Voices in Our Blood

by Jon Meacham

  “Mister, you know about the buses—about the boycott?” one of them asked me.

  “Sure—but that doesn’t mean I can’t ride if I want to, does it?”

  A second Negro rushed to say that “goddamn right he can ride—nobody gonna bother you long as I’m here. Damn right you can ride if you want to.”

  Suddenly the bus was there. I smiled as I ran to it, for I heard one of the three Negroes say: “Man, there goes a queer one.”

  Kleeman and I noticed that a Negro nurse boarded the bus as we did. We learned that she rode it every night and had not been molested by any “union-type goons.”)

  Kleeman and I left the Advertiser office agreed that we should find out more about who was behind the boycott, and how it functioned. I telephoned a Negro leader who convinced a group of Negroes holding a “strategy meeting” on the boycott that they should let me sit in.

  At the home of Mrs. JoAnn Robinson, an English instructor at Alabama State College (Negro), I found the “brains” behind the protest. Present were the Reverend A. W. Wilson, fifty-three, pastor of the Holt Street Baptist Church; the Reverend W. J. Powell, forty-seven, pastor of the A.M.E. Zion Church; Reverend Abernathy; Mrs. R. T. Adair, wife of a Negro doctor; Dr. King; Gray; and Mrs. Robinson.

  They talked freely of the “protest”—although they insisted that as leaders, they were not proud of what was taking place.

  “If only the whites could realize that we are working to help Montgomery,” said Mrs. Adair. “As long as they keep Negroes bottlenecked, intimidated and ignorant, they keep themselves ignorant.

  “Oh, it pains me deeply when I think of the brain power and the man hours that we have poured into this thing. Think how many constructive things we could do for the city if they did not force us to spend every second struggling for basic decency.

  “The white man in this town just does not want to believe that this is a people’s movement,” added Mrs. Adair. “In that fact lies the real tragedy of our South: because of segregation there is no communication between whites and Negroes.”

  When asked about alleged “Negro goon squads,” attorney Gray insisted that not the slightest intimidation was needed to keep Negroes off buses. Almost every Negro in Montgomery had been humiliated at one time or the other by a bus driver, he said, so the Rosa Parks case was merely the culmination of many grievances.

  Gray cited cases of bus drivers’ cursing some Negro women, trying to date others, and of their forcing pregnant Negro women to stand so white youths might sit. He reeled off names like Claudette Colvin, Alberta Smith, Mrs. Viola White—these among the five women and two children who were arrested in 1955 (one Negro man was killed by a policeman) when they ignored a driver’s order to stand.

  This, Gray said, is what united all the Negro ministerial groups in Montgomery and provoked them to speak for 60,000 Negroes: “Our cup of tolerance has run over. Our people . . . prefer to walk rather than endure more.”

  II

  But the white man figured the Negro still would be humble. And still available was that old technique used all over the world to keep the underprivileged underprivileged, that old technique used for decades in the South to keep the Negro “in his place”: divide and rule. White Montgomery officials set about trying just that. On Saturday night, January 21, 1956, I sat down to dinner in Minneapolis. In a couple of hours I would drive to the corner drugstore to get the Minneapolis Sunday Tribune, in which Kleeman and I were telling the story of Montgomery, in its forty-ninth day of the bus boycott. My telephone rang and the news editor asked if I was sitting or standing. After receiving an assurance that my heart could take any bad news, he told me that Associated Press had just filed a dispatch announcing that the Negro ministers of Montgomery had agreed to end their boycott. I first expressed disgust over the idea of having to leave dinner to try to change our story from what suddenly had become ancient history to something up-to-date. My second reaction was disbelief. I telephoned Dr. King, who told me that he had not seen city officials, that the protest leaders had held a meeting of their own, and that they had not agreed to end the boycott. I telephoned attorney Gray, who advised me that neither he nor any other boycott leader had met with city officials or agreed to end their protest. I checked with Associated Press, which said its Montgomery correspondent had filed the story attributing it to Commissioner Sellers. I telephoned Sellers, who told me that three Negro ministers, “a Presbyterian, a Holiness Bishop and a Baptist,” had met with him and other white leaders and had agreed to end the boycott.

  “Could you give me the names of these ministers?” I asked.

  “You know, we don’t really know these Nigras down here,” Sellers replied, assuming that I was white. “We just know these Nigras by what they represent, not by name.”

  I advised the police commissioner that I had just talked with the boycott leaders and that they had denied any settlement. He expressed no surprise. I asked if he felt the ministers with whom he conferred could end the boycott. Sellers said he did not think the three ministers had enough influence, “but they might start other Nigras to thinking.” He said that if Montgomery Negroes refused the offer of January 21 (which was a promise for more courtesy, but a denial of the other demands), Negroes could “go on walking because we have met with them for the last time.”

  The Montgomery reporter had failed even to telephone the Negro leaders of the protest, but had filed his unsubstantiated “agreement” story as part of what the Negroes promptly labeled “a scheme to divide and mislead Negroes.” The protest leaders set about identifying the three Negroes who had met with the white officials. These three ministers denied agreeing to any compromise plan for ending the boycott. They said that they had been “duped” into attending the meeting.

  When their divisive scheme failed, Montgomery officials were furious. Mayor Gayle, who was one of those who proclaimed loudly that Negroes preferred segregation, expressed disgust over rumors that even his Negro help, who had been saying “Yassuh, Boss” at work, were hurrying to church, where they put large portions of their wages into the collection plate for the NAACP. On January 23, Gayle issued a bristling statement after announcing that he and his fellow members of the city commission had joined the White Citizens Council. He said that the White Citizens of Montgomery had “pussyfooted around on this boycott long enough and it has come time to be frank and honest.

  “. . . 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 said.

  “The Negro leaders have forced the bus boycott into a campaign between whether the social fabric of our community will continue to exist or will be destroyed by a group of Negro radicals who have split asunder the fine relationships which have existed between the Negro and white people for generations. . . .

  “The white people are firm in their convictions that they do not care whether the Negroes ever ride a city bus again if it means that the social fabric of our community is to be destroyed so that the Negroes will start riding the buses again.

  “It is not that important to whites that the Negroes ride the buses. This is not a matter of a bus boycott. It is a matter of a community relationship.

  “The Negro leaders have proved they are not interested in ending the boycott but rather in prolonging it so that they may stir up racial strife. The Negro leaders have proved they will say one thing to a white man and another thing to a Negro. They have proved it again and again. . . .

  “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.”

  Mayor Gayle was especially vexed about the white families who gave car rides to their Negro help, or paid their taxi fares. He said that the cooks and maids boycotting the buses “are fighting to destroy our social fabric just as much as the Ne
gro radicals who are leading them. The Negroes are laughing at white people behind their backs. . . . They think it’s very funny and amusing that whites who are opposed to the Negro boycott will act as chauffeurs to Negroes who are boycotting the buses. When a white person gives a Negro a single penny for transportation or helps a Negro with his transportation, even if it’s a block ride, he is helping the Negro radicals who lead the boycott. The Negroes have made their own bed, and the whites should let them sleep in it.”

  Meanwhile, the city officials, particularly the policemen under Clyde Sellers, had adopted a few “get-tough” tactics of their own. Dr. King was arrested and fined on a charge of driving thirty-five miles an hour in a thirty-mile zone. City officials set out to press charges against young attorney Fred Gray, who had filed a suit on behalf of several Negro citizens, challenging the constitutionality of the bus segregation laws of Montgomery. The charge against Gray was that he acted unscrupulously and contrary to the principles of a good lawyer because he filed the suit “against the wishes” of some of the people listed as plaintiffs.

  But not all the people who felt the whip of the get-tough policy were Negroes. Pastor Graetz, the white minister at Trinity Lutheran Church (he objects to its being referred to as all-Negro. “We have four white members—my wife, myself, and our two children, and pretty soon there will be five”) had had his moments of harassment. Two weeks after the boycott began, Pastor Graetz went out on his routine chore of driving Negroes to work. After one trip, he pulled up to a parking meter at the main downtown pickup and dispatch station for Negroes seeking rides. The minister loaded five Negro women into his car and drove off, unaware that a sheriff’s car was following him. A block or so from the drugstore, the sheriff’s car pulled alongside and its driver motioned Pastor Graetz to the curb.

  “What are you doing? Running a taxi?” asked the officer, who, the minister discovered, was Sheriff Mac Sim Butler. The sheriff accused the minister of picking up passengers in the taxi zone, demanded his license and then asked who his five passengers were.

  “Just friends,” Pastor Graetz replied.

  “Friends!” Butler exploded back at him, as if to ask what white man in Alabama would have Negro friends. The sheriff told the women to remain in the car while the minister went with him to the county jail.

  “When we got to the jail, he took me inside and left me alone in the office for a few moments. I was grateful for that, because it gave me a chance to pray a bit,” Pastor Graetz remembers.

  A deputy sheriff was sent out to ask the five women how much they were paying for the ride (the pastor, aware of the law, had charged nothing but urged his riders to contribute the equivalent of bus fare to the boycott expense fund).

  The deputy searched the pastor’s car and brought in copies of his newsletter to other ministers, a list of jitney pickup stations—“and,” said Pastor Graetz with a grin, “a copy of our church budget, which didn’t interest him much.”

  There followed lectures to the minister by the deputy sheriff along the line of “we like things the way things are around here and we don’t intend to have anybody change them.” The Bible, the deputy said, supports segregation.

  Meanwhile, Sheriff Butler had disappeared. Soon he returned and told Pastor Graetz he had been to see a judge, who would not allow him to charge the pastor either with running a taxicab or with hauling whites and Negroes together.

  There followed some more discussion with the deputy, “who just couldn’t understand how I could be a Christian and a minister and believe the things I believe.”

  Then—after being detained about half an hour—the young minister was released (as his five passengers had been earlier).

  After Pastor Graetz was the subject of an extensive—and largely fair and factual—article on the editorial page of the Montgomery Advertiser, he began receiving abusive calls.

  One man, who reached the minister by telephone, exploded: “If I was you I wouldn’t call myself a pastor. You’re a no-good son of a bitch.”

  Later the pastor discovered that someone had slashed two tires on his new Chevrolet and poured sugar in his gasoline tank.

  The Lutheran minister took all this in stride, just as Negro minister King had taken it in stride when someone planted dynamite under his home; just as NAACP leader E. D. Nixon took it in stride when dynamite was exploded in his front yard.

  Pastor Graetz merely kept church people informed of what it meant to be a white man trying to live up to what he believed to be Christian principles amid this kind of tension. The twenty-seven-year-old, lean-faced Lutheran said he and his family felt like the circus lion tamer: “Our heads are in the lion’s mouth.”

  But Pastor Graetz insisted that he did not feel overly courageous. “There are others who have made, and are still making, much bolder confessions while in ‘enemy territory.’ Some of them, especially ministers, have been driven out. A few have paid the supreme price of their lives.”

  Pastor Graetz could still laugh—laugh at the way the segregationists labeled him a “northern agitator” or a “Yankee carpetbagger,” even though he was born and reared in West Virginia, where segregation also was a way of life until this decade, when the nation’s courts and its new conscience began to produce change.

  Pastor Graetz could ignore these labels, he said, because “a Negro minister who has lived in Montgomery for several years spent the first part of his life just across the county line, about thirty miles away. He says that every time trouble breaks out, he is branded as an outside agitator.

  “People scratch their heads and wonder what this ‘nigger-lovin’ ’ white preacher is up to. They suspect and have said so privately that the church sent me to Montgomery to stir up racial tension.”

  But in the early days of the boycott Pastor Graetz had explained quite simply why he felt obligated to join Negroes in their protest.

  “Pie in the sky by and by may be a fine thing to look forward to,” he told an official of the Lutheran church. “But my people [his congregation] deserve the opportunity to live a decent life in this world, too.”

  He also gave his answer to a reporter from the Montgomery Advertiser:

  “The reactionary element in the South will stop at nothing to maintain their strangle hold on the Negro population, whom they still hold in virtual economic slavery.

  “I have been told that I am a kind of symbol to my people. Many of them had long ago concluded that it was scarcely possible for a white person to be a Christian. But now they know that, with some of us, Christianity is more than pious profession of the lips. . . .

  “I know that I shall be criticized for my stand. I may even suffer violence. But I cannot minister to souls alone. My people also have bodies.”

  Some weeks later Pastor Graetz’s home was dynamited while he and the family were away. But he turned the other cheek—and went back to Montgomery.

  III

  Now what hope was there for a solution to the racial strife in Montgomery? On one side stood city officials who had announced boldly that they stood for segregation, that they were members of “the uptown Ku Klux Klan.” On the other side were some 60,000 Negroes, united, as Negro people never before had been united, by harassment, bombings, intimidation—and most of all, united by the wise, dignified leadership that caused a sense of pride and achievement to well up inside the lowliest Negro. In the middle, of course, was a bus company, losing money, the first victim in “the battle of Montgomery.”

  Surely, now, Mayor Gayle must feel that Negroes were laughing out loud at the white people of Alabama—white people who, as the Montgomery Advertiser had warned so many weeks earlier, enjoyed superior economic artillery, white men who held all the offices of government machinery. Even editor Hall must have wondered by now whether or not there would be white rule as far as the eye could see.

  Well, the showdown had to come. Sooner or later someone would have to find out whether the white man’s control of the machinery of government would be enough to
beat down these Negroes and put them “in their place.” Those who visited the transportation centers, Negro drugstores, pool halls and barber shops would have seen much reason to doubt the possibility of this, because this Negro movement not only embodied courage but had cloaked itself with an armor of humor and a willingness to suffer that was becoming almost legendary.

  But the city officials made their move. In March, 1956, they indicted ninety-odd Negroes, including twenty-four ministers, under an almost forgotten anti-labor law enacted in 1921 making it a misdemeanor to conspire “without a just cause or legal excuse” to hinder any company in its conduct of business.

  The Negroes, men, women and church leaders, were arrested, fingerprinted and released on bond. A wave of anger and indignation rolled over the Negro community like the giant mushroom from a hydrogen bomb. But Dr. King cautioned Negroes against anger and violence: “Even if we are arrested every day, let no man drag you so low as to hate.”

  So in the late days of March the white men set up their machinery at the Montgomery County Courthouse—where, for a century, Negroes had gone in meekness—to test it against the black man’s weapon of “passiveness and love.”

  But this time, Negroes walked straight and even haughtily down a gloomy corridor with its sign asserting that “Gentlemen will not and others must not spit on the floor.” All who could not crowd inside the shabby old building, to huddle in anger beneath the American flag, stood outside to murmur and roar support and determination for the man on trial inside.

  The first defendant (the Negroes had demanded separate trials) was Dr. King, who was accused, in effect, of organizing the Montgomery Improvement Association for the purpose of unjustly boycotting the bus company and forcing upon it the illegal demands of the Negro community. Dr. King’s attorneys—from the NAACP, which now had stepped into the Montgomery boycott for the first time—were prepared to prove that the “protest” was spontaneous and that it arose from a just cause.