Becoming King (21 page)

Many scholars have reflected on the significance of this front porch speech. Keith Miller characterizes it as “the most important address this man ever made. If he failed to control his emotions, if he failed to talk nonviolence, if he failed to preach love, and—most importantly—if he failed to disarm the mob, nonviolence would fail, the boycott would fail, love would fail, and he would fail.” King’s comments suggest the moment was about much more than King, however. This was a moment for the people of Montgomery. How they responded to this blatant act of violence against their leader and his family said much more about the character of the movement than King’s speech did. As the boycott entered its third month, the protest belonged to the people. It was not his
to bargain away. It was not dependent on his rhetoric in a time of crisis. Rather, the movement’s future rested with the African American citizens of Montgomery, and with God, who walked with them.
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Several months later, the MIA’s effort to get bus segregation declared unconstitutional went to trial. In the courtroom, the defense lawyer Walter Knabe interrogated Claudette Colvin, who had been arrested for violating the city’s bus segregation laws a year earlier. He charged that the MIA had changed their goals since December 5, to which Colvin responded: “No, sir. We haven’t changed our ideas. It has been in me ever since I was born.” Later Colvin responded to a question about leadership of the boycott: “Did we have a leader? Our leaders is just we ourself.” When Knabe pressed another witness to affirm that King had originally made three demands at the beginning of the boycott, none of which were for desegregation, another witness noted, “The Reverend King did not ask that, the Negroes asked that.” She later added, “We employed him to be our mouth piece.” The women who signed on to the lawsuit that would change the segregation laws in Montgomery rejected the notion that King or anybody else was the leader of the movement. Rather, they credited the people with being their own leaders. By the end of January 1956, the most significant change for King was that he was now fully a part of the people. As one movement participant commented in a mass meeting, if anybody in the city wanted to kill King, they were too late “because Martin Luther King is in all of us now, and in order to kill Martin Luther King, you’ll have to kill every black in the city of Montgomery.” Thanks to the crucible of the past few months, the people were in King as well. Their courage and commitment had inspired King, motivating him as a leader and inspiring him as a speaker. They proved willing to walk together.
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Just a few short days after the bombing of his home, King delivered a sermon at Dexter with a title he could easily embrace: “It’s Hard to Be a Christian.” The past two months of King’s life had been extremely challenging. As the most visible face of the bus boycott, he had become a lightning rod for criticism, threats, and even violence. Despite his sufferings, King reminded the people of Dexter that the Christian faith is by definition costly. This was not time to substitute “a cushion for a cross” or to have “a high blood pressure of creeds and an anemia of deeds.” He called for a more authentic Christianity that is by definition “hard because it demands a dangerous and costly altruism. It demands that the ‘I’ be immersed in the deep waters of ‘thou.’” The people of Dexter knew they were not the only Christians in Montgomery. That same morning, hymns were emanating from the all-white Dexter Avenue Methodist Church just a block away. The hypocrisy of many of Montgomery’s white Christians was fair game this Sunday, as King blasted “white people who are for justice” but who are “afraid to speak.” King concluded by reminding his congregation that Christianity demands “putting our whole being in the struggle against evil, whatever the cost.”
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The coming eleven months would prove to be costly for many involved in the local struggle. In addition to facing varied and perpetual manifestations of white racism, King and other boycott leaders tried to keep the community united in purpose. Accusations that the MIA had
mismanaged funds would add to the pressures facing King and other leaders. In response, they sought to maintain unity by closing ranks. Vigorous debate over the direction of the local movement became less regular as clergy gained greater power within the MIA. Meanwhile, E. D. Nixon’s role diminished over the course of the year. Living under the tension of segregation, white attacks, and internal conflict, leaders fixed all their energies on a skirmish over bus policies while economic initiatives were relegated to the back burner. Much of the early promise for a local sustained assault on white supremacy never materialized. They failed to develop concrete plans for African American economic development after the boycott. The MIA would win the battle over buses, but the tension they lived under each day would leave the larger war for equality and justice unresolved.

The January 30, 1956, bombing of King’s home was but the most sensational result of the “get-tough” policy toward boycott participants of Montgomery mayor William “Tacky” Gayle. Despite the onslaught, King and the people did not back down. Instead they went on the offensive, going ahead with plans to file suit in federal courts claiming bus segregation was a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Filing the lawsuit ran contrary to the original demands of the MIA, but as early as the evening of Parks’s arrest, Nixon and others had in mind the notion of a test case to strike down segregation on the city’s buses. The intransigence of the city commissioners coupled with the use of violence convinced the leadership of the MIA that only the courts would settle this issue, and that meant challenging segregation.
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The MIA leadership could not ignore the violence. An attempted bombing of Nixon’s home on February 1 reinforced the sober reality that any of them might be next. At an executive board meeting just a few days later, King addressed a recent “increase in the amount of violence” and innumerable threats since the city’s commissioners “joined the white Citizens Council.” In response, the MIA beefed up security measures for mass meetings, but King insisted: “We’re not going to give up; they can drop bombs in my house every day. I’m firmer now than ever.”
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The first task for attorney Fred Gray in developing the case that would become
Browder v. Gayle
was finding a group of people willing to serve as plaintiffs. He elected not to make Rosa Parks part of the case so
as not to complicate her criminal proceedings. Aurelia Browder, a Montgomery housewife, became the named plaintiff for the case, which was filed the morning of February 2. She was joined by seventy-seven-year-old Susie McDonald, two teenagers named Claudette Colvin and Mary Louise Smith, and Mrs. Jeanetta Reese. Once the suit was filed, the city moved to try to discredit both the legal maneuver and Fred Gray, the attorney representing the MIA. After Gray launched a legal attack on segregated buses, Jeanetta Reese pulled out under pressure from white authorities. As a result, some white leaders engaged in a concerted effort to have Gray disbarred in the state. A similar strategy had proven effective a decade earlier, when Montgomery officials convinced a court to disbar African American attorney Arthur A. Madison, who had led a large group of blacks to register to vote at the county courthouse in the fall of 1943. When they were all summarily rejected, Madison filed suit on behalf of sixteen of the applicants. In February 1944, six of the plaintiffs claimed they had not authorized Madison to file the lawsuit. Most of these were public school teachers and were thus vulnerable to white backlash expressed through the termination of their jobs. Authorities arrested Madison for filing false court documents, fined him $2,500, and disbarred him in the State of Alabama.
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On the day Gray filed the lawsuit, the board of the MIA already had heard rumors that Reese had withdrawn her name from the case. Although she had retained Gray as her attorney, she later claimed that he acted without her consent. Segregationists moved swiftly, as reports had Reese going to the mayor’s office the very day the lawsuit was filed. Once word spread about Reese’s involvement in the case, threatening phone calls to her followed. Reese worked for a high-ranking police official who brought a lot of pressure on her to drop her role in the case, which she did. MIA leaders responded with resolve, reassuring the rest of the plaintiffs that they had the full support of the organization. The intimidation efforts were directed at Rosa Parks as well. She reported to the MIA executive board that “some strange men have been coming in my neighborhood inquiring about the woman who caused all of this trouble.” In response, the MIA decided to ensure that Parks had protection at night.
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In addition to intimidation, violence, and legal maneuvers, some local
white Baptists sought to strip the MIA of their office space. Early on the MIA had set up offices at the Baptist Center, a facility donated by the Southern Baptists to assist with ministry among the city’s African American population. During the early 1950s, the center was a source of pride in the Southern Baptist’s annual reports. The Baptist Center director, Reverend Glasco, an African American member of the MIA board, reported that the superintendent of missions had decided the MIA would have to move their offices “due to the lengthy run of the movement and since it has taken on a political angle.” Glasco added that prior to this, every decision regarding the center’s operation had been made by African Americans, but this was imposed by whites. King responded to this news decisively, noting: “I think the position of the white Baptists is that they’re just against it. I don’t want to accept anything from them.” After exploring various alternatives, the board elected to move the offices to Ralph Abernathy’s First Baptist Church.
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King’s response to the barrage of white reprisals did not end with his leadership of the MIA. He also took personal steps in an attempt to provide a greater degree of protection for his family. Less than a week after the bombing of his home, King agreed to an interview with Fisk University researcher Donald Ferron. While King’s public announcements that week were bold, notes from the interview reveal he was definitely on edge. At one point, King stood up, looked out the front window, and said, “I thought somebody was putting something on the porch.” This nervousness and fear led him to have a meeting with Governor Jim Folsom, who had a reputation as being supportive of greater rights for blacks. According to King, following the bombing of his parsonage Folsom had “promised us protection and said he would talk to the mayor.”
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At the MIA board meeting on February 2, King noted that he had gone to the sheriff’s office in an attempt to get a gun permit for the men who were guarding his house but he “couldn’t get one.” King argued the sheriff’s denial of a gun permit was tantamount to saying, “you are at the disposal of the hoodlums.” In the interview, Ferron asked King about effective strategies for racial change, to which King replied: “Somebody told me a whale puts up its biggest fight after it has been harpooned. It’s the same thing with the Southern white man. Maybe its [sic] good to shed a little blood. What needs to be done is for a couple of those white
men to lose some blood; then the Federal Government will step in.” While it would be a stretch to say that King embraced violence as a strategy, he had not yet adopted nonviolence as a life commitment. King’s response to the bombing demonstrates that his overall commitment to nonviolence had not fully formed.
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Over the next few weeks, however, King had the opportunity to spend time with Bayard Rustin and Glenn Smiley, two avowed pacifists who helped King infuse his love ethic with the ideology of nonviolence. Rustin, a civil rights veteran, arrived in Montgomery at the behest of novelist Lillian Smith, who believed King and the MIA would benefit from greater instruction in nonviolence. Rustin had spent time working with the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) and the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), and in 1956 was serving as the executive secretary of the War Resisters League. Rustin was a close associate of the president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, A. Philip Randolph, and a student of Gandhian nonviolence. He also had a past that, if discovered, could embarrass the Montgomery movement. In addition to a brief period when he was a part of the Young Communist League, Rustin had served a prison sentence for resisting the draft and had been convicted for sodomy just three years earlier. Because of these concerns, some of Rustin’s associates encouraged him not to go to Montgomery at all, but in the end Randolph and pacifist A. J. Muste deemed his value to King and the nascent Montgomery movement significant enough to justify his visit. Upon his arrival in the city, Rustin was struck by the tension he witnessed. He noted that both King and Abernathy had shifts of men watching their homes every night. MIA leaders warned Rustin that he would be under white surveillance and therefore ought to take necessary precautions.
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As an outsider, Rustin spent his first few days attempting to better understand the climate in the city. One evening he went to visit Jeanetta Reese, who had withdrawn her name as a plaintiff from the lawsuit filed by Fred Gray. He was shocked by what he found at Reese’s home: “Although the police had provided no protection for King and Nixon after their houses had been bombed, I found two squad cards parked before Mrs. Reese’s home.” After negotiating with police to be allowed to approach Reese’s home, all he could get her to say was, “I had to do what I did or I wouldn’t be alive today.”
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King invited Rustin to participate in nearly all MIA events during his visit. The two men also had several extensive discussions regarding the principle of nonviolence. A few days after Rustin’s arrival, Glenn Smiley, a white FOR official, joined Rustin in Montgomery. Like Rustin, Smiley had the opportunity to spend significant time with King discussing the principles of the movement, including the relevance of Gandhi’s leadership and ideas to what was happening in Montgomery. According to Smiley’s reflections on the conversations, King admitted regarding Gandhi, “I will have to say that I know very little about the man.” King had heard of Gandhi many times at Morehouse, but he had never studied his thought in depth.
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