Eyes on the Prize

by Juan Williams

  Jo Ann Robinson volunteered to drive her car—the one she had used to carry the handbills heralding the boycott. Other members of the Women’s Council raised their hands; so did many homemakers. Mrs. A. W. West offered to transport workers in her green Cadillac. More than 150 people volunteered. Later, three whites from a nearby Air Force base would volunteer, and numerous white women would help their maids and babysitters get to work.

  The MIA appointed a Transportation Committee to work with some black postal workers who knew the layout of the streets. They developed an efficient plan for transporting the boycotters. Within one week of the meeting at which people volunteered their cars, the MIA had organized forty-eight dispatch and forty-two pick-up stations.

  The boycott had withstood its first assault. But setting up this elaborate system required funding. Mass meetings were held twice a week to keep the boycotters informed, to keep spirits high, and to collect contributions. Every Monday and Thursday night, a church would rock with a packed crowd. “This movement was made up of just ordinary black people, some of whom made as little as five dollars a week,” reporter Azbell remembers, “but they would give one dollar of that to help support the boycott.”

  In time the MIA bought several station wagons to use as taxis. The churches put their names on the side of many of the cars, which became known as “rolling churches.” Financial support came from other sources as well. Members of Montgomery’s Jewish community offered money, as did some white southerners who often gave anonymously. As news of the boycott spread, sympathizers in the North offered assistance, and the NAACP organized fundraising events. E. D. Nixon, who was also the president of the local chapter of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, garnered union support from the United Automobile Workers in Detroit.

  Days turned into weeks, and the boycott continued unabated. “One feels history is being made in Montgomery these days,” wrote white librarian Juliette Morgan in a letter to the Advertiser. “It is hard to imagine a soul so dead, a heart so hard, a vision so blinded and provincial as not to be awed with admiration at the quiet dignity, discipline and dedication with which the Negroes have conducted the boycott.” Morgan compared the movement to Mahatma Gandhi’s struggle against the British in India.

  The comparison to Gandhi’s successful struggle was apt. As a doctoral student at Boston University, King had read some of the writings of Mohandas Gandhi. Gandhi united the people of India against their colonial ruler, England, by advocating nonviolence and passive resistance—that is, by refusing to cooperate within the confines of an unjust system. King learned more about Gandhi when he met with the Reverend Glenn Smiley, and later with divinity student James Lawson, who had studied pacifism in India. But King’s first uses of the nonviolent method were based more on the Bible and Christian pacifism than on the teachings of the Mahatma. As both sides of the boycott dug in for what looked like a protracted battle, King preached the importance of meeting hate with love. For the struggle to be successful, the movement needed to win the support of morally decent and compassionate people. In the face of threats, being fired from work, or even being beaten, to react with violence would undermine the righteousness of the cause.

  Commissioner Sellers and his police department were undaunted. When their first attempt at breaking the boycott by pressuring cab drivers failed, they turned to other means. They would try to divide the leadership, set well-to-do blacks against poor blacks, and support segregationist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, which would strike violently at the boycotters.

  As president of the Montgomery Improvement Association, King worked with the Transportation Committee to develop a plan for moving the boycotters to and from work during the bus strike.

  The E. L. Posey parking lot became a transfer point for the intricate system of cabs, station wagons, and carpools that replaced the buses during the boycott.

  In early January, Commissioner Sellers, clearly the most segregationist of the three commissioners, attended a meeting of the white Citizens’ Council. He announced dramatically that he was joining the organization.

  On January 21, the City Commission met with three black ministers, none of whom represented the MIA. The commission’s hope was that the MIA did not truly reflect the will of blacks in Montgomery. If more “reasonable” ministers were to agree to a compromise, perhaps the boycotters would stop their protest. The compromise consisted of reserving ten seats in the front of each bus for whites, ten seats in the back for blacks, and having the remaining seats in the middle available on a first-come, first-served basis. The commission would not promise to hire black drivers for the black routes, and segregation, in this modified form, would continue. The three ministers accepted the proposal.

  The commission then leaked news of the agreement to the Advertiser, which ran bold headlines on the Sunday paper’s front page falsely announcing the end of the boycott.

  But King, Abernathy, and Nixon heard about the hoax and went bar-hopping on Saturday night, passing the word that the story to appear in the morning paper was a lie—the boycott was still on. The commission had underestimated the support of the MIA by Montgomery blacks. Very few rode the buses on Monday.

  When they realized that the ploy was not going to work, the ministers publicly repudiated the compromise. They told King they had not understood the proposal that had been set before them. The commissioners were enraged at what they viewed as a lack of reasonableness. And when the public learned of the failed compromise, there was increasing concern among the city’s segregationists that their commissioners were not holding the line against integration. The segregationists renewed their pressure on the local politicians. Mayor Gayle, in response to this embarrassing and maddening situation, announced that he would no longer negotiate with the boycotters. He said, “There seems to be a belief on the part of the Negroes that they have the white people hemmed up in a corner and they are not going to give an inch until they can force the white people of our community to submit to their demands—in fact, swallow all of them.” He called the leaders of the boycott “a group of Negro radicals.” He ended his vitriolic barrage by saying, “When and if the Negro people desire to end the boycott, my door is open to them. But until they are ready to end it, there will be no more discussions.”

  The bus company was feeling the economic costs of the boycott and downtown businesses were also suffering. These financial burdens, combined with the tenseness of the confrontation, fueled the anger of even some politically moderate whites in Montgomery. Telegrams, phone calls, and letters of support poured into city hall. Claiming overwhelming support, Mayor Gayle announced, “There is no need for us to straddle the fence any longer. I am taking a stand and so are the other commissioners.”

  White Support of the Montgomery Boycott: An Interview with Virginia Dur

  Born in 1903, Virginia Foster Durr was raised in Birmingham, where her father was a preacher. She spent summers at her grandparents’ plantation in Union Springs, Alabama. Later she moved with her husband, attorney Clifford Durr, to Washington, D.C. Her brother-in-law was Hugo Black, a justice on the Supreme Court. Here, Durr tells of the difficulties whites faced when they were openly sympathetic to the Montgomery bus boycott.

  I was born into a segregated system, and I took it for granted. Nobody told me any different. It really wasn’t until I got to Washington that I began to realize how much at variance the South was from the rest of the country and how very wrong the system was. So when I came back to Montgomery, in 1951, after almost twenty years, I no longer took the system for granted.

  The first thing that happened to whites like us who were sympathetic to the boycott was that we lost our businesses. People didn’t come to us. We got a reputation. My husband got mighty little law business after he took a very decided stand. People like my husband and Aubrey Williams [publisher of the Southern Farmer] realized that they were cutting their own throats. Aubrey lost all of his advertising, every bit of it.

  The fact that our fa
mily stood by us even though they did not agree with us was our salvation. If they had disowned us, had not stood by us, we could not have stayed. We were lucky because Clifford was kin to so many people in Montgomery County. It was difficult for them to ostracize us on account of that strong feeling of kinship.

  It all gets down to economics. White men were terrified that if they took any position at all they would lose their business, as my husband had. They couldn’t sell real estate to blacks or they would get in bad with the bank. You had to have a great deal of security to be willing to take that kind of ostracism and disapproval.

  Virginia Durr, preparing to testify at a hearing in New Orleans.

  There was another kind of terror. Some whites were scared that they wouldn’t be invited to the ball, to the parties. It’s a terror of being a social failure, of not making your way in the world. Now that’s not nearly as bad as being lynched or killed or beaten up. But it is a terrible fear; that’s the fear that possesses most men today.

  I think the women played a tremendous part in the movement, the white and the black women. For years, we had an integrated prayer group here. We’d pray together every morning. That was broken up by one of those white Nazi groups. The husbands and uncles and brothers of these women took out advertisements in the papers, and many of them repudiated their own wives.

  When I heard that the boycott had been successful, I felt pure, unadulterated joy. It was like a fountain of joy. Of course the blacks felt that way, but the white friends I had felt the way I did. We felt joy and release. It was as if a great burden had fallen off us.

  Members of the MIA met often to avert violence and circumvent the city commissioners’ efforts to end the boycott.

  Lone white bus riders were seen frequently during the boycott.

  Battle-cry responses from segregationists prompted the mayor to further angry statements. For example, he asked housewives not to drive their maids to work.

  “They’d arrest you if you went six miles [an hour] in a five-mile zone,” remembers Virginia Durr. “But that didn’t last, because the white women got so furious at the mayor that they kept … writing letters to the paper saying, ‘If the mayor wants to do my wash and wants to cook for me and clean up after my children let him come and do it. But as long as he won’t do it I’m certainly not going to get rid of this wonderful woman I’ve had for fifteen years.’”

  The humor of the situation escaped the mayor, now a segregationist hero for his “no-talk” and “get-tough” policy. On January 24, Mayor Gayle and Commissioner Parks (who weeks earlier had been ready to accept the MIA’s proposed seating plan) both joined the white Citizens’ Council. With police commissioner Clyde Sellers already a member, all three city commissioners now belonged to the council. Within weeks, the entire County Board of Revenue had also joined.

  The tension in Montgomery continued to escalate. On January 30, King’s house was bombed. His wife Coretta fled to a back room with her seven-week-old baby to escape injury.

  On February 1, E. D. Nixon’s home was bombed.

  Also on February 1, Fred Gray filed suit in United States District Court challenging the constitutionality of bus segregation. As Ralph Abernathy later described the sequence of events, “Our first demand was to have more courtesy on the part of the bus drivers, to eliminate them calling our women names … [calling them] cows and niggers and things like that … we could not solve the problem because they were not willing to cooperate … all they had to do was change the law and make it permissible for black people to ride on the buses under those conditions … but that was the most important lesson of the boycott … the city leaders were not going to compromise, so consequently we needed a ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court.”

  On February 1, about 6,000 people in Montgomery belonged to the white Citizens’ Council. By the end of the month, that number had doubled.

  A group of prominent white lawyers in Montgomery suggested that the protest could be destroyed by prosecuting the leaders of the MIA under an old, seldomused law prohibiting boycotts. The Montgomery business community, however, was opposed to the idea. Frustrated by the inability of the politicians to resolve the problem, a group of businessmen tried to settle the matter by negotiating with the boycotters themselves. The group, known as the Men of Montgomery, felt that the city’s image was already tarnished by the actions and reactions surrounding the boycott; it could only get worse if the ministers who led this nonviolent movement were thrown in jail. But meetings with the MIA produced no solution. On February 13, at the urging of Circuit Solicitor William Thetford, a grand jury met to consider indictments against the boycott leaders.

  Martin Luther King, Jr., was arrested for the first time in his life under an old Alabama statute that denied people the right to boycott. His wife, Coretta, celebrated her husband’s arrest because it would bring national attention to the cause.

  The bus boycott continued for nearly thirteen months, through rain, heat, and freezing temperatures.

  On February 21, the grand jury indicted eighty-nine blacks—including King and twenty-four other ministers—for conspiring to boycott. It was, as the Men of Montgomery had feared, a story of national interest.

  Also of national interest, on March 12, some 100 United States congressmen signed the Southern Manifesto, taking issue with the Supreme Court’s ruling on school desegregation announced some ten months earlier.

  When the trial of the boycott leaders began in Alabama, the national press got its first good look at Martin Luther King, Jr., the first defendant. Four days later, King was found guilty. The sentence was a $500 fine and court costs, or 386 days of hard labor. The judge explained that he had imposed this “minimal penalty” because King had promoted nonviolence. King was released on bond; his indictment and conviction became front-page news across the nation.

  In an effort to raise money for the boycott and publicize what was happening in Montgomery, King accepted many invitations to speak throughout the country. He maintained a grueling schedule of engagements, and his message and eloquence were met with rapt attention and enthusiastic support.

  Meanwhile, the boycott’s leaders were pursuing their own court case. Filed by Fred Gray on February 1, the case was on behalf of five women who were challenging the constitutionality of bus segregation. The boycott leaders now considered whether they might call an end to the strike. Their best chance of victory lay with the courts, not in negotiations with city officials or the bus company. But King and others were unhappy with the way those in power had treated them. They insisted on continuing the boycott. If the court did not rule in their favor, the boycott would still offer some chance of success. The boycotters stayed off the buses. They carpooled and walked through winter, spring, and on into the summer of 1956.

  In June, the five women won their suit by a two-to-one vote in the special three-judge federal District Court. But the city commissioners appealed the decision to the Supreme Court. The buses remained segregated, and the blacks did not ride them. Meanwhile, whites tried another way to choke off the boycott: preventing the “rolling churches” from getting insurance. Without insurance, these church-owned cars used to transport blacks could not operate legally.

  The liability insurance was cancelled four times in as many months, and insurance agents throughout the South were pressured by the city commissioners, the white Citizens’ Council, and their supporters to refuse the boycotters coverage. But King arranged for insurance through T. M. Alexander, a black agent in Atlanta. Alexander found a Lloyd’s of London underwriter who agreed to sell the boycotters a policy. Blacks stayed off the buses through that autumn.

  But the segregationists did not quit. In October, the mayor sought a restraining order in state court, hoping to prevent blacks from gathering on street corners while waiting for the “rolling churches.” The mayor claimed that the blacks were singing loudly and bothering residents, thus constituting a public nuisance.

  Under pressure from segregationists, insur
ance companies cancelled the insurance policies on the “rolling churches.” A black Atlanta insurance agent, T. M. Alexander, got Lloyds of London to underwrite the boycotters’ transportation system, enabling the protest to continue legally.

  He won a small victory on November 13, when a court granted the order. But on that same day, the boycotters won a far greater triumph. The United States Supreme Court affirmed the lower court’s decision outlawing segregation on buses. Nearly a year after Rosa Parks had defied James Blake’s order to move to the back of the bus—after months of walking, carpooling, litigation, and intimidation—the boycotters had won. As Jo Ann Robinson said years later, “We felt that we were somebody. That somebody had listened to us, that we had forced the white man to give what we knew [was] our own citizenship … And if you have never had the feeling that … you are [no longer] an alien, but that this is your country too, then you don’t know what I’m talking about. It is a hilarious feeling that just goes all over you, that makes you feel that America is a great country and we’re going to do more to make it greater.”

  The segregationists challenged the ruling, arguing that it violated states’ rights. The Supreme Court, however, refused to reconsider the case. The white Citizens’ Council forecast racial violence.

  The written mandate from the Supreme Court did not arrive in Montgomery until December 20. The next day, nearly thirteen months after the boycott began, blacks boarded Montgomery City Lines buses.