Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  The Advertiser published Johnson’s article on January 19, just in time for it to be stirred into the cycles of frustration and mistrust that were rising in Montgomery. Ignorance and fear in various combinations gave rise to the possibility of a blind man’s brawl. That same week, Police Commissioner Sellers told the Jaycees that the boycott was continuing only because white citizens were “sitting by.” Ninety percent of the Negroes wanted to ride the buses, he declared, but were intimidated by goon squads under the command of the Negro elite, which had never ridden the buses and never would. The Sellers speech made the front page. In combination with the Johnson article, it inspired a rumor campaign directed personally against King. He was an outsider, whites said to each other and to Negroes they knew. He had never even been on a bus in Montgomery. He was a highfalutin preacher who was mainly interested in getting his name in the newspaper. Whites repeated among themselves what became the standard joke, purporting to quote one of the poor foot soldiers of the boycott: “Those Negroes are making things awful tough on us niggers.”

  Myths circulating between and within the races reinforced one another to produce bizarre, unintended effects. Some of the white women who needed the services of their maids badly enough to drive them to and from Rufus Lewis’ car-pool pickup spots seized upon the commissioner’s story, saying that they transported the maids only to protect them from the goon squads—not, of course, to support the boycott. Some Negroes, frightened by the rising white anger against the boycott, rallied to the conservative NAACP idea of bringing the case to court, even though that meant the radical step of challenging segregation, while others rallied more strongly to the boycott precisely to avoid the tinderbox of the NAACP. The city commissioners, meanwhile, focused their attention on the fact that practically none of the former bus riders would tell a white person that they thought the boycott was a good idea. Ordinary Negro folk would tell even known MIA supporters like the Durrs that their regular bus had “broken down” that day, or that they were walking for medical reasons, or, in a pinch, that they “just stays off the buses and leaves that boycott alone.” The commissioners, blinkered by myth and deception, devised a brazen political gamble to put the Negroes back on the buses.

  On Saturday night, January 21, a reporter named Carl Rowan saw an item moving on the AP wire in Minneapolis: the Sunday Advertiser would break the news that the Negroes had agreed to end the boycott. All Negroes would return to the buses Monday morning, said the story, which spelled out settlement terms including more courtesy from the bus drivers, special “all-Negro” buses during rush hours, and preservation of the existing seating arrangements on normal bus runs. Rowan already had been to Montgomery to cover the boycott. Finding it difficult to believe that the MIA leaders would accept such a minimal settlement, he called King in Montgomery to find out whether the story was true.

  Listening to Rowan read the AP ticker, King felt the bottom fall out of his composure. He admitted that he knew nothing of such a deal. Privately, he feared that some of his MIA colleagues might have betrayed him behind his back. It was possible, King knew, for rivals to plot privately with the white people, especially because he was so exposed as a young outsider. Now that there was scant hope of negotiating an honorable settlement or of holding out long enough to force one, he was the natural scapegoat for almost certain humiliation. Compressed tensions could have caused a hemorrhage within the MIA leadership—but who? Rowan told him that the Advertiser story identified no one on the Negro delegation, saying only that it included “three prominent Negro ministers.” King asked Rowan to call Commissioner Sellers to find out if the story was really true and, if possible, to learn the names of the ministers.

  Rowan agreed. King hung up and waited. The timing of the story was clever. It would spring upon Montgomery just in time to cause mass confusion in the Negro churches at Sunday morning services. Many of the boycotters would be angry with the meager terms, while others would be happy that the ordeal was over and proud that they had given the white folks a run for their money. The fragile psychology of the boycott would be broken. And the MIA leaders would face the impossible choice of endorsing the settlement or admitting that it was not theirs.

  Rowan called back. Sellers had confirmed the story, he reported, but had refused to name the three ministers on grounds of confidentiality. The most Rowan could pry out of Sellers was their church affiliations: one was a Baptist, one a Presbyterian, and the third the pastor of a Holiness church. King’s mind pounced on these clues. A Holiness church? Was Rowan sure? There was no such thing as a “prominent” Holiness minister among Montgomery Negroes—nor were there any Holiness preachers among the MIA leadership. A crack of hope appeared to King. With Rowan’s clues, he thought he might find out who the conspirators were, if they existed. The Baptist preacher could be any one of a multitude, but there were very few Negro Presbyterians to investigate.

  Fortified by such hope, King placed calls to the MIA leadership. His tone and his words put this crisis so far above all the other ones attendant to the 20,000 daily rides of the car pool that the essential preachers were all sitting in his living room within half an hour. King told them the shocking news of the story that would be in the paper the next morning. The immediate response of his colleagues brought great relief to King. No one rallied to the settlement as inevitable. They all denounced it. Everyone was alarmed, but no one wanted to give in to the destructive potential of the story without a fight. In short, they reacted as King himself had reacted, which confirmed his belief that the conspirators were not among them.

  The first thing to do was to identify the three preachers in league with the commissioners. They learned all three names before midnight, and the results were as favorable as the King group could have wished. The three preachers who had met with the city commissioners were neither MIA members nor influential citizens. They were country preachers, who said Mayor Gayle had called them to city hall to discuss unspecified “insurance matters” and then handed them a copy of the bus settlement when they got there. That was it. The audacity of the city commissioners registered: they were engineering a naked hoax on the calculation that it would dissolve the boycott instantly or, failing that, at least divide the Negroes so that the boycott could never last. The ministers in King’s home faced the calamitous prospect that the ruse might work. The commissioners had surprise and authority working for them, and the Negroes lacked a means of mass communication that could compete with the Advertiser.

  They decided to wake up every single Negro minister in Montgomery, plus Graetz, in the hope that all of them would from their pulpits denounce the Advertiser story as a fake. Half the ministers went back to the telephones for this task, while King went off into the night with a group that admitted knowing the locations of the country “dives.” This was Saturday night. By virtue of Rowan’s warning, they had a chance to catch large numbers of their fellow citizens at the only traditional Negro meeting places other than the churches. A few of them, such as Rufus Lewis’ Citizens Club, approached the atmosphere of a ballroom, but the masses gathered at unmarked spots far out in the country, where people of King’s dress and demeanor were never seen. There the laborers, farmers, and maids, often still in their work boots and dirty uniforms, came to lose themselves in loud music and strong drink and hugging and sweaty dancing. King and his coterie of prim preachers must have made quite a sight as they shouldered their way into the flesh and the noise, got the music to stop as it did only for police raids and major fights, cleared their throats, and finally introduced themselves to say that the white people were trying to call off the boycott with a trick, that the boycott was still on no matter what the Advertiser said in the morning, and that they should tell everybody that Reverend King and the others said in person to stay off the buses and come to the mass meeting Monday night. Then, after a few cheers and some grunts, and perhaps a question or two, the preachers moved out across the back roads to the next juke joint.

  On Monday morning, the
day after the Advertiser announced that the boycott had been settled, empty buses rolled through the streets once again. The bus company manager announced tersely that there was “no noticeable increase on the Negro routes.” The city commissioners were of no mind to accept stark physical realities that contradicted their public assurances of the previous day. Cornered, faced with public ridicule, they fought back in all directions at once. Mayor Gayle immediately issued what Joe Azbell, on the next day’s front page, called a “dynamic statement.” He first blamed the collapse of the weekend agreement on the duplicity of the three Negro ministers he said had approved it. The commissioners had tried “with sincerity and honesty to end the boycott,” but now it was “time to be frank.” The government had “pussyfooted around long enough.” The Negroes believed they had “the white people hemmed up in a corner,” said the mayor, but the whites “have no concern” and “do not care” and “are not alarmed” about Negro bus riders. “It is not that important to whites that the Negroes ride the buses,” he repeated. “When and if the Negro people desire to end the boycott, my door is open to them. But until they are ready to end it, there will be no more discussions.”

  Hard upon this statement came the announcement from city hall that Commissioner Frank Parks and Gayle were following Sellers into the ranks of the White Citizens Council, making it unanimous. The next day, Mayor Gayle was back on the front page urging the white women of the city to stop helping their servants. “The Negroes are laughing at white people behind their backs,” he said. “They think it’s very funny and amusing that whites who are opposed to the Negro boycott will act as chauffeurs to Negroes who are boycotting the buses.” Commissioner Sellers announced at the same time that he was instructing the Montgomery police to toughen up on Negroes standing around on the streets waiting for rides. Commissioner Parks announced that dozens of businessmen had volunteered to lay off employees who supported the boycott. All three commissioners said they were surprised by the outpouring of public support for their new hard line. Mayor Gayle held up a thick stack of congratulatory telegrams. Sellers said people had walked into his office volunteering to help the police. The city hall switchboard operator said she was swamped with calls praising the mayor, and Joe Azbell found excited white people all over town. “I hope the Negroes walk until they get bunions and blisters,” one man told him.

  Among MIA leaders, gratification over the success of the weekend rescue mission was restrained severely by fear. It was one thing to defy the city authorities for eight weeks, and still another to humiliate them and call them outright liars from every pulpit in town. A grim King offered his resignation to the MIA board that same Monday. Now there was no chance at all of a negotiated settlement with him as the MIA leader, but his offer lay on the table. No one would pick it up, as the other prospective leaders knew that to change was to split, and to split inevitably was to lose. Rev. S. S. Seay, one of the most respected of the senior ministers, was moved to call King back to duty in the language of the Messiah. “You are young and well-trained in the spirit,” he told King. “I will drink my portion of this cup, but you can drink of it deeper.”

  The executive board gave King a unanimous vote of confidence. Then it turned to the more difficult task of devising a new strategy. One faint hope was that the city would allow a group headed by Rufus Lewis to operate a Negro-owned bus line, which would take the pressure off the car pool. The city would almost certainly deny Lewis’ application for a franchise, however, lest it be accused of donating the economic benefits of segregation to the Negroes. Assuming that the Lewis plan would fail, the board members discussed their ultimate weapon—a federal lawsuit against bus segregation. Fred Gray, knowing that white Alabama would react to such a step as the social equivalent of atomic warfare, had been quietly seeking advice on the possibility since the first week of the boycott, when he wrote to NAACP lawyers in New York. Also, he had talked extensively with Clifford Durr and with several of the more experienced Negro lawyers in the state. All agreed that the federal suit offered the best hope of a court-ordered solution, certainly much better than the Rosa Parks appeal, which was bogged down in the state courts. Durr warned Gray to be sure of his plaintiffs, saying that if the white authorities could bring enough pressure to make a plaintiff back out of a suit, they could then bring criminal prosecution against Gray himself on the obscure charge of “barratry,” or false legal representation. Durr knew of a Negro lawyer who had been driven from the state by such means.

  A thousand pitfalls lay in the path of the federal suit, some technical and others political. Gray reported to the board that he was having trouble locating potential clients—people who had been mistreated on the buses and were willing to stand firm as plaintiffs. He had been unable to find a single Negro male in Montgomery willing and able to be a suitable plaintiff. But he had found several women, including Claudette Colvin and her mother. He told the board that he could be ready to file a case in a matter of days. Legally, the case appeared to be sound, but it would take many months, if not years, to resolve. This presented the MIA leaders with unpleasant choices. If they called off the boycott pending the outcome of the legal proceedings, they might as well not have had the boycott in the first place. If they continued it, they would face for the first time the likelihood of a more or less permanent car pool, at a time when strain was putting new cracks in the operation every day. Under pressure, the MIA board members were second-guessing themselves even as they voted to direct Fred Gray and the strategy committee to prepare final recommendations on the lawsuit by the next week. There was no celebration. The white people across town were doing the celebrating that Monday. By the peculiar jujitsu of the boycott, the white people were excited after their weekend fiasco, while the Negroes were bemoaning the implications of their successful rescue mission. Every action seemed dwarfed by reaction in the next round. It had been so since the bus driver’s first words to Rosa Parks.

  From the next day forward, Montgomery policemen stopped car-pool drivers wherever they went—questioning them, checking their headlights and windshield wipers, writing traffic tickets for minute and often imaginary violations of the law. Car-pool drivers crept along the road and gave exaggerated turn signals, like novices in driving school. Policemen ticketed them anyway. Jo Ann Robinson, known as a stickler in everything from driving to diction, would get no less than seventeen tickets in the next couple of months—some for going too fast, others for going too slow. Traffic fines mounted, diverting into the city treasury money that might have gone into the MIA car-pool fund. Drivers feared that their insurance would be canceled or their licenses suspended. Backbiting increased, with some people saying that Rufus Lewis was too dictatorial to run the car pool and others saying that he sympathized too readily with the drivers as opposed to the riders.

  On Thursday afternoon, January 26, King finished his day at the Dexter church office and started home with his secretary and Bob Williams, his friend from Morehouse. King was driving. When he stopped to pick up a load of passengers at one of the downtown car-pool stops, two motorcycle policemen pulled up behind him. All the passengers in King’s car tried to behave normally, but three blocks down the street the motorcycles were still close behind. Williams told King to creep along; maybe they would go away. Nothing happened during the drive to the next pickup station, but when the passengers started to leave the car, one of the motorcycle policemen pulled up next to the driver’s window and said, “Get out, King. You’re under arrest for speeding thirty miles an hour in a twenty-five-mile zone.”

  Stunned, King did not protest. Telling Williams to notify Coretta, he stepped out of the car and soon found himself in the back of a radio-summoned police cruiser, whispering to himself that everything would be all right. King said nothing to the policemen, even when he realized that the cruiser was heading away from downtown. Panic seized him. Why weren’t they going to the jail? The farther they went, past strange neighborhoods toward the country, the more King gave in to visions of
nooses and lynch mobs. When the cruiser turned a corner on a dark street and headed across a bridge, his mind locked onto a single fear of the river. He was trembling so badly that it took him some time to absorb the meaning of the garish neon sign ahead, “Montgomery City Jail.” He felt a tumbling rush of emotions—first joy that he was not going to be killed by a mob, then embarrassment that he had never even known where the city jail was and had assumed it was downtown, then guilt that he had blocked the jail out of his mind so thoroughly even when some of the boycotters were going there, then a colder though less piercing fear again as he realized he was going there, too. This last fear swelled up inside him in the corridor as he smelled the foul cell long before he got there, and when the jailer said, “All right, get on in there with all the others,” he stood numb. King heard the iron door clang shut for the first time on him and a lifetime of distinctions.

  The moment did not last forever, though, and before he finished staring at the wood-slat bunks and the toilet in the corner, the other prisoners recognized his face. Then King himself recognized a schoolteacher from the bus boycott. The teacher joined the drunks and common criminals who rushed up to King wanting to hear his story. Jail was not the end of the world to them, of course, and every new prisoner had a story. Before King could finish his, one of the prisoners interrupted to ask his help in getting out. Another did the same, and then others, until King finally shouted out, “Fellows, before I can assist in getting any of you out, I’ve got to get my own self out.” At this, the entire cell erupted in laughter. King was such a mixture of the exalted and the common—the formal “assist” of the educated leader and the plaintive “own self” of all prisoners. For him, the shock of his first arrest was already over.