American Experiment (348 page)

The time had come … Rosa Parks’s was a heroic act of defiance, an individual act of leadership. But it was not wholly spontaneous, nor did she act alone. Long active in the civil rights effort, she had taken part in an integration workshop in Tennessee at the Highlander Folk School, an important training center for southern community activists and labor organizers. There Parks “found out for the first time in my adult life that this could be a unified society.” There she had gained strength “to persevere in my work for freedom.” Later she had served for years as a leader in the Montgomery and Alabama NAACP. Her bus arrest was by no means her first brush with authority; indeed, a decade earlier this same driver had ejected her for refusing to enter through the back door.

Rosa Parks’s support group quickly mobilized. E. D. Nixon, long a militant leader of the local NAACP and the regional Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, rushed to the jail to bail her out. Nixon had been waiting for just such a test case to challenge the constitutionality of the bus segregation law. Three Montgomery women had been arrested for similar “crimes” in the past year, but the city, in order to avoid just such a challenge, had not pursued the charge. With Rosa Parks the city blundered, and from Nixon’s point of view, she was the ideal victim—no one commanded more respect in the black community.

Word of Rosa Parks’s arrest sped through black Montgomery. The Women’s Political Council, a civil rights group of black professional women, had been talking for months about a bus boycott. This was the time. Soon members were handing out leaflets and conferring with Nixon, who agreed to lead the effort. When he arrived home that evening he took a sheet of paper and drew a rough sketch of the city, measuring distances with a slide rule. He found that people could walk to work from anywhere in Montgomery if they wanted to. He said to his wife, “We can beat this thing.”

Nixon realized, though, that the boycott could not succeed without the united support of the black ministers, the most influential black leaders in Montgomery as elsewhere. He called them one by one, starting with Ralph Abernathy, the passionate young pastor of the Baptist church Parks attended, a man with an earthy sense of humor and a “gift of laughing people into positive action.” Abernathy was enthusiastic. Third on the list was twenty-six-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr., minister of the Dexter Street Baptist Church, hardly more than a stone’s throw from the gleaming white state office buildings surrounding the Capitol.

King had grown up in Atlanta, Georgia, a hundred fifty miles to the northeast, the son of a prosperous minister of one of the largest Baptist congregations in the nation. “Daddy” King had long been indignant over segregation; he had led efforts against discrimination as early as the 1930s, including a voting rights march to city hall. Though he ruled his home “like a fierce Old Testament patriarch” and often whipped his kids, Martin Jr. called him “a real father to me.” Martin, the second child and first son, showed extraordinary gifts. He seemed to excel at everything—school-work, sports (especially wrestling), dancing, debate, oratory. From age six he soloed hymns at church services and conventions, and by his early teens his voice had matured into a rich, deep baritone that awed his listeners in song or speech.

Pricked by the thorns of segregation but steadied by his mother’s counsel to believe he was “somebody,” young King resolved to improve the lives of black people. At first he rebelled against Daddy King’s demand that he follow in his ministerial footsteps, but he changed his mind and served as assistant pastor in his father’s church. Later he graduated from Atlanta’s Morehouse College, attended Crozer Seminary in Pennsylvania, and earned his doctorate at Boston University. During these years King read Niebuhr, whose paradoxes fascinated him; Marx, whose materialism alienated him; and especially Walter Rauschenbusch, whose belief in a Christian commonwealth
on earth,
loving, spiritual, sharing, stirred his imagination. The young theologian searched for ways in which these ideas and those of the great Western philosophers, from Plato and Aristotle to Mill and Locke, could be converted to effective methods of social change. Hired to take over the Montgomery church, he moved there with his wife, Coretta Scott King, a gifted singer who had given up a musical career to marry him.

In the eyes of Montgomery blacks, King was no zealot. His church was a respectable one, with a largely middle-class congregation, and though he had gained a reputation for being a social activist, he had just turned down a chance to head the local NAACP. But King’s brothers and sisters throughout Montgomery were already leading the way. Nixon had set up a meeting of black ministers and community leaders at King’s church. Women’s Political Council activists and ministers then spread word of the bus boycott to Montgomery’s 50,000 blacks over the weekend, especially at church services. Monday morning thousands were driven to work in black cabs with specially cut rates, or rode mules or horses, or walked. Barely a dozen blacks rode buses. The Montgomery Improvement Association was formed to coordinate efforts, but it was left to a mass meeting to decide whether the boycott would continue. And King, who had, to his
surprise and despite his reluctance, been drafted to head the MIA, would address it.

So fast were events moving that King had only twenty minutes to prepare what he believed would be the most decisive speech of his life—one that must not only fire up his audience but blend militance with moderation. Almost paralyzed by feelings of anxiety and inadequacy, he prayed; he had time only to sketch a mental outline and tore off to the church. He found it overflowing. As the meeting opened the powerful refrains of “Onward, Christian Soldiers” swelled through the church and outside, where three or four thousand people stood patiently in the cold night listening to the meeting through loudspeakers. After prayers and scripture readings, King walked to the pulpit.

He gazed out at the audience, at the people crowded onto the floor and the balcony, at the television cameras. Speaking without notes, he told, simply but passionately, the story of Rosa Parks and others who had been mistreated on the buses. He exhorted the boycotters to use persuasion, not coercion, and ended: “If you will protest courageously, and yet with dignity and Christian love, when the history books are written in future generations, the historians will have to pause and say, ‘There lived a great people—a black people—who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization.’ This is our challenge and our overwhelming responsibility.” His electrifying words brought waves of applause, which rose again when Rosa Parks was presented. Abernathy read the boycott demands, to more wild cheering. This was, King wrote later, the first great meeting of the freedom movement.

The city responded by forbidding black taxis to lower their fares. Undaunted, the boycott organizers set up an efficient car-pool system modeled on a similar Baton Rouge action two years before. A small army of ministers, businesspeople, teachers, laborers, and others, driving cars and dusty pickups and shiny new church-owned station wagons, collected passengers at forty-eight dispatch stations to carry them to work. Hymns wafted out of car windows as the “rolling churches” crisscrossed the city with what arch-segregationists at a White Citizens’ Council meeting glumly admitted was “military precision.” Some blacks preferred to walk. Mother Pollard vowed to King that she would walk until it was over.

“But aren’t your feet tired?” King asked her.

“Yes,” she said, “my feet is tired, but my soul is rested.”

As mass meetings were rotated among churches, ministers took turns giving rousing talks to maintain militance. But it was a carefully controlled militance. King had been fascinated by nonviolent doctrines ever since
reading Thoreau’s essay on civil disobedience at Morehouse and then studying Gandhi’s
Autobiography
at Crozer, but it was all intellectual until Rosa Parks made it come alive for him. Tutored also by the pacific reflections of Rauschenbusch and the advice in person of Bayard Rustin and others, King now got a quick education in the practice of
satyagraha,
or truth force. With his fellow ministers King toured the church meetings, turning them into schools of “Christianity in action,” nonviolent resistance, and direct-action techniques.

Victory came, slow and hard. City officials, fighting every inch of the way, sought to divide the boycott leaders from one another, concocted a bogus settlement, and prosecuted King and hundreds of others. Moments arose during the year-long boycott when black commitment to tactical nonviolence was sorely tested by bombings of homes and churches. But the boycott was still going strong when on a climactic day in November 1956 the city won an injunction to shut down the car pools, the boycott’s circulatory system, while the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a prior ruling of the federal court in Montgomery that the city and state bus laws were unconstitutional.

Four days before Christmas 8,000 souls voted to end the boycott, the largest and longest protest by black people in the nation’s history to that date. Soon the desegregated buses were moving smoothly despite sporadic acts of violence. Martin Luther King, Jr., emerged from the ordeal the most prominent black leader since Booker T. Washington, a man of quite different ideological cast. The freedom movement appeared to have taken off.

But where to? How far? In what way? The Montgomery boycott did not trigger a wave of protest actions throughout the South. In that same year of 1955, when Rosa Parks would not budge, Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old Chicago black visiting relatives in Mississippi, was dragged from their home for having “whistled” at a white woman. He was beaten, his testicles cut off, and his body dumped into the Tallahatchie River with a cotton-gin fan chained around his neck. North and South, people recoiled with horror, but the atrocity had little more impact; the confessed killers were of course acquitted. In 1957 Eisenhower’s dispatch of paratroopers to Little Rock produced sensational headlines, but it was followed by resolutions in state legislatures pitting state sovereignty against federal court decisions, and by school absenteeism and occasional rioting—and precious little school integration in most southern states.

Black leaders were neither daunted nor dumbfounded by the frustration
of the civil rights movement. But now northern observers were at last seeing more clearly what blacks were up against—a system of discrimination and segregation entrenched in an array of mutually reinforcing ideological, social, political, and legal barriers.

There still was, of course—there always had been—the “Other South”: the South of racial tolerance and Christian brotherhood. Noted newspapermen embodied this heritage: Harry S. Ashmore of the
Arkansas Gazette,
Hodding Carter of the
Delta Democrat-Times
in Mississippi, Ralph McGill of the Atlanta
Constitution,
Buford Boone of the Tuscaloosa
News.
Harry Golden, publisher of the
Carolina Israelite,
won chuckles even from his enemies when he described himself as a member of three minorities—“I’m a Jew, a Yankee, and a radical”—and when he proposed the Golden Vertical Negro Plan, which would integrate the races in the schools by providing desks without seats, in the same way that blacks and whites shopped standing up side by side in city drugstores and supermarkets. But these were lonely voices. The notion of black inferiority was built into the minds of most of even the better-educated Southerners. Writing on the Other South of the nineteenth century, Carl Degler noted that with the coming of the twentieth “the great period of Southern dissent on a widespread and organized basis came to an end.” When Buford Boone attacked white violence in a talk to whites in western Alabama in 1957, from the audience came shouts of “Kill him!” and “Hang him!”

The white dogma of Negro inferiority took form in the southern mind as a mishmash of stereotypes and shibboleths: “Mongrelization”—white men must protect the purity of blue-eyed, golden-haired southern girls— Negro blood had destroyed Rome—the “curse of Ham” in Genesis defined the black race—blacks were superior only in sports and entertainment— the “good colored” were quiet and law-abiding—Negroes preferred their own segregated schools. Some of these shibboleths combined with anti-Semitism; thus activist Negroes were mere pawns of the Jews. And as the fear of communism swept the country during the 1950s, southern demagogues linked civil rights leaders to Moscow.

White children in the South picked up these stereotypes in their homes or churches or in play with other kids. Some of their most insidious notions were reinforced by grammar and high school texts. These abounded with tales of the happy relationships between masters and slaves, of slaves who after Emancipation remained with their masters because they knew who their friends were. Slavery, the children read, was the earliest form of Social Security. The Klan was a law-enforcement agency. There were the inevitable portraits of blacks as happy dancers and singers, with their “bright rows of white teeth,” of the lazy black, the carefree childlike black.
But in these schoolbooks recent-day blacks and their history remained misty and shrouded. Typically there was no mention of
Brown,
of black leaders, or of the civil rights struggle.

An array of southern organizations reflected and relayed these ideas. The most active and conspicuous, with a large membership of “respectable” whites, were the Citizens’ Councils that erupted across the South in the wake of
Brown.
First membership cardholder and Confederacy-wide head of the Association of Citizens’ Councils of America was Robert “Tut” Patterson, a onetime football player for Ole Miss. Patterson drafted a long-range platform for the Councils’ official newspaper, advocating the “recognition of racial differences as fact,” the migration of blacks and whites seeking integration to states sanctioning it, laws ensuring the “future racial integrity” of black and white communities, “strict enforcement of state voter qualification laws,” separate public schools for the black and white races. Other groups ranged from prestigious organizations for the protection of states’ rights and grass-roots independence to disreputable “white brotherhoods” and the like, and the abominable Klan.