The Woman’s Political Council was an organization begun in 1946 after dozens of black people had been arrested on the buses. We witnessed the arrests and humiliations and the court trials and the fines paid by people who just sat down on empty seats. We knew something had to be done.
We organized the Women’s Council and within a month’s time we had over a hundred members. We organized a second chapter and a third, and soon we had more than 300 members. We had members in every elementary, junior high, and senior high school. We had them organized from federal and state and local jobs: wherever there were more than ten blacks employed, we had a member there. We were organized to the point that we knew that in a matter of hours we could corral the whole city.
The evening that Rosa Parks was arrested, Fred Gray called me and told me that her case would be [heard] on Monday. As president of the main body of the Women’s Political Council, I got on the phone and called all the officers of the three chapters. I told them that Rosa Parks had been arrested and she would be tried. They said, “You have the plans, put them into operation.”
I didn’t go to bed that night. I cut those stencils and took them to [the] college. The fellow who let me in during the night is dead now … he was in the business department. I ran off 35,000 copies.
I talked with every member [of the Women’s Council] in the elementary, junior high and senior high schools and told them to have somebody on the campus. I told them that I would be there to deliver them [the handbills]. I taught my classes from 8:00 to 10:00. When my 10:00 class was over, I took two senior students with me. I would drive to the place of dissemination and a kid would be there to grab [the handbills].
After we had circulated those 35,000 circulars, we went by the church. That was about 3:30 in the afternoon. We took them to the minister … The boycott would be a direct assault by blacks on the system of Jim Crow—a serious and potentially dangerous assault.
Several of the ministers rose to suggest that the boycott might best be left as a one-day success. The strike might disintegrate if rain fell or the police started to harass the boycotters. Abernathy recalls that no one in the meeting believed the boycott would last beyond the end of the work week—four more days.
E. D. Nixon, in a thunderous voice, said the black ministers should confront the whites no matter what. The time had come to take a stand. Nixon was angry that his successor as head of the NAACP refused to become involved in the boycott unless he got approval from the national office.
“What’s the matter with you people?” Nixon said, his big hands gesturing at the assembled ministers. “Here you have been living off the sweat of these washerwomen all these years and you have never done anything for them. Now you have a chance to pay them back, and you’re too damn scared to stand on your feet and be counted! The time has come when you men is going to have to learn to be grown men or scared boys.”
The group agreed to wait until that night’s meeting and let the people decide if the boycott should continue. No one was sure how many people would show up. The meeting was to be held at the Holt Street Baptist Church, because it was large and because it was in the black section of town. People might feel safer if they didn’t have to travel through white communities to attend such a controversial meeting.
Rosa Parks with E. D. Nixon (far left).
Twenty-six-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr., the newly elected president of the Montgomery Improvement Association, had about twenty minutes to prepare what he later described as one of the most important speeches of his life.
That evening, Joe Azbell drove to Holt Street to cover the meeting. “The Holt Street Baptist Church was probably the most fired up, enthusiastic gathering of human beings that I’ve ever seen,” recalls Azbell. “I came down the street and I couldn’t believe there were that many cars. I parked many blocks from the church just to get a place for my car. I went on up to the church, and they made way for me because I was the first white person there … I was two minutes late and they were [already] preaching, and that audience was so on fire that the preacher would get up and say, ‘Do you want your freedom?’ And they’d say, ‘Yeah, I want my freedom!’ [The preacher would say,] ‘Are you for what we’re doing?’; ‘Yeah, go ahead, go ahead!’ … and they were so excited … I’ve never heard singing like that … they were on fire for freedom. There was a spirit there that no one could capture again … it was so powerful.
The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., addressing a mass meeting of boycotters.
Twenty-six-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr. (right), with the twenty-nine-year-old Ralph Abernathy, on the steps of Rev. King’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.
They had agreed at the Friday night meeting that they would call this meeting at Holt Street Church and they would let the audience determine whether or not they would continue the bus boycott or end it in one day.
Monday night, the ministers held their meeting. The church itself holds four or five thousand people. But there were thousands of people outside of the church that night. They had to put up loudspeakers so they would know what was happening. When they got through reporting that very few people had ridden the bus, that the boycott was really a success—I don’t know if there was one vote that said ‘No, don’t continue that boycott’—they voted unanimously to continue the boycott. And instead of it lasting one day as the Women’s Council had planned it, it lasted for thirteen months.
The spirit, the desire, the injustices that had been endured by thousands of people through the years … I think people were fed up, they had reached the point that they knew there was no return. That they had to do it or die. And that’s what kept it going. It was the sheer spirit for freedom, for the feeling of being a man or a woman.
An empty bus during the Montgomery bus boycott.
Now when you ask why the courts had to come in, they had to come in. You get 52,000 people in the streets and nobody’s showing any fear, something had to give. So the Supreme Court had to rule that segregation was not the way of life … We [met] after the news came through. All of these people who had fought got together to communicate and to rejoice and to share that built-up emotion and all the other feelings they had lived with during the past thirteen months. And we just rejoiced together. ‘I want to tell you what we’re going to do. We’re gonna boycott these buses. We’re tired of them fooling with our women—they done it for the last time.’ So I said, ‘Okay.’ [Nixon] said, ‘You gonna put this on the front page?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I’m gonna try to.’”
The story of the impending boycott ran on the Advertiser’s front page Sunday morning, spreading the news to blacks who might have missed the leaflets. The ministers reinforced the call from the pulpit that morning. But uncertainty lingered among boycott organizers. Would Montgomery’s blacks unite for the boycott or continue to ride the buses from fear of white retaliation? The clergymen had barely been able to agree on supporting the one-day strike. To add to their worries, it looked as though it were going to rain.
On Monday morning the sky was very dark. City police were claiming that blacks had organized “goon squads” to keep other blacks from riding the buses. The police chief said he would have two motorcycle policemen trailing every bus to hold off the “goons.”
By 5:30 A.M., however, a torn piece of cardboard appeared on a bus shelter at Court Square, a main downtown bus stop. It said, “PEOPLE DON’T RIDE THE BUSES TODAY. DON’T RIDE IT FOR FREEDOM.”
That morning, Martin Luther King, Jr., was called to his front window by his wife, Coretta. Fresh from Boston University’s doctoral program in theology, King was the new minister at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. He had replaced Rev. Vernon Johns in 1954. “I was in the kitchen, drinking my coffee, when I heard Coretta cry, ‘Martin, Martin, come quickly …’,” King wrote later, remembering the day. “As I approached the front window, Coretta pointed joyfully to a slowly moving bus: ‘Darling, it’s empty!’ I could hardly believe what I saw. I knew the South Jackson line, which ra
n past our house, carried more Negro passengers than any other line in Montgomery …” And then another bus passed their house—empty. They knew the boycott was going to be a success.
Montgomery’s eighteen black-owned taxi companies had agreed to transport blacks for the same fare they would pay on the bus—ten cents—and on this Monday morning the cabs were crammed with black people. An Alabama Journal reporter described the day. “Negroes were on almost every street corner in the downtown area, silent, waiting for rides or moving about to keep warm, but few got on buses … scores of Negroes were walking, their lunches in brown paper sacks under their arms. None spoke to white people. They exchanged little talk among themselves. It was an almost solemn event.”
A local black historian who watched the day’s events later reported, “The ‘old unlearned Negroes’ were confused. It seemed they could not figure out if the police [riding along with the buses] would arrest them or protect them if they attempted to ride the buses … the few Negroes who boarded the buses were more confused. They found it difficult to get off without being embarrassed by other Negroes who waited at the bus stops throughout the city. Some were seen ducking in the aisles as the buses passed various stops.”
In court on Monday morning, a large crowd of blacks looked on as Rosa Parks was found guilty of violating the segregation laws and given a suspended sentence. She was fined ten dollars and had to pay four dollars in court fees.
That afternoon, the preachers met with black leaders to prepare for that night’s community meeting. Several feared a repeat of the raucous Friday night meeting, when half of the group had walked out. Rev. Bennett was not popular with everyone in attendance; his abrupt style of leadership often caused internal bickering. One community leader, Rufus Lewis, worried that the boycott’s momentum might wither. Lewis, who had started a unique private nightclub for blacks—only registered voters could become members—understood what motivated people and had a solid grasp of Montgomery politics.
To plan efficiently and really let the city know that something new was being done, the group decided to set themselves up as a new organization. Rev. Abernathy suggested the group be called the “Montgomery Improvement Association.” Rev. Bennett declared that the group should elect a president. Rufus Lewis saw this as his chance to move the well-entrenched Bennett aside in a diplomatic way.
Quickly, Lewis nominated Martin Luther King. King was the minister at the church Lewis attended, so Lewis had heard him speak often. More importantly, King was new in town. Others at the meeting also saw the advantages of having Rev. King lead the group. For several months Ralph Abernathy had been trying to get the new minister involved in civil rights work, but King was too busy getting his church in order.
“Rev. King was a young man,” E. D. Nixon recalls, “a very intelligent young man. He had not been here long enough for the city fathers to put their hand on him. Usually they’d find some young man just come to town … pat him on the shoulder and tell him what a nice church he got. [They’d say,] ‘Reverend, your suit don’t look so nice to represent the so-and-so Baptist Church’ … and they’d get him a suit … you’d have to watch out for that kind of thing.”
With King as their new leader, the organizers faced the difficult question of whether or not the boycott should continue beyond Monday. The one-day boycott had shown a strength of unity not seen before in Montgomery. But an extended “And then King stood up, and most of them didn’t even know who he was. And yet he was a master speaker … I went back and I wrote a special column, I wrote that this was the beginning of a flame that would go across America.”
Azbell was particularly moved by King’s speech, at once a rousing call to action and a warning to disavow violence. “There comes a time,” King said, “that people get tired. We are here this evening to say to those who have mistreated us so long that we are tired—tired of being segregated and humiliated; tired of being kicked about by the brutal feet of oppression … For many years we have shown amazing patience. We have sometimes given our white brothers the feeling that we like the way we were being treated. But we come here tonight to be saved from that patience that makes us patient with anything less than freedom and justice. One of the great glories of democracy is the right to protest for right … if you will protest courageously and yet with dignity and Christian love, when the history books are written in future generations the historians will pause and say, ‘There lived a great people—a black people—who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization.’ That is our challenge and our overwhelming responsibility.”
In his reporter’s notebook, Azbell scribbled that the strongest applause and show of emotion came when the young preacher intoned, “We will not retreat one inch in our fight to secure and hold onto our American citizenship.”
The Reverend Ralph Abernathy spoke with humor and a down-home fundamentalism that balanced King’s more philosophical tone.
After King’s speech, Rosa Parks was introduced to the crowd, who gave her a standing ovation. Then Rev. Abernathy rose to recite the demands the Montgomery Improvement Association had decided upon in the name of the boycotters. His words silenced the throngs packed into the pews, the balcony above, and the streets outside.
The first demand was for courteous treatment on the buses. The second called for first-come, first-served seating, with whites in the front and blacks in the back. The third requested the hiring of black drivers on black bus routes.
Rev. Abernathy asked for the vote. Throughout the church, people began to stand, at first in ones and twos. Soon, every person in the Holt Street Baptist Church was standing in affirmation. The thousands outside cheered. The answer was a resounding “yes.”
“The fear left that had shackled us across the years—all left suddenly when we were in that church together,” Abernathy said, recollecting the moment.
Though unafraid, people who left Holt Street Baptist Church that December night were uncertain about how the city’s white leaders would respond to their demands. The Montgomery police were their prime concern. The police had already begun harassing blacks waiting for cab rides. A few months earlier, a white policeman had shot a black man who had refused the bus driver’s order to leave the bus and reboard through the back door. When the man demanded his dime back, the police officer intervened and suddenly fired his gun, killing the man.
What would the police do to the boycotters, whose defiance was now organized and citywide? How would the mayor and the Citizens’ Council and the Ku Klux Klan accept this mass demonstration of black pride, so new and foreign?
The answers came quickly. On Thursday, December 8, only four days into the boycott, the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), including King and attorney Fred Gray, met with the city commissioners and representatives of the bus company. The MIA presented its three demands: courtesy on the part of the bus drivers; the hiring of black bus drivers; and segregated seating on a first-come, first-served basis. King made it clear that they were not seeking an end to segregation through their boycott. “That’s a matter for the legislature and the courts,” he said before the meeting. “We feel we have a plan within the [existing] law.”
The bus company’s manager, James H. Bagley, and its attorney, Jack Crenshaw, denied that drivers were regularly discourteous, rejected the idea of black drivers, and stated that the proposed seating plan was in violation of state statute and city code. Attorney Gray responded to this last point by showing that the seating plan was in no way a violation of existing segregation laws. In fact, the seating arrangements the MIA proposed were already in practice in other Alabama cities, including Mobile, whose bus system was run by the same company as Montgomery’s.
But attorney Crenshaw was adamant. According to King, Commissioner Frank Parks was ready to accept the seating proposal, but Crenshaw argued, “I don’t see how we can do it within the law. If it were legal I would be the first to go along with it, but it just isn’t legal. The only way that it can be done is to
change your segregation laws.”
Commissioner Clyde Sellers, staunchly opposed to integration, was not about to compromise. And Crenshaw offered perhaps the most damaging argument when he said, “If we granted the Negroes these demands, they would go about boasting of a victory that they had won over the white people, and this we will not stand for.” It was this “give them an inch and they’ll take a mile” attitude that would unite many white people in Montgomery against the boycott.
Crenshaw’s words inflamed Rev. King. “Feeling that our demands were moderate,” he later wrote, “I assumed that they would be granted with little question … the experience taught me a lesson … even when we asked for justice within the segregation laws, the ‘powers that be’ were not willing to grant it. Justice and equality, I saw, would never come while segregation remained, because the basic purpose of segregation was to perpetuate injustice and inequity.”
At this same meeting, Commissioner Sellers hinted to the boycott leaders that the city’s 210 black cab drivers would be heavily fined if they didn’t charge every passenger the minimum forty-five-cent fare.
The boycott leaders now had to face the possibility that the taxicabs—their main source of alternate transportation—would no longer be available at low fares. King called Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to speak with those who had successfully staged a bus boycott months before. Rev. T. J. Jemison had worked out a detailed strategy for transporting boycotters, a complex system of carpooling with drop-off and pick-up points and a communications network to connect those needing rides with those offering them. He suggested that the MIA form a private taxi system. This could be done only if blacks in Montgomery could be convinced to use their cars to ferry maids and laborers to work.
At a mass meeting of bus boycotters Thursday night, Rev. King asked for volunteers. They would need drivers and automobiles. The preachers would be willing to drive their own cars, he assured audience members, who at first were quiet to the suggestion of sharing their automobiles with others. To many blacks, car ownership was a status symbol that distinguished them from the less privileged.
Eyes on the Prize Page 10
