Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  The crowd punctuated each pause with scattered “Yeses” and “Amens.” They were with him in rhythm, but lagged slightly behind in enthusiasm. Then King spoke of the law, saying that the arrest was doubtful even under the segregation ordinances, because reserved Negro and white bus sections were not specified in them. “The law has never been clarified at that point,” he said, drawing an emphatic “Hell, no” from one man in his audience. “And I think I speak with—with legal authority—not that I have any legal authority—but I think I speak with legal authority behind me—that the law—the ordinance—the city ordinance has never been totally clarified.” This sentence marked King as a speaker who took care with distinctions, but it took the crowd nowhere. King returned to the special nature of Rosa Parks. “And since it had to happen, I’m happy it happened to a person like Mrs. Parks,” he said, “for nobody can doubt the boundless outreach of her integrity. Nobody can doubt the height of her character, nobody can doubt the depth of her Christian commitment.” That’s right, a soft chorus answered. “And just because she refused to get up, she was arrested,” King repeated. The crowd was stirring now, following King at the speed of a medium walk.

  He paused slightly longer. “And you know, my friends, there comes a time,” he cried, “when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression.” A flock of “Yeses” was coming back at him when suddenly the individual responses dissolved into a rising cheer and applause exploded beneath the cheer—all within the space of a second. The startling noise rolled on and on, like a wave that refused to break, and just when it seemed that the roar must finally weaken, a wall of sound came in from the enormous crowd outdoors to push the volume still higher. Thunder seemed to be added to the lower register—the sound of feet stomping on the wooden floor—until the loudness became something that was not so much heard as it was sensed by vibrations in the lungs. The giant cloud of noise shook the building and refused to go away. One sentence had set it loose somehow, pushing the call-and-response of the Negro church service past the din of a political rally and on to something else that King had never known before. There was a rabbit of awesome proportions in those bushes. As the noise finally fell back, King’s voice rose above it to fire again. “There comes a time, my friends, when people get tired of being thrown across the abyss of humiliation, where they experience the bleakness of nagging despair,” he declared. “There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life’s July, and left standing amidst the piercing chill of an Alpine November. There…” King was making a new run, but the crowd drowned him out. No one could tell whether the roar came in response to the nerve he had touched, or simply out of pride in a speaker from whose tongue such rhetoric rolled so easily. “We are here—we are here because we are tired now,” King repeated.

  Perhaps daunted by the power that was bursting forth from the crowd, King moved quickly to address the pitfalls of a boycott. “Now let us say that we are not here advocating violence,” he said. “We have overcome that.” A man in the crowd shouted, “Repeat that! Repeat that!” “I want it to be known throughout Montgomery and throughout this nation that we are Christian people,” said King, putting three distinct syllables in “Christian.” “The only weapon that we have in our hands this evening is the weapon of protest.” There was a crisp shout of approval right on the beat of King’s pause. He and the audience moved into a slow trot. “If we were incarcerated behind the iron curtains of a communistic nation—we couldn’t do this. If we were trapped in the dungeon of a totalitarian regime—we couldn’t do this. But the great glory of American democracy is the right to protest for right.” When the shouts of approval died down, King rose up with his final reason to avoid violence, which was to distinguish themselves from their opponents in the Klan and the White Citizens Council. “There will be no crosses burned at any bus stops in Montgomery,” he said. “There will be no white persons pulled out of their homes and taken out on some distant road and murdered. There will be nobody among us who will stand up and defy the Constitution of this nation.”

  King paused. The church was quiet but it was humming. “My friends,” he said slowly, “I want it to be known—that we’re going to work with grim and bold determination—to gain justice on the buses in this city. And we are not wrong. We are not wrong in what we are doing.” There was a muffled shout of anticipation, as the crowd sensed that King was moving closer to the heart of his cause. “If we are wrong—the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong,” King sang out. He was rocking now, his voice seeming to be at once deep and high-pitched. “If we are wrong—God Almighty is wrong!” he shouted, and the crowd seemed to explode a second time, as it had done when he said they were tired. Wave after wave of noise broke over them, cresting into the farthest reaches of the ceiling. They were far beyond Rosa Parks or the bus laws. King’s last cry had fused blasphemy to the edge of his faith and the heart of theirs. The noise swelled until King cut through it to move past a point of unbearable tension. “If we are wrong—Jesus of Nazareth was merely a utopian dreamer and never came down to earth! If we are wrong—justice is a lie.” This was too much. He had to wait some time before delivering his soaring conclusion, in a flight of anger mixed with rapture: “And we are determined here in Montgomery—to work and fight until justice runs down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream!” The audience all but smothered this passage from Amos, the lowly herdsman prophet of Israel who, along with the priestly Isaiah, was King’s favorite biblical authority on justice.

  He backed off the emotion to speak of the need for unity, the dignity of protest, the historical precedent of the labor movement. Comparatively speaking, his subject matter was mundane, but the crowd stayed with him even through paraphrases of abstruse points from Niebuhr. “And I want to tell you this evening that it is not enough for us to talk about love,” he said. “Love is one of the pinnacle parts of the Christian faith. There is another side called justice. And justice is really love in calculation. Justice is love correcting that which would work against love.” He said that God was not just the God of love: “He’s also the God that standeth before the nations and says, ‘Be still and know that I am God—and if you don’t obey Me I’m gonna break the backbone of your power—and cast you out of the arms of your international and national relationships.’” Shouts and claps continued at a steady rhythm as King’s audacity overflowed. “Standing beside love is always justice,” he said. “Not only are we using the tools of persuasion—but we’ve got to use the tools of coercion.” He called again for unity. For working together. He appealed to history, summoning his listeners to behave so that sages of the future would look back at the Negroes of Montgomery and say they were “a people who had the moral courage to stand up for their rights.” He said they could do that. “God grant that we will do it before it’s too late.” Someone said, “Oh, yes.” And King said, “As we proceed with our program—let us think on these things.”

  The crowd retreated into stunned silence as he stepped away from the pulpit. The ending was so abrupt, so anticlimactic. The crowd had been waiting for him to reach for the heights a third time at his conclusion, following the rules of oratory. A few seconds passed before memory and spirit overtook disappointment. The applause continued as King made his way out of the church, with people reaching to touch him. Dexter members marveled, having never seen King let loose like that. Abernathy remained behind, reading negotiating demands from the pulpit. The boycott was on. King would work on his timing, but his oratory had just made him forever a public person. In the few short minutes of his first political address, a power of communion emerged from him that would speak inexorably to strangers who would both love and revile him, like all prophets. He was twenty-six, and had not quite twelve years and four months to live.

  FIVE

  THE MONTGOMERY BUS BOYCOTT

  A few days after the Holt Street mass meeting, one of the teachers at a Methodist missionary school near
Nagpur, India, rushed outside to investigate a bellowing noise that had pierced the early morning stillness. In the hut next door, he found his colleague James Lawson still in a fit of shouting and clapping and foot-stomping. Such joyous abandon was almost as alarming to the teacher as the violence he had feared, because he knew Lawson as the essence of the cerebral personality—a man who had worn spectacles since the age of four, whose superior manner and precise articulation smothered any hint of emotionalism in his character. Yet now, even after Theopolis burst through the door, Lawson was still dancing, and could only point to a story in the English edition of the Nagpur Times about how thousands of Negroes were refusing to ride segregated buses in a small American city.

  This was the beginning, cried Lawson. This was what he had been dreaming about, what he had gone to prison for, what he had come halfway around the world to find at its source, only to discover that Gandhism without Gandhi was dissolving into power politics and petty quarrels. Lawson was overwhelmed by the ironic news that the spirit of the Mahatma was breaking out only six or seven hundred miles south of his home in Ohio. He sensed immediately that he would come to know M. L. King, who was described in the Nagpur Times as a man of exactly Lawson’s age, race, and profession.

  In Montgomery, Juliette Morgan, the reclusive city librarian, watched the empty buses roll for a few days and then penned a letter to the Montgomery Advertiser. “Not since the First Battle of the Marne has the taxi been put to as good use as it has this last week in Montgomery,” she wrote. “However, the spirit animating our Negro citizens as they ride these taxis or walk from the heart of Cloverdale to Mobile Road has been more like that of Gandhi than of the ‘taxicab army’ that saved Paris.” Morgan declared that the bus boycotters had “taken a lesson from Gandhi, and from our own Thoreau, who influenced Gandhi.” She recommended that her fellow white citizens read Edmund Burke’s speech “Conciliation with the American Colonies,” and warned them against “pharasaical zeal.” “One feels that history is being made in Montgomery these days, the most important in her career,” she concluded.

  These last words confirmed her status as something of a ninny, even among those white people who admired the grandeur of her learning. Who of sound mind could write that a shift by Negro maids in their common mode of transportation was more important than all the past glories of Montgomery? Morgan’s letter brought down upon her a prolonged harassment by young people who threw rocks through her windows, insulted her on the streets, and played tricks on her in the library. Her flighty sensitivity only provoked them to do worse. A little more than a year later, she would be found poisoned in her house, an apparent suicide. By way of explanation, whites would stress her emotional vulnerability or alleged mental problems, while Negroes remained certain that she had been persecuted to death on account of the “Battle of the Marne” letter.

  Only the rarest and oddest of people saw historical possibilities in the bus boycott. Of the few people who bothered to write the Advertiser at first, most were white women who saw it as a justifiable demand for simple decent treatment. One woman correspondent did speculate that there must be a Communist hand behind such strife, but the great mass of segregationists did not bother to address the issue. In its first editorial, the Advertiser described the principal MIA demand—for bus seating by race, with Negroes from the back of the bus and whites from the front, eliminating the reserved section—as a compromise within the principles of segregation. Editor Grover Hall, Jr., advised white Montgomery simply to accept the proposal and be done with it. The very moderation of the demands led civil rights groups such as the national NAACP to frown upon the boycott as a wildcat movement for something less than integration.

  As for the boycotters themselves, the religious fervor they went to bed with at night always congealed by the next morning into cold practicality, as they faced rainstorms, mechanical breakdowns, stranded relatives, and complicated relays in getting from home to job without being late or getting fired or getting into an argument with the employer, then getting home again, perhaps having to find a way to and from the grocery store, and cooking and eating supper, dealing with children and housework, then perhaps going back out into the night for a mass meeting and finally home again, recharged by the “rousements” of Abernathy and the inspiration of King, and then at last some weary but contented sleep before the aching chill of dawn started the cycle all over again. To a largely uneducated people among whom the most common occupations were maid and day laborer, the loss of what was for many their most important modern convenience—cheap bus transportation—left them with staggering problems of logistics and morale.

  The bus boycott was a day-to-day operation. When the Montgomery police commissioner dropped hints during the first week that he would order the arrest of any taxi drivers who charged less than the minimum forty-five-cent fare, it became clear that the emergency ten-cent fare—and therefore the “taxicab army”—was doomed. King immediately called his college friend T. J. Jemison, who, as secretary of the National Baptist Convention, was a prince of the national church on a much higher level than the Kings.* Jemison, who knew King well enough to call him Mike, had led a bus boycott in Baton Rouge during the summer of 1953 and organized a car pool after the authorities banned the use of cut-rate and unlicensed taxi service. King gleaned from Jemison every useful detail within memory about how to organize a massive car pool. That very night he took the pulpit at a mass meeting to explain why they had to maintain the boycott without benefit of the eighteen Negro taxi companies. The good news, King announced bravely, was that they could organize a car pool similar to the one in Baton Rouge. To do this, car owners must volunteer cars, and drivers must volunteer to drive. No money could change hands directly, but passengers could make contributions to the MIA, and the MIA could in turn subsidize the costs of the car pool.

  King described his proposal in the most glowing terms possible, but he knew that the complicated new system would introduce a host of practical problems. Cars lent to the boycott by the wealthier Negroes doubtless would be wrecked, worn, soiled, and abused by student drivers or by passengers. The automobile was still among the prime status symbols in the United States, and therefore to volunteer one’s car as public transportation was a radical act of togetherness. Passengers, for their part, might resent becoming dependent on the largesse of their betters. Knowing such things, King was stunned once again when the crowd greeted his proposal with a church-rocking roar of approval. Whatever it took, they would do it. That first night, more than 150 car owners signed up to lend their cars to the boycott. The fractious classes of Montgomery’s Negroes now promised to blend their daily lives. Several thousand of them floated from the mass meeting of December 8 on a buoyant new cloud of optimism, leaving the harsh arithmetic to the future, or to God. Between 30,000 and 40,000 Negro fares were being denied to the buses every day. Subtracting generously for walkers and for people who were simply staying at home, the car pool would have to supply 20,000 rides, which worked out to more than 130 rides a day for each of the volunteered cars. By herculean efforts, King knew, Jemison had kept his boycott going in Baton Rouge for two weeks before it fell apart.

  At the first negotiating session, on December 8, the three co-equal city commissioners parried King’s arguments before a large crowd of reporters, boycotters, and white spectators. Commissioner W. A. “Tacky” Gayle (who was designated mayor because he supervised the employees at city hall) finally suggested that the negotiating parties retire to talk more frankly in private, and there the bus company’s lawyer, Jack Crenshaw, performed the stickler’s role, as he had in the Colvin case. He had no objection to the rather vague MIA demand for greater courtesy on the part of bus drivers, but he rejected the demand that the bus company hire Negro drivers for predominantly Negro routes. This, said Crenshaw, was a matter of private enterprise. As to the third and principal demand—bus seating—Crenshaw said the MIA plan was illegal. When Crenshaw leaned back to huddle with the other white negotiators, K
ing thought he heard him whisper that if the whites gave in on this point the Negroes would go around boasting of a victory, which would be unacceptable. Some time later, Crenshaw recalled objecting that under the MIA plan a Negro man could be “practically rubbing knees” with a white woman. Pride and deep feeling stalemated the talks, which were adjourned after four hours.

  At their next meeting, on December 17, King opened with a concession. The MIA was no longer asking that the bus company hire Negro drivers immediately, only that the company accept applications from qualified Negroes, with the intention of hiring them when job positions became available. Three eminent white ministers dominated the awkward, exploratory deliberations in the Chamber of Commerce conference room. A Methodist preacher, whom negotiator Jo Ann Robinson described as “stately, reverential, almost godly,” sought to cut through the tension with an eloquent speech stressing the common religious values of the two races. In the end, however, he disappointed the MIA delegation by portraying the boycott as an exaggerated response to the frailties of human nature. Yes, he was sure that bus drivers had behaved discourteously toward Negro passengers, but he was also sure they had mistreated white ones too. The province of the soul was much larger and more spiritual than bus seats, and for that reason he was especially sorry to see ministers of the gospel leading a political campaign. When he finished, a Presbyterian minister (brother of Senator Richard Russell of Georgia) observed that it was nearly impossible to conduct discussions in good Christian faith while one side was inflicting damage on the other. Therefore, he proposed that the MIA leaders first call off the boycott to establish an atmosphere conducive to negotiations. This remained Dr. Henry “Jeb” Russell’s position from start to finish.