In honor of Martin Luther King day, I invite you to enjoy the following excerpt from my new book, Getting Things Done in Washington, in which I tell the story of Dr. King's role in the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955.
You can read other excerpts from Getting Things Done in Washington by visiting www.jboyett.com.
Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Bus Boycott
An Excerpt from Getting Things Done in Washington
(Bloomington, IN: ASJA Press, 2011) by Joseph H. Boyett. Copyright © 2011 by Joseph H. Boyett, Ph.D.
All Rights Reserved.
On December 1, 1955, Mrs. Rosa Parks, a
seamtress working for the Montgomery Fair Department Store in Montgomery, AL,
finished work just before 5:00 PM. She
walked a half-block to the bus stop on the corner of Court Street and Dexter
Avenue to catch the bus to her home.
Mrs. Parks was tired from a long day of sewing and anxious to get off
her feet but she decided not to board the 5:00 bus since it was already crowded
and there was no place to sit. When the
next bus arrived, Mrs. Parks boarded, paid her dime fare, and walked toward the
back of the bus past several rows of empty seats, as Black passengers were
required to do by law. In Montgomery, a
bus segregation law reserved the first 10 rows of seats on public buses for
White passengers. The law designated the
remaining 23 rows to the rear as the “Colored” section.
Mrs. Parks took a seat in the first row of the
“Colored” section. Three other Black
passengers took seats in the same row.
Mrs. Parks sat quietly, balancing some packages on her lap and thinking
about the upcoming holidays. At the next
two stops, the bus began to fill up with passengers. At the third stop, several White passengers
boarded the bus and took their seats.
One White man was left standing since there were no more seats available
in the White section. The bus driver,
James L. Blake, turned, looked at Mrs. Parks and the other three Black people
seated in the first row of the “Colored” section and said, “Now, y’all
move. I’ve got to have those
seats.” Everyone on the bus knew what
Blake meant. He intended to expand the
White section to accommodate the single White passenger. The bus segregation law required all of the
Black passengers in Mrs. Parks’ row to get up and move to the rear of the bus
even though only one White person needed a seat. The law did not allow White people to sit in
the same row with Black people even if they chose to do so.
At first, none of the Black people moved. Then, Blake said, “You had better make it
light on yourself and let me have those seats.”
Reluctantly, three of the Black people got up and moved to the back of
the bus where they would have to remain standing for the rest of their trip. Mrs. Parks remained seated. Blake got up and walked back to where Mrs.
Parks was seated. He glared down at her
and said, “Look woman, I told you I wanted the seat. Are you going to stand up?” Mrs. Parks took a deep breath and calmly
said, “No.” Now angry that this Black
woman was defying him, Blake warned, “If you don’t stand up, I’m going to have
you arrested.” “You may do that” said
Mrs. Parks. She had decided, she was not
going to move. At that point, Blake got
off the bus and went to called the police.
Years later in an interview with Donnie
Williams, author of The Thunder of
Angels: The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the People Who Broke the Back of Jim
Crow, Mrs. Parks had this to say about her actions on the chilly December
day:
When I got on the bus that evening I wasn't
thinking about causing a revolution or anything of the kind. I was thinking
about my husband, how he'd spent his day at the barber shop at Maxwell Air
Force Base, where he worked. I was hoping he'd had a good day. I was thinking
about my back aching and about the pretty sights and sounds of Christmas. I was
thinking about how we were going to have a good time this Christmas, and
everybody was going to be happy.
But when that white driver stepped back toward
us, when he waved his hand and ordered us up and out of our seats, I felt a
determination cover my body like a quilt on a winter night. I felt all the
meanness of every white driver I'd seen who'd been ugly to me and other black
people through the years I'd known on the buses in Montgomery. I felt a light
suddenly shine through the darkness.
Blake returned shortly with two police officers
who arrested Mrs. Parks for violating the segregation law. They hauled her off to jail.
Later that evening, Arlet Nixon, the wife of Ed
Nixon who was the head of the local NAACP, received a phone call from Mrs.
Bertha Butler informing her that Mrs. Parks had been arrested. Nixon and Butler were both friends of Mrs.
Parks. Mrs. Butler had just happened to
have been on the bus and witnessed Mrs. Parks’ arrest. Arlet Nixon was quickly called her
husband. Nixon knew Mrs. Parks well
since she had worked with the NAACP in Montgomery for more than a decade as a
volunteer. He immediately called the
city jail, told the desk sergeant who he was and asked why Mrs. Parks had been
arrested. The desk sergeant recognized
Nixon immediately as a long time civil rights activists who had led a number of
voter registration drives in the Black community. He abruptly told Nixon that Mrs. Parks’
arrest was none of his business.
Recognizing he needed help, Nixon picked up the
phone and dialed the number of a local White attorney by the name of Clifford
Durr. Durr had tried a number of NAACP
cases and was a close friend of Nixon.
Durr and his wife, Virginia, were both liberal activists. They had developed a close friendship with
Rosa Parks during a time when Mrs. Parks had undertaking various sewing jobs
for Virginia. Durr immediately agreed to
accompany Nixon to the city jail to get Parks out on bond.
That night Nixon and the Durrs gathered around
the kitchen table in Parks’ home with Parks, her mother and her husband,
Raymond. Nixon began pressing Parks to
agree to serve as a test case for a legal challenge to overturn the bus
segregation law. He had been trying to
put together such as case for some time but had never found the right person
and situation for a test case. He was
confident he had found that person in Parks.
David Halberstam in his book The Fifities, says the most interesting
thing about Parks was how ordinary she was, at least on the surface.
[She was] almost the prototype of the black
woman who toiled so hard and had so little to show for it….she was a person of
unusual dignity and uncommon strength of character…Rosa was a serious reader, a
quiet, strong woman much admired in the local community...Parks had attended
the integrated Highlander Folk School, in Monteagle, Tennessee, a school
loathed by segregationists because it held workshops on how to promote
integration. At Highlander she not only
studied the techniques of passive resistance employed by Gandhi against the
British, she also met White people who treated her with respect. The experience reinforced her sense of
self-esteem.
Segregationist would later argue that the local
NAACP orchestrated Parks refusal to relinquish her seat. Parks denied that saying when she boarded the
bus that December evening she had no thoughts of challenging the law or
anyone. Parks was familiar with previous
incidences earlier in the year when Black people had challenged the bus
segregation law. For example, in March,
Claudette Clovin, a fifteen-year-old student at Booker T. Washington High
School, had refused to give up her seat.
Another Black teenager, Mary Louise Smith, had done the same in October. Police arrested both Clovin and Smith. A judge had placed Clovin on indefinite,
unsupervised probation. Smith pleaded
guilty and her father paid her $5.00 fine.
Initially, Nixon had thought Clovin might make a good case subject but
he later changed his mind. However,
Parks maintained she had not been thinking about the Clovin or Smith cases that
December evening.
I'd been happy early in the year when Claudette
Colvin had been arrested for refusing to give up her seat on the bus. I'd been
with Mr. Nixon when he'd declared it was exactly what the black community
needed. I'd seen the light in his eyes at the thought of being able to fight
against the oppression of the laws that were keeping us down. I'd called my
white lady friend Virginia Durr and we started calling folks to alert them to
what was going to happen. We knew we were going to have to have help for a long
struggle. Then I saw the hurt in Mr. Nixon's eyes when he found out the
Claudette Colvin case wasn't the one we could use. I saw the silent hurt take
over. But I wasn't thinking about all of that while I sat there and waited for
the police to come. All I could think about, really and truly, was the Lord
would help me through all of this. I told myself I wouldn't put up no fuss
against them arresting me. I'd go along with whatever they said. But I also
knew I wasn't gonna give up my seat just because a white driver told me to; I'd
already done that too many times.
Nixon very much wanted Parks to agree to
participate in a test case. He paced
back and forth. “Mrs. Parks, your case
is a case that we can use to break down segregation on the bus,” he said. “I gonna ask you…I want to ask you: let us
use your case for a test case. I’ll tell
you this: it won’t be easy. It’ll be
long and hard. We might have to take it
all the way to the Supreme Court, and that’ll be a struggle.”
Clifford Durr assured Rosa that he could probably get her off with a
small fine if she did not want to take the case any further.
Parks was reluctant. Her husband, Raymond, was afraid for her
safety if she were to agree. “Oh, the
white folks will kill you, Rosa. Don’t
do anything to make trouble, Rosa,” he said over and over, “Don’t bring a suit. The White people will kill you.”
Nixon kept talking and answering questions from
Rosa and Raymond. Finally, Raymond
agreed. “I think Nixon is right,” he
said. Rosa’s mother said she agreed
also. Finally, Rosa said, “Well, in that
case, we’ll go along with you.”
The next day, Nixon began planning what to do
next. He called Jo Ann Gibson Robinson,
an English professor at Alabama State College for Women, to ask her
advice. Nixon respected Robinson’s
ideas. She had given him good advice concerning the Colvin case earlier in the
year. As a young college student,
Robinson had her on run in with a Montgomery bus driver when she accidently sat
in the fifth row of a nearly empty bus when she was supposed to sit in the
tenth row. The driver kicked her off the
bus. The incident angered and
embarrassed her. When she had returned
to Montgomery to accept a teaching job at all Black Alabama State in 1949,
Robinson decided that she would do whatever she could to get bus segregation
abolished. Consequently, she was more
than willing to help Nixon in any way she could. At one point as they were discussing Rosa Parks’
case, Robinson suddenly said she had an interesting idea. They should do something more than just file
a lawsuit. Nixon asked what she meant. Robinson replied that a month earlier she had
attended a speech by New York Congressman Adam Clayton Powell. Powell had described a successful bus boycott
in New York. Robinson suggested, why not
try the same thing in Montgomery. The
majority of bus riders in the city were Black, primarily Black women domestics
taking the bus across town to work in the affluent White suburbs. The city bus company could not survive
without Black passengers. Nixon
agreed. A boycott might be just the
thing to convince the city to changes its policies.
Someone
had to organize and lead the effort.
Nixon was not overly concerned about the organizing part. He knew how to do that as he recalled some
years later:
There's one thing I know. I know how to
organize. I ain't gonna argue with you about doing paperwork. I ain't never
been a newspaperman. I ain't gonna argue with no schoolteacher about teaching
school. I never taught school. I ain't gonna argue with no minister about
preaching. I ain't never preached. But when it comes to civil rights and
organizing, I know how to do it.
Nixon was not so sure about being the
leader. He was nearly sixty. He thought the leader of the boycott should
be a younger man. Additionally, he had
to be gone from Montgomery frequently on business. The boycott leader need to be someone who
could be in town most of the time.
Additionally, the boycott leader needed to be someone who was
persuasive, articulate, and who would give the movement a positive image. Nixon thought he knew just the right man for
the job—Martin Luther King.
King was only twenty-six years old. He and his young wife Coretta had arrived in
Montgomery just the year before. King
had accepted an offer to become the new pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church
with its affluent Black congregation. He
had a Ph.D from Boston University where he had been exposed to the teachings of
Mahatma Gandhi. He enjoyed classical
music and had a habit of sprinkling his sermons with quotations from Socrates,
Aristotle, Shakespeare, and Galileo. As
Halberstam notes, as a speaker, King was nothing short of brilliant.
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, Black people at first and soon, remarkably
enough, White people as well. He could
reach people of all classes and backgrounds; he could inspire men and women
with nothing but his words.
When Nixon approached King about leading the
boycott, King was not sure he wanted the job.
Nixon recalled:
When he heard me talk about how long it'd take
and how hard the struggle would be, he wasn't sure. He was a young man just
getting started in the ministry. His family was young. His wife had given birth
to their first child, a little girl, less than a month ago. He said, 'Let me
think about it a while and call me back.' After some more calls, I went to see
him at the parsonage on South Jackson Street, and I told him straight out that
I thought he was the man who should lead this thing. He paced the floor a time
or two, then he turned to me and said in that strong and powerful voice of his,
he said, 'Brother Nixon, if you think I'm the one, I'll do it.' I nodded and
clasped his hand and held it, and I swear there was something stronger than
ever in that handshake. I knew we'd all be one together.
The Montgomery bus boycott began on Monday,
December 5, 1955, just four days after the police arrested Rosa Parks. King and his wife woke early. Organizers had distributed leaflets to the
Black community announcing the boycott.
Pastors in Black churches throughout the city had encouraged their
Sunday congregations to join in the boycott.
King and other leaders of the boycott, who had organized themselves as
the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) with King as president and chief
spokesperson, felt if they could get participation from just 60 percent of the
Black community, the boycott would be a success.
King recalled that the house he and Corretta
lived in was just a short distance from a bus stop. They could see the buses passing by from
their front window. Around six o’clock
in the morning, the first bus pulled up to the bus stop. King was in the kitchen having a cup of
coffee when Coretta rushed into the room.
“Martin, Martin, come quickly!” she said. King put down his cup and rushed to the front
window. The first bus was still sitting
at the bus stop—empty. King knew that
the South Jackson bus line that ran by his house was one the busiest in the
city. He and Corretta remained at the
window waiting. Finally, the second bus
came—empty. Then the third bus
came. It was also empty except for two
White passengers.
King rushed out and jumped in his car. He drove up and down the Montgomery streets
closely examining every bus he passed.
Most were empty or carried only White riders. King said he counted no more than eight Black
people on all the buses he passed that morning.
All day long, the buses remained largely empty. Black people walked or thumbed rides or
car-pooled. The boycott organizers had
hoped for sixty percent participation.
They got nearly 100 percent.
The boycott dragged on day after day and month
after month. The city refused to make
any changes to the bus segregation law and protesters refused to give in and
start using the busses again. Ironically
at first, boycotters weren’t asking that the busses be desegregated. They were only asking that the bus company
eliminate the arbitrary and moveable dividing line between Black and White
sections. They wanted an arrangement in
which Black people would fill the bus from back to front and White people from
front to back and that no one would have to give up their seat once they were
seated. It was a perfectly reasonable
request but the White city administration refused so the boycott went on and
on. Black leaders were surprised at the
city administration’s position since they felt their demands were sufficiently
limited such that even the most conservative White should be able to
accept.
When it became obvious that the city leaders
were not willing to settle, MIA filed a suit in the U.S. Federal District
Court. The suit asked for more than a
change in the seating arrangement. It
asked that the court declare bus segregation itself unconstitutional because it
violated the Fourteenth Amendment. The
court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs.
The city immediately appealed the case to the Supreme Court.
Months passed and there was no end to the
boycott in sight. Eventually, some
affluent White people got so desperate to have their domestic help back
cleaning their houses that they began driving them to and from work. The Mayor of Montgomery remarked, “The
Negroes are laughing at white people behind their backs. They think it’s very funny that White people
who are opposed to the Negro boycott will act as chauffeurs to Negroes who are
boycotting the buses.”
Some White people reacted to the boycott with
violence. King and his family began
receiving threatening phone calls. One
night while King was away at a meeting, someone set off a bomb on the porch of
King’s home. Fortunately, no one was
hurt. Two nights later, someone tossed a
stick of dynamite onto Nixon’s lawn. The
dynamite exploded but again no one was harmed.
Three months into the boycott, the Montgomery
city attorney announced that he had found a way to put an end to the nonsense. He cited a 1921 state anti-labor law that
made it illegal for anyone to engage in restraint of trade. Police arrested King and 114 Black leaders of
the boycott. They were fingerprinted and
released on a $300 bond each. In late
March, King case came to trial. The
charge was conspiracy “without a just cause or legal excuse” to engage in
activities designed to hinder a company in its conduct of business.
A number of Black witnesses testified to the
numerous abuses they had suffered on the bus lines over the years that provided
just cause. A woman testified that a bus
driver had once shut the door on her blind husband’s leg and then drove off
dragging him along beside the bus. A
Black man testified that a bus driver had forced him off a bus at pistol point
once because he could not produce exact change.
Another said a driver had forced his pregnant wife to surrender her seat
and stand simply because a White woman needed a seat. Others told of being verbally abused. One Black woman recalled that a bus a driver
had once called her an “ugly black ape.”
The judge listened to the testimony and was unmoved. He declared King guilty as charged, ordered
him to pay a fine of $1,000 plus court costs, and released him on bail pending
appeal. City officials thought they had
won. They had not. In fact, they made matters worse for
themselves. Black people rallied on the
courthouse lawn after hearing the verdict against King shouting their
determination to keep the boycott going.
They did.
Spring turned into summer. Summer turned into fall. The boycott continued with no end in
sight. Black people walked to work,
bicycled, shared rides, and did anything to get around the city but ride the
busses. The bus company sank into
debt. It had to lay off drivers. City officials could not believe it. They thought the first rainy day would drive
Black people back to the buses. It did
not. City police began stopping Black
cabdrivers from carrying groups of five or six at a time for ten cents a ride
citing a old ordinance requiring a minimum charge of 45 cents. Police started arresting Black carpool
drivers for any minor traffic violation.
Police stopped King for driving 30 miles per hour in a 25-mile-per-hour
zone and jailed him for his “crime.”
When Black people heard of his arrest and stormed the police station,
King was let go on his own recognizance.
Black people in Montgomery did not give
up. They had never shown such
determination before to defy a Jim Crowe law before. Black people in Montgomery were making history
and the news media took notice.
Media Coverage
On Christmas Day, 1954, Montgomery obtained its
second TV channel when WSFA-TV went on the air.
Two months later the Oklahoma Publishing Company purchased it. The new owners of WSFA were former
newspapermen and had a strong commitment to local news coverage. They promised their audience a full 15
minutes of news and 15 minutes of weather coverage each night. Such local coverage of the news and weather
was almost unheard of at the time. The
other TV channel in Montgomery, in fact, offered no local programming at all,
news or otherwise. WSFA hired as its
first news director a young man named Frank McGee. McGee was just 30 years old and had only a
high-school equivalence. McGee grew up
in northern Louisiana and Oklahoma, the son of oil rig worker. He was not ideological but he sympathized
with the plight of Black people. He
recognized immediately that the bus boycott was a very big news story so he
pursued it with vigor. McGee later said
the owners of the station gave him pretty much a free hand to put on the air
whatever he wanted. He speculated that
the owners primarily saw the boycott as an exciting story that would help the
station compete with the local newspapers.
The story got even more exciting as White people continued to resist any
change. The fact that WSFA happened to
be one of the few stations outside major markets to have its own film
processing equipment helped McGee tell his story and gain national
attention. WSFA was a key source of film
feeds to the national networks including NBC for stories from the Deep
South. McGee’s ongoing Montgomery
boycott coverage was included in those feeds and NBC network news picked up the
story. Soon the national press corps
that had only recently been involved in covering the Emmett Till trial, began
arriving in Montgomery. The national
reporters had little sympathy for the Montgomery officials when they
arrived. They had even less after they
met Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks.
The Boycott Ends
In October, the city of Montgomery sought a
court injunction to end the car pools and other means of transportation, MIA
had put in place as alternatives to the bus system. The city alleged that the car pools were a
“public nuisance” and a “private enterprise” operating without a business
license. It sought compensation for
damages the “illegal enterprise” had caused the city due to lost revenue from
bus company revenues and an end to the car pools. MIA asked for a restraining order from the
federal courts but the courts denied their request. King and other leaders of the MIA received
subpoenas to appear at a hearing on Tuesday, November 13.
As the chief defendant, King was seated at the
front table along with the prosecuting and defense attorneys on the day of the
hearing. It was around noon and the court
was taking a brief recess. Suddenly,
King saw the Mayor and other city officials called to a back room along with
the city attorneys. Excited reporters
were streaming in an out of the courtroom.
King turned to the attorneys sitting next to him and said, “Something is
wrong.” At that point, Rex Thomas, an
Associated Press reporter, walked up to King and handed him a sheet of
paper. “Read this,” he said. King opened the paper. It was a news flash.
The United States Supreme Court today affirmed
a decision of a three-judge U.S. District Court in declaring Alabama’s state
and local laws requiring segregation on buses unconstitutional. The Supreme Court acted without listening to
any argument; it simply said ‘the motion to affirm is granted and the Judgment
is affirmed.
The Montgomery bus boycott was over and because
the City of Montgomery had been unwilling to compromise bus segregation was now
illegal not just in Montgomery but throughout the South.
More
importantly, advocates for civil rights had found their Gandhi in King.
