But as he crisscrossed the country, there were grim reminders that Martin Luther King—orator, philosopher, and historian of love—was still a Negro in a white man’s land. On his way to Nashville one day, he tried to board a train through the white waiting room, only to be accosted by a policeman who threatened to kill him if he ever came there again. On another trip, his plane was delayed in Atlanta, and the airlines gave him and the white passengers complimentary meals at a nearby restaurant. The host, though, refused to seat King in the main dining room with the other passengers, instead ushering him back to a dingy compartment that concealed him from view. King was livid. It was the train ride from Connecticut all over again. “I would rather go a week without eating before eating under such conditions,” he protested, and demanded to see the management. Then he stalked out, threatening to sue the place for insulting him so.
By the fall, all the traveling and speechmaking were taking their toll on him. His doctor ordered him to slow up lest he damage his health. In late October, in between public appearances and a medical examination at Boston’s Lahey Clinic, King found time to speak in a lecture series at Boston University. While there he managed to escape to Harold DeWolf’s house for dinner and conversation. He confessed how badly he needed a rest, and he and DeWolf talked about arranging a retreat for him in Boston, a sanctuary where he could be alone for “spiritual renewal and writing.”
Roland Emerson Haynes, a Negro friend and student in the Boston University School of Theology, heard him speak in the lecture series and wrote him that it was a “most powerful address (I call it a sermon).” But he could not forget how harried King looked. “One wonders how one can effectively play the role of Pastor, Husband, Father and Public Leader when every role demands so much from the individual…. You have a rare talent and an ingenious mind. I guess I sound like an old man talking to you in this fashion; but M. L., I am still concerned in your health and the continued success of the movement.”
King was back in Montgomery when the city struck again, this time at the very heart of the bus protest. On October 30, city attorneys asked Judge Carter to enjoin the car pool as “a public nuisance” and “a private enterprise” operating without a franchise. If the judge agreed, the Negroes would all have to walk.
King fell into gloom. Another winter was approaching, and his people were really tired. “If the city officials get this injunction against the car pool—and they will get it—I’m afraid our people will go back to the buses,” King told Coretta. “It’s just too much to ask them to continue if we don’t have transportation for them.”
On November 12, the day before the court hearing, King faced his people in a subdued mass meeting. He “almost shrank” from speaking to them. He didn’t know what to say. “They had backed us up,” he said later, “and we had let them down. It was a desolate moment. I saw, all of us saw, that the court was leaning against us.” Was the boycott going to fail then? Almost twelve months of protest done in vain? “We have moved all of these months with the daring faith that God was with us in our struggle,” he told his followers that night. “The many experiences of days gone by have vindicated that faith in a marvelous way. Tonight we must believe that a way will be found out of no way.”
The next day King was in court again, listening in despair as the city demanded $15,000 in damages for the boycott and argued that the car pool be shut down. As chief defendant, King sat at the front table with the defense and prosecution, certain that Judge Carter would find for the city. “The clock said it was noon,” he remembered, “but it was midnight in my soul.”
During a recess at noon, King noticed a commotion at the back of the room. In a moment an Associated Press reporter ran up with a piece of paper. “Here is the decision you have been waiting for,” he exclaimed. “Read this release.” King glanced over it with his heart pounding.
The United States Supreme Court today affirmed a decision of a special three-judge U.S. District Court in declaring Alabama’s state and local laws requiring segregation on buses unconstitutional.
King could scarcely believe what he read. He hurried back to share the miraculous news with Nixon, Abernathy, and Coretta. “God Almighty,” a bystander cried, “has spoken from Washington, D.C.”
Visibly distressed, Judge Carter and the city officials nevertheless proceeded with the courtroom charade, with Carter enjoining the car pool as almost everyone expected. For his part, King thought it all ironic. On the same day that the local court dissolved the car pool, the United States Supreme Court removed the conditions that had made it necessary.
Segregationists, of course, reacted to the Supreme Court order with a fusillade of threats. “Any attempt to enforce this decision will inevitably lead to riot and bloodshed,” warned a member of the White Citizens’ Council. Other whites threatened to hang any Supreme Court Justice—especially “that damn Hugo Black”—who set foot in this sovereign state. “If you allow the niggers to go back on the buses and sit in the front seats,” said a note that came to King, “we’re going to burn down fifty houses in one night, including yours.”
That night forty carloads of robed and hooded Klansmen rumbled into Montgomery’s Negro section, determined to scare the residents back into behaving the way “niggers” were supposed to. Usually they locked themselves in their homes when the Klan rode through their neighborhoods. But not this night. With doors open and porch lights ablaze, black folk watched and even waved as the motorcade went by. “They acted as though they were watching a circus parade,” King rejoiced. “No one fears the Klan or the White Citizens’ Council.”
The next night thousands of jubilant Negroes crowded into Holt Street Baptist Church, the church where the boycott had begun almost a year before. In the invocation, MIA official S. S. Seay started crying from happiness. All over the church people wept and shouted for joy. Then Bob Graetz created a sensation when he read from I Corinthians: “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” In the course of business, the people voted to stay off the buses until the Supreme Court mandate reached Montgomery. Then King stood before them, and the great throng fell silent. “I would be terribly disappointed,” he said, “if any of you go back to the buses bragging, ‘We, the Negroes, won a victory over the white people.’ We must take this not as victory over the white man but as a victory for justice and democracy. Don’t go back on the buses and push people around…. We are just going to sit where there’s a seat.”
But then he said: “In the past, we have sat in the back of the buses, and this has indicated a basic lack of self-respect. It shows that we thought of ourselves as less than men. On the other hand, the white people have sat in front and have thought of themselves as superior. They have tried to play God. Both approaches are wrong. Our duty in going back on the buses is to destroy this superior-inferior relationship…. It is our duty to act in the manner best designed to establish man’s oneness.”
All over the church black people were clapping now, singing and shouting in praise of their leader. “Look at the way they greet that guy,” said a white reporter. “They think he’s a Messiah.”
“MAY GOD CONTINUE TO BLESS YOU that you may reach higher heights,” an old family friend wrote King in the wake of victory. “Your future is unlimited. You have a Ph.D. degree. You are beautifully married. You are humble. You are sweet. You have forty fruitful years before you. There is no position in any church, religious body, University and etc., which you could not fill. I have picked you for three outstanding positions in our race. I will be glad to risk my prophecy on that.”
“Your fight for the cause of justice is supported by the prayers of thinking people everywhere,” wrote an anonymous white woman. “God is no respecter of persons, and He is on the side of right. You have shown that you are on that side, and the Montgomery Negroes are very fortunate to have your wise and sane counsel and leadership. The city of Montgomery should be gr
ateful to have you in its midst.” She added, “Please forgive me for making this an anonymous letter. Not all of us have your forthright courage.”
Instead of being grateful to “nigger” King, the city fathers assured white Montgomery: “The City Commission, and we know our people are with us in this determination, will not yield one inch, but will do all in its power to oppose the integration of the Negro race with the white race in Montgomery and will forever stand like a rock against social equality, intermarriage, and mixing of the races under God’s creation and plan.”
Despite their irrational fears, King kept trying to reach the city commissioners: he warned them that violence could break out over integrated buses and pleaded with them to make a public statement, urging whites to obey the law of the land. But the commissioners did nothing, nothing at all, to prepare white Montgomery for the Supreme Court mandate.
Then it is up to us to avoid racial incidents, King said. In church workshops on nonviolence, he and his associates led Negroes through role-playing “socio-dramas” in which they acted out potential black-white conflicts on integrated buses. At the same time, King reminded his people over and over to abide by the Gandhian faith he had instilled in them throughout the protest. And the MIA even got out leaflets that urged blacks to be courteous and dignified, relying on “moral and spiritual force” to protect them from potential white retaliation.
For a week in early December, King and the MIA hosted an Institute on Nonviolence, to commemorate the anniversary of the start of the boycott and to discuss the power of nonviolent resistance. From across the Republic came distinguished white and black social scientists, religious and cultural leaders, politicians and lawyers, to give papers and make proposals on how nonviolence could improve American race relations in the light of the Montgomery victory. In the keynote address, called “Facing the Challenge of a New Age,” King reminded the delegates—and all Americans beyond—that they were living in “one of the most momentous periods of human history,” a transitional era in which the old order of white supremacy and exploitation was dying out and a new era of world community fast approaching. Yes, it was a painful time—all periods of great change were painful—but what a glorious new world awaited them, a world of “geographical togetherness” in which all people would rise above the “narrow confines of our individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of humanity.”.
Then he addressed himself to the dispirited poor in his ranks, the Negroes who toiled as America’s domestics and common laborers. “Whatever your life’s work is, do it well,” King said. “A man should do his job so well that the living, the dead, and the unborn could do it no better. If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, like Shakespeare wrote poetry, like Beethoven composed music; sweep streets so well that all the host of Heaven and earth will have to pause and say, ‘Here lived a great street sweeper, who swept his job well.’ ” Then he quoted Douglas Malloch:
If can’t be a pine on the top of the hill
Be a scrub in the valley—but be
The best little scrub by the side of the hill.
Be a bush if you can’t be a tree.
He went on to outline what the Negro must struggle for in the coming new age. We must seek the ballot, he said, so that we will no longer be the “convenient tools of unscrupulous politicians.” With the ballot, Negroes could help break up the unholy coalition of southern segregationists and northern reactionaries that dominated Congress and whipped back civil-rights legislation introduced there. Second, Negroes themselves must work for positive social legislation, to guarantee their rights as U.S. citizens and to prevent white segregationists from lynching them. Third, Negroes must invest their own economic resources in their cause. Their annual income now stood at $16 billion—almost the size of Canada’s—and could be profitably used to facilitate Negro freedom on these shores.
Above all, Negroes must unite in a true mass movement based on nonviolence. “Our defense is to meet every act of violence toward an individual Negro with the fact that there are thousands of others who will present themselves in his place as potential victims. Every time one school teacher is fired for standing up courageously for justice, it must be faced with the fact that there are four thousand more to be fired. If the oppressors bomb the home of one Negro for his courage, this must be met with the fact that they must be required to bomb the homes of fifty thousand more Negroes. This dynamic unity, this amazing self-respect, this willingness to suffer, and this refusal to hit back will soon cause the oppressor to become ashamed of his own methods.” And this will lead to that new day when we in America can live together in Christian brotherhood, and “when this day finally comes, ‘The morning stars will sing together and the sons of God will shout for joy.’ ”
On December 20, the Supreme Court mandate finally reached Montgomery, and early the next day King, Abernathy, Nixon, and Glenn Smiley, a southern-born white minister of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, climbed aboard the first integrated bus. King and Smiley sat together in the formerly all-white section, southern-born black and white preachers riding side by side in symbolic tribute to that new order King had prophesied. On the buses that day, King happily noted that most whites accepted integrated seating without incident. True, one old man stood in the aisle muttering, “I would rather die and go to hell than sit behind a nigger.” And a white woman slumped imperviously beside a Negro, only to leap up when she saw who it was. “What,” she cried, “are these niggers gonna do next?” On another bus, a white man actually slapped a Negro woman, but she refused to strike back. “I could have broken that little fellow’s neck all by myself,” she said afterward, “but I left the mass meeting last night determined to do what Reverend King asked.”
Still, King was troubled that most Negro riders—especially old folk—flocked to the backs of the buses. “Reverend,” an old woman told him, “I know I can sit in front but I just goes to my old place.” King realized that it would take time for such people to overcome habitual servility, but he had faith that they would do so (and ultimately they did). But he was glad to see young people and professionals boldly sitting in front as he did.
So it was that desegregated buses came at last to Montgomery, Alabama, but at an enormous cost. So that a black human being could sit beside a white human being, the MIA had spent $225,000 in court, transportation, and other expenses, the bus company had lost more than $250,000 in revenues, the city several thousand dollars in taxes, and downtown merchants several million dollars in business. “Oh, it pains me deeply when I think of the brain power and the man hours that we have poured into this thing,” lamented the wife of a Negro physician. “Think how many constructive things we could do for the city if they did not force us to spend every second struggling for basic dignity.”
And though it catapulted him to national fame, the boycott had cost King, too. In his annual report to Dexter, he commented on how much his “unbelievable schedule” as protest leader had threatened his health and balance. “Almost every week—having to make so many speeches, attend so many meetings, meet so many people, write so many articles, counsel with so many groups—I face the frustration of feeling that in the midst of so many things to do I am not doing anything well.” But he thanked his congregation for standing by him when his critics—Negro and white alike—had tried “to cut me down and lessen my influence.”
BY CHRISTMAS, 1956, Negroes in three other southern cities had launched bus protests like that in Montgomery, and King kept in close contact with the leaders. Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth headed a band of intrepid boycotters in Birmingham, Reverend C. K. Steele another down in Tallahassee, Florida, and several other Negro ministers still another in Mobile. With additional protests under way, Bayard Rustin approached King about the necessity of a permanent, southern-wide organization to unite the various protest groups and expand the movement across Dixie. King thought it a marvelous idea and urged Rustin to draw up plans. At that Rust
in hurried back to New York to consult friends like attorney Stanley Levison about a permanent civil-rights organization “designed around Dr. King’s charisma.”
On December 28, a reign of terror erupted in Montgomery, as armed whites opened fire on buses all over town, shot a pregnant Negro woman in both legs, and pummeled a teenage Negro girl. The Klan marched in full regalia, and fiery crosses lit up the night sky. Someone reported seeing a little Negro boy warming his hands at a burning cross. Then on January 3, 1957, a white group invaded Negro neighborhoods, handing out leaflets allegedly signed by Negroes who were tired of “Liver Lip Luther King.” “We get shot at while he walks,” the leaflets said. “He is getting us in more trouble every day.” He and his associates “ride high, eat good, stay warm and pilfer the funds.” “Wake Up! Mess is His Business. Run Him Out of Town!”
As King knew, the white opposition hoped to frustrate the court’s bus order through organized violence and psychological treachery, under the conviction that blacks would stop protesting and return to the old ways when confronted with white defiance. This convinced King all the more of the need for a southwide Negro organization to “extend and intensify the struggle.” Summoning Rustin back from New York, he consulted with Shuttlesworth of Birmingham and Steele of Tallahassee. As they went over Rustin’s plans, all agreed that the southern Negro church should be the initial point of organization, because it offered a powerful reservoir of leadership from which to draw and was overall the most widespread and effective institution in the black community through which to launch a mass movement. Supported by Shuttlesworth and Steele, King issued a call for a southern conference to meet in Atlanta on January 10 and 11 to plan organizational strategy.
Early in the morning of January 10, King and Abernathy were asleep in the King home in Atlanta when an urgent phone call came through from Abernathy’s wife. His home and church had both been bombed. Subsequent calls indicated that other Negro dwellings had been dynamited and that all-out war seemed to have begun in Montgomery. King flew there with Abernathy and toured the bomb sites. All told, four churches and two parsonages lay smoking from terrorists’ bombs, and angry crowds milled about in the debris. King begged them to remain nonviolent, but he too was appalled. What kind of people would do this anyway? “When they bomb the house of the Lord,” said an old man, “we are dealing with crazy people.”
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