Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  Robinson decided to call E. D. Nixon to let him know what they were doing. To her great surprise, the voice that came on the line was alert and full of news about the Parks case at three o’clock in the morning. Nixon was already bustling about his house getting ready to arrange the Parks defense before leaving on his morning Pullman run through Atlanta to New York and back. He instantly approved Robinson’s idea of the one-day bus boycott, saying that he had something like that in mind himself. He told her that he planned to summon Montgomery’s leading Negroes to a planning meeting the very next day, at which both the legal defense and the boycott would be organized. Robinson was the first to know.*

  All sources, including E. D. Nixon, agree that the long discussion at Rosa Parks’s home that first night was confined to the prospect of a legal challenge to the arrest, without mention of a boycott, and no one denies that before morning the women had written an independent letter calling for a boycott. These facts support King’s original division of the credit. Some of the more subjective arguments deriving from this central dispute retain their validity, however. Nixon has been slighted by popular history and patronized by supporters of King. Openly wounded by this treatment, Nixon has probably exaggerated his role in response. And the Montgomery women have been ignored to a greater extent even than Nixon.

  Nixon began his calls about five o’clock that morning. He called Ralph Abernathy first, then his own minister, then King. He was in a hurry. When King came on the line, Nixon did not bother to ask whether he had awakened the new baby, or even to say hello. Instead he plunged directly into the story of the Parks arrest, telling King of his determination to fight the case and his plan to stay off the buses on Monday. He asked King for his endorsement.

  “Brother Nixon,” King said quickly, “let me think about it and you call me back.”

  Nixon said fine. He’d make some other calls, but he wanted King to know that he wanted to use Dexter for the meeting that afternoon. Its central location made the church convenient for people working in downtown offices. Of course, said King—he just wanted to think before endorsing Nixon’s specific plan. By the time he talked to King again, King had himself talked with Abernathy and other ministers. After endorsing the general plan, he helped Abernathy call the remaining names on Nixon’s list.

  One of Nixon’s last calls was to Joe Azbell, the city editor of the Montgomery Advertiser. Promising “the hottest story you’ve ever written,” Nixon asked Azbell to meet him at the train station. Azbell did. Nixon, wearing his white coat and porter’s cap, told him the whole story as a confidential informant, mentioning no names except that of Rosa Parks, then hopped on his Atlanta-bound train.

  While he was gone, about fifty of the Negro leaders assembled in the basement of King’s church, where, after a protracted and often disorderly argument about whether or not to allow debate, they approved the plans more or less as Nixon had laid them out in advance. All undertook to spread the word. King and others retired as a committee to draft a new leaflet that was essentially a condensation of the one already being circulated by the thousands by the Women’s Political Council. “Don’t ride the bus to work, to town, to school, or any place Monday, December 5…” it said. “If you work, take a cab, or share a ride, or walk.” There was a final sentence with new information: “Come to a mass meeting, Monday at 7:00 P.M., at the Holt Street Baptist Church for further instruction.” The meeting continued amid a good deal of chaos, as some worked to print up the leaflet on the Dexter mimeograph machine, while others phoned to warn Montgomery’s eighteen Negro taxi companies that they would be called upon to be heroes on Monday, and still others huddled over countless details. The meeting broke up about midnight.

  By the next day, Saturday, thousands of Montgomery’s Negroes had either seen the leaflets or heard the news by word of mouth. Reverend Graetz of Trinity Lutheran had heard rumors, but his persistent questioning of his own church members brought poor results. He was still a white man, after all, and no one wanted to be the one who triggered a general alarm in Montgomery by telling him. Frustrated, Graetz decided to phone the best friend he had in town outside his congregation, the woman who used his church building for meetings of the NAACP Youth Council. “Mrs. Parks,” he said, “I keep hearing that somebody was arrested on the bus and there’s going to be a boycott. Is that true? Who was it?”

  There was a long pause. “It’s true,” Parks said, almost sheepishly. “It was me, Pastor Graetz. I was the one arrested.”

  “You?” Graetz exclaimed. He rushed over to the Parks home to learn the details. The next morning, from the pulpit of Trinity Lutheran, he delivered what he called a Christian analysis of the Rosa Parks arrest. Then he announced that he and his family would observe the boycott, and he urged his members to do likewise. A murmur of approval went through the congregation. At Dexter, King made a similar announcement, as did Abernathy at First Baptist and all the others.

  Nixon returned from his train run that day to find that Joe Azbell had written a story in the morning Advertiser, headlined “Negro Groups Ready Boycott of Bus Lines.” It was not the dominant race story in the paper. That distinction went to the sensational lead item from Georgia, about how “a howling mob of Georgia Tech students” had broken through police lines at the state capitol in protest of Governor Marvin Griffin’s recent statement that Georgia Tech should not be allowed to play in the upcoming Sugar Bowl because its opponent, the University of Pittsburgh, was discovered to have a lone Negro on the team as a reserve running back, and because Sugar Bowl officials had agreed to allow Pittsburgh fans to be seated on a nonsegregated basis. The Georgia governor, who since the Brown decision had enjoyed much favorable publicity from swashbuckling defenses of segregation, discovered that they did not fare so well against an emotional tradeoff in the sports area. He soon backed down, somewhat shaken by the experience of having the sons of his finest constituents smashing the windows and doors of his office.

  Azbell’s Montgomery story seemed much tamer. “A ‘top secret’ meeting of Montgomery Negroes who plan a boycott of city buses Monday is scheduled at 7 P.M. Monday at the Holt Street Baptist Church,” he began, going on to quote liberally from both the first and second leaflets, which had been relayed into the hands of the authorities by white women who had gotten them from their maids. The story reported that Montgomery had been “flooded with thousands of copies” of the leaflets, and that the Holt Street minister said the mass meeting would be open to people of all races. Azbell never bothered to explain how a meeting so advertised and described could be called “top secret” in the newspaper. He did not need to. White people would not attend, and the purpose touched upon the possibility of revolt against segregation. Any such meeting was self-evidently “top secret,” as the import of the situation overturned the literal meaning of the words. E. D. Nixon cared little about inaccuracies or the fact that the story was clearly intended as a warning to white readers. To him, the story was effective advertising. It would get the word out to more Negroes.

  He was up before dawn on Monday morning. So were the Kings, M.L. drinking coffee and Coretta keeping watch at the front window, nervously waiting to see the first morning bus. When she saw the headlights cutting through the darkness, she called out to her husband and they watched it roll by together. The bus was empty! The early morning special on the South Jackson line, which was normally full of Negro maids on their way to work, still had its groaning engine and squeaky brakes, but it was an empty shell. So was the next bus, and the next. In spite of the bitter morning cold, their fear of white people and their desperate need for wages, Montgomery Negroes were turning the City Bus Lines into a ghost fleet. King, astonished and overjoyed, jumped into his car to see whether the response was the same elsewhere in the city. It was. He drove around for several hours, watching buses pass by carrying handfuls of white passengers.

  Police cars, manned by officers with helmets and shotguns, followed many of the buses on the orders of the new police commiss
ioner, Clyde Sellers. His theory, which he had announced personally on the radio in special police bulletins, was that only violence by Negroes could motivate other Negroes to stay off the buses. “Negro ‘goon squads’ reportedly have been organized here to intimidate Negroes who ride Montgomery City Line buses today,” began Joe Azbell’s front-page story. The Sellers plan called for roving police squads to intimidate the Negro goons before they could intimidate Negro bus riders. It backfired. Confused Negro passengers took a look at the heavily armed white policemen swarming around their bus stops and shied away, wanting no part of such a scene. The plan, having frightened into the boycott some of the very Negroes whom Sellers hoped to reassure, proceeded to do worse. The policemen felt bureaucratic pressure to arrest the goons. Now that practically all the Negroes were boycotting the buses, their boss’s theory suggested that entire armies of goons must be at work. But where were they? At 7:15 P.M., police arrested a nineteen-year-old college student as he was helping an old Negro woman into his car. The officers said the student was offering the woman a ride as an alternative to the bus, but they knew this was not the kind of goon activity Commissioner Sellers had in mind. They made no more arrests.

  After Rosa Parks was convicted that morning, and after Fred Gray filed notice of appeal, E. D. Nixon walked out of the courtroom to post bond for her release. The sight that greeted him in the courthouse hallway shocked him almost as much as the empty buses at dawn: a crowd of some five hundred Negroes jammed the corridor, spilling back through the doors and down the steps into the street. Nixon, who was accustomed to find there only a few relatives of the accused, knew then that the empty buses had been no fluke. The jostling, and the sight of still more worried-looking policemen with shotguns, rattled even Nixon temporarily. He tried to disperse the crowd, promising to bring Rosa Parks outside unharmed as soon as the bond was signed. Some voices shouted back that the crowd would storm the courthouse to rescue both Parks and Nixon if they did not emerge within a few minutes. Something was new in Montgomery.

  All the Negro leaders knew it long before they reassembled that afternoon to plan for the evening’s mass meeting. Nixon, Abernathy, and a leading Methodist minister named French had met to draw up a list of negotiating demands for the bus boycott, reasoning, as usual, that if the demands were not prearranged they would never escape the chaos of debate. No sooner had the presiding officer presented the Nixon-Abernathy-French ideas to the group as a general proposition than another clique of two or three suggested that the proposals be mimeographed and handed to all those attending the mass meeting. That way, Negroes could vote on the proposals without discussing them out loud, which would conceal their plans from any white reporters present. Another person from this group proposed that the names of the leaders also be kept secret, including all those present. They discussed the fine points of stealth and security until E. D. Nixon rose in anger. “How do you think you can run a bus boycott in secret?” he demanded. “Let me tell you gentlemen one thing. You ministers have lived off these wash-women for the last hundred years and ain’t never done nothing for them.” He threatened to expose the ministers as cowards before the mass meeting if they tried to hide. He scolded the ministers and everyone else for letting the women bear the brunt of the arrests and then backing down like “little boys.” “We’ve worn aprons all our lives,” he said. “It’s time to take the aprons off…. If we’re gonna be mens, now’s the time to be mens.”

  King arrived late at the meeting, just as Nixon was spewing out the last of his taunts. Perhaps to defend himself as the conspicuous newcomer who had drawn the crowd’s eye, or perhaps to quiet what threatened to become a disastrous war of pride, he spoke before anyone could answer the tirade. “Brother Nixon, I’m not a coward,” he said easily. “I don’t want anybody to call me a coward.” All the leaders should act openly, he said, under their own names.

  Rufus Lewis seized the moment. He and Nixon had never liked each other much, having been personal and class rivals for decades. Lewis feared that Nixon’s intimidating speech was a preplanned signal for someone to propose that Nixon himself head the new boycott organization, and in that light it was quite fortunate that King had arrived just then to speak in a manner that both challenged Nixon and agreed with him. All this went through Lewis’ head in a flash, and he quickly took the floor to move that Dr. M. L. King be elected president. By prearrangement with Lewis, a Reverend Conley jumped up to second the motion. A momentary silence followed this challenge, as the members of various small caucuses eyed each other. There was hesitation and some discussion, but in the end no one else was nominated—not Nixon, nor Abernathy, nor any of the powerful senior ministers. Idealists would say afterward that King’s gifts made him the obvious choice. Realists would scoff at this, saying that King was not very well known, and that his chief asset was his lack of debts or enemies. Cynics would say that the established preachers stepped back for King only because they saw more blame and danger ahead than glory. No leader had promised all Montgomery to secure justice for Claudette Colvin, and what would have become of his reputation if he had? In the long run, what was a fourteen-dollar fine levied on Rosa Parks to a community that had calmed down after lynchings?

  After the election of other officers and the selection of a name for the organization—the Montgomery Improvement Association—someone rose to suggest that the bus boycott should be suspended during the upcoming negotiations over the demands. As of that day, he said, the boycott was a stunning success, but if they tried to go on with it people would get tired sooner or later and filter back onto the buses, which would make the white people laugh at the new MIA and grant no concessions. Other speakers supported this argument, observing that it would be better to preserve the boycott weapon as a threat than to spoil it by overuse. On the verge of approval, the proposal was suspended so that the ministers could select hymns, prayers, and speakers for the mass meeting. Then it was finessed altogether in haste. The leaders would wait to see how many people turned out that night.

  King raced home to his wife and new baby sometime after six. Hesitantly, he informed Coretta that he had been drafted as president of the new protest committee. Much to his relief, she did not object to the fait accompli and in fact said quietly that she would support him in whatever he did. King said he would have no time for supper. He had to leave for the mass meeting within half an hour, and after that he had to address a banquet sponsored by the YMCA, one of the only integrated organizations in Montgomery. Most on his mind was the speech at Holt Street—his first appearance as the new protest leader, the first words most of the audience would have heard from him. He went into his study and closed the door, wondering how he could possibly create such an important speech in a few minutes, when he required fifteen hours to prepare an ordinary sermon. His mind raced. He knew from his conscience that he wanted to answer one peevish charge that had apeared in both newspaper articles thus far—that the Negroes had borrowed the boycott tactic from the White Citizens Councils, which had openly adopted a policy of harsh economic reprisal against Negroes who fought segregation. King searched for the correct words by which he might distinguish the bus boycott from un-Christian coercion. He had written only a few notes on a piece of paper, when it was time to go.

  Elliott Finley, King’s Morehouse friend with the pool table, drove him to the rally. King had a few minutes to think in the car. A traffic jam on the way to Holt Street extended the time a bit, and then a bit more, until they realized they could go no farther—the church was surrounded. The hostile press later estimated the crowd at five thousand people; Negroes put it at two or three times that figure. Whatever the exact number, only a small fraction of the bodies fit inside the church, and loudspeakers were being set up to amplify the proceedings to an outdoor crowd that stretched over several acres, across streets and around cars that had been parked at all angles. Clifford and Virginia Durr never got within three blocks of the church door. Reverend Graetz was the only white supporter inside—the
only white face seen there other than reporters and cameramen. “You know something, Finley,” said King, as he prepared to abandon the car. “This could turn into something big.” It took him fifteen minutes to push his way through the crowd. Shortly thereafter, the Holt Street pastor called him to the pulpit.

  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.”