Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  That church, Trinity Lutheran, was an oddity in itself. To Negroes, a principal attraction of Trinity Lutheran had always been its affiliated private school, which was supported as a mission by the World Lutheran Council. For years it had been the only decent school available to Negroes, and many ambitious families had swallowed their distaste for the staid Lutheran liturgy in order to educate their children. Along with an even tinier Congregational church, Trinity was high church in doctrine and worship. Dexter got most of the college professors; Trinity got a few of the high school teachers.

  For several years, the minister at Trinity had been Nelson Trout, a Negro Lutheran who felt somewhat excluded as the head of a minuscule congregation outside the mainstream of Negro religion. His peers from the big Baptist and Methodist churches took neither Trinity nor its pastor very seriously, Trout believed, and it was all he could do to get some of them to turn out for the ceremony that marked the crowning achievement of his work in Montgomery—the dedication of the new parsonage, next door to the church. Ralph Abernathy arrived with King. The two young Baptists attended such functions together so frequently that Trout had come to think of them as a team—Mr. Rough and Mr. Smooth. Abernathy tended to lead King through the crowds, introducing him to selected new people, in a manner that offended Trout because Abernathy was at once so deferential to King and so lordly toward everyone else. Trout found it much easier to talk informally with King, and in a private moment once felt enough at ease to ask as a Lutheran how King, a Negro Baptist, had acquired the name Martin Luther. King looked searchingly at Trout for some time, then smiled and parried with a question of his own: how did a Negro like Trout come to be a Lutheran? Trout laughed. The competition was too rough among the Baptist preachers, he replied, and the Lutherans were begging for Negroes.

  Many years later, Trout would become the first black Lutheran bishop in the Western Hemisphere. On leaving Montgomery in 1955, he failed to anticipate the social friction that his new parsonage would cause—mostly because he assumed that his successor would be a Negro. Lutheran policy changed again, however, and when a white minister named Robert Graetz finished his seminary training that year in Ohio, he found his name on the missionary assignment list among those of his colleagues going to Africa and South America—posted to Trinity Lutheran down in Alabama. Dutifully, Graetz had personal stationery printed up bearing a biblical quotation: “And the angel of the Lord spoke unto Philip saying, ‘Arise, go toward the South.’” Along with his wife and their two toddlers, Graetz headed for Montgomery, where they became the first of Trinity’s white pastoral families to live in Trout’s parsonage among the Negro parishioners.

  The Graetzes discovered instantly that the social effects of the new location were severe. Previously, Montgomery whites had allowed Trinity pastors to live among them and preach to Negro Lutherans, on much the same social calculus that allowed doctors to visit a brothel in a medical emergency. Now that they were living in the brothel, however, the Graetzes forfeited their modicum of acceptability. Local whites shunned them everywhere from the laundromat to the supermarket. In most respects, the Graetz family lived as though they were Negroes, but their white skin produced some unprecedented legal contortions. Because they always chose to sit in the upstairs Negro section of movie theaters, for instance, theater owners worried that to sell them tickets might bring down Alabama’s legal sanctions against establishments that “sponsored” interracial public meetings. (Those same laws made it technically illegal for Graetz to preach in his own church.) The theater owners’ solution was to let them in free. Montgomery’s ticket takers soon learned the face of every Graetz and knew to whisk them all rapidly into the theater, so as to minimize the ire of paying white customers. Reverend Graetz tried repeatedly to pay, believing that he should not profit from his Christian witness. The owners would not hear of it.

  The Graetzes almost never got to laugh at such absurdities. There was too much tension. Besides, the daily ostracism caused too much hurt within the family for its excesses to be funny. Not all the hostility came from whites. Many of Trinity’s members had been happier with Negro pastors like Trout. Some of them said out loud that they did not need a white man to tell them how to live. At first, even those who tried hardest to welcome them were saddled constantly with awkwardness, as nothing came naturally to the Graetzes. In most situations outside the Lutheran worship service, they did not know what to eat, say, or do. Drawing on their best natural defense, they became sincere—too sincere, even by the standards of the clergy. At sessions of the Montgomery Human Relations Council, Reverend Graetz met most of the others who made up the town’s handful of white liberals, including the Durrs. Like him, they were all sincere, and some were timid, or brilliant, or damaged. Juliette Morgan, the kindly city librarian, was a recluse by night who shut herself up in a dark house with her mother. Of the Negro ministers in town, Reverend King often attended, though he usually arrived late. Graetz found King easily approachable, always supportive of him in his difficulties as a racially isolated newcomer and curious about the details. As they became better acquainted, Graetz decided that King’s own experience as a Negro student among whites in the North gave him a feel for life at Trinity Lutheran.

  In October, while King was off in Georgia for a week, living and preaching with Walter McCall, a white woman boarding the Highland Avenue bus asked the driver to make Mary Louise Smith vacate a seat for her. Smith refused, was arrested, convicted, and fined nine dollars under the segregation law. Negro activists pitched themselves into another flurry of battle preparation, except that it was foreshortened this time by a pronouncement from E. D. Nixon. Smith, he decided, was no better suited to stand at the rallying point than was Claudette Colvin the previous spring. Her father was an alcoholic. She lived in one of those see-through clapboard shacks out in the country. If a legal fight started and newspaper reporters went out to interview the Smith family, said Nixon, “we wouldn’t have a leg to stand on.” In the end, Smith paid her fine. Nixon’s judgment prevailed, but leaders of the Women’s Political Council grumbled that Smith’s shortcomings were irrelevant to the principles of the case.

  Returning home to the afterbuzz of the Smith arrest, King prepared a formal report to his congregation at Dexter, looking back on his first year and forward to the second. This time there were no new recommendations. His brief cover letter was devoted to the subject of money. “May I close,” he wrote, “by asking you to consider this question: Where else in all the world can a dollar buy so much?”

  A big baby girl—weighing more than nine and a half pounds—was born three weeks later. Mother King arrived swiftly from Atlanta to take up her station. Dr. Pettus, the attending physician, was of the old school that required confinement of the mother both before the birth and for a month thereafter. He exempted Mother King from the semi-quarantine he imposed around the baby, but the new father initially had the status of a special visitor who came and went by the rules. Generally, King’s role was to peek happily, to crow, to embrace, to entertain and restrain callers, and to pass along what he had heard from Dr. Pettus and the women.

  Two minor disagreements intruded on the domestic excitement within the first few days. First, King told the family that he was thinking of running for president of the local NAACP chapter. Coretta objected strenuously, and Mother King supported her. The timing of the sudden announcement made it look suspiciously like one of the senior King’s attention-getting maneuvers. King’s wife and mother told him that the last thing he needed with a new baby was a demanding new office, especially since his church and his outside preaching already kept him constantly in motion. They were not impressed by King’s reason for wanting to run, which was primarily that Rufus Lewis had been pushing him to do so and predicting that he could win. There was a good deal of discussion within the household, during which time King kept in contact with Lewis and with R. D. Nesbitt, in whose offices the NAACP held many of its meetings. His interest soon came to the attention of E. D. Nixo
n, who called upon King to advise him that he had controlled the NAACP for many years and was already committed to another candidate. He liked King but would have to oppose him if he ran. This warning, combined with the home-front opposition, finally made King back away, but he liked to tease his wife and mother by remarking that he might change his mind.

  The second disagreement had to do with the baby’s name. Coretta, seeking the unusual and distinctive, wanted to call her Yolanda Denise. King wanted something simpler, arguing that Yolanda was too difficult to pronounce, and too redolent of the tendency among middle-class Negroes to reach out for status in a name. Coretta won. King made himself happy with the nickname “Yoki,” saying that if they had another daughter he would like to give her a plain name, like Mary Jane.

  On December 1, 1955, the day Yolanda became two weeks old, Rosa Parks left the Montgomery Fair department store late in the afternoon for her regular bus ride home. All thirty-six seats of the bus she boarded were soon filled, with twenty-two Negroes seated from the rear and fourteen whites from the front. Driver J. P. Blake, seeing a white man standing in the front of the bus, called out for the four passengers on the row just behind the whites to stand up and move to the back. Nothing happened. Blake finally had to get out of the driver’s seat to speak more firmly to the four Negroes. “You better make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats,” he said. At this, three of the Negroes moved to stand in the back of the bus, but Parks responded that she was not in the white section and didn’t think she ought to move. She was in no-man’s-land. Blake said that the white section was where he said it was, and he was telling Parks that she was in it. As he saw the law, the whole idea of no-man’s-land was to give the driver some discretion to keep the races out of each other’s way. He was doing just that. When Parks refused again, he advised her that the same city law that allowed him to regulate no-man’s-land also gave him emergency police power to enforce the segregation codes. He would arrest Parks himself if he had to. Parks replied that he should do what he had to do; she was not moving. She spoke so softly that Blake would not have been able to hear her above the drone of normal bus noise. But the bus was silent. Blake notified Parks that she was officially under arrest. She should not move until he returned with the regular Montgomery police.

  At the station, officers booked, fingerprinted, and incarcerated Rosa Parks. It was not possible for her to think lightly of being arrested. Having crossed the line that in polite society divided Negroes from niggers, she had reason to expect not only stinging disgrace among her own people but the least civilized attentions of the whites. When she was allowed to call home, her mother’s first response was to groan and ask, “Did they beat you?”

  Deep in panic, the mother called E. D. Nixon’s house for help. Mrs. Nixon absorbed the shock and promptly called her husband at the downtown office he maintained more or less as a place to talk civic business when he was not riding the trains.

  “What was it she was arrested about?” asked Nixon.

  “I don’t know,” Mrs. Nixon replied impatiently. “Go and get her.”

  Nixon sighed. It was just like his wife to give him orders as though he could always tell the white authorities to do things, such as to release prisoners. Still, he shared her urgency, because he knew Rosa Parks was in danger every minute she remained in jail. If anything happened to her there, Parks would be utterly without recourse or remedy. Nixon called Fred Gray’s office, but he was gone for the day. After leaving messages for Gray all over town, Nixon summoned the courage to call the jail directly. What were the charges against Rosa Parks, he asked the desk sergeant—only to be told they were none of his damned business. Nixon hung up. This was serious. The normal courtesies he received as the universally recognized Negro leader were suspended, which must mean that the race laws had been transgressed.

  Nixon called Clifford Durr and told him what he knew. Durr promised to find out what he could from the jail, and soon called back with a report: Rosa Parks was charged with violating the Alabama bus segregation laws. That was all. When he volunteered to accompany Nixon to make bond for Mrs. Parks, Nixon accepted the offer readily. In fact, he told Durr to wait for him to come by. They would convoy to the city jail. When Nixon pulled up at the Durr home, Virginia Durr was waiting outside with her husband, ready to go too. She had first known Rosa Parks as a seamstress she hired to hem dresses for her three daughters, and had thought well enough of Park’s NAACP work to recommend that she spend a vacation week at one of Myles Horton’s interracial workshops at the Highlander Folk School. Parks had done so, returning to say that her eyes had been opened to new possibilities of harmony between the races. Virginia Durr was indignant that the fearful humiliation of jail had now fallen upon such a person.

  Officers fetched Parks from the cellblock as Nixon was signing the bond papers. She and Nixon and the Durrs were soon inside the Parks home with her mother and her husband Raymond, a barber. The atmosphere was as charged as the taciturn Rosa Parks could ever allow it to become, with much storytelling and rejoicing that the immediate danger, at least, had passed. Nixon read the mood of the Parks family well enough that he spoke business to Durr only in asides, out of their hearing. He asked for Durr’s legal opinion: was this the case they had been waiting for? Could they use it to win a victory over segregation on appeal? Durr replied in snippets as he could, mindful of the Parks family. The only flaw with the case as he saw it was that the charges would first be heard in state court rather than federal court. But there were ways to move cases. Otherwise, the circumstances were highly favorable. There were no extraneous charges to cloud the segregation issue, and Rosa Parks would make a good impression on white judges. This was enough for Nixon, who already knew instinctively that Rosa Parks was without peer as a potential symbol for Montgomery’s Negroes—humble enough to be claimed by the common folk, and yet dignified enough in manner, speech, and dress to command the respect of the leading classes.

  Nixon asked the husband and mother to excuse Rosa briefly, so that she could speak privately with him and the Durrs. He put the question to her: would she be willing to fight the case, the way she knew they had wanted to fight earlier with Colvin and Smith? Rosa Parks did not have to be told twice what he meant, but she knew that it was a momentous decision for her family. She said she would have to approach her relatives with the idea privately, and chose to talk first alone with her mother and then with her husband. The proposal upset both of them. Raymond Parks came nearly undone. Having just felt primitive, helpless terror when his wife had been snatched into jail, he could not bear the thought that she would reenter that forbidden zone by choice. Now there was hope that the arrest could be forgiven as an isolated incident, but if she persisted, it would be deliberate. It would be political. “The white folks will kill you, Rosa,” he said, pleading with her not to do it.

  Rosa Parks finally announced her decision. “If you think it will mean something to Montgomery and do some good, I’ll be happy to go along with it,” she said. The Durrs and then Nixon soon left. It was late on a Thursday evening. Before going to bed, Nixon pulled out his portable tape recorder and reeled off a long list of people he needed to call. Meanwhile, Fred Gray had received the message about the arrest. After talking with Parks and agreeing to represent her, he had called several of his friends on the Women’s Political Council, including Jo Ann Robinson. A divorced professor of English at Alabama State, Robinson had grown up the last of twelve children on a one-hundred-acre Georgia farm, which her father had told her was a gift from his own father, a wealthy white farmer. The only one of her siblings to finish college, Robinson had come South again from Cleveland in 1949. She was among the leaders of the women’s group who served on Reverend King’s new political affairs committee at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. Like most professional women among the Negroes of Montgomery, she had no trouble identifying with Rosa Parks, even though she herself drove a car and seldom rode the buses. As soon as she heard from Gray that night, Robin
son called her closest friends on the council. All of them responded like firefighters to an alarm. This was it.

  Casting off the old rules about how Negro women should never travel alone at night in Southern towns, Robinson and her friends met about midnight at their offices at Alabama State, each under the pretext of grading exams. They drafted a letter of protest. “Another Negro woman has been arrested and thrown into jail because she refused to get up out of her seat on the bus and give it to a white person,” they began. They revised the letter repeatedly, as ideas occurred to them. “Until we do something to stop these arrests, they will continue,” the women wrote. “The next time it may be you, or you or you. This woman’s case will come up Monday. We are, therefore, asking every Negro to stay off the buses on Monday in protest of the arrest and trial.” As they worked, the women felt urgency closing in upon them. They realized that the best way to notify Montgomery Negroes, given their lack of access to newspapers or radio, was to leaflet the town through the churches and the contacts of the Women’s Council. The best place to get copies of such an incendiary letter printed, they realized, was precisely where they were—at Alabama State, on the mimeograph machines. This would require stealth, because the college was funded largely by the Alabama legislature. If white people ever learned that state-employed teachers had used taxpayer-owned facilities to plot a revolt against segregation laws, heads would roll and budgets would surely be cut. So the women resolved to finish the mammoth task before daylight and never to speak of what they had done. They soon lost all thought of going to bed that night.