Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  Optimism broke out like an epidemic. Every hardship, every funeral of a faithful walker who had died, became grist for inspiration to keep walking another six months if necessary. Everybody knew that the first six months had been the hard ones. They were cresting. The MIA was rich. It was buying and operating its own fleet of more than a dozen new station wagons, sparing much of the wear on the cars of private volunteers. At the time of the court victory, the MIA had stowed away deposits totaling more than $120,000 in banks scattered from New York to Oklahoma—outside Alabama and therefore safe from legal raids by Attorney General Patterson. King decided that the MIA was secure enough for him to take a vacation. With Coretta and the Abernathys, he vanished by car toward the coast of California, planning to make his way to San Francisco for the NAACP convention.

  Shortly after they left, MIA secretary Uriah J. Fields held a press conference in Montgomery to charge that the boycott leadership was riddled with corruption. It involved thousands of dollars in misappropriated funds, he said, and leaders who had become “too egotistical and interested in perpetuating themselves.” “I can no longer identify myself with a movement in which the many are exploited by the few,” Fields declared. His public resignation created the most sensational news since the mass arrests. Fields was an outspoken, unconventional, bootstrap leader, about King’s age. He had worn a goatee since his student days at Alabama State, which marked him as an outsider among the more image-conscious leaders. Campaigning as a rebel, Fields had defeated in a student election the heavily favored fraternity candidate, who was now a protégé of King’s at Dexter Avenue. Fields believed that on their records as activists he, and not King, should have been elected MIA president, and he openly begrudged Abernathy his growing role as second in authority. It galled him that King was in demand for speaking engagements all over the country, whereas he had landed only one out-of-town appearance in Pittsburgh.

  By timing his gambit to coincide with the absence of King and Abernathy, Fields hoped other disgruntled leaders would rally to demand a restructuring of the executive board. However, he grossly underestimated the bond between King and the great masses of Montgomery’s boycotters. Ordinary people called Fields a traitor, and his own church voted without dissent to strip him of the pastorate. By the time King landed in Montgomery, having aborted his California vacation to face the insurrection at home, Fields already was so thoroughly discredited that King’s task was more to protect than to prosecute him. At a mass meeting, King made a long speech denying the charges but calling on the MIA membership to forgive Fields as a prodigal son. Defending his leadership was easy for King—too easy, in a sense, because he did not have to address the elements of truth in Fields’s charges. Thousands of dollars had in fact been misappropriated out of the MIA treasury, as car-pool drivers and assorted hustlers were charging the MIA for oceans of gasoline and truckloads of imaginary spare tires. A reorganized transportation committee was trying to plug the holes in the reimbursement system. As for the alleged high-handedness and egotism of the MIA leadership, there was a good deal of it, and it was resented not only by Fields. Some, like E. D. Nixon, believed they were being shunted aside for lack of polish or education, and a few of the lay people thought they were out because they were not preachers. Now such criticism would be confined forever to privacy. The defection and swift decapitation of Fields demonstrated that public criticism of the MIA would not only be seized upon by white opponents but also taken as a personal criticism of King, which would not be tolerated.

  King flew back to San Francisco to address the forty-seventh NAACP convention. Hundreds of delegates pressed upon him to shake his hand, including Medgar Evers, the NAACP field secretary in Mississippi. Evers invited King to Mississippi, saying that “your presence would do more…than any” to raise hopes in his state. The idea of a mass movement by nearly fifty thousand Negroes in a single city captivated the delegates, whose customary role in the NAACP was limited to support of the lawyers fighting segregation in court. Delegates on the convention floor drafted numerous resolutions in favor of the nonviolent methods of the bus boycott. Wilkins and Thurgood Marshall opposed them in a protracted struggle that put King in the awkward position of the insurrectionary guest. He tried to make himself as scarce as possible, but when reporters cornered him with questions about whether he thought nonviolent methods might help desegregate the schools, he replied that he had not thought about it much but that they probably could do so. This comment prompted an annoyed Thurgood Marshall to declare that school desegregation was men’s work and should not be entrusted to children. Some reporters quoted him to the effect that King was a “boy on a man’s errand.” Wilkins worked more diplomatically to smother the threat of a runaway convention, finally engineering passage of a resolution calling merely for the executive board to give “careful consideration” to the use of the Montgomery model.

  In July, sensitive to criticism that he had been neglecting his church, King started a newsletter, the Dexter Echo, to keep in touch with his members. He devoted his own column, “From the Pastor’s Desk,” mostly to problems of church finances. To offset slow collections during the summer months, King supervised the second annual Prettiest Baby Contest, which netted more than $2,000. The winning baby, on the strength of the $645.60 raised by the sponsoring August Club, was King’s daughter Yoki, now eight months old.

  King was off on a speaking tour of the Midwest. In his absence, the Echo published a FLASH bulletin announcing that his photograph was on display at the Brussels World’s Fair. When King went on to Canada to address a convention of Negro morticians, E. D. Nixon called to say that A. Philip Randolph had secured an invitation for King to testify before the platform committee of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. King, more conscious than ever of seniority and protocol among leaders, told Nixon that he did not want to testify unless Roy Wilkins approved. Nixon called Wilkins, who said, “I agree with you, Brother Nixon. He ought to be there, although it will take some of the spotlight off me.” With this clearance, Nixon then made the arrangements for King to tell the Democrats that civil rights was “one of the supreme moral issues” of the age. Perhaps because he was so intent on soothing leaders of national stature, such as Wilkins, King neglected to give enough credit for his convention appearance to E. D. Nixon—or so Nixon came to believe. Thereafter, he spoke to King only when necessary, and the coolness between the two of them became the subject of private gossip. This was to be King’s portion—new realms of success, blurred by aggravations striking randomly on all sides.

  On August 25, two or three sticks of dynamite exploded in Reverend Graetz’s front yard, shattering the windows in nearby homes. Graetz returned from out of town to find that the police had confiscated personal records and correspondence from his home as part of the bombing investigation. Detectives promptly interrogated Graetz himself, in a manner that provoked the two-year-old Graetz boy to shout, “Go away, you bad policemen!” The ever-repentant Graetz later confessed to a fleeting surge of pride in his son’s combative spirit. The next day’s Advertiser reported Mayor Gayle’s suspicions that Graetz had bombed his own home in order to stimulate out-of-state contributions to the MIA. “Perhaps this is just a publicity stunt to build up interest of the Negroes in their campaign,” he said. Two days after the bombing, King composed his first letter of protest to the White House, telling Eisenhower that Montgomery Negroes were living “without protection of law.” Cabinet secretary Maxwell Rabb replied perfunctorily for the President that “the situation in Montgomery has been followed with interest.”

  Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic candidate for President, worried about the Negro vote, especially after Roy Wilkins sharply criticized his desire to keep the civil rights issue out of the campaign. “We must recognize that it is reason alone that will determine our rate of progress,” Stevenson replied to Wilkins, who proceeded to denounce the candidate’s blithe vagueness in such blistering language that Stevenson’s friend Eleanor Roosevelt thr
eatened to resign from the board of the NAACP. In October, Stevenson’s concern over the issue prompted his appearance at a rally in Harlem, where he criticized as too passive Eisenhower’s statement that it “makes no difference” what he thought personally of the Supreme Court’s school desegregation decision. “I support this decision!” cried Stevenson. His supporters argued that his statement set him apart from Eisenhower as more friendly to Negroes, while his detractors replied that it meant little for a candidate to say he supported the law of the land, as did Eisenhower, while refusing to say what he would do to enforce it.

  Eisenhower campaigned differently. On October 10, he attended a World Series game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Yankees at Ebbetts Field. Sitting with him as a guest in the presidential box was E. Frederic Morrow. There was no official announcement of his presence, but word spread immediately through the Negro press, which noted that Stevenson could not afford to socialize with Negroes for fear of alienating Southern Democrats. The next day, Eisenhower invited Harlem congressman Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., to the White House for a private meeting that became big news when Powell, a Democrat, emerged to endorse Eisenhower for reelection, saying that he would do more for civil rights.

  The Negro issue was lost for the remainder of a campaign that finished memorably in the grip of two major world crises, the Hungarian revolt against Soviet domination and the combined effort of Israel, Great Britain, and France to take the Suez Canal from Egypt by war. Eisenhower made scathing private remarks about the “mid-Victorian style” of the Suez attack. If the United States supported such blatant colonialism, he said, the reaction “might well array the world from Dakar to the Philippine Islands against us.” His implicit threat to cut off American oil supplies to Europe helped rescue Nasser, a man Eisenhower loathed, and made a fiasco of Britain’s last effort to salvage an empire.

  Fear of war turned a probable Eisenhower reelection into a landslide margin of nearly 10 million votes. On election night, an aide danced joyfully into Eisenhower’s hotel suite with the news that the Republican ticket had carried the city of Montgomery, Alabama, for the first time in history. No one quite knew why, since Montgomery’s white citizens were known to be furious over the Administration’s private efforts to help Negroes in their eleven-month boycott of the bus system.* Post-election analysis showed that Negroes had voted Republican in substantial numbers for the first time since the New Deal, giving Eisenhower about 60 percent of their votes. Republican strategists looked forward to a major realignment of American politics, in which fiscal conservatives, educated suburbanites, and Negroes would combine to form an enlightened majority. This was among the many aspects of the election results that disheartened Stevenson. “I am quite bewildered about the Negroes,” he said.

  In Montgomery, city officials petitioned a state court for an injunction banning the MIA car pool as an unlicensed municipal transportation system. The injunction was the legal weapon King’s lawyers had feared most, knowing that court orders had the power to regulate behavior in advance of substantive court decisions. A prime illustration of such power was Attorney General Patterson’s order that outlawed the Alabama NAACP pending the outcome of protracted litigation. A similar injunction in Montgomery would mean that boycott leaders who persisted in operating the car pool would be subject to peremptory jailing on contempt charges. It would shift all the advantages of judicial delay from the MIA to the city.

  At the Advertiser, Grover Hall fulminated that the move came almost a year too late, being just “another blunder” now that the issue of segregation itself was before the U.S. Supreme Court. Hall wanted to prod the city fathers into thinking about more fundamental lines of defense. His purpose was not to give solace to King, of course, and King took none. To him, the Supreme Court decision lay somewhere in the unpredictable future, whereas the dreadful impact of the proposed injunction could be only hours away. It threatened to destroy all the accrued benefits of the car pool—the MIA-owned station wagons, the entire support budget, and the organized driver system. The boycotters would have to walk into their second winter, which was fast approaching.

  On Tuesday, November 13, one week after the Eisenhower landslide, King sat glumly at the defendant’s table as city lawyers told Judge Eugene Carter why he should not only ban the car pool by injunction but also impose a $15,000 fine on the MIA to compensate the city for lost tax revenues. A surprise city witness testified that the MIA had deposited $189,000 in his Montgomery bank, a sum that city lawyers used to ridicule King’s contention that the car pool was a voluntary, “share-a-ride” cooperative. Both sides mounted arguments that seemed highly ironic even at the time. Conservative city lawyers charged that the car pool was a “private enterprise” and therefore should be regulated or banned; King renewed his amnesiac defense that the boycott occurred spontaneously and without any organization or leadership that he could remember very well.

  During a recess, an AP reporter slipped to the front of the courtroom and handed King a note. Inside was a bulletin the reporter had ripped off the AP ticker: “The United States Supreme Court today affirmed a decision of a special three-judge panel in declaring Alabama’s state and local laws requiring segregation on buses unconstitutional. The Supreme Court acted without listening to any argument; it simply said ‘the motion to affirm is granted and the Judgment is affirmed.’”

  It was over. With blood pounding in his ears, King rushed to the back of the courtroom to tell Abernathy, E. D. Nixon, and Coretta. There was commotion at the plaintiff’s table, as word was reaching the city lawyers. The news sprinted through the courtroom on whispers, until one Negro, unable to bear the silence any longer, rose to declare, “God Almighty has spoken from Washington, D.C.!” Judge Carter was obliged to bang his gavel many times to restore order, and he handed down his injunction against the car pool even though the Supreme Court decision made it irrelevant.

  Montgomery’s Negroes did not care about the injunction now. They were celebrating. That night, at the first of two enormous mass meetings, S. S. Seay reported that the Ku Klux Klan was preparing to march on Montgomery. No matter, he cried out, “we are not afraid, because God is on our side.” Seay burst into tears at the pulpit, and, said the Advertiser, “several women screamed with what appeared to be a religious ecstasy.” The newspaper noted that King entered the meeting at precisely 7:23 P.M., touching off a standing ovation that lasted until Abernathy managed to quiet the crowd for the reading of the Scripture. A hush settled tentatively over the assembly as Robert Graetz walked to the pulpit. The skinny, jug-eared white preacher began to read from the famous love chapter of I Corinthians: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man I put away childish things.” Before he finished the sentence, everyone in the church rose en masse to cheer the passage, which struck the chord of their new self-respect with the force of an epiphany.

  Legal technicalities delayed the implementation. The Supreme Court decision would not take effect until appropriate orders reached Montgomery, King learned, whereas the spiteful injunction banning the car pool was in operation already. This meant that during the interim, bus segregation remained the law and the MIA could provide no alternative transportation system. To endure this delay without provoking the whites to legal harassments, MIA leaders summoned up the last reserves of energy within their followers to keep boycotting the buses until the integration orders arrived. They would walk. In effect, they would struggle through a victory lap.

  Euphoria propelled them. The statement King issued after hearing word of the decision was filled with the youthful enthusiasm that sometimes overran the bounds of his rhetoric. “Often we have had to stand amid the surging murmer [sic] of life’s restless sea,” he said. “Many days and nights have been filled with jostling winds of adversity.” But he recommended the prudent course: “For these three or four days, we will continue to walk and share rides with friends.” This time estimate from King’
s legal experts proved highly optimistic, as slow Court paperwork extended the victory lap through five arduous weeks.

  Celebrities called King from the first day. Mahalia Jackson wanted to come to Montgomery to sing in celebration. Several Negro seminary presidents offered to deliver theological evaluations of the boycott’s Christian spirit. Such a flurry of impressive offers inspired King to organize an entire week of seminars and church services, which he called the Institute on Nonviolence and Social Change. Reporter Carl Rowan, novelist Lillian Smith, and white Unitarian leader Homer Jack agreed to participate, as did the most powerful national figures in the Negro Baptist Church. Daddy King’s rival William Holmes Borders came from Atlanta to speak. Gardner Taylor came from his enormous “million-dollar” Concord Baptist Church in Brooklyn, and T. J. Jemison came up from Baton Rouge.

  King opened the Institute program on December 3 with an address at the Holt Street Baptist Church, where his speech almost exactly a year earlier had electrified the first mass meeting. He announced that the last year had taught six lessons: “(1) We have discovered that we can stick together for a common cause; (2) Our leaders do not have to sell out; (3) Threats and violence do not necessarily intimidate those who are sufficiently aroused and non-violent; (4) Our church is becoming militant, stressing a social gospel as well as a gospel of personal salvation; (5) We have gained a new sense of dignity and destiny; (6) We have discovered a new and powerful weapon—non-violent resistance.”