Smiley, forty-five, was a white Methodist minister raised in Texas who had pastored churches in the Southwest and joined the FOR staff in 1942. Like Rustin, whom he considered “my guru” in nonviolence, he had been imprisoned as a draft resister during the war. He was teaching nonviolent methods and fostering interracial links in southern hot spots when he was sent to Montgomery. He did not share his superiors’ umbrage toward Rustin; he admired his mentor. FOR wanted him to set the stage for effective negotiations to resolve the bus dispute. But King, who was expecting him, had bigger plans.
Rustin’s last act before hastily leaving Montgomery had been to introduce his former colleague to King on February 28. King knew what he wanted from the warm-hearted white southerner. Having just been upbraided by Rustin for his shortcomings, he asked Smiley to “teach me all you know about nonviolence,” and to teach nonviolent methods in Montgomery and across the South. He asked him to assist other protests and to organize support groups of white ministers. “I would try to build bridges with the white community in Montgomery, as well as serve as an open and above-board intelligence by which Dr. King could be kept informed about white thinking.” He would keep watch on the White Citizens Council, even the Klan. Smiley asked King what he knew about Gandhi.
“I know very little about the man,” King replied, “although I’ve always admired him.”132 Smiley was taken aback. He handed him an armful of books on Gandhi and nonviolence, including works by Richard Gregg, Krishnalal Shridharani, and Aldous Huxley. Smiley was impressed that King borrowed from these writers at the next mass meeting.
The minister told him about the bombing of his family.
“Dr. King,” Smiley cut in, echoing Rustin’s concern, “I’m afraid that I have to say that I think they will kill you.”
“I know,” he replied softly. “Coretta and I have already settled this in many a dark and sleepless night.”133 Many a dark and sleepless night—Smiley remembered those words forty years later. When he mentioned “the committee,” nickname for the armed bodyguards, King mused, “You know, I feel like a hypocrite because I talk about nonviolence yet I have a gun.”134
Smiley cautioned that “the law of retaliation is the law of the multiplication of evil,” a notion that intrigued King; he would make it his own. He asked his guest to accompany him to a press conference with reporters from as far away as Bombay.
“Dr. King,” a journalist queried, “downtown they say you are a communist. What do you reply to this?”
He laughed his baritone laugh.
“Well, I am Negro, I am a Baptist minister, and if after saying that you would believe that I were a communist, you would believe most anything.” Everyone laughed. But he didn’t leave it there. He gave a thumbnail lecture on Marx and Hegel and where he differed, concluding that Marx got the problem right but the solution wrong. And how could he believe in a godless religion?135
In a letter to FOR colleagues Smiley wrote that King told him he “had Gandhi in mind when this thing started,” that he was “aware of the dangers to him inwardly, wants to do it right, but is too young and some of his close help is violent. King accepts, as an example, a body guard, and asked for a permit for them to carry guns. This was denied by the police, but nevertheless, the place is an arsenal. King sees the inconsistency, but not enough. He believes and yet he doesn’t believe. The whole movement is armed in a sense, and this is what I must convince him to see as the greatest evil. If he can really be won to a faith in nonviolence there is no end to what he can do.”136
“The die has been cast,” Smiley reported to fellow clergy around the country. “There is a crisis of terrifying intensity, and I believe that God has called Martin Luther King to lead a great movement here and in the South. But why does God lay such a burden on one so young, so inexperienced, so good? King can be a Negro Gandhi, or he can be made into an unfortunate demagogue destined to swing from a lynch mob’s tree. That is why I am writing more than two dozen people of prayer across the nation, asking that they hold Martin Luther King in the light.”137
He delivered a note to King telling of his appeal to clergy to pray for him. He quoted Gandhi: “ ‘If one man could achieve the perfect love it is enough to neutralize the hatred of millions.’ Who knows? Maybe in Montgomery someone may achieve this perfect love! I am at your service.”138
On Thursday night, March 1, King and Abernathy entered the packed church amid rousing cadences of “When the Saints Go Marching In.” Lewis pleaded for more car owners to drive in the car pool and for people to walk shorter distances. At the peak of an emotional prayer a woman shook and shrieked in hysterics. When the Reverend Lambert gave a long-winded “singing prayer,” many grew impatient. King’s discomfort made him squirm. He covered his face, first one hand, then the other, to keep from cracking up. An observer noted: “It was comical to me to see him fighting with himself and to note his definite relief once the prayer had ended.”139
Smiley, introduced by King, was stunned by the power of the gathering, gratified by the applause he got for his talk on Gandhi’s work in India. “Religious fervor is high and they are trying to keep it spiritual,” he reported to FOR. “They are sure this is the will of God. We can learn from their courage and plain earthy devices for building morale.” But, he added pointedly, “they can learn more from us.”140
Unlike most of his fellow leaders and followers, King joined the bus boycott committed to a qualified Christian nonviolence. If his grasp of it had been rooted mainly in the New Testament, it might have looked more like the Gandhian nonviolence espoused by Rustin and Smiley. But King’s faith-based nonviolence was anchored in the Hebrew Scriptures and had been tempered by Reinhold Niebuhr’s compelling conception of evil. The young preacher’s makeshift philosophy differed from that of Gandhi and his radical pacifist disciples in that he faced sin squarely, without illusion, like the Hebrew prophets. He believed that love could not endure without the power to defeat evil that revolted against love—and that this power of justice and righteousness required coercion as well as suasion.
Thus in his own mind he was not being inconsistent when to Rustin he defended guns in his house and asserted that his concept of nonviolence might allow armed self-defense as a last resort—when attackers came to his own door. The gun might be needed still as an instrument of justice, if it was the only way to keep love alive. But in a matter of weeks, through patient tutoring by Rustin, Smiley, and others, King came to reject all use of violence. When he picked up Smiley at the airport in April, he told him that he had put down the sword. It had gotten too heavy. Another time at another airport he said to Smiley that what mattered to him more than tactics was, “Can I apply nonviolence to my heart?”141
His developing ideas shaped by the two American Gandhian traditions imported by Rustin and Smiley respectively, during 1956 King forged an amalgam of Gandhian nonviolence and black Christian faith, in oratory and mass action. This was fifty years after Gandhi invented satyagraha—“truth force” or “soul force”—in a South African protest against white racism. If, as King later wrote, “Christ furnished the spirit and motivation, while Gandhi furnished the method,” black Protestant practice provided much of the method as well, particularly mobilizing rituals like call-and-response preaching, praying, and singing hymns and spirituals.142
Although refined by FOR’s faith-based pacifism, which itself blended Gandhian with Christian motifs, King’s resolutely Christian nonviolence did not derive so much from the moral reform tradition of evangelical Protestantism, of which FOR was an offshoot, with its accent on moral perfectibility. He fashioned it more from values, themes, rituals, and other resources of the African-American religious experience rooted in slavery—despite his reservations about the slave-based religion’s wildness, which he sought to tame, to rationalize, to modernize. His philosophy centered on the black social gospel tradition he had picked up from his father, grandfather, and other activist preachers. His signal contribution to nonviolent protest was to incorporate Gandhian principles and techniques into the black church culture that had nurtured him, and to do so in ways that enabled the church culture to manifest powerfully its latent legacy of resistance.
King would bring together Randolph’s Gandhian mass action with black social gospel to create a synthesis of visionary but pragmatic nonviolent politics. If Randolph’s goodwill direct action was more strategic and operational, applied social gospel unleashed prophetic fire.
Unlike its better-known white counterpart, the black social gospel tradition was driven more by the Old Testament than by the New. It sought to merge the two Bibles in ways that much of white Christianity shied away from. One reason that King was so drawn to Niebuhr’s neoorthodox theology was that in his reclaiming of Hebrew Scriptures Niebuhr began in roughly the same place as did the black Christian belief system: with the problem of evil, its omnipresence in human life, and prophetic resistance to it. The basis of the white social gospel of Walter Rauschenbusch and others was that people were naturally good, original sin notwithstanding, and were corrupted by sinful social structures.
The basis of black social gospel was that, from the time of Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel, evil had overtaken the world and its peoples. Black spirituality took the Devil for real, which was a defining theme of African-American literature. It was presently Satan’s world as much as God’s. Every person, though created in God’s image, was cleaved by a jagged fault line between contending forces of good and evil. God was commanding humankind, especially black people, to pursue a messianic mission to fight the Devil and win the world back for God and goodness, which included cleansing each soul from inside out.
Human fighters for good and justice must wield prodigious power, as channels or proxies of God, to vanquish the evil Goliath, within and without. This power must be equivalent to the power God wielded to part the Egyptian sea, which brought “the death of evil upon the seashore,” the theme of a sermon King gave in May; power on a par with lightning and thunder, storms and floods. Mere moral witness, useful, necessary, and mandated by Jesus, was hardly sufficient as a weapon against evil. Nonviolent methods had to be more powerful than violent ones, applications of greater mass and energy. Mass nonviolent power fused physical with psychological, moral, and spiritual force: the Godlike power of moral absolutes, certitudes, and commandments, fueled by fervent faith.
Such mighty sacred force had to be tempered and bounded by compassion, sensitive understanding, and humility—qualities compressed in what King called goodwill, the love that Paul honored in his first letter to the Corinthians. The grace of goodwill—“the love of God working in the lives of men”—not only rendered righteousness a power that could be wielded safely by mortal beings. It also deepened this power by making it simultaneously a force for personal conversion and transformation, for releasing one’s inner evil, for realizing one’s higher self—the “better angels of our nature,” as Lincoln put it. This difficult alchemy of justice and love was the only way to avert psychological legacies of hatred and bitterness, and to bring about long-term social healing, the mending of broken community.
Traditional pacifism and Gandhian nonviolence, especially that reflected by FOR, stressed the power of love alone to effect change. The nonviolent philosophy King synthesized aspired to be more dynamic and dialectical. It would combine two divinely originated forces, as he interpreted them, into one—the power of justice and righteousness and the power of agape, or creative goodwill. If the power of love could transform individual hearts and minds, righteousness grappled with collective, structural evil. King sought to merge these two powers, incompatible on the surface, into a seamless union more potent than the sum of its parts; in philosophy and rhetoric, if not easily in action—or in one’s heart. The moral passion for justice would be even stronger, more irresistible, could truly part waters, move mountains, make ways out of no way, when leavened by the unifying force of compassion.
“Love must be at the forefront of our movement if it is to be a successful movement,” he told Smiley at their first meeting. “When we speak of love, we speak of understanding goodwill toward all men. We speak of a redemptive, a creative sort of love.” Then he shifted accent marks.
“We see that the real tension is not between the Negro citizens of Montgomery and the white citizens,” he said to his new white friend, “but it is a conflict between justice and injustice, between the forces of light and the forces of darkness. If there is a victory—and there will be a victory—the victory will not be merely for the Negro citizens and a defeat for the white citizens. It will be a victory for justice and a defeat of injustice. It will be a victory for goodness in its long struggle with the forces of evil. This is a spiritual movement.”143
Love or compassion necessitated justice and vice versa. The bus protest served as crucible for the faith that good would ultimately triumph over evil.
ACTIVIST WRITER LILLIAN SMITH, fifty-eight, who had first proposed that Rustin go to Montgomery, had grown up in an affluent Georgia family and sparked controversy with her 1944 novel, Strange Fruit, about a steamy interracial romance in the Deep South. It was banned in Boston and Detroit, sold 3 million copies, and was translated into fifteen languages. She had been fighting breast cancer for three years. Her Georgia home had just been burned to the ground by white teenagers aroused by her threatening creed. All of her manuscripts, her current work, library, records, and seven thousand letters were destroyed. Notwithstanding her own struggles, she was thrilled by the Montgomery protest, which embodied the values she held dear. She wrote King that at the end of World War II she had suggested to Morehouse president Benjamin Mays (when King was a sophomore) that “the Negroes begin a nonviolent religious movement. But the time had not come for it.” She had no money to send right now, but rather “a spoonful of advice: don’t let outsiders come in and ruin your movement. You know the fury a northern accent arouses in the confused South. The white South is irrational about this business of ‘outsiders.’ ”144
“Irrational” was putting it mildly. The white South was still traumatized by the Civil War and Reconstruction, sharing a collective post-traumatic stress disorder. Despite Lincoln’s prophetic words, there had been no reconciliation. Yankees were still the enemy. They had ravaged the southern way of life in the exceedingly bloody war. In the aftermath they had imposed a regime of conquer and plunder whose “carpetbaggers” bamboozled Negroes to be their political pawns in remaking the South according to northern designs. This was the version of southern history still taught North and South: the narrative of southern defeat and redemption popularized by D. W. Griffith’s breathtaking 1915 film, The Birth of a Nation, which made the Ku Klux Klan heroic and helped inspire the Klan’s rebirth in the 1920s.
The white southern mind believed in 1956 as doggedly as in 1866 that indolent, illiterate Negroes were incapable of mounting effective resistance to white supremacy—and had no desire to. Challenges to the southern way of life could be orchestrated only by northerners. Anything else was unimaginable—or imagined only in that most diabolical of nightmares, slave rebel Nat Turner’s return. Everywhere they looked, both respectable and extremist whites (often one and the same) saw evidence of Yankee conspiracy.
The two-year-old Brown decision was the tip of the iceberg. A new army of carpetbaggers was infiltrating the Southland. King might have grown up in Atlanta, but he had been brainwashed in elite northern schools. Bayard Rustin, Glenn Smiley—the old familiar pattern was repeating itself. No wonder the Montgomery-area White Citizens Council had mushroomed in a few months to be the largest in the South. Segregationists were fighting not only the “second Reconstruction,” but a second Civil War—and this time, by God, they would prevail. Slavery might have proved ultimately untenable, but the Jim Crow system, they convinced themselves, had matured into a viable and reliable protector of racial peace. Separate but equal had been the national rule for sixty years, until a northern cabal led by communist dupe Earl Warren had thrown it out in a judicial coup d’état.
A rift opened up among northern activists over whether they should be involved in the South’s new awakening and if so, how. King and MIA leaders were torn because, in their darker days, they doubted whether they could succeed without northern help. Yet they had to show the world and themselves that they could manage on their own. After visiting Montgomery, Unitarian minister and FOR leader Homer Jack, from suburban Chicago, suggested that northern activists, white and black, had a valuable role to play. Socialist leader Norman Thomas wrote back: “I do not think it good to send Northerners into that Montgomery situation,” especially someone with dark skin. He warned about Rustin, toeing the line of Swomley and James Farmer: “He is entirely too vulnerable on his record—and I do not mean his record as a c.o. [conscientious objector].”145
Jack replied to Thomas that northerners should help out if asked. As for Rustin, “I can attest that he did a necessary job which nobody else apparently had the foresight to do: to help indoctrinate the Negro leadership into some of the techniques of Gandhism.”146 Indoctrinate was a telling word.
To iron out this dilemma, Rustin and William Worthy sneaked back to Montgomery to meet with King on March 7. Rustin was still hotly pursued by Montgomery police. He awoke in his Ben Moore hotel room to find his face gracing the front page of the Montgomery Advertiser, headline screaming: “Who is this man? He is wanted for inciting to riot.”147 In their meeting the trio spelled out three areas in which outsiders could play a role: mentoring leaders, as they were doing with King; literature, logistics, and fund-raising; and nonviolent education to spread the protest.
Rustin left fired up to marshal northern support and stimulate further protests. Returning to New York, he joined Muste and Farmer to create the Committee for Nonviolent Integration, which held workshops on nonviolent resistance for southern black leaders. This short-lived support committee complemented In Friendship, a group just founded by NAACP leader Ella Baker to “provide economic assistance to those suffering economic reprisals” in the civil rights struggle.148 Besides giving financial, technical, and intellectual aid, Rustin, Baker, and other figures in the boycott’s expanding support network helped convey King’s ideas to likely allies among liberals, labor, and the religious left.
The Montgomery movement was more spiritual than Gandhi’s but not as principled. In his March 1956 conspiracy trial King and his lawyers put bus segregation on trial, somewhat in Gandhian fashion. Yet while Gandhi insisted on truth telling in the courtroom and a willingness to go to prison, asking judges for the maximum sentence, King’s and his fellow leaders’ sworn testimony was riddled with evasions and prevarications, approaching perjury. Gandhi, a British-trained lawyer, put his faith in direct action to topple the British Empire. King and the American movement relied upon legal protections afforded by the Constitution and its First and Fourteenth amendments, which Britain lacked, to reinforce mass protest and to defend themselves against what they perceived to be unconstitutional legal assaults. This legal realpolitik, which kept nonviolent principles out of the courtroom, owed partly to the mind-set of NAACP lawyers, partly to King’s realistic dread of southern jails. Gandhi would not have been lynched.
Although King’s timorous handling of his 1956 trial did not square with his later advocacy of open civil disobedience, the difference was that, like Rosa Parks and Claudette Colvin, King and colleagues did not believe they had broken the law.
MIA leaders and lawyers turned the crisis of the conspiracy indictments into an opportunity to bolster the movement just when it had begun to falter. Judge Eugene Carter and prosecutors agreed to the defense motion to try the eighty-nine defendants individually, without juries. While the defense lawyers did not expect to win over the segregationist judge, he probably would not have allowed separate trials if they had all demanded juries. The decision to try King first and alone meant that media coverage would magnify his leadership mystique and emerging role as preeminent national symbol of black advance. The trial marked the second fateful step in his journey toward martyrdom, the first being the terror bombing and his Christlike response to it.
Boycott participants felt blessed by the string of blunders made by white officials, encouraging their belief that God must be with them. Officials refused to accept a reasonable, face-saving settlement that would have ended the protest in a jiffy. Then they adopted their self-defeating “get tough” policy of harassment followed by mass indictments that even the prosecutor felt skeptical about and moderate white leaders like Montgomery Advertiser editor Grover Hall publicly opposed. Now they had agreed to eighty-nine separate trials, which might tie up the court for months and give steady publicity to the protest. The prospect of trying King first, with its windfall of national sympathy for David fighting Goliath, felt like pure grace.
The four-day trial began on Monday, March 19, with exuberant crowds ringing the courthouse. The handful of white prosecutors and witnesses in the segregated courtroom found themselves engulfed by a black sea: defendants, defense witnesses, a six-man legal team headed by Fred Gray, supporters, and distinguished visitors including Congressman Charles Diggs Jr. of Detroit. Spectators wore white cloth crosses on their lapels saying “Father, forgive them.” The trial was covered by scores of journalists from all over the world, showed up on network news, and won a front-page berth in the New York Times.
The prosecutors were no match for the heavyweight defense team, which included Alabama’s most prominent black lawyer, Arthur Shores from Birmingham, and savvy NAACP attorney Robert Carter from New York, an associate of Thurgood Marshall’s and a veteran of the Brown case. Rather than aim at the illegality of the protest, prosecutors sought to prove that King was its prime mover. But that claim was dubious on its face. Their actions spoke louder than their words. They had indicted close to a hundred boycott leaders, thus acknowledging that King was one leader among many. Prosecutors were stymied by the movement’s underlying paradox, one that even a crew of black spies on work release from jail and two detectives could not unravel. King was both leader and follower. He could hide behind his follower mask whenever convenient or necessary. Despite meeting minutes, signed checks, and other hard evidence, the movement’s informality and dispersed responsibility made it difficult for prosecutors to pin specific acts, like formulating the demands, on the MIA president. The vagueness, evasiveness, and half truths of hostile witnesses added to the white man’s burden.
Rev. Fields’s testimony was evasive to the point of comedy. As recording secretary, he had written the telltale minutes of the MIA’s founding meeting.
Q. Do you remember who called the mass meeting for that night?
A. Since I promised to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, I don’t know. I am not sure of that. I couldn’t say.
Q. Were these minutes made by you?
A. They were.
Q. Do they reflect what went on at the meeting on the afternoon of December the 5th, to the best of your judgment?
A. They do. However, I don’t profess to be an adequate secretary.
Q. Are you now the secretary of the organization?
A. I am secretary in name, sure.
Q. What do you mean by secretary in name, sure? Somebody else doing the work with your name signed to it?
A. I am secretary, but my multiplicity of duties makes it impossible for me to be an efficient secretary.
Q. Do you mean you are secretary but you are just not efficient?
A. That is right.
Q. What are your multiplicity of duties at the present time?
A. I have to keep in touch with my Creator. It takes a lot of prayer through times like this.
Fields could recall little about the historic mass meeting that night, or any discussion of the bus boycott.
“All the time,” he stated, “we were trying to inform our people to go with their Master, keep God before them in these trying times. Regardless of what conditions might be they must always keep God before them.” It was just “a happily singing group” that had gathered for “spiritual edification,” hardly more than a church service, free expression of religion protected by the First Amendment.149 This response echoed an age-old black strategy of dissembling that had helped slaves survive slavery.
Fields’s curious testimony exposed another paradox that disadvantaged the prosecution. No legal or constitutional hairsplitting could have defined the boundary between the movement as church, as spiritual expression, and the movement as secular political action. Only poetry could have articulated the relationship. Although Fields and other witnesses hid behind religion and used the language of Spirit to obfuscate the “truth,” on a deeper level this language was as truthful as any other. Ultimately if subliminally, defense lawyers were implying that if there was a single “leader,” God or Jesus was the culprit, the hidden cause of all the commotion.
Defense testimony began on the third day. The strategy was to show that, though he led the MIA, King was not the leader of the mass protest; that the boycott was started spontaneously by the black community; and that the protesters had “just cause” for their actions, a loophole in the 1921 law that may have been a leftover from turn-of-the-century Alabama populism. In particular King’s lawyers sought to disprove the prosecutors’ contention that he had urged people to boycott the buses.
“My exposition has always been,” King testified, “to ‘let your conscience be your guide, if you want to ride that is all right.’ ” Under cross-examination he denied that he had “anything to do with calling” the boycott, or that he knew who did. “It was a spontaneous beginning,” he claimed, “one of those things which just had been smoldering.”150 While these sworn statements were technically correct, they were misleading and incomplete. In a narrow legal sense he did not specifically incite or instruct his followers to refuse to ride. But in countless mass meetings from the very first he had given inspirational talks in which there could be no doubt that he was encouraging his listeners to boycott, if not in so many words. Of course, each participant decided for herself; but for how many was King’s exhorting the decisive motivating factor? It proved impossible for the white man’s law to translate the dialect of moral and spiritual protest, which they could not even comprehend, into the discourse of legal accountability. But that would prove a moot point.
KING’S TESTIMONY was the culmination of the four-day trial, but anticlimactic because it was all about minimizing his role. His lawyers’ tack was to shift the spotlight off him and shine it on the evils of segregation. Most of the two days devoted to the defense was taken up by thirty-one women, ranging in age from their twenties to their sixties, speaking with bristling honesty about how they had been abused on the buses.
Gladys Moore testified that drivers treated her and other black riders “just as rough as could be. I mean not like we are human, but like we was some kind of animal.” She recalled an instance in 1950, the same year that a cop killed army veteran Hilliard Brooks for no reason but that he was an uppity Negro. Although Moore’s bus was fairly quiet, the driver yelled: “You niggers there. Don’t you upset me with the racket.” He stopped the bus and turned to the back: “You niggers, come on and get your fare and get off.” Moore stayed put. She had to get home. Black passengers commonly ignored such commands. “When the driver tells you to move,” she said, “you look the other way.”
Two years later Moore was riding on a South Jackson Street bus and the driver “closed the door on my foot getting off the bus. I had on a coat, it was a heavy coat, and landed on the highway. It throwed me clean off the bus when the door caught my foot.”
The bus driver called out: “The next time you catch your foot, I ought to drag you all the way up South Jackson hill.” He didn’t stop to see if she was hurt. “I didn’t report the injury,” she said, “because I didn’t think it would do any good.”151
For years, middle-aged Henrietta Brinson had labored as a maid in the upscale neighborhood of Cloverdale, riding the trolley cars—Montgomery was the first city in the Americas with electric streetcars—then motor buses when they replaced trolleys in the mid-1930s. Because she worked in two homes, she rode the bus four times daily. One day in 1953 she got on a bus and squeezed by a swarm of white private-school kids. She put her transfer ticket on the meter box and stood up in the back. The driver, “the meanest man I ever saw,” called her an “awful name” and accused her of giving him a used transfer.
“There it is,” she said, pointing to the ticket.
“Who are you talking to?” he asked gruffly.
“I am talking to you,” she replied. “Every time I catch the South Cloverdale I always have to worry with you about something. I don’t see why you always keep on griping about something. The other bus driver that carries me on the South Cloverdale bus, you don’t have no trouble with him.”
Startled, the driver glared at her angrily. “Who do you think you are talking to? You are just getting off this bus, all you niggers behaving like a parcel of cows.”
“Well, that is all right,” she told him. “Just as long as I get to work.”152
Martha Walker was married to a World War II vet who had been blinded fighting against Germany. One afternoon in 1954 they were returning home from the Veterans Administration hospital in Tuskegee, where he had been hospitalized. They got on a bus downtown going home. She pulled the cord several times before the driver finally stopped; then she led her husband to the exit.
“When I got ready to get off,” she testified, “he didn’t stop, he slowed up. I stepped down on the side of the step there, and he opened the door. I got out, ready for my husband to step down. Just as my husband put his left foot down, the driver started on out with his right foot still on the bus. I screamed. A white lady said, ‘Wait a moment!’ Finally I jiggled his foot free. He couldn’t get loose by himself. With me helping him he did, and he got his foot out.” She ran into a store at the corner, crying, and said to the white proprietor: “I just had some trouble with a bus operator.” The woman gave her the name of the manager.
Walker left her husband at the store and crossed the street, waiting for the bus to return. She flagged it down.
“Look yourself what you just done to my husband,” she said angrily.
“I don’t remember seeing you niggers on the bus,” the driver retorted.
“My husband and I got off that bus there. He caught his foot in the door and broke the skin here on his ankle.”
“I didn’t do no such damn thing.”
“He is over there on the corner to prove it. If you cannot give me any consideration,” she said, “I am afraid I will have to take further steps.” He pulled away. She called the bus company but never heard back from the manager. “They promised me I would, but I never did.”153
Georgia Jordan, cook, nurse, and midwife, a city resident since 1920, grew so enraged by unrelenting abuse that she decided to boycott the buses on her own. The cruel name-calling tore her up. She was sick of ugliness like “Back up, nigger, you ain’t got no damn business up here, get back where you belong.”
What galled her the most was the humiliation of paying her fare at the front, then having to get off and enter through the back door, no matter how cold or rainy or heavy her load. A painful experience with her mother stuck in her craw.
“She was an old person,” Jordan told the court, “and it was hard for her to get in and out of the bus except the front door. The bus was crowded that evening with everybody coming home from work. This bus driver was mean and surly, and when she asked him if she could get in the front door, he said she would have to go around and get in the back door. She said she couldn’t get in, the steps were too high.” He refused to let the old woman enter in the front.
“You damn niggers are all alike,” he barked. “You don’t want to do what you are told. If I had my way I would kill off every nigger person.”
Mother told daughter they were “riding among maniacs.”
Another time, Jordan paid her fare in front, and the driver snapped: “Nigger, get out that door and go around to the back door.” Holding her anger, not wanting trouble, she got off. The driver then closed the back door in her face and pulled away, leaving her fuming. “So I decided right then and there I wasn’t going to ride the buses anymore.” She assuaged her rage by taking a stand against any more hurt.154
Like many of their enslaved forebears, these women resisted being dehumanized. They confronted and scolded abusive drivers, ignored or defied commands, reported drivers to the manager, occasionally engaged in physical self-defense. More and more often they refused to give up their seats to white people. Once in a while they held their ground even if a driver called the cops. And like Georgia Jordan, well before December people had voted with their feet and stopped riding the buses. The protest that began as a trickle soon swelled into a mighty stream.
The women’s soul-stirring testimony, producing the longest trial transcript in Alabama history, spoke deeper truths than white lawyers and judges could fathom. It answered who started the protest, why they felt compelled to do so, why they were persisting with such passion, why jailing ninety of its leaders would only magnify their fire. It explained why the protesters did not need King or anyone else to urge them to act; why more often it was they who had to buck up their leaders, keep them on course. Their testimony explained how it could happen that, far from being ignorant Negroes manipulated by Yankees, local people were leading the movement every step of the way, giving new meaning to democracy.
“Wasn’t no one man started it,” Gladys Moore summed up. “We all started it over night.” Over a long dark night of captivity.
ANY DECENT JUDGE or jury would have had to conclude that the protesters had just cause for their actions, and thus the boycott was not illegal. The prosecution had not proved its case, certainly not beyond a reasonable doubt. But Judge Carter was oblivious to the deeper or higher truths dramatized in his courtroom. After closing arguments, he swiftly convicted King of conspiring to disrupt the bus system and sentenced him to a five-hundred-dollar fine plus court costs. He gave him the minimum sentence, he said, because of King’s advocacy of nonviolence. When the defendant indicated that he would not pay the fine, Carter converted it to a year in county jail at hard labor. Defense lawyers announced that they would appeal, sentence was stayed, and King remained free on bond. The judge postponed all the other cases pending resolution of the appeal.
King sauntered out of the courthouse with a brimming smile, cheered by hundreds of supporters. That night a raucous meeting shook Holt Street Baptist Church, full and rocking since the verdict. “It ain’t hardly fair,” a woman complained to researcher Anna Holden. “Folks who works and needs to sit down can’t be coming in time to get a seat. Those that don’t work and don’t need to sit gets here and takes up all the seats.” Another woman turned to Holden: “We all wanted to be here together tonight, because this is where we started.”
A minister stood at the podium and gestured to the sea of people to cease singing. “He who was nailed to the cross for us this afternoon approaches,” he called out.
King walked down the center aisle in flowing black robes, milk chocolate face glowing as if lit from within. “He’s next to Jesus himself,” a woman muttered. “He’s my darling,” another cooed. “He’s right there by God,” a third exclaimed. A woman in the balcony’s front row burst into wanton soprano wailing, head bobbing up and down, banging on the railing, tears dripping on heads below. The audience sang heartily, “I Want to Be Near the Cross Where They Crucified My Lord,” after which Dr. Moses Jones introduced the MIA president: “He is a part of us. Whatever happens to him, happens to us. Today he was crucified in the courts.”
“We don’t mind the cross,” King declared to the still assembly, “because we know that beyond the tragedy of Good Friday”—a week away—“is the breathlessness of Easter. We know that Easter is coming through the suffering of Good Friday. Easter is coming to Montgomery.
“Almost since the beginning of his existence,” he kept on, “man has recognized the struggle between the forces of good and evil. A philosopher named Plato saw it, and later on, a man called Thoreau. Christianity has always insisted that in the persistent struggle between good and evil, in the long battle between dark and light, the forces of light emerge as victor. This is our hope, that we will know the day God will stand supreme over the forces of evil, when the forces of light will blot out the forces of dark.
“You don’t get to the promised land,” he concluded, “without going through the wilderness. You don’t get there without crossing over hills and mountains, but if you keep on keeping on, you can’t help but reach it. We won’t all see it, but it’s coming, and it’s coming because God is for it.
“There can never be growth without growing pains. There is no birth without birth pains. Like the mother suffering when she gives birth to new life, we know there is glory beyond the pain.
“I believe that God is using Montgomery as his proving ground.”
At the end of the long gathering Dr. Jones put into words what most everyone must have felt in their gut: “The fellowship is like an electric charge to us. We can’t give it up.” The black souls walked out of the church singing “God Be with Us.”155
Easter is the holiest of Christian holy days, commemorating Jesus’ resurrection three days after his crucifixion. Piling on more cruelty, the Romans executed Jesus on Passover, the Jewish holy day marking the miracle of Pharaoh’s “passing over” the Hebrew slave children he sought to slay, which came to symbolize the Hebrews’ earthly resurrection in escaping from Egypt over the Red Sea. But Easter as a celebration of fertility, of birth and rebirth, was as old as humankind. The name came from Eastre or Esther, a Teutonic/Scandinavian goddess, whose festival was celebrated on the spring equinox, the first day of spring.
Easter’s glorification of rebirth was Christianity’s most important transfiguring of pagan spirituality. Easter echoed Greek and Roman myths of rebirth, such as the earth princess Persephone’s return from the underworld. Easter encouraged black Christians to recover, if subconsciously, the fertility and reawakening of African nature spirits. The “drums of Easter,” in King’s words, resurrected African spirit worship like nothing else in Christian liturgy.
So black Christians even more than white experienced Easter as the holy of holies. Black women and girls paraded colorful new dresses and hats to express with their bodies spiritual cleansing and the bright light of spring. Like evangelicals of old, they shone as “new lights.”
While Jews observed Passover as collective deliverance, mass rebirth, and Africans worshiped the reemergence of the natural world from winter death (including in their own being), Christians glorified the resurrection of the individual soul, as represented by Jesus, and of the body containing it. As a boy King shocked his Sunday school class by denying the bodily resurrection of Jesus.
The Christian concept of the soul stemmed from Greek influences, especially Plato and Aristotle. Unlike in Judaism, the Christian faith’s primary source, which treated the human body and soul as a unit—thus encouraging the body to be savored, not reviled—Greeks following Plato considered the soul to be individual, a revolutionary idea, but also imprisoned within bodily matter just as ideas were shackled by earthly distortion. So Christianity arose as a double-edged sword: the individual soul was discrete, independent, and equal to every other, but it was polluted by the flesh in which it was trapped. Body was dirty and sinful, soul was (potentially) good and virtuous. Yet soul and body, if saved, would ultimately be resurrected together—King’s childhood heresy to the contrary notwithstanding.
For each soul to be reborn in the spring, and later for eternity, it was essential that it cleanse itself from the evils of flesh, that it repent for sins flowing mainly from bodily needs and lusts. Of course as theologians from Augustine to Niebuhr stressed, sin (especially pride) issued from the corrupted soul as well. Thus Christians had Lent: forty days of repentance and purification to empty the soul into a womb for its own rebirth. Saving each soul from one spring to the next would prepare the way for immortality, the eternal spring of heavenly life. Saving souls in the here and now might also, with grace, bring the kingdom of God on earth.
So Martin King was speaking to each person as an individual, and to his flock as a whole, when he called for transforming the Good Friday of pain and sacrifice into the Easter of triumphant regeneration. As a Christian and especially a southern Baptist, he took on a pastoral responsibility that was all about personal redemption, personal salvation. His faith in a personal God, and in a one-to-one personal relationship between each believer and their divinity, was buttressed by his personalist philosophy, which redefined personality as the inner light within each person, the divine presence within. Every personality was sacred without exception.
Christianity being a religion of paradox, the individual soul was independent and yet dependent; dependent not only upon God but also on other souls. If its separate nature owed to Greek rationality, its interdependence owed to Jewish origin, interdependence articulated fervently by Christianity’s founding genius, the Greek Jew Paul of Tarsus. To figure out how individual souls were related to each other, King turned as much to Jewish teaching as to Christian. He learned from theologian Martin Buber that true divinity was not found inside, or only inside, each personality but more fundamentally in the relationship among personalities. It was in the ether of connection between persons that God’s presence was strongest. This relationship could not be between objects—I and it—but only among beings made sacred by their interconnection—I and Thou.156
Thus in King’s preaching, Easter signified the rebirth of each human soul not in isolation, but embedded in relationship with other souls, together constituting the beloved community.
The new meaning he brought to personal rebirth was to make it transformative not only of the individual but of the whole society. Social gospel preachers spoke of restructuring institutions through which persons, already good, would be bettered. In a sense King was being a traditional Baptist evangelist by focusing on individual redemption, individual salvation. In fact he was turning social gospel theology inside out. Harking back to abolitionists of the Second Great Awakening such as David Walker, William Lloyd Garrison, and Henry Highland Garnet, he claimed that renewing, reforming, indeed revolutionizing individuals would reform and revolutionize society, more than the other way around. Like evangelical abolitionists he took on white sinners, but during the bus boycott he dwelt as much on remaking black souls as the route to the whole society’s deliverance.
“The tragedy of physical slavery,” King exhorted a gala New York NAACP dinner marking the second anniversary of the Brown decision, “was that it gradually led to the paralysis of mental slavery. The Negro’s mind and soul became enslaved.
“Then something happened to the Negro,” he asserted. “The Negro masses began to reevaluate themselves. They came to feel that they were somebody.
“With this new self-respect and new sense of dignity on the part of the Negro, the South’s negative peace was rapidly undermined. The tension which we are witnessing in race relations in the South today is to be explained in part by the revolutionary change in the Negro’s evaluation of himself.
“This is at bottom the meaning of what is happening in Montgomery. There is a new Negro in the South, with a new sense of dignity and destiny.”
As he wrote in his first published essay, which appeared in the April issue of Liberation: “We Negroes have replaced self-pity with self-respect and self-depreciation with dignity. In Montgomery we walk in a new way. We hold our heads in a new way.”157
For black Americans to see themselves in a new way, they had not only to defy three centuries of crippling white supremacy; they had to challenge reigning social norms of conformity and adjustment. While King acknowledged some forms of maladjustment as harmful, he urged black people to be creatively and courageously maladjusted to the evils of racism and injustice. In a Dexter sermon he quoted Saint Paul’s admonition: “Be not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.”158
The scarring of the soul by slavery and segregation had eventually brought the soul’s awareness of its psychic wounds and its determination to heal them. King’s designation of “the Negro” (singular) as subject of transformation converted a patronizing and disparaging reference to African Americans (as in “What does the Negro want?”) into a shorthand for his philosophy of self-liberation. The freeing of each Negro soul would be the means of freeing the souls of all black folk. The Negro as full individual would save the Negro as a full people. Each Negro was a potential messiah just as black people, like the Hebrew chosen people, were a collective messiah.
King made it clear that the Negro’s self-renewal was not occurring in a vacuum of time. It was prepared by a century of social struggle during which African Americans slowly but surely threw off their shackles, first physical, now psychological. The self-renewal, the new birth of freedom, was inconceivable outside the flowing tide of social protest, and diehard resistance to it, of the 1950s—in Africa and Asia as much as in the American South.
The Negro in Montgomery was transforming herself in the cauldron of her community’s white-hot battle to be free. Her rebirth was bound to that of her sisters and brothers like links on a chain. As the singer-activist Bernice Johnson Reagan pointed out, when black men and women sang for freedom in the first person singular—“This Little Light of Mine,” “I’ve Got the Light of Freedom”—they included in “I” and “mine” the “we” of their people.159
Just as the Negro’s revolution in self-image and self-assertion was embedded in large-scale historical forces as well as in the storms of everyday struggle, so too this revolution soul by soul was giving birth, painful but necessary birth, to a new world of freedom and justice. Not only individuals but the whole world, it seemed, was being reborn in the middle of the twentieth century.
Around the globe, 1956 gave birth to new beginnings, fresh bursts of freedom sprouting from withered husks of the preatomic order. The triumphant nonviolent movement in Ghana would render irreversible the overthrow of European colonialism in Africa, its last frontier. Poor nations of the Southern Hemisphere banded together in Bandung, Indonesia, to create the nonaligned movement as an independent third force between the rival American and Soviet empires. In Moscow the new Communist Party leader, Nikita Khrushchev, denounced Stalinist crimes at a February party congress, sparking disaffection among communists worldwide and a democratic revolt in Hungary that Soviet tanks crushed in the fall. In the United States the demise of Senator Joseph McCarthy diminished the anticommunist witch-hunt bearing his name, opening up breathing room in the constricted veins of American political culture for nonconforming ideas and initiatives.
“We stand today between two worlds, the dying old and the emerging new,” King told the fiftieth-anniversary gathering of Alpha Phi Alpha, his college fraternity. “The tensions which we witness in the world today are indicative of the fact that a new world is being born and an old world is passing away.”160 In King’s eye the key evidence for this global turning was that two-thirds of the world’s population was freeing itself from the yoke of white dominion. He saw that people of color more than whites, at home and abroad, were straddling the boundary of old world and new, wandering in the twilight between darkness and daybreak, navigating the complex ambiguities of a transition time from winter to spring, Good Friday to Easter. Between two worlds—a familiar stance for dark-skinned peoples. To prepare for entering the new world, he felt, black people needed to adopt a spirit of interdependence free from bitterness, open to forgiveness.
This identity of personal and social rebirth was not an idea that King came up with out of thin air. He was interpreting what he was witnessing, doing what he did best, translating into eternal diction what the people were teaching him—leadership rising from the pews.
THIS EMBRYONIC SPIRITUAL POLITICS that synthesized personal and social rebirth coincided with, and was shaped by, a more secular vision being fashioned by radical pacifists. Like King they were striving to create a third way between authoritarian socialism and Cold War liberalism, the dominant ideologies of the age.
From the right came rival efforts to rethink freedom and democracy, notably the philosophers of a new conservatism who also saw individual liberation as the engine of social freedom. Ayn Rand’s best selling Atlas Shrugged, published in 1957, became the bible of an acquisitive generation for whom unchaining the (white middle-class) individual became an ideal: secular redemption through unfettered free-market capitalism. Critics on the left averred that Rand’s “objectivism” would move society backward, not forward. Nor would people’s souls be renewed, only defrauded.
The manifesto of the new radical pacifism was written by Rustin, A. J. Muste, Dave Dellinger, and Paul Goodman, editors of the new magazine Liberation, which featured their “Tract for the Times” in its founding issue, March 1956. Rustin sent a copy of the first issue of Liberation to King, explaining the journal’s significance. Liberation’s editors suggested in their manifesto that the crisis problems of racism, poverty, and nuclear weapons had to be attacked on a fundamental level, requiring “changes in our deepest modes of thought.” Grounding their thinking in four traditions—Judeo-Christian prophesy, American egalitarianism, libertarian socialism, and Gandhian nonviolence—the editors put forth a new political sensibility that stressed personal ethics and honesty, dwelt more in “concrete situations than in rhetorical blueprints, in individual lives than in ‘global historical forces’ which remain merely abstract. What matters to us is what happens to the individual human being—here and now.” Unlike liberals they would go to the roots of social problems. Unlike Marxists they would refuse to sacrifice the present for the future, to treat persons as pawns for “a tomorrow that never comes.”
For their “politics of the future,” Rustin and his New York colleagues sought to forge a radical pragmatism, a pragmatic radicalism, that would fuse politics and ethics. Means and ends would condition each other reciprocally, the ends built into the means, the basis of Gandhian philosophy. Rather than put down idealistic thinking as did tough-minded liberals and Marxists, the new politics would be inspired by utopian visions, which expressed “the growing edge of society and the creative imagination of a culture.” Above all, “the very presuppositions on which human relationships are based must be revolutionized.”
This dynamic politics aspired to be an American moral equivalent of the Third World’s nonaligned movement (born in 1955) and of fledgling democratic dissent behind the Iron Curtain. It would stand for “refusal to run away or to conform, concrete resistance in the communities in which we live to all the ways in which human beings are regimented and corrupted, dehumanized and deprived of their freedom.”161
We can see the revolt of the bus boycott, and the precepts King drew from it, as a living out of this manifesto. To an extent the boycott’s collective leadership was shaped by this new thinking that Rustin brought to Montgomery in February and continued to promote in his advising and ghostwriting for the MIA president. To a greater extent the boycott movement was the shaping force—not only grounding this new philosophy, transmuting ideas into flesh, but deepening the ideas themselves that struggled to birth a new world.
NOT ONLY IN MONTGOMERY was spring blowing in new births of freedom. Students at South Carolina State College in Orangeburg boycotted classes after the arch-segregationist governor sent in police to stop a civil rights rally. It grew into a full-fledged student strike against police spying and White Citizens Council harassment. Several thousand black people commenced a bus boycott in Capetown, South Africa, against imposition of segregated seating. In Washington, D.C., seventy-five black leaders gathered for the State of the Race conference in late April, headed by Randolph. They responded to southern Congress members’ shrill denunciation of the Brown decision by calling for a South-wide school-desegregation campaign. In Tallahassee in May, two Florida A&M students, Wilhelmina Jakes and Carrie Patterson, were arrested for sitting in the white section of a bus (the only vacant seats, again), sparking a seven-month bus boycott that applied lessons from Montgomery.
After tea with Rosa Parks in her New York apartment, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in her syndicated column that “human beings reach a point when they say: ‘This is as far as I can go.’
“That is what seems to have happened in Montgomery, and perhaps it will happen all over our country wherever we have citizens who do not enjoy complete equality. It may be that this attitude will save us from war and bloodshed and teach those of us who have to learn that there is a point beyond which human beings will not continue to bear injustice.”162
Among mountains of support letters King received in the wake of his trial, most of which he or his secretary answered, came one from Juanita Moore of Baltimore. She praised his successful work that “comes only through God & good leadership an followers. i my self is a widow with a 4 yeairs old Sun to support is why i am writing this letter without a donation. Keep the good work up and ask God for what you wont for I no he is able he said he will fight your battle if you just keep still just trust him for his Word and dont get empatience.”163
As spring turned to summer in Montgomery, the bus boycott’s legal offensive heated up along with the air, pavement, and car-pool car radiators. For several surreal days it looked like the boycott might have won, with news of a Supreme Court ruling on a South Carolina bus case. Alas, reporters missed the fine print. In 1954 soon after the Brown decision, a young woman in Columbia, South Carolina, Sarah Mae Flemming, sued the bus company for violating her right to equal protection by forcing her to sit in the black section. A federal district judge, father of the segregationist governor, rejected her lawsuit. But the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, upholding her appeal, declared in-state bus segregation unconstitutional. The Supreme Court’s ruling in late April 1956 did not affirm the Fourth Circuit decision but merely dismissed the bus company’s appeal as premature.
Nonetheless, the narrow technical ruling was widely perceived as striking down bus segregation. The New York Times headlined: HIGH COURT VOIDS LAST COLOR LINES IN PUBLIC TRANSIT. IMPACT OF RULING IS EXPECTED TO BE AS WIDE AS DECISION AGAINST SEPARATE SCHOOLS.
The hyperbole spurred thirteen southern bus lines to desegregate. The Montgomery parent company in Chicago, eager to save the local franchise from collapse, instructed Montgomery drivers to end Jim Crow seating. But Mayor Gayle and Police Commissioner Sellers resolved to maintain the status quo. Sellers threatened to arrest drivers who disobeyed their higher law.
The split between commissioners and bus company tore wide open in early May, when the city obtained an injunction from Judge Walter B. Jones making the bus company cancel its desegregation order. Jones quoted an 1899 Alabama Supreme Court finding that it was reasonable to seat passengers so as “to prevent contacts and collisions arising from natural or well known customary repugnances which are likely to breed disturbances by a promiscuous sitting.” He appealed to the Tenth Amendment, which arguably authorized states’ rights, thus putting that amendment on a collision course with the Fourteenth, which restricted them.164 Before year’s end, as in 1954, the latter would prevail over the former. This constitutional conflict foreshadowed the South’s social drama of the next decade.
Now the movement’s hopes rested foursquare on the Browder v. Gayle lawsuit, which looked promising. But the unpredictability of a federal panel of three southern whites ranging from solid segregationist to racially moderate made a strikeout seem possible. If they lost in this federal court, an appeal to the Supreme Court would take months, maybe a year or more.
With so much at stake, tensions ran high when plaintiffs Aurelia Browder, Claudette Colvin, Susie McDonald, and Mary Louise Smith testified on May 11 in the old federal courthouse two blocks from the bus stop where Rosa Parks had been arrested. The bus boycott played a lead role in the courtroom drama. The defendants’ attorneys put the boycott on trial, but less credibly than King’s lawyers had done with bus segregation in March. When a defense lawyer tried to show that the boycott aimed strictly at making segregation fairer, thus indirectly accepting Jim Crow, Aurelia Browder cut him off at the pass: “It is the segregation laws of Alabama that caused all of it.”
During Colvin’s last appearances in Montgomery courtrooms, she had been traumatized by the judges’ vindictive verdicts. Her wails careened off the courtroom walls. Now a year later, the tables had turned, in no small measure because of her brave defiance. The sixteen-year-old who had aspired to be a lawyer, but now was a struggling unwed mom with an infant son, was getting her calm revenge. This time in federal court, the sudden adult told the tale of her arrest and jailing in cinematic prose, then immortalized her saga in one pithy sentence. When asked by the opposing lawyer who was the leader of the bus protest, she replied sternly: “Our leaders is just we ourself!”165
On June 5, the federal judges ruled two-to-one for the Browder lawsuit. The court declared unconstitutional the Montgomery and Alabama bus-segregation statutes as violations of the Fourteenth Amendment. The decision hinged on how the judges interpreted the Supreme Court’s two-year-old school-desegregation verdict. Federal appeals judge Richard T. Rives’s majority opinion, with which new local district judge Frank M. Johnson Jr., concurred, found that the Brown decision’s rejection of the 1896 “separate but equal” doctrine “impliedly” reached beyond public schools to other forms of legal segregation. District judge Seybourn H. Lynne’s dissent argued that it did not.
The court panel suspended enforcement of its decree until the Supreme Court could rule on the city’s appeal. With renewed spirit the boycott carried on through summer and fall. Foot soldiers believed that the arc of the moral universe had bent, and that justice was rolling down.
On the surface it seemed, as the Montgomery Advertiser later editorialized, that the Browder decision was “achieved in absolute independence” of the bus boycott.166 A deeper look showed that not to be the case. In the first place, a likely motive in the minds of Rives and Johnson was to halt the growing disorder on the streets of Montgomery and the potential for mass violence. Confirmed by Congress the day before Browder was filed, Johnson was a Republican from northern Alabama whose three-month tenure in Montgomery was dominated by the boycott disruption that had put Montgomery on the national and global map. Were it not for the ongoing protest, he might not have pressed the chief appeals court judge to create the special panel required for constitutional challenges; and the latter, very reluctant as it was, might not have agreed. Historically, nonviolent direct action has achieved its goals most often by forcing authorities to give in to preserve social order. This was certainly true seven years later in Birmingham.
While there was little doubt that Rives and Johnson would have voted for Browder without the boycott, on the strength of Brown, it was less likely that they would have faced the decision had the mass protest not put the case before them. MIA lawyers would not have initiated the lawsuit until black leaders had learned the hard way that bus segregation was brittle; it could not bend without breaking. Other than a cosmetic touchup, it could not have been modified easily—especially by black demand. They would not have learned about this irrational rigidity, largely a result of the commissioners’ electoral needs, without the boycott. Thus they would have been unlikely to take the dangerous step of suing to end segregation.167
As King explained the dynamic to a radical pacifist later that year, “We had negotiated for several weeks to no avail. The City Commission insisted that what we were asking for could not be done on the basis of the present law; so we had no other alternative but to attack the structure of the law itself.”168
Nor did they know anything about who would hear the case. Johnson, the brand-new Montgomery judge, was a stranger. To MIA leaders all southern judges looked as white as snow. Even with Brown to buttress them they thought the prospects looked dicey.
It was also unlikely they would have filed such an incendiary lawsuit without the protection afforded by the MIA and the organized black community, and the shield of the media presence that kept a spotlight on the city. Fear of physical or economic retaliation might have deterred them and the brave plaintiffs, like it did Jeanetta Reese. Furthermore, without the disorder and threat of worse, the federal judges might have sidetracked or defused the Browder suit as happened to the Flemming case that the NAACP had been betting on.
While it would be overstating to claim that the bus boycott directly produced the Browder decision, it would be wrong to conclude that it had little or no impact. Weighing all factors, it looked probable that the mass protest had an important indirect influence.
THE FELICITOUS Browder ruling made victory unstoppable, but its immediate fruit was bitter. King’s most severe test of leadership came not from outside—bombings, White Citizens Council intimidation, intransigent city officials—but inside, from the threat to the MIA’s carefully manicured unity posed by Rev. Uriah J. Fields. He would have hesitated to challenge the MIA leadership so brazenly had the Browder outcome not made the movement less vulnerable.
The young pastor of Bell Street Baptist had been elected MIA recording secretary at the founding meeting. As we have seen, he testified in King’s trial that he was a lousy secretary. At the end of May the MIA was incorporated with a constitution and bylaws and its structure reorganized. Rev. W. J. Powell replaced Fields as secretary. This was partly because the latter had not been attending meetings faithfully—he was absent from this one—and partly because King’s inner circle did not trust him. Having a tendency to act with impulsive independence, he had angered his colleagues in January when he published his Advertiser letter scorning compromise and threatening “annihilation” of segregation. His rogue letter had spurred the MIA executive board to require its approval for all public statements except King’s.
Fields angrily denounced his removal at a mass meeting on June 11, but the assembly reaffirmed his ouster. Livid, he stormed out and announced to the press he was resigning from the MIA because of “misappropriation of funds” by leaders who were “misusing money sent from all over the nation.” He said: “I can no longer identify myself with a movement in which the many are exploited by the few.” The leaders had become “too egotistical and interested in perpetuating themselves.” The MIA “no longer represents what I stand for.”169
When Fields made his public charges, King and Abernathy were in California, taking a rare vacation with their families, hosted by a Los Angeles black church, and promoting the boycott. King’s chronic fatigue and sleep deficit, his doctors warned, made rest vital. Realizing that the allegations threatened the MIA’s reputation, fund-raising, and cohesion, he flew back to Montgomery and met with the apostate, whom the black community was treating as a traitor, a “black Judas.” According to King’s account of their conversation, Fields withdrew the allegations and admitted they had been motivated by his feeling of mistreatment by two executive board members.
“I want you to know,” Fields told him, “that I was not referring to you in my accusations. I have always had the greatest respect for your integrity and I still do. All of those things I made up in a moment of anger. This was my way of retaliating.”
He agreed to publicly recant and apologize at the next mass meeting. In the sweltering heat of overflowing Beulah Baptist Church, an “unaccustomed atmosphere of bitterness,” Fields joined the MIA president at the pulpit. “Look at that devil!” someone shouted. King denied that the MIA had mishandled any money. He asked the agitated assembly to forgive the young pastor in a spirit of Christian love.
“We must meet this situation with the same dignity and discipline with which we have met so many difficult situations in the past. Let us never forget that we have committed ourselves to a way of nonviolence, avoiding not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him.
“We are all aware of the weaknesses of human nature,” he proceeded. “We have all made mistakes along the way of life. We have all had moments when our emotions overpowered us. Now some of us are here this evening to stone one of our brothers because he has made a mistake.
“Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.” People were still. Fields prayed out loud, got an Amen!, and asked for forgiveness. His retraction was equivocal, referring to statements “attributed to me as having said.” The assembly nonetheless applauded him as he walked down from the altar.170
Although the young preacher acted out of resentment and his allegations were overblown, they were not entirely untrue. On some occasions, possibly on a regular basis, King and other leaders who spoke and raised funds for the MIA out of town received honoraria that they kept.
“We had a whole lot of money at that time and some of it we handled unwisely,” MIA treasurer E. D. Nixon later stated. “There wasn’t nobody stealing much of anything, but we just handled it unwisely.” It might have been Nixon’s grousing that prompted his protégé Fields to let loose. Nixon was even more alienated from the MIA inner circle than was Fields; later he too resigned in anger. Not willing to disagree with Fields’s charges, he said: “A lot of times a minister would go and make a speech and he’d think that he’s entitled to some of it.” He admitted that he once kept a six-hundred-dollar fee.171
When Fields publicly atoned, he sidestepped the issue of speaking fees. “Money sent to the organization” was not misused, he said. He was silent about cash given to individuals.172
Not all speakers accepted personal fees. Rosa Parks, despite her penury and family illness, and white Lutheran minister Robert Graetz were among those who didn’t. Graetz later recalled that Fields’s charges “reignited my own concerns about the way money was handled. I had raised several thousand dollars through speeches at fund-raisers, and each time, after paying for my travel expenses, I turned everything else over to the MIA. After one of those trips, however, when I brought the money in to be deposited, someone asked, ‘Did you keep enough out for yourself?’
“I balked. ‘I never keep any for personal use,’ I replied. ‘This money was raised for the movement.’
“ ‘I know, but the other speakers normally keep an honorarium for themselves out of the money they raise.’ I was shocked. I had no idea others were doing that. But I never changed my policy.”173 Fields, however, had little opportunity to earn such fees, had he been so inclined, since the speakers’ bureau rarely if ever asked him to represent the MIA. That might have contributed to his jealousy.
Fields and Nixon might have been more upset about a different excess. Funds were routinely spent on things unrelated to the car pool or community organizing, especially relief to families in need, an off-the-cuff welfare program. This largesse resulted from the MIA’s fund-raising prowess, especially after King’s trial. The MIA took in more money every month than the boycott needed; some of the overflow was sent to an Atlanta savings bank. Financial secretary Erna Dungee remembered:
“We paid rent. We paid gas bills. We paid water bills. We bought food. We paid people’s doctor bills. We even buried somebody. Those were free rides as far as I was concerned. But they seemed to think this is what we had to do. We even bought washing machines. We did everything trying to get along with the people,” to maintain morale and unity at whatever cost. She recalled that it was “usually the poorest ones” who came for help. King was “real sympathetic” to these people’s needs. Though “he was against some of that,” she stated, “he felt he had to go along with most of it.”174 Daddy King’s son was such a fastidious financial overlord that not much of anything dollar-wise escaped his notice.
In his memoir King concluded that “nonviolence triumphed again” in the Fields blowup “and a situation that many had predicted would be the end of the MIA left it more united than ever in the spirit of tolerance.”175 Within two weeks of the Browder victory, King had directed a morality play on the boycott’s stage that illustrated the power of nonviolent action within the movement. He faced the problem head-on; communicated directly, forcefully, but compassionately with Fields; shamed him into a public act of contrition; persuaded the mass meeting, the jury of the people, to forgive him; finessed Fields’s reconciliation (at least in appearance); and transformed a setback into a step forward, repairing the broken community into restored wholeness. As with any show, however, the performers returned to their real selves after the curtain fell. Fields was not pacified for long.
Still, like many things about the bus boycott, this experience was a new departure, a new way of dealing with internal conflict. Other radical or revolutionary movements dealt with dissidents or apostates by censoring, suppressing, ostracizing or, like the Soviet Union, sending them to Gulags. Committed both to free speech and to challenging untruths, the Montgomery movement conducted a public display of redemption and reconciliation. Even though Fields’s staged apology was not fully sincere, what mattered was the “spirit of tolerance” and the reunifying of the movement.
Within the fold and against the walls of injustice, King pioneered the first self-consciously nonviolent movement in U.S. history. It did not avoid, appease, or stifle conflict but faced and fostered it. The movement did not constrain or inhibit force but marshaled it creatively for transformative ends. Like martial artists, activists took the force of the adversary and turned it against itself. The nonviolent theorist Richard Gregg, who influenced King, called this force “moral jujitsu.”
Guided by Gandhi, Gregg, Rustin, Smiley, and other teachers—above all by the Montgomery foot soldiers—King crafted a coherent philosophy of nonviolent conflict. It incorporated others’ ideas about strategy, tactics, and technique into a wider ethical and spiritual framework. In Montgomery he tested the philosophy in the raw experience and uncharted terrain out of which he articulated it. He staked his moral authority and prestige on the daunting task of winning support for it, at least on a tactical level, from activists and the black community.
Rarely has a leader melded theory and practice so successfully as King did during the bus boycott; better than he did later on. For this new public philosophy, which until his death he retooled to fit historical shifts, he owed much to circumstance and locale, more to experienced organizers who tutored him, more still to the black church culture and social gospel that he refashioned to serve his nonviolent ideal.
Initially he called the method “passive resistance,” but this was misunderstood as passivity. He stressed how it was spiritually aggressive while physically nonthreatening, in the first place toward its own practitioners—an inward scouring that supplanted the “normal” internalized aggression of anger turned into powerless depression. It “does something to the hearts and souls of those committed to it. It gives them new self-respect; it calls up resources of strength and courage that they did not know they had.”176 It converted the energy of anger and fear into the sinews of inner strength. It helped to heal one’s own pain and trauma.
In its outward projection the spiritual aggression grasped the adversary’s conscience, awakening his moral sense by shaming, or by appealing to his higher values. Just as no physical harm would be inflicted, there would be no internal violence of spirit—no derogatory language or gestures, for example. Any emotional hurt—from shame, let’s say—would be the pain of growth, not dehumanization, and ultimately healing. (We must distinguish between healthy shaming and guilt-laying, the latter harmful because it mired one deeper into sin rather than opening a door out. MLK was never clear about this distinction, especially in his own soul.)
The aim was not to defeat or humiliate the adversary but to humanize him or her. To plant seeds of eventual friendship or alliance—to communicate, to forge a relationship against the grain. The person’s humanity would be respected at all times, even while their actions were interrupted.
While aimed at redeeming the adversary, the spiritual force sought to eliminate the evil structure that the adversary served, often against his better judgment, or feeling trapped in it. The spiritual force would give the adversary a choice, a way out. It would do away with the evil structure not by destroying its physical form, but by dismantling it from within: releasing the human energy that kept it going. No lives or limbs would be lost—on the opposing side, anyway. The evil structure would be no less dead than if physically destroyed—and much harder to rebuild.
Again and again King rang out his Christian mantra that unearned suffering was redemptive. Black Christians took to this New Testament platitude without much persuasion, but it did not sit well with everyone. The idea was that suffering educated, transformed, and ennobled the sufferer and those who witnessed it. The model was Jesus on the cross and the martyrs who followed his path. The pain of Good Friday would give way to the glory of Easter. Suffering brought rebirth, of the soul and of the community.
“The cross,” King wrote, “is the eternal expression of the length to which God will go in order to restore broken community. The resurrection is a symbol of God’s triumph over all the forces that seek to block community.”177
In extolling Christ’s crucifixion was King glorifying violence and masochism and making a fetish of victimization? He would have argued, like Hindus who followed Gandhi and Buddhists he got to know toward the end of his life, that suffering was omnipresent in human life. Whether pain and hardship were inflicted by Roman soldiers in Jerusalem, by remorseless plagues, by agonizing poverty, by the whip of injustice, suffering was the raw material of mortality that humans had to work with. The question was not whether but how one dealt with suffering, and whether suffering ennobled oneself.
The Christian faith evoked by King said that suffering was fertile, not futile; mutable, not immobilizing. That the divine force looked kindly upon the human passion to overcome suffering. When people pushed against suffering, the immanent God would pull from the other side. Jesus modeled this: “Take this cup from me.” But if people were passive God would remain transcendent, “wholly other.” He would hear but not answer their prayers, listen but not act.
The moral universe was on the side of justice and healing. People had cosmic companionship in their struggles to transform mortal suffering into personal and social rebirth. But this did not mean that the kingdom of God would roll in on “wheels of inevitability.” People had to activate the Spirit within them, turn on their inner light, in order to connect their soul’s transfiguration with the bending of the universe toward wholeness.
The real struggle, King asserted, was between justice and injustice, “between the forces of light and the forces of darkness.” If there was a victory, “and there will be a victory,” it would be a victory for justice and a defeat of injustice. “It will be a victory for goodness in its long struggle with the forces of evil.”178
What kept this cosmic struggle between light and darkness, good and evil, from turning into a modern-day crusade against infidels, and an inquisition against heretics? If this was, in some sense, a holy war, what would prevent it from wreaking havoc upon bodies and souls, leading to an endless future of bitterness and revenge, a ceaseless reign of chaos? What would prevent the holy war for justice and wholeness from being consumed by its own fire of certitude and self-righteousness?
Justice was not the highest good—certainly not absolute justice, if such a thing existed. The highest good, the summum bonum, was love or compassion, the “most durable power” in the world. Justice, as King declared on the first night of the bus boycott, was “love in calculation. Justice is love correcting that which revolts against love.”179 Justice would not be true justice if allowed to escape the bounds of love.
Although King, being a Christian preacher, might have found it impossible to do otherwise, it may have been a strategic error for him to put so much weight on the tender word love. He tried to distinguish his concept of love, or agape, from other forms of love expressed in Greek as eros, romantic or erotic love, and philia, affection between friends. (He did not consider a fourth type of love, storge, maternal or parental love, or pastoral caring.) He made it clear that agape had nothing to do with liking someone, fondness or affection. Agape was tough love—tough as a lion, yet gentle as a lamb.
He defined agape as “understanding, creative, redeeming goodwill.” It was not a feeling or emotion but a relationship—between I and Thou. It was a way of seeing and approaching the Other, a way of communicating. Goodwill meant suspension of judgment (“judge not, that you be not judged”) and prejudice (pre-judging).180 It meant refusal to communicate with the Other’s lower self (I-it), which was the human norm; insistence on communicating with his or her higher self, even if invisible or repressed. It meant making a leap of faith to see the Other as a fellow child of God, a fellow sinner whose essence was good even if his existence was evil.
A stance of empathic goodwill toward another flawed being was not possible without compassionate understanding. One had to comprehend that the other person’s sinfulness and evil doing were the result of suffering (this as much a Buddhist as a Christian notion); that on a fundamental level—King called it the “fundamentum”—everyone’s suffering was equal or commensurate. Suffering caused some people to be better, others to be bitter, some almost irredeemable. But just as Jesus would not give up on one lost sheep, even at the risk of losing the flock, so one who truly understood the human condition would never give up on a single soul, no matter how depraved. This meant at least not taking his life.
The creative aspect of agape was the commitment to figure out how to save the soul of the sinner who oppressed you, while at the same time throwing off the oppression and turning over the temples of injustice. How to bring about your adversary’s rebirth while nurturing your own and that of society as a whole.
Since King sought not only to revive the nonviolent tradition but to reshape it, he tried to find a more robust term. Passive resistance, equated with nonresistance, perpetuated the false stereotype of nonviolence as weak and submissive. Creative goodwill direct action, from Randolph, was a mouthful. He chose soul force, Gandhi’s term, but it never caught on. Such an imaginative communicator, he was nonetheless stuck with the word nonviolence, which became an easy target for his militant critics on the left and for watering down by the right. He made the most of the term. Toward the end of his life it meant for him what he wanted it to mean.
Perhaps King should have worked harder to make soul force stick. Gandhi coined the compound satyagraha from two Sanskrit words, satya (“truth” or “love”) and graha (“to grasp or cling”), to mean “clinging to the truth.” He translated it into English as “truth force” or “soul force.” A practitioner of soul force called herself a satyagrahi.
King’s conception of the commingling of personal and social rebirth resonated as much with Hindu faith as Christianity. The satyagrahi achieved self-purification and self-realization through social struggle—in India, fighting for independence, for peace between Hindus and Muslims, for land reform. Through struggle (inward and outward) her individual soul, “atman,” would move toward merger with the universal Soul, or “Brahman.” The unity of the self with the “Oversoul” was a basic tenet of the transcendental philosophy that King had absorbed, itself influenced by Hinduism. But transcendentalism did not require a life of action or commitment.
Soul force was a good name for King’s method because, like the satyagrahi, the soul-force activist in the American context sought to remold her personality in the course of struggle in such a way that her transformation and that of others would lead to society-wide transformation. What Hindus called the universal Soul and transcendentalists the Oversoul, King called the beloved community, a termed coined by Harvard philosopher Josiah Royce after the Civil War.
The “new Negro in the South” could not begin to exercise soul force until social circumstances had brought a measure of self-respect and self-confidence. But once she had claimed her new dignity and destiny, she was ready for the next step of risky activism. As both Gandhi and King stressed, soul force was a weapon for the self-assured, for the strong and brave. Gandhi said famously that he preferred violence to cowardice. So did King, who unlike Gandhi knew he had a cowardly streak. One’s exercise of soul force would further enhance self-esteem and self-empowerment, leading in turn to more powerful expression of soul force. The born-again black and the technology of soul force would make an irresistible synthesis to change history.
So when King preached that the means must be as pure as the end, representing the end in process, “the ideal in the making,” when he preached that the end was “preexistent in the means,” he referred above all to people as means and as ends.181 A movement, he came to believe, was “finally judged by its effect on the human beings associated with it.”182 Only new selves could give birth to a new world. Only such a new world could sustain the new human beings who constituted it, who would sustain it in turn.
Soul force would tap into the cosmic force forging universal wholeness. “Whether we call it an unconscious process, an impersonal Brahman, or a Personal Being of matchless power and infinite love,” King said, “there is a creative force in this universe that works to bring the disconnected aspects of reality into a harmonious whole.”183
Summer 1956 was a season of ripening for civil rights forces in Alabama and beyond. Rustin’s urging to King that he go national with the movement was bearing fruit. As the national and international symbol of the newly empowered Negro, darling of black and white media alike, King grew in stature in tandem with the growth of the nascent movement he led. A big part of his attraction for both races was his aura of responsibility and reasonableness. His persona was closer to conservative educator-politician Booker T. Washington than to radical nationalist Marcus Garvey. If King was a safe bet for white Americans, he was also safe for most blacks, who dared to ruffle feathers only if real progress could be made. But for black Americans King stood for implacable resistance to the racial status quo, unlike Washington, more like Garvey. It was thus in the interest of both communities to enhance his prestige, and to prevent the rise of a black messiah who might accentuate race hatred.
As King and the Montgomery movement reached a national audience, so did the movement’s philosophy of nonviolent conflict. King’s forthright advocacy of mass protest at home and of anticolonial struggles abroad flew in the teeth of America’s Cold War hysteria and ideology of consensus.
The spectacle of King’s conspiracy trial as David beaten by Goliath enabled King to tap existing black leadership networks, in both the North and the South, along with northern-based white and biracial civil rights groups. While his main purpose in cultivating this spreading web was to get backing and funds for the MIA, he drew upon these diverse allies during the boycott’s aftermath, when southern leaders utilized the Montgomery victory to launch a South-wide organization to combat segregation.
Support for the bus boycott in the white world came mostly from its progressive fringes, but backing among blacks was pervasive, centered in mainstream black institutions. During the 1950s as in the prior half century, African-American leadership was sheltered in a professional subculture of black-run institutions: churches, businesses, colleges, newspapers, fraternities, sororities, social clubs, and civic groups such as the NAACP. Because he had grown up in this middle-class milieu in Atlanta and his parents had close links to ministers, educators, and journalists all over, King was well positioned to get allegiance from the black elite, many of whom were acquaintances and several his mentors. Most were eager to help. He pulled them in quickly, methodically, and respectfully.
He began closest to home, with the black Baptist church. He had grown up not only in Atlanta’s flagship Ebenezer Baptist, but also in the nation’s largest black organization, National Baptist Convention, USA, with its thousands of preachers, several million lay members, myriad missions, services, ministers’ and Sunday school training programs, seminaries, and colleges like Morehouse, his alma mater. His leadership of the bus boycott propelled his rise in this religious empire in which his father and grandfather had been players. As in Montgomery, the new kid had not been around long enough to make enemies. During 1956 two senior ministers promoted the candidacy of the twenty-seven-year-old boy wonder to challenge autocratic J. H. Jackson of Chicago, an old family friend, for the NBC presidency. Imagine the effect on your self-image of dozens of esteemed elders writing or wiring that you were the prophet or messiah they had long been waiting for.
Adulation of the prodigy peaked when he preached “Paul’s Letter to American Christians” to the NBC’s annual gathering in Denver in early September. Daddy King was so agitated with pride that he couldn’t sit down. King’s mentor J. Pius Barbour wrote in the national Baptist journal that the boy he had guided in his Crozer Seminary days had grown into “the greatest orator on the American platform,” the “first Ph.D. I have heard that can make uneducated people throw their hats in the air over philosophy.
“The center of attraction was THE KING,” Barbour oozed. “Never in the history of the Baptist denomination has a young Baptist preacher captured the hearts and minds of the people as has young King. He just wrapped the convention up in a napkin and carried it away in his pocket.” When the young pastor said, “ ‘I must close now,’ the sea of black Baptists arose as one and protested.”184
Praising his “masterpiece,” a retired Tuskegee preacher wrote him: “You spoke as a prophet and seer which you are,” his sermon “as vivid and real as any of the Pauline Epistles. The preachers will be talking about it always.” Perhaps it was his “calm, dispassionate” style that won over these bourgeois black Baptists to what was in part an anticapitalist diatribe excoriating consumerism.
Leading lights of the NBC were moved to tears, unashamed. “You may not have known it, but many, myself and others, wept like babies, and couldn’t help ourselves,” the Tuskegee elder confessed. “Like Joseph, God is with you, because you are with God.”185
While his boycott leadership had lifted him to this mount of admiration, he used his growing popularity in the NBC ranks to further the civil rights cause in the black religious world. He aspired to be a black Billy Graham for earthly emancipation.
If one looked over Jet, Ebony, and venerable papers like the Pittsburgh Courier, Chicago Defender, Baltimore Afro-American, and Amsterdam News during 1956, one might have concluded that the black print media almost single-handedly made King black America’s new hero. One reason that ministers, journalists, and other black opinion leaders rushed to King like moths to flame was to fill the abyss of African-American leadership, ravaged by McCarthyism. By the mid-1950s other political heroes like W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Richard Wright, or budding ones like Bayard Rustin, had been soiled by the un-American mix of black and red. King’s instantaneous rise must be explained in large part because of deep-seated black hunger for a political savior, especially one of the rising generation.
The older generation of progressive, noncommunist leaders were publicly pleased but privately uneasy about King’s threat to their status and stature. The two most prominent elder statesmen, both men of King’s father’s age whom he had not known before, took different tacks with the upstart. Randolph, whose prestige in the black world was beyond question, sought to draw the young minister under his wing, with Rustin his emissary. Roy Wilkins, combative new chief of the NAACP, waved an iron fist in a velvet glove to show him who was boss.
King’s roots sunk deep in the NAACP. His maternal grandfather, A. D. Williams, headed the NAACP branch in Atlanta after World War I. His father was active in it during the 1930s and 1940s. He himself had served on the Montgomery NAACP executive committee, invited by branch secretary Rosa Parks before the bus boycott; he had decided against being branch president. But King had little contact with the national NAACP. Wilkins’s national office refused to back the bus boycott because MIA demands did not include eliminating segregation. After MIA lawyers Fred Gray and Charles Langford filed the Browder lawsuit with much NAACP help, Wilkins covered most legal costs for the lawsuit and the conspiracy trial. But the national NAACP never formally endorsed the bus boycott. Friction arose over King’s concern that the NAACP might exploit the boycott for fund-raising, and Wilkins’s fear that the MIA would capture his own funding sources. Daddy King’s son, child of the Depression, always worried about money for his organizations, though not—to his wife’s chagrin—for his own family.
His need to stand abreast with established civil rights figures showed also in his first contacts with Randolph, who had been battling for black people’s rights, especially on the labor front, well before King’s birth. He valued Randolph’s support and guidance, which opened the door to backing by progressive groups and several national labor unions. Randolph served as the first black vice president of the AFL-CIO, which had just been formed from the merger of the AFL and CIO under George Meany’s heavy hand. But King did not always reciprocate: He respected but rarely deferred to his elders. Despite Randolph’s repeated appeals, he did not take part in the State of the Race Conference, nor did he speak at a major civil rights rally in New York’s Madison Square Garden in May 1956 that featured the Montgomery struggle. Parks and Nixon represented the MIA at the latter.
White media rivaled black in celebrating King’s emergence, though stressing his respectability over his militancy. Look and Redbook featured him. King’s June address to the national NAACP convention appeared in U.S. News & World Report. Newsweek and Time covered the bus boycott favorably. Time put King on its cover in March 1957. He appeared on television interview shows such as Meet the Press and began to master the powerful new medium that blessed his voice and image.
King baptized himself in the rituals of national party politics at the August Democratic convention in Chicago, where he prodded the platform committee to support a strong civil rights plank. Starting off with a prayer, he urged the party to endorse federal enforcement of the Brown decision, even withholding federal funds.
“The question of civil rights is one of the supreme moral issues of our time,” the neglect of which “would mean committing both political and moral suicide.” He warned that the doctrine of states’ rights “must not be made an excuse for insurrection,” which had brought the Civil War. “Whenever human rights are trampled over by states’ rights, the federal government is obligated to intervene.
“If democracy is to live, segregation must die.” Because of stiff resistance from southern delegates, the party platform failed to endorse the Brown decision but opposed use of force to block federal court rulings.
In the half year following King’s conspiracy conviction, he and his associates planted bulbs of connection, alliance, and shared thinking in fields black and white, marginal and mainstream, that would mature underground for several years until bursting forth as the most powerful grassroots movement in American history.
For Montgomery’s black community, buoyed by the Browder ruling, boycotting buses had become a way of life. When King came home from Chicago and from heralding “The Birth of a New Age” to his fraternity jubilee, a new season of white repression was setting in to break the boycott. Taking his cue from Louisiana, Alabama’s attorney general, John Patterson, had secured a court order shutting down the state NAACP. This led to Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth’s founding of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR), powered by his evangelist followers, to fill the gap with a militancy foreign to the legalistic NAACP. Patterson contended falsely that the NAACP had orchestrated the illegal bus boycott and thus should be outlawed.
During the summer, insurance for car-pool station wagons was mysteriously canceled—WCC fingerprints. Drivers continued to be harassed and fined. Police brutality against black citizens mounted, even while black crime rates plummeted to record lows because of the community’s new solidarity. Threats by mail and phone proliferated against librarian Juliette Morgan and the coterie of whites who dared to publicly back the boycott or oppose segregation. As we saw, the harassment got to be too much for Morgan: She took her life the next summer.
In late August Rev. Robert Graetz’s home was bombed. Fortunately he, his wife, and children were visiting Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, accompanying Rosa Parks. Graetz had invited fellow white pastors to attend an interracial meeting the day before to hear King speak; none showed up. Mayor Gayle called the bombing a publicity stunt to beef up fund-raising. “It is a strange coincidence,” he told the press, “that when interest appears lagging in the bus boycott, something like this happens.”186
A week later in Clinton, Tennessee, segregationists rioted against the admission of twelve black kids to the high school, prompting the governor to send in the highway patrol and national guard to enroll them. Rioting against school desegregation took place later that week in another Tennessee town. En route to speak at Hampton Institute in Virginia, King was denied service at the Atlanta airport restaurant, despite being an interstate passenger. He refused to be hidden in a “dingy” section behind a screen. He sued for damages with NAACP help.
The grip of white supremacy and Cold War conformity loosening, fall 1956 saw surprising breakthroughs around the globe. In mid-September, after a long nonviolent struggle, Britain granted independence to Ghana, the first African nation freed from colonial rule. After Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal, pressure from President Eisenhower and other world leaders prevented England and France from retaking the strategic waterway, a major blow to European dominance of the Middle East. In October, after a surge of anti-Soviet protest by students and workers, the reformist leader Imre Nagy withdrew Hungary from the Warsaw Pact. Khrushchev sent Soviet tanks to suppress the spreading revolt; fierce resistance left thirty thousand Hungarians and seven thousand Soviet troops dead. In the United States, the liberal National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy was founded, while radical pacifists led by A. J. Muste engaged in civil disobedience against air-raid drills and nuclear missile sites.
Cold War conformity was also under siege in the arena of art and entertainment. Poet Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” an inflammatory indictment of corrupted American values, became so notorious that police banned it in California and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti was tried for obscenity. Enlightened by jazz, blues, and urban black culture, Beat writers and their “beatnik” following were determined to give America rhythm and “beatification” as the remedy for its spiritual depression.
Just as the Deep South–bred black freedom struggle was getting national exposure, so earth-rich black southern rhythm-and-blues was going mainstream by means of an unlikely white boy from Tupelo, Mississippi, raised in gospel music and Pentecostal preaching. In September 1956, Elvis Presley sang to 54 million Americans on The Ed Sullivan Show, shown from waist up to hide his Afro-dance-influenced pelvic thrusts. His hit songs, launching the era of rock and roll, thrilled teenagers, especially girls, and shook up complacent parents. For middle-class white America the veiled menace of black deviance was reaching ominous proportions.
KING AND OTHER MIA LEADERS repeatedly appealed to President Dwight Eisenhower and his attorney general to investigate violence and civil rights violations by segregationists, including city officials, but to no avail. An assistant attorney general replied to King that because there did not appear to be violations of federal law, the violent incidents were immaterial. In September supremacists formed a Klan klavern in Montgomery, which had not had one since the earlier klavern collapsed in the 1930s. Luther Ingalls of the local White Citizens Council warned of a conspiracy to give white nursery school kids black and white dolls to condition them to integration.187 Confidential word came to the MIA—probably through Graetz’s trusted local FBI contact—that Citizens Council outside agitators who considered the Montgomery-based WCC weak-kneed (battling children’s dolls?) were plotting a vigilante mission to stop Montgomery’s civil war. And rumors flew that a phalanx of white trade unionists would swoop into town and round up car-pool drivers by citizen’s arrest.
Troubled by the tightening repression, expectant that the boycott would end before long, King and colleagues decided they must prepare not only blacks but the white community for desegregated buses. White leaders would not lift a finger to ease the passage. King appointed a special committee to try to “change the bitterness” of whites toward blacks. This committee met in late September “to consider ways of creating the most wholesome attitude possible among the mass of whites.” King stated that “we must make friends with those who oppose us, we should make our motives clearly understood, and we must move from protest to reconciliation.”188 They adopted a plan that included Advertiser articles, direct dialogue with middle-class white citizens, and utilizing local radio and TV to spread their message of reconciliation. Would their efforts make a dent in the armor of white hatred?
How could they expect to ride buses sharing seats with whites when, according to Judge Walter Jones and the Alabama Supreme Court, the “customary repugnances” of “promiscuous sitting,” especially between black males and white females, would “breed disturbances”? There might be physical contact, accidental or not—God knew where that might lead. From the segregationist standpoint it was the worst thing besides racial mixing of schoolchildren. If hostility was thick now, before the change, what meanness might be uncorked when judgment day arrived?
As part of their tutoring of the MIA president, Glenn Smiley and Bayard Rustin taught him how to conduct nonviolent training workshops, which had been practiced by FOR and CORE activists for over a decade, but only with small teams like Rustin’s 1947 freedom riders. Never before had there been a training of hundreds, thousands. Could it be done? In early October King tried his hand.
“Even though our hopes must not be raised too high,” he told a packed mass meeting, “it is nevertheless important to consider how we are to manage ourselves on integrated buses, because it is only to integrated buses that we plan to return.” Crashing applause.
“There will be some people who will not like this change, and they will not hesitate to express themselves to you. There will possibly be some unpleasant experiences for us at the hands of people who will not immediately accept the idea of sitting with us on the bus. It is important that we begin to think seriously about how we are going to face up to these possibilities of abuse, slander, and embarrassment.” Thus began the first workshop for the multitude.
“Now I want just two persons to stand up,” King instructed from the pulpit, “and tell us how they plan to act on the buses. Suppose you sat down next to a white person on a bus. Suppose this person begin to make a fuss, calling you names, or even going so far as to shove you? What would you do?”
Emotions were electric. A pair of middle-aged women rose.
“All right, sister,” King called on one.
“Well,” she said, nervously at first, “if someone was to start calling me names, I guess I would be kinda upset. But mind you, I don’t intend to move. I think I would just sit there and ignore her and let folks see how ignorant she was. But if she were to start pushin’ me, maybe I would give her just a little shove.”
Many shouted, “No! No!”
“Thank you for your candid opinion,” King replied to the woman. “Now let me ask you this. If you were to shove this white person back, what would you achieve?”
“Nothing!” others called out.
“Now do you agree with the opinion expressed here,” he asked her, “that nothing would be achieved by treating the white person in question the same way you were treated?” She nodded.
“Then why would you push that person back?”
“Well, I guess I wouldn’t.”
The second woman was more astute. “Now, I think most of us know the white folks pretty well,” she said. “We have to remember that they are not used to us, but we’re used to them. It isn’t going to do us any good to get mad and strike back, ’cause that’s just what some of them want us to do.”
“That’s right!” people shouted.
“Now we’ve got this freedom,” she continued. “It is something they can’t take away from us. But we will lose it if we get mad and show them we are incapable of acting like good Christian ladies and gentlemen.” Great clapping answered her.
“This is good,” King concluded. “Now you can see the seriousness of our task here. We are going to be doing some more of this in the meetings to come. Let’s discuss and think this through together, for this is serious business. I want you to feel free to discuss and express your opinions about this. But I also want you to see what our Christian responsibility is to each other when we return to the buses of Montgomery.”189
Meanwhile, events in Florida’s capital were impinging on the boycott’s resolution in Alabama. The Tallahassee bus boycott had copied the MIA’s car-pool system, but Tallahassee officials were cannier than the Montgomery commissioners. When talks fell apart in July, the city moved to disable the alternative transportation. Authorities insisted that drivers have chauffeur licenses and proper license plates. They got a local judge to impose a hefty fine on the Inter-Civic Council and its leaders for operating an illegal business without permit, bond, or tax. In late October the legal and financial pressure compelled leaders to shut down the Tallahassee car pool, weakening the boycott.
Montgomery’s extreme white leaders paid close attention. Printers’ union chief Jack Brock, former head of the Alabama AFL (his brother had been a Klan grand dragon), was spearheading an effort to secede from the new AFL-CIO because of its national leaders’ tilt toward civil rights. Not only was the bus boycott an outrage in itself, he and associates felt, but its harmful publicity made it harder for them to promote the interests of the white working class. This cabal nudged the county attorney, who got advice from Tallahassee’s prosecutor. A delegation led by Brock then persuaded the city commission to apply the Tallahassee tactic. Despite public opposition from Advertiser editor Grover Hall (who had also objected to King’s prosecution) that the problem should be left to the Supreme Court, the commissioners announced they would seek an injunction to end the MIA car pool.190 City attorney Walter Knabe filed the petition on the same day the MIA petitioned federal judge Frank Johnson to block the city’s maneuver.
On November 13, Judge Carter heard testimony from both sides and ordered the car pool to cease and desist. Next day Judge Johnson refused to stay the state court’s ruling.
As King and MIA lawyers sat through the daylong hearing in Judge Carter’s courtroom, crestfallen about the foregone result, “I was faltering in my faith and my courage,” he recalled.191 During a noontime break, after King noticed the commissioners scurrying about, an Associated Press reporter handed him a teletype. In one terse sentence the Supreme Court that morning had unanimously upheld the lower court’s Browder ruling: “The motion to affirm is granted and the judgment is affirmed.”192 Despite its brevity the high court had done explicitly what the Brown decision had done only implicitly—overturned the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling that had given constitutional sanction to segregated public transportation, and by extension a segregated society, for sixty years.
When the good word bounced through the courtroom a black spectator exulted, “God Almighty has spoken from Washington, D.C.” King wrote that the “darkest hour of our struggle had indeed proved to be the first hour of victory.”193 Many black people felt that the simultaneity of the twin decisions could not have been coincidence, but the intercession of the holy spirit.
That evening Montgomery’s new Klan klavern made its public debut. Preceded by bomb threats, forty carloads of white-robed racists invaded black neighborhoods. In the past residents would have pulled down shades and locked doors, rifles at hand. This time they refused to be intimidated. They turned on porch lights, opened their doors, and sat on stoops watching the Klan pass by like a holiday parade. Some waved to the masqueraders. Flummoxed, the Klan caravan cut short its tour and drove off into the dark.
Although Judge Johnson had refused to block the car-pool injunction, MIA leaders expected the Supreme Court’s ruling to be enforced in a matter of days. King called an executive board meeting to make recommendations to dual mass meetings that evening for the people to decide whether, and when, to end the boycott.
“If there is anything about this Christian faith that means anything to us,” he preached to the executive board, “it says to us that lives can be changed! (Yes) There is a Nicodemus standing before Jesus asking about it. (Yeah) Jesus cries out, ‘You must be born again,’ but he implies that you can be born again. We must live by that and we must believe it.”194
That night, to eight thousand souls gathered at Holt Street Baptist and Hutchinson Street Baptist, King interpreted their triumph as a reliving of the Jews’ liberation from Egypt. In a powerful exposition on the meaning of freedom and the danger of misunderstanding it, he asserted that it meant not only freedom from oppression.
“It is not only breaking aloose from some evil force, but it is reaching up for a higher force. Freedom from evil is slavery to goodness.” More important than their right was their duty to be free. Freedom meant a responsibility to respect everyone as a sacred personality, even those who despised you—believing that they can be better.
Like the parable of the prodigal son, “strayed away to some far country of sin and evil, I must still believe that there is something within them that can cause them one day to come to themselves (That’s right, Yes) and rise up and walk back up the dusty road to the father’s house.
“I want to tell you this evening that I believe that Senator Engelhardt’s heart can be changed. (Yes) I believe that Senator Eastland’s heart can be changed! (Yes) I believe that the Ku Klux Klan can be changed into a clan for God’s kingdom. (Yes) That’s the essence of the gospel.”
Everyone must be born again. “The fact that you must means you can.” They had to live by the faith that rebirth was possible.
“And we must go back to the buses with that faith. (Yes) I’ll tell you, if we will go back to that faith, we will be able to stagger and astound the imagination of those who would oppress us. (That’s right) We will be able to astound the world.
“Tonight as we go home,” he concluded, “let us pray (Yes) that God will touch the hearts of some of these people. (We will, Amen) And that through the constraining and compelling power of the holy spirit,” the opposition, and the silent middle, would be forced to be true to the Spirit within.195
Without a single nay both assemblies voted to cease the boycott as soon as the enforcement order arrived from Washington.
But the order did not come. The city commissioners waited three weeks to file a last-ditch appeal for a rehearing by the high court. The MIA replaced the car pool with a neighborhood ride-sharing operation, but it carried a fraction of the former traffic. As a second winter set in, most of the multi-thousand protesters, unbent, walked the last leg of their crusade along the city’s cold, slick streets.
WCC leader Luther Ingalls warned the press that “any attempt to enforce this decision will inevitably lead to riot and bloodshed.” Another segregationist announced: “We are prepared for a century of litigation.”196 King knew that the most difficult stage of the struggle lay ahead.197
While the foot soldiers were still walking, the MIA was busily preparing the centerpiece of its effort to train participants for reconciliation with the hostile white majority. In early December, commemorating the movement’s first birthday, King opened the MIA’s weeklong Institute on Nonviolence and Social Change with an address before several thousand townspeople and visitors at Holt Street Baptist Church.
“God decided to use Montgomery as the proving ground,” he declared to the assembly, “for the struggle and triumph of freedom and justice in America. It is one of the ironies of our day that Montgomery, the Cradle of the Confederacy, is being transformed into Montgomery, the cradle of freedom and justice.
“All of the loud noises that you hear today from the legislative halls of the South in terms of ‘interposition’ and ‘nullification,’ and of outlawing the NAACP, are merely the death groans from a dying system. The old older is passing away, and the new order is coming into being. We are witnessing in our day the birth of a new age.” He called for reconciliation, redemption, creation of the beloved community. “It is this type of understanding goodwill that will transform the deep gloom of the old age into the exuberant gladness of the new age.”198
The educational marathon featured workshops and mass meetings led by distinguished guests on the dynamics of the “new and powerful weapon” of soul force. It culminated in a huge Sunday prayer service with Rev. J. H. Jackson, president of the National Baptist Convention. On its second night Smiley moderated a forum on nonviolent change at Bethel Baptist Church, including ministers T. J. Jemison, architect of the 1953 Baton Rouge bus boycott; C. K. Steele, leader of the current boycott in Tallahassee; and Fred Shuttlesworth, organizer of Birmingham bus protests.
Next evening, the anniversary of the boycott’s heroic opening day, Baptist educator Nannie Burroughs enthralled her listeners by likening the protest to the American Revolution. “Work as if all depended upon you,” she exhorted, “and pray as if all depended upon God.”199
THE SPIRITUAL PARADOX that the darkest night preceded the dawn derived from pagan, Celtic, and Christian worship of the winter solstice—for Christians in the guise of evergreens, St. Nicholas, stars guiding the Magi, and a heaven-gifted birth. Through cosmic force alone, the darkest midnight turned magically into the return of the light, days of rising brightness.
Of all poets Robert Frost perhaps best captured the moment of transition, of soul stopping, between dark and light, death and rebirth. On the “darkest evening of the year,” his snowy woods comprised a dark night of the soul, a pregnant womb in which one prepared for the soul’s rebirth. “The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,”—one might wish to lose oneself in the seductive fertile darkness, even to die—“but I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.” The new light of redemption, leading to the promised land, could emerge only out of the deepest depth of darkness.
As November fell into December, five long weeks passed before the Supreme Court rejected the city’s groundless appeal, a ploy to postpone the inevitable. With the advent of Christmas, “bus classes” continued apace, folding chairs lined up on the altar to simulate buses in which protesters role-played as black and white riders and bus drivers. Despite MIA urging and Smiley’s gentle persuasion, the white community steadfastly refused to prepare for “promiscuous sitting.” Its leaders took the opposite stance of defiance.
When the Supreme Court put out its final word, the commissioners publicly reviled its unconstitutional “usurpation.” Foreseeing bloodshed and “the curse of tragedy,” they asserted that the city commission, backed by the white citizenry, “will not yield one inch, and will forever stand like a rock against social equality, intermarriage, and mixing of the races in the schools. There must continue the separation of the races under God’s creation and plan. In so doing, we know that the best interest of both races will be served.”200
The enforcement order arrived in Montgomery on December 20 and took effect. At a spirited mass meeting that night at St. John AME Church, the people reaffirmed their decision to return.
“We have lived under the agony and darkness of Good Friday,” King called out, “with the conviction that one day the heightened glow of Easter would emerge on the horizon.” Along with exaltation, people were anxious with worry about what would come, some semiconsciously afraid of life without the now familiar comfort of shared sacrifice. “Like many consummations,” King commented, “this one left a slight aftertaste of sadness.”201
A code of nonviolent conduct, drafted by Smiley, was handed out to the foot soldiers, and published in the Advertiser. Among the seventeen guidelines was to “be loving enough to absorb evil and understanding enough to turn an enemy into a friend.”202
Just before dawn on the winter solstice, Abernathy, Nixon, Smiley, and Rosa Parks arrived at the King parsonage. When the first bus pulled up on South Jackson Street at 6 A.M., King was greeted politely by the driver and sat in the front next to Smiley, behind Abernathy.
The first two days of desegregation stirred little resistance. But late Saturday night, December 22, someone fired a shotgun through King’s front door. On Christmas Eve, five white men savagely assaulted a fifteen-year-old black girl at a bus stop. Right after Christmas half a dozen buses were shot up at night. One blast hit laundress Rosa Jordan, eight months pregnant, inches from her unborn child, shattering her leg. Doctors were afraid to operate until after her baby was born. When the city commissioners suspended night service, snipers fired by day. Sellers blamed black people for the attacks as a tactic to win white sympathy.203 The new day of bus desegregation came to a city mired more than ever in the bleak darkness of racial division.
Would the world turn forward with the return of the light?
DURING THE IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH, in which participants’ heady feeling of triumph and vindication mingled with fear and foreboding, King barely paused to take a deep breath. He turned his attention to how his acclaimed leadership might catalyze a broad civil rights structure to support local struggles across the South. It was needed as much for protection of fragile gains as for further progress. This goal had been central for Rustin from the outset. When he first arrived in Montgomery he had suggested to Coretta King the need for a coordinating agency.204 Smiley too had felt the necessity of a South-wide vehicle for communication, coordination, and the teaching of nonviolent methods to local leaders and had done some spadework through FOR.
King conferred often during the bus boycott with leaders of sister movements, sharing tales and counsel and arranging mutual aid, particularly with fellow Alabama preachers Fred Shuttlesworth of Birmingham and Joseph Lowery in Mobile. The state’s June 1956 court injunction barring Alabama NAACP operations made such interchange all the more urgent since the state NAACP had provided what little coordination had previously linked Alabama activists. He also kept in touch with Baptist ministers C. K. Steele, leader of the Tallahassee bus protest, and T. J. Jemison in Baton Rouge. Lowery recalled that he, King, and Shuttlesworth “saw this need to get together and then we just talked about how we ought to broaden it to include Steele, Jemison, and the other guys.”205
Having nudged King’s thinking all year about the need for a regional organization, Rustin began active planning in the second half of November with two New York colleagues, NAACP leader Ella Baker and Stanley Levison, a white leftwing attorney, businessman, and civil rights fund-raiser with ties to the Communist Party. In a letter to King just before Christmas Rustin suggested: “Regional groups of leaders should be brought together and encouraged to develop forms of local organization leading to an alliance of groups capable of creating a Congress of organizations.”206 The same idea had been urged on King by others such as Rev. Doug Moore of Durham, North Carolina, a friend from Boston University days.207
On the last Sunday of the year King spoke to a convention banquet of the black Omega Psi Phi fraternity in Baltimore. Afterward he and his wife were driven to Washington by Harris and Clare Wofford, authors of a firsthand account of the Indian independence struggle, India Afire. Harris Wofford, a Washington attorney, was one of King’s tutors in Gandhian nonviolence and later became President Kennedy’s special assistant for civil rights. The two couples were joined in the crowded sedan by Rustin and Levison, who met King for the first time. Along the Maryland highway—where the racially mixed group would have been barred from sitting together in a roadside restaurant—the six discussed Rustin’s and Levison’s ideas for a new civil rights organization. Rustin fired up the dialogue.
“I believe that you have got to have a South-wide organization, which I think you must now head up, made up of key boycott leaders across the South, not involving Urban League or NAACP, because if you bring all those organizations together, you will have to compromise to their needs. But you’re in a very strong position now, to set up an organization, but to set it up so that you are the key, and to set it up in a way where your board is only advisory.”
Although Rustin had decisively parted company with the Communist Party long before, and was an ardent rhetorical advocate of grassroots democracy, his blueprint sounded curiously redolent of Leninist democratic centralism.
“You can’t set up an organization like that!” King replied testily—despite his longtime fealty to the democratic centralism of the black Baptist church.
“I can show you how to do it,” Rustin shot back. As usual King did not want to argue.
“OK,” he said, “draw up the plans.”208
As they rode through the wintry Maryland countryside, Levison was struck by King’s frank doubts about his leadership. The New York socialist would soon become King’s trusted adviser and confidant, his closest white friend. King pierced the tension by opening up.
“If anybody had asked me a year ago to head this movement,” he said quietly, “I tell you very honestly, that I would have run a mile to get away from it. I had no intention of being involved in this way. As I became involved, and as people began to derive inspiration from their involvement, I realized that the choice leaves your own hands. The people expect you to give them leadership. You see them growing as they move into action, and then you know you no longer have a choice. You can’t decide whether to stay in it or get out of it. You must stay in it.”
Levison was seized by the sense that he “didn’t seem to be the type to be a mass leader. There was nothing flamboyant, nothing even charismatic about him as he sat in an ordinary discussion. He looked like a typical scholarly kind of person—very thoughtful, quiet, and shy—very shy. The shyness was accented, I felt, with white people.
“There was a certain politeness,” he observed, “a certain arm’s length approach, and you could feel the absence of relaxation. As the years went on this vanished. But it was as if Dr. King’s southern background, largely with the black community, had its effect on him as far as thinking comfortably and easily in the company of white people.”209
The MIA announced an “emergency conference call” sent out by King, Steele, and Shuttlesworth on New Year’s—known to black America as Emancipation Day—to about a hundred southern leaders in a dozen states. It asked them to gather in Atlanta on January 10 and 11.
Despite legal victories in Montgomery and Tallahassee, the Southern Negro Leaders Conference on Transportation and Nonviolent Integration convened in a crisis mood. In the Florida capital leaders had just suspended the seven-month boycott after a federal judge, at the bus company’s behest, restrained the city from enforcing bus segregation. But after a week of desegregated riding, the Florida governor declared a state of emergency and halted bus service.
On Christmas night in Birmingham, Klan dynamite destroyed Shuttlesworth’s home, but he and his family miraculously escaped death. The next morning, as planned, he led 250 black citizens to defy Jim Crow seating on Birmingham buses, backed by King. He and twenty others were arrested. This represented an escalation of tactics, a new departure; the MIA never did civil disobedience as such. The Birmingham leader was not only a more rhetorically radical preacher than King. He and his spirited evangelist followers were more militant in action. At the same time bus desegregation campaigns were taking place in Atlanta, Miami, Mobile, New Orleans, and other cities.
King Sr. hosted the two-day conference at Ebenezer. Martin and Coretta King stayed at his parents’ home along with Abernathy. At 2 A.M. the night before the meeting began, Juanita Abernathy phoned to tell her husband that their home and church had just been bombed, along with the Graetz parsonage, again, and three other black churches. King and Abernathy rushed home to Montgomery. In their absence Coretta King, Steele, and Shuttlesworth chaired the conference. Rustin and Ella Baker orchestrated in the wings.
Sixty representatives from twenty-nine communities in ten southern states spent the first day discussing several working papers Rustin had drafted. A large majority were black clergy, only a handful were women, and only one was a paleface, Rev. Will Campbell of Mississippi. Besides Coretta King none of the boycott’s women leaders, not even Jo Ann Robinson, attended the Atlanta parley.
Rustin’s seven mimeographed handouts addressed issues such as responding to violence, the role of nonviolence and law, and the relationship of voting-rights organizing to direct action. His first paper asked the key questions: “Do we need a coordinating group for advice and council among the present protest groups?” “Should such a council try to stimulate bus protests in other areas of the South?”210 The gathering answered the first affirmatively by constituting themselves a continuing group and choosing King chairman when he returned on the second afternoon. They did not resolve the second, thornier question. The consensus seemed more to press for federal intervention against violence and violation of court rulings than to launch new protests. For the time being they wanted to forestall terrorist reprisals sparked by more confrontational efforts.
Upon adjourning, the leaders called for national protest and prayer decrying the dynamite and TNT bombings of churches and parsonages in Montgomery. They issued a wide-ranging “Statement to the South and Nation,” appealing to Christian principles of love and reconciliation. They addressed the white majority, particularly “white southerners of goodwill” and white churches and clergy.
“We advocate nonviolence in words, thought and deed, we believe this spirit and this spirit alone can overcome the decades of mutual fear and suspicion that have infested and poisoned our southern culture.” Through this spirit “a miracle will be wrought from this period of intense social conflict.”
They called for federal action to stop the “reign of terror”: for President Eisenhower, resoundingly reelected over Adlai Stevenson, to speak in a southern city urging citizens to abide by Supreme Court decisions, stressing the moral justice of civil rights; for Vice President Richard Nixon to make a fact-finding tour of the South like his European trip for Hungarian refugees after the Soviet invasion; and for the attorney general to meet with their representatives about the Justice Department’s responsibility to preserve law and order in the Deep South.211 They got only a polite nonresponse.
Back in Montgomery, the strain on King from violence, exhaustion, MIA quarreling, and others’ jealousy of his stardom—he felt guilty for all that was amiss—caused him one night to lose himself in the emotional preaching he had always disdained. During the first mass meeting after the bombings, he led a prayer at Bethel Baptist that pumped up “an emotion I could not control” in the crowd and in himself. Beseeching God about the dangers they faced, he cried out, “If anyone should be killed, let it be me!”212 The assembly’s pandemonium pushed him over the edge. He collapsed behind the lectern, kept from falling by fellow ministers holding him up.
Supremacist violence struck again later in January. A powerful bomb, a dozen dynamite sticks with smoldering fuse, was found outside King’s front door. The home of a hospital orderly was blown up down the street, probably as a diversion. Police believed that the neighboring blast was timed to bring King or his wife to the door just as the bomb exploded at their feet. A few days earlier the Klansmen who carried out the attacks forced a black man to jump to his death in the Alabama River for allegedly going out with a white woman. It was a case of mistaken identity, like so many others. All black men looked alike; all were guilty of the desire if not the act. Negroes were interchangeable. The Klan made their point.
The Saturday night that King’s parsonage was nearly blown to kingdom come happened to be the anniversary of his midnight vision. In his sermon at Dexter next morning he revealed how much this assassination try had shaken him by recalling, for the first time publicly, the holy spirit’s visitation in his kitchen, which had given him the strength to persevere.213
“I went to bed many nights scared to death,” he said to his congregation, but “early on a sleepless morning in January 1956, rationality left me. Almost out of nowhere I heard a voice that morning saying to me, ‘Preach the gospel, stand up for truth, stand up for righteousness.’ Since that morning I can stand up without fear.
“So I’m not afraid of anybody this morning. Tell Montgomery they can keep shooting and I’m going to stand up to them. Tell Montgomery they can keep bombing and I’m going to stand up to them. If I had to die tomorrow morning I would die happy because I’ve been to the mountaintop and I’ve seen the promised land and it’s going to be here in Montgomery.”214
MODERATE WHITE BUSINESSMEN prodded the city to track down the bombers—a class fracture in the fortress of white supremacy. The trail led to the city’s new klavern, dominated by union activists. Seven Klan members, local laborers, were apprehended. But when the first two defendants were tried in May 1957, after an energetic public campaign on their behalf, an all-white jury acquitted them easily. The prosecutor announced that further convictions were impossible; he let the others go free. The fact that a ringleader had been editor of the White Citizens Council newspaper and that others were associated with the WCC gave the lie to the council’s claim that its tactics were peaceful and lawful.215 For quite a few it was Citizens Council by day, Klan after dark.
Due in part to the climate of intimidation surrounding the Klan trial, white moderates who had rarely opened their mouths before were now chilled into frozen silence. Supremacists believed that their success in stemming further black advances in Montgomery resulted from their silencing of racial moderates. Actually the glacial racial progress, slower even than before the bus boycott, had much to do with acrimony among black leaders, not able to preserve the fragile unity of the bus boycott. King’s frequent absences did not help matters. Race relations reached a low ebb with the failure of school desegregation around the time he moved back to Atlanta at the end of the 1950s.
Although supremacists succeeded after the boycott in unifying the white community in cowardly quiescence, they never hardened them behind everlasting segregation—though in the early months of 1956 it looked like they were making headway. Why did their momentum stall? For one thing, despite its ability to induce mass hysteria, the fast-growing Citizens Council movement did not have leadership comparable to the MIA’s at either top or grass roots. During the boycott King and his colleagues managed—barely, at times—to keep egos and ambitions under control and harnessed toward common aims. The WCC, and its Klan underground, revealed itself as a muscular front without a strong back to hold it up and keep it accountable to an anxious constituency. Jealousies, rivalries, and turf battles, and the lack of any but a rear vision, tore holes in supremacist armor and kept it from sustaining its mobilization.
Did the black movement’s empowerment by black church culture have a lot to do with this contrast? Was white resistance too secular, despite pious platitudes obligatory in a highly religious culture, for its own good? Fuller use of fundamentalist Christian symbols, done with integrity, might have inhibited its means and undermined its ends. To be sure, the Klan made mileage with cross burnings and other rituals that condemned black Christians as the Antichrist; to bomb a heathenish black church was a blow for the avenging white Christ.
During the bus boycott both racial communities mobilized with fierce determination, blacks fueled more by anger, whites by fear. But only the black community effectively organized. For these organizing miracles, to which white blunders contributed, the women leaders and black churches deserved the lion’s share of credit.
IN EARLY FEBRUARY 1957 King wired the Atlanta conferees asking them to reconvene on Valentine’s Day in New Orleans at New Zion Baptist Church. Its pastor, A. L. Davis, helped lead the New Orleans bus desegregation campaign. Ninety-seven activists from thirty-four cities created the Southern Leaders Conference and elected King president. More than a coordinating body, the new association emerged as a regionwide equivalent to the MIA: a top-down organization of black leaders, mostly ministers, to link church-based movements sprouting across the South. The mass base of the black church, with grassroots activists in each city, was incorporated into the organization through its preacher leaders.
A clergy-led association composed of affiliates like the MIA, Birmingham ACMHR, and Tallahassee Inter-Civic Council could not only foster leaders’ collaboration but enhance their ability to mobilize their own communities behind shared goals. The leaders opted not to make it a mass-membership organization, so as not to compete with the NAACP, but this would affect organizing choices and fund-raising down the road.
Smiley had tried to set up something different: a biracial group of southern activists, including white and black clergy, educators, and college students, more explicitly grounded in nonviolent principles. Although King trusted Smiley and FOR and appreciated their help, his Baptist orientation combined with the success of the MIA model drew him toward a more indigenous, all-black formation in which preachers centering around himself would run the show. He and his colleagues christened it the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) at a third gathering in Montgomery in August 1957. Thus movement leaders chose for their strategic vehicle the nonviolent tradition of A. Philip Randolph, which called for a black-led organization and mass action, rather than FOR’s pacifist tradition that was oriented more toward moral witness than mass organization.216
As it took shape SCLC opted not to further bus boycotts or other direct action against segregation. That would come later. In the next few years, even in Montgomery, black citizens made scant progress in desegregating schools, parks, other public facilities, or in voter registration. Local activists were divided by strategic choices, especially between voting and desegregation.
SCLC leaders decided to concentrate on voting-rights education and organizing, hoping to launch a South-wide movement to secure the ballot. This strategy was idealistic in that achieving universal suffrage would require not only changes in official practices but also in black attitudes and customs. The betterment promised by black voting power would take time. The voting strategy was practical in that, being less of an immediate threat to white supremacy, it would not provoke as much violent opposition, outside of Mississippi; nor would it be impeded by the mythology of separate but equal. And for what it was worth, the hallowed Constitution mandated their right to vote.
At the New Orleans meeting on Valentine’s Day, King and his colleagues made plans for a “Prayer Pilgrimage” to Washington on May 17, third anniversary of the Brown decision. Randolph helped negotiate cosponsorship with the NAACP. King’s speech to the rally of twenty-five thousand at the Lincoln Memorial culminated in his resounding call to “Give us the ballot!” Foreshadowing his famous address six years later at the same spot, his hit performance solidified his symbolic leadership of the rising black movement.
Despite this dramatic start, SCLC floundered in carrying out its voting-right campaign. Although it faced daunting obstacles, failure to build a southern mass movement in the late 1950s was rooted in its identity crisis. Was SCLC to center around and capitalize on King’s fame and prestige? Or was it to be the congress of local organizations that would nurture and coordinate grassroots activism? Was its priority to build up King, or to build up the affiliates and their indigenous leadership, dynamic organizers such as Jo Ann Robinson, E. D. Nixon, and Shuttlesworth? It could not do both; centralism clashed with autonomy. The growing gulf between King and the local groups not only hindered the latter’s efforts but held back SCLC.
An astute recruiter of leadership, King had the good sense to hire seasoned organizer Ella Baker to manage SCLC’s operations. With her organizing prowess, three decades full, she ran in a league of her own. But as in the bus boycott, he could not keep from micromanaging at whim, delegating responsibility without authority. He erred in not backing her efforts to grow the grassroots movement that he rhetorically advocated. In early 1958 SCLC launched the Crusade for Citizenship, aimed at doubling the number of southern black voters by 1960, but it failed to adopt Baker’s blueprint. By the end of the first year the crusade had run aground.
If SCLC had forged firmer ties with affiliate “movement centers”—in Nashville, for example—it might have realized that, as Montgomery had presaged, building protest against the everyday evil of segregation, rather than pushing for suffrage, was the strategy needed at this historical moment to ignite and fuel a sustained large-scale movement. The unanticipated explosion of southern student activism in early 1960 compelled King’s organization to downplay voting and pursue the path of mass protest not taken at its founding meetings.
Even so, SCLC stumbled before finding its footing. But the brilliant Birmingham campaign and the “Negro Revolution of 1963” led to achievement of civil rights reforms that abolished legal segregation and enforced voting rights. All across the South, as Montgomery had heralded, ordinary citizens proved themselves the motors of change, the leaders of their leaders, the shapers of history.
Bringing into being SCLC, which after fits and starts surpassed the half-century-old NAACP as the 1960s’ leading civil rights organization, was one of the crucial ways that the Montgomery bus boycott prepared the ground for the nationwide black freedom movement that transformed American politics, culture, and values over the next decades. The bus boycott was “God’s proving ground,” manifesting the destiny of African Americans to achieve their own freedom and “redeem the soul of America.” It forged and tested the strategies and methods, support networks and alliances, language and vision, and shared spiritual meaning that helped generate and came to fruition in the ensuing mass movement.
The Montgomery epic showed the power and potential of mass nonviolent action in the American grain. It set the standard for a profoundly democratic grassroots movement in which leadership multiplied. It proved that ordinary people could behold the beloved community by building it, day by day, in the storm of heartfelt struggle.
“FRANKLY, I’M WORRIED TO DEATH,” Martin King confessed to his mentor J. Pius Barbour. “A man who hits the peak at twenty-seven has a tough job ahead. People will be expecting me to pull rabbits out of the hat for the rest of my life.”217