Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  To King, the lessons of leadership and unity came first, the militancy of the church next, and the “discovery” of nonviolence last. His list was aptly chosen and properly ordered as a distillation of the boycott experience. Nonviolence, like the boycott itself, had begun more or less by accident. The function of the boycott leaders had been to inspire, to react, and to persevere. Not until Birmingham, more than six years later, would King’s idea of leadership encompass the deliberate creation of new struggles or the conscious, advance selection of strategies and tactics. For now, his notion of leadership emphasized the display of learning. He said many wise things in his address—on technology, colonialism, the pace of time, but the speech as a whole went sprawling. King quoted notables from Heraclitus to Bob Hope. His anthem was a yearning for justice, and he extolled the value of martyrdom in a meditation on courage, but his oratory suffered markedly from abstraction once he was cut loose from the specific pressures of the boycott.

  Sunday, December 9, was a banner day for King. In the morning, he turned over his Dexter pulpit to Vernon Johns, who preached a sermon commemorating the seventy-ninth anniversary of the church’s secession from First Baptist. In the afternoon, King presided at First Baptist over a huge service culminating the events of the Institute week. Visiting choirs warmed up the crowd with an hour of music. Vernon Johns, swallowing his pride and his distaste for the National Baptist Convention, offered up the invocation in his inimitable growl. Then, after a solo by King’s friend Bob Williams, J. H. Jackson made his entrance. He never had openly endorsed the boycott, and he said almost nothing of it that day. Nevertheless, his presence as the titular head of the largest and most powerful organization controlled by American Negroes guaranteed an enormous, respectful crowd, estimated at up to eight thousand people. His was the kind of power King and Abernathy dreamed about when they spoke of spreading the movement through the instruments of a militant church. At the last NBC convention, in September, Jackson had bestowed a sign of recognition on King by inviting Coretta to give a solo recital at his church in Chicago. Now Jackson acknowledged King among the few royal figures of the Negro Baptists—Jackson, Gardner Taylor, the Jemisons, and, to a lesser extent, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. King had surpassed his father within the ranks of the organized Negro clergy. In the long Institute program, King’s name and everything about him was spelled entirely in capital letters. This was also true of Jackson but of no one else.

  On December 20, Supreme Court notifications arrived at the federal courthouse in Montgomery, and deputy U.S. marshals served notices on city officials. That night, King told a mass meeting that the walking was over. He stressed reconciliation, saying that the boycott had brought a victory for justice that would benefit both races. It was not a victory over the white people, he said, but most white politicians seemed to believe otherwise. Mayor Gayle and Police Commissioner Sellers managed to be out of town, unavailable for comment. A local judge who was forced to dissolve his pro-segregation decrees denounced the Supreme Court decision as based on “neither law nor reason” but an “evil construction.”

  King, in his suit and dress hat, followed by Fred Gray, Abernathy, Glenn Smiley, and a flock of cameramen and reporters, boarded a city bus before dawn the next morning. “We are glad to have you,” the bus driver said politely as he rumbled off down the street. Photographers on board took pictures of King sitting next to Smiley near the front of the bus. The integrated group achieved a convivial banter with the driver, who went so far as to make an unscheduled stop to pick up Reverend Graetz. Summoned outside by the bus horn, Graetz was treated to the sight of Smiley leaning casually out the front door of a city bus. “What time do you want me for dinner tonight?” Smiley shouted grandly, as though he had transformed the bus into a personal limousine. Graetz joined King and all those on the bus in laughter. It was a moment of innocence, dearly paid for.

  King asked Bayard Rustin to come to Montgomery. Only the extraordinary burst of post-victory activity produced the invitation, as both men knew Rustin’s physical presence could be a dangerous matter. Local whites still remembered the mysterious impostor from Le Figaro, and King felt a greater political threat from his own colleagues, especially the preachers, among whom tolerance for homosexuals was shunned as the wedge of evil. Some of the Negroes around King remembered Rustin less than fondly as the bizarre, imperious man who had caused a great alarm in their camp back in February. Even worse, Rustin had just arranged the publication in his Socialist magazine, Liberation, of an article by E. D. Nixon, in which Nixon claimed more than his share of credit for the creation of the boycott.* The article earned Nixon a fresh burst of ridicule from some of King’s more intellectual friends. King’s desire to hide Rustin from practically everyone was so strong that he asked him to fly into Birmingham instead of Montgomery. Bob Williams met Rustin there and put him face down in the backseat of his car. King’s instructions were that Rustin was not to raise his head until the car was parked safely at the Dexter parsonage.

  Rustin arrived on Sunday, December 23, in time to inspect the damage from a shotgun blast fired into King’s home early that morning. Everyone was scared, but no one was hurt. King huddled privately with Rustin on a host of matters, including New York fund-raising, Randolph’s efforts to facilitate better relations between Wilkins and King, future publications by King, a possible King trip to meet with Gandhians in India, and, most important, King’s response to the Negroes across the South who were besieging him for help in their desire to integrate their bus systems. King and Rustin had just finished one of their strategy sessions when Daddy King burst through the front door of the parsonage like a G-man leading a raid. The shotgun news had propelled him to Montgomery in high dudgeon. Coretta asked him if he would like something to eat.

  “I have not come to eat,” Daddy King declared. “I have come to pray.” He commanded M.L. to get down on his knees and then prayed out loud. Rustin retreated into an adjoining room, from where he heard Daddy King talking to God in such a way that God seemed to be telling the younger King that the boycott was over and that God now had things for him to do outside of politics. The prayer went on for some time. At its conclusion, Daddy King spoke more directly on the same theme, and the tension of the ensuing argument soon reduced his son to tears of anger and frustration. The younger King said little in his own defense until the end, when he blurted out that he would just have to do what he felt he had to do. Somehow this ended it. The force of the moment was such that Rustin felt he had witnessed a unique crisis between the Kings.

  The next day, Christmas Eve, a car pulled up to a Montgomery bus stop where a fifteen-year-old Negro girl was standing alone, and five men jumped out, beat her, and quickly fled. In Birmingham, Fred Shuttles-worth announced that he would lead a group onto the front of the buses the day after Christmas. He was preparing himself for the test on Christmas night, sitting in his parsonage with one of his deacons, when some fifteen sticks of dynamite exploded beneath them, virtually destroying the house. Investigating police shining flashlights through the dense clouds of smoke heard shouts from the basement, where Shuttlesworth and his deacon had fallen. “I’m not coming out naked!” cried the preacher, who was dressed for bed. The police draped Shuttlesworth with blankets, pulled fallen lumber off the deacon, and pronounced it a miracle that either was alive. When several officers advised Shuttlesworth to leave town, he proclaimed loudly that he would never do it. “God erased my name off that dynamite,” he declared, his sense of destiny renewed. The next day, he led two hundred of his followers into the white sections of Birmingham buses. More than a score of them were arrested and convicted on charges of violating the segregation laws.

  In Montgomery, after shotgun snipers fired on an integrated bus, King issued a statement calling on city authorities to “take a firm stand” against such violence. City Commissioner Parks, one of the few whites to speak up in response, announced that the city would have to suspend bus service if the shootings continued—a statement that
dismayed King’s followers because they believed that stopping the only integrated public institution in Alabama was precisely what the snipers wanted to accomplish. Two days later, bushwhackers fired another volley at an integrated bus, this time sending a pregnant Negro woman to the hospital with bullet wounds in both legs. The city commissioners halted night bus service.

  King sent out invitations to what he called the first Negro Leaders Conference on Nonviolent Integration. Sixty preachers from ten Southern states responded, gathering in Atlanta at Ebenezer early in January of 1957. They represented a pitifully small portion of the Negro preachers in the region, but their ranks included many of the most influential mavericks. Fred Shuttlesworth came from Birmingham, and Rev. C. K. Steele from Tallahassee, Florida, where he was leading a Montgomery-inspired campaign to integrate the buses. William Holmes Borders attended from Atlanta, where his own nonviolent bus demonstration provoked Georgia’s governor to put the state militia on standby alert just before the conference. Bayard Rustin came down from New York to work quietly on drafting resolutions and an organizational charter.

  Abernathy stayed with King in the Atlanta family home. At 2:30 A.M. on January 10, the day the conference was to begin, Mother King shook Abernathy awake to take an emergency phone call. “Ralph, they have bombed our home,” said a shaky Juanita Abernathy from Montgomery. “But I am all right and so is the baby.” She reported that the porch and front room of the house were practically demolished, and that the arriving policemen seemed frightened too, because other blasts had been heard since. They said the Hutchinson Street Baptist Church was destroyed, its roof caved in. People were calling or driving around the street in dumb panic, some too afraid to go outside and others too afraid to stay home.

  The King home in Atlanta was lit up and buzzing as Abernathy relayed the news. The preachers offered prayers, and then Abernathy worried out loud about First Baptist. “I don’t want Reverend Stokes’s church bombed,” he said plaintively. Daddy King was pacing the floor angrily. “Well, they are gonna bomb it,” he said. Abernathy grew so agitated that he tried repeatedly to get a call through to his wife. When he finally succeeded, he learned that the panic in Montgomery was growing worse. There had been another blast, loud enough to be heard all over town. It was definite that Hutchinson Street Baptist had been hit—people had seen the ruins—and the Graetz home had been bombed again. Mrs. Abernathy went off the line briefly and came back to say that another one had just gone off, close to their home. She felt the rumble. And another church had been hit. She was not sure which church and had no idea yet about where the latest bomb had struck.

  Later reports confirmed Abernathy’s fears that it was First Baptist. He and King, leaving Coretta and Rustin to run the Atlanta conference, departed before dawn for Montgomery, where they surveyed the night’s total of four bombed churches and two houses. Of the churches, First Baptist was the least severely hit, as the bomb had torn apart the basement but done little damage to the sanctuary above. Still, city authorities condemned it as structurally unsound for use.

  King returned hastily to Atlanta, where the assembled preachers voted to form an organization that, after several name changes, would be called the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. They elected King president. In the name of the new organization, he sent telegrams to President Eisenhower, Attorney General Brownell, and Vice President Richard M. Nixon. Sherman Adams replied for the President that it was not possible for Eisenhower to schedule a speech in the South against segregationist violence, as King had requested. An aide to Brownell replied that the Justice Department would look into the bombings and other incidents but that the primary authority for the maintenance of law and order was lodged in state governments. Nixon did not reply.

  Abernathy stayed in Montgomery, supervising church volunteers who worked frantically on Friday and Saturday to shore up the basement beams and sweep out the debris at First Baptist. City inspectors, granting Abernathy’s desperate wish to hold Sunday services there, stipulated wisely that no one was to go upstairs, as their weight might cause the temporary beams to collapse. Abernathy agreed. A piano was hauled in, a makeshift pulpit erected, and on Sunday the members took seats on chairs in the basement. They cast anxious looks toward the fresh carpentry above them and the grit on the floor. A pall hung over the service until Mrs. Beasley, mother of church clerk William Beasley and one of the oldest members of the congregation, rose to speak. “I don’t like what I see here today,” she said. “Brother Pastor, you can’t leave no church worried and troubled. I remember in 1910, when this church was just a big hole in the ground after the fire. And two fine ladies from Dexter walked by and said, ‘What is this? Unborn generations will say this hole is where the First Baptist Church was supposed to be.’ But they were wrong! Dr. A. J. Stokes built this church, and I want you to have a vote of confidence that we will build it again!” As the congregation jumped to its feet, church pianist Dorothy Posey spontaneously began to play the “Hallelujah Chorus.”

  The inspiration that surged through First Baptist derived in part from community rivalries, and MIA leaders discovered to their dismay that a new and uglier side of crisis psychology emerged simultaneously with the most inspired goodwill. Even those who had lived through the boycott could not explain it, except to say that the MIA community was suffering a natural letdown. Once the endeavor was behind them, crisis emotions slipped easily into depression or jealousy. Some resented the fact that Abernathy’s prestige rose dramatically because he was the only leader bombed both at church and at home. Graetz’s stature grew because on the most recent night of terror his home had been the target of two bombs, one of which did not go off. (An intrepid neighbor snipped the smoldering end off a fuse leading to eleven sticks of dynamite.) When the rumor mill passed the word that one of the Graetz bombs had been meant for a Methodist preacher within the MIA, that preacher actually became consumed with regret that he had not been bombed—to the point that he later had a mental breakdown. Rev. Uriah J. Fields, the “traitor” of the previous summer, was temporarily restored to leadership because the church he had regained, Bell Street Baptist, suffered the most destruction on the night of the bombs.

  E. D. Nixon, who was not bombed this time, became openly hostile to King’s manner and importance. Not long after the bombing, Nixon resigned as MIA treasurer with a bitter “Dear Sir” letter to King, in which he complained of being “treated as a child.” Some of King’s partisans looked upon Nixon with the same tart condescension that moved one of them publicly to refer to Rosa Parks as “an adornment of the movement.” In this spirit, the most sophisticated leaders around King agreed that the next desegregation target should be the Montgomery airport. Graetz, Fred Gray, and a few others objected to this notion as absurd and selfish, inasmuch as only a tiny fraction of MIA members ever had been on an airplane. But the leaders, including Abernathy, wanted to hit the airport. They had moved up from the bus.

  A roiling undertow ensured that the MIA would never again play a major part in American racial politics. Although the force of the boycott would reach the country by delayed reverberation, Montgomery’s contribution was already history. King himself suffered a corresponding letdown. He was fearful of the bombs, saddened by the backsliding on bus integration, hurt by criticisms within the MIA that he traveled too much and received too much attention, and depressed by the carping disunity among the MIA leadership. Instinctively, he took the fears and failures upon himself, feeling guilty and miserable, and the overload of guilt spilled over into self-reproach. On the Monday night after Abernathy’s basement church service, King took the pulpit at an MIA mass meeting. Praying publicly for guidance, he said, “Lord, I hope no one will have to die as a result of our struggle for freedom in Montgomery. Certainly I don’t want to die. But if anyone has to die, let it be me!” His outcry threw the audience into pandemonium. Shouts of “No! No!” clashed with a wave of religious ecstasy. In the midst of it, King became overwrought. He gripped the pulpit with bo
th hands, unable to speak. He remained frozen there long after the crowd stilled itself, which produced an awkward silence and then a murmur of alarm as the seconds went by. King never spoke. Finally, two preachers draped their arms around him and led him to a seat.

  Two weeks later, Bob Williams was on Saturday night duty at the Dexter parsonage. Coretta and Yoki were in Atlanta. There was the usual mix of friendly and hateful phone calls, but something disturbed King so much that he got up from his bed to wake Williams. “Bob, I think we better leave here tonight,” he said. The two of them promptly went to Williams’ house. Several hours later, before dawn, a bomb exploded on the corner nearest the parsonage. The blast crushed the front part of a house, damaged an adjacent Negro taxi stand, and shattered the windows of three taxis parked there, sending the drivers to the hospital with cuts. During the alarm that followed, someone went to the empty parsonage to check on King and found twelve sticks of dynamite lying on the front porch, the fuse giving off an acrid smell. An hour later, after a tense drama inside the police cordon and a near riot on the outside, the state of Alabama’s chief munitions expert defused the bomb. Two Negroes who denounced the police for failing to catch any of the bombers were arrested and later convicted for incitement to riot. King, summoned by telephone, arrived to quiet the crowd with a speech.

  That morning, from the Dexter pulpit, King told the congregation of his experience in his kitchen exactly one year earlier, just before the first bombing. He had heard an inner voice telling him to ignore the confusions and fears swirling about him and do what he thought was right. An Advertiser reporter was attending the service that morning because of the bomb, and his report set off a venomous delight within Grover Hall. In the pages of the Advertiser, Hall ridiculed what he called the “vision in the kitchen speech,” distorting it to imply that King’s will to fight segregation had come to him from an alleged kitchen conversation with God. A few days later, Hall came across a passage in an obscure newsletter from a Methodist college outside Alabama, in which a professor wrote that King’s nonviolent bearing during the boycott had been worthy of Christian saints. Hall developed this item into a scathing editorial entitled “Dr. King Enters Hagiology of Methodist Church,” which touched off a heated controversy throughout the South. Some Alabama churches voted to cut off all financial support for Methodist higher education.