Becoming King

by Troy Jackson

  Amazingly, all of the candidates attended the meeting. Mayor William “Tacky” Gayle was noncommittal on the issues the African American community raised, as was candidate George Cleere. Dave Birmingham, Frank Parks, and the mayoral candidate Harold McGlynn did agree to appoint a black representative to the Parks and Recreation Board. Clyde C. Sellers, a candidate for public safety commissioner, gave a general speech but avoided addressing specifics. None of the candidates dealt with the bus situation, which was the number-one concern on the list. Nor did any engage any of the economic problems or quality of life issues that affected the daily lives of working-class and poor blacks in Montgomery.36

  A few weeks later, Sellers took out a large advertisement in the Montgomery Advertiser in which he offered his answers to the concerns raised in the meeting. Regarding the bus situation, Sellers wrote: “There is a state law which requires segregation of passengers on public conveyances. I feel that there should ALWAYS be seats available for BOTH races on our buses.” Unwilling to offer seats on any city board to African Americans, Sellers offered to “gladly work with their representatives in an attempt to establish a negro park and expanded recreational facilities in Montgomery.” He flatly rejected the suggestion that a new black housing development be located in the rapidly expanding Lincoln Heights community. While not opposed to new homes for blacks, he worried that the lack of adequate African American schools in the Lincoln Heights area “would lead to dissatisfaction and dissention,” leading him to conclude “NEVER in Lincoln Heights.” Regarding the request that blacks be eligible for any civil service job for which they were qualified, the candidate proclaimed: “There ARE places in this nation where civil service jobs for negroes in cities are available, but not in Montgomery. I will expand [sic] every effort to keep it that way.” Sellers ended his advertisement with these words: “I have answered these questions exactly the way I feel. I have many friends among the negroes of Montgomery and I will be fair and honest with them in all our contacts, yet I will not compromise my principles nor violate my Southern birthright to promise something I do not intend to do. I will not be intimidated for the sake of a block of negro votes. I come to you not seeking your votes with wild promises, but with positive and constructive program, based on my training and experience in the fields of business and law enforcement.” Sellers coupled this advertisement with what one historian described as “the most blatantly and insistently racist addresses heard in Montgomery since the days of J. Johnston Moore, the Ku Klux Klan’s candidate against Mayor Gunter in the 1920s.” Sellers’s commitment to a “no-compromise” approach with the city’s African Americans led him to a victory in the commission elections, as he outpaced the incumbent Dave Birmingham 43 percent to 37 percent.37

  During March, the election took a back seat in the minds and hearts of many black citizens when word spread that police had arrested a teenage girl for violating the segregation statutes on city buses. Claudette Colvin, a student at Booker T. Washington High School, refused to stand when ordered to get up from her seat to accommodate a white passenger. When an officer came to forcibly remove Colvin from the bus, she resisted. Women’s Political Council member A. W. West remembered: “she fought like a little tigress. The policeman had scars all over his face.” Clifford Durr supported the local black attorney Fred Gray as defense attorneys for Colvin. In the middle of the legal fight, Virginia Durr described the teenager in glowing terms, noting that she was willing to “stand her ground in the face of the big burly white bus driver, two big white policemen and one big white motor cop. They dragged her off the bus, handcuffed her, and put her in jail and the most marvelous thing about her was that the two other young Negro girls moved back, the woman by her moved back, and she was left entirely alone and still she would not move.” When Durr asked Colvin why she did not move, the girl replied, “I done paid my dime, they didn’t have no RIGHT to move me.”38

  Over the next few months, Durr wrote several letters seeking support for legal expenses, as many hoped the arrest and conviction might become a test case that would go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. When Durr pleaded for financial support for the Colvin case from friends around the country, she asked that checks be sent to Mrs. Rosa Parks. When the case went before the circuit court in early May, the authorities elected to try Colvin on assault and battery, dropping any charges of breaking segregation laws, thus preventing the emergence of any constitutional challenge from the case. Authorities tried and convicted Colvin, placing her on a year’s probation. Summarizing the impact of the Colvin incident, Virginia Durr reflected, “this has created tremendous interest in the Negro community and made them all fighting mad and may help give them the courage to put up a real fight on the bus segregation issue.”39

  According to Ralph Abernathy, the teen’s arrest added to the feeling of discontent in the African American community. In response, he was part of a group that had several meetings with city and bus officials in which they sought to “change the seating policy to a first come, first served basis; that is, with reserved seats for either group. Wherever the two races met, this would constitute the dividing line.” When city leaders claimed the suggestion could not be done according to Alabama law, black leaders asked “that they clarify the seating policy and publish it in the paper so that each person would know where his section was, so that once a Negro got on the bus and was properly seated in the Negro section he would not have to worry about getting up, giving his seat to a white passenger. After several conferences, bus officials refused to clarify this policy.” The lack of concrete action by city leaders further angered many African Americans.40

  Meanwhile, as King completed his first year preaching at Dexter, he had several opportunities to speak to a broader community increasingly agitated by white leaders’ lack of concern. In sermons and speeches, he consistently encouraged his audiences not to allow anger to give rise to bitterness. In May, he accepted an invitation from Alabama State College president and Dexter Avenue Baptist Church member H. Councill Trenholm to serve as the school’s baccalaureate speaker at graduation. In the speech, King challenged the new graduates to not be prisoners of “rugged individualism and national isolationism.” He encouraged them not to settle for mediocrity in “various fields of endeavor” or to give into “hate and bitterness.” Despite the frustrations the graduates were sure to face as they entered the workforce, King called for a loving approach in the face of repression. As King heard stories of blatant racism and experienced the sting of segregation on a daily basis, he had to regularly remind Montgomery’s African American community, including himself, of the need to overcome the temptation to hate.41

  In mid-June, King delivered a speech for the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP titled “The Peril of Superficial Optimism in the Area of Race Relations.” Dexter clerk and former search committee chair Robert D. Nesbitt introduced King: “He is a great asset to Montgomery by his activity in everything for the betterment of the community. He has launched an intensive campaign in the church for NAACP membership and voters.” King began his address by recognizing the amazing progress that made optimism in the area of race relations much more tenable than it would have been a few years earlier. He even suggested that “segregation is dying. He is dying hard, but there is no doubt that his corpse awaits him.” King warned against complacency, noting the persistence of prejudice in the hearts of some whites and the struggles of other minorities throughout the world: “We must be concerned because we are a part of humanity. Whatever affects one affects all.” Despite the intransigence of racism, King claimed that God acted through the 1954 Brown decision, leading him to conclude “that segregation is just as dead as a doornail and the only thing I am uncertain about is how costly the segregationist will make the funeral.” King espoused this same optimism when addressing his own congregation. In a sermon titled “Discerning the Signs of History,” King claimed that “evil carries the seed of its own destruction. God spoke through nine men in 1954, on May 17. They
examined the legal body of segregation and pronounced it constitutionally dead and ever since then things have been changing. We can go to places all over the South that we could not go last year.”42

  Later in the summer, King delivered “The Death of Evil upon the Seashore” to his Dexter congregation. Basing his comments on Phillips Brooks’s nineteenth-century sermon “The Egyptians Dead upon the Seashore,” King admitted: “We have seen evil. We have seen it walk the streets of Montgomery.” He surmised that human history “is the history of a struggle between good and evil. In the midst of the upward climb of goodness there is the down pull of evil.” Citing the Exodus story of the parting of the Red Sea and the subsequent death of the Egyptian army, King declared: “It was a joyous daybreak that had come to end the long night of their captivity. But even more, it was the death of evil; it was the death of inhuman oppression and crushing exploitation. The death of the Egyptians upon the seashore is a glaring symbol of the ultimate doom of evil in its struggle against good.” King applied his interpretation of the Exodus story to the challenges facing his congregation:

  Many years ago we were thrown into the Egypt of segregation, and our great challenge has been to free ourselves from the crippling restrictions and paralyzing effects of this vicious system. For years it looked like we would never get out of this Egypt. The Red Sea always stood before us with discouraging dimensions. But one day through a worldshaking decree by the Supreme Court of America and an awakened moral conscience of many white people, backed up by the Providence of God, the Red Sea was opened, and freedom and justice marched through to the other side. As we look back we see segregation and discrimination caught in the mighty rushing waters of historical fate.

  King tempered his triumphant pronouncement, however, warning that the drowning Egyptians must have “struggled hard to survive in the Red Sea. They probably saw a log here and even a straw there, and I can imagine them reaching desperately for something as light as straw trying to survive. This is what is happening to segregation today. It is caught in the mighty Red Sea, and its advocators are reaching out for every little straw in an attempt to survive.” This desperation accounted for the flurry of absurd obstructionist laws by southern legislatures. These actions simply reinforced that “the advocators of segregation have their backs against the wall. Segregation is drowning today in the rushing waters of historical necessity.” Although the ultimate outcome was clear to King, the struggle in Montgomery was far from over.43

  During the summer of 1955, a young white pastor who would prove an important ally in the ongoing struggle moved to Montgomery as the new pastor of Trinity Lutheran Church. Most whites in the city viewed Robert S. Graetz, a Caucasian pastor of an African American congregation, with suspicion. Considered outsiders by white southerners, Graetz and his family were not fully a part of the African American culture, either. As his family sought support, they “discovered quite early that there was an underground network of so-called ‘liberals’ who maintained close contact with each other.” They became friends with I. B. and Clara Rutledge, Clifford and Virginia Durr, and other whites in the area. Graetz marveled at the activism of white women: “While white men were shouting ‘Segregation forever!’ and working hard to preserve their cherished traditions, white women all over the South were working just as hard to eliminate racial prejudice and segregation. Some were quite outspoken. Mrs. Rutledge was one of the finest, a remarkable, fearless woman, who lived into her nineties.” Immediately Graetz realized that they were outsiders and intruders who posed a threat to “the societal fabric of the time. We knew that. But plenty of people around us, Negro and white, reinforced our conviction that the fabric not only needed to be changed but to be torn apart.”44

  Graetz developed a relationship with Robert Hughes, who served as the state director of the integrated Alabama Council on Human Relations. The organization’s local chapter was one of the city’s few groups that brought blacks and whites together. As Graetz put it, “In the 1950s a white person taking part in an integrated organization, especially in the South, defied all social mores and jeopardized the principles that controlled every aspect of lives.” The countercultural nature of the Montgomery Council on Human Relations meant that businesspeople were reluctant to be identified with the group even if they agreed with its principles. Graetz remembers: “A few of them supported us, but they rarely came to our meetings. More commonly, wives became actively involved in our councils, while husbands took part in White Citizens Councils and other organizations working to preserve segregation.”45

  A few white women did continue to work behind the scenes to challenge the racial mores of Montgomery. In a letter to Mayor Gayle, Juliette Morgan expressed her “shock and horror” regarding Police Chief Reppenthal’s recent remarks concerning black police officers: “They are just niggers doing a nigger’s job.” While Morgan recognized that her protests amount to “so much whistling at the whirlwind,” she was unwilling to “stand by and not appeal to your sense of common decency in such a case as this. If I did, I would feel like those ‘good Germans’ who stood by and did nothing all during the 1930’s.” In an addendum at the bottom of her letter to Gayle, she added, “I have long felt that there are great inconsistencies in our professions of Christianity and democracy—and our way of life.”46

  As a handful of whites spoke out against Montgomery’s racism, several African Americans sought to apply direct pressure on the city regarding the integration of public schools. At a midsummer executive meeting of the NAACP, members worked on developing a petition to present to the school board in an attempt to inspire some action by the fall. Attorney Fred Gray encouraged only those parents “whose jobs will not be in jeopardy” to sign the petition. The NAACP also continued to work through the courts, filing motions for new trials in both the Jeremiah Reeves and the Claudette Colvin cases. The minutes from the July meeting also indicate that the organization’s local president, Robert L. Matthews (whom Nixon had replaced as NAACP president in 1946), nominated Martin Luther King Jr. as a candidate to serve on the executive committee, noting he had “made a great contribution to the branch, bringing in memberships and contributions.” Taking minutes at the NAACP meeting was Rosa Parks, who served as the organization’s secretary. A few weeks later, she left the city for a pivotal two-week trip to the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee.47

  Earlier that summer, Virginia Durr had recommended Parks, who did seamstress work for the Durr family, as an ideal delegate for a workshop on segregation that Myles Horton and the staff at Highlander had assembled. Unable to afford the workshop’s cost, Parks was granted a scholarship, prompting her to write a letter of thanks to the school’s executive secretary. In the note, she expressed her excitement regarding this opportunity: “I am looking forward with eager expectation to attending the workshop, hoping to make a contribution to the fulfillment of complete freedom for all people.” Parks had a wonderful experience at the school: “I was forty-two years old, and it was one of the few times in my life up to that point when I did not feel any hostility from white people. I experienced people of different races and backgrounds meeting together in workshops and living together in peace and harmony. I felt that I could express myself honestly.” She recalled wishing, as her time in Tennessee came to an end, that she could have stayed longer: “It was hard to leave, knowing what I was going back to.”48

  Upon her return from Highlander, Parks resumed her role as secretary for the next NAACP branch meeting. At the gathering hosted by the Metropolitan Methodist Episcopal Church, the chapter officially approved King as a new board member. They also publicized an upcoming Women’s Day Program during which the featured speaker was to be introduced by Autherine Lucy, to whom the courts had recently granted the right to be admitted to the University of Alabama after being denied three years earlier. The group also continued to discuss the need for blacks to register to vote.49

  Despite the efforts of Nixon, the WPC, and the NAACP, the entire African American
community had not come together as a unified front in their fight against white supremacy. A large part of the problem was the gulf between black professionals and the black working class in and around Montgomery. Earlier in the year, Virginia Durr had noted the class divisions: “the Negro leaders themselves have such a hard time arousing the mass of Negro people to put up any kind of fight for themselves.” Part of the difficulty in mobilizing the masses rested in local social networks that rarely brought the classes together. While all faced the dehumanizing impact of segregation, their social spheres rarely intersected. Census data indicate that less than 10 percent of the African American population worked in professional fields, while most blacks worked as domestics, common laborers, or service workers. The division between the classes significantly affected one’s daily routine. While a professor at Alabama State College would be able to run a hot bath or shower in the morning, more than 82 percent of the black community lacked piped hot water in their homes. Nearly 70 percent of the black community still relied on chamber pots and outhouses, while only 6 percent of the white community lacked flushable toilets.50