Voices in Our Blood

by Jon Meacham

  The news spread quickly through a Negro community where deep bitterness already existed over the bus situation. There had been many charges that bus drivers used abusive language toward Negro passengers. During 1955, two other Negro women had been taken off the bus, arrested and fined, although they contended that they were seated according to bus company policy. One Negro mother had stirred anger among the 60,000 Negroes in the metropolitan area when she told about a driver’s alleged action when she put her two infants on the front seat while getting change from her purse. She said the driver ordered her to take the children from the seat, and without giving her a chance to place them elsewhere, lunged the bus forward, throwing the children onto the floor.

  When word of Mrs. Parks’ arrest reached the rougher element in the tavern district, they began to organize. “Goddamn it, we’re gonna make it safe for our women,” said one tough guy. “These bus drivers either dog ’em or date ’em.”

  But several Negro ministers were informed that these Negroes were oiling their pistols, sharpening their switch blades, and building up an arsenal of pipes, baseball bats and spiked sticks. The ministers got busy. On December 3, two days before the trial, the Negro community was flooded with mysterious circulars asking Negroes to stage a one-day protest by refusing to ride buses on the day of the trial. As yet, there has been no public admission as to who arranged for and distributed the circulars, but it is my belief that the job was done by the ministers, seeking to prevent the hoodlum element from carrying out its threat to “beat the hell out of a few bus drivers.” On Sunday, December 4, many Negro ministers included in their sermons a request that Negroes protest Mrs. Parks’ arrest by staying off buses the following day.

  On Monday, after the newspapers had given even wider circulation to the protest plans, probably eighty per cent of the Negro bus riders went to their jobs by bicycle, taxi, truck, wagon or on foot, covering distances up to ten miles. City officials were somewhat disturbed, but officials of Montgomery City Lines, a subsidiary of National City Lines of Chicago, were alarmed, for Montgomery’s Negroes represented seventy per cent of the company’s passengers.

  On Monday, Mrs. Parks was found guilty of disobeying the bus driver and fined $10 and $4 cost. This angered Negroes even more. That night, 5,000 Negroes overflowed the Holt Street Baptist Church, where, according to press reports, some forty-seven Negro ministers and one white one, the Reverend Robert S. Graetz of the all-Negro Trinity Lutheran Church, led the crowd through hymn-singing and speech-making and produced a solid corps of citizens determined to produce changes in the transportation system of Montgomery. They extended the boycott—or “protest” as they called it—until such time as the bus company and city officials agreed to (1) more courteous treatment of Negroes; (2) seating on a first-come-first-served basis, agreeing that Negroes would continue to fill the bus from the rear and whites from the front; and (3) that Negro bus drivers be employed on predominantly Negro lines.

  Negro citizens founded the Montgomery Improvement Association to direct the protest and to work out new means of transportation for Negroes. Named president of the association was a quiet, pacifist-type, twenty-seven-year-old minister with a doctorate in religion from Boston University, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.

  At dawn the following morning, Montgomery was a strange sight. People accustomed to seeing as many as two hundred Negro domestics awaiting buses at Montgomery and Lee Streets saw none. Instead, beginning at 5 A.M., they saw a straggling parade of the young and the aged, hiking to their jobs. They saw some three hundred Negro-owned automobiles—old clunks fresh from used-car lots and new family “chariots”—picking up other Negro workers. They saw the wife of a Negro doctor halt her shiny Cadillac to offer a ride to domestic workers.

  “I’m sure glad this protest started,” a Negro maid whispered to the doctor’s wife. “Otherwise, I never would’ve got to ride in a car like this.”

  They saw empty and near-empty buses, and wealthy white women, in housecoats and pincurls, driving to get Negro servants. Occasionally they saw a white citizen using his car to give free rides to Negroes.

  The bus company reported that a half-dozen or so of its buses were stoned and shot at as they rolled through Negro neighborhoods. The Negro ministers—who had achieved the almost unbelievable by pulling the hoodlums out of the crap games and honky-tonks into the churches where they sang hymns, gave money, shouted amen and wept over the powerful speeches—quickly went to the public with paid advertisements in the daily press:

  1. Non-violence—

  At no time have the participants of this movement advocated or anticipated violence. We stand willing and ready to report and give any assistance in exposing persons who resort to violence. This is a movement of passive resistance, depending on moral and spiritual forces. We, the oppressed, have no hate in our hearts for the oppressors, but we are, nevertheless, determined to resist until the cause of justice triumphs.

  2. Coercion—

  There has not been any coercion on the part of any leader to force anyone to stay off the buses. The rising tide of resentment has come to fruition. This resentment has resulted in a vast majority of the people staying off the buses willingly and voluntarily.

  3. Arbitration—

  We are willing to arbitrate. We feel that this can be done with men and women of good will. However, we find it rather difficult to arbitrate in good faith with those whose public pronouncements are anti-Negro and whose only desire seems to be that of maintaining the status quo. We call upon men of good will, who will be willing to treat this issue in the spirit of Him whose birth we celebrate at this season, to meet with us. We stand for Christian teachings and the concepts of democracy for which men and women of all races have fought and died.

  Now the boycott was practically ninety-five per cent effective, and the bus company was suffering losses estimated at $3,200 per day. The Negroes had organized a car pool, posting unsigned and unidentified schedules on telephone poles or the sides of buildings. These schedules listed some forty pickup points at which workers could get rides from 6 to 8:30 a.m. and from 3 to 6 p.m. City policemen, under orders from a white supremacist police commissioner, became extra zealous in enforcing the city’s traffic laws. To avoid violating regulations governing taxis, automobiles operating in the Negro pool charged no fares. Funds were collected for gasoline at the churches and at rallies which became regular events.

  Tension rose. National City Lines of Chicago sent a representative to Montgomery to look into the trouble. The mayor of Montgomery, W. A. Gayle, himself an ardent segregationist, called a meeting to which several citizens were invited, including a leader of the Montgomery White Citizens Council. Out of this meeting the mayor appointed a committee to try to reach a solution.

  The Negroes observed that among the whites appointed was the White Citizens Council leader, and they contended that the whites were not prepared to bargain in good faith. Whites accused the Negroes of not wanting to reach a solution. On matters of disagreement, the sixteen-member committee split along racial lines—eight Negroes against eight whites.

  Now the citizenry began to observe that something revolutionary was taking place in the heart of Alabama. But large numbers of whites still were unwilling to believe that this was the mark of the new Negro. On December 13, the Montgomery Advertiser, a newspaper which had been skillful at saying “nice” things about Negroes just often enough to stay in the “liberal” column, while cutting their throats when it really counted, declared editorially:

  “A lot of grief can be averted if whites and Negroes in these parts dismiss their emotions long enough to take a cool, practical look at the consequences of boycott and counter-boycott . . . as a matter of enlightened self-interest. . . .

  “The bus boycott here is a painful economic injury to the company.

  “But as a matter of the facts of life, Negro leaders should reckon with two realities:

  “The white
man’s economic artillery is far superior, better emplaced, and commanded by more experienced gunners.

  “Second, the white man holds all the offices of government machinery. There will be white rule as far as the eye can see.

  “Are those not facts of life?”

  Mayor Gayle and others quickly charged that Negroes were being kept off the buses by fear. Gayle charged that “outside influences” were “stirring this thing up.” He promised police protection to anyone who wanted to ride the buses, adding that Montgomery “has good impartial law enforcement, with equal treatment for white and black. We have offered them equal accommodations and everything else. But they want integration—that’s the whole thing.”

  But one of the leading citizens of Montgomery, Miss Juliette Morgan, saw the Negroes’ protest as a fine example of the spirit and the discipline of Mahatma Gandhi. In a letter to the editor of the Advertiser, she wrote:

  “The Negroes of Montgomery seem to have taken a lesson from Gandhi—and our own Thoreau, who influenced Gandhi. Their own task is greater than Gandhi’s, however, for they have greater prejudice to overcome.

  “One feels that history is being made in Montgomery these days, the most important in her career. It is hard to imagine a soul so dead, a heart so hard, a vision so blinded and provincial as not to be moved with admiration at the quiet dignity, discipline and dedication with which the Negroes have conducted their boycott. . . .

  “It is sad indeed that the most reasonable and moderate requests presented to the bus company and City Commission by the Reverend M. L. King were met with such a ‘Ye rebels! Disperse!’ attitude as voiced by their attorney and others. No, the law must be enforced with all pharisaical zeal and inflexibility. Well, I say the law ought to be changed. . . .

  “I am all for law and order, the protection of person and property against violence, but I believe the Constitution and Supreme Court of the United States constitute the supreme law of the land. I find it ironical to hear men in authority who are openly flouting this law speak piously of law enforcement.

  “I also find it hard to work up sympathy for the bus company. . . . Three times I’ve gotten off the bus because I could not countenance the treatment of Negroes. I should have gotten off on several other occasions. Twice I have heard a certain driver with high seniority mutter quite audibly ‘black ape.’ I could not tell whether the Negro heard or not, but I did and felt insulted.

  “It is interesting to read editorials on the legality of this boycott. They make me think of that famous one that turned America from a tea- to a coffee-drinking nation. Come to think of it, one might say that this nation was founded upon a boycott.

  “The likening of the bus boycott to those of the White Citizens Councils is misleading. The difference in the causes and in the spirit behind each is vast. Just compare the speeches delivered at Selma and here in the City Hall with those at the Holt Street Baptist Church Monday night. Read them side by side as reported in the Advertiser—and blush.”

  These were extremely interesting words from an Alabama white woman, and they must have been heartening words to those Negroes who wondered whether they walked alone. They certainly were important words, for there were many whites, including the editors of the daily papers, seeking to put the Negro protesters in the same camp as the members of the White Citizens Councils who had resorted to economic coercion in order to defy the decision of the United States Supreme Court.

  I asked Dr. King if he saw any difference between what the Negroes were doing and what the Citizens Councils were doing.

  “Ours is an open and above-board protest for the birth of justice,” said the young minister. “The White Citizens Councils’ is a surreptitious movement for the perpetuation of injustice, to preserve what is illegal, to maintain a deadening status quo.

  “This,” added Dr. King, “is democracy being transformed from thin paper to thick action. Negroes long infected with the crippling paralysis of fear are tired of the long nights of captivity and are now reaching out for the daybreak of freedom.”

  By now, white Montgomery was shocked—shocked at the determination of Negroes who said: “We will not retreat one inch in our fight to secure and hold our American citizenship. The history books will write of us as a race of people who in Montgomery County, state of Alabama, country of the United States, stood up and fought for their rights as American citizens, as citizens of a democracy.”

  But always, the leaders of the protest kept their hand atop those Negroes who once were eager to resort to violence. Pastor Graetz, the young white minister who had stood beside the Negroes through the bitterest kind of harassment, wrote the National Lutheran Council that the Negroes of Montgomery were “conducting a real ‘love’ campaign”:

  “Week after week [the Negro] ministers proclaimed, ‘We must love our enemies. Don’t ever let them bring you down so low that you will hate them. We don’t want to harm anyone. . . .’

  “And the white leaders of Montgomery are at a loss. They do not know how to meet such a campaign. If we were to take up arms, they could defeat us in battle. If we were to engage in full-scale economic warfare, they could starve us into submission. But they know not how to respond to the regular prayers that we send up in their behalf.”

  As I moved about Montgomery, it became obvious that the Negro people sensed that the white man of Montgomery was at a loss. In all the eighteen years I had lived in the South, in my three extended trips back since World War II, I had never seen such spirit among a group of Negroes. When a Negro minister, working for the car pool, offered a ride to an old woman who obviously had walked a long distance, he said: “Sister, aren’t you getting tired?”

  “My soul has been tired for a long time,” she replied. “Now my feet are tired and my soul is resting.”

  The Reverend R. D. Abernathy, pastor of First Baptist Church and one of the leaders in the protest, told me of a seventy-year-old Negro woman who limped to his church one morning looking for a car-pool ride to work. All the cars were out.

  “You’re old and crippled, and it’s cold,” a young Negro said to the woman. “You take the bus to work. We’ll understand.”

  “Children, I ain’t got many days left,” the old woman replied. “So I ain’t walking for myself. I’m walking for my grandson. I want him to be able to pay his money and take his seat.”

  The old woman hobbled off.

  One Negro woman quit her $12-a-week domestic job and devoted her time to the boycott when the white woman for whom she worked refused to drive her home from work.

  “I told her that if I took a taxi, I would have only four dollars left, and I’d rather be rested and proud with no money than tired and humiliated with four dollars—so good-bye,” the woman reported.

  Still Montgomery’s police commissioner, Clyde Sellers (one of the three commissioners who would have to rule on any concessions granted the Negroes), insisted that he was unimpressed by the Negroes’ protest. He boldly joined the local White Citizens Council. The Montgomery Advertiser reminded the public of its December 13 warning that white people held all the big ammunition, and then pointed out that by joining the pro-segregation group, Sellers had in effect made the city’s police force an arm of the White Citizens Council. The editorial was more a passed-along threat than an expression of the Advertiser’s desire to help Negroes, though.

  The Advertiser reported that its poll showed white citizens overwhelmingly in support of the bus company. The Alabama Council on Human Relations, an interracial group, reported that letters from whites to the city’s newspapers were running five to one in favor of the Negroes’ position.

  Negro leaders said one gauge of white opinion—at least, whites in higher educational and economic brackets—was the fact that employers did not try to force Negroes to ride buses.

  “One white woman fired her Negro cook for refusing to ride,” reported Fred D. Gray, twenty-five-year-old Negro lawyer and a leading figure in the protest, “but the white woman next door
hired the Negro as she left the first house!”

  He told of another domestic who got tired of walking and took the bus. Her white employer found out and fired her with this lecture: “If you have no race pride—if your own people can’t trust you—then I can’t trust you in my house.”

  Whites like Grover C. Hall, Jr., editor of the Advertiser, and Commissioner Sellers said it just wasn’t so. The boycott couldn’t be spontaneous, they argued.

  My colleague, Kleeman, and I asked Hall’s city editor, Joe Azbell, if Negroes were using intimidation to keep Negroes off buses.

  “They haven’t been able to convict anybody,” he replied. “One man was arrested on a policeman’s complaint, but they had to release him.”

  We asked Hall if Negroes were using coercion.

  “It’s indisputable on any assumptive basis,” he replied. I paused to figure out how something assumptive could be indisputable, but was interrupted by Hall, who was quite sensitive about two northern reporters even coming to Montgomery.

  “So many Negroes are leaving here for the East that pretty soon you fellows can stay home and cover the story,” he cracked.

  “Wherever the story is—New Jersey, Minnesota or Montgomery—we’ll be there, for if it affects part of the nation, it affects all the nation,” I replied.

  When I expressed a desire to cover a meeting of the White Citizens Council scheduled for that evening, Hall advised me not to.

  “I know that crowd—it’s pretty rough,” he said. “Now if you want a good city editor’s tip, why don’t you ride a bus and tell what they do to a Negro? That’s how you find out about the labor-union-type goons.”

  (I took this tip, going to a busy intersection in the heart of the Negro community. I got bored because no one bothered me while I awaited the bus. While Kleeman stood nearby watching, I strolled across the street in front of a tavern and inquired of three Negroes whether I was waiting in the right place.