by Troy Jackson
Clear direction for the Montgomery movement proved elusive. In early February, King appeared as a guest on a national NBC Sunday news program called The Open Mind. When asked by the moderator about future plans for the MIA, King admitted: “In Montgomery we have not worked out any next steps, that is, in any chronological order. We are certainly committed to work and press on until segregation is nonexistent in Montgomery and all over the South.” While plans were hazy on the local scene, King continued to take full advantage of opportunities to travel, speak, and promote the cause of justice both domestically and abroad. An appearance on the cover of Time magazine cemented King’s role as the face of not only the MIA, but also the broader civil rights struggle. Among King’s many opportunities was a request from Gold Coast prime minister Kwame Nkrumah to attend Ghana’s independence celebration. Seeking to solidify his understanding of the relationship between national and international freedom movements, King accepted the invitation. Only twenty-eight years old, King had already earned the status of foreign dignitary. A few days before departing, King preached “It’s a Great Day to Be Alive” at Dexter. King told his congregation that the groundswell of freedom movements around the globe demonstrated God’s power at work, leading him to be optimistic that the local struggle for social change would prove successful.5
Before leaving, King hoped to set in motion a process that would provide the MIA with a blueprint for how they would take full advantage of what King called “a great time to be alive.” In a memo to Ralph Abernathy, King urged his deputy to call together a “Future Planning Committee” to chart a course for the future of the MIA. The committee included Abernathy as chair, Jo Ann Robinson and Dr. Moses W. Jones as co-chairs, as well as J. E. Pierce, Solomon Seay, H. H. Hubbard, R. J. Glasco, Rufus Lewis, E. D. Nixon, Mrs. A. W. West, and Robert Graetz. At the first meeting, the committee discussed implementing an eight-point program for the organization. Proposed initiatives included nonpartisan political education and involvement, an emphasis on interracial communication, providing means for adult education, and improving recreation opportunities for African Americans in the city. They also sought to improve the economic status of Montgomery’s black citizens through securing more good jobs, providing better housing, promoting neighborhood businesses, establishing credit unions and perhaps a Savings and Loan, and continuing financial relief efforts. Finally, the committee hoped to pursue better cooperation with the police while recognizing the need for an “impartial investigation of alleged intimidations and discriminations” by law enforcement.6
Soon after King’s return from Ghana, the committee settled on a plan for the future of the MIA. They began their written blueprint for the organization with an idealistic preamble:
Recognizing that every community has the basic potential for the solution of social problems and the implementation of legal decisions which redefine the ideals set forth by the founders of this nation, and that ultimately the local community is the proving ground for the social progress of the nation; and recognizing that the only feasible solution to the problems of group relations and race relations is through the Christian and non-violent approach; and recognizing that enforced segregation is a social evil which must be eradicated before any group or people can reach their full social, political, economic, and moral maturity; and desiring to provide a far-reaching MIA program that would embrace both the immediate and the remote problems, and at the same time center its aims upon the building of a bigger, a better, and a more beautiful community, wherein good group relations and good race relations exist; we therefore set forth the following ten-point program.
Despite consistent backlash from segregationists, the MIA dared to dream big as they prepared for the future. They believed Montgomery would continue to be a primary proving ground for the burgeoning civil rights movement. Over the coming years, all Montgomery would prove was that the nation had a long way to go.7
King used his first sermon at Dexter following his return from Ghana to reflect on his trip, emphasizing the tragic stories of colonialism and slavery that deeply affected the continent of Africa and her people. Citing the groundswell of independence movements throughout the world, he asserted that “there is something in the soul that cries out for freedom.” When King heard the chants of freedom emanating from the people at the hour of Ghana’s independence, he remembered “that old Negro spiritual once more crying out: ‘Free at last, free at last, Great God Almighty, I am free at last.’” Although Ghana had experienced their liberation, the local struggle continued for Dexter’s parishioners: “Don’t go back to your homes and around Montgomery thinking that the Montgomery City Commission and that all the forces in the South will eventually work out this thing for the Negroes.” The lesson of Ghana was that “freedom only comes through persistent revolt, through persistent agitation, through persistently rising up against the system of evil. The bus boycott is just the beginning. Buses are integrated in Montgomery, but that is just the beginning.” Emphasizing the theme of nonviolence, he instructed his congregation to “fight with love, so that when the day comes that the walls of segregation have completely crumbled in Montgomery, that we will be able to live with people as their brothers and sisters. Oh, my friends, our aim must be not to defeat Mr. Engelhardt, not to defeat Mr. Sellers and Mr. Gayle and Mr. Parks. Our aim must be to defeat the evil that’s in them. But our aim must be to win the friendship of Mr. Gayle and Mr. Sellers and Mr. Engelhardt.” King embraced the MIA’s belief that Montgomery could become a proving ground for the development of genuine cross-racial relationships.8
On Easter Sunday, King shared some of his heartfelt questions regarding the persistence and power of evil in the world. As he contemplated the implications of Christ’s resurrection, he confessed his doubts: “Every now and then I become bewildered about this thing. I begin to despair every now and then. And wonder why it is that the forces of evil seem to reign supreme and the forces of goodness seem to be trampled over.” He admitted struggling to understand why “the forces of injustice have triumphed over the Negro, and he has been forced to live under oppression and slavery and exploitation? Why is it, God? Why is it simply because some of your children ask to be treated as first-class human beings they are trampled over, have their homes bombed, their children are pushed from their classrooms and sometimes little children are thrown into the deep waters of Mississippi?” King’s specific questions for God reveal his commitment to wrestle along with the people through the most perplexing challenges of life in the segregated South. While happy the boycott was successful, they experienced in its wake the full onslaught of racist resistance to social change. In the face of such hatred, King’s faith remained steadfast as Easter “answers the profound question that we confront in Montgomery. And if we can just stand with it, if we can just live with Good Friday, things will be all right. For I know that Easter is coming and I can see it coming now. As I look over the world, as I look at America. I can see Easter coming, in race relations. I can see it coming on every hand. I see it coming in Montgomery.”9
King’s frequent travels meant he had fewer opportunities to see Easter coming in Montgomery. When Pulpit Digest requested that King provide a sermon on race relations for publication, King declined, citing “an extremely crowded and strenuous schedule for the last two or three years, I have not had the opportunity to write most of the sermons that I preach. In most cases I have had to content myself with a rather detailed outline.” His energies were increasingly directed toward achieving national objectives. In May, King joined A. Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Roy Wilkins of the NAACP in calling for a march on Washington, D.C., dubbed the “Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom.” Set for the third anniversary of the Brown decision, the organizers stressed that “eight states have defied the nation’s highest court and have refused to begin in good will, with all deliberate speed, to comply with its ruling.” In their attempt to garner participants for the march, the sponsors noted the passivity o
f law enforcement while “ministers have been arrested, threatened and shot,” “churches and homes have been bombed,” and “school children have been threatened with mobs.” William Holmes Borders, the pastor of Atlanta’s Wheat Street Baptist Church, attended the organizational meeting for the march and responded with a brief note to King. Concerned that there was no concrete plan for action beyond the event, Borders suggested an agenda that included integrating buses in several southern cities, registering more voters, testing integration at southern restaurants, and “continuous intelligent agitation for implementation of the Supreme Court Decision.” While Borders lobbied for a more clearly defined agenda for the Washington, D.C., event, his civil rights agenda reflected the typical concerns of activist professionals who were only marginally concerned with economic issues, but instead focused on integration and the right to vote.10
Bayard Rustin did encourage King to adopt a more aggressive economic agenda by emphasizing connections between the objectives of civil rights leaders and the national labor movement. Given the critical role that labor leader A. Philip Randolph played in bringing the march together, Rustin saw this event as a great opportunity to elevate the potential partnership between labor and civil rights. He argued that “equality for Negroes is related to the greater problem of economic uplift for Negroes and poor white men. They share a common problem and have a common interest in working together for economic and social uplift. They can and must work together.” When King took the podium in front of the Lincoln Memorial for his address before a crowd of roughly twenty thousand participants, he eschewed any emphasis on furthering a relationship between the civil rights agenda and labor or broader economic concerns. Instead he focused squarely on the desperate need for African Americans to have full voting rights, demanding again and again, “Give us the ballot.”11
While King’s star continued to rise nationally, trouble brewed in Montgomery. Six months after the end of the boycott, Nixon sent King a letter of resignation from his post as treasurer of the MIA. In the caustic correspondence, Nixon expressed anger that local leaders continued to minimize his contributions while treating him “as a newcomer to the MIA.” Noting he had been a treasurer only “in name and not in reality,” he reminded King and the MIA board that it had been his “dream, hope and hard work since 1932” that had tilled the soil for change in the community. A few weeks later, King and Abernathy met with Nixon in an attempt to pacify the fiery Pullman porter. They managed to convince Nixon to remain with the organization as treasurer, suggesting they would change some of the organization’s financial practices that had caused him concern for some time. Despite the truce, distrust between the parties continued unabated. Even as King gained an audience with Vice President Richard Nixon and was awarded the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal “for the highest and noblest achievement” by an African American over the previous year, he was losing his grip on the local scene.12
The summer of 1957 proved tragic for one of Montgomery’s most outspoken white advocates for justice and civil rights. In January, librarian Juliette Morgan had written an editorial to a paper in Tuscaloosa in which she attributed the crisis in the South to the cowardice of white males who were afraid to stand up for justice and equality. Following the article, pressures on Morgan escalated, leading her into a deep depression. Morgan’s mother, while not supportive of her daughter’s stand for civil rights, did all she could to help in this time of need. Morgan began seeing a psychiatrist in Birmingham from whom she received shock treatments. Although she briefly rallied, in early July she overdosed on pills, leading to her death.
Many of Montgomery’s African American women wanted to honor Morgan by attending her funeral. Virginia Durr called the church rector to receive permission for the women to attend, but was told that approval for an interracial gathering would take too long. Although she had put her reputation at risk to argue for an end to segregation in her hometown, Morgan’s funeral was a fully segregated, white-only affair.13
Morgan’s willingness to courageously challenge white supremacy had an impact on King. He mentioned her in his memoir of the boycott, recognizing she was the first to connect the boycott to Gandhi’s nonviolent struggle for Indian independence. King also observed the onslaught of abuse she faced in the wake of her fearless public attacks on the racial mores of Montgomery. Morgan’s life and tragic death impressed upon King the high cost to southern whites who openly supported the fight against segregation.14
If whites could expect to encounter significant backlash if they were too closely tied with the struggle for justice, King began to embrace his symbolic association with the growing civil rights struggle. In an August 1957 sermon, King admitted his growing notoriety often tempted him to believe that he was special: “I can hardly walk the street in any city of this nation where I’m not confronted with people running up the street, ‘Isn’t this Reverend King of Alabama?’ Living under this isn’t easy, it’s a dangerous tendency that I will come to feel that I’m something special, that I stand somewhere in this universe because of ingenuity and that I’m important.” King claimed he prayed to God daily to “help me to see myself in my true perspective. Help me, O God, to see that I’m just a symbol of a movement.” Noting “a boycott would have taken place in Montgomery, Alabama, if I had never come to Alabama,” King admitted that “this moment would have come in history even if M. L. King had never been born.” But King had been in Montgomery, and his leadership of the movement had opened many doors for him even as they slammed shut on many African Americans in the city. Unfortunately, King’s potent oratory was not accompanied by concrete local action.15
Despite lofty goals from the MIA, the lives of boycott participants continued to be plagued with difficulty. Rosa Parks’s financial situation was particularly dire. While her arrest and personality had served the movement well, she was unable to find regular employment both during and after the boycott. As early as February 1956, Virginia Durr wrote Highlander Folk School director Myles Horton regarding Parks’s tenuous financial situation: “She has lost her job and had her rent raised and I am at the moment trying to raise some money for her to live on. It is fine to be a heroine but the price is high.” By November 1956, Durr had raised around $600 to assist Parks’s family. In a letter to Horton, Durr lamented that the funds raised to that point were “hardly enough to live on and she has had a hard time. As you know she has a terrible problem with her husband [alcohol abuse] and her mother is sick a lot and she has real troubles and cannot leave them.” As the boycott neared its conclusion, Durr was concerned about how the MIA seemed to be treating both Nixon and Parks: “the time has now gone by I am afraid for Mr. Nixon to start the voting office. I think the MIA will do it on a big scale and it should be a great success but Mrs. Parks won’t have a job there (the jobs will all go to the college people) and Mr. Nixon won’t be in charge. Perhaps he can start the Progressive Democrats again. In the meantime Rosa is still in need.”16
The MIA attempted to assist Parks during the first few months of 1957. In a memo written prior to his departure for the Gold Coast, King had directed the MIA vice president, Ralph Abernathy, to take action regarding Rosa Parks’s financial struggle. He told Abernathy that “she is in real need, and because of her tremendous self respect she has not already revealed this to the organization. After studying her situation and realizing that the whole protest revolves around her name, I am recommending that $250.00 be given to her from the Relief Fund.” He later added, “You may make it three hundred dollars ($300.00) if you feel so disposed.” Minutes from an early March relief committee meeting indicate Parks received $300 from the MIA. While Nixon and Virginia Durr remained frustrated by what they deemed to be insufficient local support for Parks, the action by the MIA indicates that King was trying to do something on her behalf.17
By midsummer, after enduring over eighteen months of harassment and threats while struggling to find consistent employment, Parks elected to leave Montgomery. In response, the MIA decl
ared August 5 “Rosa Parks Day” and held a program on her behalf that evening. They provided her a gift of around $800 collected from area churches. A few weeks later, Parks penned a letter to King thanking him and the MIA board for their generosity. She was sad that she had to leave Montgomery but believed living near her brother in Detroit would be better for her mother and husband. While Parks left gracefully, some believed movement leaders had neglected to provide her with enough support and adequate opportunities. Nixon claimed that on the evening of the program held in her honor, he “almost cussed at Mt. Zion,” the church that hosted the event. He later added:
It’s a shame before God, here is the women responsible for this thing and got to leave home for bread. Raising a little pitiful seven or eight hundred dollars and give her then stick your chest out and think you’ve done something. But the people got carried away with Reverend King and forgot about everyone else. And like a woman told me coming down on the airplane one day, “Mr. Nixon, I don’t know what those black folks would have done in Montgomery if Reverend King had not come to town.” I said, “If Mrs. Parks had gotten up and given that cracker her seat you’d never heard of Reverend King,” which is true.
King did not disagree with Nixon’s assessment of Parks’s role in the boycott. In early September, King and Parks saw one another at Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, where King delivered a keynote address to commemorate the institution’s twenty-fifth anniversary. He acknowledged that Parks was in the audience, claiming “you would not have had a Montgomery story without Rosa Parks.” Parks herself had delivered a report for the anniversary meeting in which she described Montgomery as an “integration beachhead.” Parks would no longer be a part of this beachhead, however. As the summer of 1957 drew to a close, Nixon was estranged from King and the pastoral leadership of the MIA while Parks had left the city altogether. Parks and Nixon, who for years had toiled for the NAACP on both the local and statewide levels, became outsiders. As others attempted to further their labors and dreams, they found themselves on the outside looking in.18