by Jon Meacham
Dr. King, his eight lawyers and the Negro spectators, many wearing crosses urging “Father forgive them,” listened intently as the prosecutor produced evidence that the Montgomery Improvement Association had spent some $30,000 in support of the boycott. He produced witnesses who testified that force had been used to maintain the boycott, and the Negro courthouse janitor bragged that he knocked down a Negro who threatened to whip him if he didn’t stop riding the bus. The prosecutor gave no evidence that the defendant was linked to any violence; the record showed that, in fact, Dr. King had urged Negroes against violence.
When time came for the defense to show the “just cause” that provoked a spontaneous protest, Della Perkins took the stand and testified that a driver once called her “an ugly black ape.” Georgia Gilmore said that when she boarded a bus the driver hollered, “Come out, nigger, and go in the back door,” and that when she stepped off he drove away. Sadie Brooks said she saw a Negro man forced from a bus at pistol-point because he did not have the correct change. Martha Walker said her blind husband’s leg was injured when a bus driver shut a door on him and drove on. Stella Brooks testified that her husband was shot to death when he refused to obey a bus driver, but the judge ordered this testimony stricken from the record because Stella Brooks did not see the shooting.
After four dramatic days of testimony, Circuit Judge Eugene Carter reached a quick verdict; he found Dr. King guilty, fined him $500 and assessed him $400 for court costs. Dr. King appealed and was released on bond.
Outside that old courthouse, the throng of Negroes raised their voices in rebellious tones such as the Deep South had never heard before. A minister shouted out plans for a mass prayer meeting that night.
“Y’all gonna be there?” demanded a bass-voiced man.
“Yes, Jesus, yes,” replied a roly-poly woman just after the crowd had shouted a loud “Yes.”
“Y’all gonna ride them buses?” bellowed the bass-voiced man.
“No,” roared the crowd.
“You’re damn right we ain’t,” added the roly-poly woman.
Now the cold winter rains had stopped. Flowers were blooming in Alabama. A deeper green came over the weeping-willow trees. Negro Montgomery began to forget about the worn-out brakes and the slipping clutches in the family cars that were volunteered for the transportation pool. Now a fleet of sleek station wagons rolled down the streets, bearing the names of the Negro churches. City officials had denied a request by the Negroes for permission to operate their own bus company.
A new element of conflict arose when, on April 23, 1956, the United States Supreme Court dismissed as frivolous an appeal from a Court of Appeals decision in Richmond, Virginia, holding that racial segregation on intrastate buses violated the Federal Constitution. This case arose from a lawsuit filed in South Carolina by a Negro who had been ordered by a bus driver to sit in the “Negro section” of a bus.
Newspapermen hastily interpreted this as a decision by the Supreme Court outlawing intrastate transit segregation. Several transit firms in the South quickly announced that they would cease enforcing segregation, among them Montgomery City Lines. It developed, however, that by a technicality, the Supreme Court actually had made no clear ruling on segregation.
Montgomery city officials demanded that the bus company resume its old policy of having drivers enforce segregation. The bus company, still in a financial pinch despite a fifty-per-cent fare increase, refused to do so. The city turned to Circuit Judge Walter B. Jones, who ruled on May 9 that the bus company would have to continue a policy of segregation.
But Montgomery knew, as all the South must know, that the last word had not been spoken, for the legality of bus segregation in the state was being challenged (by the NAACP at the request of Montgomery Negroes) before a three-judge federal court panel. On June 5, these judges, all southerners, voted two to one that bus segregation in Montgomery violated the Constitution. Judge Richard T. Rives of the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and Judge Frank M. Johnson, Jr., of the United States Middle District Court, signed the majority opinion. Judge Seybourn Lynne of the Northern Alabama United States District Court in Birmingham dissented.
The decision was hailed by Dr. King as “a great victory for democracy and justice.” There was hope, the happy Negroes cried, so long as the Citizens Councils could not buy or intimidate the federal courts.
On June 28, attorneys for the state appealed the federal panel’s decision to the United States Supreme Court. Pending this decision, segregation continued in the once-quiet capital, the old Cradle of the Confederacy; so did the Negroes’ boycott. In the besieged and bewildered Southland, the battle lines were shaping up for a new kind of conflict: a new Negro with an old Constitution against the old South with a new-style Ku Klux Klan.
Once again it was time for the nation’s highest tribunal to speak. Meanwhile, black Montgomery would continue to walk and ride those church-sponsored station wagons. But each day brought new troubles for their operators. Most any speed seemed too fast for the city’s traffic laws; suddenly, no Negro could make a proper left turn. Finally, the segregationists found a way (and with very little trouble in the Alabama courts) to ban the use of the station wagons altogether.
On November 13, 1956, even as the Negroes turned to the federal courts in an effort to regain use of the station wagons, the Supreme Court spoke: the lower federal court was correct when it said on June 5 that an Alabama law and a Montgomery ordinance requiring racial separation violated the Negroes’ constitutional rights.
The next night 2,000 cheering Negroes held another mass meeting and voted to end their eleven-month-old protest as soon as the Supreme Court order was delivered to the local court.
Alabama State Senator Sam Engelhardt called the Supreme Court ruling “another attempt by a group of misguided zealots in Washington to torpedo constitutional government.” To him it meant nothing that all these Washington “zealots” had done was say “amen” to what two white Alabama judges had said five months earlier.
Montgomery’s white leaders, beaten but defiant, announced that they would fight the Supreme Court ruling “with every lawful means.” But the Negro citizens had no doubt but that they had scored a great victory, that a “new age” had dawned in which American Negroes would use this technique of “non-violent protest” to end segregation in other areas of life.
A year after the beginning of the boycott, Montgomery Negroes conducted a week-long institute on “non-violence and social change,” at which their leader, Dr. King, said:
“If we are to speed up the coming of the new age we must have the moral courage to stand up and protest against injustice wherever we find it. Wherever we find segregation we must have the fortitude to passively resist it. . . . This will mean suffering and sacrifices. It might even mean going to jail. . . . we must be willing to fill up the jailhouses of the South. It might even mean physical death. But if physical death is the price that some must pay to free their children from a permanent life of psychological death, then nothing could be more honorable.”
On December 21, 1956, the Supreme Court’s decree was delivered to Montgomery. Dr. King and other Negro ministers led a return to the buses after workshop demonstrations of courtesy, including advice that Negroes should sit beside whites only if no other seats were available. “We are not returning to the buses to abuse anyone, or to gloat over any so-called victory over the white people of Montgomery,” Dr. King said. “We shall go back in a spirit of love and humility.”
On December 22 newspapers all over the country headlined stories that Negroes had ridden unsegregated without any unpleasant incidents. But there were ominous reports of carloads of white men, members of the Citizens Council, observing buses, sometimes following them.
Then there came a report that three white men had beaten a teen-age Negro girl as she got off a bus. A few days later Dr. King announced in a sermon that during the night someone had fired a shotgun blast into his front door. Then snipers began to sh
oot at buses, hitting one Negro woman passenger in the leg.
Meanwhile, the movement to secure compliance with the court ruling had spread to other cities. The Reverend F. L. Shuttlesworth, a thirty-four-year-old Negro minister in Birmingham, led a group of Negroes in an unsegregated bus ride. Birmingham police, who have given the city a reputation as one of the most racially brutal in the world, arrested three Negroes. During the night, Reverend Shuttlesworth’s home was ripped by a dynamite explosion. Miraculously, no one was killed.
The young minister went before his congregation (and the nation’s television cameras) the next day and took note of the fact that millions of Americans were in anguish over Communist Russia’s rape of Hungary. Reverend Shuttlesworth said that he shared this concern; that he approved President Eisenhower’s humane decision to raise the quota for Hungarian refugees; but that he wanted to say this to Americans:
“You cannot go on throwing bread to Hungarians and bombs at us.”
Birmingham Negroes returned to segregated riding, pending a court test of the city’s right to enforce its segregation ordinance—a court decision that now was a foregone conclusion. But the pattern of violence was spreading. The situation became so bad in Tallahassee that Florida’s Governor LeRoy Collins ordered all bus service halted. Negro ministers in Atlanta began a desegregation movement, provoking Governor Marvin Griffin to alert the National Guard, a body Talmadge had once threatened to use to keep segregation.
In the early darkness of January 10, 1957, four Negro churches and the homes of two ministers were dynamited in Montgomery. One of the homes was that of Reverend Graetz, the white Lutheran. No one was killed, but only because eleven sticks of dynamite placed at the Graetz home failed to explode.
Montgomery buses were ordered halted and Governor James E. Folsom offered a $2,000 reward for the arrest and conviction of the bomb-throwers.
“The issue now is no longer segregation on city buses. . . . The issue is whether it is safe to live in Montgomery, Alabama,” declared the Advertiser.
Amid this angry furor, the Southern Regional Council in Atlanta announced that many cities—Little Rock, Pine Bluff, Fort Smith and Hot Springs, Arkansas; Charlotte, Greensboro, Durham and Winston-Salem, North Carolina; Richmond, Norfolk, Portsmouth, Newport News, Petersburg, Charlottesville, Fredericksburg, Lynchburg and Roanoke, Virginia; San Antonio, Corpus Christi and Dallas, Texas; and Knoxville, Tennessee—had quietly ended bus segregation.
As the violence continued in the Deep South, some fifty Negro leaders assembled in Atlanta. They appealed jointly to President Eisenhower, whom Negroes had favored with more of their votes than any Republican presidential candidate in decades, for a trip South and a speech asking southerners to respect law and order.
All along, there had been a growing cry that the President had taken the comfortable refuge of pretending that the South’s struggles over desegregation were not the business of his administration. Many felt that his aloofness—timidity, even—had added to the boldness of hoodlums and lawless groups and forced southerners of good will to run to shelter. But there was little room for evasion of this challenge from Atlanta, this request that the man most able to articulate the moral conscience of the nation walk into the midst of southerners and say that the girl-beaters and dynamite-throwers were betraying and dishonoring America. Nevertheless, early in February, Presidential Assistant Sherman Adams advised Dr. King that President Eisenhower had decided against making any such speech in the South.
Parting the Waters: America in the King Years
1988
TAYLOR BRANCH
King stood silently for a moment. When he greeted the enormous crowd of strangers, who were packed in the balconies and aisles, peering in through the windows and upward from seats on the floor, he spoke in a deep voice, stressing his diction in a slow introductory cadence. “We are here this evening—for serious business,” he said, in even pulses, rising and then falling in pitch. When he paused, only one or two “yes” responses came up from the crowd, and they were quiet ones. It was a throng of shouters, he could see, but they were waiting to see where he would take them. “We are here in a general sense, because first and foremost—we are American citizens—and we are determined to apply our citizenship—to the fullness of its means,” he said. “But we are here in a specific sense—because of the bus situation in Montgomery.” A general murmur of assent came back to him, and the pitch of King’s voice rose gradually through short, quickened sentences. “The situation is not at all new. The problem has existed over endless years. Just the other day—just last Thursday to be exact—one of the finest citizens in Montgomery—not one of the finest Negro citizens—but one of the finest citizens in Montgomery—was taken from a bus—and carried to jail and arrested—because she refused to give up—to give her seat to a white person.”
The crowd punctuated each pause with scattered “Yeses” and “Amens.” They were with him in rhythm, but lagged slightly behind in enthusiasm. Then King spoke of the law, saying that the arrest was doubtful even under the segregation ordinances, because reserved Negro and white bus sections were not specified in them. “The law has never been clarified at that point,” he said, drawing an emphatic “Hell, no” from one man in his audience. “And I think I speak with—with legal authority—not that I have any legal authority—but I think I speak with legal authority behind me—that the law—the ordinance—the city ordinance has never been totally clarified.” This sentence marked King as a speaker who took care with distinctions, but it took the crowd nowhere. King returned to the special nature of Rosa Parks. “And since it had to happen, I’m happy it happened to a person like Mrs. Parks,” he said, “for nobody can doubt the boundless outreach of her integrity. Nobody can doubt the height of her character, nobody can doubt the depth of her Christian commitment.” That’s right, a soft chorus answered. “And just because she refused to get up, she was arrested,” King repeated. The crowd was stirring now, following King at the speed of a medium walk.
He paused slightly longer. “And you know, my friends, there comes a time,” he cried, “when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression.” A flock of “Yeses” was coming back at him when suddenly the individual responses dissolved into a rising cheer and applause exploded beneath the cheer—all within the space of a second. The startling noise rolled on and on, like a wave that refused to break, and just when it seemed that the roar must finally weaken, a wall of sound came in from the enormous crowd outdoors to push the volume still higher. Thunder seemed to be added to the lower register—the sound of feet stomping on the wooden floor—until the loudness became something that was not so much heard as it was sensed by vibrations in the lungs. The giant cloud of noise shook the building and refused to go away. One sentence had set it loose somehow, pushing the call-and-response of the Negro church service past the din of a political rally and on to something else that King had never known before. There was a rabbit of awesome proportions in those bushes. As the noise finally fell back, King’s voice rose above it to fire again. “There comes a time, my friends, when people get tired of being thrown across the abyss of humiliation, where they experience the bleakness of nagging despair,” he declared. “There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life’s July, and left standing amidst the piercing chill of an Alpine November. There . . .” King was making a new run, but the crowd drowned him out. No one could tell whether the roar came in response to the nerve he had touched, or simply out of pride in a speaker from whose tongue such rhetoric rolled so easily. “We are here—we are here because we are tired now,” King repeated.
Perhaps daunted by the power that was bursting forth from the crowd, King moved quickly to address the pitfalls of a boycott. “Now let us say that we are not here advocating violence,” he said. “We have overcome that.” A man in the crowd shouted, “Repeat that! Repeat that!” “I want it to be known throughout Montgomery and throughout
this nation that we are Christian people,” said King, putting three distinct syllables in “Christian.” “The only weapon that we have in our hands this evening is the weapon of protest.” There was a crisp shout of approval right on the beat of King’s pause. He and the audience moved into a slow trot. “If we were incarcerated behind the iron curtains of a communistic nation—we couldn’t do this. If we were trapped in the dungeon of a totalitarian regime—we couldn’t do this. But the great glory of American democracy is the right to protest for right.” When the shouts of approval died down, King rose up with his final reason to avoid violence, which was to distinguish themselves from their opponents in the Klan and the White Citizens Council. “There will be no crosses burned at any bus stops in Montgomery,” he said. “There will be no white persons pulled out of their homes and taken out on some distant road and murdered. There will be nobody among us who will stand up and defy the Constitution of this nation.”
King paused. The church was quiet but it was humming. “My friends,” he said slowly, “I want it to be known—that we’re going to work with grim and bold determination—to gain justice on the buses in this city. And we are not wrong. We are not wrong in what we are doing.” There was a muffled shout of anticipation, as the crowd sensed that King was moving closer to the heart of his cause. “If we are wrong—the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong,” King sang out. He was rocking now, his voice seeming to be at once deep and high-pitched. “If we are wrong—God Almighty is wrong!” he shouted, and the crowd seemed to explode a second time, as it had done when he said they were tired. Wave after wave of noise broke over them, cresting into the farthest reaches of the ceiling. They were far beyond Rosa Parks or the bus laws. King’s last cry had fused blasphemy to the edge of his faith and the heart of theirs. The noise swelled until King cut through it to move past a point of unbearable tension. “If we are wrong—Jesus of Nazareth was merely a utopian dreamer and never came down to earth! If we are wrong—justice is a lie.” This was too much. He had to wait some time before delivering his soaring conclusion, in a flight of anger mixed with rapture: “And we are determined here in Montgomery—to work and fight until justice runs down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream!” The audience all but smothered this passage from Amos, the lowly herdsman prophet of Israel who, along with the priestly Isaiah, was King’s favorite biblical authority on justice.