M.L.’s mind, of course, was already made up. We went off to his room after I’d spoken with Coretta. He told me he wanted to marry her. I could still hear the fire in her voice as she told me, I have something to offer! And I knew that it was real between them, that no amount of discouragement was going to mean anything at all. And so I reluctantly agreed that perhaps they should marry, before anything happened that would force them to rush into a wedding that would bring a lot of embarrassed whispering to the ceremony.
“I must marry Coretta,” said M.L. “She’s the most important person to come into my life, Dad. I know you don’t really approve, but this is what I have to do.”
We returned to find that Bunch had gone downstairs with Philip and had him honking the horn of his car to get me started for the trip to the train station. I spoke briefly with Coretta before I left, just to assure her that I was not entirely pleased with what was going on between her and M.L., but that if he was convinced, I was sure that eventually I would be. And, eventually, I was. When they married, on the lawn of her parents’ home in Marion, Alabama, on June 18, 1953, I pronounced them man and wife.
TWELVE
Pride runs deep in the southern personality, and often causes confusion. Atlantans wanted to feel proud of the city’s efforts to bring equality to all citizens. But the people here also thought this could be accomplished within the framework of a sophisticated exchange of viewpoint, one black, one white. Unfortunately, racial discrimination was too primitive for this kind of process to continue indefinitely. And so while coalition politics ground slowly to a halt in Atlanta, another city in the South became the focal point of that period of history.
Montgomery, Alabama, had no coalition politics because whites there just couldn’t bear the thought of communicating with any black people on such a level. In 1954, following the completion of his course work at Boston University, M.L. took the pastorate of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery. Within a year after he and Coretta had moved to the city, Rosa Parks set into motion America’s most famous boycott. When she refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a city bus, Mrs. Parks was arrested. Negroes responded with a boycott of the transit company that eventually bankrupted the bus lines. The famed Montgomery Bus Boycott was led by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. And although I’d been uneasy about the role he played in the beginning of this enormous national drama, I soon realized that the effort made in Montgomery created the Civil Rights Movement, and made all the other parts of it possible.
M.L. told me that Montgomery happened the way it did because the people there simply had no other choice but to participate in direct action to break the law in order to change it. The people in Alabama lived in what often came close to a police state as far as racial matters were concerned. Among the whites there were no voices of reason, no one willing to listen to the song of progress.
Atlanta had been inching along with the integration of city golf courses, which few Negroes used, and other small concessions designed to unravel slowly the pattern of segregated life. And all the things that were accomplished in Montgomery would eventually have come about in Atlanta and other parts of the South, but not before many years had passed. Montgomery changed the concept of time as it relates to social change. The boycott there also made it clear that segregation was an economic matter, not merely a political one. When the pressure of profits being lost is felt in this society, all things begin turning very quickly. Those who do not change, fall. The bus company in Montgomery held on stubbornly to a policy of segregated seating long after there was nothing but the vanity of white supremacists left at stake. By then it was too late, and the bus line was destroyed, swept away by new time. When the Supreme Court of the United States held that separate seating in a public vehicle, because of race or color, was unconstitutional, a great victory had been won. Yet Montgomery stood virtually alone in its boycott effort.
I was still in favor of boycotts, which I will always feel are the greatest weapon possessed by any disadvantaged people. But some people in Atlanta, including many blacks, remained uncertain about marching or demonstrating. There were Negroes who were embarrassed by the thought of making a public display of any concern they had, no matter how deep. And whites took advantage of this attitude. As long as the system of segregation was a matter for discussion, blacks were caught in a trap. Southern white folks are among the greatest talkers and storytellers in the world. They can go on for hours, for days and weeks, just running their mouths without ever getting tired. Without a tactic to break that flow of talk, nothing would ever have been solved for the Negro in the South during the middle of this century. A boycott brought all the chatter to a halt. White businessmen feared boycotts more than they feared the flood. You could get insurance against the rising waters, but nobody paid off for stores that shut down because a bunch of “niggers” decided to stop spending what little money they had with people who didn’t consider them human.
Atlanta didn’t want to push. The golf courses were integrated during this time because a Negro boycott of the municipal golf links would have had no effect. Only a handful of blacks in the city were golfers. Thousands rode the buses. Consequently, not much more than a half-dozen people were on hand that morning in the summer of 1955 when Hartsfield resisted pressure to close the golf courses rather than integrate them. First he had had racist remarks painted off the benches and buildings around the links, and had warned parks department employees that insulting Negroes who used golf courses would be grounds for dismissal from their jobs.
But a couple of years after the golf-course integration, it became clear that this tactic was going to have a shorter life than many people expected. During the summer of 1957, the president of Atlanta Transit, Robert Sommerville, began holding regular meetings with Hartsfield and several of us from the Negro community. The matter we discussed was the orderly transition to an integrated bus system. Once again, the Atlanta Plan was to be followed: one nonviolent action, arrests, and subsequent integration through court decree. I maintain to this day that there was nothing basically wrong with this approach, except that it took too long and never got to the roots of segregation, those deeper places in the human soul where the law did not reach. If America was going to become one country instead of two, more than seats on buses would have to be shared. But I was also growing weary of complaints about what a character I was becoming for seeking firmer, more direct types of action against the institutions that promoted racism in the country. I had learned from Montgomery—where the action, direct or not, had required so long to complete—that the long pent-up feelings about segregation were emotional time bombs that had to be defused rather than hidden even further away. The South had to come out of a very old shell and look at itself, honestly, and with the courage to face up to what it had been. That couldn’t be accomplished through polite ceremonies alone. For all the passion that was ignited in Alabama, people seemed relieved that so much of the tension could be released, so much fear among whites and blacks could be overcome. In Atlanta, everything would be done with smiles and handshakes, the way it’s done when monuments are dedicated, or ships are sent off to sea with the smashing of a bottle of champagne.
Sommerville was a very convincing speaker. He quoted the findings of a study commissioned by the local bus company in conjunction with several black Atlanta civil-rights organizations. Negro passengers had a case that could be taken to court. The bus company was willing to lose in court—that was a gentleman’s way of losing, after all. No white businessman could put up with losing directly to the Negro. The courts could instruct them, not black folks. And of course there was a lot of publicity value to get out of all this, too. BUS COMPANY OBEYS LAW; that sort of thing.
The Reverend William Holmes Borders, pastor of the Wheat Street Baptist Church, liked the idea of the court case resolving the bus-segregation struggle, and he agreed to support it. This would be a very visible kind of evidence for the young people, he argued; they’d now s
ee something concrete that coalition politics had achieved; the value of cooperation between antagonists would be stressed.
There were others in the black community who felt that the results of the study pointed out the new power Negroes possessed in the southern political firmament. Fifty-three percent of Atlanta’s bus passengers, the study revealed, were black. The loss of their business would be dangerous. Negroes, the study really pointed out, no longer had to ask for anything.
Sommerville probably recognized this as clearly as anyone. He offered promises, for example, that Negroes would find jobs that had never been open to them before within the framework of the Atlanta transportation system, and that even more blacks were going to be hired in the future. But on the campuses around town, black students were saying no to all the plans that did not express their viewpoint. And the way they were starting to see things wasn’t as polite as the point of view of their elders. The students knew how long court cases took to be resolved. They knew that Negroes would be expected to behave during those times. They wanted a more dramatic sort of victory than others were willing to settle for; they wanted whites to come right out and say, We are wrong, we will stop being wrong immediately. Whites, on the other hand, said this kind of victory would humiliate them and was too much to ask.
The students were soon mobilizing themselves for some of the most forceful actions Negroes had ever put forth in the South. This was not to be an armed assault on the traditions of the South, it was to be a demonstrative expression directed at the hearts of all people of goodwill. The time had come to throw off the mask—not in secret and not in anger, but in peace and brotherhood and mutual respect. It could have happened that way. But it didn’t.
One day during the late summer of 1957, a group of young black men in Atlanta boarded a city bus, rode for several blocks and were met by local police. Chief Herbert Jenkins himself was the arresting officer, and one of these young men, John Porters, was detained. Later he was booked, very quietly, and released. The case was now ready for court. Eventually two cases developed, one of them going directly to Federal District Court, the other being argued at the state level. A friend of M.L.’s, Sam Williams, who was president of the local chapter of the NAACP, was the plaintiff in the federal case. Atlanta’s branch office of the NAACP was following the overall directive of the national headquarters, although Williams was reportedly favoring the pressure tactics of the sit-in movement. By now the divisions between the two movements had widened even further. The national civil-rights groups, by which I mean the NAACP and Urban League mainly, had no real interest in the nonviolent application of citizen protest if it constituted more than a single instance. They were, for example, more than satisfied with the extended period of time required to resolve the bus cases—two years. But to young people, that was an eternity for the right to take a front seat on a bus!!
When the bus cases were brought to court, Borders and the Wheat Street Baptist Church moved quickly, more quickly than anyone else, to pay some court costs, which the NAACP did not have the money to do. The emphasis thus shifted away from the value of NAACP rights tactics toward those of the younger strategists, who sought to force change to take shape more quickly. The state court upheld the bus company’s right to segregate passengers, knowing that the federal court would overturn that decision. This helped whites save enough face to feel comfortable about the fact that they’d be sitting next to blacks when they all rode the city buses. The big question for all activists was how the fact of the southern timetable was to be taken into consideration in all future actions. If the buses took two years, many people were arguing, actual desegregation of the schools in response to the 1954 Supreme Court decision would take at least ten. The NAACP took the official position that the route through the courts was the only legitimate course to freedom. Fewer folks in the South seemed to be agreeing with them, however, as the Sixties approached. The power of new organizations was clearly evident now. Confrontation was a necessary part of the movement. To be put on hold when your life was at stake just wasn’t going to be tolerated anymore. Many of us had hoped it would not come to such a point. And many knew that it had to.
Student demonstrations in other parts of the South brought Atlanta into a completely new political climate. There was no precedent for the size and scope of the changes Negroes were now demanding as part of their citizenship in this country. What could America tell the rest of the world about freedom if so many people in this country did not consider themselves free? And these young people could not be dismissed as troublemakers and hoodlums. Their grievances came out of acquired knowledge and experience. They were kids, but they were bright and sharp and filled with a sincere sense of purpose that seemed almost mystical at times. Before these believers, many others became cynics. It seemed naïve to suppose that hardened southern whites could be reached with logical readings of the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, or any other historical evidence a person might honestly care to examine. But more and more young people were moving together in the belief that this was possible. And their faith was more than just contagious. It embraced hundreds, then thousands, then hundreds of thousands of people all over the country who now saw a time when history could be shaped.
White resistance in Atlanta was predictably rigid. The businessmen were caught in the middle of their feelings and their options. Many of them knew that northern corporations could make fortunes from regional offices, franchised operations, and subsidiary corporations throughout the South. Cities like Birmingham, New Orleans and Miami were all trying to compete for those dollars. Atlanta had the best shot at winning if it could distinguish itself from all the others on the matter of race relations. Now those waters were being tested by the Negro in a call to people of goodwill throughout the world. We ask, said the students, that the world look to see if we are being wronged in our country, and whether those wrongs deserve international attention.
There could no longer be any question that they did. America had to address itself to nations everywhere, not with slogans about moving ahead slowly but surely, but rather with specific actions to rid the most powerful country on earth of a crippling disease for which a cure had always been available.
The businessmen of Atlanta responded hastily, without doing what I think they might have done had they examined what the students were asking for. Instead, they broke into factions and tried to face individually what could only be solved by everyone collectively. Richard Rich, head of the Atlanta department store that carried his family’s name, came out of a meeting and said he would not integrate his facilities until he was assured that other store owners were committed to opening their businesses to Negroes on an equal basis with whites. Rich, I think, could have led the others; instead he tried to get them to lead him. They couldn’t. White reaction to a public statement in favor of integration by a small businessman could be devastating; a man could lose a life’s investment in a matter of hours. Rich wouldn’t be hit that hard, some of the smaller merchants felt.
It was here that a major imbalance in the struggle became evident. Whites were being represented, but blacks were producing leaders. The businessmen in white Atlanta were very entrenched sort of people, extremely conservative, basically distrustful of outsiders for all the friendly good ol’ boy image projected across the country in movies and folk songs. Most of these men didn’t even bother to consider what the changes would really accomplish. They lived with ideas that were then a hundred years old, and refused to take the kind of chance by investing in their own country that they were willing to take investing in a partnership in a frozen-custard stand. To represent them, they needed only men who would hold a line and not give anything up, not men who would seek, in an adventurous use of their own intellects, a philosophy of change and progress.
How sad it is, for example, that not a single white southern minister emerged to influence the spiritual development of whites living through the end of an old order and the start of a new one! Those of u
s in the Negro ministry counseled moderation for the very simple reason that we did not believe that bloodshed could be avoided; and once started, many of us felt, it would prove devastating. Why, we often asked each other, would whites want to risk that? What was it in them that could not face negotiating honorable terms with us? How easy it could have been. But someone, anyone with more than a loud voice going for him in the white community, had to say something!
Attorney A. T. Walden, one of the black leaders in the coalition, kept explaining to white coalition members how we had our hands full getting the student groups even to listen anymore. “They’re kids,” he’d shout, “and kids get impatient. You guys should know that from your own children!”
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