“I almost broke down under the continual battering of this argument,” King recalled. When other MIA leaders began repeating it themselves, King called an emergency meeting and offered his resignation. “I am willing to decrease so that others may increase,” he told them. “Maybe a more mature person can bring about a speedier conclusion.” His colleagues were shocked. Aware that the people probably would not follow anyone but King, they assured him that they were pleased with his leadership and unanimously urged him to remain. After the meeting, King drove to the parsonage “more at peace than I had been in some time.”
As January passed, the city fathers turned to more devious tactics. They lured three unsuspecting Negro preachers to a city commission meeting, then on January 22 announced to the press that a settlement had been reached with Negro leaders and that the boycott was over. When King heard about the hoax, he was incredulous. Clearly he had more to learn about the sneakiness of segregationists. Quickly he sent word out to black Montgomery that the announcement was a lie. The next morning, Negro paperboys aroused their clients and warned them not to believe “that stuff about the boycott on the front page.” King and others confronted the three ministers, who repudiated the newspaper story, and King himself publicly announced that the boycott was still on.
After that the mayor went on television and warned that the city commission was going to “stop pussy-footing around with the boycott.” Then the police started harassing the car pool, threatening to arrest Negro drivers, revoke their licenses, and cancel their insurance policies. One dreary January evening, King was on his way home when two motorcycle cops arrested him for speeding. A patrol car came and took him away. Alone in the back seat, King panicked. The car was heading in the opposite direction from downtown, where he thought the jail was located. Presently the driver turned onto a dark and dingy street and headed under a bridge. King was certain that the cops were going “to dump me off” in some remote place. “But this can’t be,” he thought. “These men are officers of the law.” But the law was white man’s law, and he feared that a mob was waiting on the other side of the bridge. He was going to be murdered and mutilated. The cops would claim that the mob had overpowered them….
As the car moved past the bridge, King braced himself, certain that he was approaching his doom. But when he looked up, he saw a light in the distance and gradually made out the sign: “Montgomery Jail.” He let out a sigh of relief, for “going to jail at that moment seemed like going to some safe haven.”
Inside, the jailer booked and threw him into a large cell with many others. As he stood there, “strange gusts of emotion swept through me like cold winds,” King said. For the first time in his life, he was behind bars, and he felt profoundly disoriented, for his father had taught him to have an Old Testament respect for the law. But remember what Thoreau said. “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.” “The real road to happiness,” Gandhi said, “lies in going to jail and undergoing suffering and privations there in the interest of one’s country and religion.”
King found himself with drunks, vagrants, and thieves, all thrown together in democratic misery. They lay on cots with torn-up mattresses, relieved themselves in a naked toilet in the corner. The place reeked of urine and sweat. No matter what these men have done, King thought, “they shouldn’t be treated like this.”
The jailer came and led him down a long corridor into a small room at the front. Here the police fingerprinted him “like a criminal.” Meanwhile Ralph Abernathy had tried to sign King’s bond and a crowd of Negroes had gathered in front of the jail. Intimidated, the police released King on his own recognizance and told him his trial would be held on Monday morning. All this for a minor traffic violation! King would be found guilty, of course. But at home, in the company of his wife, church members, and MIA friends, King felt strong again, knowing that he did not stand alone.
BY LATE JANUARY, King was receiving thirty to forty hate letters a day. Some were signed from the “KKK,” warning him to “get out of town or else.” Others were crudely lettered threats on his life. “You old son of a bitch,” read one missive from a Montgomery white citizen, “did you know you only have a very short time to life if you dont quit your dam foolishness here in Montgomery? You old goddam son of a bitch when you think you are as good as white people you are sadly mistaken…. If you don’t heed this warning it will be kayo for you and your gang.” “You niggers are getting your self in a bad place,” another letter said. “We need and will have a Hitler to get our country straightened out.”
Then there were the obscene phone calls—as many as twenty-five a day now. Sometimes there was only the hawk of a throat, the sound of spit against the receiver. Other callers would curse and rave, accusing King of lusting after white women, of wanting to perform “incredible degeneracies.” Still others threatened not only to murder King, but to wipe out his wife and daughter too. King could not bear such phone calls. He had no right to put his family in such danger. He saw how upset Coretta was, for she had to answer the phone when he was gone, and the threats were getting to her, too. But they did not dare take the phone off the hook lest they miss some urgent call about the boycott. It was getting so bad that they both jumped when the phone went off.
One day a friend reported from reliable sources that a plan was afoot to have King assassinated. King admitted that he was “scared to death,” worn down by “the freezing and paralyzing effect” of fear. He found himself at a mass meeting, trying to give an impression of strength. “If one day you find me sprawled out dead, I do not want you to retaliate with a single act of violence. I urge you to continue protesting with the same dignity and discipline you have shown so far.” A strange hush fell over the church. Afterward, Abernathy said, “Something is wrong. You are disturbed about something.” But King was evasive. “Martin, you were not talking about some general principle,” Abernathy said. “You had something specific in mind.” For the first time, King confided in Abernathy about the threats on his life and family. Abernathy tried to help, to say something comforting, but King was still afraid.
He found himself wishing that there might be “an honorable way out without injuring the cause.” He would look at Coretta and Yoki and freeze with fear: they can be taken away from me at any moment.
One night he came home late from an MIA meeting. Exhausted, he crawled into bed and tried to sleep, knowing that he had to get up early “to keep things going.” The phone rang. Steeling himself, he picked up the receiver. On the other end was a furious voice, “an ugly voice,” and it cut through King like a dagger, “Nigger, if you aren’t out of this town in three days we gonna blow your brains out and blow up your house.” There was a click.
King rose and walked the floor. He thought about all the things he had studied in college, the philosophical and theological discourses on sin and evil, and realized that he couldn’t take it any more: the calls, the threats, this awful fear. He went into the kitchen and put on a pot of coffee. Yes, he had to quit. There was no other choice. He watched the coffee perk, poured a cup, and sat down at the table. He brooded on how he could step down without appearing to be a coward. He thought about Coretta and Yoki—“the darling of my life”—and felt weak and terribly alone. Then he heard something say to him, “You can’t call on Daddy now. He’s up in Atlanta a hundred and seventy-five miles away. You can’t even call on Momma now.”
He put his head in his hands and bowed over the table. “Oh, Lord,” he prayed aloud, “I’m down here trying to do what is right. But, Lord, I must confess that I’m weak now. I’m afraid. The people are looking to me for leadership, and if I stand before them without strength and courage, they too will falter. I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left. I can’t face it alone.”
He sat there, his head still bowed in his hands, tears burning his eyes. But then he felt something—a presence, a stirring in himself. And it seemed that an inner voice was speaking to
him with quiet assurance: “Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth. And, lo, I will be with you, even unto the end of the world.” He saw lightning flash. He heard thunder roar. It was the voice of Jesus telling him still to fight on. And “he promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone. No, never alone, No, never alone. He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone….”
He raised his head. He felt stronger now. He could face the morrow. Whatever happened, God in His wisdom meant it to be. King’s trembling stopped, and he felt an inner calm he had never experienced before. He realized that “I can stand up without fear. I can face anything.” And for the first time Cod was profoundly real and personal to him. The idea of a personal God was no longer some “metaphysical category” he found philosophically and theologically satisfying. No, God was very close to him now, a living God who could transform “the fatigue of despair into the buoyancy of hope” and who would never, ever, leave him alone.
ON THE NIGHT OF JANUARY 30, the date Gandhi was assassinated, King was speaking at a mass meeting when he received dreadful news. His house had been bombed. He sped home in a strange calm. A crowd of Negroes surged about the parsonage, white police trying to hold them back. The bomb had exploded on the porch, breaking it in two and showering the living room with broken glass. The house was full of people; Mayor Gayle and Police Commissioner Sellers had just arrived. King forced his way inside and found Coretta and Yoki at the back. He hugged them. “Thank God you and the baby are all right!” Quietly he told Coretta to get dressed, for she was still in her robe.
Gayle and Sellers told King they truly regretted “this unfortunate incident.” But C. T. Smiley, chairman of Dexter’s board of trustees and principal of Booker T. Washington High School, said in a cutting voice: “Regrets are all very well, but you are responsible. It is you who created the climate for this.”
Outside the crowd was getting out of control. A Negro man confronted a policeman: “You got your thirty-eight, and I got mine. Let’s shoot it out.” Even Negro boys were armed with broken bottles, and there were jeers at the cops. “Let us see Reverend King,” a woman cried out. King stepped out onto the shattered porch, which still smelled of dynamite fumes, and surveyed his angry brothers and sisters on the lawn and in the street beyond. “He held up his hand,” an observer said, “and they were suddenly silent…absolutely still.”
“My wife and baby are all right,” he said. “I want you to go home and put down your weapons. We cannot solve this problem through retaliatory violence…. We must love our white brothers, no matter what they do to us. We must make them know that we love them. Jesus still cries out across the centuries, ‘Love your enemies.’ This is what we must live by. We must meet hate with love.” His voice was quivering. “Remember, if I am stopped, this Movement will not stop, because God is with this Movement.”
Slowly his people dispersed, melting away in the night. Afterward a policeman told a reporter, “I’ll be honest with you. I was terrified. I owe my life to that nigger Preacher, and so do all the other white people who were there.”
King and his family spent the night at the home of a church member. King lay in a. front bedroom, unable to sleep, a distant street lamp glowing in the curtained window. He thought about the viciousness of people who could bomb his home, and anger rose in him. His wife and daughter could have been killed. He thought about the city commissioners and all the vicious things they had said about him and the Negro. He was on the verge of real hatred when he caught himself again. You must not be bitter, must not hate. He tried to put himself in the position of the city fathers. “These are not bad men,” he reflected. “They are misguided. They have fine reputations in the community. In their dealings with white people they are respectable and gentlemanly. They probably think they are right in their methods of dealing with Negroes. They say the things they say about us and treat us as they do because they have been taught these things. From the cradle to the grave, it is instilled in them that the Negro is inferior. Their parents probably taught them that; the schools they attended taught them that; the books they read, even their churches and ministers often taught them that; and above all the very concept of segregation teaches them that. The whole cultural tradition they have grown under—a tradition blighted with more than 250 years of slavery and more than 90 years of segregation—teaches them that Negroes do not deserve certain things. So these men are merely the children of their culture. When they seek to preserve segregation they are seeking to preserve only what their local folkways have taught them was right.”
They were victims of the collective evil that Niebuhr stressed, the kind of evil that caused basically good men to be blind, ignorant, and hateful.
AFTER THE BOMBING, floodlights blazed all night at King’s parsonage, and watchmen stood guard around the clock. Somebody had thrown dynamite on E. D. Nixon’s lawn, and King was taking no chances. He let his sentries carry pistols and shotguns and even bring them inside his home. He told people this was only for self-defense, to protect his family. Of course he was still nonviolent. Of course he didn’t want anyone shot and killed.
But the guns troubled him. He felt afraid with them in his house. He told himself, “I’ve got to be totally nonviolent because the guns here are going to attract guns.” Again he had to face the question of death. Remember, if something happens, it is meant to be. Nothing can stop the cause. You don’t need guns to protect yourself or your family. “Ultimately,” he reasoned, “one’s sense of manhood must come from within.” He ordered the guns out of his house. Henceforth he would face any form of violence with only his faith in God and in the power of love.
February came with a rush of ominous events. In Montgomery, white officials refused to put Rosa Parks’s case on the court dockets, thus blocking the MIA’s hopes of taking it into the federal courts. Consequently, the MIA got five Negro women to file suit in the U.S. District Court in town, asking that the Alabama and Montgomery transportation laws be declared unconstitutional. Nine days later, the local White Citizens’ Council—which now included all three city commissioners—held a rally in the Montgomery coliseum, where Senator James Eastland of Mississippi ranted against the NAACP, and racist handbills circulated by the thousands: “When in the course of human events it becomes necessary to abolish the Negro race, proper methods should be used. Among these are guns, bow and arrows, sling shots and knives. We hold these truths to be self evident that all whites are created equal with certain rights, among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of dead niggers. In every stage of the bus boycott we have been oppressed and degraded because of black, slimy, juicy, unbearably stinking niggers. The conduct should not be dwelt upon because behind them they have an ancestral background of Pygmies, Head hunter, snot suckers…. If we don’t stop helping these African flesh eaters, we will soon wake up and find Reverend King in the white house.”
In Washington, some one hundred southern congressmen signed a ringing denunciation of school integration called “The Southern Manifesto.” In Birmingham, Alabama, Nat King Cole, the celebrated Negro singer, was performing in the city auditorium when a gang of whites leaped on stage and mauled him brutally. Afterward they grabbed a Negro pedestrian and mutilated his genitals. In Tuscaloosa, a Negro named Autherine Lucy tried to enter the University of Alabama, only to be expelled after whites attempted to murder her. Asked if she was connected with the Montgomery protest, a local judge said, “Autherine is just one unfortunate girl who doesn’t know what she is doing, but in Montgomery it looks like all the niggers have gone crazy.”
By February 21, the situation in Montgomery was extremely tense. “This is like war,” one Negro said. “You can’t trust anyone, black or white, unless you know him.” “They can bomb us out and they can kill us,” said E. D. Nixon, “but we are not going to give in.” On February 21, in an effort to break the boycott once and for all, an all-white grand jury found the Negroes guilty of violating an obscure state antil
abor law, which prohibited boycotts. The grand jury indicted eighty-nine leaders, including twenty-four ministers and all the drivers in the car pool.
King was in Nashville, giving a series of lectures at Fisk University, when the grand jury made its move. That night, he talked on the phone with Abernathy, who was certain that the arrests would start the next day and that he and King would be at the head of the list. Early the next morning, King flew home by way of Atlanta, where Coretta and Yoki were staying with his parents. The boycott was two months old now; his people were tired, worn down from all the intimidation. Would the mass arrests break their spirit? Would this end their movement?
In Atlanta he found another problem. Daddy King did not want him going back to Montgomery. He was sick with worry about M. L.; so was Momma, and she was subject to heart attacks. Daddy could scarcely talk about the danger to M. L. without getting tears in his eyes. “Although many others have been indicted,” he told his son, “their main concern is to get you. They might even put you in jail without a bond.” They might even kill him. Daddy had told Atlanta’s Police Chief Herbert Jenkins, “They gon’ kill my boy.” And Jenkins agreed. “I think you’re in great danger,” he once warned King. “I think you’re a marked man. I think if you don’t leave Montgomery and come back to Atlanta, they gon’ bury you over there.”
As Daddy carried on about his safety, King was terribly distressed. It hurt his conscience that he should cause his parents such pain. But he had to go back to Montgomery. His conscience would hurt him far more if he did not go back. To his dismay, Daddy now summoned several close friends to try and reason with his boy. Here came gray-haired Dr. Mays, as elegant as always. Here came the president of Atlanta University, a prominent businessman, and several drugstore owners. Assembling them in the living room, Daddy announced that he had talked to a white lawyer who agreed that M. L. should not return to Montgomery. What about them? Didn’t they think his boy should stay in Atlanta where he would be safe? There were murmurs of approval. Then all eyes fell on young King, who kept thinking, These are my elders, the leaders of my people. But he had to stand up to them and Daddy. “I must go back to Montgomery,” he said with great earnestness. “My friends and associates are being arrested. It would be the height of cowardice for me to stay away. I would rather be in jail ten years than desert my people now. I have begun the struggle, and I can’t turn back. I have reached the point of no return.”
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