Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  Rev. Henry Parker of the First Baptist Church, out of which Abernathy’s church had been born eighty-eight years earlier, attempted to bridge the substantive differences. The problem, said Parker, was a narrower one than most people believed, and from what he could tell most of the bus incidents could be traced to uncertainty among the Negro passengers as to just where the reserved white section ended. To eliminate this confusion, he proposed that signs be installed in all buses designating the first ten seats for whites and the last ten seats for Negroes, with those in between to be filled by overflow passengers of either race. King and the other Negroes objected vehemently to the detested “White Only” signs, which had been eliminated from Montgomery buses twenty years before. The whites replied that they were open to any other proposal that promised to eliminate the confusion. They drew the attention of the Negro delegation to technical flaws in the MIA proposal. Suppose that a bus filled completely with Negroes seating themselves from the back, as the MIA wanted, and then, at a certain stop, ten Negro passengers left the bus from scattered seats while ten white passengers boarded. Where would the white passengers sit? How could they call such a bus segregated, in compliance with state law? On such hypotheticals, the delegations circled to exhaustion.

  Six days before Christmas, a newcomer took a seat on the white side of the conference table at the Chamber of Commerce. Someone whispered to King that he was Luther Ingalls, secretary of the Montgomery White Citizens Council. When Ingalls rose to speak, King jumped up to object that he was not a member of the committee. “Furthermore,” King said rather testily, “we will never solve this problem so long as there are persons on the committee whose public pronouncements are anti-Negro.” When someone replied that the mayor had approved Ingalls’ presence, King said the mayor had acted unfairly by adding to the committee without consulting the MIA representatives.

  King’s statement provoked Reverend Parker of First Baptist to defend Ingalls. “He has just as much right to be on this committee as you do,” Parker said heatedly. “You have a definite point of view, and you are on it.” Some of the other whites, following Parker’s lead, criticized King for introducing hostility and mistrust into the meeting before Ingalls had spoken a word. These comments set off an acrimonious exchange between white and Negro delegates over what was objective and who had cast the first stone. Each side moved to adopt its own proposals, and the other side always voted as a bloc to stop them. Some of the whites criticized King for dominating the discussion on the Negro side. He was inflexible, they said, an obstacle to negotiation. This accusation hung in the room until Abernathy stood up to say that Dr. King spoke for him and all the other Negro members. From there, negotiations resumed in a rather bitter mood. Finally, King made a motion to recess. The whites, he said, had come to the meeting with “preconceived ideas.”

  This time there was no need for Reverend Parker to lead the counterattack. Mrs. Logan A. Hipp, a white woman who had been serving as secretary for the meeting, rose to speak. “You are the one who has come here with preconceived ideas,” she told King, trembling with indignation. “I resent very deeply the statement that we have come here with preconceived ideas. I most certainly did not.” As proof, she mentioned that she had come to the conclusion that she would vote in favor of hiring Negro bus drivers. Negroes already served as chauffeurs, she said, and therefore could no doubt adapt to the buses. A white man seconded Mrs. Hipp, saying that he had come prepared to vote for some of the MIA proposals.

  A few hours later, King left the utterly unproductive meeting burdened by what he called a “terrible sense of guilt.” He had come to the negotiations expecting to find that the more enlightened whites would acknowledge the soundness of his moral claims, like the whites at Crozer and Boston University, and that the less enlightened ones would expose themselves in defensive hatred, like the more abusive segregationist whites he had encountered in his life. Instead, he found that the whites sincerely believed that morality was neutral to the issue, that the White Citizens Council was more or less a natural counterpart of the MIA as a racial interest group. The whites had spoken as the diplomats of a large country might defend their interests to diplomats from a small one. Their technical approach had deprived King of the moral ground he had occupied all his life. Frustrated, King had spoken in anger and resentment, which had served only to ruin the negotiations and convince the more reasonable whites that if there was indeed a moral battle at hand, they and not King held the advantage. Filled with self-reproach, King called Reverend Parker on the telephone to apologize for any of his comments that had given offense. Parker seemed taken aback by the very sound of King’s voice, and by the unprecedented overture that was at once humble and gentlemanly, suggesting equality. He fell into a nervous, perfunctory recitation of the points he had made earlier in the day.

  Parker called no more meetings, and the pressure of continuing the boycott fell heavily on the MIA. They passed the Baton Rouge car-pool record and struggled onward. Every day’s transportation brought slightly less chaos but more strain and fatigue; every mass meeting brought renewal. Speakers built morale at the predominantly female meetings by singling out some of the walking women as heroes. One of the more conservative ministers told the crowd about a group of women he had seen walking to work early one morning. They were walking in pride and dignity, he declared, with a gait that would “do justice to any queen.” The same preacher quoted an elderly woman who had told him that if her feet gave out she would crawl on her knees before riding the buses. Another preacher told the crowd of his effort to give a ride to an ancient woman known to almost everyone as Mother Pollard. She had refused all his polite suggestions that she drop out of the boycott on account of her age, the preacher announced. He inspired the crowd with a spontaneous remark of Mother Pollard’s, which became a classic refrain of the movement: “My feets is tired, but my soul is rested.”

  King took to the pulpit to say that he knew everyone was worrying about how to do their Christmas shopping. He proposed that they all rally to the boycott and to the original meaning of Christmas at the same time by refusing to shop at all. They should take the money they were planning to spend on presents and divide it into thirds—putting one part into their savings account, giving another part to charity and the third to the MIA. If they had to go somewhere, they should visit someone in need or go to church or a mass meeting. By restoring the true spirit of Christmas, they could give each other a lasting gift that no amount of money could buy.

  A sharp decline in Christmas purchases by Negroes caused Montgomery store owners to wince, but they were not greatly alarmed. Negro purchasing power accounted for a small fraction of their business, and the effect of the drop-off was spread among a large number of merchants. City Bus Lines enjoyed no such cushion, however. Its financial distress reached quickly to Chicago, headquarters of the parent company, and the men running the Montgomery subsidiary spoke the blunt, empirical language of financial pain. From the beginning, their public statements that the boycott was 99 percent effective gave no comfort to the Montgomery politicians who were minimizing the boycott to the same news reporters. In the first week of 1956, bus company managers told the three city commissioners that they faced imminent bankruptcy. White people were not even beginning to make up the loss of Negro riders, they said. No matter how much the mayor and the White Citizens Council urged whites to patronize the buses, most of them drove cars and could not bring themselves to climb aboard a bus. Therefore, the bus company demanded an emergency fare increase. The commissioners had no choice but to approve, but they felt a strong political incentive to make sure that if there was to be blame, the voters would lay it elsewhere.

  Three days after the increase was approved, a crowd of some 1,200 people gathered at the Montgomery City Auditorium for a rally of the White Citizens Council. The first of two guest speakers from Arkansas told the audience of the real boycott, the white boycott, in which Arkansas council members were cooperating to cut off credit, suppl
ies, sales, and all other forms of economic sustenance to Negroes identified as anti-segregation activists. Just as the speaker was making sarcastic remarks about the few fainthearted Arkansas businessmen who were afraid of alienating Negro customers, a booming voice rang out from the back of the auditorium. “I don’t have any Negro customers!” shouted Clyde Sellers, the Montgomery city commissioner in charge of police. Sellers walked grandly down the aisle to the stage, and as the hushed crowd recognized him they erupted row by row into a prolonged standing ovation. Lifted to the podium and introduced, Sellers assured the crowd that he would never “trade my Southern birthright for a hundred Negro votes.” This brought a roar of applause that was topped only by his dramatic pledge to join the White Citizens Council that very night. A large photograph of Sellers shaking hands with one of the Arkansas speakers appeared the next day at the top of the Advertiser’s front page, above the headline “Sellers Draws Applause at White Citizen Parley.” The story said he “stole the show.”

  Daddy King, arriving on January 8 to preach at Dexter, found his son under nearly unbearable pressure. The boycott had lasted a month. Transportation chairman Rufus Lewis had dragooned nearly every Negro-owned vehicle into the car pool—between 275 and 350 a day—and there were no replacements for those who wanted to drop out. The MIA treasury was exhausted, which meant that Lewis relied increasingly on goodwill, and the inspiration of the mass meetings was wearing down under the hardships of another day’s resistance. Accordingly, the day after Daddy King’s sermon, the MIA leaders sued for peace. They asked for a fourth negotiating session, this time with Sellers and the two other city commissioners. Fred Gray, not King, presented a new MIA plan. This was a conciliatory gesture in itself, and Gray’s legal presentation made it clear that the MIA was bending to the city’s technical view of the seating problem. He announced that the MIA was now willing to make a major concession: Negroes would move voluntarily to fill seats that became vacant toward the back of the bus, and white passengers would move forward to fill vacancies toward the front. This meant that under busy conditions the passengers would be resegregating themselves continuously, and, as a practical matter, the Negroes would be doing nearly all the moving. On a full bus, many Negro riders would never be able to relax in their seats. They would be obliged to keep looking to the rear to see if they had to move. But at least they would not have to stand up over empty seats in the white reserved section, nor would they have to vacate seats on the order of bus drivers who anticipated the arrival of whites.

  The city commissioners rejected the new offer categorically. There were remote technical objections, such as what would happen if disagreement arose among the passengers as to which of them needed to move, but the more powerful objections were political and psychological. Under the new proposal, white passengers would be obliged to move forward to fill vacant seats to make room for Negroes standing in the back. This was unheard of—the law had never required whites to move for Negroes. The commissioners held fast to the whites-only section as a requirement of the segregation laws. Their position was hardening, the more so because they saw the MIA weakening.

  At the next MIA executive board meeting, the members admitted gloomily that they had misconstrued the nature of the contest. It was no longer—if indeed it ever had been—a question of finding the proper wording for the best possible compromise. According to the official minutes of the meeting, the board agreed that the negotiations had broken down into a siege, testing “which side can hold out the longer time, or wear the other down.” This new strategic situation boded ill for the MIA. It could hold fast until forced to surrender, or it could try to reverse its retreats by taking a wild gamble to offset the steady erosion of strength. Ironically, the Montgomery Negroes faced a strategic disadvantage not unlike that of the Confederates in 1862, when daring counterstrokes made Southern legends of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.

  This kind of historical twist was just the thing to appeal to Grover Hall, Jr., the editor of the Montgomery Advertiser. Hall was anything but a conventional white citizen of the town. Scorning piety and most social orthodoxy, he cultivated his own eccentricity to the point of decorating his apartment with mynah birds and large stands of camellias. Hall was a dandy. He seemed to enjoy the stories that circulated of his elegant bachelorhood—of his wry humor and his scotch and his music collection, and the effects of the combination upon a succession of fine young women who possessed just a touch of wildness. Hall cherished the image of himself as a self-taught historian and philosophe, who had inherited the editorship despite his lack of college training. His idol was H. L. Mencken, notwithstanding Mencken’s celebrated satires on the South as a land filled with pretentious buffoons. In fact, Hall took a rather perverse pleasure in tweaking his fellow Southerners with Mencken-like observations on their peculiarities. When Clyde Sellers made his Hollywood entrance at the City Auditorium, Hall wrote derisively that “in effect, the Montgomery police force is now an arm of the White Citizens Council.”

  In January, concluding reluctantly that the boycott had endured long enough to require special journalistic attention, Hall summoned a young reporter named Tom Johnson to his office for an assignment: find out “who is behind the MIA.” Perhaps the Negroes would talk with him. Johnson received the challenge with trepidation. Never before had the Advertiser approached Negro life as a subject for serious journalism. As the paper had no reliable news sources among Montgomery’s Negroes, Johnson talked first with the police and with every knowledgeable white leader in town. The most common opinion he found was that the NAACP was secretly directing the boycott. This was everywhere, but it was vague. Probing further, Johnson found an intriguing current of suspicion pointing toward a man who worked ceaselessly for the boycott but professed to have little to do with its direction. The suspect’s humility, it was thought, might be the perfect disguise. After discussing his preliminary findings with Hall, Johnson wrote the first article of his boycott series about Reverend Graetz, who, as a white man, seemed uniquely qualified for the role of hidden mastermind. With this thesis, Hall and Johnson bravely took their readers across the racial barrier.

  Johnson’s story, “The Mechanics of the Bus Boycott,” appeared on January 10 and gave white citizens their first specific news about the inner workings of the MIA—its budget (nearly $7,000 spent so far), the number of cars in the car pool (up to 350 daily), and the ideas of the leadership. Johnson wove these facts into a profile of Graetz, but he did not write explicitly that Graetz was the “brains behind the boycott.” He had come to disbelieve the rumors himself, partly because he found Graetz to be almost suicidally ingenuous. Unfazed by interrogation, Graetz volunteered stories animated by a childlike faith and utter disregard of political reality. He recalled, for instance, that he had once been introduced to the NAACP’s Walter White, and that White had complimented young white people for doing so much to advance the NAACP cause. “Naturally, I just beamed,” Graetz told Johnson, “because that really fit me.” Such statements floored Johnson (who regarded White as an “incendiary”), convincing him beyond doubt that Graetz was incapable of the deviousness required to run the boycott covertly.

  The next Saturday morning, Johnson kept his appointment at the Dexter Avenue pastor’s office, where King was finishing work on his sermon for the next day, “How to Believe in a Good God in the Face of Glaring Evil.” It was the day before King’s twenty-seventh birthday. Johnson, who was about King’s age, was among the first of many reporters who found that King looked and acted much older than his years. He spoke slowly and formally, seeming to protect himself with a great wall of dignity. Johnson returned to the Advertiser offices with a notebook full of information, including the full title of the dissertation on Tillich and Wieman. He told Hall that he was “relatively unimpressed.” For the editor’s benefit, he read notes of King’s quotations on Tillich and Kant, even Nietszche, which Johnson interpreted as evidence of King’s eagerness to use philosophical patter to impress people. May
be it worked on the Montgomery Negroes, he conceded, because Johnson had seen some of the oldest Negro ministers in town treat King with extraordinary respect, bordering on sycophancy. King spoke with authority on the boycott and might well be the leader. Unlike Graetz, he seemed to have the capacity for tactical maneuver. King had told Johnson that although as MIA leader he was seeking concessions within segregation, he was personally for “immediate integration” because as a minister of the gospel he believed segregation to be evil. This candor supported what Montgomery whites had been saying all along—that the radical Negro leaders were not really for segregation, that they were lying.

  Johnson wrote up many of the pertinent facts of King’s history, including the exact number of years that grandfather A. D. Williams had been pastor of Ebenezer, and went so far as to search out Will Durant’s Story of Philosophy to give his readers a definition of “dialectics,” about which King talked so much. The publication in the Advertiser of a full-scale portrait of a Negro was a historic event in itself. And while hostile readers could draw from it inferences that King was uppity and devious, as Johnson himself believed, the tone of the article was generally neutral. Hall wanted it straight. If angry whites objected, Hall would tell them that the city fathers had bollixed things up in pretending to know everything about the local Negroes. Perhaps it was time to learn something about those inciting this rebellion. In the article, Johnson committed himself to only one judgment about King, in the headline: “The Rev. King Is Boycott Boss.” Then he hedged. “There seems to be uncertainty in the minds of the white community of Montgomery over the identity of the director of the bus boycott,” he began. “Who is the acknowledged boycott leader? He seems to be the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.”