Becoming King

by Troy Jackson

  In October, King offered his annual report to his Dexter congregation. He thanked the church for its “willingness to share me with the nation. Through the force of circumstance, I was catapulted into the leadership of a movement that has succeeded in capturing the imagination of people all over this nation and the world.” The ramifications of King’s frequent absences from the city led him to confess that “almost every week—having to make so many speeches, attend so many meetings, meet so many people, write so many articles, council with so many groups—I face the frustration of feeling that in the midst of so many things to do I am not doing anything well.” King expressed his appreciation for the ongoing support of Dexter as evidenced in not complaining when some tasks were left undone, providing support when he and his family faced physical danger, and encouraging him when opponents sought to tear him down.19

  King also continued to challenge his congregation to live out Jesus’ command to love one’s enemies. Because the practice of genuine concern for the well-being of one’s opponents seemed so alien to human nature, he told the people of Dexter they could expect to hear about this topic at least once a year. Although a year later King would publish an essay titled “My Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” in this sermon he referred to love for enemies rather than nonviolence as his “basic philosophical and theological orientation.” He encouraged his audience to remember “that love has within it a redemptive power” and advocated looking into the eyes of every person in Alabama and around the nation and saying, “I love you. I would rather die than hate you.” He maintained the belief that “through the power of this love somewhere men of the most recalcitrant bent will be transformed. And then we will be in God’s kingdom.” For King, the language and tactics of nonviolence became a vehicle to express a more consistent and enduring commitment to the radical love ethic found in the teachings of Jesus.20

  An MIA newsletter penned by Jo Ann Robinson demonstrated the difficulty of embodying genuine love for one’s enemies in Montgomery. Although she recognized that both races seemed to have accepted integrated buses in Montgomery, Robinson also acknowledged that the MIA faced “a dark future just now, with some conditions getting worse, with no obvious efforts on the part of proper authorities to inaugurate ‘the equalization plan’ in their so-called separate-but-equal doctrine.” Several events led to Robinson’s negative assessment, including a gerrymandering of nearby Tuskegee that had resulted in nearly twenty-seven thousand blacks being zoned out of the city limits, preventing them from voting in local elections. In Montgomery, city architects had recently designed a $900,000 library for whites while only allotting $100,000 for a branch library for blacks. The city failed to provide adequate park and recreation facilities for Montgomery’s African American community. Robinson also noted the recent arrest of Fred Gray for sitting in the white section of the Montgomery Airport, the recent firings of African American employees from grocery stores and as truck drivers, and the stiff resistance by election officials when blacks attempted to register to vote.21

  Although the MIA failed to gain any real traction in 1957, they went ahead with their “Institute on Nonviolence and Social Change” on the second anniversary of the boycott’s commencement. King offered a keynote address titled “Some Things We Must Do.” In his opening comments, King applauded the corporate commitment of Montgomery’s African American community, noting over the past year he had received more than sixty awards, but “the award really should be duplicated in about fifty thousand awards. Montgomery is not a drama with one actor, but it is a drama with fifty thousand actors, each playing their parts amazingly well.” After offering appreciation to fellow clergy and his wife, Coretta, King took a moment to thank the members of Dexter who “haven’t had much of a pastor the last two years” but did not complain as “they had the vision to see that this struggle is bigger than Montgomery. And they have been willing to share me with this nation and with the world.” King had dedicated more and more time beyond the local community, traveling nearly every week. While the local struggle frayed at the edges, he found appreciative national audiences eager to hear his speeches and contribute to the cause of civil rights. King had found that sometimes the bigger, broader, more idealistic struggles were easier to fight than the tedious, slow, grassroots struggles of the local community. Significantly, in a speech on how the community should proceed, he avoided identifying specific local initiatives. King naturally gravitated to issues and battles that were “bigger than Montgomery.”22

  Reporter Trezzvant W. Anderson of the prominent black newspaper the Pittsburgh Courier wrote a series of articles on the situation in Montgomery a year after the boycott’s completion. His first article argued that press coverage of the boycott had “projected into a position of world eminence … a young Georgia-born Negro minister, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., who was named to head the movement strictly by force of circumstances and not by any planned action.” Anderson claimed the “real dynamo” that launched the protest was Nixon, who had been “the true leader of Montgomery’s Negroes over a span of a quarter century.” According to Anderson, King’s international prominence had resulted in “some deep scars on Montgomery Negroes. There are scars which will never be healed in our lifetime, all growing out of that unfortunate imbalance which disregards the sacrifices and toils of all and focuses on one individual while others work hard, if not harder.”23

  Anderson also questioned the true objectives of the protest. In an interview, King told Anderson that the boycott “cannot be said to have had a purpose in the sense that it was planned from the beginning to achieve a certain end. It is easy to see and understand this when one remembers that the MIA is a ‘spontaneous outgrowth’ from a precipitant incident—the arrest of Mrs. Rosa Parks. The protest continued as an expression of the dissatisfaction among Negroes for the discourteous treatment which they received in a system which allowed them to be segregated against.” King also reflected that “the movement took on a characteristic of love for one’s enemies and non-violent resistance which captured the imagination of men throughout the world. The purpose from this moment on was to stand firm before the world and before God with a calm and dignity of person that is unquestionably Christian.” Anderson compared King’s vague objectives with the three demands the MIA made at the beginning of the boycott: seating on a first-come, first-served basis, with blacks beginning at the back and whites at the front of the bus; drivers treating all passengers with courtesy; and the hiring of black bus drivers for primarily African American bus routes. The city still did not have black bus drivers a full year after the end of the boycott. On the positive side, Anderson emphasized the MIA’s successful carpool program “which cost the MIA approximately $1,000 a day to operate. It was effective as an economic weapon in that it caused the bus company to lose $2,000 a day for over a year.”24

  In his next article, Anderson discussed the circumstances surrounding Rosa Parks’s decision to leave Montgomery. He charged that the MIA, which received thousands of dollars from around the nation and the world, “failed to sustain and nourish the woman who had caused it all!” While the MIA hired a personal secretary for King at $62.50 a week and paid $5,000 annually to Mose Pleasure to serve as the executive secretary of the organization, they failed to offer office work to Parks, who had extensive experience as a secretary with the NAACP. He also insinuated that the MIA had focused almost exclusively on King’s plight while ignoring the trials of other local leaders including Nixon, who told Anderson that “they bombed my house too, but you never heard anything about it…. They didn’t put any lights around my house” as they did King’s after his home was bombed. Anderson charged that the leaders of the MIA became enamored with publicity: “In Montgomery the theme grew to such a proportion that if one of the MIA leaders went down to the corner he had to do it to the accompaniment of a press conference.”25

  The series unearthed the lack of economic development for many African Americans in the wake of the boycott. Anderson
stressed that the MIA had not delivered on a promised credit union to aid the city’s African American citizens. He also exposed the difficult financial situation facing many of those who had sacrificed most. Although they could now ride on integrated buses, many could not find employment as a result of white backlash propagated by the White Citizens Council. Many black laborers “were feeling the pinch, and there seemed to be no help for them.”26

  An attempt by the MIA to discredit the series appeared in the December 7 edition of the Pittsburgh Courier, when Lawrence Dunbar Reddick claimed the articles were “based upon false assumptions and filled with insinuations and inaccuracies. The main false assumption is that the test of the success of the Montgomery movement is to be found in what it has done for the Negro community of this city.” Had those who had both endured the indignity of segregated buses and sacrificed most during the yearlong protest been aware of Reddick’s views, they might have been befuddled. While not opposed to being an inspiration to others around the nation, they would have been troubled by the assertion that the true impact and effectiveness of the boycott was demonstrated by its “positive national and international effect, far more significant than any local effects.” Although Reddick acknowledged that Montgomery had improved as a result of the boycott, his views must have felt like a slap in the face to the foot soldiers of the movement.27

  Despite Reddick’s public relations on behalf of the MIA’s leadership, the series continued with an exploration of the employment challenges facing many working-class people in the city. Anderson cited King’s response to suspicions of a job squeeze against local African Americans: “We are helping these people as much as we can and piecing together the information and evidence that we can put our fingers on in the hope that we will find some clear-cut case to handle in this regard. We are certain that some elements in the white community are using punitive economic measures against Negroes, but we can only serve in a relief capacity to these persons until we can establish the economic discrimination as a fact.” While King recognized the problem and was attempting to provide assistance to those most affected, there was no real strategy by the MIA to address the economic injustices that continued to affect the daily lives of many African Americans in the city. Although the conclusion to Anderson’s series included qualified praise for one day of door-to-door registration efforts by MIA leaders, he concluded with a stinging critique: “Frankly, this was the only positive action I observed or learned about at the MIA headquarters, except for the 10-point program outlined for the organization.”28

  King did not exert significant energy in Montgomery to try to silence the critics of the MIA. Instead he devoted the early part of 1958 to the SCLC’s Crusade for Citizenship, an effort to urge “every Negro in the South to register to vote.” Following an executive meeting of the organization in late January, King offered a list of talking points on the campaign for SCLC speakers and members. The memorandum described the goals of the effort as doubling the number of African American voters in the South while also “liberating all Southerners, Negro and white, to extend democracy in our great nation.” On the birthday of Abraham Lincoln, the SCLC launched their voting registration campaign in twenty-one cities throughout the South. In a keynote address for a rally in Miami, King cited the fight for women’s suffrage as an example of the kind of struggle and persistence needed to gain the vote. Determined to make their “intentions crystal clear,” King announced: “We must and we will be free. We want freedom now. We want the right to vote now. We do not want freedom fed to us in teaspoons over another 150 years. Under God we were born free. Misguided men robbed us of our freedom. We want it back, we would keep it forever.”29

  While King continued to travel on behalf of the SCLC’s Crusade for Citizenship, challenges in Montgomery continued. In March 1958, King responded to E. D. Nixon’s letter from a few months earlier in which he had officially resigned as treasurer of the MIA. In his November letter, Nixon had charged King and Abernathy with not following through on commitments made the previous summer: “You both agreed on some of the points raised by me, and promised to correct them. To date nothing has been done about it.” King’s letter acknowledged Nixon’s resignation and expressed his thanks “for the very fine service you have rendered to the Association since its inception.” King ended the letter acknowledging “the support you have given me all along. Let us continue together in the great struggle ahead.” Dexter deacon Robert D. Nesbitt Sr. later surmised that Nixon left the MIA because he felt he was “lost in the turn of events and receiving too little attention.” While Nixon’s desire for greater publicity played a role in his enmity with King, he was also frustrated with the lack of continuity on the ground in Montgomery. He was concerned that a largely symbolic victory over segregation had overshadowed more significant economic needs in his hometown. Nixon would remain frustrated with the outcomes of the boycott for the rest of his days.30

  Although his relationship with Nixon remained tense, King learned a great deal from the outspoken Pullman porter. At pivotal moments during the boycott, King listened to Nixon’s voice above all others. It was Nixon who challenged all MIA leaders to have the conviction and fortitude to be publicly identified with the new organization when the boycott began. Inspired by Nixon’s strong words, King immediately agreed. Less than two months later, as the MIA leaders contemplated settling for a compromise with city leaders, Nixon spoke plainly that he would not agree with any attempt to sell out the people. Again King sided with Nixon, noting that the people are “willing to walk,” and any compromise would not reflect the desires of the community. King also learned how to try to work with an internal critic who disagreed with aspects of his leadership. Nixon was not the last outspoken idealist who would both challenge and frustrate King. In future years, Fred Shuttlesworth, Ella Baker, and Stokely Carmichael would offer similar challenges. King’s experiences with Nixon helped prepare him for future internal conflicts. Nixon exemplified the type of tireless sacrifice necessary in the struggle for racial justice.

  Before the dawn of the boycott, Nixon had devoted countless hours to the NAACP. One of the organization’s major concerns had been the conviction and death sentence of Jeremiah Reeves, who in 1952 was indicted and found guilty of raping a white woman. Still in high school at the time of his arrest, Reeves had confessed to the rape under police interrogation, though his defense attorneys later claimed his confession had been unjustly coerced. Many African Americans in Montgomery held that the white housewife and Reeves were having an affair. When discovered, the woman claimed she had been raped. On March 28, 1958, Jeremiah Reeves was executed at Kilby State Prison. Following the execution, King joined around two thousand people in a prayer pilgrimage to the Alabama Capitol to protest the state’s action. He addressed the crowd, claiming the gathering was “an act of public repentance for our community for committing a tragic and unsavory injustice.” Acknowledging that they did not know definitively whether Reeves was guilty or innocent of the charges, King questioned “the severity and inequality of the penalty” he received, noting “full grown white men committing comparable crimes against Negro girls are rare ever [sic] punished, and are never given the death penalty or even a life sentence.” King took the opportunity to challenge the pattern of injustice perpetuated by the court system: “Negroes are robbed openly with little hope of redress. We are fined and jailed often in defiance of law. Right or wrong, a Negro’s word has little weight against a white opponent.” A few days later, a group of three hundred white clergy and church leaders in the community issued a statement denouncing the Easter demonstration, suggesting that instead local African American leaders should participate in organized dialogue with white leaders. When King and the MIA asked for a meeting to begin such discussions, they received no reply.31

  King continued to take advantage of opportunities to speak on the national stage. In 1957, he began writing answers to readers’ questions in a column titled “Advice for Living” published in Ebony m
agazine. He also participated along with other African American leaders in a meeting with President Eisenhower on June 23, 1958. Following the meeting, King joined A. Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Lester B. Granger of the Urban League, and Roy Wilkins of the NAACP in crafting a statement to President Eisenhower. They urged the president to ensure national law would be enforced throughout the land, sought a White House conference to deal with the integration rulings of the U.S. Supreme Court, and pleaded for full protection for those seeking to register to vote.32

  A few months after meeting with President Eisenhower, Montgomery police once again arrested King. He was charged with loitering as police claimed King failed to cooperate with a request to “move on” as he tried to gain entrance to the trial of Edward Davis, a man who had attacked Ralph Abernathy the previous week. King countered by accusing the officers of using unnecessary force including trying to break his arm, choking him, and kicking him once he got to his cell. The court found King guilty of loitering and fined him ten dollars in addition to four dollars for court fees. Following his conviction, King informed the judge that he “could not in all good conscience pay a fine for an act that I did not commit.” Instead he agreed to “accept the alternative which you provide, and that I will do without malice.” Although King intended to serve time in jail, the Montgomery police commissioner, Clyde Sellers, paid the fine in order to avoid further negative publicity for his city.33