Becoming King

by Troy Jackson

  Burks and Robinson, the two women most responsible for the effectiveness of the Women’s Political Council and the initial launching of the bus boycott, had to leave the city in search of employment. The same year, Thomas Thrasher, an active participant in the Alabama Conference on Human Welfare and one of the few white pastors to challenge white supremacy, was transferred by the Episcopal Church to the chaplaincy of the University of North Carolina due to his outspokenness on racial issues.4 Four years after the conclusion of the boycott, supporters continued to experience retribution for their involvement, preventing any reemergence of a sustained local movement for civil rights.

  Over the coming years, Montgomery remained a part of the struggle for civil rights, but more as a staging ground for national protests than as a result of local agitation. On May 20, 1961, an angry white mob physically assaulted Freedom Riders as they departed their bus at the Montgomery bus station. The following day, King joined his friend and the MIA president Ralph Abernathy at First Baptist Church for a mass meeting, noting that “over the past few days Alabama has been the scene of a literal reign of terror.” As King spoke inside First Baptist Church, a white mob gathered outside, threatening violence and preventing meeting participants from departing. King took the microphone to try to calm the agitated crowd: “Now, we’ve got an ugly mob outside. They have injured some of the federal marshals. They, they’ve burned some automobiles, but, we are not, we are not giving in for what we are standing for.” King continued a few moments later: “The first thing we must do here tonight is to decide that we aren’t going to become panicky, and we’re gonna be calm, and that we are going to continue to stand up for what we know is right, and that Alabama will have to face the fact that we are determined to be free. The main thing I want to say to you is, fear not, we’ve gone too far to turn back, let us be calm, we are together, we are not afraid, and we shall overcome.” By dawn the mob had dispersed, allowing officials to restore order. The Freedom Rides did result in an integrated bus terminal in Montgomery, a fact the MIA celebrated in a November 1961 newsletter. Despite this symbolic victory, the City of Montgomery had still not met one of the original demands issued at the commencement of the boycott six years earlier: the hiring of black bus drivers.5

  On July 6, 1962, Montgomery finally hired their first two black bus drivers.6 Later that year, the MIA president, Solomon Seay, still found himself lobbying with city commissioners to hire additional black drivers to serve a clientele that remained primarily African American.7 Less than two months into the bus boycott, the demand for black bus drivers had already proven to be a low priority. When the MIA developed a plan to chart a new direction for the organization in early 1957, they made no concrete mention of their desire to see integrated employment policies in public transportation. The failure to hold out until officials met this demand, or even to continue to vigorously lobby for greater access to working class jobs in Montgomery, demonstrates the absence of a local plan that would affect the daily lives of marginalized blacks in the years after the boycott. As professional leaders sought to integrate public parks, economic goals faltered. No sustained movement emerged to build on the successes of 1956. The Montgomery movement floundered, leaving few tangible benefits for those who had sacrificed most during the boycott.

  The national civil rights spotlight returned to Montgomery one last time on March 25, 1965. A few weeks earlier, police officers had bludgeoned marchers in Selma, Alabama, when they attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in a march to Montgomery to lobby for voting rights. This time, several thousand gathered again in Selma to conduct a march to the State Capitol. They successfully completed their protest, which culminated with a rally on the steps of the State Capitol building. King began his address by paying tribute to the struggle that had launched his civil rights leadership a decade earlier: “Montgomery was the first city in the South in which the entire Negro community united and squarely faced its age-old oppressors. Out of its struggle more than bus integration was won. A new idea more powerful than guns or clubs was born. Negroes took it and carried it across the South in epic battles that electrified a nation and the world.” As he neared his conclusion, King reflected: “In the glow of lamplight on my desk a few nights ago, I gazed again upon the wondrous signs of our time, full of hope and promise for the future and I smiled to see in the newspaper photographs of nearly a decade ago, the faces so bright, so solemn of our valiant heroes, the people of Montgomery.” Just a few hundred yards from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, King paid homage to the people of Montgomery whose sacrifices and courage had catapulted him to the forefront of the national civil rights struggle.8

  E. D. Nixon remained in Montgomery until his death, convinced that King’s prominence was directly tied to his participation in a local struggle in the 1950s. Nixon claimed that “King was not the same man when he left here as when he took over the boycott.” He changed because Nixon, Parks, Robinson, Burks, and countless working-class blacks “pushed him a whole lot. Right now people don’t like to hear me say this … but it isn’t what Reverend King did for Montgomery, it’s what the people of Montgomery did for Reverend King.” King agreed to a point, crediting his time in the Alabama capital for sharpening his approach to social change: “The experience in Montgomery did more to clarify my thinking than all the books that I had read. As the days unfolded, I became more and more convinced of the power of nonviolence. Nonviolence became more than a method to which I gave intellectual assent; it became a commitment to a way of life.” Perhaps the author James Baldwin best captured the significant influence of Montgomery on King: “It is true that it was they who had begun the struggle of which he was now the symbol and the leader; it is true that it had taken all of their insistence to overcome in him a grave reluctance to stand where he now stood. But it is also true, and it does not happen often, that once he had accepted the place they had prepared for him, their struggle became absolutely indistinguishable from his own, and took over and controlled his life. He suffered with them and, thus, he helped them to suffer.” Baldwin’s 1961 essay accurately conveys the deep and abiding influence Montgomery’s local struggle had on Martin Luther King Jr. It also recognizes the very real contributions King made to both the local and national struggle. Baldwin’s reflections accent the seminal role the people of Montgomery played in King’s emergence and effectiveness as a civil rights leader. The Martin Luther King Jr. remembered and celebrated around the world was born in Montgomery.9

  Notes

  Prologue

  1. Among works that have explored the impact of Montgomery on the broader civil rights movement, see Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement; Branch, Parting the Waters; Fairclough, To Redeem the Soul of America; Garrow, Bearing the Cross; and D. Williams, with Greenhaw, The Thunder of Angels. Several recent works have elevated the roles played by Jo Ann Robinson, Mary Fair Burks, Rosa Parks, and E. D. Nixon in laying the groundwork for the bus boycott. See, for instance, Garrow, ed., The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It; Dyson, I May Not Get There with You, 202–4; Burns, To The Mountaintop, 19–25; and D. Williams, with Greenhaw, The Thunder of Angels.

  2. Over the past few decades, several historians have examined the significant role people in local communities played in preparing the way for and leading the civil rights movement. Others have also helpfully examined the connections of labor to the civil rights movement. See, for example, Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom; Dittmer, Local People; Fairclough, Race and Democracy; Eick, Dissent in Wichita; Whitaker, Race Work; Theoharis and Woodard, eds., Groundwork; Honey, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights; Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism; and Minchin, The Color of Work.

  3. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, 417–18.

  4. Pittsburgh Courier, December 7, 1957.

  5. Eskew, But for Birmingham. Over the last few years of King’s life, he began to participate more directly in efforts to bring about economic justice, as evidenced in his support for the st
riking Memphis sanitation workers and in his organization of the interracial Poor People’s Campaign.

  6. Branch, Parting the Waters, 558.

  7. Garrow, ed., The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It; Crawford, Rouse, and Woods, eds., Women in the Civil Rights Movement. For more on the contributions of women to the struggle, see Collier-Thomas and Franklin, Sisters in the Struggle. For a detailed study of the life and contributions of Ella Baker, see Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement. Gender analysis of the civil rights era is beginning to consider the construction of masculinity (see Estes, I Am a Man!).

  8. Johnny E. Williams, African American Religion and the Civil Rights Movement in Arkansas; Chappell, A Stone of Hope; and Marsh, The Beloved Community.

  9. The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., vol. 6.

  10. Branch, Parting the Waters, 225; Branch, Pillar of Fire, 24.

  11. MIA mass meeting at Holt Street Baptist Church, December 5, 1955, in The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 3: 71.

  12. Rosa Parks to Mrs. Henry F. Shepherd, July 6, 1955, Mss 265, Folder 22, Box 22, Highlander Research and Education Center.

  1. “The Stirring of the Water”

  1. Montgomery Advertiser, April 14, 1952: “The new section of seats in the bowl will be reserved for Negroes”; “Just three minutes before the annual Easter Sunrise Service was to begin in Cramton Bowl yesterday, the rain, which had been falling steadily, stopped.” Portia Trenholm, “Memoirs,” April 17, 1958, Portia Trenholm Papers. This twelve-page document, composed during the bus boycott, includes a cover letter from the Alabama State College professor L. D. Reddick to Portia Trenholm dated April 17, 1958. While the Montgomery Advertiser stories regarding the service indicate blacks attended in 1952, articles about the 1953 event do not mention African American attendees or the availability of bus services for the event (Montgomery Advertiser, April 14, 1952, April 3, 6, 1953).

  2. While many historians have examined the Montgomery bus boycott in great detail, few have given serious attention to the climate in the city in the years prior to King’s arrival in 1954. Those who do consider this period tend to consider only particular aspects of the situation. For instance, Taylor Branch focuses primarily on the tenure of Vernon Johns at Dexter (Parting the Waters, 1–26). Dividing Lines, J. Mills Thornton’s recent work on Montgomery, Selma, and Birmingham, does an excellent job chronicling the political and demographic shifts facing Montgomery following World War II. Thornton recognizes the major African American voices that set the scene for the civil rights movement, yet his attention remains fixed on the political ramifications of the city’s demographic shifts. Montgomery’s white citizens who worked against white supremacy escape Thornton’s notice. Willy Leventhal has highlighted many of the white participants who had an impact on Montgomery, including Clifford and Virginia Durr, Aubrey Williams, Juliette Morgan, and Clara Rutledge. His narrative does not extend back to the early 1950s, however, when these white activists were finding their voices (Leventhal, “The White Folks,” in Gray, Leventhal, Sikora, and Thornton, The Children Coming On, 195–223). Most other significant contributors to the historiography of the Montgomery movement deal sparingly with events prior to King’s arrival in 1954.

  3. Rogers, Confederate Home Front, 5, 52. Rogers notes that in 1860, workers in Montgomery handled more than 1 million cotton bales. In 1958, Ralph David Abernathy described Montgomery as “a non-industrial city. Montgomery is just a shopping center for what we call the Black-Belt areas” (Abernathy, “The Natural History of a Social Movement: The Montgomery Improvement Association,” master’s thesis, Department of Sociology, Atlanta University, August 1958, in Garrow, ed., The Walking City).

  4. For a detailed history of Maxwell Air Force Base, see Ennels and Newton, The Wisdom of Eagles. Taylor Branch asserts that Maxwell and nearby Gunter Air Force bases contributed almost $50 million a year to the local economy (Branch, Parting the Waters, 13).

  5. Thornton, Dividing Lines, 23. For a thorough exploration of the significant political shifts in Montgomery during the decade prior to the boycott, including the election of Dave Birmingham, see ibid., 20–40.

  6. Abernathy, “The Natural History of a Social Movement,” in Garrow, ed., The Walking City, 109; Preston Valien, “The Montgomery Bus Protest as a Social Movement,” ibid., 94; Steven Milner, “The Montgomery Bus Boycott: A Case Study in the Emergence of a Social Movement,” ibid., 433.

  7. Kathy Dunn Jackson, “You Can Go Home Again,” in Westhauser, Smith, and Fremlin, eds., Creating Community, 19–20.

  8. Alabama Tribune, September 19, 1952; Thornton, Dividing Lines, 38.

  9. Thornton, Dividing Lines, 33–35.

  10. Garrow, The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It, 21; Thornton, Dividing Lines, 35.

  11. For a thorough discussion regarding the founding and history of Tuskegee Institute, see Norrell, Reaping the Whirlwind; and Harlan, Booker T. Washington. Portia Trenholm, “Memoirs,” 2. Trenholm claims that during the 1930s, “the buying power of Tuskegee instructors was higher than” that of teachers at Alabama State Teachers College in Montgomery.

  12. Rogers, Ward, Atkins, and Flynt, Alabama: The History of a Deep South State, 329; Juan Williams and Ashley, I’ll Find a Way or Make One, 312–13; Jo Ann Robinson to H. Councill Trenholm, August 3, 1950, H. Councill Trenholm Papers.

  13. Roberson, Fighting the Good Fight, 21, 56; Virginia Durr to Clark and Mairi Foreman, February 26, 1953, in Sullivan, ed., Freedom Writer, 47. Montgomery’s NAACP chapter was not alone in its middle-class orientation. According to Manford Berg in his recent study of the NAACP, the years immediately following World War II saw a vast increase in working-class memberships, a period that corresponds with when E. D. Nixon was president of his local and state chapters. Despite this surge, Berg admits that “the local leaders continued to be male and middle-class.” The spike in membership nationally was short-lived, with a 1946 high-water mark of roughly 540,000 members decreasing to 350,000 in 1948, and falling to 150,000 in 1950 (Berg, “The Ticket to Freedom,” 109–11).

  14. E. D. Nixon to Walter White, December 14, 1944, Group II, Box C-4, Montgomery Branch, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Papers, 1940–1954, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Hereafter cited as Montgomery NAACP Papers.

  15. Rosa Parks to Ella Baker, May 2, 1945, Donald Jones to Ella Baker, 1945, Montgomery NAACP Papers.

  16. E. D. Nixon to W. G. Porter, 1945, W. G. Porter to Ella Baker, December 1945, Montgomery NAACP Papers; Parks, with Haskins, Rosa Parks, My Story, 80–95.

  17. Brinkley, Rosa Parks, 48, 71.

  18. The Citizens Overall Committee letterhead used in 1944 lists most major African American organizations in Montgomery as members. The presidents and leaders of the NAACP, the Negro Civic League, and the City Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs were joined by President Trenholm of Alabama State Teachers College, several prominent businessmen, teachers, and ministers, as well as local newspaper editors in serving as members of the Citizens Overall Committee. The particular correspondence concerned the need to upgrade “the condition of the Ladies rest room in the Colored Waiting Room in the Union Station.” Nixon also drew attention to the filth of the wash basin and the unsanitary state of the drinking water provided (E. D. Nixon to the President of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, February 7, 1944, Box 27, Nixon Collection; Nixon, interview by Lumpkin).

  19. Garrow, ed., The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It, 27; Alabama Tribune, December 5, 1952.

  20. Nixon, interview by Lumpkin; Warlick, “‘Man of the Year’ for ‘54,” 27; Donald Jones to Ella Baker, 1945, Ella Baker to E. D. Nixon, January 21, 1946, Montgomery NAACP Papers; Gray, Leventhal, Sikora, and Thornton, The Children Coming On, 225.

  21. Charles G. Gomillion was the dean of students and a sociology professor at Tuskegee Institute. He was involved in the leadership of the local NAACP chapter and in the Tuskegee Civic Association.
In 1957, the Alabama state senator Sam Englehardt Jr. sponsored a successful bill before the state legislature that redrew the boundaries of Tuskegee in an attempt to nullify the black vote in the community. In response, Gomillion led a boycott of Tuskegee’s white merchants. With Fred Gray as their attorney, they filed suit against the Alabama legislature’s ruling. In 1961, the U.S. Supreme Court found for the plaintiffs in a case known as Gomillion vs. Lightfoot (Robert E. Hughes, Alabama Council on Human Relations newsletter [January 1958], Fellowship of Reconciliation Papers; Gray, Bus Ride to Justice, 112–24). The 1946 election was the first Alabama Democratic primary in the twentieth century in which blacks could legally vote. In 1944, the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled white primaries unconstitutional (Thornton, Dividing Lines, 27). Turnipseed, interview by Durr.

  22. Egerton, Speak Now against the Day, 101, 321, 464.

  23. Gould Beech and Mary Beech, interview by Durr.

  24. Virginia Durr to Otto Nathan, August 29, 1951, in Sullivan, ed., Freedom Writer, 35–36.

  25. Durr, Outside the Magic Circle, 241–47.

  26. Montgomery Advertiser, June 9, 1952.

  27. The Southern Conference Education Fund (SCEF) grew out of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW), an organization formed during the New Deal era in an effort to mobilize a liberal coalition in the South. Founded in 1946, when the SCHW began to focus on political lobbying, the SCEF was a tax-exempt organization focused primarily on challenging racial discrimination in the South through the dissemination of information (Egerton, Speak Now against the Day, 441, 529–30). Dombrowski to Morgan, June 19, 1952, Morgan to Dombrowski, July 8, 1952, Morgan Papers; Clifford and Virginia Durr, interview by Lumpkin.