Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  Abernathy was the first to arrive at the jail after Williams and Coretta spread the alarm. His frantic urgency to get King out ran smack into the bureaucracy of the constabulary, and after finally accepting the fact that it was too complicated and too late in the evening to get King out on a property bond, Abernathy raced off to scrounge up enough currency to make a cash bond. Leaving, he passed carloads of Dexter members and MIA supporters who were converging on the jail. On the inside, King thought he was being bailed out when the jailer came after him. So did the prisoners, one of whom shouted, “Don’t forget us when you get out.” King shouted back that he wouldn’t, but soon found himself rolling his fingers across an inkpad. Fingerprinted, hopes dashed, he was soon back in the cell. By the time the jailer came for him again, he had already learned to expect nothing. He held himself in check even when he began to realize that now it was the jailer, not he, who was frightened—a large crowd of Negroes had practically surrounded the building. The jailer hurried King out the front door on his own recognizance, and King, who had entered the jail in the grip of terror a couple of hours earlier, walked out to address a huge throng of well-wishers. It was some time later, at that night’s mass meeting, before Abernathy caught up with the switches and reversals that rendered his cash unnecessary.

  Word of King’s arrest radiated through all of Negro Montgomery, stimulating rumors, horror stories, and vows of retribution. A restive crowd gathered outside the packed mass meeting. Inside, King and the other MIA leaders feared that the latecomers who could not squeeze into the meeting might do something violent. Besides, they wanted to share King’s story and the joyous unity of the mass meeting with everyone possible. So the leaders took the unprecedented step of sending criers outside to announce that there would be a second mass meeting at another church immediately after the present one. With this news, the outside crowd moved off, mostly on foot, to the second church, which they filled, then to a third one.

  This phenomenon repeated itself that night until there had been no fewer than seven mass meetings. Many people attended more than one of them. No one could believe it. In a floating conversation among several of King’s friends and peers, mostly Dexter members, it was decided that it was too dangerous to let King drive anymore. To protect him, they would form themselves into a corps of drivers and bodyguards. It was agreed that they must override any objections from King and start that very night. Richmond Smiley went off to fetch his little .25-caliber Baretta. Bob Williams, another of those who would be a driver for the next few years, was so moved by the night’s events that he went back to his studio and worked until morning, arranging what would become his first published choral work, “Lord, I Just Can’t Turn Back.” His choir at Alabama State performed the composition that week.

  King woke up the next morning to a fresh day of pressure. For him, time was fluctuating too rapidly between moments of deep fear and those of high inspiration. Late the next night, his mind was turning over as he lay in bed. Coretta had fallen asleep. The phone rang again. “Listen, nigger,” said the caller, “we’ve taken all we want from you. Before next week you’ll be sorry you ever came to Montgomery.” King hung up on the angry voice. Hope of sleep receded further. He paced the floor awhile before giving in completely to wakefulness, which drove him to the kitchen to make a pot of coffee. Some of the Negro callers were just curious about his arrest, while others wanted to complain about the car pool. He never knew what to expect. The sensations of the incoming images pressed in upon him—the hatred of the whites, the burdened, offended rectitude of the middle-class Negroes, the raw courage or neediness of the plain folk. He associated the Negro voices with the sea of enraptured black faces he had seen from the pulpit at mass meetings. The pressure of the Negro callers worked against this image, as did the white callers against his memories of Crozer. There was no idea nor imaginable heart large enough to satisfy all of them, or to contain them. The limitless potential of a young King free to think anything, and therefore to be anything, was constricted by realities that paralyzed and defined him. King buried his face in his hands at the kitchen table. He admitted to himself that he was afraid, that he had nothing left, that the people would falter if they looked to him for strength. Then he said as much out loud. He spoke the name of no deity, but his doubts spilled out as a prayer, ending, “I’ve come to the point where I can’t face it alone.” As he spoke these words, the fears suddenly began to melt away. He became intensely aware of what he called an “inner voice” telling him to do what he thought was right. Such simplicity worked miracles, bringing a shudder of relief and the courage to face anything. It was for King the first transcendent religious experience of his life. The moment lacked the splendor of a vision or of a voice speaking out loud, as Vernon Johns said they did, but such differences could be ascribed to rhetorical license. For King, the moment awakened and confirmed his belief that the essence of religion was not a grand metaphysical idea but something personal, grounded in experience—something that opened up mysteriously beyond the predicaments of human beings in their frailest and noblest moments.

  The next day, a Saturday, King worked until early evening at the MIA and at the Dexter office. Among other chores, he wrote a letter to thank Roy Wilkins for the NAACP’s “fine contribution” to the MIA, which had arrived not long after King publicly criticized the NAACP for scorning the boycott. Appropriately to their long future together, this first exchange between King and the famous civil rights leader, whom he addressed as “Mr. Wilkins,” was concerned with money, tinged slightly with suspicion, and smothered with politeness. Among the day’s crises, the one commanding the most attention was a rumor that the police were going to raid the MIA offices at Rufus Lewis’ Citizens Club. King worked the phones to find an alternate site, which was not easy to do given the scarcity of centrally located, Negro-owned real estate in Montgomery. Intelligence reports of an imminent raid came so thickly that King and the other MIA leaders spirited away the MIA records that night in the trunks of the automobiles of trustworthy Citizens Club patrons. The next morning, they transferred them stealthily to the basement of the First Baptist Church while Abernathy was conducting the morning service upstairs. Some weeks later, E. D. Nixon secured permanent space for MIA headquarters in a building owned by the all-Negro Bricklayers Union.

  At the Monday executive board meeting, members voted to proceed with the federal suit against bus segregation in Montgomery. They all knew it was a fateful step. For reasons of tactical consistency, they resolved to tell both the city fathers and their own followers that the boycott would continue as a separate matter. If the city agreed to the MIA’s current segregation reform proposal, Negroes would return to the buses on those terms pending the outcome of the lawsuit. If the city tried to combine the two matters, offering to modify segregation on the buses if the MIA would drop the lawsuit, the MIA would consider such offers as they came. Frankly, King and his colleagues expected no such offers, anticipating correctly that their NAACP-style lawsuit would bring down nothing but increased hostility from the city. Against the punishment ahead, the MIA leaders offered the vision of a great victory over all bus segregation—no more technical hypotheticals about who might have to move where on the bus under what conditions. Freedom would be so simple. People could sit anywhere there was a seat.

  King tried to explain this at the mass meeting that night in Abernathy’s church, which was packed with a crowd of two thousand people. He tried to rally everyone’s courage behind the lawsuit decision and the boycott, pulling the distant hopes nearer while dispelling the fears close by. It was not one of his best speeches. After he finished, old Mother Pollard got up and made her way slowly to the front of the church. This was not unheard of. Since being enshrined as walking heroes of the boycott, some of the more outspoken old people were moved to speak from the floor at the mass meetings. Their folk wisdom and their tales of daily life inside the homes of powerful white people—how the boss lady had slipped them five dollars for the boycot
t with a warning not to tell the boss man, and later that same day the boss man had slipped them another five with a warning not to tell the boss lady—had become a special treat at the mass meetings, bringing both entertainment and inspiration.

  Mother Pollard drew a hush of recognition and the automatic right to speak. “Come here, son,” she said to King, and King walked over to receive a public, motherly embrace. “Something is wrong with you,” said Pollard. “You didn’t talk strong tonight.”

  “Oh, no, Mother Pollard,” King replied. “Nothing is wrong. I am feeling as fine as ever.”

  “Now you can’t fool me,” she said. “I knows something is wrong. Is it that we ain’t doing things to please you? Or is it that the white folks is bothering you?”

  Pollard looked right through a smiling but flustered King. Before he could say anything, she moved her face close to his and said loudly, “I done told you we is with you all the way. But even if we ain’t with you, God’s gonna take care of you.” With that, Mother Pollard inched her way back toward her seat, as the crowd roared and King’s eyes filled with tears. Later, King said that with her consoling words fearlessness had come over him in the form of raw energy.

  He first noticed that something was wrong a few minutes later when a messenger slipped in to Abernathy, who rushed down into the basement and then returned, looking worried. King was standing in the front of the church as the collection plate was being passed. He saw Abernathy whispering furtively with other MIA preachers. More messengers came and were dispatched. Perhaps the MIA records had been seized. The organ played and King watched calmly. A couple of the messengers seemed to start toward him and then to hesitate and retreat. Finally, one of the ushers waved King to the side of the platform to give him a message, but S. S. Seay stepped between them, shaking his head in the negative. This caused King to wave Abernathy over to him. “What’s wrong?” he whispered.

  Abernathy and Seay looked at each other, stalling. “Your house has been bombed,” said Abernathy.

  “Are Coretta and the baby all right?”

  “We are checking on that now,” said a miserable Abernathy, who had wanted to have the answer before telling King.

  In shock, King remained calm, coasting almost automatically on the emotional overload of the past few days. Nodding to Abernathy and Seay, he walked back to the center of the church, told the crowd what had happened, told them he had to leave and that they should all go home quietly and peacefully, and then, leaving a few shrieks and a thousand gasps behind, walked swiftly out a side door of the church.

  Near his house, King pushed his way through a barrage of ominous sights and sounds. Little boys dashed around carrying pop bottles broken in half for a fight. Negro men brandished guns and knives, and some confronted the barricade of white policemen shouting for them to disperse. One berserk man, struggling to break the grasp of a policeman, challenged whites to shoot it out with .38s. Shouts of anger and recognition competed with sirens and the background noise of earnest Negro women singing “My Country ’Tis of Thee.” Flanked by MIA leaders, King walked across the broken glass on his front porch and into the living room, which was jammed with Dexter members. Among them was an isolated group of first-time visitors to the King home, including several white policemen, reporter Joe Azbell, Mayor Gayle, Commissioner Sellers, and the fire chief. King brushed by them and into a back room, where a group surrounding Coretta and little Yoki, now ten weeks old, parted to make way for him. King hugged Coretta, and gave thanks that they were all right. Then he assumed the remote calm of a commander. There was much to do. Bombers were loose, and a riot was threatening to erupt outside. He leaned forward and whispered, “Why don’t you get dressed, darling?” to Coretta, who was still in her robe.

  King moved back into the front room to receive a crime scene report from Sellers and the mayor, both of whom assured him that they condemned the bombing and would do everything in their power to punish the bombers. “Regrets are fine, Mr. Sellers,” an authoritative voice called out from behind King’s shoulder. “But you created the atmosphere for this bombing with your ‘get tough’ policy. You’ve got to face that responsibility.” It was C. T. Smiley, King’s board chairman at Dexter and the older brother of the driver with the Baretta. More important to every Negro in the room, Smiley, as principal of Booker T. Washington High School, was utterly dependent on the city commissioners for his continued livelihood.

  Sellers and Gayle said nothing. Joe Azbell and a couple of other white reporters wanted to leave the house to file their stories. They worked as stringers for national publications, and they knew this bomb story would sell. But they could not get out of the house, which was surrounded by angry, armed Negroes. A policeman rushed in huffing and said that some people in the crowd were saying they wouldn’t leave without assurance from King that everything was all right.

  King walked out onto the front porch. Holding up his hand for silence, he tried to still the anger by speaking with an exaggerated peacefulness in his voice. Everything was all right, he said. “Don’t get panicky. Don’t do anything panicky. Don’t get your weapons. If you have weapons, take them home. He who lives by the sword will perish by the sword. Remember that is what Jesus said. We are not advocating violence. We want to love our enemies. I want you to love our enemies. Be good to them. This is what we must live by. We must meet hate with love.” By then the crowd of several hundred people had quieted to silence, and feeling welled up in King to an oration. “I did not start this boycott,” he said. “I was asked by you to serve as your spokesman. I want it to be known the length and breadth of this land that if I am stopped, this movement will not stop. If I am stopped, our work will not stop. For what we are doing is right. What we are doing is just. And God is with us.”

  King stepped back to a chorus of “Amens,” but as soon as Sellers stepped forward to speak, the mood vanished as suddenly as it had arrived. The mob booed him. When policemen tried to shout them down, they booed even louder.

  King raised his hand again. “Remember what I just said,” he cried. “Hear the Commissioner.”

  Sellers began anew, promising full police protection for the King family. Mayor Gayle seconded him and announced that the city would pay a $500 reward for information leading to the arrest of the bombers. When they finished, King urged the crowd to disperse. “Go home and sleep calm,” he said. “Go home and don’t worry. Be calm as I and my family are. We are not hurt. I am all right and my wife is all right.”

  “Show her to us!” cried a voice in the crowd, and Coretta came outside to stand with him. The crowd began to trickle away, followed by the reporters and white officials. Everyone took with them yarns that would be repeated throughout the city the next day, including the white policeman who said he would sure enough be dead if it hadn’t been for that nigger preacher. Many of the Negroes would liken the sight of King with his hand raised to the famous poses of Gandhi or to Jesus calming the waters of the troubled sea. And the story of C. T. Smiley raced from mouth to mouth: imagine a Negro school principal telling off the police commissioner like that in front of everybody. For many, this was the most shocking event of the long night.

  King took his rattled family to the Brooks home—where he had spent his first night in Montgomery two years earlier after eating the prophet’s dinner with Vernon Johns. Long before dawn, both Daddy King and Coretta’s father Obadiah Scott showed up there separately, each pounding on the door, scaring the sleepers inside. The two fathers had come to take their children away from bombings. Daddy King in particular was all thunder. “Well, M.L.,” he said, “you just come on back to Atlanta.” King, stalling, said that the bomb had not done much damage and that he had to think of the important principles at stake there in Montgomery. Daddy King cut him off. “It’s better to be a live dog than a dead lion,” he said. They argued for several hours, both afraid, with Daddy King stressing that the movement had gotten out of hand, that the danger was all out of proportion to Rosa Parks, and his son sayi
ng yes, it was bigger than bus seats now. Meanwhile, Coretta resisted her own father’s command to go home with him. After the fathers retreated, King took his wife aside and emotionally thanked her for being such a soldier. She was deeply moved to hear that King, with all his strength, needed her.

  Fred Gray filed the papers in federal court the next day, February 1, just as President Eisenhower asked Congress to raise the price of first-class postage stamps by a penny, to four cents. Both actions made the front pages of newspapers across the country, as had the King bombing two days earlier. Ike’s news was bigger news, of course, but the boycott was rising to consciousness outside Montgomery.

  February dawned cold and dangerous. The night of February 1, a bomb exploded in E. D. Nixon’s yard, drawing another angry crowd. Three days later, the Advertiser reported that one of Gray’s clients said she “was surprised” to see herself listed as a plaintiff, and that she had told Mayor Gayle, “You know I don’t want nothing to do with that mess.” Jeanatta Reese, who worked as a maid for one of the mayor’s relatives, broke down under the pressure as visitors of both races trampled a path to her door, urging her to stick to the contrary assurances she had given them. The police car that had been parked outside King’s house since the bombing disappeared and then reappeared for continuous station outside the ex-plaintiff’s house. MIA boycotters took this as a telltale sign that the woman was in great fear, which under the circumstances meant that she was throwing in with the whites, who promptly decided that she was more deserving of police protection than was King. Fred Gray was in trouble, as Durr had warned.