Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (59 page)

Dependence on buses galled many blacks in the city. The bus company in Montgomery hired no black bus drivers. Its white drivers enforced rules that required blacks to pay at the front of the bus, enter toward the back, and sit in the rear. Drivers often insulted and demeaned black passengers. When buses filled with whites, drivers yelled, "Niggers move back." Blacks sitting at the front of their section were expected to give up their seats and crowd to the rear.

Mrs. Rosa Parks, a forty-five-year-old Negro seamstress and downtown department store worker, regularly rode these buses. Parks was a quiet woman who wore rimless spectacles. Acquaintances knew her to be a dependable, reasonable person and a faithful church-goer. She had long chafed at Jim Crow. More than ten years earlier she had been ejected from a bus for refusing to do as she was told. A member of the NAACP, she was ready to test the bus company's policies. On December 1, 1955, she finished work and Christmas shopping and boarded a bus to go home. When white passengers filled seats in front of her, the driver yelled, "Niggers move back." Parks refused to budge. The driver hailed policemen, who booked her for violating the city's laws and told her to appear for trial four days later.
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E. D. Nixon, a Pullman porter who headed the local NAACP, had been waiting for an opportunity such as this and responded quickly. His actions, and those of the NAACP, revealed the central role played by unheralded black people in the fight for civil rights in the 1950s and thereafter. Dramatic leaders came and went, but they could do little without the sacrifices of local folk, who confronted great intimidation, including violence, on the grass-roots level. And many of these people had long been restless indeed. "The Reverend [Martin Luther King] he didn't stir us up," one young Montgomery woman told a reporter at the time. "We've been stirred up a mighty long time."
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Women played large roles in what followed in Montgomery and in other demonstrations to come. Jo Ann Robinson, a black English teacher, moved quickly. Hearing of Parks's arrest, she stayed up most of the night, with other members of the Women's Political Council of Montgomery, which she headed, to print protest leaflets, some 50,000 in all, to be distributed in the next few days.
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The contribution of women like Robinson did not suggest that they were angrier than men; the mounting impatience of involved black people knew no gender boundaries. But black women were often a little less susceptible to economic pressure and to violence than were black men. Many, like Robinson, were steadfast in their goals, well disciplined, efficient, and for all these reasons vital to the cause of civil rights.

Nixon, Robinson, and other activists resolved to fight by boycotting the buses until the company agreed to their demands. These were initially very moderate: the hiring of black drivers, courtesy from drivers to black passengers, and seating on a first-come first-served basis with blacks filling up the back and whites the front. Their strategy of boycott had a considerable history: blacks had boycotted Jim Crow streetcars at the turn of the century. More recently, in 1953, a boycott in Baton Rouge had lasted a week and forced the city to let riders, regardless of race, be seated on a first-come first-served basis.
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Starting a boycott of course demanded sacrifices: people who refused to get on the buses would have to walk or cooperate in car pools. The tactic also required widespread support; without unity among masses of black residents it would backfire. But a boycott had attractive possibilities. It would enable people to express long-pent-up feelings. It could be undertaken by blacks who acted by
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acting and who thereby risked relatively little (compared to the brazen business of trying to vote) in the way of individualized reprisals. If successful, a boycott could hit white people where it hurt, in the pocketbook. If thousands of people refused to take the buses, not only the company but also downtown merchants would suffer severe financial losses.
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The organizers of the boycott knew that they must rely heavily on the most important of all Jim Crow instititions: black churches. Southern blacks were perhaps the most religiously active major group in the United States. At that time the National Baptist Convention, a confederation of black churches, was the largest black organization in the United States and far and away the best supported. It had twice as many members as did the NAACP.
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Churches in the South provided virtually the only places where large numbers of black people could meet.

Over the weekend before Parks's trial, Nixon and other organizers held long, emotional meetings in these churches. Looking for leadership, they turned to the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., a twenty-six-year-old pastor who had come to Montgomery in late 1954 to head the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. Although young, King was well regarded by local people. As a relative newcomer to the city, he had not antagonized its officials. He was quickly elected president of the Montgomery Improvement Association, the organization formed to lead the boycott.

King was well educated, especially for a black man in the 1950s. Raised in Atlanta, he was the son of Reverend Martin Luther "Daddy" King, Sr., a locally famed preacher and sometimes opponent of Jim Crow. The son had graduated from Morehouse College in Atlanta, an elite Negro college, and then studied at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania and at Boston University, whence he received his doctor of philosophy degree (after coming to Montgomery) in June 1955. Although King was hardly an intellectual, he was familiar with a number of key philosophical and theological texts, among them the teachings of non-violent protest as advocated by Henry David Thoreau and Mohandas Gandhi.

Even more important to King's thought were the writings of Reinhold Niebuhr, America's most distinguished theologian. "Niebuhr's great contribution to contemporary theology," King wrote, "is that he has refuted the false optimism characteristic of a great segment of Protestant liberalism, without falling into the anti-rationalism of the continental theologian Karl Barth, or the semi-fundamentalism of other dialectical theologians." What King meant was that Niebuhr understood the profoundly sinful nature of mankind without lapsing into despair or abandoning the struggle for social change.
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Niebuhr's Christian realism provided King with a base on which he rested growing faith in tactics of non-violence.

King's emphasis on non-violent protest, which he refined in the course of the boycott, was sincere and stubborn. Many times during his subsequent career he demanded of impatient followers that they show love, not hate, against oppressors. Even when racists bombed his home in 1956, he remained steadfast in holding to non-violent convictions. King's principled adherence to such beliefs proved inspirational, especially to the religious southern folk who most revered him. To stand up for what was right while trying to stay within the law offered his followers a moral high ground. To contest injustice while refusing to strike one's oppressors was to express the power of Christian love and forgiveness and to make one feel proud to be alive. "We got our heads up now," a black janitor in Montgomery said, "and we won't ever bow down again—no sir—except before God."
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No approach was better suited to the mobilization of the millions of religious black people who yearned to support causes that would bring great meaning to their lives.

Non-violence, moreover, offered distinct tactical advantages in quests for civil rights. King, a thoughtful tactician as well as an inspirational moral leader, understood this. Non-violent boycotting, for instance, was reassuring, for it promised to give supporters a way of expressing themselves short of undertaking aggressive (and most likely bloody) confrontations with armed and powerful authorities. Later, anticipating violent white retaliation, King shrewdly organized protests in places (Birmingham, Selma) where volatile lawmen were in power, expecting that violence against peaceful demonstrators would promote national revulsion against white racism and elicit popular sympathy for his goals. To liberal whites, too, non-violence was reassuring, for it relieved them of the stereotype of the angry and dangerous black man. When non-violent activists were attacked—as increasingly happened—liberal whites often felt ashamed and guilty. King anticipated these profound human reactions. But he knew enough not to gloat or to reveal his more devious tactical moves. In contrast to other fiery leaders who arose to take the lead in civil rights protests, he seemed moderate. Liberal whites gave money to him that they denied to those who seemed radical.

King, however, was hardly a moderate by the standards of 1955. At that time he represented a dynamic and forceful salient of what was not yet a national movement. Many white opponents called him a rabble-rouser, even a Communist. Although the demands of the Montgomery Improvement Association remained moderate, King refused to relent until the goals of the association were won. Moreover, he denounced more than Jim Crow on buses; he also challenged all aspects of racial segregation and discrimination in the United States. Desegregation, he insisted, should be accomplished non-violently, but it must be accomplished.

Above all, King was a preacher and an advocate, not a theologian or a philosopher.
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Exposure to injustice in Montgomery and elsewhere, more than book-learning in graduate school, roused him to heights of eloquence. Like his father (and his grandfather, who had also been a minister), he rooted his thinking and his style in established, widely appreciated Negro Baptist ways.
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In the pulpit or before a crowd he conveyed deep feeling, indeed moral passion, in a dramatic and cadenced manner that lay deep in the most powerful of African-American preaching traditions. Listeners, especially southern Christians, found him awe-inspiring as a speaker. A biographer-historian, Taylor Branch, describes this appeal: "His listeners responded to the passion beneath the ideas, to the bottomless joy and pain that turned the heat into rhythm and the rhythm into music. King was controlled. He never shouted. But he preached like someone who wanted to shout, and this gave him an electrifying hold over the congregation. Though still a boy to many of his older listeners, he had the commanding air of a burning sage."
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All these elements—the readiness of Nixon and the NAACP; the engagement of women such as Parks, Robinson, and others; the outstanding leadership of King; above all the willingness of rank-and-file black people to stick together—proved necessary to sustain the boycott in the difficult months to come. Parks was convicted, ordered to pay a fine of $10, refused, and was jailed. Black boycotters who could be identified were fired from their jobs. King was arrested on a trumped-up charge and sent to jail, along with 100 others, for conspiring to lead an illegal boycott. The Klan marched openly in the streets, vandalized at night, and poured acid on vehicles used by blacks for car-pooling. The Citizens' Council distributed inflammatory handbills. Boycott opponents bombed the homes of King and other Negro leaders. President Eisenhower, still enormously popular in the country, kept his distance. "There is a state law about boycotts," he explained at a press conference, "and it is under that kind of thing that these people are being brought to trial."
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The solidarity of Montgomery's black citizens (a small number of whites sympathized) nonetheless prevailed. The boycott leaders brought suit, which rose slowly through the federal courts, against the policies of the bus company. Meanwhile, most blacks refused to take the buses, causing ridership to decline by an estimated 65 percent and bus company revenues to plunge. Well-organized car pools helped some of the protestors. But others walked. The most lasting anecdote of the Montgomery movement describes King stopping to ask an old woman walking on the road whether she would prefer to ride the bus. "Aren't your feet tired?" he said. "Yes," she replied, "my feets is tired but my soul is rested."

The boycott ended only after the Supreme Court ruled on November 13, 1956, almost a year after the protest had started, that the city ordinances concerning seating on the buses violated the Fourteenth Amendment. It declared that these discriminatory rules must stop as of December 20. City officials balked at first and required King to pay an $85 fine for breaking anti-boycott regulations. But they finally relented, and King and his co-leaders called off the boycott. On December 21, 381 days after the boycott had started, King sat down with a white man at the front of a bus.

One of the most sustained and coordinated black efforts in the entire history of the civil rights movement was over at last. Indeed, the boycott was a very impressive effort. It thrust King, an extraordinarily gifted leader, into a national and world spotlight. It proved that black people could come together, persevere, and suffer at great length in order to establish their dignity, and it remained an inspiring example for activists in the years to come.

Still, the Montgomery movement left some people unimpressed. Thurgood Marshall said privately at the time, "All that walking for nothing. They might as well have waited for the Court decision." King, he added, was "a boy on a man's errand." (Marshall nonetheless aided efforts by the NAACP to get King out of jail.)
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Marshall's reaction, while ungenerous, captured an important point: it took a decision of the Supreme Court to force city authorities to surrender. The Court (and NAACP litigation) may have saved the boycott.