King was well aware of such anxieties. He read white newspapers. He overheard white people talk. He thought them victims of irrational fears—fear of economic and social loss, fear of intermarriage, fear of somebody different. Some whites, he noticed, practiced escapism, pretending that nothing was going on. Others flocked to meetings of the White Citizens’ Councils, often held in sporting arenas. And still others joined the Klan and resorted to nightriding terrorism. And it was all futile, King said, because violence, resistance, and escapism only instilled deeper and more pathological fears.
And those fears, in turn, often led to macabre atrocities. An example was the case of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old Negro who came down from Chicago that summer to visit relatives in Greenwood, Mississippi. One August night three white men dragged him away from a Negro home and flung him into the Tallahatchie River with a seventy-pound cotton gin fan tied to his neck with barbed wire. The whites murdered him because of a rumor that he had whistled at a white woman. The Brown decision, and the southern white reaction to it, had made national news out of southern racial matters, and numerous outside reporters came to Mississippi for the trial of two of the killers, who of course went free. Why all this fuss over a dead “nigger” in the Tallahatchie? complained one Mississippi white. “That river’s full of niggers.”
Montgomery, meanwhile, had a similar case, and King became involved in it as an NAACP leader. Back in 1952, a white woman had accused a teenage Negro of raping her. His name was Jeremiah Reeves, and he was a drummer in the Negro high school band. When an all-white court found him guilty of rape and sentenced him to hang, Reeves appealed with the help of local Negro activists and the NAACP. After a bitter legal battle that consumed five years, Reeves was executed.
The Reeves case stirred Montgomery’s Negro community like a whirlwind. Here was one more example of white man’s justice, of the legal double standard that Negroes had to live by in Dixie. In the early 1950s alone, plenty of white men had sexually abused Negro women in Montgomery, but none of them had ever been arrested and brought to trial. One white man had beaten his Negro lover to death: there were grisly reports that he had found her messing around with a black man and had poured lighter fluid into her vagina and set it afire. Yet nothing happened to him. A white cop forced a black girl into his patrol car and raped her in a cemetery, but nothing happened to him either. Two other cops forced a black woman to ride with them to a vacant lot in a railroad yard. Here they made her perform “unnatural acts” on them, raped and beat her, after which she ran “wet and crying” to a local preacher, who tried to rally the Negro community behind her. But what was the use? An all-white grand jury dismissed the charge against the policemen. On another occasion, a white father raped a fifteen-year-old Negro girl, his babysitter. When a white judge declared him innocent, local blacks boycotted his store, which was situated in a black neighborhood, and drove him out of business. But it didn’t help the young woman, who died of shock from the assault.
By the spring and summer of 1955, a flame of discontent was smoldering below the surface of passivity in black Montgomery. King himself sensed the stirrings—a growing resentment at white man’s justice, sexual abuses, and endless daily harassment and humiliation. The most commonplace outrage occurred on the city buses, the only means of transportation for thousands of local Negroes. Though they comprised 70 percent of the bus clientele, white drivers—all drivers were white—went out of their way to insult Negro passengers, calling them “niggers,” “apes,” and “black cows.” The drivers particularly singled out black women for abuse. They made Negroes pay at the front of the bus and then step off and reboard through the back door; sometimes the drivers roared away before the luckless blacks could get on again, leaving them stranded without their fares. Once a Negro was on the bus, he could not sit down in the first four rows, which a sign reserved for WHITES ONLY. If all the front seats were taken and more whites entered the bus, Negroes in the unreserved section had to turn their seats over to them. If a white took a seat beside a Negro, the Negro had to stand, because bus company regulations prohibited white and black passengers from sitting together. If a Negro found the unreserved section full and the white section empty, he had to stand in the aisle, gazing at the empty seats in front. A Montgomery city ordinance enforced the seating policy, and Negro violators could be fined and jailed.
By 1955, Montgomery blacks were becoming increasingly fed up with the Jim Crow buses and their insulting drivers—none more so than gruff and gravel-voiced E. D. Nixon, a regional official of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and a leader of the Montgomery and Alabama chapters of the NAACP. Six feet three and coal black, Nixon spoke in a slurred, ungrammatical, excited style and was extremely sensitive about his want of education, though he boasted that he had more property and money in the bank than a lot of B.A.s, M.A.s, and Ph.D.s. “He was considered the most militant man in town,” said his NAACP secretary, and he pointed to the buses as the worst example of racial insults to black folk. What he wanted, he said, was a test case to challenge the city bus ordinance in the courts.
In the space of ten months that year, three Negroes challenged the Jim Crow bus regulations, and the police arrested and hauled them all off to jail. But city authorities either dismissed their cases or charged them with disorderly conduct, thus denying Nixon an incident he could use to test the city segregation ordinance. Even so, one of the arrests—that of a fifteen-year-old high-school girl—so aroused the black community that there was talk of a bus boycott. King was in the thick of such talk. Why couldn’t Montgomery Negroes mount a bus protest? It had been done in other cities: up in Harlem during World War II, down in Baton Rouge in 1953. King even served on a Negro citizens’ committee that called on the police commissioner and the manager of the local bus lines, but nothing came of the meeting. Nothing came of the boycott either, and King despaired of ever getting Montgomery Negroes to put their words of hurt into action.
In November, 1955, several members of the Montgomery NAACP urged King to run for president. He started to do so, but changed his mind on the grounds that he needed to devote more time to his church work. That same month, Coretta presented him with a baby girl, whom they named Yolanda. King was proud of Yoki and said she came at a time when he needed a healthy diversion from the pressures of his work.
ON FRIDAY MORNING, DECEMBER 2, King was working at Dexter when he received a phone call from E. D. Nixon. “We got it!” Nixon exclaimed. “We got our case!” With unrestrained excitement, Nixon recounted what had happened late yesterday afternoon. Mrs. Rosa Parks, a tailor’s assistant in a downtown department store, had gotten on a bus at Court Square and taken a seat behind the “lily-white section.” When the bus filled up, the driver ordered Mrs. Parks to stand so that a white man could sit down. She refused to move. She’d gone shopping after work, and her feet hurt. She couldn’t bear the thought of having to stand all the way home. The driver, of course, threatened to call the police. Go ahead and call them, Mrs. Parks sighed. And she thought how you spend your whole life making things comfortable for white people. You just live for their well-being, and they don’t even treat you like a human being. Well, let the cops come. She wasn’t moving.
Two patrolmen took her down to the police station, where officials booked her for violating the city bus ordinance. Her throat was dry, but they wouldn’t let her drink from the whites-only fountain. She made a phone call, and Brother Nixon came on the run to post her bond. When he learned of her charge, he was quite beside himself. It was the first time a Negro had been charged with violating the city segregation code—a historic blunder and the test case Nixon had been waiting for. “We can go to the Supreme Court with this,” he said in the Parks home that evening, “and boycott the bus line at the same time.” Surely black Montgomery would rally behind Mrs. Parks, for she was no ordinary “colored.” Honest, smart, and “morally clean,” she had worked with Nixon as secretary of the Montgomery NAACP and enjoyed considerable respect in t
he black community.
All this Nixon told King. “We have took this type of thing too long already,” Nixon said “We got to boycott the buses…. Make it clear to the white folks we ain’t taking this type of treatment any longer.”
King agreed. Had Nixon phoned Ralph Abernathy? Yes, Nixon said, and Abernathy was all for it. And so were a lot of other folks. What they needed was to call a leaders’ conference that night and get organized. King offered his church as the meeting place.
He was astonished at the turnout that evening. From forty to fifty ministers and civic leaders gathered in his church, and all threw their support behind a boycott. True, some fretted about repercussions, but all realized that they had to act. Already rumors were abroad that Negro toughs were threatening to “beat the hell out of a few bus drivers” and were oiling guns and sharpening switch-blade knives. To ward off violent Negro retaliation and still stand up to the white man, the leaders agreed to launch a boycott on Monday, December 5. The ministers would alert their congregations on Sunday morning, and King and others would circulate leaflets throughout black Montgomery. Once the boycott was under way, they would hold a mass meeting at Holt Street Baptist Church in the Negro district and there decide how long the protest would last. When the meeting ended, King said, “the clock on the wall read almost midnight, but the clock in our souls revealed that it was daybreak.”
The next day he and his church secretary mimeographed seven thousand leaflets, and a veritable army of women and young people took off to distribute them. Meanwhile King and other leaders contacted Montgomery’s eight Negro taxi companies, with an operating fleet of sixty to seventy cars, and persuaded them to haul black people for the bus fare of ten cents apiece.
On Sunday, though, King received a shock. The Montgomery Advertiser carried a long article about the projected boycott (Nixon claimed that he had leaked the story to help spread the word). The piece not only accused the NAACP of planting “that Parks woman” on the bus to stir up trouble, but likened the protest to the tactics of the White Citizens’ Councils, which often boycotted whites who resisted them. Suddenly King was beset with doubts. Was the paper right—were Negroes about to embrace the same “negative solutions” as the hated Citizens’ Councils? Was a boycott unethical? Even unChristian? He brooded in his den, surrounded by his books. Finally he decided that “boycott” was the wrong term for what they were about to do. They weren’t out to strangle an isolated firm. No, they were withdrawing their cooperation from an evil system. In fact, the bus company was “an external expression of the system,” and if it suffered that could not be helped. Was this not what Thoreau summoned moral men to do? They were telling whites: “We can no longer lend our cooperation to an evil system.” For “He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with evil.” And they were through cooperating.
Exhausted, he went to bed early that night, but not to sleep. Two-week-old Yoki started to cry, and the phone rang and rang. Condemned to lie awake, he worried that his people might not respond to the leaflets and the exhortations of their ministers. What if they were still too apathetic or too frightened to participate? The leaders hoped for 60 percent cooperation, but what if they got only 30 percent—or even less? What if the boycott fizzled on the first day? Would whites not laugh at them? Would they not suffer an irreversible setback?
At last dawn came. In the kitchen, King made some coffee and sat down to await the first bus on the South Jackson line, due to stop in front of his house at 6 A.M. He was still in the kitchen when Coretta cried, “Martin, Martin, come quickly!” He ran to the front window just as the bus went by. It was empty. The South Jackson line carried more Negroes than any other in town; the first bus was usually jammed with Negro domestics on their way to work. In a state of high excitement, King awaited the second bus, due in fifteen minutes. It too was empty. And so was the third bus, save for a couple of white passengers. With spirits soaring, King fetched Abernathy in his car and they cruised the streets. All over town the buses were empty of black people. It looked as though the boycott would be almost 100 percent effective.
They thrilled at the drama unfolding in Montgomery. There were students happily hitchhiking to Alabama State, the city’s all-black college. There were old men and woman walking as far as twelve miles to their dreary downtown jobs. There was a Negro riding a mule to work, another in a horse-drawn buggy. Not a single passenger stood at the bus stops—just bands of youths who cheered and sang, “No riders today,” as the buses pulled away. Soon motorcycle cops were trailing them, dispatched by the city fathers to arrest Negro “goon squads” thought to be keeping “the coloreds” off the buses. The city fathers refused to believe that Negroes could do this thing by themselves. No, this had to be the work of the NAACP and other “outside agitators.”
At nine, King and Abernathy drove to City Hall for Rosa Parks’s trial. A large crowd of Negroes milled about the place, eying a squadron of police armed with sawed-off shotguns. “My Gawd,” said Nixon when he came to City Hall with Mrs. Parks, “the black man is born again!” In her trial, the judge found Parks guilty of disobeying the Montgomery segregation ordinance and fined her $14, including court costs. As Nixon filed an appeal bond, King was amazed at the stupidity of white officials. Unwittingly they were inviting a federal court test of the kind of Jim Crow statutes on which the entire superstructure of segregation depended.
At three that afternoon, King and the other leaders met in a local church and set up a permanent organization to run the boycott and handle future racial difficulties as well. At Abernathy’s suggestion, they called it the Montgomery Improvement Association, to stress the positive, uplift approach of their movement. The next order of business was the election of officers. “Mr. Chairman,” said businessman Rufus Lewis, “I would like to nominate Reverend M. L. King for president.” Nixon vigorously supported the motion, and the group elected King unanimously. Taken by surprise, King said he would like to think it over. Only three weeks before, he had refused to run for the NAACP presidency… But Nixon cut him short. “You ain’t got much time to think, ’cause you in the chair from now on.”
At that King relented. “Somebody has to do it,” he said, “and if you think I can, I will serve.”
Still, he wondered why they had selected him rather than one of the established leaders like Nixon, Lewis, or Ralph Abernathy, who was secretary of the black Ministerial Alliance. Later Nixon claimed that King was “my man” and that he more than any other promoted his candidacy. King could talk to people “from any direction,” Nixon said, and he hadn’t been in Montgomery long enough “to be spoiled by politicians—the city fathers. They couldn’t get their hand on him nohow. So many ministers accept a handout, and then they owe their soul.” But young King didn’t owe white people anything.
But B. J. Simms, a history professor at Alabama State, thought there was more to King’s election than that. According to Simms, many leaders feared that the boycott would fail, and they pushed King as a sacrificial scapegoat, so that he would have to take all the blame. Attorney Fred D. Gray, on the other hand, contended that King was a compromise choice between two rival factions—one led by Nixon, “the leader of the masses,” and the other by “Coach” Lewis, “the leader of the classes.” Had either of them become MIA president, Gray maintained, “we would have gotten bogged down in personalities.” And so they all—Nixon and Lewis included—closed ranks behind King, “a nice young man” who hadn’t “become identified with any particular group.” King himself decided that this was why he was chosen president. “Somebody had to bell the cat,” as another observer put it, “so they gave him the bell.”
Once they chose their officers, the group turned to the boycott and the mass meeting scheduled that night. Afraid of white retaliation, some ministers urged that they conceal their names and pass out secret leaflets, so that whites would not know what was in the air. At that Nixon was on his feet. “What the hell you people talkin’ ’bout? How you g
onna have a mass meeting, gonna boycott a city bus line without the white folks knowing it?” His voice rose. “You oughta make up your mind right now that you gon’ either admit you are a grown man or concede to the fact that you are a bunch of scared boys.”
King said he was “no coward” and agreed that they should protest out in the open, like men. After that there was no more talk of secrecy. With the mass meeting only an hour away, the group directed that a committee under Abernathy draft a set of demands and present it as a resolution that night.
King went home at six, nervous about telling Coretta about the MIA presidency. Since their marriage, she’d had to make a lot of difficult adjustments, giving up her career, coming south to Montgomery, learning the role of a young minister’s wife, and then becoming a mother. She had scarcely regained her equilibrium from the enormous responsibility of a baby in her life. How would she respond to this latest intrusion, which was bound to take him away from home much of the time? But she was very supportive when he told her about the meeting and his election as MIA president. “You know that whatever you do, you have my backing,” she said.
Reassured, he went into his study and closed the door. It was almost 6:30, and he had to leave at 6:50 to make the mass meeting. Only twenty minutes to prepare the most important speech of his life. Fear knifed through him. He had always taken at least fifteen hours to prepare a sermon. Now in only a few minutes—and they were ticking away—he had to devise a speech that would give his people “a sense of direction” and “a passion for justice.” Worse, reporters and television newsmen were certain to be on hand to record and transmit his remarks across the country. He was overcome by feelings of inadequacy. He looked at his watch: he had already wasted five minutes just worrying. He prayed that God be with him and help him be strong. With minutes fleeing by, he began an outline with a trembling hand. Then he stared at the paper, blocked by another problem. How could he arouse the people to militant action and yet keep their fervor within controllable bounds? So many Negroes were victims of deadly bitterness and could easily be excited to violence. What could he say that would incite people to positive action, to action without hate?
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