Fifties (89 page)

The bus issue became the most pressing one for Mrs. Robinson’s group. A few months before Rosa Parks made her stand, a fifteen-year-old black girl had refused to give up her seat to a white and had been dragged from the bus (“She insisted she was colored and just as good as white,” T. J. Ward, the arresting policeman, had noted with some surprise during the local court proceedings on her arrest). She had been charged with assault and battery for resisting arrest. For a time the black leadership thought of making hers the constitutional test case it sought, but backed off when someone learned that she was pregnant. So when Rosa Parks was arrested, the obvious response was a boycott. This was the blacks’ strongest lever: They were the biggest group of riders, and without them it was not going to be a very profitable bus service.

One of their great problems was the terrible divisions within the black leadership itself—by religion, by generation, by age, by class. There was no doubt that Ed Nixon was a forceful figure, willing on many occasions to take risks that few others would; but some felt that he was too abrasive, too eager for glory, and not sensitive enough to others. At the first organizational meeting, held the day after Parks was arrested, there was quick agreement on the need for a one-day boycott, starting on Monday morning. There was also a decision to hold a meeting of the black leadership, which included many ministers, on Monday afternoon, and a large public protest meeting was set for Monday night. At the Monday afternoon meeting, one of the ministers suggested that future meetings be secret, closed to the press, so that the whites would know as little as possible about what they were doing and who their leaders were. Meetings closed to the press! Ed Nixon got up and began to taunt them. “How in hell are you going to have protest meetings without letting the white folks know?” he began. Then he reminded them that those
being hurt were the black women of the city, the most powerless of the powerless, the domestics who went off every day to work for whites. These were the people who suffered the greatest pain from segregation and made up the core of every black church in town. “Let me tell you gentlemen one thing. You ministers have lived off the sweat of these washwomen all these years and you have never done anything for them,” he said. His contempt seemed to fill the church. “I am just ashamed of you. You said that God has called you to lead the people and now you are just afraid and gone to pieces because the man tells you that the newspapers will be here and your picture might come out in the newspaper. Somebody has got to get hurt in this thing and if you the preachers are not the leaders then we will have to pray that God will send us more leaders.” That stunning assault contained all too much truth. It was a young minister named Martin Luther King, Jr., who answered Nixon and said that he was not a coward, that they should act in the open, use their own names, and not hide behind anyone else. With that, the Rev. King had at once taken a strong position for the boycott, but he had also shown he was not completely Nixon’s man. Before the meeting was over, Martin Luther King, Jr., was named president of the new group, to be called the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA). It was not a role he sought, but he was the obvious choice—in no small part because he was relatively new on the scene and belonged to no faction of the city’s black leadership. There were other reasons as well: His congregation was unusually affluent and therefore less vulnerable to white reprisals. Finally, a number of people did not want Nixon to be the leader, yet King got on relatively well with Nixon, who had heard King speak earlier that year at an NAACP meeting and had been impressed. “I don’t know how I’m going to do it,” Nixon told a friend of his who taught at Alabama State, “but someday I’m going’ to hitch him to the stars.” King himself did not necessarily want to be hitched to the stars; he was wary of taking on too much responsibility and had only recently turned down an offer to head the local NAACP. After all, he was new in town, had a young family, and wanted first and foremost to do a good job at his first church.

But with a certain inevitability the movement sought him. He was a brilliant speaker. He had the ability to make complex ideas simple: By repeating phrases, he could expand an idea, blending the rational with the emotional. That gave him the great ability to move others, blacks at first and soon, remarkably enough, whites as well. He could reach people of all classes and backgrounds; he could
inspire men and women with nothing but his words. On that first day, the Holt Street Baptist Church was filled by late afternoon, and a crowd estimated at between six and ten thousand gathered in the street to hear the meeting broadcast over loudspeakers. The white police watched the crowd gather with increasing nervousness, and the officer in charge finally ordered the organizers to turn off the public address system, hoping thereby to disperse the crowd. One of the black organizers answered that if the police wanted the PA system off, they could do it themselves. The cops, looking at the size of the crowd, decided to let them have their PA broadcast after all.

That night, most of the black people of Montgomery got their first taste of Martin King’s oratory. He started out by making one point clear: Their boycott was different from those of the White Citizens’ Councils, which were using the threat of violence to stop black political and legal progress in the deep South. “Now, let us say that we are not here advocating violence. We have overcome that. I want it to be known throughout Montgomery and throughout the nation that we are a Christian people. The only weapon that we have in our hands this evening is the weapon of protest.” They were nothing less than ordinary Americans, he was saying, seeking the most ordinary of American rights in a democracy they loved as much as white people loved it. They were, in effect, setting out to make America whole. “If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong. If we are wrong, Jesus of Nazareth was merely a Utopian dreamer and never came down to earth! If we are wrong, justice is a lie.” By then the crowd was with him, cheering each incantation. “And we are determined here in Montgomery to work and fight until justice runs down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.” When it was over, it was clear that the right man had arrived in the right city at the right time; this would be no one-day boycott but one that would continue until the white community addressed black grievances.

That the black ministry at this moment was to produce an exceptional generation of leaders—of whom King was merely the most visible—was not surprising. It was the obvious repository for black talent at that moment. In the past, black leadership had tended to be fragmented and poorly educated. (Five years before the bus boycott, at the time of the 1950 census, the city of Montgomery had had some 40,000 black citizens, including three doctors, one dentist, two lawyers, one pharmacist, and 92 preachers.) There were not a lot of black lawyers around in those days, and the usual political avenues were blocked in the Deep South. Therefore, the new black
ministry was where talented young black men went to learn how to lead their people: It was outside the reach of the white community, a rare place where a young, well-educated black man could rise by merit alone.

When the bus boycott began, Martin Luther King, Jr., was twenty-six years old; he had been in Montgomery only fifteen months. He was a black Baptist Brahmin, a symbol of the new, more confident, better educated black leaders now just beginning to appear in the postwar South. His maternal grandfather, A. D. Williams, had formally founded the Ebenezer Baptist Church in 1894, its eighth year of existence, and made it one of the most important black churches in Atlanta. The Rev. Williams had been a charter member of the local NAACP. When a local white newspaper criticized Atlanta’s blacks as being “dirty and ignorant,” he led the boycott that helped close the newspaper down. When an important school-bond issue failed to include any money for the city’s first black high school, he started rallies, which resulted in the building of Booker T. Washington High. His son-in-law, Martin Luther King, Sr. (known as “Daddy” King), had led a voter-registration drive as a young minister in Atlanta and pushed the other black ministers to make their churches centers for voter-registration drives in the thirties, a move opposed by many on his board. But one thousand blacks had showed up at Ebenezer and marched to the city hall. Such activism made Atlanta, by the fifties, one of the great centers of black middle-class life, a place where black economic power had made black political power possible.

Daddy King was one of nine children of sharecroppers. As a boy he watched the vicious cycle of poverty and powerlessness destroy his father, who turned to alcohol and wife beating. Delia King farmed alongside her husband and worked in the home of the white owners. When Daddy King (whose real name was Michael and who changed his name to Martin as a man) was twelve, he accompanied his father to town when the annual accounts were being settled up. The little boy, a good student and better at numbers than his father, was aware that his father was being swindled. “Ask him about the cotton seed money, Daddy,” he said, for that was an important part of the equation, and the tenant farmer got the money. The landowner was furious, but in the end he paid; but he did not forget the incident or forgive the little boy. The next day he had arrived to tell the elder King that he had to leave his land altogether. With that James King started coming apart. Beaten down by the harshness and cruelty of the system, he took his anger out on his family, particularly
his wife and this son whose moment of truth had caused him even greater humiliation and revealed his true powerlessness.

Watching the disintegration of his family, Mike King could not wait to leave. He and his father had a violent fight once after his father had beaten his mother. The youth, already powerfully built, won the fight, but he heard his father shout, “I’ll kill you, kill you, I’ll do it, damn you ...” Terrified, his mother told her son to hide out for a time. “A man’s anger gets the best of him,” Daddy King wrote, describing the scene some seven decades later. “Violence is the only thing he’s got to calm him down some, or get him killed, one day.”

The only place young Mike King decided he could find any kind of peace was in the church. He would feel, he wrote later, bitterness and anger descend upon him at other times of the day, but not when he was in church. He became a licensed minister at fifteen, traveling and preaching in small rural churches. At eighteen he went to Atlanta. There, he was regarded as a hick, bright but unlettered. He wanted badly to be somebody, yet he felt the awful shame of his rural ignorance, his rustic language.

He was nothing if not ambitious, though. Encouraged by an older sister, he went back to school at the age of twenty-one. He was assigned to the fifth grade, which completely shattered his confidence; never had he felt so ignorant before. But he persevered: He spent five years at the school, always working full-time as a driver for a man who sold and repaired barber-shop chairs, and taking his books with him wherever he went and, of course, preaching on weekends. Finally, he received his high school degree. During this time he saw Alberta Williams, the daughter of one of Atlanta’s foremost ministers. She was, he thought, everything he was not: sophisticated, educated, genteel. He immediately fell in love with her. When he told this to some friends who were also country boys, they teased him unmercifully. “Now, King,” one of them said. “You know God doesn’t love ugly and that’s about the worst-looking story I’ve heard all year—you marrying Alberta Williams. Get on away from here!” But King pursued her relentlessly. For his first date he took his best pair of pants, put them between two boards, and then put the boards under his mattress for a few days in order to ensure a crease. He asked the lady who ran the boardinghouse to iron his best shirt. “Why, Reverend King, you must be fixin’ to court some nice young lady,” she had said. “No, ma’am,” he answered. “I’m fixin’ to get married.”

Their courtship lasted six years. Driven by the need to be worthy
of Alberta, he had decided to enter Morehouse and get a college degree. He was twenty-seven, and the officials at Morehouse were not enthusiastic. He took their tests. “You’re just not college material,” the registrar told him. He told them he didn’t care how poorly he tested—he
knew
he could succeed, if it was a matter of hard work. Nonetheless, they rejected him. Pushed by Alberta, he tried again and was rejected again. Finally, he begged for a trial period as a student and was rejected again. In a rage, he charged into the office of the president of the college and told his story. Then he stomped out. But because of his assertiveness, he was at last given a chance. “Apparently,” said the unsympathetic registrar, “you can begin classes at Morehouse. Don’t ask me why, but you can ...” By going to summer school, he managed to get his degree in four years. A year later, his father-in-law died of a heart attack and Mike King took over the Ebenezer Baptist Church.

Martin Luther King, Jr., the second of three children, grew up in an environment far gentler than the one his father had known. He was a member of the black elite of Atlanta, perhaps not as wealthy as some, but even that in time might change, for Daddy King planned to have Martin marry a daughter of one of Atlanta’s truly wealthy Atlanta families and come back home to Ebenezer and work with him. Then the Kings would presumably become
the
leading black family of Atlanta, the heiress’s money attached now to the powerful social-political position that Daddy King had created at Ebenezer. Young Martin lived the odd duality of a black prince: He at once was exceptionally privileged within the black world yet virtually everything outside it was denied him. There were, for all the attempts to protect him, humiliations that occurred as he crossed over to the alien environment of white Atlanta, where he, like all other blacks, lost all status.

Though his birth had coincided with the coming of the Depression, which hit black Southerners hardest, the King family knew little deprivation. A black church as prosperous as Ebenezer was immune to the vagaries of national economics. Martin King remembered driving through Atlanta and seeing the long lines of black people waiting to buy bread as his parents tried to explain the harsh reality of the Depression to him. Martin King, Jr., grew up loved and secure; years later James Baldwin wrote that King lacked the self-doubts that burdened most blacks of their generation. “Martin,” Baldwin wrote, “never went around fighting himself the way the rest of us did.” He grew up with segregation, yet he saw his father’s strength in the face of prejudice: Once when he was driving with his
father, an Atlanta policeman stopped the car. “All right, boy,” he had said. “Pull over and let me see your license.” “I’m no boy,” Daddy King said. He pointed at his son. “This is a boy. I’m a man and until you call me one I will not listen to you.”