Montgomery’s blacks also kept walking because of themselves.
Though incidents on the city’s buses had been increasing in recent years, they had invariably ended in defeat and humiliation for the black person involved. Boarding a bus with her arms filled with packages one Christmas, Jo Ann Robinson, a professor at Montgomery’s black college, Alabama State, took a seat in the white section without thinking. Striding toward her, his arm up as if to strike her, the bus driver shouted, “Get up from there! Get up from there!” “I felt like a dog,” Mrs. Robinson was to recall, and, crying, she left the bus. But when she asked friends to help her protest the incident, they demurred, saying that the driver’s conduct was simply what one expected in Montgomery. Once, Martin Luther King’s predecessor in the Dexter pulpit, Vernon Johns, had dropped his dime as he was trying to put it in the fare box. Although it rolled near the driver’s seat, the driver ordered Johns to pick it up, saying, “Uncle, get down and pick up that dime and put it in the box.” When Johns asked the driver to do it himself, the driver said that if Johns didn’t do it, he’d throw him off the bus. Turning to the other passengers, all of whom were black, Johns said he was leaving and asked them to join him. Nobody moved.
But now, partly because of their new leader, partly because of a new determination, emblematic of the widespread new determination among southern blacks, Montgomery’s blacks kept on walking even when ten thousand people attended a White Citizens Council rally in the Montgomery Coliseum—“the largest pro-segregation rally in history”—to hear Mississippi’s senior United States Senator, James O. Eastland, shout that “In every stage of the bus boycott we have been oppressed and degraded because of black, slimy, juicy, unbearably stinking niggers … African flesh-eaters. When in the course of human events it becomes necessary to abolish the Negro race, proper methods should be used. Among these are guns, bows and arrows, slingshots and knives…. All whites are created equal with certain rights, among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of dead niggers.” They kept on walking even when, after that rally, long caravans of cars filled with hooded men brandishing rifles and Confederate flags roamed the city. Montgomery’s Negroes kept on walking even when the city fathers, who thought they were dealing with blacks from the past—ill-educated, easily divided, and without access to national publicity outlets—turned to the “get tough” policies that had always worked with blacks in the past, urging businessmen to fire Negro employees who came to work on foot instead of by bus, ordering police to break up for “loitering” groups of Negroes waiting for car pool pickups, and to give car pool drivers so many traffic tickets—Jo Ann Robinson got seventeen in two months—that the drivers faced the loss of their licenses and insurance. They kept walking even when a grand jury—an all-white grand jury, naturally—subpoenaed more than two hundred Negroes, and it became known that wholesale criminal indictments were being prepared under an obscure anti-boycott ordinance. They kept walking even when, in late February, after 115 indictments, twenty-four against ministers, had been returned by the grand jury but had not yet actually been served by police, the city commissioners called on the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, a key figure in the boycott, and delivered an ultimatum: a broad hint that the indictments would not be served if the boycott was called off immediately. “We have walked for eleven weeks in the cold and the rain,” Abernathy replied. “Now the weather is warming up…. We will walk on….”
They walked on even when the indictments were served—walked on, and found the courage not to be cowed by the indictments.
“For centuries,” as Taylor Branch has written, “the jailhouse door had conjured up visions of fetid cells and unspeakable cruelties” for southern blacks. Now one of the 115 blacks indicted, E. D. Nixon, a rough-hewn railroad porter, didn’t wait for the sheriff’s deputies to come for him, but walked into the county courthouse and said, “Are you looking for me? Well, here I am.” Released on three hundred dollars’ bail, he emerged, having removed a little of the terror from the act of being arrested. Then a dignified elderly black pastor followed Nixon, joking with the deputies as they were booking and fingerprinting him. News of what the two men had done spread across Negro Montgomery. A crowd gathered around the courthouse, shouting encouragement to the men and women who walked into it, applauding them as they came out. The furious sheriff came outside to shout, “This is no vaudeville show!” but that dreaded jailhouse door had begun to turn, in Branch’s words, “into a glorious passage.”
One of the ministers indicted was Martin Luther King. He was away when the indictments were handed down, and his father, a renowned black minister himself, in Atlanta, pleaded with him not to return to Montgomery lest he be killed. The Atlanta police chief told the younger King that that was a strong possibility: “I think you’re in great danger,” he said. “I think you’re a marked man.” There might be no bail for the boycott’s leader—and if he was kept in jail, what might not happen to him there? King replied that he must go back, and he did—arrested, he was photographed as a criminal, with a number, 7809, under his chin. He was released on bond, but only after an early date had been set for his trial.
One evening not long thereafter, King was speaking at a mass meeting when, looking down from the podium, he saw a man hurry into the hall and say something to Abernathy, who quickly left the room, and, when he returned, seemed very upset and started whispering urgently to ministers near him in the audience. Then King saw other men come in, and he saw some of them start to walk toward the podium, and then hesitate and retreat, as if there was something they didn’t want to tell him. He saw some of them whisper something to Abernathy. Abernathy didn’t come up either. Motioning Abernathy to come up to the podium, King whispered “What’s wrong?” and Abernathy had to tell him. “Your house has been bombed,” he said. When King asked, “Are Coretta and the baby all right?” Abernathy had to say, “We’re checking on that right now”—he had been desperate to have the answer for King before telling him anything.
In front of King’s home was a barricade of white policemen shouting to a huge crowd, a black crowd, to disperse, but the men in the crowd, yelling in rage, were brandishing guns and knives, and teenage boys were breaking bottles so that they would have weapons in their hands. King pushed through the crowd. The front porch, broken in two by the bomb, was covered with shattered glass from broken windows. He walked across it. Inside the front room, which was still reeking of dynamite fumes, were the Mayor and other city officials, whom King brushed past. In a back room was a crowd of neighbors; it was only when they parted to make way for him that he saw that at its center were Coretta and Yoki, unharmed.
And then, having made sure of that, Martin Luther King became very calm, with what Branch calls “the remote calm of a commander.” Stepping back out on the porch, he held up his hand for silence. Everything was all right, he told the crowd. “Don’t get panicky. Don’t do anything panicky. Don’t get your weapons. If you have weapons, take them home. He who lives by the sword will perish by the sword. Remember that is what Jesus said. We are not advocating violence. We want to love our enemies. I want you to love our enemies. Be good to them. This is what we must live by. We must meet hate with love.”
The crowd was silent now, as King continued speaking. He himself might die, he said, but that wouldn’t matter. “If I am stopped, this movement will not stop. If I am stopped, our work will not stop. For what we are doing is right. What we are doing is just. And God is with us.”
The people left, the men taking their weapons home. The boys put down the broken bottles. “I owe my life to that nigger preacher,” a white policeman said. That very night, floodlights were strung around the King home with its shattered porch, and for the remaining months of the boycott, men stood guard around it. They knew nothing must happen to the man inside. I. F. Stone had said that Negroes needed a Gandhi. They had a Gandhi now.
THE EMMETT TILL CASE had been the first great media event of the civil rights movement, but it had been a bri
ef event—its centerpiece a five-day trial—and it had been primarily a story for the print media. The Montgomery Bus Boycott took place not in a hamlet but in a big city, and it went on for months—for almost all of 1956, in fact—a dramatic story from the start, with its basic theme of downtrodden people fighting for a very basic right; and with the arrest and trial of Martin Luther King, and the bombing of his home, the drama escalated and escalated and escalated again. The reporters from the big northern newspapers who had come together for the first time in Money now came together again in Montgomery, and were joined by many others. And even in the six months since the Till trial, television had grown immensely, and so had the importance of its news programs, and this story provided the raw material that television needed—dramatic, unforgettable pictures: of elderly women trudging wearily home from work, passed by the buses they refused to ride; of King’s wrecked home; of mass meetings with hundreds, thousands of men and women lifting up their heads in defiant song. The days of setting down planes in fields were over; the networks set up direct feeds from Montgomery, for the boycott was on the news night after night.
Among the effects of this coverage was increased safety for the boycott’s footsore troops. As David Halberstam says, “The more coverage there was, the more witnesses there were, and the harder it was for the white leadership to inflict physical hardship upon the blacks. In addition, the more coverage there was, the more it gave courage to the leadership and its followers. The sacrifices and the risks were worth it, everyone sensed, because the country and the world were now taking notice.”
The coverage also affected the television viewers who were watching it, particularly, perhaps, those in the North. The “educational process” begun in the Till case was continuing, and intensifying. For people for whom “segregation” had been only an abstraction, disliked but vague, segregation was suddenly, night after night, a reality brought into their living rooms, in all its injustice and cruelty.
And this story had a hero. A keen sense of the possibilities of the media was combined in Martin Luther King with rare courage and a passionate desire for justice, and TV caught it all. An interview with that serious young man, who quoted Hegel and Nietzsche with evident familiarity, was memorable for reasons that went far beyond erudition. “Are you afraid?” an interviewer asked him after the bombing, and there was a pause, and then Martin Luther King said, very firmly, “No, I’m not. My attitude is that this is a great cause, a great issue that we’re confronted with, and that the consequences for my personal life are not particularly important. It is the triumph of a cause that I am concerned about, and I have always felt that ultimately along the way of life an individual must stand up and be counted, and be willing to face the consequences, whatever they are, and if he is filled with fear, he cannot do it.” His arrest and trial—on March 19, he was found guilty, sentenced to pay a $500 fine or serve a year at hard labor but was freed pending appeal—was front-page news everywhere. More and more, it was not just to Negroes that King was a hero. Arriving in New York to raise funds for his cause, he received what one newspaper called “the kind of welcome [the city] usually reserves for the Brooklyn Dodgers”; there were white people as well as black among the thousands who crowded into New York churches to hear him. White people as well as black came from all over the world on pilgrimages to Montgomery. A Swedish woman wrote, “I went directly from the airport to the by now world-famous car-pool lot. I stood across the street from it for a moment, and although I am neither a sentimental nor an emotional woman—we Swedes are neither—I don’t mind telling you that my throat tightened as I watched the crowded station wagons entering and leaving the car park and as I watched the many gayly smiling people who waited so patiently for their turn to be brought home after a hard day’s work…. I felt that somehow I was standing on historical ground.” The Negroes of Montgomery, Alabama, had gained—had won, won by sacrifice, by determination, by courage—the attention, and, increasingly, the admiration of America.
AND, BEFORE 1956 WAS OVER, they would win more than admiration. They would win.
On November 13, 1956, Martin Luther King was sitting again at the defendant’s table in a Montgomery courtroom. The city fathers had finally devised a maneuver that would cripple the boycott; they had asked for an injunction banning the car pool as an unlicensed transportation system, and the lawyers for his Montgomery Improvement Association had told King the injunction would be granted. If it was, the boycotters, with another winter approaching, would no longer have the car pool to help their fight—and to his wife Coretta, King confessed that without the car pool, “I’m afraid our people will go back to the buses. It’s just too much to ask them to continue if we don’t have transportation for them.” On November 13, when the hearing began, “the clock said it was noon, but it was midnight in my soul,” he was to remember.
But it was noon.
All that year, since long before the injunction suit had begun, another suit—brought not against the MIA but filed by the association itself—had been rising through the federal court system. Back in February, the MIA’s leaders had decided that the fight should be not merely for more seats for blacks on buses, and for a section reserved for blacks from which they could not be ousted, but rather for the right to sit anywhere on a bus they wanted, and the association had therefore filed a federal lawsuit not to modify bus segregation ordinances but to eliminate them entirely, on the grounds that they were unconstitutional because they violated the Fourteenth Amendment. The suit had been filed not only against Montgomery’s ordinances but also against Alabama’s, so it carried the hope of a victory over all bus segregation in the state. (MIA attorney Fred Gray had been arrested for barratry for filing it.) The suit had been upheld by lower federal courts, and had reached the Supreme Court that fall. And it was that case—not the unlicensed transportation system injunction—that was decided first: on that very day, November 13, on which King was sitting desolate in court.
Pushing through the crowd, a reporter handed him a slip of paper that had just been torn off the Associated Press teletypewriter. It said: “The United States Supreme Court today affirmed a decision of a special three-judge U.S. District Court in declaring Alabama’s state and local laws requiring segregation on buses unconstitutional.”
Although the city went ahead with the injunction request, and the judge granted it, the Supreme Court decision made the injunction irrelevant. The Emmett Till and Autherine Lucy episodes had ended in defeat. Not the Montgomery Bus Boycott. On the morning after the Supreme Court decision, a bus pulled up at the bus stop near Martin Luther King’s home and King boarded it. The driver, a white man, smiled at him. “I believe you are Reverend King,” he said. “Yes, I am,” King said. “We are glad to have you with us this morning,” the driver said. Martin Luther King sat down—in the front row. All that year, black Americans had been proving they could fight. Now they had proved they could win.
SOUTHERN WHITES REACTED to this development with heightened fury. A shotgun blast was fired into the King home; snipers fired on the integrated buses, one volley wounding a pregnant Negro woman in both legs; a car pulled up to a bus stop at which a fifteen-year-old Negro girl was standing alone, and five men jumped out and beat her; the long Klan caravans honked through Negro sections of Montgomery, and Klansmen marched through the streets in full regalia; fiery crosses burned in the night. One night explosions rumbled across the city as four churches and two homes—one of them Ralph Abernathy’s—were wrecked. Praying for guidance at a mass meeting the next day, King said, “Lord, I hope no one will have to die as a result of our struggle for freedom in Montgomery. Certainly I don’t want to die. But if anyone has to die, let it be me.” Two weeks later, while Coretta and Yoki were in Atlanta, something—he wasn’t sure what—disturbed King during the night; leaving his home, he went to a friend’s. A few hours later, a bomb exploded at his house; another—twelve sticks of dynamite—failed to explode; it was found at the house later. But the victory�
�a victory at last—had given southern blacks hope, and they met segregationist fury with increased determination. King and Abernathy established a permanent organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, to launch civil rights protests all across the South. In one sense, the victory in Montgomery was confined to a single front. While it was no longer illegal on a Montgomery bus for someone with black skin to sit beside someone with white skin, the rest of the city was still rigidly segregated, and whites vowed to keep it that way, planning not only new tactics of physical intimidation but legal strategies that could keep such threats as desegregation of the schools ensnarled in perpetual litigation. In a larger sense, however, the victory elevated the fight for civil rights to a new level, in part because it had produced a leader whose greatness was equal to the greatness of the cause—Martin Luther King gave people “the feeling that they could be bigger and stronger and more courageous than they thought they could be,” Bayard Rustin said—in part because of the powerful new weapon, non-violent resistance, that had been forged on the Montgomery battlefield. For perhaps the first time, and certainly the first time on such a scale, a black community had risen up in the heart of Dixie and defeated entrenched white power, and blacks had a new self-respect. After the Montgomery Bus Boycott victory, after they had proven they could endure, and could win, they were ready to move on to new fronts. They could sit beside white people on buses now; why couldn’t they sit beside them in theaters, in restaurants? Why couldn’t they live beside them in the same housing developments and apartment houses? Why couldn’t they compete equally with white people for jobs? Why couldn’t they vote in elections as easily as white people voted? Why was it that their children, whom the Supreme Court had ruled three years before could attend the same schools as white children—why were their children still not attending those schools? Fed, after Till and Lucy, by indignation, driven, after Montgomery, by hope, the tide was rising steadily now, southern black and northern liberal demand for equality combining to beat more and more powerfully against the political barriers that had, for so long, held it back.
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Page 122
