by Troy Jackson
By examining King’s activities after the boycott through the lens of Montgomery, one sees how he slowly disengaged from the local struggle. While maintaining symbolic leadership as the president of the Montgomery Improvement Association, King’s energies drifted more and more to the broader regional struggle. Elevated to national prominence by the success of the boycott, King used his impressive resume, oratorical gifts, and tactical skills to contribute to other local movements. He would never again be as intimately connected to local activists as he was in Montgomery. His elevated status led to criticisms of his leadership, with members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee referring to King derisively as “de Lawd” by 1962. Five years earlier, King had already begun to disengage from the only local movement to which he had a true grassroots connection. The strong pull of the regional and national platform eclipsed his efforts in Montgomery, where due to white intransigence and violence as well as reemerging divisions within the black community, moving forward proved tedious and tiring. By understanding the more complete story of Montgomery, one gains a better understanding of the strengths and limitations of King’s civil rights leadership.6
The local movement also demonstrates the indispensable contributions of women in the struggle for civil rights. Many early histories of the civil rights era emphasized the significance of male leaders while failing to recognize the efforts of female leaders. Jo Ann Robinson’s memoir on the Montgomery movement helped correct this omission. Women in the Civil Rights Movement, a volume of essays published in the early 1990s, furthered the effort to emphasize the critical contributions of women like Robinson, Rosa Parks, Fannie Lou Hamer, Mary Fair Burks, and Ella Baker. A close look at Montgomery from 1948 to 1960 continues this important effort by demonstrating not only the significance of white and black women to the local struggle, but also the influence they had on King’s development.7
Scholars have recognized the church-based and religious roots of the civil rights movement for decades. Many of the leaders were black clergy; mass meetings tended to take place in local congregations; and one of the leading organizations pushing for social change in the South was the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Recent studies have explored in greater depth the way religion, theology, and the church helped inspire and define the struggle. By examining the earliest sermons and religious writings of King before, during, and after the boycott, this work highlights the significant and sustained theological underpinnings that help explain why King had the influence and following that he did. King’s optimistic, hope-filled message rooted in the power of God inspired men and women to remain in and sacrifice for the struggle. His consistent emphasis on the love ethic found in the life and teachings of Jesus provided the theological undergirding for the strategy of nonviolence. King’s growing faith in God also fueled his conviction that the civil rights movement could become a vehicle for redemption in Montgomery, the South, and throughout the nation.8
As a Baptist minister, King delivered sermons that provide an excellent window into his thought and development as a leader. Through the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project, hundreds of King’s early homiletic manuscripts, outlines, and recorded sermons are now available to researchers through the publication of their latest volume. These religious writings demonstrate more clearly the theological commitments King brought to Montgomery. King’s oratorical skills coupled with a passionate commitment to the power of love and the centrality of the social gospel allowed him to be the ideal spokesperson and leader for the Montgomery movement. Years before the boycott, King was already regularly addressing issues of race, segregation, peace, and economic injustice from the pulpit. The core of King’s message stayed consistent throughout his adult life. By 1954, King and Montgomery were ready for each other.9
Montgomery demonstrates that King’s sermons and speeches became most poignant when accompanied by direct action, something he was willing to participate in, but not something he ever initiated. Taylor Branch, in his three-part series on King’s public career, concludes that King’s inclination was to inspire social change through oratory. Following the bus boycott, he was unsure where the movement should go next, and “under these conditions, oratory grew upon him like a narcotic.” Unable to effectively transfer the model of the bus boycott to address other local challenges or broader regional injustice, King replaced nonviolent direct action with public speaking. Branch concludes that “this conversion approach had brought King the orator’s nectar—applause, admiration, and credit for quite a few tearful if temporary changes of heart—but in everyday life Negroes remained a segregated people, invisible or menial specimens except for celebrity aberrations such as King himself.” Following the boycott, it was not until the advent of the sit-in movement, the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the demonstration of courage by the Freedom Riders that the civil rights movement became a national phenomenon. These and subsequent local movements, buttressed by King’s oratory and symbolic leadership, transformed the civil rights struggle into a regional civil rights movement that changed a nation. Without the courage and sacrifice of countless men and women from Montgomery to Greensboro and from Nashville to Birmingham, King’s “I have a dream” speech would have fallen on deaf ears. King’s oratory had its full potency only when accompanied by concrete engagement.10
The March on Washington was not the first time King learned both the limits and possibilities of the spoken word. King’s first oratorical triumph, his Holt Street address delivered on the first day of the boycott, emerged only because of the fifty thousand African Americans who did not ride Montgomery’s buses that day. In the speech, King claimed that the people gathered at Holt Street Baptist Church “because of our deep-seated belief that democracy transformed from thin paper to thick action is the greatest form of government on earth.” King experienced the power of oratory coupled with “thick action” first in Montgomery.11
When King’s sermons at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church between 1954 and 1960 are put in conversation with historical events chronicled through numerous oral histories, newspaper articles, and archival material, they reveal a growing passion, urgency, and faith forged in the midst of struggle. The fortitude of Montgomery activists such as E. D. Nixon, Jo Ann Robinson, Rufus Lewis, Mary Fair Burks, and Rosa Parks had a significant impact on King’s early public ministry. Local grassroots leaders helped refine King’s early experiences as they joined together in a prolonged struggle against white supremacy.
This study is structured chronologically. Chapter 1 examines the story of Montgomery from 1948 to 1953, demonstrating that years before King arrived in the Alabama capital, several black and white men and women were challenging segregation and white supremacy in their city. Chapter 2 explores King’s ministry and theological development before he became pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. By the time he preached his first sermon at Dexter, King had already crafted a socially engaged understanding of Christianity that would form the heart of the social gospel he would preach throughout his public ministry. Chapter 3 reviews King’s tenure in Montgomery prior to the bus boycott. He joined many in the city who, as Rosa Parks put it, were “hoping to make a contribution to the fulfillment of complete freedom for all people.” Through involvement in the NAACP and his activities as pastor of Dexter, King supported the local movement before the boycott began.12
The fourth chapter concerns the first two months of the boycott, concluding with the bombing of King’s home on January 30, 1956. Chapter 5 explores how King and the broader community responded to threats, violence, and legal maneuvers over the last ten months of the boycott. The sixth chapter examines how King gradually turned his attention away from Montgomery during his last three years at Dexter. By the time King departed the city, his focus had shifted to the national stage, to a struggle bigger than Montgomery.
Many of those who predated King in Montgomery faced difficult days as the local movement faltered. In the final analysis,
the bus boycott did more for King and the emerging national civil rights movement than it did for the broader African American community in Montgomery. King took the lessons of Montgomery with him, as their courage, activism, and sacrifice prepared him for the many battles that awaited him. In the crucible of Montgomery, Martin Luther King Jr. was becoming King the civil rights leader.
1 “The Stirring of the Water”
I think the Negroes are stirring and they won’t be held down much longer.
—Virginia Durr, 1951
Racially integrated events rarely occurred in Montgomery, but for several years both whites and blacks gathered together at the city’s spacious Cramton Bowl for an Easter sunrise celebration. Segregated seating applied at the municipal arena, but the all-white planning committee worked to include African American preachers in the program as they developed the service. Typically a black minister delivered a prayer and an African American choral group from a local school led the audience in a few traditional spirituals while whites presented the balance of the program, including the sermon. The 1952 gathering proved to be the last, however. Despite steady rainfall, city bus drivers found it more convenient to drop off their black passengers several blocks from the entrance to the event. Even if the weather had not dampened spirits, the discourteous treatment they experienced at the hands of the bus drivers certainly did. Some did not stay for the service, and many more lobbied their ministers to put together all-black sunrise services in the future. Portia Trenholm, the wife of the president of Alabama State College, claimed this was “the very first spontaneous protest as a result of discourteous treatment on the buses.” The following year the black clergy bowed out of the planning process, and African Americans attended a separate sunrise service on the Alabama State College campus.1
This act of protest on the part of the black citizenry of Montgomery reveals their willingness to act collectively to resist mistreatment at the hands of white bus drivers. While this action may have seemed inconsequential at the time, it demonstrates a discernible spirit of resistance among African Americans in the city by the middle of the twentieth century. Years before Martin Luther King Jr. arrived in Montgomery, a handful of whites and many blacks shared a growing dissatisfaction with the racial status quo. Several were already hard at work testing strategies of resistance to segregation.
The ranks of those questioning and even challenging Montgomery’s racial mores near the middle of the twentieth century were diverse. While demeaning experiences due to segregation concerned the entire African American community, leaders broadened their civil rights agenda to include broader economic concerns. Specifically, Dexter Avenue pastor Vernon Johns, Pullman porter E. D. Nixon, and seamstress Rosa Parks not only challenged the physical markers of white supremacy evidenced by segregation, but also questioned the more insidious and diffuse economic oppression that gravely influenced the lives of poor and working-class African Americans. While their agendas were not uniform, several men and women had already decided their days of quiet submission under segregation were over years before King ever set foot in the city. Though their methods and philosophies differed, several were actively stirring the waters in Montgomery.2
Montgomery sits on the Alabama River in the heart of the Black Belt, a land with rich soil, a heritage of bountiful cotton crops, and a legacy of slavery. In addition to its role as a major marketplace for the sale and distribution of cotton, the city also serves as the state capital. The community’s investment in the institution of slavery made it a hotbed of southern political maneuvering following the election of Abraham Lincoln. When southern voices arguing for secession from the United States prevailed, Montgomery was chosen to host a convention of slave states. Following the Civil War, the city continued to depend upon cotton from hinterland plantations to fuel the economy. Many former slaves transitioned to either tenant farming or sharecropping, and as a result cotton production remained the economic bellwether for the region. Thanks to a combination of state government jobs and the region’s rich agricultural land, Montgomery did not aggressively pursue industrialization. The city’s economy during the twentieth century was shaped more by advances in aviation than in industrialization.3
A few years after their first flight, Wilbur and Orville Wright searched for a place to train prospective pilots during the colder winter months. They selected a site on the outskirts of Montgomery, which became known as Maxwell Field. While the training school was relatively shortlived, aviation remained a permanent feature of the city’s economy. Over the coming decades, Montgomery became home to two air force bases, introducing a reliance on the federal government into the local economy.4
The increase in military personnel reshaped the city’s job market and demographics. Following the Civil War, African Americans outnumbered whites until around 1910, by which time whites had pulled even with blacks. The white population continued to grow more rapidly over the next forty years, resulting in a 1950 population of more than 110,000, with roughly 60 percent white. This increase can be attributed to an influx of working-class whites who greatly reshaped municipal politics as the old political machine slowly lost control of the city. The military employed hundreds of Montgomery’s new residents, who had no ties to historically elite families that had monopolized local political power. The city leaders’ failure to attract and develop major manufacturing further weakened their hold. The populist Dave Birmingham capitalized on this growing distrust of political leaders in his 1953 campaign for a seat on the city commission. He went so far as to accuse politicians and city fathers of poisoning the city water supply, a claim that resonated with the suspicions of some of the town’s newer residents. With the support of an effective alliance of a few registered African Americans and the white working class, Birmingham shocked the establishment with his election to the city commission. New political realities were but one indication that the city was undergoing significant social change.5
The economy and social structure of Montgomery depended upon the affordable service labor of the region’s African American men and women. In the late 1950s, Baptist minister Ralph Abernathy estimated that service-oriented occupations accounted for 75–80 percent of the African American workforce. Approximately two-thirds of the black women in the area found employment as domestic workers. The lack of alternative industrial jobs significantly limited their earning potential. According to the 1950 U.S. Census, the median family income for African Americans in Montgomery in 1949 was $908, while in Birmingham, where the availability of industrial jobs bolstered the earning power of black residents, the median income was $1,609. While a small percentage of the city’s black population held professional jobs, primarily in the education field or the military, the lack of industrial jobs made the gap between the classes in Montgomery’s African American community particularly acute. The limited economy contributed to the stifling experience of life under white control for many of the city’s African Americans.6
Kathy Dunn Jackson, who grew up in Montgomery during the 1940s and 1950s, still remembers the dehumanizing treatment she received when she had to have her tonsils and adenoids removed as a young child. Since there were no African American ear, nose, and throat doctors in the city, she had to have her surgery at St. Margaret’s Hospital, which did not allow blacks to have a room in the main building following their surgery. Instead, hospital orderlies moved Jackson to a room shared with all the hospital’s black patients in a small house behind the hospital. In follow-up visits with her doctor, she had to wait in a “colored” waiting room that doubled as a janitorial closet. Jackson’s memories are indicative of the dehumanizing events that were all too common in Montgomery during the decade following World War II.7
Given the insidious nature of Montgomery’s racism and segregation, it appeared that white supremacy was firmly in place. Further examination, however, reveals the presence of subtle changes in racial mores. A front-page article in the Alabama Tribune indicated “race plates” (a practice whereby
a letter C was placed next to names of African Americans) would be dropped from the Montgomery phone directory. The rationale for the change, according to a company representative, was “to avoid discrimination against Negro people.” He indicated that all married women, regardless of race, would be given the title “MRS.” before their names. In addition to this symbolic change, significant services for African Americans also expanded. Montgomery established two black high schools: Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver High. St. Jude’s Hospital opened, marking the first hospital for blacks in the city. Local white leaders provided these expanding services for African Americans within the framework of white supremacy and segregation. While easier access to quality medical care and education directly enhanced the daily lives of Montgomery’s African American citizens, these services did not ameliorate the dehumanizing pall of segregation and economic marginalization they continued to face. Even though President Harry S. Truman’s 1948 Executive Order integrating the armed forces provided an oasis of growing inclusion at Maxwell Air Force Base, African Americans who worked there returned each evening to a segregated southern city.8
As Montgomery’s African Americans gained access to additional community services and institutions, their challenges to overt racism expanded. Protests following incidents of police brutality even led a few whites to question unwarranted violence by police against African Americans. When Montgomery police mercilessly beat an African American, Robert Felder, so severely that he was hospitalized for several weeks, his white employer took the unusual step of reporting the incident to the press. Police chief Ralph B. King dismissed the officers involved, but he paid a price for his diligence. Bowing to public pressure, the city commissioners forced Chief King to retire. A few years later, the police arrested Gertrude Perkins on a charge of public drunkenness. Rather than transporting her to the police station, the arresting officers took her to a remote location where they raped her. When the incident came to light, police chief Carlisle E. Johnstone vigorously pursued harsh reprimands and even the prosecution of the officers involved. Once again, the city commission did not back their police chief. The mayor accused the NAACP of fabricating the whole story, and police records were altered to protect the identities of the accused rapists. When city authorities ignored his recommendations, Chief Johnstone began searching for a job in another community and soon left the city.9