Becoming King (14 page)

A lack of cohesiveness did not slow down the leaders of the Women’s Political Council. During January 1955, they met with the city commissioners, seeking to broker additional gains following the hiring of black police officers the previous year. The group requested spots on the city’s Parks and Recreation Board, as they hoped to eventually integrate the city’s park system. While the commissioners did not provide the desired response to their demands, Mayor Gayle did take this opportunity to praise the work of the city’s African American police officers. If they could not secure action from current elected officials, many blacks in Montgomery were ready to invest significant energy into electing the next city commissioners at the polls in March.
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Nixon, who had run for public office the previous year, helped lead the charge for a more politically engaged African American populace. In a letter penned in early February, Virginia Durr took note of Nixon’s bold leadership, calling him “the most effective and bravest fighter for equal rights” in the city. She emphasized the external support he received from his union (the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters) and the NAACP that allowed him to persevere despite perpetual resistance by those in power. Durr concluded that Nixon had “more support on a national basis than any man in Montgomery, and is more effective politically than any other Negro here.” Nixon joined forces with the WPC in an attempt to further engage the broader African American community in the upcoming local elections. They also hoped prospective office holders would hear and respond to the concerns of Montgomery’s black population.
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On February 23, some of the city’s African American leaders invited the city commission candidates to a forum hosted at the Ben Moore Hotel. When the candidates arrived, forum organizers presented them with a list of eight “urgent needs” that demanded “immediate attention.” The black community asked the politicians to offer a response to each issue, beginning with “the present bus situation.” Other concerns included a request for black representation on the Parks and Recreation Board, the need for a new subdivision for African American housing, jobs for qualified blacks in the community (concerning which they noted “everybody can not teach”), black representation on all boards affecting black citizens, a need for fire hydrants in congested areas, a dearth of sewage disposals in black neighborhoods, and the prevalence of narrow streets without curbing or pavement in many African American sections of Montgomery. The sheet concluded: “What will you do to improve these undemocratic practices? Your stand on these issues will enable us to better decide on whom we shall cast our ballot in the March election. Very truly yours, Montgomery Negroes.”
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Amazingly, all of the candidates attended the meeting. Mayor William “Tacky” Gayle was noncommittal on the issues the African American community raised, as was candidate George Cleere. Dave Birmingham, Frank Parks, and the mayoral candidate Harold McGlynn did agree to appoint a black representative to the Parks and Recreation Board. Clyde C. Sellers, a candidate for public safety commissioner, gave a general speech
but avoided addressing specifics. None of the candidates dealt with the bus situation, which was the number-one concern on the list. Nor did any engage any of the economic problems or quality of life issues that affected the daily lives of working-class and poor blacks in Montgomery.
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A few weeks later, Sellers took out a large advertisement in the
Montgomery Advertiser
in which he offered his answers to the concerns raised in the meeting. Regarding the bus situation, Sellers wrote: “There is a state law which requires segregation of passengers on public conveyances. I feel that there should
ALWAYS
be seats available for
BOTH
races on our buses.” Unwilling to offer seats on any city board to African Americans, Sellers offered to “gladly work with their representatives in an attempt to establish a negro park and expanded recreational facilities in Montgomery.” He flatly rejected the suggestion that a new black housing development be located in the rapidly expanding Lincoln Heights community. While not opposed to new homes for blacks, he worried that the lack of adequate African American schools in the Lincoln Heights area “would lead to dissatisfaction and dissention,” leading him to conclude
“NEVER
in Lincoln Heights.” Regarding the request that blacks be eligible for any civil service job for which they were qualified, the candidate proclaimed: “There
ARE
places in this nation where civil service jobs for negroes in cities are available, but not in Montgomery. I will expand [sic] every effort to keep it that way.” Sellers ended his advertisement with these words: “I have answered these questions exactly the way I feel. I have many friends among the negroes of Montgomery and I will be fair and honest with them in all our contacts, yet
I will not
compromise my principles nor violate my Southern birthright to promise something I do not intend to do.
I will not be intimidated for the sake of a block of negro votes.
I come to you
not
seeking your votes with wild promises, but with positive and constructive program, based on my training and experience in the fields of business and law enforcement.” Sellers coupled this advertisement with what one historian described as “the most blatantly and insistently racist addresses heard in Montgomery since the days of J. Johnston Moore, the Ku Klux Klan’s candidate against Mayor Gunter in the 1920s.” Sellers’s commitment to a “no-compromise” approach with the city’s African Americans led him to a victory in the commission elections, as he outpaced the incumbent Dave Birmingham 43 percent to 37 percent.
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During March, the election took a back seat in the minds and hearts of many black citizens when word spread that police had arrested a teenage girl for violating the segregation statutes on city buses. Claudette Colvin, a student at Booker T. Washington High School, refused to stand when ordered to get up from her seat to accommodate a white passenger. When an officer came to forcibly remove Colvin from the bus, she resisted. Women’s Political Council member A. W. West remembered: “she fought like a little tigress. The policeman had scars all over his face.” Clifford Durr supported the local black attorney Fred Gray as defense attorneys for Colvin. In the middle of the legal fight, Virginia Durr described the teenager in glowing terms, noting that she was willing to “stand her ground in the face of the big burly white bus driver, two big white policemen and one big white motor cop. They dragged her off the bus, handcuffed her, and put her in jail and the most marvelous thing about her was that the two other young Negro girls moved back, the woman by her moved back, and she was left entirely alone and still she would not move.” When Durr asked Colvin why she did not move, the girl replied, “I done paid my dime, they didn’t have no
RIGHT
to move me.”
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Over the next few months, Durr wrote several letters seeking support for legal expenses, as many hoped the arrest and conviction might become a test case that would go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. When Durr pleaded for financial support for the Colvin case from friends around the country, she asked that checks be sent to Mrs. Rosa Parks. When the case went before the circuit court in early May, the authorities elected to try Colvin on assault and battery, dropping any charges of breaking segregation laws, thus preventing the emergence of any constitutional challenge from the case. Authorities tried and convicted Colvin, placing her on a year’s probation. Summarizing the impact of the Colvin incident, Virginia Durr reflected, “this has created tremendous interest in the Negro community and made them all fighting mad and may help give them the courage to put up a real fight on the bus segregation issue.”
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According to Ralph Abernathy, the teen’s arrest added to the feeling of discontent in the African American community. In response, he was part of a group that had several meetings with city and bus officials in which they sought to “change the seating policy to a first come, first served basis; that is, with reserved seats for either group. Wherever the
two races met, this would constitute the dividing line.” When city leaders claimed the suggestion could not be done according to Alabama law, black leaders asked “that they clarify the seating policy and publish it in the paper so that each person would know where his section was, so that once a Negro got on the bus and was properly seated in the Negro section he would not have to worry about getting up, giving his seat to a white passenger. After several conferences, bus officials refused to clarify this policy.” The lack of concrete action by city leaders further angered many African Americans.
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Meanwhile, as King completed his first year preaching at Dexter, he had several opportunities to speak to a broader community increasingly agitated by white leaders’ lack of concern. In sermons and speeches, he consistently encouraged his audiences not to allow anger to give rise to bitterness. In May, he accepted an invitation from Alabama State College president and Dexter Avenue Baptist Church member H. Councill Trenholm to serve as the school’s baccalaureate speaker at graduation. In the speech, King challenged the new graduates to not be prisoners of “rugged individualism and national isolationism.” He encouraged them not to settle for mediocrity in “various fields of endeavor” or to give into “hate and bitterness.” Despite the frustrations the graduates were sure to face as they entered the workforce, King called for a loving approach in the face of repression. As King heard stories of blatant racism and experienced the sting of segregation on a daily basis, he had to regularly remind Montgomery’s African American community, including himself, of the need to overcome the temptation to hate.
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In mid-June, King delivered a speech for the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP titled “The Peril of Superficial Optimism in the Area of Race Relations.” Dexter clerk and former search committee chair Robert D. Nesbitt introduced King: “He is a great asset to Montgomery by his activity in everything for the betterment of the community. He has launched an intensive campaign in the church for NAACP membership and voters.” King began his address by recognizing the amazing progress that made optimism in the area of race relations much more tenable than it would have been a few years earlier. He even suggested that “segregation is dying. He is dying hard, but there is no doubt that his corpse awaits him.” King warned against complacency, noting the
persistence of prejudice in the hearts of some whites and the struggles of other minorities throughout the world: “We must be concerned because we are a part of humanity. Whatever affects one affects all.” Despite the intransigence of racism, King claimed that God acted through the 1954
Brown
decision, leading him to conclude “that segregation is just as dead as a doornail and the only thing I am uncertain about is how costly the segregationist will make the funeral.” King espoused this same optimism when addressing his own congregation. In a sermon titled “Discerning the Signs of History,” King claimed that “evil carries the seed of its own destruction. God spoke through nine men in 1954, on May 17. They examined the legal body of segregation and pronounced it constitutionally dead and ever since then things have been changing. We can go to places all over the South that we could not go last year.”
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Later in the summer, King delivered “The Death of Evil upon the Seashore” to his Dexter congregation. Basing his comments on Phillips Brooks’s nineteenth-century sermon “The Egyptians Dead upon the Seashore,” King admitted: “We have seen evil. We have seen it walk the streets of Montgomery.” He surmised that human history “is the history of a struggle between good and evil. In the midst of the upward climb of goodness there is the down pull of evil.” Citing the Exodus story of the parting of the Red Sea and the subsequent death of the Egyptian army, King declared: “It was a joyous daybreak that had come to end the long night of their captivity. But even more, it was the death of evil; it was the death of inhuman oppression and crushing exploitation. The death of the Egyptians upon the seashore is a glaring symbol of the ultimate doom of evil in its struggle against good.” King applied his interpretation of the Exodus story to the challenges facing his congregation:

King tempered his triumphant pronouncement, however, warning that the drowning Egyptians must have “struggled hard to survive in the Red Sea. They probably saw a log here and even a straw there, and I can imagine them reaching desperately for something as light as straw trying to survive. This is what is happening to segregation today. It is caught in the mighty Red Sea, and its advocators are reaching out for every little straw in an attempt to survive.” This desperation accounted for the flurry of absurd obstructionist laws by southern legislatures. These actions simply reinforced that “the advocators of segregation have their backs against the wall. Segregation is drowning today in the rushing waters of historical necessity.” Although the ultimate outcome was clear to King, the struggle in Montgomery was far from over.
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During the summer of 1955, a young white pastor who would prove an important ally in the ongoing struggle moved to Montgomery as the new pastor of Trinity Lutheran Church. Most whites in the city viewed Robert S. Graetz, a Caucasian pastor of an African American congregation, with suspicion. Considered outsiders by white southerners, Graetz and his family were not fully a part of the African American culture, either. As his family sought support, they “discovered quite early that there was an underground network of so-called ‘liberals’ who maintained close contact with each other.” They became friends with I. B. and Clara Rutledge, Clifford and Virginia Durr, and other whites in the area. Graetz marveled at the activism of white women: “While white
men
were shouting ‘Segregation forever!’ and working hard to preserve their cherished traditions, white
women
all over the South were working just as hard to eliminate racial prejudice and segregation. Some were quite outspoken. Mrs. Rutledge was one of the finest, a remarkable, fearless woman, who lived into her nineties.” Immediately Graetz realized that they were outsiders and intruders who posed a threat to “the societal fabric of the time. We knew that. But plenty of people around us, Negro and white, reinforced our conviction that the fabric not only needed to be changed but to be torn apart.”
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