assertiveness, were central for the first time. In late February E. D. Nixon, NAACP activist and union leader, had organized an unprecedented meeting at the black-owned Ben Moore Hotel where black leaders quizzed the white candidates about pressing issues, including the bus situation. On March 5 the Citizens Coordinating Committee, formed by undertaker and ex–Alabama State football coach Rufus Lewis to speak for all black organizations, issued an appeal to the “Friends of Justice and Human Rights.” It denounced injustices on city buses and presented the Colvin case as “an opportunity, in the spirit of democracy, and in the spirit of Christ, to deal courageously with these problems.”⁸

As the March election neared, the Women’s Political Council brought a small delegation to meet with the bus manager and a racially moderate city commissioner. The WPC, comprising black professional women, had been fighting to improve bus treatment for several years. The delegation, led by WPC president Jo Ann Robinson, an English professor at Alabama State, included Parks, Nixon, Lewis, and twenty-six-year-old Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who had arrived in town six months earlier to take over Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. The white officials appeased the indignant blacks; the commissioner was counting on black votes for reelection. The bus manager admitted that the driver had violated regulations by ordering Colvin to give up her seat and promised to investigate. Responding to the group’s demand to get rid of reserved sections, the commissioner said he would have the city attorney determine its legality. He assured the group that justice would be done, Robinson recalled, “and that Claudette would be given every fair chance to clear her name.”⁹ The leaders left cautiously optimistic.

Their momentary hope was dashed when Colvin’s trial took place in mid-March before Juvenile Court judge Wiley Hill Jr., cousin of Alabama senator J. Lister Hill. Although several people had been convicted of violating bus segregation, no one had ever before pleaded not guilty. Judge Hill denied Gray’s motion to acquit because the city bus segregation law was unconstitutional, flouting the Fourteenth Amendment. When Gray then moved for acquittal because no vacant seat was available, the prosecutor abruptly switched the charge to disobeying the state law, which had no such provision. Gray objected that the state law did not apply to city buses, but Hill found Colvin guilty. He dismissed the disorderly conduct charge, but convicted her also of assault and battery. Although his partner did not back him up, one of the arresting officers testified that, handcuffed in the police car, Colvin had “kicked and scratched me on the hand, also kicked me in the stomach.”¹⁰

Judge Hill put Colvin on indefinite probation and, declaring her a juvenile delinquent, made her a ward of the state. Gray appealed her conviction to Montgomery Circuit Court, hoping to challenge the segregation violation.

Although her supporters in the courtroom had no illusions about Jim Crow justice, even for a juvenile, the verdict came as a shock. Despite her distress Colvin had remained calm, Robinson remembered, but when convicted, “Claudette’s agonized sobs penetrated the atmosphere of the courthouse. Many people brushed away their own tears.”¹¹

Robinson reported that “blacks were as near a breaking point as they had ever been. Resentment, rebellion, and unrest were evident in all Negro circles. For a few days, large numbers refused to use the buses” in a spontaneous boycott.¹²

Rev. King, many of whose congregants were shaken by Colvin’s plight, wrote that “the long repressed feelings of resentment on the part of the Negroes had begun to stir. The fear and apathy which had for so long cast a shadow on the life of the Negro community were gradually fading before a new spirit of courage and self-respect.”¹³

In this supercharged atmosphere, black leaders held a second meeting with bus and city officials. The bus manager could have defused the crisis if he had carried out his promise to investigate Colvin’s arrest and clarify the seating policy. But at this follow-up meeting, lawyers were marched in and the white stand hardened. Mayor W. A. Gayle, who did not need black votes for reelection, and the city attorney represented the city. The bus company lawyer, Harvard Law graduate and racial moderate Jack Crenshaw, expressed certitude that neither the city nor state segregation law would permit a “first come, first serve” seating arrangement without reserved sections. In fact the bus line in Mobile, Alabama, owned by the same company, had done this since 1917.

Frustrated by the official intransigence, the black leaders found their tempers flaring. Robinson threatened a boycott of the buses, which the WPC had almost started right after Colvin’s arrest. Several days later, following a campaign more racially polarized than ever, the moderate commissioner was defeated by exterminator Clyde Sellers, ex-chief of the state highway patrol, who had race-baited his way to victory.

Gray’s appeal of Colvin’s conviction was heard in May by Circuit Court Judge Eugene Carter, who denied Gray’s challenge to the Alabama bus segregation law. But the prosecutor dropped the segregation charge, preventing Gray from pursuing his constitutional battle in a higher state court. Despite flimsy evidence, Carter affirmed Colvin’s conviction for assault and battery on the police officer.

Gray explored options with his mentor, prominent white lawyer Clifford Durr, a Montgomery native who had served Roosevelt’s New Deal as a member of the Federal Communications Commission. Gray decided he would file a lawsuit in federal court with Colvin as plaintiff. Gray, Durr, his wife Virginia Foster Durr, an anti-segregation activist, and E. D. Nixon drove to Colvin’s home to discuss the lawsuit with Mary Ann and Quintus Publius Colvin. Mrs. Colvin revealed to them that their daughter “done took a tumble.” She had just found out that she was pregnant. The couple were devastated.¹⁴ They did not want their daughter to be publicly shamed in another courtroom. The meeting convinced Nixon that even if Claudette could handle the pressure, her parents might not. That was the end of the lawsuit—for the time being.

Colvin had gotten pregnant by a married man two or three months after her arrest. “I didn’t know what to do,” she recalled. “I couldn’t marry him, I didn’t have the money to run away, my mother wouldn’t hear of an abortion. It was so hard on my nerves.”¹⁵

The arrest and trials had ravaged her emotionally. She dropped out of school in the fall, abandoning her dream of college and law school. Humiliated, shunned by former friends, she struggled to regain the self-worth that the ordeal had stolen from her. Jim Crow had sullied, then wrecked her childhood, dragging her into an unforgiving adulthood. She gave birth to her son, Raymond, in the winter—she had turned sixteen—and raised him with her family.

“The only thing I am still angry about,” she confided forty years later, “is that I should have seen a psychiatrist. I needed help. I didn’t get any support. I had to get well on my own.”¹⁶

Colvin lost her childhood and her last illusions about justice. In neighboring Mississippi a boy barely fourteen had his young life crushed out of him. In August 1955 Emmett Till, who lived in Chicago, was visiting his cousins in the flat, fertile cotton-rich Delta his parents had come from. He had a speech defect caused by polio. Buying candy at a country store in Money, the high-spirited kid whistled to the white proprietress, out of nervousness or jest. This was an intolerable affront to Deep South racial order.

Three days later, after midnight, the woman’s husband and his brother took Till from the shack where he was staying to a plantation barn, where they found a white girl’s photo in his wallet. Unfamiliar with southern rules, he admitted she was his girlfriend. The men beat him savagely, shot him through the head, cut off his testicles, and dumped him in the Tallahatchie River with a heavy cotton gin fan wired to his neck. His body somehow floated to the surface and was discovered by a white teenager fishing. His mother, Mamie Till, insisted that her son’s mutilated corpse, his monstrous crushed face, be displayed at his funeral for the world to see. The killers were caught. Despite gripping testimony by Mrs. Till, an all-white jury set them free. Paid by Look magazine for their story, they confessed to the crime but were never punished.

The murder and trial drew a surprising amount of national publicity. Why all this fuss over a dead nigger in the Tallahatchie? asked a white Mississippian. “That river’s full of niggers.”¹⁷ Throughout the country African Americans were horrified by the brutality of the child lynching and the killers’ acquittal. For many it washed out the optimism they had felt with the Brown decision a year before.

Till’s slaying was a barbaric example of a customary practice of white repression that grew out of slavery. More than four thousand black citizens, almost all male, had been lynched since Reconstruction. Nearly a century after slavery’s abolition, lynching was still the core of a violent system of social control that terrorized African Americans in the Deep South.

Back in Montgomery, where the Till horror hit black people hard, official promises proved hollow as usual. Bus riders continued to be mistreated and forced out of seats they had a right to. Mary Louise Smith was an eighteen-year-old housemaid making two dollars a day. She had toiled all week for a white woman who had not paid her. Now she had to give up a morning and two bus fares to ride across town to collect the eleven dollars, which she and her family depended on. When she knocked at the middle-class home no one came to the door. Furious, fighting back tears, she took the bus home. Her day got worse.

“I was sitting behind the sign that said for colored,” she later testified in federal court about this October day. “A white lady got on the bus and she asked the bus driver to tell me to move out of my seat for her to sit there. He asked me to move three times, and I refused. So he got up and said he would call the cops.”

She told the driver: “I am not going to move out of my seat. I got the privilege to sit here like anybody else.”¹⁸ Police took her to jail. Her father, a widower working two jobs to raise six children, got a ride from a friend to bail her out. She was tried in city court and fined, not for violating the segregation law but for refusing to obey an officer. Like Colvin she did not believe she had broken the law.

As winter swept into Montgomery, black citizens felt beleaguered and betrayed. Would they resign themselves to their subjugation, dig in their heels, and wait for a better day? Or would they walk an untraveled path into the future?

First Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama
January 30, 1956

“Onward Christian soldiers,” the spirited assembly belted out, “marching as to war.” The hymn had been written to inspire Union forces during the Civil War. Prayer followed, then another hymn, “Plant My Feet on Higher Ground.” A short, somber minister rose to the pulpit for that evening’s pep talk.

“Some of our good white citizens told me today that the relationships between white and colored used to be good,” he said softly, “that the whites have never let us down and that the outsiders came in and upset this relationship. But I want you to know,” his voice building volume, “that if M. L. King had never been born, this movement would have taken place. I just happened to be here.

“There comes a time,” his words now a resonating shout, “when time itself is ready for change. That time has come in Montgomery and I had nothing to do with it.

“Our opponents—I hate to think of our governmental officers as opponents, but they are—have tried all sorts of things to break us, but we still hold steadfast. Their first strategy was to negotiate into a compromise and that failed. Secondly, they tried to conquer by dividing and that failed. Now they are trying to intimidate us by a get-tough policy and that’s going to fail too, because a man’s language is courage when his back is against the wall.” The assembly erupted in thunderclaps.

“When we are right, we don’t mind going to jail!” More ear-splitting applause. “If all I have to pay is going to jail a few times and getting about twenty threatening phone calls a day, I think that is a very small price to pay for what we are fighting for. We are a chain. We are linked together, and I cannot be what I ought to be unless you are what you ought to be.”¹⁹ More thunderous clapping as he sat down.

Following him at the pulpit was Solomon S. Seay, former head of the national African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church.

“You know,” Rev. Seay started out, “if a man doesn’t want to sit besides me because I’m dirty, that’s my fault. If he doesn’t want to sit besides me because I’m loud, that’s my fault too, but if he doesn’t want to sit besides me because I’m black, that’s not my fault because God made me black and my white brother is discriminating against God and His will. But even though they are, we must love them. We must love Mr. Sellers and Mr. Gayle for God said that we must love our enemies as ourselves. Let’s not hate them, for with love in our hearts and God on our side, there are no forces in hell or on earth that can mow us down.

“I had a book which was so interesting,” he continued, “that I gave it to the city officials to read. It’s a book on great powers, the stories of men who ruled and conquered by force only to lose. Men like Alexander the Great, Napoleon and Hitler were discussed, men who lived by the sword. Their empires are no longer, but have perished.

“But there was a man who taught that love and faith could move mountains and more mountains. And unto this day that empire which was built by a man who said while dying on the cross, ‘Forgive them O Lord, for they know not what they do.’ That is the empire of Jesus Christ! He was asking forgiveness for the men who crucified him, drove nails through his hands and put thorns on his head. So we forgive Sellers and Gayle, but we do not give up.”²⁰

Back at the King parsonage on South Jackson Street, a small one-story clapboard house, Coretta Scott King was watching television, still a novelty, in the front parlor, a church friend keeping her company. She heard the thud of something landing on the concrete porch and footsteps scurrying away. Alert to what it might be, she grabbed her friend and they dashed to the back of the house, where tiny, two-month-old Yolanda was sleeping in her crib. Then came the explosion, the loudest noise she had ever heard. She held her screaming friend. The baby cried. The dynamite sticks had blown a hole in the concrete floor, wrecked porch columns and the front wall, and smashed several windows. It would have injured anyone sitting in the parlor. It would likely have killed Coretta King had she looked out the window to investigate the thud.

Over at First Baptist on the other side of the statehouse, Rev. King was supervising the collection. A member of his church walked briskly down the aisle and whispered to Rev. Ralph Abernathy, King’s closest friend, whose church this was. Out of the corner of his eye King saw ministers conferring urgently. Agitated, he turned to Abernathy and asked what the hell was going on.

“Your house has been bombed.”

He asked about his wife and baby.

“We are checking on that now.”²¹

He returned to the pulpit, told the people what happened. Several shouted out in shock and alarm. A few women screamed. King urged calm, which he somehow embodied, advising them to go home directly and hold to nonviolent principles.

“Let us keep moving,” he said firmly but wearily, “with the faith that what we are doing is right, and with the even greater faith that God is with us in the struggle.”²²

Staring straight ahead, he marched out of the church and drove home. The parsonage was surrounded by a furious sea of several hundred black people, who “came to do battle,” Coretta King recalled.²³ New waves were arriving every minute. Densely packed, they closed in around the house. Making his way through the strangely silent crowd, King saw many handguns in belts and pockets, a few hunting rifles, scores of knives and baseball bats. He heard a black man defy a white cop.

“Move back, boy. What’s the matter, you can’t understand plain English?”

“I ain’t gonna move nowhere,” the black fellow burst out. “That’s the trouble now. You white folks is always pushin’ us around. Now you got your .38 and I got mine. So let’s battle it out.”²⁴

Stunned by the sight of the bombed-out porch, lit by police searchlights, King strode into the house past police, reporters, cameras, Mayor W. A. Gayle, and Police Commissioner Clyde Sellers. He found his wife and baby unhurt. Gayle and Sellers tried to reassure him that such behavior would not be tolerated. King did not reply, but C. T. Smiley, head of the Dexter church trustees and principal of segregated Booker T. Washington High School, where Claudette Colvin had gone, could not hold back:

“Regrets are all very well,” he said sternly, “but you are responsible. It is you who created the climate for this.”²⁵

The phone rang nonstop, mostly supporters. A white woman said she was sorry, but the Negroes were responsible; the boycott had made the white people lose all respect for them. Another white woman claimed that she had thrown the bomb, that she was sorry she did such a poor job, but she wanted to teach Rev. King a lesson. She hung up before a detective grabbed the extension. The Kings made statements for the TV cameras aimed at calming the furor.²⁶

Hapless police efforts to disperse the still growing crowd had the opposite effect, provoking them into belligerent defiance. They jeered the beet-red mayor and police boss when the arch-segregationists tried to pacify them. The officials retreated into the house, where they beseeched King to stop a full-scale race riot. The pastor walked grimly out on the mangled porch and the huge throng cheered lustfully. He raised one hand and silence broke out.

“Everything is all right,” he reassured the crowd. “It is best for all of you to go home.²⁷

“We believe in law and order,” he continued. “Don’t get panicky. Don’t get your weapons. He who lives by the sword will perish by the sword. Remember that is what God said.

“We are not advocating violence. We want to love our enemies. I want you to love our enemies. Be good to them. Love them and let them know you love them.

“I did not start this boycott. I was asked by you to serve as your spokesman. I want it to be known the length and breadth of this land that if I am stopped this movement will not stop. If I am stopped our work will not stop. For what we are doing is right. What we are doing is just.

“And God is with us.²⁸ With love in our hearts, with faith and with God in front we cannot lose.”²⁹

Many of the people were crying. Coretta King “could see the shine of tears on their faces, in the strong lights. They were moved, as by a holy exaltation.” Some shouted “Amen” and “God bless you, Reverend.”³⁰

The multitude of over a thousand started to drift away but then swayed ominously back toward the parsonage. Standing in the dark night like solid granite, they solemnly sang, “My country ’tis of Thee, sweet land of liberty.” Then “Amazing Grace,” composed as an act of repentance by John Newton, an English slave ship captain. Softly hymning, “I once was blind but now I see,” the black mass, moving as one body, disappeared into the darkness.

A relieved policeman had the final word: “If it hadn’t been for that nigger preacher,” he said to a fellow cop, “we’d all be dead.”³¹

“This could well have been the darkest night in Montgomery’s history,” King wrote in his memoir. “But something happened to avert it: The spirit of God was in our hearts.”³²

Forty years later Coretta King reflected that this moment was “a turning point in the movement, in terms of injecting the nonviolent philosophy into the struggle. It could have been a riot, a very bloody riot. If that had happened the whole cause could have been lost.”³³

Two months before:
Early Thursday evening, December 1, 1955

Rosa Parks was eager to get home after a long, hot day of tailoring in the pre-Christmas rush at Montgomery Fair department store. She earned fifty cents an hour, below minimum wage, in a steamy, claustrophobic sweatshop, where she handled a heavy pressing iron that worsened the painful bursitis in her shoulder.

After work, hefting a full bag of groceries, the light-skinned Negro woman climbed on a city bus at historic Court Square, once the center of slave auctions and the first capital of the Confederacy. In February 1861, ex-Mississippi senator Jefferson Davis chaired a meeting here of white leaders from six Deep South states that had decided to secede from the Union. These slaveholders drafted a constitution for the new Confederacy and elected Davis president. He was inaugurated a few blocks away near the statehouse.

Now a century later, Court Square sparkled with Christmas lights. A bright banner declared, “Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Men.” Parks sat down in a row between the “whites only” section up front and the rear seats reserved for “colored.” By custom blacks always sat in the midsection if the back was filled. A white man got on the crowded bus and the driver—who a decade before had ejected Parks for refusing to enter through the back door—ordered her and three other black riders to stand so the white man could sit alone. The others reluctantly got up, but she did not budge. She was put off by the driver’s command, since she believed she was sitting where she belonged. Certainly she wasn’t violating the law. He stopped at the Empire Theater and called the police. She felt no fear. Police arrested her and took her to jail.

Parks had not planned her calm, resolute protest but had prepared well for it. Like Claudette Colvin, Mary Louise Smith, and other black women in past years, her cup of forbearance had cracked open.

“I had almost a life history of being rebellious against being mistreated because of my color,” she recalled. On this occasion more than others—did her bursitis hurt more that day?—“I felt that I was not being treated right and that I had a right to retain the seat that I had taken.” The time had come “when I had been pushed as far as I could stand to be pushed. I had decided that I would have to know once and for all what rights I had as a human being and a citizen.”³⁴

Reflecting later on her motives, she said that she refused to obey the driver “because I was so involved with the attempt to bring about freedom from this kind of thing.” She felt determined “to give what I could to protest against the way I was being treated, and felt that all of our meetings, trying to negotiate, bring about petitions before the authorities, really hadn’t done any good at all.”³⁵ A civil rights activist of long standing, Parks had served as secretary of both the Montgomery and Alabama state NAACP. For years she had advised the local NAACP Youth Council, which she had helped found in the 1940s. Colvin had joined the activist youth group after her March arrest for the exact same “crime” that Parks herself had just committed.

Since childhood in the rural outskirts of Montgomery, when on her own she learned Bible passages by heart, Parks had been an ardent worker in the African Methodist Episcopal Church—known as the “Freedom Church,” she was proud to say, during the abolitionist movement. Founded in 1816 in Philadelphia, the AME church had broken away from the white Methodist mainstream that condoned slavery. The AME, less patriarchal than black Baptists, had always had a majority of female members, who like Parks were its informal leaders. Women AME preachers had been prominent for a century, although not ordained until 1948.

“God is everything to me,” she once confessed. Civil rights leader James Farmer later remarked of her “biblical quality”—“a strange religious glow” about her, a “humming Christian light.”³⁶

BY THE EARLY 1950s ill treatment on city buses, which replaced the half-century-old electric streetcars during the Depression, had emerged as the most acute problem in the black community, since so many thousands, especially women and schoolchildren, depended on the bus every day. Inflicting the injustice of Jim Crow apartheid, it proved the impossibility of “separate but equal” accommodations.³⁷ Resentment and anger grew, fueled by expectations of better race relations in the postwar era. The black community felt most aggrieved when, during the Korean War, young army vet Hilliard Brooks, wearing his uniform the day after discharge, was shot dead by a cop after arguing with the bus driver over his dime fare.

Leaders of the Women’s Political Council converted the pain of abusive treatment on buses into a glaring public issue. Mary Fair Burks, chair of the English department at all-black Alabama State College in Montgomery, founded the council in 1949 after experiencing racial harassment by local police. As a teenager growing up in Montgomery during the 1930s, she had defied the Jim Crow system by insisting on using white-only elevators, rest rooms, and other public facilities in “my own private guerrilla warfare.”³⁸ Burks, her Alabama State colleague Jo Ann Robinson, and other active members of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church made up the core of the group’s membership of middle-class professional women, many being teachers. The WPC’s initial purposes were to foster black women’s involvement in civic affairs, to promote voting through citizenship education, and to help victims of rape.

Robinson was born in 1912 on a small cotton farm in southern Georgia, youngest of twelve. After her father died and the farm failed, she graduated from Georgia State College and earned her master’s degree at Atlanta University. She got married, but the death of her infant child embittered her and the marriage collapsed. She joined the newly formed Montgomery women’s group in fall 1949, having just begun teaching English at Alabama State. Upon completing her first semester, happier than she’d ever been, she boarded a bus to the airport to spend the Christmas holidays with family in Cleveland, Ohio. Not habituated to seating rules because she usually drove, the young professor absentmindedly sat down in the front white section of the almost empty bus. The driver yelled at her and raised his arm to strike her. Fleeing in terror, she cried for days—so shaken that she vowed to remedy such racial abuse.

After she succeeded Burks as WPC president in the early 1950s, the group focused more on bus treatment and other everyday concerns like police brutality. Robinson persuaded Mayor Gayle to permit WPC leaders to attend all city meetings that affected black residents. They learned how to lobby white officials face-to-face, but with little success.

The WPC was the largest, best-organized, and most assertive black civic organization in the Alabama capital. It worked with other community groups like the NAACP that had been organizing longer but had made voter registration and electoral politics their priority, particularly after the Supreme Court in 1944 abolished the “white only” southern primaries.

Tall, stately, and ebony black, E. D. Nixon, in his mid-fifties, had been a Pullman train porter for thirty years and for nearly that long head of the Alabama region of A. Philip Randolph’s Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. He once spoke of the Pullman porters’ role as heralds of black freedom.

“Everybody listened because they knowed the porter been everywhere,” he explained, “and they never been anywhere themselves. In cafés where they ate or hotels where they stayed, they’d bring in the papers they picked up—white papers, Negro papers. We’d put ’em in our locker and distribute ’em to black communities all over the country. Along the road, where a lot of people couldn’t get to town, we used to roll up the papers and tie a string around ’em. We’d throw these papers off to these people. We were able to let people know what was happening.”³⁹

In June 1941, the month of a threatened black march on Washington against racial discrimination, Nixon led several hundred aspiring voters to the Montgomery courthouse in an attempt to register, which was blocked by county officials. Two years later he founded the Montgomery Voters League to promote black registration and voting. Registration efforts gathered steam after World War II, when black combat veterans like Hilliard Brooks came home with boosted confidence and self-esteem. They expected to be rewarded for fighting for freedom overseas with more freedom at home.

Nixon hammered away at a host of civil rights issues as president of both the Montgomery NAACP branch, which he helped found in the 1920s, and the state NAACP conference. Rufus Lewis, a mortician who had coached a championship Alabama State football team in the 1930s, made voter registration a single-minded crusade. In the late 1940s he established a night club called the Citizens Club to promote registering and voting among vets and other young people. No one could enter the club without proof of registration.

A handful of ministers too had battled racial injustice. In 1949 Solomon Seay sought redress without success for a young black woman raped by two white police officers—a common outrage in the segregationist South. After the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education he led a campaign to desegregate local schools. For several years, through 1952, Vernon Johns railed against segregation from the pulpit of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. One of his brash sermons helped inspire Burks to start the Women’s Political Council.

Owing to friction among Negro leaders, like that between middle-class Lewis and working-class Nixon, and to resignation in the black community, but more because of monolithic resistance by the white elite, none of these reform efforts made much headway by the mid-1950s. Black leaders faced a sobering dilemma that would bedevil the freedom movement for years to come. They lacked political power and knew that they could not really change their circumstances until they were fully enfranchised. But electoral initiatives toward this end, vital for long-term progress, did not offer immediate solutions to their pressing problems.

Then came the lightning flash of Rosa Parks’s auspicious “no.”

Nixon, whom Parks had worked with for a dozen years in the NAACP and as his secretary in his union office, bailed her out of jail. To make sure there would be no problem, two liberal whites accompanied him: attorney Clifford Durr and his wife, Virginia Foster Durr, a well-known activist, a leader of the antisegregation Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF), a crusader against the discriminatory poll tax, and sister-in-law of Supreme Court justice and ex-Alabama senator Hugo Black, who had been an active member of the Ku Klux Klan during its heyday in the 1920s.

Virginia Durr, then fifty-two, had become close friends with Parks, who had sewn dresses for her four daughters when she had no money to buy new ones. In August 1955, the month of Emmett Till’s killing, Durr had arranged a scholarship for Parks to attend a two-week workshop on school desegregation at the Highlander Folk School, in the Appalachian mountains of Tennessee. Union Theological Seminary graduate Myles Horton, born and bred in the region’s poverty, started the school in 1932, the Depression bottom. He burned with desire to help poor people gain power to improve their lives. For twenty years Highlander had served as a training center for community activists and CIO labor organizers. Recently it had begun schooling southern activists for the civil rights struggle. Like a modern-day Socrates, Horton fired questions to workshop participants to help them find answers to social problems from their own experience, then taught them how to apply this method to develop grassroots leadership.

At the close of the August workshop, Horton asked participants what changes they hoped for in their far-flung southern communities. Parks said that she did not expect things to improve in Montgomery, where the Negroes were “timid and would not act” and “wouldn’t stand together.” Still, she was deeply stirred by her sojourn at the mountain retreat, experiencing Highlander, where whites and blacks talked, ate, square-danced, swam, and played volley ball together, as a microcosm of a racially integrated society.

“I found out for the first time in my adult life that this could be a unified society,” she recalled, “that there was such a thing as people of differing races and backgrounds meeting together in workshops and living together in peace and harmony. I gained there strength to persevere in my work for freedom.”⁴⁰

Now four months later Nixon and the Durrs returned with Parks from jail to her small apartment in a housing development on Cleveland Avenue, eventually renamed Rosa Parks Avenue. Rosa Parks shared it with her husband, Raymond, and her ailing mother, a former schoolteacher who had wanted Rosa to teach. As they drank coffee, Nixon persuaded her, over her husband’s diehard resistance, to use her arrest as the long-hoped-for test case to challenge the constitutionality of bus segregation. Raymond Parks, whose skin was so light he could pass for white, cut airmen’s hair at integrated Maxwell Field Air Force base outside town. He was no stranger to activism, a longtime NAACP member who had served during the 1930s on the National Committee to Defend the Scottsboro Boys, nine youngsters falsely accused of raping two white women on a freight train in northern Alabama. Virginia Durr recalled his panic: “He kept saying over and over again, ‘Rosa, the white folks will kill you.’ ”⁴¹

Her quiet resolve prevailed. Having worked with her closely for a long time, Nixon was sure that—although he would never have foreseen it—she was the right person to serve as public symbol. She was well known and esteemed in the black community as activist and church worker, she was educated and articulate, and her character was unblemished—the ideal representative of black grievances and hopes. And it helped that she had a light complexion. “If ever there was a woman who was dedicated to the cause,” Nixon recalled, “it was Rosa Parks.”⁴²

Later that night, attorney and part-time pastor Fred Gray, two weeks shy of twenty-five, told Jo Ann Robinson about Parks’s arrest. They agreed that if they were ever to boycott the buses, this was the time. Robinson then talked with Nixon on the phone. They concurred that pursuing the slow-moving constitutional challenge should be reinforced by a boycott, initially for one day, that the Women’s Political Council had long been mulling over and others had tried to start more than once. They set the boycott for Monday, December 5, the date of Parks’s trial, to dramatize their grievance and demonstrate newfound black unity and determination.

Nixon placed a sheet of paper on his kitchen table, drew a rough sketch of the city, measuring distances with a slide rule. “I discovered nowhere in Montgomery at that time a man couldn’t walk to work if he wanted to.” He said to his wife: “We can beat this thing.”⁴³ While Nixon, knowing how things got done in the black world, wanted first to enlist the backing of black ministers, Robinson and her WPC colleagues kicked off the bus boycott on their own. This time they would not let it be held back by more cautious leaders. She quickly typed up a half-page flyer on a stencil and around midnight drove to the Alabama State campus. She and a business professor stayed up the night covertly mimeographing thousands of copies. Next day, between and after classes, she and two trusted students delivered bundles to black neighborhoods, schools, and businesses.

Before he left on his Pullman run that morning, Nixon called the preachers. According to his recollection, activist Ralph Abernathy was enthusiastic but Martin King, one of the newest pastors in town, was hesitant.

“Brother Nixon,” he replied slowly, “let me think about it a while, and call me back.” When Nixon did so, he was supportive.

“I’m glad you agreed,” Nixon chuckled, “because I already set the meeting up to meet at your church,” which was also Robinson’s.⁴⁴ Later that day at Dexter Avenue Baptist, ministers joined with the WPC ladies, the Citizens Coordinating Committee, Progressive Democrats, and other black groups to prepare the Monday protest. On Sunday morning preachers pushed participation from their pulpits. The best publicity came from a front-page article in Sunday’s Montgomery Advertiser, intended to alert the white community.

Scarcely any African Americans rode the buses on Monday, December 5. Most walked to work or school, carpooled with friends, hitchhiked. Some rode farm tractors, mule wagons. Hundreds took taxis as black cabdrivers cut fares to the price of a bus ride. In the morning Parks appeared in Recorder’s Court with her supporters. Judge John B. Scott convicted her of violating the state (not city) segregation law and fined her fourteen dollars. Gray appealed the verdict as planned.

Awestruck by the boycott’s stunning success, eighteen leaders met in the afternoon at Mount Zion AME Zion Church, Parks’s church, and created a new organization, the Montgomery Improvement Association, to direct the protest. They elected officers, set up committees, and drew up an agenda for a preannounced mass meeting at Holt Street Baptist Church that night. Rufus Lewis nominated King, his pastor, for MIA president, and—getting over their surprise—participants elected him without opposition. They chose him because he was known as a strong social gospel preacher—and because as a newcomer he was unencumbered by long-running quarrels and rivalries among his peers.

SEVERAL THOUSAND SOULS converged on spacious, newly restored Holt Street Baptist Church in a black working-class area, filling the sanctuary and basement two hours before the 7 P.M. starting time, tightly packing the aisles and entryway. Four or five thousand stood silently outside, listening to the meeting by loudspeakers. Those who found seats sang hymns and spirituals and prayed until the meeting began with singing of “Onward Christian Soldiers” and “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.” When the mammoth audience stood to sing, King recalled, “the voices outside swelling the chorus in the church, there was a mighty ring like the glad echo of heaven itself.”⁴⁵ Then a rousing prayer by Rev. W. F. Alford, and a Scripture reading by U. J. Fields, a mid-twenties Korean War vet and pastor of Bell Street Baptist Church.

Fields read Psalm 34, David’s hymn of praise and thanksgiving to the Lord, in which, as the Old Testament put it, he “pretended madness” before Abimelech, murderous king of Shechem, who expelled him. But what appeared as madness to the king was for David possession by the Spirit of God, which gave him an unearthly glow.

“I sought the Lord, and He heard me, and delivered me from all my fears. The angel of the Lord encamps all around those who fear Him, and delivers them. Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord delivers him out of them all.”⁴⁶

This was the radiant courage, Fields was saying, that black people had to wear before their white rulers. But what did it mean to fear God, in order to be delivered from all fears? It did not mean to cower before God but rather to feel reverential awe, to feel God’s presence within through the power of the holy spirit. This was the source of David’s radiance, as for all those whose light within was moving them to leave the buses. To many in the white community, black folks were acting crazy. Rather, in their own minds they were being glorified by their inner light. Fear of God removed human fear.

The featured speaker was the MIA’s new president, a stranger to most people there. In this whirlwind day he’d had less than half an hour to prepare his address. His anxiety nearly paralyzing him, he had prayed for help.

“How could I make a speech,” he had asked himself, glaring at blank note paper, “that would be militant enough to keep my people aroused to positive action, and yet moderate enough to keep this fervor within controllable and Christian bounds? I knew that many of the Negro people were victims of bitterness that could rise to flood proportions. What could I say to keep them courageous and prepared for positive action and yet devoid of hate and resentment? Could the militant and the moderate be combined in a single speech?”⁴⁷ The resolution of this dilemma, making this “the most decisive speech of my life,” prefigured the moral quest that would define his ministry from that moment on.⁴⁸

After reviewing Rosa Parks’s arrest and the black community’s history of abuse on the buses, and sketching the national and global context in which they were acting, he declared baldly that “we are not wrong in what we are doing.” If they were wrong, he insisted, the Supreme Court and the Constitution were wrong. Justice would be a lie and love have no meaning. 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.”

This last claim was the most absolute of all. If they were wrong, in other words, Jesus was no more than a naïve idealist, pontificator of lofty beatitudes—but not God’s anointed messiah who took earthly form to redeem humanity from its wickedness. Jesus would be a fake. For black Baptists in particular this would be blasphemy. King was stepping out on the first of many trembling moral limbs. If their protest was wrong, he might as well give up not only the MIA presidency but his Baptist ministry, his whole faith. That’s how sure he was, or convinced himself to be.

“We are determined here in Montgomery,” he went on, “to work and fight until justice runs down like water (Yes, applause), and righteousness like a mighty stream (Keep talking, applause).

“We must keep God in the forefront. (Yeah) Let us be Christian in all of our actions. (That’s right) But I want to tell you this evening that it is not enough for us to talk about love. Love is one of the pivotal points of the Christian faith. There is another side called justice. And justice is really love in calculation. (All right) Justice is love correcting that which revolts against love. (Well)” He borrowed this formulation from theologian Paul Tillich, the subject of his doctoral dissertation. Then he upped the ante to cosmic heights.

“The Almighty God himself is not the God just standing out saying through Hosea, ‘I love you, Israel.’ He’s also the God that stands up before the nations and said: ‘Be still and know that I am God (Yeah), that if you don’t obey me I will break the backbone of your power (Yeah) and slap you out of the orbits of your international and national relationships.’ (That’s right) Standing besides love is always justice, and we are only using the tools of justice. Not only are we using the tools of persuasion, but we’ve come to see that we’ve got to use the tools of coercion.”

After Rev. Abernathy read the boycott resolutions from the pulpit, the vast audience rose as one and with great cheering called out their resolve to continue the boycott “until some arrangement has been worked out” with the bus company.

When King returned to the pulpit after Parks was introduced and the resolutions ratified, he sharpened his words. They will face any consequences, he bellowed, as long as they get justice. As they struggle for their rights, some might die. But “if a man doesn’t have something that he’ll die for, he isn’t fit to live. (enthusiastic applause)”⁴⁹ Not only might some in this new crusade lose their lives, but if they weren’t willing to do so, they were not worthy of life.

Thus, as much as he might have intended to balance the absolute demand for justice with the tempering force of Christian love, and as much as he sought to subdue his rhetoric in his reconstruction of the speech in his memoir Stride Toward Freedom, in fact he failed to “combine the militant and the moderate.” It was, despite evocations of forbearance and compassion, an unabashed call for moral militancy, for unbridled moral courage, to attain God’s Truth. He did not utter the words nonviolent or passive resistance. He did not say the “weapon of love,” but the “weapon of protest.” He deployed violent imagery, speaking of an angry God slapping peoples around and breaking their earthly power. He set no limits on how far justice might go in “correcting that which revolts against love.”

But the thirty-fourth Psalm Fields had recited promised that God would not harm those who were righteous, even as the divinity smashed to oblivion those who did evil, to the unforgiving extreme of cutting off “remembrance of them from the earth.” Like most black preaching through the ages, King’s sermon was inspired by the prophetic fire of the Hebrew Scriptures. The Jesus he invoked in this instance was not the beatific rabbi of the Sermon on the Mount, but the militant Christ of Revelation, fury overflowing.

What then was the “new meaning” that the morally courageous black people of Montgomery would inject into “the veins of history and of civilization”?⁵⁰ Above all, it was the power of unity in faith. Beginning on December 5, the participants in this saga learned that true democracy cannot bloom without deep community. The bus boycott exemplified an unparalleled solidarity across class and gender lines, the schooled and unschooled, literate and illiterate, Ph.D.s and “no D’s.” The driving force of it all was thousands of African-American women, middle class and working class, active in churches, clubs, and sororities. They transplanted democracy from their sheltered sanctuaries to public streets and squares. They turned faith and friendship from the healing balm of survival into the fire of defiance and transformation.

Montgomery’s black citizens understood, as did their nineteenth-century forebears who conquered slavery, that democracy meant that they “must themselves strike the blow.” They must act as their own agents of change. They would learn in the coming months that democracy was more than a right, more than a responsibility, but a pantheon of hope and faith. These citizens’ reach for democracy was rooted in the churches, scriptures, and spirituals that tied them to their divinity and to generations past and not yet born. They would make Montgomery a praying movement, a testament to their faith in God and, through God, faith in themselves. A testament to God’s grace.

Their Bibles and preachers taught them that they were God’s chosen people, like the children of Israel. The bus boycott consummated this faith, made it surge alive in mass meetings, car pools, and weary soulful walking. Every day, in their minds, they were moving toward the promised land. The mass church-based protest exalted them as makers of history, vehicles of the holy spirit. The sense of divine calling catapulted their self-esteem, their dignity, their collective self-confidence. They came to believe that they were building, through toil, sacrifice, and sharing, a “new Jerusalem” in Montgomery and “a new heaven and a new earth” in the dispirited South. Black people of Montgomery believed that they were breaking a new day.

The boycott leaders agreed upon three demands to the bus company: courteous treatment; a “first-come, first-serve” seating arrangement that would preserve segregation but without reserved sections (the Women’s Political Council had been pushing this proposal for two years); and hiring black bus drivers on predominantly Negro routes. Some leaders were willing to give up the last demand if they won the first two, but all thought the three demands were fair and reasonable—if anything, too accommodating. They expected a settlement within a few days.

The biracial Alabama Council on Human Relations (ACHR), which worked to improve race relations, arranged the first negotiating session between the MIA and city and bus company officials. On Thursday, December 8, the opposing sides met at Montgomery City Hall. King, Abernathy, Jo Ann Robinson, and eight others negotiated for the MIA. Mayor Gayle and commissioners Clyde Sellers and Frank Parks represented the city. Manager J. H. Bagley and counsel Jack Crenshaw spoke for Montgomery City Lines. The icy meeting was stiffened further by acts of violence: four buses had been fired on, and two black homes, including that of a Negro cop, were hit by shotgun blasts; no one was hurt. The meeting quickly deadlocked over the seating demand, which the officials insisted would be illegal—even though the parent bus company, based in Chicago, used that seating arrangement in Mobile and other Deep South cities.

Because press coverage might have contributed to the impasse, Gayle convened a smaller group to talk in private. Still the four whites in the group were unyielding. From their perspective, of course, the black delegates were no less unyielding on the seating policy. The difference was that the black leaders, in their own eyes, had gone to the limit of compromise; any further and their constituents would likely have considered them to be selling out in the familiar tradition of “Uncle Tom” capitulation. They were already catching flak from Nixon and the NAACP for not opposing segregation outright. But the white officials probably felt the same about their constituents. Most white citizens were in no mood to compromise. Each side misread the other, partly out of mutual ignorance.

According to King’s account Crenshaw, “our most stubborn opponent,” admitted at the smaller meeting: “If we granted the Negroes these demands, they would go about boasting of a victory that they had won over the white people; and this we will not stand for.”⁵¹ The whites’ rigid stance stunned the MIA leaders and dashed their expectation that the protest would be short.

Not all of white Montgomery opposed the bus boycott, and many of those who did were impressed by the black community’s resolve. “They know after this,” Virginia Durr wrote a friend, “that they have a united group to deal with.”⁵² Montgomery native Juliette Morgan, librarian at the public library, was the fifth generation of female college graduates in her family; her great-great-grandmother had graduated in 1822, when women rarely attended college. Morgan, in her early forties, had written her first letter to the Montgomery Advertiser opposing segregation in June 1952, titled “ ‘White Supremacy’ Is Evil.” Now, one week into the boycott, she published an even more subversive letter to the editor. At a time when no one in the mass protest was thinking seriously about Mahatma Gandhi or nonviolence, she wrote about the 1930 boycott of the British salt monopoly that the Indian leader launched with his famous Salt March, and about the American boycott of British tea “that this nation was founded upon.” Montgomery’s black people “seem to have taken a lesson from Gandhi—and our own Thoreau, who influenced Gandhi. Their own task is greater than Gandhi’s, however, for they have greater prejudice to overcome.

“It is hard to imagine a soul so dead, a heart so hard, a vision so blinded and provincial as not to be moved with admiration at the quiet dignity, discipline, and dedication with which the Negroes have conducted their boycott. Their cause and their conduct have filled me with great sympathy, pride, humility and envy. I envy their unity, their good humor, their fortitude, and their willingness to suffer for great Christian and democratic principles.” She called for an end to segregation.⁵³ Of course such verbal dynamite could not go unpunished. For months white people harassed her, even former friends. School kids threw rocks through her windows. The relentless hate campaign drove her to kill herself by an overdose of sleeping pills, the bus boycott’s only known death.

To provide alternative transportation, most of Montgomery’s hundred-plus black cab drivers cut rates to a dime, the bus fare. At the first negotiating session, Police Commissioner Sellers mentioned a city law requiring cab drivers to charge a minimum fare of forty-five cents, making it unaffordable—round-trip fare would cost two hours’ labor. Black cabs offered the bus fare until the police started citing them. Some circumvented the law by charging a group of riders the minimum fare. But even if all black cabs were commandeered for the cause, they could not have met the demand. Ten times as many workers and schoolchildren needed rides as the cabs could handle. They needed something on a grander scale.

The MIA transportation committee, led by Rufus Lewis and women activists, set in motion a car-pool system modeled on one used during a brief bus boycott in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in June 1953 that had won its modest demand (to enforce a new city law improving segregation) in ten days. For hands-on advice, King phoned an old family friend, noted Baptist preacher T. J. Jemison of Baton Rouge, an official of the National Baptist Convention, who had led the earlier boycott. The small army of drivers in Montgomery included ministers, shop owners, teachers, laborers, students, homemakers. Sedans, pickup trucks, and then a fleet of shiny, church-bought station wagons—1956 was the first big year for Detroit’s mass-marketed family wagon—collected passengers patiently lined up at forty-eight “dispatch stations.” Most of these were churches, where passengers could stay warm at dawn. Drivers returned them from forty-two “pick-up stations” after work or school. Hymns wafted lustily out car windows as these “rolling churches” crisscrossed the city with what the segregationist White Citizens Council admitted was “military precision.”

Many preferred to walk, as much as twelve miles a day, to pound out their determination and hope. “I’m not walking for myself,” an elderly woman explained, turning down a ride, “I’m walking for my children and my grandchildren.” Another old woman, Mother Pollard, vowed to King that she would walk until it was over.

“But aren’t your feet tired?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said, “my feets is tired, but my soul is rested.”⁵⁴

January 1956 opened a critical new phase of the bus boycott. As the new year dawned, MIA leaders and white officials held a fourth and final fruitless meeting. Heated debate flared in the Montgomery Advertiser, on the street, and in meeting rooms about whether a compromise was achievable, of what it might consist, and whether the protest was justified. The civic temper grew more and more polarized. A black cook complained in a letter to the editor: “Why is it a sin to ride the bus?” A white supporter wrote: “Here is one white ex-bus rider who would like to declare that as long as the boycott is on, it will be a dreary, rainy day, when I have a sprained ankle, and less than 45c cab fare, before I board one of those yellow rolling cell blocks again.”

Hill Lindsay bemoaned the Negroes’ ingratitude. His letter claimed that whites were responsible for every civilized advance they enjoyed. “You are indebted to the white people of Montgomery for life itself,” he hectored.

A white housewife declared it was time to stop pussyfooting around: “We housewives must quit being so lazy, get together and tell the help to either ride the buses and get to work on time or quit. We white people have tried to be understanding of our servants for years and I feel we were understanding until some outside influence put fear in them.

“We have been good to our Negroes,” her letter concluded, “but now is the time to make them understand a few things. We should quit paying taxi fare, quit going for them or taking them home, quit paying their Social Security tax, quit lending them money.”

Rev. U. J. Fields, MIA recording secretary, inflamed the climate and rankled his coworkers by telling the editor: “We have no intention of compromising. Such unwarranted delay in granting our request may very well result in a demand for the annihilation of segregation which will result in complete integration.”⁵⁵

Day in and day out through the winter chill and rain, thousands of black citizens of all ages trod miles to work or school or rode in car pools along slippery streets.

Around 9 P.M. on Saturday, January 21, Minneapolis Tribune reporter Carl Rowan phoned King long-distance to ask about a wire-service teletype he had just received announcing that the bus dispute had been settled. That afternoon city commissioners had met with three black ministers not associated with the MIA. The meeting might have been initiated by the ministers, rankled at how the bus boycott had alienated them from the black community. Although they denied it later, the ministers apparently agreed to a compromise keeping reserved seats, even though they had no authority to do so. And while King and the MIA may have believed that a “settlement” had in fact been reached, they denounced it as a hoax by the commissioners. It proved to be a hoax only in the sense that it was illegitimate and patently unrepresentative of, and unaccountable to, the black community’s general will.

Rowan recalled of his phone call that King “was startled to hear of the phony announcement. He came to the same conclusion that I did: the whites had bought, cajoled, or threatened three blacks, the assumption being that if the mass of blacks could be tricked into going back aboard the buses, it would be almost impossible to get the boycott going again.” King and other leaders frantically called dozens of volunteers, who ran all over town crying out, “No matter what you hear or read, the boycott is not over. Please do not go back onto the buses.”⁵⁶

Late into the cold Saturday night King and Abernathy visited bars, poolrooms, and nightclubs—new to King but not to his worldly pal—to deny the bogus settlement. King delighted the drunk patrons, many his own age, by his pool-playing finesse. In one dark club someone shouted, “Just let us know who they were, we’ll hang ’em.” King smiled in recounting this at the next executive board meeting. It seemed to be the common mood they encountered in darker black Montgomery.

“We can’t hurt Uncle Toms by violence,” he admonished his colleagues, “but only by mass action.”⁵⁷ At this meeting he defended himself against scurrilous white accusations. His fellows gave him a vote of confidence. The three apostate preachers publicly repudiated the settlement. The boycott did not lose a beat.

Leaders knew that humiliated city officials would have to strike back—hard. The commissioners announced a “get tough” policy to end the boycott. It included pressuring housewives not to chauffeur their servants, and stepped up harassment of car-pool drivers, stopped by police for contrived or trivial offenses. And no further talks with the MIA until the protest ended. Mayor Gayle stressed that this boycott led by “Negro radicals” was about much more than bus seating: “What they are after,” he warned, “is the destruction of our social fabric.”⁵⁸ To underscore their resolve, all three commissioners joined the Montgomery chapter of the White Citizens Council.

On January 26 police arrested King, driving in the car pool that afternoon, for alleged speeding (30 m.p.h. in a 25 m.p.h. zone) and jailed him for the first time. On the long, circuitous ride to the city jail, the handcuffed preacher was terrified that the cops were delivering him to a waiting lynch mob. He had lived in the city for a year and a half and didn’t yet know where the jail was located, notwithstanding Jesus’ directive to visit those behind bars.

“I found myself trembling within and without,” he recalled. “Silently, I asked God to give me the strength to endure whatever came.

“We turned into a dark and dingy street that I had never seen and headed under a desolate old bridge. I was sure now that I was going to meet my fateful hour on the other side.” He found himself relieved to arrive at the jail, where he was placed in a smelly overcrowded cell with several other blacks. He was appalled: “men lying on hard wood slats, and others resting on cots with torn-up mattresses. The toilet was in one corner of the cell without a semblance of an enclosure.”⁵⁹ His jailers were unwilling to release him, but finally relented when a furious black crowd gathered outside; they couldn’t get him out the door fast enough. In the darkness he saw a radiant star of unity.⁶⁰ That night the MIA ran several mass meetings out of concern for their leader.

Next afternoon a neatly dressed store maid in her mid-thirties, wearing a cap and jacket, was interviewed by Willie Lee, a young black researcher from Fisk University in Nashville who was giving her a ride home.

“I’m so mad I don’t know what to do,” the dark-skinned protester burst out. “Do you know those bastards put Reveren’ King in jail last night. They think they bad ’cause they got guns, but I sho hope they know how to use ’em, ’cause if they don’t, I’ll eat ’em up with my razor. If they can use ’em, they bet not come up on me and hit me, ’cause he’ll never use it then ’cause he’ll be in pieces so fast he won’t know what hit ’em.”

“Before the people stopped riding the buses,” Lee asked her, “did you ever have to get up and stand so white people could sit down?”

“Yeah, that happen almost every day,” she answered. “But let me tell you about this. One morning I got on the bus and I had a nickel and five pennies. I put the nickel in and showed him the five pennies. You know how they do you. You put five pennies in there, and they say you didn’t. And do you know that bastard cussed me out. He called me bastards, whores, and when he called me motherfucker, I got mad and I put my hand on my razor. I looked at him and told him, ‘Your mammy was a son-of-a-bitch, that’s why she had you a bitch. And if you so bad, git up outta that seat.’ I rode four blocks, then I went to the front door and backed off the bus, and I was jest hoping he’d git up. I was going to cut his head slamp off, but he didn’t sey nothing.

“Dey started this thang, and now they can’t finish it. They didn’t have a bitter need to ’rest Miss Park. All they had to do was talk to ’er lack she was a lady, but they had to be so big and take her to jail. Dey bit the lump off and us making ’em chew it. I know ole Sellers, ole dog, wish he could spit.

“But God fix ’em,” she rapped on, “all colored folks ain’t like they use to be. They ain’t scared no more. Guns don’t scare us. These white folks jest keep messing up. Dey gona have a war if they keep on. We be jest forced to kill ’em all ’cause if they hurt Rev. King, I don’t mine dying, but I sho Lord am taking a white bastard with ’em. If I don’t have my razor with me, I’ll use a stick.

“You can do anything for ’em, but jest don’t set beside ’em. Now you know it ain’t no harm in that. I don’t wont they no good men ’cause a white man can’t do nothing fur me. Give me a black man any day. And I never worry ’bout any no good white bitch taking a man o’ mine. She ain’t woman ’nough to take ’em.”

If the bus boycott ended, she told Lee, “I’m gona walk that mile still. If they git another dime from me, I won’t know it. Well this is my stop. Let’s hold out and pray, and I know we’ll get what we wont.”

Lee recorded similar angry sentiments at a car-pool dispatch station where protesters were waiting for rides to work.

“I’ll crawl on my knees ’fo I git back on dem buses,” a domestic worker exclaimed to a friend. “Look at dem red bastards over der watching us”—she pointed to the cops—“Ain’t nobody scared of dem.”

“I ain’t ’bout to get on dem buses,” another woman said. “Des white folks gona mess right ’round here and git killed. I don’t mind dying but I sho take one of dem with me. God done got fed up wid des white folks. We kin stand hard time betterin dey kin ’cause us use to it and dey ain’t.”

If “dat son-of-a-bitch I work fur” threatened to fire her for not riding the bus, the first domestic said sternly, furrowing her brow, “I beat her skinny ass and tell ’er keep de money ’cause I ain’t hongry. Did you see ’em when they put dat boy in jail?” referring to King.

“Dey jest trying to skere us back on dem buses,” the other replied, “but I’ll be damn if I get on one. I’ll walk twenty miles ’fo I ride ’em. Dey trying to be smart, but if dey beat dat boy dere is going to be hell to pay.”

The researcher picked up other random comments at the dispatch station: “Dey got dem guns but us ain’t skered,” one woman said. Another woman: “Dey bet not come in our neighborhood by de self.” A third protester: “Some of ’em gona mess right ’round here and get killed.” A fourth woman said somberly, “I ain’t got but one time to die and I may as well die fur somethin’.”⁶¹

That night, after a day fraught with chilling phone calls—a white friend warned him about a plot to kill him—King spoke at a mass meeting to reassure the black community that he was all right, that he had not been mistreated in jail. “I attempted to convey an overt impression of strength and courage,” he recalled, “although I was inwardly depressed and fear-stricken.”⁶² His off-the-cuff words betrayed his thinly veiled terror:

“If one day you find me sprawled out dead, I do not want you to retaliate with a single act of violence.”⁶³ The audience froze in silent dread. After the meeting, seventy-two-year-old Mother Pollard, the tireless walker, called him over. He hugged her warmly.

“Son, what’s wrong with you? You didn’t talk strong tonight.”

“Oh, no, Sister Pollard, nothing is wrong,” he lied. “I am feeling as fine as ever.”

“You can’t fool me,” she replied. “I knows something is wrong. Is it that we ain’t doing things to please you? Or is it that the white folks is bothering you?”

“Everything is going to be all right, Sister Pollard.”

She looked straight into his chocolate eyes. “Now, I don told you we is with you all the way.” Her face radiated serenity. “Now, even if we ain’t with you, the Lord is with you. God’s gonna take care of you.” As she spoke these comforting words, King later wrote, “everything in me quivered and quickened with the pulsing tremor of raw energy.”⁶⁴ The Spirit was warming his bones.

Around midnight, as he struggled to sleep, the phone rang one more time. “Listen, nigger,” an ugly voice crackled over the wire, “we’re tired of you and your mess now. If you aren’t out of this town in three days, we’re going to blow your brains out and blow up your house.” He paced the bedroom floor in angry fear, then walked across the hall to the kitchen and heated some coffee. He tried to find solace in what philosophy and theology had taught him about the meaning of evil. Could there be good without evil? Could there be redemption without sin? No answer came to shake his despair. Nothing relieved the fear in his gut. He was ready to give up.

“I got to the point that I couldn’t take it any longer,” he recalled in a sermon the summer before his death. “I was weak. Something said to me you can’t call on Daddy now,” as he had in past troubles. “You can’t even call on Mama now. (My Lord) You’ve got to call on that something in that person that your daddy used to tell you about. (Yes) That power that can make a way out of no way. (Yes)” He had to call on the holy spirit’s power to help him through. The church had been so much his home all of his young life that he had never stepped outside of it far enough, or boldly enough, to forge his own relationship with God, with Jesus, with the Spirit—not that of his father or mother or Ebenezer Baptist in Atlanta.

He discovered at this midnight hour that “religion had to become real to me”—not merely the hand-me-down family business—“and I had to know God for myself. (Yes, sir) With my head in my hands, I bowed down over that cup of coffee. Oh yes, I prayed a prayer. I prayed out loud that night. (Yes) The words I spoke to God that midnight are still vivid in my memory:

“Lord, I’m down here trying to do what’s right. (Yes) I think I’m right. I think the cause that we represent is right. (Yes) But Lord, I must confess that I’m weak now. I’m faltering. I’m losing my courage. (Yes) I am afraid. The people are looking to me for leadership. I can’t let the people see me like this because if they see me weak and losing my courage, they will begin to get weak. (Yes) I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left. I’ve come to the point where I can’t face it alone.”

“At that moment,” he continued, “I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never experienced Him before. I could hear an inner voice saying to me, (Yes) Martin Luther, (Yes) stand up for righteousness, (Yes) stand up for justice, (Yes) stand up for truth. (Yes) And lo, I will be with you, (Yes) 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. No, never alone. He promised never to leave me, (Never) never to leave me alone.”⁶⁵

A branch shall grow out of his roots, spoke Isaiah. The Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the Spirit of Wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and might, the Spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord.

I have put My Spirit upon him. He will bring forth justice to the Gentiles. He will bring forth justice for truth. He will not fail nor be discouraged, till he has established justice in the earth.

Then Jesus, when he had been baptized, came up from the water. And behold, the heavens were opened to him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting upon him. And suddenly a voice came from heaven.⁶⁶

Birmingham civil rights activist Pinkie Franklin heard about the bombing of King’s home, three days later, the morning after. She couldn’t sleep that night. Like many supporters far and wide, she wrote King a letter to help strengthen him. Forty years old, the Alabama State College graduate, born in Selma, had been a schoolteacher and for ten years had owned a Birmingham grocery store with her husband.

“For years,” she wrote him, “we Negro Mothers of the Southland have prayed that God would send us a leader such as you are. Now that the Almighty has regarded our lowly estate and has raised you up among us, I am indeed grateful.

“Be assured that day and night without ceasing I shall be praying for your safety and that of your family’s. The Arm of God is everlastingly strong and Sufficient to keep you and yours. There shall no harm come to you, and the Comforting Spirit of God shall guide you.”

She closed her letter, “A fellow Suffer, (Mrs.) Pinkie S. Franklin of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.”⁶⁷ Her own church would be bombed on a Sunday morning seven and a half years later, killing four young girls dressing up for the Lord.

Birmingham, the big industrial city a hundred miles north of Montgomery, had already racked up such a fearsome record of bombings by the Ku Klux Klan that it had earned the nickname “Bombingham.” A frequently targeted middle-class black neighborhood was called “Dynamite Hill” because so many black homes had been blown up. The “Big Mules,” iron and steel magnates who dominated this American Johannesburg, were determined to preserve Jim Crow by any means necessary in order to keep the industrial work force divided and weakened.

Their man in city hall, ambitious police commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor, gave the green light to Robert “Dynamite Bob” Chambliss and other Ku Klux Klan members who had mastered the use of dynamite in northern Alabama mines and quarries they had labored in. They were not apprehended for the rash of bombings. Was a similar pattern taking hold in Montgomery? Evidence later showed that city officials might have known in advance about some bombings of churches and parsonages. Montgomery was the first place where ministers were bombed.

Just before the attack on King’s home, MIA leaders had secretly shifted course, a move that would change the course of history. Among many reasons black Montgomerians hated segregation was the conviction, reaffirmed daily, that it could never be equitable or fair. In December and January they had experienced publicly, as a unified community, what most already knew in their bones: legalized segregation could never be but white supremacy, naked or veiled. It could not be fixed by cosmetic touch-ups.

The authorities “did not do what we wanted done,” attorney Fred Gray later reflected. “When that became apparent, then the question is, ‘how long are we gonna stay off the buses?’ People have to look forward to something. And the logical thing is to stay off the buses until we can return to them on an integrated basis. Because they wouldn’t give us the smaller things, we go for the larger and the only way we can go for that, and I knew it, was a federal suit.”⁶⁸

The dynamics of the mass protest taught participants that they finally had no recourse but to challenge the constitutionality of bus segregation—encouraged, of course, by the Supreme Court’s recent Brown decisions overturning the Plessy v. Ferguson doctrine of “separate but equal.” Officials subverted their own segregation laws when they refused to enforce them fairly yet hid behind and manipulated them to preserve the unsustainable status quo. The movement spawned an efficient car-pool operation that might have grown into a full-fledged system of public transport. But when the city commission refused to bend on reserved sections (partly to preserve the fiction of equal treatment), renewed the bus company’s franchise, and denied the MIA proposal for its own jitney service, they closed off any possibility of a “separate but equal” solution and made bus desegregation inescapable.

Toward the end of January Gray spent a few days in New York conferring with Thurgood Marshall and other top NAACP lawyers to prepare the ground for a federal lawsuit. It was a delicate situation for the MIA. While they needed NAACP expertise and money, over which tension had already surfaced, the NAACP’s name and reputation in the white South were mud—only slightly less sullied than those of the Communist Party. Many white southerners saw them as one and the same, the way black people conflated the White Citizens Council and the Ku Klux Klan.

The pivotal meeting of the MIA executive board took place on Monday, January 30—the afternoon before the bombing attack on King’s home. It was the eighth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination in New Delhi. While remotely possible that a spy’s report on the meeting triggered the bombing, most likely the attack had already been planned for that night with no link to this meeting. The midnight January 27 phone call had given King three days to leave town. The three days were up.

Participants were sworn to secrecy at this meeting. “It is very important,” King stressed, “that this information does not leak out about the NAACP and the court action until it’s printed in the newspaper. We want to surprise the whites.” Surprise was a key element of nonviolent combat, like every other kind.

Opening with prayer, the specially called meeting dealt first with a proposal by Rev. Alford to accept a compromise tendered by the city that would keep a smaller number of reserved seats. The general feeling was that it didn’t come close. But many ministers were tired and frustrated—though they had not been walking—and sought a graceful way out. King was ambivalent but swayed by the foot soldiers’ fervency.

“I’ve seen along the way,” King commented, “where some of the ministers are getting weary”; he said he wouldn’t mention any names. If you think that Negroes “should go back under the same conditions, we won’t ostracize you. We should iron it out here.”

Alford took up the challenge. “There’s a time in the life of any crisis,” he argued, “when you ought to be reasonable.” The leaders would have been willing to give up, for now, the demand for black bus drivers. It was the fairer seating arrangement, a more civil if not quite civilized segregation, that they would not budge on. Nothing could have been more “reasonable.”

“From my limited contact,” King countered, “if we went tonight and asked the people to get back on the bus, we would be ostracized. They wouldn’t get back. I believe to the bottom of my heart that the majority of Negroes would ostracize us. They are willing to walk.”

What did he mean by “ostracize”? He worried that the aroused mass following might repudiate the current leaders, replace them with others more militant, more responsive to the people’s will, perhaps advocates of violent tactics.

He then turned to the federal lawsuit about to be filed. This constitutional challenge to city and state bus segregation laws would not be brought formally by NAACP lawyers, he explained, but rather by five female plaintiffs, including Claudette Colvin, now sixteen, who had just given birth to her baby son, Raymond. The lawyers estimated that the lawsuit would be decided by the Montgomery federal court within three weeks.

“We need to train people to go back to the bus,” the Reverend Seay urged. “We would disgrace ourselves before the world if we give up now.” Feeling strong pressure from below, the leaders resolved to continue the boycott. They hoped that the daily civic disruption and media spotlight would penetrate the minds and hearts of the federal judges holding court in the boycott’s epicenter.

“By the way,” King disclosed, “I’ve found out that the Negro lady who was beat up by a Negro man a few days ago is the cook for the mayor. She attends the mass meetings and tells the mayor what happened the next morning. We also found out that Sellers has let three Negro prisoners attend the mass meetings so that they can tell him what has happened.”

Gray pitched for one or two respected gentlemen to join the five women as plaintiffs.

“I think it is very important in throwing sentiment our way,” King pleaded, “if we have a minister as a plaintiff. Who will volunteer?” he asked the two dozen men of cloth. We cannot know whether he or Abernathy would have been willing to sign up, but it was evident to all that they were too central as leaders. No one raised his hand. A few ministers claimed that they were acting for their parishioners but were not personally aggrieved. Many like King had never ridden the bus. The meeting ended with prayer—and only women as plaintiffs.⁶⁹ The men of cloth had feet of clay.

Two nights after King’s home was bombed, dynamite thrown from a passing car exploded in E. D. Nixon’s yard, causing little damage but sending a strong message. His wife told him about it when his train from Chicago pulled into Birmingham the next morning.

King had gone to the sheriff’s office to request firearm permits for himself and his bodyguards, but the application was rejected. On February 2, King, Abernathy, Gray, and Jo Ann Robinson met with the Alabama governor in his capitol office a block from King’s church. A populist politician in the mold of Louisiana’s fabled Huey Long, “Big Jim” Folsom was the most racially liberal governor in the South. He had set off a brouhaha three months before (and probably wrecked his career) when he drank Scotch in his governor’s mansion with New York’s black congressman, Adam Clayton Powell Jr.—and had him chauffeured around town in his limousine. He was noncommittal when King asked for state police protection from white violence. What King wanted most was what the sheriff had just denied him.

“What we would like to have is to have you issue a permit to keep a gun in my car.”⁷⁰ He deemed armed protection worth a private meeting with the governor. Supportive of the protest in principle, its ends if not its means, Folsom declined to help him with his personal need. The parley revealed the naked fear King felt—his nascent premonition of death.

We are not of those who shrink back from destruction, the writer of Hebrews declared, but of those who believe to the preservation of the Spirit.⁷¹. . .

THERE WAS NO ATTACK on Fort Sumter or outright secession, but southerners both black and white saw signs of a second Civil War. Even official vocabulary reprised the rhetoric that led to the War Between the States. On January 24, the day after Gayle announced the city’s get-tough policy, the governors of Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, and Mississippi vowed to resist the Supreme Court’s Brown decision through “interposition.” The Alabama legislature, like others, enacted a statute of “nullification.” There was no Lincoln in the White House, only a southern-born war hero who personally opposed Brown. No Jefferson Davis conspiring with fellow secessionists in Montgomery, “Cradle of the Confederacy,” but another Mississippi senator of far lesser stature, James Eastland, exhorting his followers to hold the line against “mongrelization” of the races.

The 1956 equivalent of Fort Sumter—less destructive but no less menacing—broke out on Monday, February 6, in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, an hour and a half’s drive northwest of the capital. Autherine Lucy, twenty-six, was the tenth child of tenant farmers in Shiloh, in Alabama’s fertile Black Belt, where she had helped her family grow cotton, watermelon, sweet potatoes, and peanuts. Ever since getting her undergraduate degree from all-black Miles College in 1952, the Birmingham secretary had fought to be admitted to the University of Alabama as its first openly black student. NAACP lawyers took up her case a year before the Brown decision; in June 1955 a federal judge forced her admission. A month prior, the Supreme Court’s delayed enforcement decree had mandated school desegregation “by all deliberate speed.” The university stalled with an unsuccessful appeal, then announced on January 30, the day King’s house was bombed, that Lucy could register for spring semester. Next week she enrolled for graduate study in library science.

As school officials escorted her to class the first two days, she encountered angry protests. Fiery crosses burned on campus three nights in a row. On Friday and Saturday evening a thousand protesters marched on the home of the university’s president, Oliver Cromwell Carmichael. His wife was hit by a flying egg. On Monday, February 6, the growing mob of incensed students and townspeople were joined by a large phalanx of rubber workers from the nearby Goodrich tire factory. Heading to her first morning class, Lucy, together with the dean of women and a male administrator, were pelted by eggs, rocks, and mud balls. The protesters called the officials “nigger-lovin’ bastards” and screamed “Keep ’Bama White!” Several tried to break into her classroom. When Lucy and her escorts escaped by the back door, they were ambushed by the vicious mob, shrieking, “Let’s kill her! Let’s kill her!” Miraculously, they managed to drive away, rocks smashing the back window. The police were lying low; they made three arrests.

The rioting crowd multiplied during the day. By nightfall they were joined by high school students and rubber workers from the day shift. A mob estimated at three thousand marauded around campus and again besieged the president’s house. State police repulsed them, firing tear gas, never before used on a college campus. It was the first organized violence on an American campus in two decades; the first time that school desegregation had brought rioting anywhere in the South. A report to Governor Folsom revealed that rioters intended to kill Lucy. Many of the militant rubber workers were members of the Klan, which drew its shock troops, like “Dynamite Bob” Chambliss, from the exploited white working class.

During the Monday rioting the university board of trustees met in emergency session. Dismissing entreaties by moderate faculty and students against “mob rule,” the trustees suspended Lucy. “They did it because the mob forced them to,” a student leader told Time. “The mob won.”⁷² Three weeks later the trustees expelled her, a move applauded by the White Citizens Council and whites generally. ’Bama stayed white for seven more years, until another governor, a protégé of Big Jim Folsom, made a last stand at the schoolhouse door in Tuscaloosa.

The Oconee River wound southward, cutting a valley through pine-forested hills of central Georgia, seventy miles east of Atlanta, then widened into Lake Oconee. In this pine river valley, in the village of Penfield, in November 1846, Willis Williams, thirty-six, joined Shiloh Baptist Church, a racially mixed congregation of fifty whites and twenty-eight slaves founded in 1795. He was owned by another Willis Williams, one of the county’s most prosperous slaveholders, who joined the church later, perhaps through his namesake’s influence.

Two years after joining up, slave Williams was convicted of theft by a biracial church committee and expelled. Two months later, in October 1848, church minutes reported that “Willis, servant to Bro. W. N. Williams, came forward and made himself confession of his guilt and said that the Lord had forgiven him for his error. He was therefore unanimously received into fellowship with us.”⁷³ His redemption augured his conversion into a zealous slave preacher, or “exhorter.” He devoted himself to preaching the Word among Greene County slaves and brought many families into the Baptist fold, which after the Civil War split into segregated congregations.

By turn of the century his son Adam Daniel Williams, endowed with a double dose of Old Testament namesake—and his twin sister was Eve—had emerged as a prominent black Baptist preacher in Atlanta. His daddy had taught him his calling as a young boy, growing up in the wake of the Civil War, when he reveled in preaching the funerals of “snakes, cats, dogs, horses or any thing that died. The children of the community would call him to preach the funeral and they would have a big shout.”⁷⁴ His daughter, Alberta Christine, married a young backwoods Georgia preacher, like he himself had started out. Michael and Alberta King’s first son, namesake of Martin Luther, entered the earthly kingdom on January 15, 1929.⁷⁵

When Willis Williams preached the gospel in the mid–nineteenth century, black Christianity was only two or three generations removed from its African roots. Many older slaves, perhaps Williams’s parents or grandparents, had grown up in the African Spirit world of ancestor worship and nature gods, whether in their homeland or transplanted in the New World. They heard and passed on tales of African spirits and saints, both good and evil. Stories were sung and danced as well as spoken. A favorite sacred ritual was the “ring shout”—slaves danced and called out in a circle to embody the ties between past, present, and future.

Mixing up African beliefs and practices with Christian language and ritual, slave spirituality served as the driving force of all aspects of the slave community. Slaves shaped it anew to meet their needs and ensure their survival and salvation.

The gift of African-American Christianity to the Christian religion, and ultimately to all the world’s faiths, was the magic of intimate interplay with the divine. This was not to imply that mainstream Christianity (as well as Judaism and Islam) did not already worship a personal God, but that black Christians, perhaps most like Muslims, staked their faith on divine intimacy. Other believers tended to keep God at arm’s length, as a general rule, despite lip service to the contrary (or, like many Catholics, saved their intimate devotion for the Virgin Mary or a personal saint).

Black people’s divine intimacy varied in form. It was often intensely emotional. It was a felt connection with a God not only of emotion, but at times of raw passion and physicality. Just as their West African ancestors had conversed directly with their nature gods and ancestral spirits, so did enslaved African Americans commune with their divinity on a horizontal as much as a vertical basis.

As one slave put it, “Gwine to argue with de father and chatter wid the son.” Another said simply, “Our God talks to his children.”⁷⁶

From slavery time to twentieth-century gospel singing, African Americans have nourished a special intimacy with Jesus, or with God through Jesus, God as Jesus—both called Lord without distinction. Spirituals, and later on gospel and blues, expressed the connection with Jesus in ways that words alone could not.

Sometimes I hangs my head an’ cries,

But Jesus goin’ to wipe my weep’n eyes.

He pluck my feet out’n de miry clay,

He set dem on de firm rock of ages.⁷⁷

No song conveyed this intimate relationship with more feeling than Thomas Dorsey’s gospel classic, “Precious Lord, Take My Hand”—Martin King’s favorite song, sung at his funeral in Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church.

W. E. B. Du Bois’s encounter as a young man with the “frenzy” of Deep South black religion left a searing imprint on his consciousness. It was the core event around which he constructed his 1903 masterpiece, The Souls of Black Folk.

A “suppressed terror hung in the air and seemed to seize us,” he recalled, “a pythian madness, a demoniac possession, that lent terrible reality to song and word. The people moaned and fluttered, and then the gaunt-cheeked brown woman beside me suddenly leaped straight in the air and shrieked like a lost soul, while round about came wail and groan and outcry, and a scene of human passion such as I had never conceived before.”

The frenzy, or shouting, “when the Spirit of the Lord passed by, and, seizing the devotee, made him mad with supernatural joy” varied from “the silent rapt countenance or the low murmur and moan to the mad abandon of physical fervor—the stamping, shrieking, and shouting, the rushing to and fro and wild waving of arms, the weeping and laughing, the vision and the trance.”

So solid a hold did it have on the rural Negro, the scholar activist concluded, “that many generations firmly believed that without this visible manifestation of God there could be no true communion with the Invisible.”⁷⁸

The term spirit possession pinpointed the physical, forceful quality of the divine interaction in African-American Christianity. The divine spirit invaded the human bodysoul, but only when it opened itself. The human vessel, male or female, was not a passive receptacle. It passionately clutched the spirit force with its whole physical and emotional being, possessing the spirit from within just as it was being seized from without.

“All night long I’ve been feelin’ ’im,” Georgia slave Mary Gladdys described an all-night prayer meeting. “Jest befo’ day, I feels ’im. Jest befo’ day, I feels ’im. The sperit, I feels ’im. The sperit, I feels ’im!”⁷⁹ Another testified: “I got Him! I hold him here all the time!”

That this spiritual intercourse corresponded, more than symbolically, with female worshipers’ experience of sexual intercourse, and that Christians believed that God impregnated a flesh-and-blood woman, often lent women’s spiritual expressions an erotic undertone—as, for example, gospel singers’ cry to Jesus or the holy spirit to “fill me up!” Communicating one-to-one with divine force through prayer, song, rapture, or frenzy opened the gateway between the profane and sacred worlds.

For the slaves and for generations of descendants, the omnipresent Spirit world translated into the experience of what Christians called the holy spirit. If God was the transcendental Supreme Being and Jesus the incarnate personality who sacralized the cosmos, the Word becoming flesh, the Spirit was the divine force itself manifested on earth, and thus the spark of divinity, or “inner light,” that glorified each creature. Of course the three persons of the Trinity were really One, viewed from different angles on earth.

Holy spirit, breath of God, wind of the cosmos was the life energy that flowed through beings either as acts of grace or as invoked or conjured by believers. The Spirit, which generated and protected sacred time and space amid the travails of ordinary life, was the force that simultaneously emancipated and unified those who embodied it. Liberated them from sin, evil, forces of darkness, mortality itself. Unified them into a chain, a cosmic arc of relationship and interdependence, an “inescapable network of mutuality.” Above all, the Spirit expressed the content of the relationship between humans and God, the substance of things unseen—the relationship, as Jewish theologian Martin Buber put it, between I and Thou. This relationship was made of love.

For people in traditional societies, religious historian Mircea Eliade explained, religion was a means of extending the world spatially upward “so that communication with the other world becomes ritually possible, and extending it temporally backward so that the paradigmatic acts of the gods and mythical ancestors can be continually re-enacted and indefinitely recoverable. By creating sacred time and space, Man can perpetually live in the presence of his gods, can hold on to the certainty that within one’s own lifetime ‘rebirth’ is continually possible, and can impose order on the chaos of the universe.

“Life is lived on a twofold plane; it takes its course as human existence and, at the same time, shares in a trans-human life, that of the cosmos or the gods.”⁸⁰

Historian Gayraud Wilmore pointed out that the religions of West and Central Africa had a single dominating quality that endured among African Americans: “a profound belief that both the individual and the community had a continuous involvement with the spirit world in the practical affairs of daily life. African religions know of no rigid demarcation between the natural and the supernatural, the sacred and the profane. All of life is permeated with forces or powers which exist in some relationship to man’s weal or woe. Man is, therefore, required—for his own sake and that of the community—to understand and appreciate this spirit world which merges imperceptibly with immediate, tangible reality.”⁸¹

LITTLE OF THIS SPIRIT awareness seemed to have imbued young Martin King, even though as a child he considered the church his “second home” and was ordained a Baptist minister at nineteen.

“My call to the ministry,” he wrote two years later at Crozer Seminary in Pennsylvania, “was not a miraculous or supernatural something, on the contrary it was an inner urge calling me to serve humanity.” It was the “noble moral and ethical ideals” conveyed by the church, by his father and other preachers of black social gospel that swayed his vocational doubts, in his view a more secular than spiritual springboard.

“Even though I have never had an abrupt conversion experience,” he concluded his 1950 autobiographical essay—he knew this was obligatory for a truly called Baptist—“religion has been real to me and closely knitted to life. In fact the two cannot be separated; religion for me is life.”⁸²

But how deep did it run? How deep had he drunk? Religion was so completely life for him, such an all-consuming everyday reality—his hot dates were Sunday worship services—that it came to be mundane, taken for granted. The Spirit world had boundaries, however porous. His religious world, undifferentiated, had none.

His parents pushed him so hard to pursue the path of ministry—he sang church solos at six—that he never made a real choice. He confessed that he joined his father’s church impulsively at age seven out of a competitive desire “to keep up with my sister.”⁸³ He was so conditioned by outward forms and rituals that he found little room to absorb the sacred substance—the abiding if elusive Spirit itself—which many he preached to had experienced firsthand. He was so caught up in the appearances, sights, sounds, and smells that he came to reject the inner core of emotionalism, of “soul”—the experience of an intimate relationship with God. Whether he was rebelling against his patriarchal father, whether it embarrassed his middle-class striving, or whether it cut against the grain of who he thought he was or would be, the great-grandson of Shiloh’s Willis Williams scorned the God of emotion at the heart of black faith.

King may have preached earnestly about the personal God central to the black church, but it was an intellectual and formal God. By all accounts he did not yet have a relationship with this divinity, however flowery his lip, his outward projection. By the time he graduated from Crozer Seminary in May 1951, he was determined to find an orderly, rational God to undergird his faith, a God of ideas rather than emotions, a thinking man’s personal God befitting a suave, modern Negro intellectual. A doctorate in theology from an elite northern university might be just the ticket he needed to escape what he considered the primitive religiosity of the backward black South.

In September 1951, at the height of the Korean War and the anticommunist witch hunt led by Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy, twenty-two-year-old Martin King had just finished a fourth summer of preaching in Atlanta as Ebenezer’s assistant pastor. Upon his graduating as Crozer’s award-winning valedictorian, and giving the valedictory address, his parents bought him a shiny green Chevy. Now he drove it from his boyhood home on “Sweet Auburn” Avenue through the Jim Crow states of the Carolinas, Virginia, and Maryland, over the Mason-Dixon line into eastern Pennsylvania, where he had attended Crozer near Philadelphia, into the burst of early fall’s fiery foliage across New York and New England. Searching for housing in Boston, he faced overt discrimination for the second time in the North. The first had been in a New Jersey restaurant the year before; the owner had fired a pistol when King and friends insisted on being served. That he largely escaped such humiliations in Atlanta showed how sheltered was his middle-class southern boyhood.

Securing an apartment on St. Botolph Street, he readied himself for a rigorous doctoral program in systematic theology at Boston University. He was drawn to B.U. to search out the philosophical and theological basis for belief in a personal divinity. This would be the philosophy of personalism that his liberal evangelical Baptist professor, George W. Davis, had introduced him to at Crozer.

Boston and personalism met his intellectual needs. For half a century the university’s school of theology had been the wellspring of American personalism. A term that Walt Whitman coined in the 1860s in Democratic Vistas to express his vision of cosmic self, personalism congealed in the twentieth century as a school of thought holding that all reality was personal, of a personal nature, and that God was the ultimate personality, a personal divinity in the most literal sense. Influenced by the German idealism of Kant and Hegel and by the New England transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau, resonating with the slave religion that King thought he had left behind, personalists contended that valid spiritual communion came through a direct, unmediated relationship between autonomous personalities—between an individual and their personal deity.

Some personalist theologians, such as King’s teacher Edgar Brightman, stressed the invisibility of personality to human beings. Bodies could be seen and touched, but not personalities or souls. All outward things were manifestations of invisible personality, cosmic or human. Personality was the divine inner light inside each individual. King came to accept on a rational theological basis what had troubled him in raw experience.

Personalism’s rationalistic depiction of a personal God, however, did not take him far enough from the unruliness of the black Baptist church. He raised his doubts about a personal divinity to even higher scrutiny in his doctoral dissertation. He spent only a year writing it, starting in spring 1954 and finishing during his first six months pastoring Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, writing in longhand early in the morning and late at night. In the heavily plagiarized thesis he not only weighed and tested his own God concept, but sought to expand the conception of divine personality to encompass views that appeared to deny a personal God. He focused on the theologies of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman, two perspectives that strongly challenged personalism without addressing it directly. Flawed though his dissertation proved to be in its wholesale borrowing and shoddy attribution of sources—partly the result of his hectic ministry in Montgomery—it nevertheless provided the theoretical groundwork for him to reconcile personalism with its critics, not least himself.

He tried to show that neither Tillich nor Wieman accepted the idea of an impersonal divinity, that their God concepts not only were not antithetical to personalist philosophy, but affirmed its premises and corrected some of its problems. Experimenting with the dialectical method that would loom large in his later life, he posed the thesis of personalism against the challenges of Tillich and Wieman in order to move toward a synthesis that reconciled the strengths of each side.

What was at stake here? King sought to supplant the anthropomorphic concept of a personal God that he found distasteful—a divinity created, in effect, as a reflection of sinful human beings—with the notion of personality originating as a divine essence, that human beings laid claim to personality and personhood because God created these in the divine image. Personality was not a given, but a gift of grace. Thus King redefined personality in its human incarnation as the divine presence within, the holy spirit internal.

Tillich, a refugee from Nazi Germany, rivaled Reinhold Niebuhr as the preeminent American theologian of the postwar era. Both luminaries taught at Union Theological Seminary in New York while King was studying in Boston. Tillich believed that God was not a being in the usual sense (thus could not be a personal being) because he was “being-itself,” the ground and depth of all being, of all meaning. As ground of being, so King interpreted Tillich, God was the creative force of the universe—immanent in his own creation. As depth, or “abyss,” God was transcendent not spatially above or outside, but deep within creation. God was simultaneously visible and invisible, manifest and latent—visible as ground of being, invisible as depth, as darkness. Tillich turned the traditional model of a transcendent God upside down and inside out. It would take only a small further step to suggest that if conscious human personalities could relate to God as ground of being, their subconscious minds might communicate with God in the dark abyss inside their souls.

Unlike Tillich, Wieman was not a well-known American theologian. He “stresses the fact that men must worship the actuality of God and not their ideas about God,” King wrote. “It is imperative that men not allow their wishes and needs to shape their ideas of God,” but that their ideas be “shaped solely in the light of objective evidence.” One can imagine his relief; this was the problem with the faith of his fathers. He employed Wieman’s “scientific” frame of reference to comprehend divine personality as it might be viewed from the “objective” standpoint of the cosmos, of “ultimate reality,” rather than from the subjective vantage point of a fragmented individual or of sinful humanity.

Wieman suggested that God was a dynamic, interactive process, not a static object—energy, not matter; a verb, not a noun. God was the “creative event” (grace of God)—here foreshadowing physicists’ discoveries that subatomic particles were events, process, not objects, and that the universe was not only expanding but unifying. Wieman defined God as the integrating process that “works through all the world not only to bring human lives into fellowship with one another but also to maintain and develop organic interdependence and mutual support between all parts and aspects of the cosmos.”

God was the “integrating behavior” of the universe, the “growth of meaning and value in the world,” the nurturing of organic connections to bring about a “new structure of interrelatedness.” This evolving structure of interrelatedness called for transformation of meanings such that (as King paraphrased Wieman), “the individual sees what he could not see before. Events as they happen to him now are so connected with other events that his appreciable world takes on an expanded meaning unimaginable before.” According to Wieman this integrating process of communication, support, and learning “must be not only between contemporaries but also between successive generations, ages, and cultures.”⁸⁴

As much as Tillich’s, Wieman’s theology was basic to King’s expanding conception of divinity and a key to his budding cosmology.

He returned to the Deep South with his new bride, Coretta Scott, a native of rural Alabama, who had attended Antioch College and Boston’s New England Conservatory of Music. She regretfully gave up a promising career as a classical singer to return to her Black Belt roots as a preacher’s wife, an unwanted fate that was not easy for her to accept. Her love for Martin and her sense of spiritual duty warred with her personal ambition.

Nor was her husband entirely happy about moving to Montgomery, a city still steeped in white supremacy and with few pretensions of New South modernity. But wearing the armor of his elite northern education, he seized the opportunity to share his newfound knowledge of a rational God and a scientific theology with an educated, middle-class Baptist congregation, a thinking fellowship. They would listen to his logos and not lose themselves in frenzy. The first year was consumed by taking charge of the church and completing his dissertation a world apart from Boston.

All of a sudden his comfortable world took a tumble. On the night of December 5, 1955, he was thrust into presiding over a church mass meeting that was a supercharged melting pot of black spirituality of all shades. His Dexter Avenue flock was out in force, but a far larger number were poor working people who, unlike King, talked to God every day and lived their toilsome lives in an elevated world of Spirit. He stood face-to-face with the fierce raw emotionality of black church culture, a volcanic congregation believing itself in the presence of the Lord. As many participants later testified, the holy spirit was alive that night, and in a hundred such nights to come, with a palpable power and crystal clarity that overwhelmed the freshly minted doctor of theology.

Yet by some uncanny act of grace, the breath of Spirit that he drew in that evening burst out of him in a jeweled torrent of unscripted words, a Lincoln-like synthesis of the rational and emotional, the secular and sacred. The faithful, King now among them, had conjured the kingdom of God in that place.

Two months later:
Early February 1956

Anna Holden, a white woman in her mid-twenties, walked into the law office of Luther Ingalls, general counsel and chief organizer of the Central Alabama White Citizens Council. She felt like she was living a hundred years in the past, walking into Confederate headquarters, which Montgomery had once been—just a few blocks away. Although she hailed from the Deep South, it felt like enemy territory. She introduced herself to Ingalls, with whom she had an appointment, as a social scientist researching the Montgomery situation. Late thirties, crew cut, he wore a tweed jacket without tie over a gabardine sport shirt. He came from an old-line Montgomery family and commanded respect in the white community. His great-grandfathers had owned many slaves.

Ever since the Supreme Court’s Brown decision of May 1954, arch-segregationists had been leading a grassroots campaign of “massive resistance” to desegregation and “race mixing.” While the Ku Klux Klan reignited its tactics of terror, a militant organization arose to draw the white mainstream to the cause. It began when Mississippi judge Tom Brady warned the Sons of the American Revolution in his state that desegregation, which he blamed on communists, would lead to extinction of the white race. Brady’s speech spurred thirty-three-year-old Robert Patterson, manager of a Mississippi Delta cotton plantation and former Mississippi State football star, to organize a town meeting in Indianola on July 11, 1954. The seventy-five participants, led by business and civic leaders, founded the White Citizens Council.

Chapters instantly proliferated across the Magnolia State. In October delegates from 250 chapters with 60,000 members in half of the state’s counties gathered to create a state association. Publicly they vowed to fight integration through education and propaganda. Less visibly they promoted their real strategy: boycotts and other methods of economic strangulation of black agitators and their white sympathizers. Mississippi Council leaders spread the gospel to Alabama.

“Come on inside the office and we can talk there,” Ingalls said to Holden. “Senator Engelhardt is in my office now and you can talk to him too.” The two white supremacists were hard at work organizing a mammoth rally at the state Coliseum two days hence, fielding a flurry of phone calls.

“Sam, there is a young lady here from Fisk University in Nashville who wants to talk to me, and I told her she could come in here and talk to both of us. Miss Holden, this is Senator Engelhardt.” Sam Engelhardt, mid-to-late fifties, was state senator from nearby Macon County and president of the recently formed Central Alabama WCC. Conservatively dressed, he projected a somber mood that contrasted with Ingalls’s upbeat spirit.

Engelhardt: Fisk University? That’s a colored school, isn’t it?

Holden: Yes it is. I am a researcher on staff there.

Engelhardt: You take white students there now, don’t you?

Holden: Yes. It has been opened to white students since the Supreme Court decision.

He demanded to know what she was doing at a “nigra” college.

“Now, Sam,” Ingalls jumped in. “Let’s let Miss Holden ask her questions. We don’t want to be disrespectful to the young lady.” He chuckled. “Well, Miss Holden, you aren’t gonna like anything I’m gonna say but I don’t really mind talking to you.”

“It doesn’t really matter, does it? Say what you please and I will write it down. That’s what I’m here for, to get everybody’s view.” She asked him how the bus boycott started.

“Well,” he explained, “you probably know by now that it was started by NAACP agitators. Ninety-five percent of the nigras here were happy with things the way they were and are now the victims of their exploitation. They didn’t want this. NAACP leaders like King and Nixon forced it on them. It was a plant to get a case. The Parks woman tried five or six times to create an incident before they finally arrested her. I got that from the drivers. You know, she used the white toilet at Montgomery Fair. You can see what she is after.

“The mayor’s committee was picked to meet with them and work out a compromise, but we couldn’t get anywhere.” King had wanted him booted off the committee. Black delegates came “with a mimeographed sheet with their stand printed on it and they never departed from it. We came in willing to compromise, but they wouldn’t give an inch. They wanted first come, first serve without any regard to the state segregation law and that was it. We offered them the whole bus except for one seat in the back and one in the front, but they wouldn’t take that.”

For Ingalls and the other whites it made no difference how reasonable the blacks’ demands had been. What mattered was that they were making demands at all, that they were setting the terms. From the white point of view, the concession to negotiate was a major compromise, all that they could afford.

“So that’s what the committee did—wasted a lot of time. Has anybody called to your attention the statute making a boycott illegal?” He pulled down a big dusty law book, the Alabama Code of 1940. “See here,” he showed her, “misdemeanor for two or more persons to enter into any conspiracy to deprive . . .”

“I knew there was such a law,” she replied, “but I hadn’t heard anything about anyone trying to enforce it.”

“You’ll hear plenty about it,” Ingalls countered, “when Monday rolls around. The grand jury goes into session Monday and you’ll hear plenty about it then. They’ll be indicting all the nigras who are pullin’ the thing.”

“There were other demands besides the seating arrangements, weren’t there?”

“Two others—courtesy and nigra drivers. The committee held no brief on courtesy. That’s the southern way. All races are entitled to that.” He laughed. “We don’t hate the nigras or want to be mean to them or anything like that. Certainly bus drivers should be polite to them, and the bus company wants them to be. After all, they are in business.”

“I wondered if there was any evidence that the drivers had been discourteous to them?”

“I don’t ride the bus myself, but I hadn’t heard anything about it. Our own girl never said anything about being treated discourteously. She did come to work late all the time and when I said something to her about it, she told me that the bus wouldn’t stop and pick her up—that it would go on by and leave her. I went down to the bus company to find out about it and they said that they couldn’t run so many buses during peak hours and that the buses would only hold so many people. What they said seemed logical to me and I took their word that that was the reason they would pass people by sometimes and not stop. I don’t know what she’s doing about getting to work now, I haven’t even asked her. But she’s been on time since the boycott started.

“I don’t doubt that some of the drivers were rude at times,” he admitted, “but I don’t think they were any ruder to the nigras than to the whites.”

“I want to be clear on the seating demand,” Holden said. “Did the first come, first serve basis they asked for mean they would want that on a nonsegregated basis?”

“What they are out for is full integration. Hell, we don’t care whether they have two seats or ten seats. This bus boycott is piddlin’ stuff. Everybody knows what the NAACP is after—complete integration, even to intermarriage.”

“How do most white people feel about the bus situation?”

“They’re scared to death, Miss Holden. Most of them are afraid there will be riot and havoc if this thing keeps on. They feel sorry for the nigras who are walking and suffering and are afraid to do anything to end it. You know how they have kept them off the buses, don’t you? They have goon squads take them out and work them over. I don’t mean they work everybody over—most of them can be kept in line by threats and intimidation. I know of two cases where they worked on two of them—beat them up. One was the cook of a personal friend of mine,” the incident King had reported at the MIA executive board meeting. “Those are exceptions, of course. But that keeps the rest of them afraid.”

“What about your organization, Mr. Ingalls, the Citizens Council? Are you doing anything on the bus boycott?”

“We ran some ads, that’s all we’ve done, asking all citizens to ride the buses. We asked nigras as well as whites to support the buses.”

“Have you done anything else?”

“No, that’s all. We’ve been building up our membership. Nearly 10,000 in the Central Alabama Council. Most of them in Montgomery. We had less than 200 in November,” before the boycott.

“I heard that you have tried to get people to take economic sanctions against Negroes who are taking part in the boycott.”

Engelhardt had stepped back in. “The White Citizens Council doesn’t work through economic sanctions,” he said.

“I had the impression that you did, Senator.”

“Where did you hear that?”

“I had the impression from the papers . . .”

“Well we don’t. The papers have given people a false picture of the Citizens Council. Don’t believe anything about the Citizens Council you read in the newspaper. We definitely don’t use economic sanctions.” Ingalls handed her a copy of the WCC constitution.

“Did you come here to talk about the Citizens Council or the bus boycott?” he asked with annoyance.

“I am interested in the relationship between the two.”

“We are an educational organization, and a charitable organization,” he told her. “Members try to persuade people in talking to them personally. I have talked it over with my yardman, for instance. I haven’t discussed it with our girl yet, but I did talk to the yardman and told him why he should ride the bus. He said he is afraid to ride, and I can’t talk him into riding it. But we work like that.”

“I heard that you are asking people to fire their maids until they went back to the buses.”

“Hell,” Ingalls replied, “you can’t get people to do anything like that. I told you, I haven’t even discussed this with our girl. I’m still paying her the same salary and I gave her a better Christmas present than I gave my wife.” He laughed. “You see how bad we treat them?”

“You have been very generous with your time, and I appreciate it.”

“Have I been courteous to you? Have I been kind?”

“Oh, yes indeed. No complaints on that score.”

“I don’t want you to go away from here saying that you weren’t well received. Well, if you are through asking me questions, there is one I would like to ask you. Miss Holden, would you marry a nigra?”

“I haven’t married anybody so far, white or black.”

“That’s not what I asked you. Would you be willing to marry a nigra?”

“Why don’t you ask me whether I would be willing to marry a soldier or a farmer? I am not under the impression that people marry on the basis of these large categories.”

“Now, you still aren’t answering my question. Would you marry a nigra?”

“I am answering you by saying that is not the kind of question a person can answer ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ How do you know who you would marry and who you wouldn’t until the situation comes up? People marry individuals. They don’t marry because a person is a teacher or a member of some large group like that.”

“You’re young, honey, but you’re off on the wrong road. You’d better think about this. Here you are working in a nigra college. You’d better ask yourself that question and answer it. If you can’t answer it now, you’d better hurry and make up your mind, because intermarriage is what is at the heart of the whole thing. Tell me this. If you let your children go to school with nigras and eat with ’em and play with ’em and go to the same social functions and work with them, how can you teach them that it’s wrong to marry them?

“Well, I see that you aren’t going to answer any of my questions, so you might as well be on your way. Now I meant that. You’d better think about whether you’d marry a nigra, because that is the whole thing in a nutshell.”⁸⁵

Two days later, Friday evening, February 10, the Central Alabama Citizens Council held the “largest segregation gathering in the recent history of the South,” as one speaker called it, overflowing the state Coliseum with a record-setting crowd. Arriving from Montgomery and nearby counties in “shiny new Cadillacs, pickup trucks, rattletrap old Fords, and atomic age Jaguars,” the zealous assembly was one in its purpose: to “rededicate themselves to the southern way of life.” Reporter Joe Azbell described it as a mix of pep rally, political convention, and old-fashioned revival. The crowd wildly cheered, rebel yells ricocheting, when Mayor Gayle, standing with commissioners Sellers and Parks, promised to “hold the line against Negro integration.”⁸⁶

But it was Mississippi’s senior senator, James Eastland, a driving force behind the Citizens Council movement born in his state in June 1954, that the crowd had come to hear. Owner of a six-thousand-acre cotton plantation in the Mississippi Delta, Eastland had built his political life on white supremacy. His first Senate speech in 1942 denounced black soldiers as lazy, ignorant, and prone to rape. Soon after the war, Virginia Durr brought a small group of high-society Methodist ladies from Mississippi, wearing white dresses, white gloves, and white flowered hats, to talk to their senator. All was cordial until one lily-white lady mentioned repeal of the poll tax. Eastland jumped out of his chair. “I know what you women want,” he screamed, “black men laying on you!”⁸⁷

In 1954 Eastland had called Durr before a hearing of his McCarthyite Senate subcommittee in New Orleans to testify about her alleged communist ties. When another witness accused her of passing war secrets from her friend Eleanor Roosevelt to a Soviet spy ring, Clifford Durr blew up. Vaulting over the jury rail, he yelled, “You goddam son of a bitch, lying about my wife that way—I’m going to kill you!”⁸⁸ Marshals grabbed him. He collapsed with a heart attack and was hospitalized for a week.

“There is only one course open for the South to take,” Eastland yelled to the vast white sea at the Montgomery Coliseum two years later, “and that is stern resistance. We must fight them with every legal weapon at every step of the way. Southern people are right both legally and morally” and to win must “organize and be militant.” Condemning the Brown decision that sparked the WCC as “illegal, immoral, dishonest, and a disgrace,” he warned that the South faced an “era of judicial tyranny.” But “the Anglo-Saxon people have held steadfast to the belief that resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.”⁸⁹ The crowd’s roars echoed eerily through the hall.

A handbill floated around the Coliseum that declared war on black people, in the spirit of 1776.

“When in the course of human events it becomes necessary to abolish the Negro race, proper methods should be used. Among these are guns, bows and arrows, sling shots and knives.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” the handbill proclaimed, “that all whites are created equal with certain rights; among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of dead niggers.

“In every stage of the bus boycott we have been oppressed and degraded because of black slimy, juicy, unbearably stinking niggers. The conduct should not be dwelt upon because behind them they have an ancestral background of Pigmies, head hunters and snot suckers.

“My friends it is time we wised up to these black devils. I tell you they are a group of two legged agitators who persist in walking up and down our streets protruding their black lips. If we don’t stop helping these African flesh eaters, we will soon wake up and find Rev. King in the White House. LET’S GET ON THE BALL WHITE CITIZENS.”

“It is rather difficult right now to take a stand in favor of the preservation of the Union,” the Durrs wrote to a friend up north. “Our old pal, Eastland, has become the leader of the crusade for righteousness and racial purity and as he got an audience of between ten and fifteen thousand to hear him when he spoke here last week, I don’t think he can be laughed off, as irresponsible as he has proved himself to be. Black rather than red seems to be the incendiary color here, but they are rapidly beginning to identify them as one in the Southern Spectrum. Things are getting pretty rough.”⁹⁰

The tall, stately men greeted each other with a warm handshake. Asa Philip Randolph, sixty-six, had convened a meeting in his Harlem office on West 125th Street, headquarters of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, which he had founded and led for thirty years. A. J. Muste, four years older, had shepherded the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), an international Christian-based pacifist organization born with the First World War. They had been allies for years in campaigns for social justice. Both men came from Protestant religious backgrounds—Randolph’s father a Baptist preacher in Jacksonville, Florida, ministering to poor blacks. Randolph’s parents were children of slaves. Muste, who immigrated from Holland with his parents at age six, was an ordained minister of the Dutch Reformed Church, graduate of Union Theological Seminary. He had been forced out as pastor of a Congregational church near Boston because he opposed World War I.

Muste and Randolph were longtime democratic socialists with decades of labor leadership. Muste had led a nonviolent strike of textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1918, served as general secretary of the Amalgamated Textile Workers of America, then directed Brockwood Labor College, where many future CIO organizers learned the ropes. As a Trotskyite labor leader during the 1930s he played a key role in strikes and helped popularize the sit-down strike invented by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) auto workers. During the Depression decade his pacifism solidified; he resigned from the Old Left and took the helm of FOR. Under his leadership FOR put civil rights on the front burner and in 1942 cooked up the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), which conducted the first sit-ins to desegregate restaurants (and an ice-skating rink) in Chicago and other northern cities.

Randolph’s hard-earned success in winning recognition of his union in 1937, two years after passage of the New Deal’s National Labor Relations Act, made him the nation’s preeminent black labor leader. Four years later he mounted a massive march on Washington by black workers against job discrimination. Tens of thousands of his followers were readying a nonviolent confrontation on July 1, 1941, when President Roosevelt buckled. Prodded by his wife, Eleanor, the conscience of the White House, he issued an executive order banning racial discrimination in war industry. Although she opposed the march, the first lady had attended meetings with Randolph and other black leaders and sympathized with their cause.

The threat of thousands of black working men invading the segregated capital on the eve of global war proved to be the single most effective protest by African Americans, thus far. The outcome was largely symbolic, however, because the fair employment committee FDR set up had little enforcement power. Soon after the war ended, Randolph’s threat of nationwide civil disobedience to the first peacetime draft pressured President Truman to desegregate the armed forces in 1948. Some called Randolph the “American Gandhi.”

Randolph, the most influential black American, and Muste, dean of American pacifists, were the architects of the two main schools of nonviolent direct action in the United States. Randolph’s March on Washington Movement, which had moved on to organize wartime rallies and “Negro mass parliaments” to fight racism, combined Gandhian methods with mass direct-action techniques that CIO unions had employed in the 1930s. Muste’s FOR tradition stressed nonviolent solutions to war and racial conflict aiming at reconciliation. The FOR tradition was largely white and middle class, shaped explicitly by Gandhian practice, rigorously pacifist. It focused on small-group actions, was committed to interracialism, anchored in the Christian faith. By contrast, what Randolph called “nonviolent goodwill direct action” was shaped as much by the labor movement as by the Gandhian independence struggle. It featured mass action, aimed at mobilizing African Americans as an autonomous force, was working-class, democratic socialist, and secular. It placed racial justice ahead of peacemaking. Yet the two traditions, like Randolph and Muste, had more in common than not.

This February 20 meeting in Randolph’s book-lined office concerned a personal relationship the two men shared. They had been mentors to Bayard Rustin, who more than anyone else bridged these nonviolent traditions. His experience and skill in nonviolent direct action were unequaled among American pacifists; he had “an extraordinary way of pulling people into political action.”⁹¹ Muste had guided him more in personal, ethical, and spiritual ways, Randolph more in politics, ideology, and strategy. They were father figures to this forty-three-year-old man with no father of his own.

If Ingalls and Engelhardt were obsessed with the horror of black men’s sexuality as an overarching principle, Randolph, Muste, and their mostly white colleagues from FOR, CORE, and the War Resisters League, along with socialist leader Norman Thomas, worried about the sexuality of one black man in flesh and blood. Apart from his homosexual lifestyle, however, they held Rustin in high esteem. But three years earlier he had been arrested and jailed in Pasadena, California, for homosexual activity in a parked car, right after he had given an FOR public lecture. Muste had forced him to resign his FOR position as race-relations director.

The radicals had gathered to discuss how they as northern civil rights activists could support the Montgomery struggle, in light of the bombings of King’s and Nixon’s homes and the tightening noose of repression. But their urgent business was to pass judgment on the suggestion of white Georgia novelist and CORE activist Lillian Smith that Rustin go to Montgomery to help the beleaguered movement. Most of those present were adamantly opposed. Only Igal Roodenko of the War Resisters League, which Rustin served as executive secretary, backed the mission without reservation. Charles Lawrence, the black sociologist who chaired FOR, spoke sharply:

“It would be too easy for the police to frame him with his arrest in L.A. and his police record generally, and set back the whole cause there.”

FOR executive secretary John Swomley Jr. chimed in: “Whether or not there’s a frame-up, there could be an actual incident or something dramatic in which Bayard in his usual fashion becomes the focal point.”

Listening carefully to each side, Randolph and Muste made up their minds. Randolph believed that his protégé could help to make Montgomery a springboard for a Negro mass movement across the South, his dream for half his life. He offered to pay Rustin’s expenses. Muste concurred with Randolph’s OK. If a vote had been taken, the two elder statesmen would have lost. But none of the distinguished activists, not even five-time socialist presidential candidate Thomas, had the gall to challenge their judgment. Rustin left by car in the morning.

Businessman Ben Moore had built Montgomery’s only black-owned hotel after World War II, a showpiece of black uplift. After Rustin checked in, the clerk warned him to keep his window blinds tightly drawn. “This is like war,” he said, urging the tall lanky Yankee not to go out alone after dark. “If you find it necessary to do so, by all means leave in the hotel everything that identifies you as an outsider. They are trying to make out that Communist agitators and New Yorkers are running our protest.”⁹²

As usual Rustin took the risk. The street-smart New Yorker headed toward Court Square, the first capital of the Confederacy. He passed a car-pool lot where a team of disheveled winos camped out in station wagons, guarding the “rolling churches” against saboteurs.

What was strikingly different from everything he’d done—sitting down in segregated white restaurants in the North, defying Jim Crow seating on buses and trains, refusing to serve in the military during the war, threatening mass draft resistance to desegregate the military, leading FOR’s interracial Journey of Reconciliation in April 1947 to desegregate interstate bus transportation, and witnessing Gandhian protest in India—was that Parks’s action was unplanned, almost accidental. No tactical wizard like himself could have conjured a more suitable person to contest the bus segregation law and to rally around for a mass protest. He could never have organized such a perfect direct action. Quakers like Rustin didn’t usually think about God having a plan, but maybe God worked differently in the Deep South.

He walked up Dexter Avenue past King’s church, turned right on South Jackson Street below the brightly lit statehouse flying Alabama’s Confederate flag. He passed by the King parsonage, lit up with floodlights and strings of lightbulbs. Rifle-toting guards patrolled the perimeter. Heading deeper into Montgomery’s black west side, he found the home of Jeanetta Reese, two police cars parked in front. One of five plaintiffs in the Browder federal lawsuit that Fred Gray filed on February 1, she had told the press next day: “You know I don’t want nothing to do with that mess.”⁹³ She accused Gray of tricking her into signing the complaint. The county grand jury charged him with fraud and “unlawful appearance as an attorney.” If convicted, he could be disbarred. Rustin wanted her to withdraw the charges. First he had to get past the burly cops who were guarding her house.

“I am Bayard Rustin,” he said in the clipped British accent he had assumed as a young man. “I am here as a journalist working for Le Figaro and the Manchester Guardian.”⁹⁴ Whether it was persistence, tact, or the cops’ bewilderment, they let him approach her door. All she said was, “I had to do what I did or I wouldn’t be alive today.”⁹⁵ She was the cook for the mayor’s mother-in-law. She had earlier told a black reporter that her boss had threatened to fire her, as had her husband’s boss threatened to fire him. Menacing phone calls from White Citizens Council members threatened foreclosure of their home.⁹⁶ Rustin walked briskly back to the Ben Moore Hotel.

ON TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 21, the foreman of the Montgomery County Grand Jury, standing next to the county solicitor, announced to the press that they had indicted eighty-nine bus boycott leaders for violating a 1921 state law prohibiting conspiracies to interfere with a lawful business. Legislators had made the law, aimed at suppressing labor unrest, at the tail end of the nation’s Red Scare, after a bloody coal miners’ strike had shut down the state’s core industry. The Durrs were right. Black and red had bled into each other, become one.

The authorities, though woefully ignorant of the black community, understood that the protest had many leaders. “These indictments should not come as a surprise,” county solicitor William Thetford declared. “We are committed to segregation by custom and by law”—cameras flashing around him—“and we intend to maintain it.”⁹⁷

King was out of town at Fisk University on his first speaking tour. Cutting short his Nashville lectures, he flew to Atlanta to pick up Coretta and their baby daughter Yolanda at his parents’ home.

Emotions soaring, the indicted leaders gathered for an emergency meeting at Abernathy’s First Baptist Church. Abernathy had invited Rustin to attend and introduced him. He didn’t hesitate to offer advice. The leaders knew that the grand jury had been deliberating and heard rumors of the verdict, but they were staggered by the sweep of the dragnet. It was by far the largest mass indictment in Alabama history; the only larger indictment in the nation had been the roundup of 173 Wobbly (Industrial Workers of the World) organizers in Chicago during the First World War. They had expected King and a handful of others to be prosecuted. But two dozen ministers? Twenty-eight drivers? Doctors and dentists, hairdressers and schoolteachers? Would this doom the movement, or rescue it? Was it the death knell, or a disguised gift of grace giving new life? Hand the whites enough rope, some hoped, and they might hang themselves.

Leaders believed that the move to prosecute came as reply to the movement’s spurning of a proposal by the Men of Montgomery, a white businessmen’s group promoting industrial development. The group was alarmed that the prolonged protest was giving Montgomery a black eye, especially to northern investors. At the mass meeting the night before, the protesters voted to turn down the proposal that was apparently OK’d by officials. Rev. Roy Bennett and another pastor cast the only votes in favor. The offer did not differ from minor concessions the MIA had rejected before. A leader commented afterward that “the morale of the masses, once again, revived the morale of the leaders.”⁹⁸

After this mass meeting Abernathy had explained to the press, whom they did not allow inside, that they would gain little by accepting the proposal and “would have to return to the buses with increased rates besides. We have walked for eleven weeks in the cold and rain. Now the weather is warming up. Therefore,” he announced, “we will walk on until some better proposals are forthcoming from our city fathers.”⁹⁹

Now at their emergency meeting next day MIA leaders tossed around every option. Rustin goaded his Alabama friends to face their fear of jail. Discussion turned to whether they would wait to be arrested at home or work. Rev. H. H. Hubbard suggested they dress up like they were going to church and all go down to the courthouse together, showing their unity, the pastors up front. They would carry their churchly spirit to the courthouse.

“Let’s all go to jail!” the Reverend Seay hollered.¹⁰⁰ After a tense silence someone called for a vote. Half the ministers voted nay, but the lay people voted yea. The proposal carried. They closed with prayer.

NEXT MORNING, WEDNESDAY, Martin King was greeted at the Atlanta airport by his parents, wife, and baby daughter. Coretta appeared calm as usual, but his parents’ faces were chiseled with anguish. His parents would never be the same.

“My father, so unafraid for himself,” he recalled, “had fallen into a constant state of terror for me and my family. Many times he had sat in on our board meetings and never shown any doubt about the justice of our actions. Yet this stern and courageous man had reached the point where he could scarcely mention the protest without tears. My mother too had suffered. After the bombing she had had to take to bed under doctor’s orders and she was often ill later.”¹⁰¹

They were barely in the black Cadillac when Daddy King began preaching on the dangers of returning to Montgomery. “Although many others have been indicted,” he declared, “their main concern is to get you. They might even put you in jail without a bond.” He explained that a pair of Montgomery gumshoes had showed up at the Atlanta police station searching for a police record that would enable them to banish him from Alabama. The cops were dejected, Daddy King said with a strained chuckle, when his friend Chief Jenkins told them that King junior had never even been arrested. “All of this shows that they are out to get you.” He could spend the rest of his life rotting in Atmore prison, or be dead before thirty.

King was alarmed by his parents’ fragile emotional state. He knew that if he resumed battle in Montgomery the pain he caused them would plague him. “But if I eased out now,” he recalled, “I would be plagued by my own conscience, reminding me that I lacked the moral courage to stand by a cause to the end.”¹⁰² Above all, he had made a solemn vow to his divinity on the hallowed, harrowing night of January 27 that he would never give up the fight for righteousness. The divine voice had promised to stay with him forever—never to leave him alone, no never alone. He could not now, not ever, turn tail on such a sacred covenant. But how could he release his parents’ torment, the mother and father he loved to the depth of his soul, who loved him even more? As the older and younger couple hashed it out in the home that Martin knew so well, he found his anger rising at his father.

While Martin tried to explain why he could not abandon his coworkers, Coretta retreated upstairs with the baby. His blood pressure surged. He may have flashed back on childhood face-offs with his father; he may have remembered the sting of the lash. Now fully grown, a father himself, he was more afraid of his father’s tears than his rage.

A phone call from Abernathy broke the funereal mood, telling King of the march on the courthouse the next morning. But Daddy King persuaded his son to stay another day. Despairing of his own ability to change his son’s mind—his emotional whip only springing back on his own heart—he called for reinforcements.

THE OLD MONTGOMERY COUNTY Courthouse had always been a place of terror for the black community. Hardly a black family had a member or friend who had not been beaten, framed, or railroaded. How many untold victims had been imprisoned for crimes they had not committed? How many black men had been convicted on false charges of rape? Raw in the guts of many was the conviction of young Jeremiah Reeves, Claudette Colvin’s friend, for rape of a married white woman he was having a fling with. He awaited electrocution on Atmore’s death row. White cops were notorious for raping black women with impunity like their slave-owning forebears. The courthouse was a voracious machine for locking up black citizens on the slightest pretense. But when these citizens sought to register to vote, or serve on a jury, courthouse doors shut in their face.

Nixon, dressed to the nines, was the first to go in on Wednesday morning, a crowd cheering him as he proudly climbed the steps.

“You are looking for me?” he asked a stunned deputy in the sheriff’s office. “Here I am.”¹⁰³ They took a mug shot and fingerprints, then released him on three hundred dollars bail.

MIA leaders had sent out an emergency call for people to show up at the courthouse that morning for a prayer vigil and be willing to stay all day. The nearly one hundred defendants arrived at the courthouse, some marching in groups from their homes or churches. The mass turn-in “had a startling effect in both the Negro and the white communities,” Rustin wrote in his diary. “White community leaders, politicians, and police were flabbergasted. Negroes were thrilled to see their leaders surrender without being hunted down.”¹⁰⁴

As the sun grew warmer, the black assembly ballooned. A white reporter wrote that the triumphant feeling was like “old home week.”¹⁰⁵ By early afternoon gaggles of schoolkids had discovered the courthouse fair. Colvin may have come by with her just-born baby to show support; it was nearing the anniversary of her own arrest. Jokes flew back and forth, laughter blended with cheering the parade of heroes. The deputies’ stiff demeanor loosened; by lunchtime they were joining in the merriment. The Klan would have been apoplectic. For a sunny moment Montgomery’s civic life had been desegregated.

Sheriff Mac Butler walked out red-faced. “This is no vaudeville show!” he barked at his men.¹⁰⁶ The crowd exploded in laughter.

By midafternoon, when more than four score had been booked and bailed out, the defendants and several hundred supporters marched solemnly up Dexter Avenue and gathered in King’s church for a prayer meeting.

Without knowing quite what they were doing, the leaders had flawlessly conducted the first mass civil disobedience of the civil rights era. But it was disobedience turned into its opposite, mass civil obedience—an imaginative leap of collective action, contrived in grassroots spontaneity, that even Gandhi had never tried. Outdoing the Mahatma, they had marched to the courthouse to submit freely to arrest—showing the world, not least their own children and grandchildren, that they were no longer terrified of the white man’s jail. They were cleansing the forbidding gray courthouse of its corrosive evil, if only for a day, discharging its demonic spirits, freeing its ghosts from suffering. Those who were there that day would never again see the courthouse, or themselves, in the same way.

A LESS LOYAL SON might have considered it a trap. That same afternoon Daddy King assembled the black elite of Atlanta in his parlor: the leading black attorney, two prominent businessmen, editor of the Atlanta Daily World, bishop of the AME church, president of Atlanta University; and one whose advice it would be hardest for Martin to ignore: Benjamin Mays, president of Morehouse College, King’s alma mater. Rev. Mays, his first and most influential mentor, had shaped his growth nearly as much as his father had. Every Tuesday morning for four teenage years, the young man had listened to the president’s weekly sermon in the Morehouse chapel, drinking in the black social gospel that would drive his own life.

With undisguised emotion Daddy King told his longtime friends how fear for his son had caused him and his wife sleepless nights and great distress. He laid out his reasons for Martin to stay in Atlanta, with a fervent prayer to spare his son’s life. Martin listened soberly to his father’s plea. His parents had raised him to hold these elders in reverence. They were the giants of the Atlanta black community. One after another they backed up his father. But Martin stood his ground, following the commands of the divine and the needs of his flock.

“I must go back to Montgomery,” he told them. “My friends and associates are being arrested. It would be the height of cowardice for me to stay away. I would rather be in jail ten years than desert my people now. I have begun the struggle, and I can’t turn back. I have reached the point of no return.”¹⁰⁷ His father sobbed. Martin looked at his mentor.

“You’re right, son,” Mays said quietly.¹⁰⁸Daily World editor C. A. Scott concurred. Others followed.

The Atlanta attorney called Thurgood Marshall in New York, who promised that King would get the best legal help from NAACP lawyers. The visitors embraced Martin and Coretta and his parents, then walked out the door. From that hour on, the father knew that his son would be taken from him.

As before—about his son going to Boston, marrying Coretta, pastoring Dexter—once Daddy King had been forced to change his mind, he acted like a zealous convert. He drove with his son and daughter-in-law back to Montgomery at dawn.

When they arrived at the Kings’ home, Martin was mobbed by TV cameras. Abernathy drove King junior and senior to the courthouse, where a crowd of supporters greeted them. Abernathy had recounted with glee the exhilarating drama of the day before, saying with a laugh that some MIA people were upset to find their names not on the list. The three pastors, wearing white crosses on their lapels, fended off more cameras and microphones and mounted the courthouse steps. Just like his eighty-eight fellow conspirators, Martin was photographed, fingerprinted, and released on bond, offered by a Dexter church friend.

King had come far from his admonition to Dexter members when he took charge of their church that leadership never flowed up to the pulpit, but only from the pulpit down. He had learned that some rivers flowed upstream.

THE WEEK OF THE INDICTMENTS was the first week of Lent, the forty-day Christian season of praying, fasting, and servanthood—cleansing the soul, reconciling with sinners, and preparing for redemption, for the kingdom of God. As Lent encouraged ardent prayer, MIA leaders voted to turn the mass meetings into prayer meetings to magnify the spiritual nature of the struggle. The coming Friday would be a “Double P-Day” of prayer and pilgrimage: everyone would walk in solidarity, giving the drivers a holiday.

Adoption of prayer meetings dramatized the movement’s religious currents. For devout African Americans, especially in the Deep South, praying was central to everyday life. They believed that, just as they actually ate Jesus’ flesh and drank his blood in Holy Communion (like Catholics), prayer was a real-life conversation with Jesus, God, or holy spirit. Praying opened the channel that dissolved the boundary between the spirit world and ordinary life, much as meditation was understood by Hindus and Buddhists, inviting the Spirit in to enrapture one’s soul.

People filled up Abernathy’s First Baptist Church on Thursday, the day of King’s return, by midafternoon. They sang and prayed out loud till darkness fell. At 7 P.M. the eighty-nine heroes, a mix of class and gender, clergy and laity, the “classes” and the “masses,” strode down the aisle with sublime dignity. They were dressed brightly as if Easter had come early. Everyone in the pews stood and cheered; the clapping, stomping, whooping, and whistling rattled the stained-glass windows. Lights for TV cameras eerily lit the nave. It was the first mass meeting that network television covered, the first time the bus boycott was featured on page one of the New York Times.

“Overnight these leaders had become symbols of courage,” Rustin jotted in his diary. “Women held their babies to touch them.”¹⁰⁹ They stood arm to arm across the altar and circling back around the pews. King stood smiling at the pulpit, looking as though lifted up by the semicircle of light arcing around him. He managed to quiet the happy tumult. The show began, as usual, with the singing of “Onward Christian Soldiers,” the movement’s anthem, then a prayer to God “not to leave us in this hour.” Rev. U. J. Fields brought a message from Saint Paul:

“Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels,” he recited, “but have not love, I have become as sounding brass or a clanging cymbal.

“And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.

“And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing.

“Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

“Love never fails. And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”¹¹⁰

All stood and sang lustily, “O lift me up and let me stand on higher ground.”

King gave that night’s pep talk. He declared that the long winter protest was about an unceasing stream of injustices that “go deep down into the archives of history,” three centuries of white supremacy.

“It is one of the greatest glories of America that we have the right of protest, the right to protest for right.” Loud clapping, cheering, and whistling. “Tell it doctor!” “That’s all right!” “We can’t stop now.”

“There are those who would try to make of this a hate campaign,” he warned. “This is not war between the white and the Negro but a conflict between justice and injustice. This is bigger than the Negro race revolting against the white. We are seeking to improve not the Negro of Montgomery but the whole of Montgomery. We are not struggling merely for the rights of Negroes but for all the people of Montgomery, black and white. We are determined to make America a better place for all people. Ours is a nonviolent protest. We pray God that no man shall use arms.

“If we are arrested every day, if we are exploited every day, if we are trampled over every day, don’t ever let anyone pull you so low as to hate them. We must use the weapon of love. We must have compassion and understanding for those who hate us. We must realize so many people are taught to hate us that they are not totally responsible for their hate. But we stand in life at midnight, and we are always on the threshold of a new dawn.”¹¹¹

Ministers took turns leading prayers for success of the meeting, strength of spirit to carry on nonviolently, strength of body to walk for freedom, and for all people to live in justice and equality. The Reverend Seay led the assembly in “a prayer for those who oppose us,” the toughest of the prayers.¹¹² By forgiving their adversaries, protesters sought to convert them in their hearts, turning enemies into friends, moving toward reconciliation and a new relationship. Loving their enemy would loosen the grip of fear, fortifying their courage when faith might falter.

BECAUSE KING WAS OUT OF TOWN when he had arrived in Montgomery, Rustin sought out Abernathy, who invited him to strategy meetings and put him to work drafting a position paper and composing a song. On Friday, February 24, he walked up the front stoop of the King parsonage. Coretta King greeted him with an excited smile.

“I know you, Mr. Rustin.” She told him that he had lectured about nonviolent resistance to segregation at her high school in Marion, then later she heard him at Antioch College in Ohio.

“Bayard told me how strongly he felt about our work,” she recalled, and his desire to turn it into a nonviolent movement all over the country.¹¹³ When Martin got home, he greeted the visitor he had heard so much about with warm respect. We can imagine Rustin telling the young couple his life story: how he had been born out of wedlock to a caring Quaker family in West Chester, Pennsylvania; about the deep Quaker faith instilled in him; about his days as a popular New York folksinger and as a youth organizer for the Young Communist League, then as race relations secretary for the Fellowship of Reconciliation during the 1940s; about his constant travels lecturing about nonviolent methods, his twenty-eight months in federal prisons for resisting the draft during the war. Then working with Randolph to integrate the military, and leading the first freedom ride, the Journey of Reconciliation in spring 1947, to desegregate interstate buses in the upper South. For seeking to enforce a Supreme Court ruling, he was sentenced to thirty days in a wretched North Carolina prison camp. His New York Post articles about the black chain gang he worked on—in which he forged a mutually respectful relationship with the white gang boss—led to reform of North Carolina’s prison system.

The next morning, Saturday, undertaker Rufus Lewis invited Rustin to attend a meeting of car-pool drivers, women and men from all walks of life. These were the twenty-eight-plus full-time drivers who had submitted to arrest three days before, charged with conspiracy to shut down the bus company.

“The success of the car pool is at the heart of the movement,” Lewis opened the meeting. “It must not be stopped.”¹¹⁴ Rustin had predicted that some drivers, fearing jail, would back out. He was astonished when, one after another, these Christian soldiers pledged that they would be arrested again and again if necessary. The problem wasn’t with the drivers, though a few had pocketed money meant for tires or repairs, but an alarming shortage of cars.

After the meeting Rustin grabbed the nearest phone and called New York.

“Mr. Randolph, there’s a need for automobiles. Do you think we can get enough middle-class blacks to give up their automobiles?”

“I don’t think so, Bayard,” he replied. “But I’ll tell you what to do. Go up to Birmingham, where the steelworkers are making enough money to afford two cars. Ask them to donate their second car.”¹¹⁵

That afternoon, MIA leaders turned down a proposal that people be asked to stop work for an hour in late March to show support for the boycott, an idea floated nationally by Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. They endorsed an alternative proposal for a nationwide day of prayer at the end of Lent spearheaded by black Baptist and AME church leaders and sympathetic white clergy.

“We do not want to place too much of a burden upon white housewives,” King put in, “nor to give them the impression that we are pushing them against the wall.” Rustin was heartened by the MIA’s attitude, which he felt “adhered to the Gandhian principle of consideration for one’s opponents.”¹¹⁶ He was struck by the movement’s split personality: adhering to Gandhian precepts by day, flagrantly violating them with armed guards at night.

In the evening several leaders gathered with Rustin, upon his suggestion, to brainstorm ideas for another basic Gandhian element: a “constructive program” that would help spread the meaning of nonviolent struggle in the wider community, especially to moderate whites. Nothing as grandiose as a South-wide campaign of cotton spinning or other home industry to build economic self-sufficiency, as Gandhi might have suggested. They came up with ideas for a national high school essay contest on “Why We Should Use Nonviolence in Our Struggle,” and to promote preaching of nonviolent principles in all churches, white and black. They considered Rustin’s proposal for a workshop on nonviolent skills to train people to lead resistance campaigns in other southern cities. He felt sure that this was the time to take the movement on the road. They would fail in Montgomery, he warned, if they didn’t grow a broader movement against segregated transportation. He would hit the road sooner than he had imagined.

Rustin recalled that he and King “hit it off immediately,” but the protest leader “had very limited notions about how a nonviolent protest should be carried out. When I first got there, the leadership were carrying guns, had Dr. King’s home, and the homes of others, protected day and night by men, not only with shotguns, but with pistols. In fact two days after I got down there, CORE activist Bill Worthy”—a reporter for the Baltimore Afro-American who at the height of McCarthyism had defied the government by traveling to Communist China—“walked into Dr. King’s house, and was about to sit down, and I said, ‘Oh, Bill, wait, wait, Bill. Couple of guns in that chair. You don’t want to shoot yourself.’

“I do not believe,” Rustin asserted two decades after King’s death, “that one does honor to Dr. King by assuming that, somehow, he had been prepared for this job. He had not been prepared for it: either tactically, strategically, or his understanding of nonviolence. The glorious thing is that he came to a profoundly deep understanding of nonviolence through the struggle itself, and through reading and discussions which he had in the process of carrying on the protest.

“It was as he began to discuss nonviolence,” Rustin contended, “as the newspapers throughout the country began to describe him as one who believed in nonviolence, he automatically took himself seriously because other people were taking him seriously.”

He remembered a vital dialogue about the Indian revolution, which fascinated King. Rustin explained to him that “the great masses of Indians who were followers of Gandhi did not believe in nonviolence. They believed in nonviolence as a tactic: the British can, in fact, be won over without violence. But it was precisely what I discussed with Dr. King that, because the followers will seldom, in the mass, be dedicated to nonviolence in principle, that the leadership must be dedicated to it in principle, to keep those who believe in it as a tactic operating correctly. But if, in the flow and the heat of battle, a leader’s house is bombed, and he shoots back, that is an encouragement to his followers to pick up guns. If, on the other hand, he has no guns around him, and they all know it, they will rise to the nonviolent occasion.”¹¹⁷

On Sunday night, February 26, Rustin relaxed with Martin and Coretta King in their parlor. Rustin told King that he and his movement were sowing the seeds of Gandhi in the soil of the South. People felt in his presence what one had felt around Gandhi. Nevertheless, he was betraying nonviolent principles. Having guns in his home and armed guards outside not only was hypocritical but would invite more violence than it would repel.

The movement “is nonviolent,” King replied stiffly. “We’re not going to harm anybody unless they harm us.”¹¹⁸ If the whites don’t attack us, he said, we won’t attack them. But he believed that black people had the right to defend their homes and families. Rustin responded that in this historic situation such rights were trumped by a greater moral responsibility. A commitment to Gandhian nonviolence called for unconditional rejection of retaliation, even in self-defense.

“I’m for peaceful evolution rather than damaging revolution,” King insisted, but he was a practical man, and this was Alabama. “When a chicken’s head is cut off,” he said, “it struggles most when it’s about to die. A whale puts up its biggest fight after it has been harpooned. It’s the same thing with the southern white man. Maybe it’s good to shed a little blood. What needs to be done is for a couple of those white men to lose some blood. Then the federal government will step in.”¹¹⁹

Give us until Easter, he said. “The spirit of nonviolence may so have permeated our community by that time that the whole Negro community will react nonviolently.”¹²⁰

“Dr. King, I have a feeling that you had better prepare yourself for martyrdom, because I don’t see how you can make the challenge that you are making here without a very real possibility of your being murdered. I wonder if you have made your peace with that.”

The preacher replied that he and Coretta had long talks about his death, and her death, lying in bed late at night, steadying each other. They had prayed over it together, knowing that it would be a lot easier without a child. But they had come to accept the inevitable.

“I have the feeling,” Rustin said softly, “the Lord has laid his hands on you and that is a dangerous, dangerous thing.”¹²¹

Rustin reported to WRL colleagues that the boycott leaders “are clear that they will have no part in starting violence. There is, however, considerable confusion on the question as to whether violence is justified in retaliation to violence directed against the Negro community. At present,” he understated, “there is no careful, nonviolent preparation for any such extreme situation.”¹²²

THE NEXT NIGHT another prayer meeting took place, this time at Holt Street Baptist Church, where it had all started three months before.

“Direct us, Lord God,” Rev. J. W. Barnes called out. “Tell us what you want us to do. We know that no harm can come over us with your hand over us.”

“Even those who oppose us,” Abernathy began his pep talk, “must agree that this is a spiritual movement. It gives us just room for giving thanks to God. We are not trying to put any firm out of business. This is not a matter of economic reprisal. The buses can run the streets as long as they please, but we’re going to continue to walk. Thanks must go to fifty thousand Montgomery Negroes. This is your movement. We don’t have any leaders in this movement. You are the leaders.” Wild cheers. “That’s right!” “You know it, Rev!” “Lord have mercy!”

“Someone asked me yesterday,” he continued, “ ‘Who are the leaders?’ ”

“We are!” many cried out. “There ain’t no leaders!” one yelled. People shouted back and forth, arguing whether all were leaders, or none were. Or was God their leader?

“There are too many people to talk at once,” Abernathy broke into the cacophony, setting off laughter. “Since we can’t all talk at once, we talk through one unified voice. We tell Reverend King what to say and he says what we want him to say. He is our mouthpiece, the mouthpiece of fifty thousand Negroes of Montgomery.”

“Make us strong,” Rev. Smith prayed, “to walk the sea of time.”

Rev. Hubbard preached: “For the past eighty-four days many of us have sacrificed, suffered, and have been put in jail. The end is not here yet. The novelty has worn away, and we’re down to the deep roots of the situation. We’ve emptied ourselves of pent-up emotions. Something will fill that vacuum—what it is remains up to you.

“This is not local,” he continued. “It did not begin in Montgomery. But it was in Montgomery that God chose us to play this all-important role. We must accomplish the will of God. The white church does not practice what it preaches—the Brotherhood of man and the Fatherhood of God. We must grab the whites with a spiritual hand”—he clasped his hands firmly and brought them to his chest—“and tell them, ‘We love you as though you were our very own.’ We must not fail God in this hour.

“It used to be,” he said in closing, “that the white man could toe us along. The white man has discovered that Negroes are no longer afraid to go to jail. I spent Wednesday night in jail. Remember this day, the year of our Lord, 1956. I stayed home all day waiting on them.” Finally he walked down to the courthouse. “They tried to fingerprint me and were all thumbs. When they finished they couldn’t tell what it was. They tried to do it again and I said, ‘Don’t bother, mister, I’ll do it myself.’ ” The crowd howled. “We don’t mind going to jail, giving our lives.”¹²³

Seeing the people slowly leave the church, a sparkling sea of smiles and embraces, Rustin scribbled in his diary: “I had a feeling that no force on earth can stop this movement.” It had all the elements, he believed, to transform the human heart.¹²⁴

The visitor knew that he was being watched. He minimized phone calls because he assumed they were tapped. Montgomery police awkwardly followed him. Twice when two northern white reporters questioned him in public, two cops “stood over us with the most menacing expressions,” he wrote WRL colleagues. “When I called one of the girls to ask her not to contact me publicly, she told me to be careful, that every move I made was being watched; that I should be prepared to leave town by car at a moment’s notice; that the rumor was being spread by a reporter on The Advertiser, the local paper, that I was a communist NAACP organizer; and that the Rev. Abernathy, trained in Moscow, and I were planning a violent uprising. So I must be prepared if necessary to leave here.”¹²⁵ Rumors swirled that he was about to be arrested for fraud, or inciting a riot.

It wasn’t only the FBI, white police, and reporters who were alarmed by Rustin’s presence. Emory Jackson, Birmingham World editor and moderate activist, warned Nixon and other MIA leaders that he would expose Rustin’s leftwing baggage if they didn’t send him packing. Meanwhile across the Atlantic, the Manchester Guardian and Le Figaro were investigating the alleged impostor posing as a correspondent—the Guardian reportedly offering a reward. Later, he cleared up the problem with the European journals, to which he submitted articles about the protest but denied he had identified himself as a correspondent.¹²⁶

Although they valued his advice and loved to hear him sing, some MIA leaders resented Rustin’s arrogant style. They felt the sophisticated New Yorker was patronizing to his less educated southern brethren.

White Lutheran minister Robert Graetz, who pastored a black congregation, recalled that “we had almost a paranoia about anybody getting involved who was related to any kind of a subversive or questionable organization.” Indeed the national NAACP, to which many in the MIA belonged, was conducting its own purge of alleged Communists. It was determined to ward off repression that might destroy the half-century-old organization, in which liberals like Roy Wilkins and radicals like W. E. B. Du Bois had long battled.

“We were just on our guard constantly,” Graetz stated. So anxious were they that he and other leaders talked frequently with an air force intelligence officer from nearby Maxwell Field keeping tabs on the movement. On a regular basis Graetz reported to a local FBI agent. “If you don’t mind,” the agent had introduced himself, “I’ll be checking in with you occasionally.”¹²⁷ It is possible that Graetz told the FBI agent about Rustin’s arrival. During the early civil rights movement, despite the FBI’s anticommunist obsession, activists believed that the agency was a neutral force if not benign, being an arm of the Department of Justice. They had no idea of the extent of FBI collusion with southern cops, with whom they were often pals.

Nixon called Randolph, his boss in the railroad porters’ union, on Monday night, February 27. He asked why Rustin had been sent, whether he could be trusted. Randolph vouched for his longtime associate. But he knew the moment had come to get him out of there. Yet he believed, from reports he had heard, that Rustin’s intervention had done far more good than harm.

Next morning he made urgent calls to the same leaders who had reluctantly signed off on his and Muste’s plea to approve Rustin’s mission. An even bigger group than two weeks earlier gathered in his Harlem office, which as before included Muste, Norman Thomas, James Farmer, and John Swomley Jr., who had recently taken the helm of FOR when seventy-year-old Muste retired. A key concern, knowing Rustin’s talent for self-embroidery, was that he was taking credit for more than he prudently should. He was not known for humility.

“Should we recall Bayard from Montgomery?” Randolph somberly asked the two dozen seasoned activists. Only strong-willed Igal Roodenko of WRL pushed for him to stay. A printer and World War II draft resister, Roodenko had served time in federal prison with Rustin. Later, arrested in the 1947 freedom ride Rustin led, Roodenko was given the longest jail sentence. The North Carolina judge berated him: “It’s about time you Jews from New York learned that you can’t come down here bringing your nigras with you to upset the customs of the South. Just to teach you a lesson, I gave your black boy thirty days, and I now give you ninety.” Rustin, said black boy, had kidded Roodenko, “See, there are certain advantages to being black.”¹²⁸

Now nearly a decade later, Randolph and his colleagues concluded that “there were very serious elements of danger to the movement there for Bayard to be present,” Swomley noted. Randolph reported that “influential leaders down there had phoned him to find out whether Bayard was the genuine article, and whether they should cooperate with him. He is obviously being watched, in view of the fact that he has been accused of being a Communist and coming down from the North.”

The meeting reached consensus, Swomley summed up, “that we should not try from the North to train or otherwise run the nonviolent campaign in Montgomery, as Bayard had hoped to do, but rather to expect them to indicate ways in which we could be of help.” This realization transcended the issue of Rustin’s role. Many in the room had hoped that they would lead the civil rights crusade they had long awaited. Now they were shifting to a role of backup support. Rustin had been the lightning rod.

Randolph closed the meeting by observing that “the Montgomery leaders have managed a mass resistance campaign thus far more successfully than any of our so-called nonviolence experts.” He referred not only to Rustin. “We should learn from them, rather than assume that we know it all.”¹²⁹ They were not just pulling Rustin from the battlefield. Reluctantly, they were removing themselves.

Rustin’s critics in New York fretted that he might not leave. “There are some here,” Swomley wrote to an FOR organizer just arrived in Montgomery, “who feel the local leaders ought to know about Bayard’s personal problem but dare not mention it over the phone. They ought to know the risks that are being taken and if they are prepared to accept those risks then it is not our responsibility.”¹³⁰ This was the first time that the prospect of exposing Rustin’s homosexuality—“outing” him, in later parlance—had been broached. Among sympathizers it would have been dynamite. What would enemies do if they got wind of this bombshell?

Rustin did not dally. On the last day of February, three black sedans pulled up in the Ben Moore’s back parking lot. Rustin and Bill Worthy were waiting for them. Rustin folded his tall body into the trunk of one car, hugging his luggage. Worthy lay down on the backseat. Rustin assumed the drivers were armed. The three sedans, their contraband cargo in the middle car, drove off in the black night. Minutes later they crossed the Alabama River, heading north to Birmingham.

John Swomley and Charles Lawrence, the FOR leaders who attended the meetings in Randolph’s office, were making their own plans to assist the suddenly exploding movement. After the approval of Rustin’s mission, they decided to send their own organizer, Glenn Smiley, into the Montgomery cauldron—“not to compete or collaborate with Bayard,” their former race relations director, but to carve out their own niche.¹³¹ When Rustin was compelled to leave Montgomery, the field was clear. Rustin was too eager to take charge, they felt. They would tread more lightly, more attuned to southern rhythms. Their determination to upstage him showed the extent to which FOR had ostracized their star performer of the postwar era.