Six months later, in the consolidated decision that became known as Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, the Supreme Court unanimously struck down the doctrine of “separate but equal” education across the land. In Pittsburgh, the editors splashed the news that “SCHOOLS WILL BE MIXED!” across the front page. Yet along with praise for “Buster” Marshall, as the paper called him, the Courier also identified omens of trouble to come. Another front-page story quoted Southern officials, from Georgia to Louisiana, defiantly vowing to maintain segregated schools in their states. An editorial foresaw more political gerrymandering to make school districts increasingly white or black. In a story entitled “School Decision Fails to Excite Southern Mothers!” both white and black parents expressed fears that the ruling might be implemented too quickly and worried about what it would mean for their children.
In the year after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, Cunningham continued to dispense personal advice while keeping an eye out for big reporting opportunities. In her weekly column, she pondered the vogue for informal dinner parties and the dilemma of modern women expected to act feminine and help pay the bills. Meanwhile, she profiled the new director of the NAACP, Roy Wilkins, and soprano Marian Anderson, on the eve of her debut as the first black singer to perform with the Metropolitan Opera. As news of Emmett Till’s murder spread, Cunningham rushed to a Harlem church were ten thousand people shared their anguish over the fourteen-year-old Chicago boy who had gone to visit relatives in Mississippi only to be kidnapped, mutilated, shot, and drowned for chatting with a white woman who ran the local grocery store.
In January 1956, another protest had begun to capture the attention of the country, and Cunningham urged her bosses in Pittsburgh to send her to cover it. In Montgomery, the capital of Alabama, virtually the entire community of forty thousand Negroes was refusing to ride the city’s segregated buses. The protest had started on the first day of December 1955, when Rosa Parks, a seamstress who was also a secretary of the local NAACP, was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger. Following a trial one-day strike, church leaders banded together with the local NAACP director, E. D. Nixon, to organize a sustained boycott. Instead of taking the bus, blacks car-pooled, hitchhiked, rode with Negro cab drivers, or simply walked. As word of the boycott spread over the Christmas holiday, black pastors across America praised it from the pulpit and took up collections of money and secondhand shoes to send to Alabama.
When Cunningham arrived in Montgomery, she checked into “a sad little hotel” in the heart of town, as she described it. On Tuesday, January 31, she was in her hotel room when she heard the sound of a loud explosion nearby. She followed the noise and smoke to Highland Street, to find that a firebomb had ripped into a tiny white bungalow house. It was the parsonage of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., the young pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church who had been elected to chair the boycott committee, which called itself the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA). King was speaking at another church, First Baptist, several blocks away at the time of the bombing, but his wife, Coretta, and their ten-week-old daughter, Yolanda, were inside the house. By the time King got there, it was surrounded by white policemen and scores of angry black town neighbors, some of them brandishing construction pipes and broken Coca-Cola bottles.
After checking to make sure his loved ones were all right, King emerged on what was left of the small, columned porch to urge calm. As Cunningham listened to his resounding voice and eloquent cadences, she could see why despite King’s age—he had just turned twenty-seven—he had emerged as the leader of the Montgomery protest. “If you have weapons, take them home,” King pleaded to the angry crowd. “If you do not have them, please do not seek to get them. We cannot solve this problem through retaliatory violence. We must meet violence with nonviolence. Remember the words of Jesus: ‘He who lives by the sword will perish by the sword.’ 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 in the words that echo across the centuries: ‘Love your enemies; bless them that curse you; pray for them that despitefully use you.’ ”
Within days of the firebombing, a grand jury with only one black member indicted King and other boycott organizers for conspiring to violate an obscure ordinance against interfering with local business. Rather than wait to be arrested, more than ninety of the city’s most distinguished black citizens, dressed in their Sunday best, turned themselves in. Cunningham watched as they submitted to mug shots and fingerprints and posted $300 bail each, then posed for a group portrait on the courthouse steps. Later in the week, she attended the first MIA meetings opened to reporters. At one, the organization rejected by a vote of 3,998 to 2 a deal from the bus company, promising better treatment but retaining segregated seating. At another, the crowd resolved to carry on the protest by refusing to use any vehicles at all. “Now they’re really going to see some walking!” an elderly lady called out after the motion passed.
As the streets of Montgomery filled with Negroes, defiantly but peacefully going about their business entirely on foot, Cunningham wrote a status report to her editors in Pittsburgh. “This situation here is something like I’ve never in life seen,” she wrote. “It’s difficult to believe what these people are doing and the almost Christ-like manner in which they’re doing it. It is my considered—though womanly—opinion that this deal will be seen as bigger than the Supreme Court decision [on school desegregation] and that you ought to have somebody real close here for the next few months. I’ve never seen Negroes ‘cool it’ like these people. They KNOW they’re right and they aren’t going to quit for nothing or nobody. They aren’t being excitable and emotional as we’ve always been. And they’re slowly realizing that they’ve got a key to the whole race thing right in their pockets. In short, they don’t give a damn what the entire white people do. They’re ready, spiritually and psychologically, to be martyrs if need be. Honest to God, I’ve never been prouder of being a Negro. Love and kisses and forgive the sentimentality, but I’m moved.—EVELYN”
Cunningham became even more moved as she listened to the testimony during King’s four-day conspiracy trial. As fellow ministers tried to play down King’s role in organizing the boycott, his lawyers worked to establish the “just cause” of the protest by calling more than thirty black citizens, most of them women, to describe their experiences riding Montgomery’s buses. The rule that Rosa Parks had violated—Negroes in the back half of the bus had to stand once the front half was full and whites needed more seats—was only the start of the indignities described. Blacks were forced to enter the front door to pay a dime for their ride, then to exit the bus and reenter through the back door. Often drivers pulled away before they could get back on. Buses routinely drove by stops in black neighborhoods, or peeled away before colored passengers found their footing. Virtually every black witness described vile names by which bus drivers had called them: “nigger,” “boy,” “shine,” “black cow,” “big black ape.”
Yet instead of sounding angry or humiliated, the witnesses appeared eager to share their stories for the benefit of dozens of reporters, from as far away as France and India, who had descended on Montgomery to cover the trial. When Judge Eugene Carter tried to dismiss one woman from the stand, she didn’t want to leave. “Y’all can ask me some more questions if you want to!” the woman said.
Carter pressed another woman about why she had stopped riding the bus on the specific date of December 5, 1955.
“Because we decided,” the woman answered.
“Who decided?” the judge asked.
“We decided,” the woman said.
“Who’s we?” the judge asked.
“Fifty thousand Negroes of Montgomery!” the woman cried out—eliciting such a loud cheer from the black spectators in the courtroom that Carter threatened to jail them all if the commotion continued.
Faced with writing “The Women” column in the midst of the trial, C
unningham skipped her usual lifestyle tips. Instead, she opened up to her female readers about how the Montgomery assignment had changed her. “I’ve always felt that being a Negro was one of life’s most interesting experiences,” she wrote. “There have been countless times when certain individual Negroes have made me very proud to be part of them. And there’ve been times when I have been utterly ashamed. But for the most part, I’ve been resigned and indifferent. But here in Montgomery, I got a good shaking up. I learned so much that it was like I’d never known anything. And most of all I experienced sheer happiness that I am a Negro. I felt that I was part of the finest, noblest, most courageous people in the world. Even more amazing to me was to realize that this thing that sprinkled off on me was something that had been soaking into the people here a mighty long time. And I was ashamed for the times I had been ashamed.”
As soon as the lawyers completed their summations, Judge Carter found King guilty of conspiracy and ordered him to pay a $500 fine or face jail time. King chose to go to prison for two weeks, transforming him for the first time into not just a leader but a martyr for his cause. Suddenly the interest of news organizations turned from the boycott to Reverend King himself. Jet magazine put his face on the cover. The New York Times commissioned a “Man in the News” profile. Yet for all the veteran reporters from around the world who were now assigned to the Montgomery story, none had gained more access to the young preacher than the tall, stylish woman from The Pittsburgh Courier.
When they first met, Cunningham hadn’t tried to interview King but instead had engaged him in a casual conversation. “I just wanted to get to know him,” she recalled, “and I wanted him to get to know me, because I was going to be around.” Soon they were having long talks about King’s philosophy of nonviolence, and he was teasing her about not being a true pacifist. “I’m listening to you!” he said. “I’m listening to your anger. I’m listening to how you want to shoot up and kill the bad guys!” Because he liked Cunningham—and because he understood the power and reach of her newspaper across black America—King began to introduce her to fellow protest leaders and other valuable sources. “This is Sister Cunningham, and she’s from the Pittsburgh Courier,” he would say. “But she’s a New Yorker and she is not nonviolent.”
In April 1956, five months into the boycott, that access allowed Cunningham to write the first truly personal profile of King to appear in the national press. The New York Times and other publications had reported the factual highlights: King’s upbringing as the son of one of Atlanta’s top Baptist preachers; his education at Morehouse College and Boston University’s divinity school; his interest in the teachings of Gandhi, Kant, and Hegel. But in “The Life Story of Martin Luther King,” published in three installments in the Courier, Cunningham provided details that no white or male reporter would likely have gleaned.
The moment that King had fallen in love with public speaking, Cunningham reported, wasn’t when listening to his father or his maternal grandfather preach at Ebenezer Baptist Church. It was when he impressed all the other boys and girls at the local Elks Club by winning an oratory contest at the age of fourteen. At Morehouse, King was known more for his love of talking and socializing than for his schoolwork. Until his senior year, he had resisted the idea of becoming a minister. “I had the feeling that you had to make social sacrifices and I wasn’t willing to make these particular sacrifices,” King confessed to Cunningham. “I also had some intellectual doubts about religion. But I finally came to see that religion could be intellectually respectable as well as emotionally satisfying.”
Cunningham coaxed King’s wife of three years, the former Coretta Scott, into recounting their courtship. Inviting Evelyn to the parsonage, Coretta described how a mutual friend had tried to set her up with Martin when he was at Boston University and she was studying at the New En- gland Conservatory of Music. At first she was wary. “I had an aversion to ministers because of a stereotyped impression of them,” Coretta said. But Martin got her phone number from the friend, and “gave me a line I had never heard before” to convince her to have lunch. “He said he would be driving a green Chevy,” Coretta said, “and that he usually made it from the University to the Conservatory in seven minutes, but that tomorrow he would make it in five.” By the end of that lunch, Martin was talking about marriage, and he continued to do so during daily phone calls and dates for months until Coretta finally accepted his proposal.
At that point in the interview, King walked into the room where Coretta and Evelyn were talking. “Why don’t you simply tell her that I swept you off your feet?” he joked. “And don’t forget to mention that when you saw all those girls talking to me at that party in Waterbury, you started looking at me in a new light!” Coretta laughed. It was true, she admitted to Cunningham.
In the last story in her series, Cunningham described how King had emerged as the leader of the Montgomery movement. When the city’s black leaders met on the night of Rosa Parks’s arrest, he arrived late. Before then, there was talk of what to do next but no sense of who would be in charge. “It was an Alphonse-Gaston affair,” as Cunningham put it. Then King walked in, one participant told her, and “it was like someone had sent him. He was it.” Cunningham also captured the extraordinary gift for public speaking that had galvanized the protesters and that was beginning to awe blacks around the country as King traveled to raise funds for the boycott. “No one can leave one of his sermons without being profoundly moved,” she wrote. “He speaks without notes and gives the impression of spontaneity. But his talks are well-prepared and studied. He never underrates his listeners or talks down to them . . . . When he is delving deeply into a weighty subject matter he knows how to make it understandable without the least bit of condescension. He might well be termed one of the great orators of this century.”
Cunningham’s evocative stories on the Montgomery boycott caught the eye of editors at The New York Times, who hired her as a part-time stringer. For the next decade, she helped inform the Times’s slowly expanding coverage of civil rights while returning to the front lines of the struggle for the Courier. Covering the unrest in Birmingham, Alabama, she pushed her way through a crowd to try to interview Bull Connor, the city’s defiantly pro-segregationist police chief. When she identified herself as working for The Pittsburgh Courier, Connors snorted: “Oh, that’s that nigger paper up North, huh?”
Eventually, Cunningham landed another part-time job hosting a lunchtime talk show on WLIB-AM, a jazz radio station in New York City. Her first guest was Malcolm X, the fiery Nation of Islam leader who was just starting to gain national attention. Her last guest was New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, who offered her a job as an adviser and opened the door to a new career as a political consultant and civic activist.
Ever stylish, Evelyn became a muse of Bill Cunningham, The New York Times fashion photographer who shared her last name and delighted in including her in his weekly collages of city trendsetters. Upon her death at the age of ninety-four, he would pen a fond remembrance praising Evelyn’s penchant for “long dangling earrings,” “playful use of scarves,” and figure-stretching combinations of short jackets and long Pucci and St. Laurent dresses and pants suits. “Her hands gave her the expressiveness of a Giacometti sculpture,” the photographer wrote, “not unlike the style of Diana Vreeland.”
Evelyn Cunningham’s stay in Montgomery ended in June 1956, after a federal district court in Alabama found in favor of the boycotters in a civil case filed by the NAACP. It was the first step toward a Supreme Court ruling later that year which mandated an end to segregated seating on buses across the country. After six months of living in a hotel, Cunningham decided it was time to go back north, back to writing advice for modern women and to her next assignment for the Courier. But before leaving Alabama, she wrote a farewell column entitled “What I Like About Dixie.”
Whenever she went south, Cunningham confided, she arrived full of rage over the injustices she was sent to cover. Then she enumera
ted the reasons that “I always wind up enjoying myself and hating to leave, lynch mobs notwithstanding.” Southern blacks knew how to take life slowly, unlike rushing, shoving, subway-riding New Yorkers. They still enjoyed formal meals at dining tables, rather than eating on the run in cramped kitchens like apartment-dwelling Northerners. Most of all, they all seemed to know and look after one another. “If you go out and leave a pot boiling on the stove,” Evelyn wrote, “you can always call a neighbor to go over and turn out the gas.”
Cunningham ended with an observation that sounded gentle at the time, but that in the years ahead would be starkly confirmed in her second home of Pittsburgh, and captured in the work of the most illustrious of all its black native sons. “Being in Dixie always takes some of the smugness out of me about being a big city gal,” she wrote. “They got a way of making me feel that I’ve got as many problems as they have.”
August Wilson revisits his childhood home on the Hill, a cold-water flat (rear) in the back of what was once Bella Siger’s market on Bedford Avenue.
THE CITY
10
THE BARD OF A BROKEN WORLD
LIKE ROBERT L. VANN, Gus Greenlee, Billy Strayhorn, and Evelyn Cunningham, Daisy Wilson had North Carolina roots. She grew up in Spear, a tiny, remote town high in the Appalachian Mountains near the northern Virginia border. Raising Daisy and a younger brother by herself, her mother, Zonia, did her best to scratch out a living on their subsistence farm, but illiteracy limited her horizons. It kept Zonia from advertising her produce, from deciphering bills and contracts, and from otherwise protecting herself against cheats. Daisy was forced to leave school in Spear after the sixth grade to work on the farm, but not before she mastered the skill that she would pass along to her own children, along with the message that reading was the one thing that Negroes needed to survive in a hard world and to make the most of the gifts that God gave them.
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