Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  The deadline was of more than passing significance to the new pastor, because on the last day of October Reverend King led a caravan of Ebenezer members down the highway to Montgomery—including Mother King and her choir, and supporters numbering nearly a hundred—for the formal ceremonies in which young King was installed in the Dexter pulpit. King was able to report to his father that he had established financial control of Dexter’s legendary baronies.

  King already had written Paul Tillich to ask for a personal interview. In November, Tillich replied from Aberdeen, Scotland, where he was delivering the Gifford Lectures. Tillich was working feverishly on the second volume of his Systematic Theology, with new ideas and definitions coming to him so rapidly that he often muttered to colleagues or himself, “I must revise my system.” Despite his burdensome schedule, Tillich advised Ph.D. candidate King that he would be happy to talk with him for his dissertation on Tillich’s ideas of God but regretted to say that he would not be at Harvard during any of King’s trips to Boston, as King had hoped, because he would be writing, traveling, and lecturing for another year before taking up new duties at Harvard. He gave dates when he would be available in Chicago or New York.

  Although King would finish his dissertation before the interview could be arranged, the mere fact that he had been welcomed by the most eminent Protestant theologian in the world was satisfying. He began his career near the summit of both the white and Negro church worlds. His “twoness” seemed to translate into sturdiness and balance, as his interest in Tillich’s abstractions did not crowd out his instinct for power within the practical confines of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. Beneath his genteel, aristocratic manner—never without his big words or his dress fedora—there were only hints at first that King was balanced, holding within himself contending forces of great power. One hint was his rapport with Dexter’s less sophisticated members, who noticed that King never greeted them with the dreaded question, “What are you doing?” This password was an invitation for the person so greeted to mention some sabbatical, club project, upcoming convention, or other delicious burden of professional status. It offended those who would have to reply that they were just farming or ironing the white folks’ laundry, as they always had. Even an old farmer like Vernon Johns had asked people what they were doing, and was capable of that satisfied tone of voice when he did—but not King. The new pastor always looked his members squarely in the eye and asked them how they were doing, usually following with a personal question about their health or the kids. Moreover, he would linger over such conversations against all competing obligations. It was a small thing except to those who treasured the difference.

  Another hint was the way he preached. At first some of the older members complained that Pastor King was “not a God man,” meaning that he did not dwell on salvation or describe the furniture in heaven. Soon those complaints died away, however, as the congregation grew accustomed to King’s passion. In keeping with Dexter’s heritage, he sprinkled classical quotations within his lectures on the hidden meaning of the universe, but he also released a good deal of controlled heat through the cracks in Keighton’s sermon types. And his listeners responded to the passion beneath the ideas, to the bottomless joy and pain that turned the heat into rhythm and the rhythm into music. King was controlled. He never shouted. But he preached like someone who wanted to shout, and this gave him an electrifying hold over the congregation. Though still a boy to many of his older listeners, he had the commanding air of a burning sage. He began to come into full power that first year on his own, at Dexter and also at some of the largest Negro churches in the country, where he “brought down the house.”

  Late in November 1954, he preached a guest sermon at Atlanta’s Friendship Baptist Church that sent aftershocks of recognition through the church world of his hometown. King was becoming a phenomenon, and the magnitude of his success put Reverend King into his usual jumble of emotions—pride, worry, envy, love, and fear. On December 2, he wrote his son a letter, enclosing young King’s checkbook, which he had balanced and corrected. (Though King was married and gone, his father handled such chores because he was good at them and because he was a power in Atlanta banking. There were no Negro banks in Montgomery.) Beginning “My dear M.L.,” the elder King passed along some preacher news from Ebenezer. “Sister Luella Allen lost her husband yesterday,” he wrote. “I am sure you remember her, she is the little Sister that usually sits on the left side of the church, shouts up against the wall. With the exception of that, everything seems to be moving on very well around the church.” Then, noting that he had just gotten another phone call “about how you swept them at Friendship Sunday,” he delivered a thunderous message to his son, warning that success threatened not only temptation and sin but annihilation. “You see, young man, you are becoming very popular. As I told you, you must be very much in prayer. Persons like yourself are the ones the devil turns all of his forces aloose to destroy.”

  On March 2, 1955, a handful of white people sought to board a city bus as it chugged up Dexter Avenue to the Court Street stop. Peering into the rearview mirror, the driver saw that the white section was full of whites and that both the Negro section and the “no-man’s-land” in the middle were full of Negroes. The driver turned around and pointed to a row in the middle section. “Give me those seats,” he said to the four Negro women seated there. Two of them moved obediently to stand in the aisle, but two of them pretended not to hear and stared into the middle distance. The driver, having committed himself to secure the seats, cajoled and warned the two recalcitrant women. Then he stepped outside to hail a foot policeman, who in turn hailed a squad car with two other policemen. Soon the policemen began pressuring some of the Negro men to give their seats to the holdout women. Seeking the point of least resistance, they tried to turn a segregation dispute into a question of chivalry. One man complied, but no one would move for the last holdout, a feisty high school student named Claudette Colvin, who defended her right to the seat in language that brought words of disapproval from passengers of both races. One white woman defended her to the police, saying that Colvin was allowed to sit in no-man’s-land as long as there were no seats in the Negro section, but another white woman said that if Colvin were allowed to defy the police, “they will take over.” Colvin was crying and madder than ever by the time the policemen told her she was under arrest. She struggled when they dragged her off the bus and screamed when they put on the handcuffs.

  Four days later, the Advertiser published a letter in which one of the white passengers commended the policemen for handling the bus incident without violence, without even raising their voices. Montgomery Negroes, by contrast, disputed the need to handcuff a high school girl. To them, Colvin had been entitled to her seat even under the hated segregation law, and for her to have been insulted, blamed, and arrested on the whim of the driver and by force of law was a humiliating injustice not only to her but to all the Negro passengers who had witnessed the arrest in helpless, fearful silence. Prosecutors had thrown the book at Colvin, charging her with violating the segregation law, assault, and disorderly conduct. She might be going to jail instead of to Booker T. Washington High School.

  Privately, E. D. Nixon consulted Clifford Durr about the Colvin case. The two men made an unlikely pair: Nixon, a Negro railroad porter with fists as big as eggplants and a coal-black face, and Durr, a white lawyer and Rhodes scholar from the Alabama gentry. Between them, they had connections that reached high and wide among the quixotic groups that for decades had tried to build a network of support for civil rights. E. D. Nixon was a union man. For nearly half of his fifty-six years, he had served as president of the Alabama branch of A. Philip Randolph’s Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Nixon almost worshipped Randolph, who in his legendary career had dared to attack Du Bois for urging Negroes to fight in World War I, then had fought the Pullman Company for twelve years before winning recognition of the first major Negro trade union. Randolph was an old lion—tall, white-ha
ired, and dignified, speaking elegantly with a slight British accent—and Nixon was a homespun Alabama copy of him. He was famous to Montgomery Negroes as the man who knew every white policeman, judge, and government clerk in town, and had always gone to see them about the grievances of any Negro who asked him for help. Nixon seldom got anything close to justice, but he usually got something. Once, he pushed his way into the governor’s office, and he was the first Negro since Reconstruction to put himself on the ballot for local office. He was not an educated or cultivated man, however, and many of the town’s more educated Negroes sniped at him for his imperfections.

  Clifford Durr, for his part, was a grim harbinger to white Southern liberals on the race issue. He retained many influential contacts from his glowing past as a second-echelon braintruster of the New Deal. The Johnsons, Lyndon and Lady Bird, were old friends, for example, and Durr was related by marriage to Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black. But these surviving ties counted for very little when Durr rebelled against the most sensitive taboos of the Cold War era. First he had resigned his post as FCC Commissioner to represent some of the early victims of the Truman loyalty program. To Durr, the loyalty hearings were un-American inquisitions in which innocent people were branded as perverts or subversives on the word of anonymous FBI informants. His cases isolated him from mainstream politics, and things grew worse when he returned home to practice law.

  With Aubrey Williams, a fellow New Dealer from Montgomery, Durr sponsored the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee. For more than twenty years, Highlander had functioned as a unique “workshop” of the Social Gospel, being one of the few places in the South where Negroes and whites mixed freely. Its founder, Myles Horton, had been a student of Reinhold Niebuhr at Union Theological Seminary. Niebuhr was chairman of the Highlander advisory board that at times had included Eleanor Roosevelt, Norman Thomas, and Harry Emerson Fosdick. Durr tried to defend Highlander as a sensible, patriotic experiment in racial democracy, but during the passions of the Joseph McCarthy hearings and the Brown case his associations landed him, his wife Virginia, Myles Horton, and Aubrey Williams before James Eastland’s Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. On television, Eastland let it be known that he considered Highlander freakish, mongrelized, and basically Communist. The normally judicious Durr exploded in rage, challenging Eastland to a fist-fight, and photographs of guards restraining him landed on the front page of The New York Times. After that, Durr lost most of his remaining clients in Montgomery. He became a threadbare patrician, explaining patiently why he thought the confluence of events had reduced him to such a state. His wife was far less tolerant. She combined the background of a Southern belle with the sharp tongue of an early feminist, and had called Eastland a “nasty polecat” long before the Highlander hearings.

  After the Colvin arrest in Montgomery, Nixon and Durr conferred with Colvin, Colvin’s relatives, witnesses from the bus, and Fred Gray, a young Negro lawyer only one year out of school, who moonlighted on weekends as a preacher. Durr considered Gray bright, aggressive, and promising. He had been advising the younger man on the eccentricities of the Montgomery courts, and now they weighed the prospects of turning the Colvin defense into an attack on segregation. Gray agreed to represent Colvin and was eager to make a run at it.

  Nixon’s first move was to try negotiation. He called for an appointment with Police Commissioner Dave Birmingham, a man he knew to be an amiable populist in the style of Governor James “Kissin’ Jim” Folsom. Shortly thereafter, with an ad hoc Colvin committee that included the new Baptist minister in town, Rev. M. L. King, Jr., Nixon arrived in Birmingham’s office for talks, which led quickly to a tentative agreement. Bus drivers should be courteous to everyone, and bus seats should be filled by Negroes from the back and whites from the front, eliminating the no-man’s-land where passengers could be removed or inserted by the driver. If the bus company adopted such a policy, said Birmingham, he would instruct the police to act accordingly.

  The plan sailed along until it reached the desk of Jack Crenshaw, the bus company’s lawyer, whose instincts ran quickly to objection. What would happen if whites tried to board a bus completely filled with Negroes? Would they stand in the aisle? If so, where would be the white section required by state law? Crenshaw said the bus company would not endorse something that could be construed as illegal, especially not with its operating license soon up for renewal. This was sneaky, he said. If the police wanted to change the segregation laws, they should change them outright. Stung, Nixon’s committee went back to Birmingham and asked him to implement the plan on his own, but the police commissioner retreated painfully.

  Meanwhile, Claudette Colvin had been found guilty at a brief trial. On May 6, Judge Eugene Carter crossed up the Colvin supporters with an appeal ruling worthy of a fox. He dismissed the segregation charge, nullifying their plans to take that issue into federal court on constitutional grounds. Dismissing the charge of disorderly conduct, he showed a willingness to forgive. Upholding the charge of assault—the most preposterous of the three—he let it be known that he would tolerate no challenge to authority. Finally, he sentenced Colvin to pay a small fine—a sentence so much lighter than anticipated that it ruined her martyr status. Many Negroes who supported her cause nevertheless came to believe she was lucky.

  Fred Gray wanted to press an appeal anyway, but Durr and Nixon believed that the case had already lost its momentum. There was much internal turmoil among Negro leaders. Members of the influential Women’s Political Council—most of whom served on the social and political affairs committee at King’s church—had completed a discouraging canvass of the likely witnesses in the case. Most of them were frightened, and might at any moment deny what they had said. Colvin herself would not recant, they reported, but she was immature—prone to breakdowns and outbursts of profanity. Worse, she was pregnant. Even if Montgomery Negroes were willing to rally behind an unwed pregnant teenager—which they were not—her circumstances would make her an extremely vulnerable standard-bearer. Some of Colvin’s friends resented this assessment as condescending. Women leaders criticized the local ministers for failing to press the segregation issue harder and more eloquently during the negotiations, which the women stressed above the lawsuit, and the ministers defended themselves by recalling the lawyers’ advice against poisoning the trial atmosphere with too much excitement. In the end, E. D. Nixon made the decision. Although Nixon was sensitive about his country dialect and often asserted his worth defensively against the airs of the more educated Negroes, saying, “You won’t find my car parked out in front of no loan shop,” his practicality prevailed. Colvin would not do, he decreed. Her family agreed and paid the fine.

  That July, one month after getting his doctorate, King flew to New Orleans to explore a special new job at Dillard University. Dillard, founded by Congregationalists shortly after the Civil War, had enjoyed the patronage of Chicago philanthropist Julius Rosenwald and his heirs. Its campus of whitewashed classical buildings laid out on a vast tree-lined lawn was as handsome as Spelman’s, and its reputation was the equal of any coeducational Negro college in the South. The Dillard president, A. W. Dent, a Morehouse man from Daddy King’s class, wanted King to become dean of the new Lawless Memorial University Chapel. In that post, he would be allowed to teach courses in the religion and philosophy departments without being lashed to the full schedule of a regular faculty member. He would preach in the chapel, but he would escape the more tedious duties of a church pastor. The combination was ideal for King. From Dent’s point of view, the job’s only drawback was that construction of the chapel would not be completed by September, and it was complicated to start anything at a college in the middle of the school year. King welcomed the delay, however, as he thought he should stay at Dexter at least another year. He would also have to figure out how to tell Dr. Mays and his father, among others.

  To search so soon for a teaching job was a departure from King’s plan to preach for a number of years, like Mordecai Johnson, Nieb
uhr, and Howard Thurman, before rising to life in the academy. He was advancing the schedule because he was impatient—not because of failure at Dexter but by the very fact of his success. His father’s budget system had worked; Dexter had already paid off a debt of nearly $5,000 from the Johns era, hired new staff, and paid $1,000 into the new building fund. King had made the church into a beehive, and now he saw the only catch: the hive could get no bigger. The legendary Stokes had baptized a thousand a year during the heyday of Montgomery’s First Baptist, and Daddy King had baptized enough to build Ebenezer from two hundred souls to four thousand, but King would finish his banner year having baptized only twelve. Fewer than thirty new members joined the rolls, and many of those were part of the annual turnover at Alabama State. The only way for Dexter to grow larger was to transform itself into a mass church of all classes, and the only way to do anything substantial with the new building fund was to move away from the prestigious but tiny site there beneath the state capitol. King knew his congregation would do neither.

  Restless, King decided to step up his activity in the local chapter of the NAACP. He gave a stirring speech at one of its small gatherings and then accepted a position on the executive committee. His letter of appointment came from Rosa Parks, secretary of the chapter. A seamstress at a downtown department store, Parks made extra money by taking in sewing work on the side. She had come into the NAACP through E. D. Nixon, who had served as chapter president for five years before stepping aside for a friend. Her background and character put her firmly astride the class fault that divided the politically active Negroes of Montgomery. Had the professionals and the upper strata from Alabama State taken over the organization—as they were threatening to do now that the Brown case had brought fresh excitement to the NAACP—Parks might well have been replaced by one of the college-trained members of the Women’s Political Council. As it was, she remained the woman of Nixon’s circle most congenial to the Council members. She wore rimless spectacles, spoke quietly, wrote and typed faultless letters on her own, and had never been known to lower herself to factionalism. A tireless worker and churchgoer, of working-class station and middle-class demeanor, Rosa Parks was one of those rare people of whom everyone agreed that she gave more than she got. Her character represented one of the isolated high blips on the graph of human nature, offsetting a dozen or so sociopaths. A Methodist herself, she served as teacher and mother figure to the kids of the NAACP Youth Council, who met at a Lutheran church near her home.