When we moved, I told Martin, “I will make myself happy in Montgomery. You perfect your preaching and improve yourself in the ministry, and I will learn to be a good minister’s wife”—which I did. I taught Sunday school and sang in the choir, using my formal musical training to make it one of the finest choirs in Montgomery. I also had the opportunity to appear in concert in several churches and at gatherings in surrounding towns, such as Shiloh Baptist Church in Brunswick, Georgia. Meanwhile, Martin divided his efforts between completing his dissertation and performing his church duties, rising daily at five-thirty to write and returning to it late at night. The remainder of the day was given over to church work: visiting the sick, officiating at marriages and funerals, and of course preparing the Sunday sermon.
Despite my intentions to carve out a low-key role as a pastor’s wife, my role quickly evolved into more of a collaborative partnership with Martin. I began typing, listening, critiquing, and helping him prepare his sermons, something I continued to do throughout our married life. He would start his preparation around Monday. By Saturday, he would have the sermon written out word for word, and he would memorize it. He had a photographic memory, so he would go to the pulpit on Sunday and preach without notes. But in preparing the sermons, he would sometimes give me the subject matter and say, “Now what would you call my first point?” Of course I would think of something. Sometimes he would incorporate my suggestion into his sermon. Then he would rephrase it and go on to the next two points. Most of his sermons were three-point sermons. I felt very much involved in what he was doing.
As I worked with Martin’s sermons and watched him preach, I grew to understand that he had the hand of God upon him. Before he mounted the sacred desk (the pulpit), he stood in the presence of God. Martin’s sermons did much more than present a catchy title, a nice theme, or a message perfect in syntax and elocution. He spoke prophetically, bringing into existence images and a destiny we had not seen or lived before. It was his calling to help usher in the age of a new Negro, someone with starch in his or her backbone, someone with concern for others, regardless of the obstacles. Unlike sermons by the preachers I heard growing up, Martin’s sermons were not escapist. They did not call upon the listeners to look for salvation of their souls while their minds and bodies experienced the agony of disrespect and the terror of trying to live as less than what the Bible says they were, persons “made in the image of God.”
One of his sermons, “Loving Your Enemies,” was built on many private discussions we had about Gandhian nonviolence and the power of Jesus’s love to change minds, hearts, and behavior. Martin had to teach this concept, pound away at it continually and consistently, because nonviolence had to become a habit, a way of life for a people who would be commissioned to stand unarmed before terrorists with guns and bombs.
As I listened to Martin, I had to gird myself with the sense of his reasoning. In the beginning, I don’t think I was as committed to nonviolence as he was. I was committed to pacifism, which means not cooperating with evil, but I was not ready to confront violence head-on with nonviolence, as Martin conceptualized. I had to grow into that. I don’t believe any of us is born with an innate ability to effectively respond to violent situations nonviolently. Too often, we respond by doing nothing at all, and resign ourselves to live with oppression, which is wrong because, as Martin said, “non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as cooperation with good.” Or we meet violence with violence, creating more social problems and leaving a bitter legacy for the next generations. Martin’s ideology demanded that we confront violence in faith and love, which sometimes means moving directly into the line of fire. That is a call to pick up the Cross of Jesus, to follow Him and be prepared to die.
In Martin’s sermons, I saw how he prepared the congregation for a time when they would have to act upon the words he was instilling in their souls. In one sermon, he preached that “the way to be integrated with yourself is to be sure that you meet every situation of life with an abounding love. Never hate, because it ends up in tragic, neurotic responses.… There is a final reason I think that Jesus says, ‘Love your enemies.’ It is this: that love has within it a redemptive power. And there is a power there that eventually transforms individuals. That’s why Jesus says ‘Love your enemies.’ Because if you hate your enemies, you have no way to redeem and to transform [them].… Even though they’re mistreating you … keep on loving them … just keep loving them and they can’t stand it too long. Oh, they react in many ways in the beginning. They react with guilt feelings and sometimes they’ll hate you a little more at the transition period, but just keep loving them. And by the power of love, they will break down under the load. That’s love, you see. It is redemptive, and this is why Jesus says love. There is something about love that builds you up and is creative. There is something about hate that tears down and is destructive. So love your enemies.”
It was incredibly affirming to see Martin excelling in his role as pastor. In addition to this, and to being welcomed into a vibrant church community, our move to Montgomery was made more enjoyable because of the friendship we formed with Ralph Abernathy and his wife, Juanita. Ralph had come to hear Martin preach at Ebenezer in Atlanta when he, Ralph, was a graduate student at Atlanta University. When Martin was considering coming to Dexter, he called Ralph, a passionate preacher on social justice, who at the time had moved on to pastor First Baptist Church in Montgomery. Once we moved to Montgomery, the Abernathys invited us to dinner. A friendship took off from there.
That spring, as we continued to settle into our lives in Montgomery, two wonderful things happened. After years of intensive study, Martin was awarded his PhD in systematic theology from Boston University, and I discovered I was pregnant. It seemed our lives were becoming complete. We both had our degrees, and we were starting a family. Martin had always said he wanted eight children. After thinking it over, I offered a compromise of four. We were on our way.
During my pregnancy, Martin was particularly attentive. As many first-time parents do, we worried that something could go wrong, but on November 17, 1955, our little girl, Yolanda (“Yoki”) Denise, was born. She was a big, healthy baby, weighing nine pounds, eleven and one-half ounces. Martin had wanted a son, but he was just as elated to have a daughter. She was born in St. Jude’s Hospital, a Catholic institution that was the only hospital in Montgomery where blacks were treated with a modicum of respect. St. Jude’s kept blacks and whites segregated unless the hospital became overcrowded. Then the racial ban was disregarded, and babies could take their first breath as equals—at least for a moment.
In the segregated South, there was something about giving birth, especially for the first time, that tore at your heart, forcing you to confront painful realities. You want to protect your children, to keep them from having to experience the same hardships you’ve suffered. Somehow you want the muck and mire cleaned up, so they won’t be forced to slush through it. As I held my baby Yoki, so tiny and vulnerable, so beautiful, I reflected on some of my yesterdays and wondered aloud if those same harsh realities awaited her. One day, when she was walking to school in her nice clean dress with matching ribbons, would yellow school buses filled with jeering white children maliciously splash mud on her little dress, as they had done to mine? In their ignorance, would the whites hurl vile names at her? My little girl! How could I protect her from the evils of inhumanity?
My private thoughts about the birth of my firstborn were a soliloquy, spoken to no one but God. Yet it appeared that God must have been listening. In less than two weeks, a seamstress and NAACP secretary named Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus, and we began a movement that would become our life’s work. Soon, answers would come to the very questions pouring out of my soul—and not only answers. God appeared to have appointed Martin and me, and those who would answer the call, to become the messengers.
FIVE
Time Itself Was Ready
NOTHING HAPPENS IN a vacuum, and e
specially not the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Not only did Mrs. Parks, my husband, and all the other protagonists have to be in place, but the social and atmospheric forces had to be right. There had been a shift in the political landscape, a buildup of climatic changes, almost like the moments before a rainstorm, when you can sense the thunder and smell the chill before the lightning flash. From afar, we heard the thunder rolling in.
There was the case of Brown v. Board of Education in Topeka, Kansas. Through the hard work of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, headed by Thurgood Marshall, and the appointment of Justice Earl Warren to the Supreme Court, virtually fifty years of legal degradation ended in 1954, when the Court reversed its ancient, unworkable opinion that “separate but equal” educational facilities met the requirements of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Marshall’s team put in thousands of hours of legwork, wearing out shoe leather and making financial sacrifices, traveling and interviewing, to prove to white folks what black folks had always known: imposed segregation by the majority falls unequally and tyrannically upon the minority.
Finally, it seemed as though the Court, if not on our side, could at least understand the injustices and indignities perpetrated on black Americans in America, their homeland. After a blackout of more than fifty years, it appeared that the highest court was once again on the side of justice. A breath of freedom was stirring in the land. Although, for a while, it looked like nothing different was happening in Montgomery, at least there was an upsurge of hope. Maybe, just maybe, blacks were not to be locked into degradation forever.
Then, on December 1, 1955, the quiet and dignified Rosa Parks, a forty-two-year-old seamstress who had been trained at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, a training ground for labor organizers, was arrested when she refused the driver’s request to move to the back of the bus. The response from the black community was disciplined outrage, demonstrated by an unprecedented 381-day boycott.
But the question in my mind as I looked back over the years was: Why then?
There had been other women arrested before Mrs. Parks. For example, in March 1955, fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin refused to give up her seat to a white passenger. The enraged driver called a policeman. Several showed up, and the officers ordered Colvin to get up. When she refused, they dragged her kicking and screaming hysterically off the bus, and she was carted off to jail, where she was charged with misconduct and resisting arrest. Her case was widely discussed in black circles. At that time, Martin served on a committee that protested to the city and bus company officials. The committee was received politely, but nothing happened.
Further, the jailing of Mrs. Parks, who was also a volunteer secretary for the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP, was hardly one of the worst abuses by the buses, whose brutal segregated system had existed for half a century. Documented reports by the Women’s Political Council (WPC), a group of politically active black women that had been working for change since the 1940s, showed hundreds of complaints against the bus company. There had been a mother who boarded a bus with two small infants in her arms. Since there were no whites on the bus, she placed the two babies on the empty front seat while she searched in her purse for a dime. The horrified driver demanded that the “black dirty brats” be removed from the seat reserved for whites; to back up his demand, he lunged the bus forward with such a terrific jerk that the infants were thrown into the aisle. In another instance, a mentally defective but harmless black man was severely beaten by a bus driver for walking in front of a bus. In 1952 an intoxicated black man argued with a bus driver over whether he had put a dime into the slot. When the police came upon the scene, they shot and killed the man as he climbed off the bus. The authorities ruled the shooting of the unarmed black man “justifiable homicide.”
In fact, the northern-owned Montgomery Bus Line was the most potent, degrading symbol of southern segregation in the town. Although 70 percent of its passengers were black, the system was operated so as to make blacks feel less than human. Imagine what it was like to get on a Montgomery bus with your children.
Not only had there been worse atrocities than the Parks incident, but other leaders had challenged the bus company. Rev. Vernon Johns called on blacks to confront them. When no one would take the dare, Johns stopped riding. It was a long-standing theme of the Women’s Political Council that blacks should boycott the bus company. The cause had been there; the agony had been there; the leaders had been there. After a half century of pain and humiliation, why did December 5, 1955, become the day that the Montgomery Bus Boycott finally began? Why did the cries of “We have taken this long enough” soar through the black community with the power of a national anthem? It was as if every tear, every groan, every hurt had been stored up somewhere, and Rosa Parks’s arrest was the last indignity. The dam burst. The flow of agony ran over with such force that it submerged fear, mistrust, doubt, and all the previous beliefs that social conditions existing for decades would continue unchecked. As a result, the desire to stand tall, to be confident in times of trouble, surfaced. It was as if souls were being liberated.
But the boycott could also be credited to something Martin used to call the “divine dimension.” At the January 30, 1956, mass meeting, two months into the boycott, he said, “There comes a time when time itself is ready for a change,” he offered. Often, he would point to the Zeitgeist as being responsible for the birth of the movement. The leaders do not ask for the task, but are tracked down by the spirit of the times until it consumes them; they reach a point where they become the symbol of both the disaffected and the movement swirling around them. It was the spirit of the times that tracked Martin, coupled with the Holy Spirit that motivated, inspired, and directed him. He became that lead symbol. From black barbershops and beauty shops to Negro schools and Alabama State University, the cry was the same.
On Friday, December 2, 1955, in response to Parks’s arrest, E. D. Nixon, a fiery local civil rights leader, called Martin. By then, Nixon was echoing what many black people in Montgomery were feeling. “We have taken this type of thing too long,” he said. “I feel the time has come to boycott the buses. It’s the only way to make the white folks see that we will not take this sort of thing any longer.”
Martin offered his church, Dexter, as a meeting place to discuss the idea of a boycott. To his delight, forty leaders showed up, representing every segment of African American life. There were doctors, lawyers, union leaders, federal government employees, and a great number of ministers. The ministers were important because of their influence on their congregations, of course, but their presence also showed a meeting of the minds with Martin and Ralph, who had been preaching the social gospel that religion had to deal not only with heaven, but with the hell playing out on earth.
The decision was unanimous. Yes, they would boycott. From that very first meeting, the Christian ministry provided the leadership of our struggle, and Christian ideals were its source.
* * *
THE SATURDAY BEFORE the boycott, Martin and other members of the committee hurried about, working out details with black-owned taxi companies and owners of private cars, who would help transport people to and from work. Although I could not leave Yoki to help outside our home, our house initially served as a command post for the new group, which came to be named the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), and it was my responsibility to answer the telephone, which rang incessantly. People needed directions and encouragement. I also cooked the meals for the continuous meetings.
During the boycott, some of the strategy was planned at my dinner table. Very often, I sat in on the meetings as part of the inner circle. Juanita Abernathy and the other ministers’ wives and I often served as conduits between the press, the movement volunteers and staff, and our husbands, relieving some of the stress, which built constantly from all directions. Eventually people from across the country and from many foreign countries made their way to our home to become a part of the Montgomery movement.
Far too much
of the valuable role that women played in the Montgomery movement and other such efforts has been lost to history. It should be remembered that it was Jo Ann Gibson Robinson, an English professor at Alabama State College and then-president of the Women’s Political Council, who put in place a plan for a citywide bus boycott more than a year before Mrs. Parks’s arrest. Robinson and Mary Fair Burks, who was equally fervid, helped create and sustain the climate that supported the 1955 boycott. Robinson and her team played multiple roles during the boycott. She drove six hours a day for the car pool, helped shape policy as a member of the Montgomery Improvement Association’s executive board, and played a central role in the start of the protest by producing and distributing thousands of leaflets announcing the boycott. Myriad other women were involved as well, making phone calls, organizing, hosting bake sales to raise funds, and so on. Women as old as eighty went to jail.
One of our first challenges was determining how to reach the fifty thousand black people in Montgomery, a problem that, much to our delight, was solved by one of the biggest enemies of our efforts: the white press. A white woman found one of our leaflets, which her maid had left in the kitchen. The enraged woman telephoned the local press to expose what her servant was up to, and their coverage spread the word better than we ever could have.
As the countdown continued on Sunday morning, almost every African American pastor in town urged his parishioners to honor the boycott. Not surprisingly, the news media mounted a fervent case against us. One morning paper wrote an article accusing the NAACP of planting Mrs. Parks on the bus, and likened the boycott to the tactics of the White Citizens’ Council, a white supremacist group that had formed in 1954. These accusations really upset Martin. Instead of slinging off the comparisons, he struggled with the ethical question of whether he was doing the right thing. Alone in his study, he paced back and forth, caught up in self-examination.
My Life, My Love, My Legacy Page 7