Finally, he wrote, “Our purposes are altogether different from those of the White Citizens’ Council. We were using this method to give birth to justice and freedom and also to urge men to comply with the law of the land. Our concern would not be to put the bus company out of business, but to put justice in business. What we were really doing was withdrawing our cooperation from an evil system, rather than merely withdrawing our support from the bus company.”
On the eve of the boycott, I pondered with Martin the pros and cons of the movement long into the night, wondering whether we would succeed. We hardly slept. The next morning, we rose early and were dressed by 5:30 sharp. We woke in anticipation, not knowing what to expect. After having coffee and toast, I planted myself in front of the window to check out the first bus, which was to stop just five feet from our house. At 6:00 a.m., the bus rolled up, right on time, headlights blazing through the December darkness.
“Martin, Martin, come quickly!” I called. He ran in and stood beside me, taking my hand, his face lighting up with excitement. Not one person was on the bus. Then came the next bus. It, too, was empty. This was the most traveled line in the city. We were so happy that we could hardly find words to express our joy.
Everywhere in the city that day, the scenario was the same: sidewalks crowded with men and women trudging to work; students at Alabama State College walking or hitchhiking; people clustered in taxis. Some even rode mules. Others were in horse-drawn buggies, and a few were on bikes. Some people had to make treks as long as twelve miles that day. Never before had I seen such courage and unity in so many, from butlers to schoolteachers, from the maids to the ministers. Truly, as Martin said, “a miracle had taken place.” Instead of the 60 percent cooperation we had hoped for, we reached nearly 100 percent.
The next bombshell was the news Martin brought me that evening about the activities that had happened on day one. Martin and Ralph had attended the 9:30 a.m. trial of Rosa Parks. After the judge heard the arguments, she was found guilty of disobeying the city’s segregation laws and fined fourteen dollars, including court costs. She appealed the case. This was one of the first clear-cut instances in which a black was convicted of disobeying segregation laws. Heretofore, such cases had either been dismissed or those involved had been charged with disorderly conduct. Had the D.A. known that the Parks case would evolve into a test of the validity of segregation laws, and that it would fuel the protest, I am sure they would have dismissed the case.
Later that afternoon, Martin went to a meeting with E. D. Nixon, Ralph Abernathy, and other organizers. Much to Martin’s surprise, when he walked into the meeting, he was quickly named president of the Montgomery Improvement Association, with the understanding that the organization would continue the boycott until certain demands were met.
When I heard the news, I wondered aloud: Why Martin? Maybe because he was new in town, maybe because others already had important assignments. (Ralph had been made chairman of the committee and was asked to draw up its demands.) In any event, here was Martin, home at six o’clock, confronting a stack of messages because the phone had been ringing all day in support of our cause. He updated me, telling me very hesitantly about his new position. I didn’t need to be told of the danger that loomed ahead for any black person who stood up for his or her rights. Nevertheless, I reassured him: “You know that whatever you do, I am with you.”
Martin went off to his study to work on his address for the mass meeting that night at Holt Street Baptist Church. He had only twenty minutes to prepare for what he told me would be the most decisive speech of his life. Reporters and news cameras would be there to send his words around the world, and he confided to me that for a moment he almost panicked at the thought of what he was about to do. Beating back fear with prayer, Martin asked God to restore his balance and “to be with me in a time when I need your guidance more than ever.”
Martin and Ralph had been debating whether the press would call their efforts a failure if only five hundred people showed up that night, only half-filling the thousand-seat church. But when they got within five blocks of the church, they encountered a traffic jam. Cars were everywhere: in yards, parked on sidewalks. It looked as though someone were having a party. As they pressed their way in, they found about a thousand people in the church and about four thousand more milling around outside, a response that was much more than Martin and I could ever have imagined.
When Martin and Ralph approached, someone saw them and announced that they were in the house. The crowd started applauding politely, then wildly. The space was so jammed that people had to lift Ralph and Martin above the crowd and pass them from hand to hand over the heads of the crowd and to the platform.
Opening an hour and a half late, the program started with “Onward Christian Soldiers,” which literally sounded like a five-thousand-voice battle cry. When Martin was introduced, a cry went up. The cameras clicked. Without manuscript or notes, Martin retold the story of Mrs. Parks and reviewed the long history of abuses and insults that Negro citizens had experienced on city buses. He told the audience that there comes a time “when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression.” He pleaded for unity: “It is the great need of the hour.” He cautioned against fear: “Don’t let anyone frighten you. We are not afraid of what we are doing because we are doing it within the law.” He refuted the press’s inappropriate comparisons between the movement and the Klan: “There will be no crosses burned at any bus stops in Montgomery. There will be no white persons pulled out of their homes and taken out on some distant road and lynched for not cooperating.” He reiterated that ours was a Christian movement: “In all of our doings, in all of our deliberations … whatever we do, we must keep God at the forefront”; “Love is one of the pivotal points of the Christian face, faith. There is another side called justice. And justice is really love in calculation. Justice is love correcting that which revolts against love.” He closed the speech by saying, “As we prepare ourselves for what lies ahead, let us go with a grim and bold determination that we are going to stick together. We are going to work together. Right here in Montgomery, when the history books are written in the future, someone will say, ‘There lived a people, a black people, fleecy locks and black complexion, a people who had the moral courage to stand up for their rights and thereby they injected a new meaning into the veins of history and of civilization.’”
As Martin finished speaking, the audience rose, cheering in exaltation. And in that speech, Martin laid the spiritual foundation, set the moral tone, and provided a model of courage for the movement that was born in Montgomery that very night. As Martin himself concluded that day, “the real victory was in the mass meeting, where thousands of black people stood revealed with a new sense of dignity and destiny.”
Since I was under doctor’s orders to remain at home following the birth of Yoki, I could not attend the meeting. However, Martin and I knew that the speech he would deliver would probably be one of the most important of his life, so I arranged ahead of time to have it taped. In retrospect, I believe that night in 1955, the seed for the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change was planted in my mind. What happened in Montgomery would eventually become a living model for future generations, through an institution that would preserve and grow Martin’s vision.
I suppose I have always had a feel for history. It’s a gift my mother had. Martin was too busy racing around, preaching, and being at the forefront to record his efforts. I remember telling myself that the life Martin and I were living was important and that, just maybe, people might someday want to know what was said and done. I knew I could not depend upon most of the mainstream press to record these events accurately; I often agonized over the ways they mangled the truth.
So, beginning with Martin’s first mass address, which officially launched the Montgomery Bus Boycott, I started saving his speeches, his papers, and all other memorabilia. Of course, this makes sense in retrospect, but back then,
I thought that if we who are living these events don’t document our story, whom could we depend upon to be the truth tellers, to pass on accurate information to the next generation? Who would teach them, motivate them? Would the next generation understand what we were doing when we ourselves were young people if we didn’t pass on our story?
Of course, that night, December 5, 1955, I envisioned passing our story to the next generation as something Martin and I would work on together. And of course, on that night, victory was far away. The struggle was just beginning. Yet, we could see that black people were being empowered. A change had come. We were willing to walk the streets in dignity rather than ride buses in shame. Despite mass jailings, bombing of homes and churches, firings, and slander in the press, we would not cooperate with injustice. We kept on walking, and walking, and walking—for 381 days.
On January 20, 1956, Montgomery city leaders announced a “get tough” policy in a desperate attempt to stop the boycott. “Get tough” amounted to a series of trumped-up charges for imaginary traffic violations, intended to put fear in the hearts of the protesters. Martin was among the first to go to jail that day.
The whole episode started when my husband and Robert “Bob” Williams, Martin’s former schoolmate at Morehouse College, who was teaching music at Alabama State College, drove downtown to pick up Mrs. Lillie Thomas, the church secretary of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. At the edge of the parking lot, a policeman stopped Martin and asked to see his license. As Martin was showing it, someone overheard another policeman say, “It’s that damn King fellow.” When Martin stopped to let his passengers out, a policeman pulled up and said, “Get out, King. You’re under arrest for going thirty miles in a twenty-five-mile zone.” Martin told Williams to drive on and notify me. Meanwhile, after two policemen searched him from top to bottom, they put Martin in the back of the car and drove off.
I was at church when one of the church sisters came running up to me. “Mrs. King, Mrs. King, they got him. They’ve arrested Dr. King. Please do something.” My heart sank, and a sense of indescribable agony gripped me. I knew that Martin, who had to help others relinquish their fears, was struggling with his own personal fear of being alone in jail. This was the South, the cradle of the Confederacy, and the stomping grounds of the KKK. It was not unusual for a policeman also to be a Klansman. Martin and I knew that not every black person arrested made it home alive. Later, when Martin told me about this experience, he described the sense of panic he felt come over him when the police car appeared to be taking him in the opposite direction from the jail.
“I thought the jail was in the downtown section, yet we were going in a different direction,” he told me. “The more we rode, the farther we were from the center of town. Pretty soon we turned into a dark and dingy street that I had never seen before and headed over a desolate old bridge. By this time, I was convinced that they were carrying me to some faraway spot to dump me off. I began to wonder whether they were driving me out to some waiting mob, planning to use the excuse later on that they had been overpowered. I found myself trembling within and without. I asked God to give me the strength to endure whatever came.”
Yet the police drove on to the police station, and ushered Martin into a dingy, smelly cell. A big iron door shut behind him. He later told me that, as it dawned on him that, for the first time in his life, he was behind bars, gusts of emotion swept through him like cold winds on an open prairie.
For me, the hours that Martin was behind bars seemed like days. While he went to jail physically, I went to jail emotionally. Just as he in his imprisonment could not get out, I felt the same way: imprisoned outside, since I could not get in to be with him and share in his suffering. But there was no time for tears. Immediately, I helped get the word out. Later that afternoon, Martin was released on his own recognizance, apparently because as soon as word of his arrest spread, so many friends and well-wishers congregated at the jail that his jailers wanted to be rid of him. It seemed that virtually every black person in town had either come to the jail or was at one of five mass meetings being held around town, to pray for him.
When Martin was released, he spoke at each of those five meetings. It had been the aim of the authorities to discredit Martin. However, his followers saw his release as a direct answer to their prayers, a blessing that only made him more of a hero in their eyes.
Later that night, when Martin and I were alone, I did not tell him of my deep pain, my feeling of utter helplessness during those hours when I couldn’t hear from him. I never let on how deeply it hurt me to see him in the hands of people who meant him harm, or how, for the first time, I had to reflect on the possibility that he could be taken from me and our infant daughter. I agonized over how unbearable life would be without him. I did not share these feelings. Instead, I listened to his story and encouraged him. Later, when he told his account of the jailing, he said, “As usual, Coretta gave me the reassurance that can come only from one who is as close to you as your own heartbeat.” These are words that I never stopped cherishing.
Shortly after Martin was released from jail, however, the hate calls to our home increased, keeping me awake and turning me into an insomniac. The threats and the prevalent danger depressed us both. One night, at a mass meeting, Martin found himself saying, “If one day you find me sprawled and dead, I do not want you to retaliate with a single act of violence. I urge you to continue protesting with the same dignity and discipline you have shown so far.”
On another day, Martin came home feeling very weary. He looked at me and the baby and worried aloud that we might be taken from each other at any time. In the middle of the night, an angry phone caller warned, “Nigger, we’ve taken all we want from you. Before next week you’ll be sorry you ever came to Montgomery.” One Saturday, I received forty abusive and threatening calls. I admit I did not always respond with a nonviolent demeanor. One of the early morning hecklers chided me for taking the telephone off the hook. “It’s my phone, and I’ll do what I like with it,” I answered angrily. In the background, Martin prompted, “Oh, darling, don’t talk like that. Be nice. Be kind.”
The phone harassment became so heated that Martin told his congregation, “If you call and you cannot get through, it is because we take the phone off the hook at night. It’s the only way we can get any rest.” One night, after I had fallen asleep, Martin answered another angry call. Later he told me that, at that moment, it seemed he just couldn’t take any more. He slipped out of bed to make himself some coffee, but something stopped him in his tracks. He sat down at the kitchen table, put his head in his hands, and bowed his head. He began to pray aloud. “Dear God, I am taking a stand for what I believe is right. The people are looking to me for leadership, and if I stand before them without strength and courage, they will falter. I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left. I’ve come to the point where I can’t face it alone.”
At that moment, when he could go no further on his own power, Martin felt a sudden dramatic shift. He told me, “I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never experienced it before. It seemed as though I could hear the quiet assurance of an inner voice saying, ‘Stand up for righteousness, stand up for truth, and God will be at your side forever.’”
That voice was right, because eventually, of course, we won. On November 13, 1956, the Supreme Court declared Alabama’s state and local laws requiring segregation on buses unconstitutional. This was a landmark verdict. While the Court’s decision and its long-standing merits now take up volumes in law libraries, a more difficult story to tell is the effect on the human spirit, which will last even longer.
On December 20, the bus integration order finally reached Montgomery. After 381 days of determined protest, we could once again ride city buses. And for the first time since almost anyone could remember, we could sit where we wanted to and ride with dignity.
The next morning, Martin became one of the first passengers to ride the desegregated buses. Rosa Parks, Ralph Abernathy, E.
D. Nixon, and the Rev. Glenn Smiley (who was white) of the Fellowship of Reconciliation all joined him, gathering in my living room beforehand in preparation to take their place in history.
Right on time, at 5:55 a.m., the bus flashed its lights as it rolled up to the bus stop. How normal that looks today! On that day, though, its appearance was fraught with the dangers one might expect from taking off to be the first to land on the moon. As the lights from TV cameras flooded the bus, a smiling bus driver said, “I believe you are Dr. King.”
Martin said, “Yes, I am.”
“We’re glad to have you with us this morning,” the driver said.
It’s hard to describe the emotions—exhilaration, pride, hope—that washed over us all as we boarded that bus.
Before 1956 came to a close, I was able to move from a supportive to a major role as fund-raiser for the Montgomery Improvement Association. Activists Bayard Rustin, Stan Levison, and Ella Baker founded a group called In Friendship, which raised funds for victims of economic reprisals in the South. They put on a big benefit concert at the Manhattan Center in New York City on December 5, 1956, to mark the first anniversary of the start of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Ruth Bunche, wife of Ralph Bunche, who was U.N. undersecretary general for special political affairs, and “Minnie” Wilkins, the wife of the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins, were among the honorary chairs.
I was the featured performer among the great stars, such as Harry Belafonte and Duke Ellington, who performed that night at the jam-packed center. It was a frightening and humbling experience. First, I sang a program of classical music, and then I told the story of Montgomery. Weaving spirituals and freedom songs into the narration I had written, I spoke of the oppression suffered by many people throughout the ages and said that God had always sent deliverers to them, as He had sent Moses to the children of Israel. “Today God still speaks to the modern Pharaohs to ‘Let My People Go,’” I said. “It was one year ago today, on December 5, 1955, that the cradle of political, economic and social injustice began rocking slowly but surely. For a year we have walked in dignity rather than ride in humiliation. As we walked to and from our jobs, we sang a song to give us moral support.”
My Life, My Love, My Legacy Page 8