From   Taylor Branch,  PARTING THE WATERS: America in the King Years. Simon &
Schuster, 1988)                                               


FIRST TROMBONE                 

 On March 2, 1955, a handful of white people sought to board a city bus
 as it chugged up Dexter Avenue to the Court Street stop.  Peering into
 the rearview mirror, the driver saw that the white section was full of
 whites and that both the Negro section and the "no-man's-land" in the
 middle were full of Negroes.  The driver turned around and pointed to a
 row in the middle section.  "Give me those seats," he said to the four
 Negro women seated there.  Two of them moved obediently to stand in
 the aisle, but two of them pretended not to hear and stared into the
 middle distance.  The driver, having committed himself to secure the
 seats, cajoled and warned the two recalcitrant women.  Then he stepped
 outside to hail a foot policeman, who in turn hailed a squad car with two
 other policemen.  Soon the policemen began pressuring some of the
 Negro men to give their seats to the holdout women.  Seeking the point
 of least resistance, they tried to turn a segregation dispute into a question
 of chivalry.  One man complied, but no one would move for the last
 holdout, a feisty high school student named Claudette Colvin, who de-
 fended her right to the seat in language that brought words of disapproval
 from passengers of both races.  One white woman defended her to the
 police, saying that Colvin was allowed to sit in no-man's-land as long as
 there were no seats in the Negro section, but another white woman said
 that if Colvin were allowed to defy the police, "they will take over."
 Colvin was crying and madder than ever by the time the policemen told
 her she was under arrest.  She struggled when they dragged her off the
 bus and screamed when they put on the handcuffs.
   Four days later, the Advertiser published a letter in which one of the
 white passengers commended the policemen for handling the bus inci-
 dent without violence, without even raising their voices.  Montgomery
 Negroes, by contrast, disputed the need to handcuff a high school girl.
 To them, Colvin had been entitled to her seat even under the hated
 segregation law, and for her to have been insulted, blamed, and arrested
 on the whim of the driver and by force of law was a humiliating injustice
 not only to her but to all the Negro passengers who had witnessed the
 arrest in helpless, fearful silence.  Prosecutors had thrown the book at
 Colvin, charging her with violating the segregation law, assault, and
 disorderly conduct.  She might be going to jail instead of to Booker T.
 Washington High School.
   Privately, E. D. Nixon consulted Clifford Durr about the Colvin case.
 The two men made an unlikely pair: Nixon, a Negro railroad porter with
 fists as big as eggplants and a coal-black face, and Durr, a white lawyer
 and Rhodes scholar from the Alabama gentry.  Between them, they had



  connections that reached high and wide among the quixotic groups that
  for decades had tried to build a network of support for civil rights.  E. D.
  Nixon was a union man.  For nearly half of his fifty-six years, he had
  served as president of the Alabama branch of A. Philip Randolph's Broth-
  erhood of Sleeping Car Porters.  Nixon almost worshipped Randolph, who
  in his legendary career had dared to attack Du Bois for urging Negroes to
  fight in World War I, then had fought the Pullman Company for twelve
  years before winning recognition of the first major Negro trade union.
  Randolph was an old lion-tall, white-haired, and dignified, speaking
  elegantly with a slight British accent-and Nixon was a homespun Ala-
  bama copy of him.  He was famous to Montgomery Negroes as the man
  who knew every white policeman, judge, and government clerk in town,
  and had always gone to see them about the grievances of any Negro who
  asked him for help.  Nixon seldom got anything close to justice, but he
  usually got something.  Once, he pushed his way into the governor's
  office, and he was the first Negro since Reconstruction to put himself on
  the ballot for local office.  He was not an educated or cultivated man,
  however, and many of the town's more educated Negroes sniped at him
  for his imperfections.
   Clifford Durr, for his part, was a grim harbinger to white Southern
  liberals on the race issue.  He retained many influential contacts from his
  glowing past as a second-echelon braintruster of the New Deal.  The
  johnsons, Lyndon and Lady Bird, were old friends, for example, and Durr
  was related by marriage to Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black.  But these
  surviving ties counted for very little when Durr rebelled against the most
  sensitive taboos of the Cold War era.  First he had resigned his post as
  FCC Commissioner to represent some of the early victims of the Truman
  loyalty program.  To Durr, the loyalty hearings were un-American inqui-
  sitions in which innocent people were branded as perverts or subversives
  on the word of anonymous FBI informants.  His cases isolated him from
  mainstream politics, and things grew worse when he returned home to
  practice law.
   With Aubrey Williams, a fellow New Dealer from Montgomery, Durr
  sponsored the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee.  For more than
  twenty years, Highlander had functioned as a unique "workshop" of the
  Social Gospel, being one of the few places in the South where Negroes
  and whites mixed freely.  Its founder, Myles Horton, had been a student
  of Reinhold Niebuhr at Union Theological Seminary.  Niebuhr was chair-
  man of the Highlander advisory board that at times had included Eleanor
  Roosevelt, Norman Thomas, and Harry Emerson Fosdick.  Durr tried to
  defend Highlander as a sensible, patriotic experiment in racial democ-
  racy, but during the passions of the Joseph McCarthy hearings and the

Brown case his associations landed him, his wife Virginia, Myles Horton,
and Aubrey Williams before James Eastland's Senate Internal Security
Subcommittee.  On television, Eastland let it be known that he con-
sidered Highlander freakish, mongrelized, and basically Communist.  The
normally judicious Durr exploded in rage, challenging Eastland to a fist-
fight, and photographs of guards restraining him landed on the front page
of The New York Times.  After that, Durr lost most of his remaining
clients in Montgomery.  He became a threadbare patrician, explaining
patiently why he thought the confluence of events had reduced him to
such a state.  His wife was far less tolerant.  She combined the background
of a Southern belle with the sharp tongue of an early feminist, and had
called Eastland a "nasty polecat" long before the Highlander hearings.
  After the Colvin arrest in Montgomery, Nixon and Durr conferred with
Colvin, Colvin's relatives, witnesses from the bus, and Fred Gray, a
young Negro lawyer only one year out of school, who moonlighted on
weekends as a preacher.  Durr considered Gray bright, aggressive, and
promising.  He had been advising the younger man on the eccentricities
of the Montgomery courts, and now they weighed the prospects of turn-
ing the Colvin defense into an attack on segregation.  Gray agreed to
represent Colviii and was eager to make a run at it.
  Nixon's first move was to try negotiation.  He called for an appoint-
ment with Police Commissioner Dave Birmingham, a man he knew to
be an amiable populist in the style of Governor James "Kissin' Jim"
Folsom.  Shortly thereafter, with an ad hoc Colvin committee that in-
cluded the new Baptist minister in town, Rev.  M. L. King, Jr., Nixon
arrived in Birmingham's office for talks, which led quickly to a tentative
agreement.  Bus drivers should be courteous to everyone, and bus seats
should be filled by Negroes from the back and whites from the front,
eliminating the no-man's-land where passengers could be remove or
inserted by the driver.  If the bus company adopted such a policy, said
Birmingham, he would instruct the police to act accordingly.
  The plan sailed along until it reached the desk of Jack Crenshaw, the
bus company's lawyer, whose instincts ran quickly to objection.  What
would happen if whites tried to board a bus completely filled with Ne-
groes?  Would they stand in the aisle? if so, where would be the white
section required by state law?  Crenshaw said the bus company would
not endorse something that could be construed as illegal, especially not
with its operating license soon up for renewal.  This was sneaky, he said.
if the police wanted to change the segregation laws, they should change
them outright.  Stung, Nixon's committee went back to Birmingham and
asked him to implement the plan on his own, but the police commis-
sioner retreated painfully.

  Meanwhile, Claudette Colvin had been found guilty at a brief trial.  On
May 6, judge Eugene Carter crossed up the Colvin supporters with an
appeal ruling worthy of a fox.  He dismissed the segregation charge, nul-
lifying their plans to take that issue into federal court on constitutional
grounds.  Dismissing the charge of disorderly conduct, he showed a will-
ingness to forgive.  Upholding the charge of assault-the most preposter-
ous of the three-he let it be known that he would tolerate no challenge
to authority.  Finally, he sentenced Colvin to pay a small fine-a sentence
so much lighter than anticipated that it ruined her martyr status.  Many
Negroes who supported her cause nevertheless came to believe she was
lucky.
  Fred Gray wanted to press an appeal anyway, but Durr and Nixon
believed that the case had already lost its momentum.  There was much
internal turmoil among Negro leaders.  Members of the influential Wom-
en's Political Council-most of whom served on the social and political
affairs committee at King's church-had completed a discouraging can-
vass of the likely witnesses in the case.  Most of them were frightened,
and might at any moment deny what they had said.  Colvin herself would
not recant, they reported, but she was immature-prone to breakdowns
and outbursts of profanity.  Worse, she was pregnant.  Even if Montgomery
Negroes were willing to rally behind an unwed pregnant teenager-
which they were not-her circumstances would make her an extremely
vulnerable standard-bearer.  Some of Colvin's friends resented this assess-
ment as condescending.  Women leaders criticized the local ministers for
failing to press the segregation issue harder and more eloquently during
the negotiations, which the women stressed above the lawsuit, and the
ministers defended themselves by recalling the lawyers' advice against
poisoning the trial atmosphere with too much excitement. in the end, E.
D. Nixon made the decision.  Although Nixon was sensitive about his
country dialect and often asserted his worth defensively against the airs
of the more educated Negroes, saying, "You won't find my car parked
out in front of no loan shop," his practicality prevailed.  Colvin would
not do, he decreed.  Her family agreed and paid the fine.
  That July, one month after getting his doctorate, King flew to New
Orleans to explore a special new job at Dillard University.  Dillard,
founded by Congregationalists shortly after the Civil War, had enjoyed
the patronage of Chicago philanthropist Julius Rosenwald and his heirs.
Its campus of whitewashed classical buildings laid out on a vast tree-
lined lawn was as handsome as Spelman's, and its reputation was the
equal of any coeducational Negro college in the South.  The Dillard pres-
ident, A. W. Dent, a Morehouse man from Daddy King's class, wanted
King to become dean of the new Lawless Memorial University Chapel.
 in that post, he would be allowed to teach courses irT the religion and
 philosophy departments without being lashed to the full schedule of a
 regular faculty member.  He would preach in the chapel, but he would
 escape the more tedious duties of a church pastor.  The combination was
 ideal for King.  From Dent's point of view, the job's only drawback was
 that construction of the chapel would not be completed by September,
 and it was complicated to start anything at a college in the middle of the
 school year.  King welcomed the delay, however, as he thought he should
 stay at Dexter at least another year.  He would also have to figure out
 how to tell Dr. Mays and his father, among others.
  To search so soon for a teaching job was a departure from King's plan
 to preach for a number of years, like Mordecai Johnson, Niebuhr, and
 Howard Thurman, before rising to life in the academy.  He was advancing
 the schedule because he was impatient-not because of failure at Dexter
 but by the very fact of his success.  His father's budget system had
 worked; Dexter had already paid off a debt of nearly $5,000 from the
 Johns era, hired new staff and paid $1,000 into the new building fund.
 King had made the church into a beehive, and now he saw the only catch:
 the hive could get no bigger.  The legendary Stokes had baptized a thou-
 sand a year during the heyday of Montgomery's First Baptist, and Daddy
 King had baptized enough to build Ebenezer from two hundred souls to
 four thousand, but King would finish his banner year having baptized
 only twelve.  Fewer than thirty new members joined the rolls, and many
 of those were part of the annual turnover at Alabama State.  The only
 way for Dexter to grow larger was to transform itself into a mass church
 of all classes, and the only- way to do anything substantial with the new
 building fund was to move away from the prestigious but tiny site there
 beneath the state capitol.  King knew his congregation would do neither.

Restless, King decided to step up his activity in the local chapter of the
NAACP.  He gave a stirring speech at one of its small gatherings and then
accepted a position on the executive committee.  His letter of appoint-
ment came from Rosa Parks, secretary of the chapter.  A seamstress at a
downtown department store, Parks made extra money by taking in sew-
ing work on the side.  She had come into the NAACP through E. D.
Nixon, who had served as chapter president for five years before stepping
aside for a friend.  Her background and character put her firmly astride
the class fault that divided the politically active Negroes of Montgomery.
Had the professionals and the upper strata from Alabama State taken
over the organization-as they were threatening to do now that the
Brown case had brought fresh excitement to the NAACP-Parks might
 well have been replaced by one of the college-trained members of the
 Women's Political Council.  As it was/ she remained the woman of Nix-
 on's circle most congenial to the Council members.  She wore rimless
 spectacles, spoke quietly, wrote and typed faultless letters on her own,
 and had never been known to lower herself to factionalism.  A tireless
 worker and churchgoer, of working-class station and middle-class de-
 meanor, Rosa Parks was one of those rare people of whom everyone
 agreed that she gave more than she got.  Her character represented one of
 the isolated high blips on the graph of human nature, offsetting a dozen
 or so sociopaths.  A Methodist herself, she served as teacher and mother
 figure to the kids of the NAACP Youth Council, who met at a Lutheran
 church near her home.
  That church, Trinity Lutheran, was an oddity in itself.  To Negroes, a
 principal attraction of Trinity Lutheran had always been its affiliated
 private school, which was supported as a mission by the World Lutheran
 Council.  For years it had been the only decent school available to Ne-
 groes, and many ambitious families had swallowed their distaste for the
 staid Lutheran liturgy in order to educate their children.  Along with an
 even tinier Congregational church, Trinity was high church in doctrine
 and worship.  Dexter got most of the college professors; Trinity got a few
 of the high school teachers.
  For several years, the minister at Trinity had been Nelson Trout, a
 Negro Lutheran who felt somewhat excluded as the head of a minuscule
 congregation outside the mainstream of Negro religion.  His peers from
 the big Baptist and Methodist churches took neither Trinity nor its pas-
 tor very seriously, Trout believed, and it was all he could do to get some
 of them to turn out for the ceremony that marked the crowning achieve-
 ment of his work in Montgomery-the dedication of the new parsonage,
 next door to the church.  Ralph Abernathy arrived with King.  The two
 young Baptists attended such functions together so frequently that Trout
 had come to think of them as a team-Mr.  Rough and Mr. Smooth.
 Abernathy tended to lead King through the crowds, introducing him to
 selected new people, in a manner that offended Trout because Abernathy
 was at once so deferential to King and so lordly toward everyone else.
 Trout found it much easier to talk informally with King, and in a private
 moment once felt enough at ease to ask as a Lutheran how King, a Negro
 Baptist, had acquired the name Martin Luther.  King looked searchingly
 at Trout for some time, then smiled and parried with a question of his
 own: how did a Negro like Trout come to be a Lutheran?  Trout laughed.
 The competition was too rough among the Baptist preachers, he replied,
 and the Lutherans were begging for Negroes.
  Many years later, Trout would become the first black Lutheran bishop

  in the Western Hemisphere.  On leaving Montgomery in 1955, he failed
  to anticipate the social friction that his new parsonage would cause-
  mostly because he assumed that his successor would be a Negro.  Lu-
  theran polity changed again, however, and when a white minister named
  Robert Graetz finished his seminary training that year in Ohio, he found
  his name on the missionary assignment list among those of his col-
  leagues going to Africa and South America-posted to Trinity Lutheran
  down in Alabama.  Dutifully, Graetz had personal stationery printed up
  bearing a biblical quotation: "And the angel of the Lord spoke unto Philip
  saying, 'Arise, go toward the South.' " Along with his wife and their two
  toddlers, Graetz headed for Montgomery, where they became the first of
  Trinity's white pastoral families to live in Trout's parsonage among tile
  Negro parishioners.
   The Graetzes discovered instantly that the social effects of the new
  location were severe.  Previously, Montgomery whites had allowed Trin-
  ity pastors to live among them and preach to Negro Lutherans, on much
  the same social calculus that allowed doctors to visit a brother in a
  medical emergency.  Now that they were living in the brothel, however,
  the Graetzes forfeited their modicum of acceptability.  Local whites
  shunned them -everywhere from the laundromat to the superi-narket.  In
  most respects, the Graetz family lived as though they were Negroes, but
  their white skin produced some unprecedented legal contortions.  Be-
  cause they always chose to sit in the upstairs Negro section of movie
  theaters, for instance, theater owners worried that to sell them tickets
  might bring down Alabaiiia's legal sanctions igiiiist estil)lislliiiciits that
  disponsored" interracial public meetings. (Those same laws made it tech-
  nically illegal for Graetz to preach in his own church.) The theater own-
  ers' solution was to let them in free.  Montgomery's ticket takers soon
  learned the face of every Graetz and knew to whisk them all rlpidly into
  the theater, so as to minimize the ire of paying white customers. l@ever-
  end Graetz tried repeatedly to pay, believing that he should not profit
  from his Christian witness.  The owners would not hear of it.
  The Graetzes almost never got to laugh at such absurdities.  There wis
  too much tension.  Besides, the daily ostracism caused too much hurt
  within the family for its excesses to be funny.  Not all the hostility came
  from whites.  Many of Trinity's members had been happier with Negro
  pastors like Trout.  Some of them said out loud that they did not need a
  white man to tell them how to live.  At first, even those who tried hardest
  to welcome them were saddled constantly with awkwardness, as nothing
  came naturally to the Graetzes.  In most situations outside the Lutheran
  worship service, they did not know what to cat, say, or do.  Drawing on
  their best natural defense, they became sincere-too sincere, even by tihe
standards of the clergy.  At sessions of the Montgomery Human Relations
Council, Reverend Graetz met most of the others who made up the
town's handful of white liberals, including the Durrs.  Like him, they
were all sincere, and some were timid, or brilliant, or damaged.  Juliette
Morgan, the kindly city librarian, was a recluse by night who shut herself
up in a dark house with her mother.  Of the Negro ministers in town,
Reverend King often attended, though he usually arrived late.  Graetz
found King easily approachable, always supportive of him in his difficul-
ties as a racially isolated newcomer and curious about the details.  As
they became better acquainted, Graetz decided that King's own experi-
ence as a Negro student among whites in the North gave him a feel for
life at Trinity Lutheran.

In October, while King was off in Georgia for a week, living and preach-
ing with Walter McCall, a white woman boarding the Highland Avenue
bus asked the driver to make Mary Louise Smith vacate a seat for her.
Smith refused, was arrested, convicted, and fined nine dollars under the
segregation law.  Negro activists pitched themselves into another flurry
of battle preparation, except that it was foreshortened this time by a
pronouncei-neiit from E. D. Nixon.  Smith, he decided, was no better
suited to stind at the rallying point than was Claudette Colvin the pre-
vious spring.  Her father was an alcoholic.  She lived in one of those see-
through clapboard shacks out in the country. if a legal fight started and
newspaper reporters went out to interview the Smith family, said Nixon,
'we wouldn't have a leg to stand on." in the end, Smith paid her fine.
Nixon's judgment prevailed, but leaders of the Women's Political Coun-
cil grumbled that Smith's shortcomings were irrelevant to the principles
of the case.
  Returning home to the afterbuzz of the Smith arrest, King prepared a
formal report to his congregation at Dexter, looking back on his first year
and forward to the second.  This time there were no new recommcnda-
tions.  His brief cover letter was devoted to the subject of money.  "May I
close," he wrote, "by asking you to consider this question: Where else in
all the world can a dollar buy so much?"
  A big baby girl-weighing more than nine and a half pounds-was.
born three weeks later.  Mother King arrived swiftly from Atlanta to take
up her station.  Dr. Pettus, the attending physician, was of the old school
that required confinement of the mother both before the birth and for a
month thereafter.  He exempted Mother King from the semi-quarantine
lie imposed around the baby, but the new father initially had the status
of a special visitor who came and went by the rules.  Generally, King's

 role was to peek happily, to crow, to embrace, to entertain and restrain
 callers, and to pass along what he had heard from Dr. Pettus and the
 women.
   Two minor disagreements intruded on the domestic excitement
 within the first few days.  First, King told the family that lie was thinking
 of running for president of the local NAACP cliipter.  Coretta objected
 strenuously, and Mother King supported her.  The timing of tile sudden
 announcement made it look suspiciously like one of the senior King's
 attention-getting maneuvers.  King's wife and mother told him that the
 last thing he needed with a new baby was a demanding new office, espe-
 cially since his church and his outside preaching already kept him con-
 stantly in motion.  They were not impressed by King's reason for waiting
 to run, which was primarily that Rufus Lewis had been pushing him to
 do so and predicting that he could win.  There was a good deal of discus-
 sion within the household, during which time King kept in contact with
 Lewis and with R. D. Nesbitt, in whose offices the NAACP held many
 of its meetings.  His interest soon came to the attention of E. D. Nixon,
 who called upon King to advise him that he had controlled the NAACP
 for many years and was already committed to another candidate.  He
 liked King but would have to oppose him if he ran.  This warning, com-
 bined with the home-front opposition, finally made King back away, but
 he liked to tease his wife and mother by remarking that lie might change
 his mind.
  The second disagreement had to do with the baby's name.  Coretta,
 seeking the unusual and distinctive, wanted to call her Yolanda Denise.
 King wanted something simpler, arguing that Yolanda was too difficult
 to pronounce, and too redolent of the tendency among middle-class Ne-
 groes to reach out for status in a name.  Coretta won.  King made himself
 happy with the nickname "Yoki," saying that if they had another daugh
 ter he would like to give her a plain name, like Mary Jane.

On December 1, 1955, the day Yolanda became two weeks old, Rosa
Parks left the Montgomery Fair department store late in the afternoon
for her regular bus ride home.  All thirty-six seats of the bus she boarded
were soon filled, with twenty-two Negroes seated from the rear and
fourteen whites from the front.  Driver J. P. Blake, seeing a white man
standing in the front of the bus, called out for the four passengers on the
row just behind the whites to stand up and move to the back.  Nothing
happened.  Blake finally had to get out of the driver's seat to speak more
firmly to the four Negroes.  "You better make it light on yourselves and
let me have those seats," he said.  At this, three of the Negroes moved, to
  stand in the back of the bust but Parks responded that she was not in the
  white section and didn't think she ought to move.  She was in no-man's-
  land.  Blake said that the white section was where he said it was, and he
  was telling Parks that she was in it.  As he saw the law, the whole idea of
  no-man's-land was to give the driver some discretion to keep the races
  out of each other's way.  He was doing just that.  When Parks refused
  again, he advised her that the same city law that allowed him to regulate
  no-man's-land also gave him emergency police power to enforce the seg-
  regation codes. He would arrest Parks himself if he had to.  Parks replied
  that he should do what he had to do; she was not moving.  She spoke so
  softly that Blake would not have been able to hear her above the drone
  of normal bus noise.  But the bus was silent.  Blake notified Parks that she
  was officially under arrest.  She should not move until he returned with
  the regular Montgomery police.
    At the station, officers booked, fingerprinted, and incarcerated Rosa
  Parks.  It was not possible for her to think lightly of being arrested.  Hav-
  ing crossed the line that in polite society divided Negroes from niggers,
  she had reason to expect not only stinging disgrace among her own peo-
  ple but the least civilized attentions of the whites.  When she was allowed
  to call home, her mother's first response was to groan and ask, "Did they
  beat you?"
    Deep in panic, the mother called E. D. Nixon's house for help.  Mrs.
  Nixon absorbed the shock and promptly called her husband at the down-
  town office he maintained more or less as a place to talk civic business
  when lie was not riding the trains.
    "What was it she was arrested about?" asked Nixon.
    "I don't know," Mrs. Nixon replied impatiently.  "Go and get her."
    Nixon sighed. it was just like his wife to give him orders as though he
  could always tell the white authorities to do things, such as to release
  prisoners.  Still, lie shared her urgency, because he knew Rosa Parks was
  in danger every minute she remained in jail. if anything happened to her
  there, Parks would be utterly without recourse or remcdy.  Nixon called
  Fred Gray's office, but he was gone for the day.  After leaving messages
  for Gray all over town, Nixon summoned the courage to call the jail
  directly.  What were the charges against Rosa Parks, he asked the desk
  sergeant-only to be told they were none of his damned business.  Nixon
  hung up.  This was serious.  The normal courtesies he received as the
  universally recognized Negro leader were suspended, which must mean
  that the race laws had been transgressed.
    Nixon called Clifford Durr and told him what he knew.  Durr promised
  to find out what he could from the jail, and soon called back with a
  report: Rosa Parks was charged with violating the Alabama bus segrega-
 tion laws.  That was all.  When he volunteered to accompany Nixon to
 make bond for Mrs. Parks, Nixon accepted the offer readily. in fact, he
 told Durr to wait for hii-n to come by.  They would convoy to the city iiii.
 When Nixon pulled up at the Durr home, Virginia Durr was waiting
 outside with her husband, ready to go too.  She had first known Rosa
 Parks as a seamstress she hired to hem dresses for her three daughters,
 and had thought well enough of Park's NAACP work to recommend that
 she spend a vacation week at one, of Myles Horton's interracial work-
 shops at the Highlander Folk School.  Parks had done so, returning to say
 that her eyes had been opened to new possibilities of harmony between
 the races.  Virginia Durr was indignant that the fearful liuniiliatioii of jail
 had now fallen upon such a person.
  Officers fetched Parks from the cellblock as Nixon was signing the
 bond papers.  She and Nixon and the Durrs were soon inside the Parks
 home with her mother and her husband Raymond, a barber.  The atmo-
 sphere was as charged as the taciturn Rosa Parks could ever allow it to
 become, with much storytelling and rejoicing that the immediate danger,
 at least, had passed.  Nixon read the mood of the Parks family well
 enough that he spoke business to Durr only in asides, out of their hear-
 ing.  He asked for Durr's legal opinion: was this the case they had been
 waiting for?  Could they use it to win a victory over segregation on ap-
 peal?  Durr replied in snippets as he could, mindful of the Parks family.
 The only flaw with the case as he saw it was that the charges would first
 be heard in state court rather than federal court.  But there were ways to
 move cases.  Otherwise, the circumstances were highly favorable.  There
 were no extraneous charges to cloud the segregation issue, and Rosa
 Parks would make a good impression on white judges.  This was enough
 for Nixon, who already knew instinctively that Rosa Parks was without
 peer as a potential symbol for Montgomery's Negroes-humble enough
 to be claimed by the common folk, and yet dignified enough in manner,
 speech, and dress to command the respect of the leading classes.
  Nixon asked the husband and mother to excuse Rosa briefly, so that
 she could speak privately with him and the Durrs.  He put the question
 to her: would she be willing to fight the case, the way she knew they had
 wanted to fight earlier with Colvin and Smith?  Rosa Parks did not htve
 to be told twice what he meant, but she knew that it was a momentous
 decision for her family.  She said she would have to approach her relatives
 with the idea privately, and chose to talk first alone with her mother and
 then with her husband.  The proposal upset both of them.  Raymond Parks
 came nearly undone.  Having just felt primitive, helpless terror when his
 wife had been snatched into jail, he could not bear the thought that she
 would reenter that forbidden zone by choice.  Now there was hope that
   the arrest could be forgiven as an isolated incident but if she persisted,
   it would be deliberate. it would be political.  "The white folks will kill
   you, Rosa," he said, pleading with her not to do it.
     Rosa Parks finally announced her decision.  "if you think it will mean
   something to Montgomery and do some good, I'll be happy to go along
   with it," she said.  The Durrs and then Nixon soon left.  It was late on a
   Thursday evening.  Before going to bed, Nixon pulled out his portable
   tape recorder and reeled off a long list of people he needed to call.  Mean-
   while, Fred Gray had received the message about the arrest.  After talking
   with Parks and agreeing to represent her, he had called several of his
   friends on the Women's Political Council, including Jo Ann Robinson.  A
   divorced professor of English at Alabama State, Robinson had grown up
   the last of twelve children on a one-hundred-acre Georgia farm, which
   her father had told her was a gift from his own father, a wealthy white
   farmers The only one of her siblings to finish college, Robinson had come
   South again from Cleveland in 1949.  She was among the leaders of the
   womeii's group who served on Reverend King's new political affairs corn-
   i-nittee at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.  Like most professional women
   among the Negroes of Montgomery, she had no trouble identifying with
   Rosa Parks, even though she herself drove a car and seldom rode the
   buses.  As soon as she heard from Gray that night, Robinson called her
   closest friends on the council.  All of them responded like firefighters to
   an alarm.  This was it.
    Casting off the old rules about how Negro women should never travel
   alone at night in Southern towns, Robinson and her friends met about
   midnight it their offices, at Alabama State, each under the pretext of
   grading exams. -They drafted a letter of protest.  "Another Negro woman
   has been arrested and thrown into jail because she refused to get up out
   of her seat on the bus and give it to a white person," they began.  They
   revised the letter repeatedly, as ideas occurred to them.  "Until we do
   something to stop these arrests, they will continue," the women wrote.
   "The next time it may be you, or you or you.  This woman's case will
   come up Monday.  We are, therefore, asking every Negro to stay off the
   buses on Monday in protest of the arrest and trial." As they worked, the
   women felt urgency closing in upon them.  They realized that the best
   way to notify Montgomery Negroes, given their lack of access to news-
   papers or radio, was to leaflet the town through the churches and the
   contacts of the Women's Council.  The best place to get copies of such an
   incendiary letter printed, they realized, was precisely where they were-
   at Alabama State, on the mimeograph machines.  This would require
   stealth, because the college was funded largely by the Alabama legisla-
   ture.  If white people ever learned that state-employed teachers had used
 taxpayer-owned facilities to plot a revolt against segregation laws, heads
 would roll and budgets would surely be cut.  So the women resolved to
 finish the mammoth task before daylight and never to speak of what
 they had done.  They soon lost all thought of going to bed that night.
    Robinson decided to call E. D. Nixon to let him know what they were
 doing.  To her great surprise, the voice that came on the line was alert
 and full of news about the Parks case at three o'clock in the morning.
 Nixon was already bustling about his house getting ready to arrange the
 Parks defense before leaving on his morning Pullman run through At-
 lanta to New York and back.  He instantly approved Robinson's idea of
 the one-day bus boycott, saying that he had something like that in mind
 himself.  He told her that he planned to summon Montgomery's leading
 Negroes to a planning meeting the very next day, at which both the legal
 defense and the boycott would be organized.  Robinson was the first to
 know. *
  Nixon began his calls about five o'clock that morning.  He called Ralph
 Abernathy first, then his own minister, then King.  He was in a ]furry.
 When King came on the line, Nixon did not bother to ask whether lie



* This point, marking the origins of the Montgomery bus boycott, would become
hotly contested ground to future generations of civil rights historians.  King hiln-
self would divide the credit between Nixon and the Womcn's Political Council,
citing Nixon for taking the first steps to fight the Parks and the Womens Political 
Council for conceiving of tiic boycott.  Nixon himself would later claim credit for 
both, stating that he had told his wife-after leaving the Parks honic but before hearing
from Robinson a few hours later-that there would be a boycott.  Kilig's partisans
would dismiss Nixon's assertion with more than a hint of condescension, but
Nixon's side of the story would be taken tip later by viriotis kinds of revisionists.
Roy Wilkins stressed Nixon's longtime service to the NAACP, whereas black
power activists stressed Nixon's proletarian origins to sliow that the boycott
sprang from the masses.  Some white chroniclers seemed to stress Nixon's role
because he was a colorful character whose contribution ha(i been overlooked.
Years after the pro-E. D. Nixon revisionists, new feininist versions, largely un-
published, would stress the role of the upper-class women of the Womn's Polit-
ical Council.
  All sources, including E. D. Nixon, agree that the long discussion at Rosa
Parks's home that first night was confined to the prospect of a legal challenge to
the arrest, without mention of a boycott, and no one denies that before morning
the women had written an independent letter calling for a boycott.  These facts
support King's original division of the credit.  Some of the more subjective argu-
ments deriving from this central dispute retain their validity, However.  Nixon
has been slighted by popular history and patronized by supporters of King.  Openly
wounded by this treatment, Nixon has probably exaggerated his role in response.
And the Montgoiiiery wonicii have been ignored to i greater extent even thin
Nixon,


 had awakened the new baby, or even to say hello.  Instead he plunged
 directly into the story of the Parks arrest, telling King of his determina-
 tioii to fight the case and his plan to stay off the buses on Monday.  He
 asked King for his endorsement.
  "Brother Nixon," King said quickly, "let me think about it and you
 call me back."
  Nixon said fine.  He'd make some other calls, but he wanted King to
 know that he wanted to use Dexter for the meeting that afternoon.  Its
 central location midc the church convenient for people working in
 downtown offices.  Of course, said King-he just wanted to think before
 endorsing Nixoii's specific plan.  By the time he talked to King again,
 King bid himself talked with Abernathy and other ministers.  After en-
 dorsing the general plan, he helped Abernathy call the remaining names
 on Nixoii's list.
   One of Nixon's last calls was to Joe Azbell, the city editor of the
 Montgomery Advertiser.  Promising "the hottest story you've ever writ-
 tcn," Nixon asked Azbell to meet him at the train station.  Azbell did.
 Nixon, wearing his white coat and porter's cap, told him the whole story
 as a confidential informant, mentioning no names except that of Rosa
 Parks, then hopped on his Atlanta-bound train.
   While lie was gone, about fifty of the Negro leaders assembled in the
 basement of King's church, where, after a protracted and often disorderly
 argument about whether or not to allow debate, they approved the plans
 ii-iorc or less is Nixon had laid tlici-n out in advance.  All undertook to
 spread the word.  King and others retired as a committee to draft a new
 leaflet that was essentially a condensation of the one already being cir-
 culated by the thousands by the Wo    mcn's Political Council. "Don't ride
 the bus to work, to town, to school, or any place Monday, Decei-nber
 5 . . ." it said.  "if you work, take a cab, or share a ride, or walk." There
 was a final sentence with new information: "Coi-ne to a mass meeting,
 Monday at 7:00 P.m., at the Holt Street Baptist Church for further in-
 structioii." The meeting continued amid a good deal of chaos, as some
 worked to print up the leaflet on the Dexter mimeograph machine, while
 others phoned to warn Montgomery's eighteen Negro taxi companies
 that they would be called upon to be heroes on Monday, and still others
 huddled over countless details.  The meeting broke up about midnight.
   By the next day, Saturday, thousands of Montgomery's Negroes had
 either seen the leaflets or heard the news by word of mouth.  Reverend
 Graetz of Trinity Lutheran had heard rumors, but his persistent ques-
 tioning of his own church members brought poor results.  He was still a
 white man, ifter all, and no one wanted to be the one who triggered a
 general alarm in Montgomery by telling him.  Frustrated, Graetz decided
to phone the best friend he had in town outside his congregation, the
woman who used his church building for meetings of the NAACP Youth
Council.  "Mrs.  Pirks," he said, "I keep hearing that somebody was lr-
rested on the bus and there's going to be a boycott.  Is that true?  Who was
it?"
  There was a long pause.  "It's true," Parks said, almost sheepishly.  "it
was me, Pastor Graetz.  I was the one arrested."
  "You?" Graetz exclaimed.  He rushed over to the Parks hoi-ne to learn
the details.  The next morning, from the pulpit of Trinity Lutheran, lie
delivered what he called a Christian analysis of the Rosa Parks arrest.
Then he announced that he and his family would observe the boycott,
and he urged his members to do likewise.  A murmur of approval went
through the congregation.  At Dexter, King i-nade a similar announce-
ment, as did Abernathy at First Baptist and all the others.
  Nixon returned from his train run that day to find that Joe Azbell had
written a story in the morning Advertiser, headlined "Negro Groups
Ready Boycott of Bus Lines." It was not the dominant race story in the
paper.  That distinction went to the sensational lead itein from Georgia,
about how "a howling mob of Georgia Tech students" had broken
through police lines at the state capitol in protest of Governor Marvin
Griffin's recent statement that Georgia Tech should not be allowed to
play in the upcoming Sugar Bowl because its opponent, the University of
Pittsburgh, was discovered to have a loiie Negro on the teiin as a reserve
running back, and because Sugar Bowl officials had igreed to illow Pitts-
burgii fans to be seated on a nonsegregated basis.  The Georgia governor,
who since the Brown decision hid enjoyed much favorable publicity
from swashbuckling defenses of segregation, discovered that they did not
fare so well against an emotional tradeoff in the sports area.  I-le soon
backed down, somewhat shaken by the experience of having the sons of
his finest constituents smashing the windows and doors of his office.
  Azbell's Montgomery story seemed much taiiier.  "A 'top secret' meet-
ing of Montgomery Negroes who plan a boycott of city buses Monday is
scheduled at 7 i).m. Monday at the Holt Street Baptist Church, " lie began,
going on to quote liberally from both the first and second leaflets, which
had been relayed into the hands of the authorities by white women who
had gotten them from their maids.  The story reported that Montgomery
had been "flooded with thousands of copies" of the leiflets, Ili(i that the
Holt Street minister said the mass meeting would be open to people of
all races.  Azbell never bothered to explain how a meeting so advertised
and described could be called "top secret" in the newspaper, He did not
need to, White people would not attend, and the purpose touched upon
the possibility of revolt against segregation.  Any such meeting was self-
  evidently "top secret," as the import of the situation overturned the
  literal meaning of the words. E. D. Nixon cared little about  inaccuracies
  or the fact that the story was clearly intended as a warning to white
  readers.  To him, the story was effective advertising.  It would get the
  word out to more Negroes.
  He was up before dawn on Monday morning.  So were the Kings, M.L.
  drinking coffee and Coretta keeping watch at the front window, ner-
  vously waiting to see the first morning bus.  When she saw the headlights
  cutting through the darkness, she called out to her husband and they
  watched it roll by together.  The bus was empty!  The early morning
  special on the South Jackson line, which was normally full of Negro
  maids on their way to work, still had its groaning engine and squeaky
  brakes, but it was an empty shell.  So was the next bus, and the next.  In
  spite of the bitter morning cold, their fear of white people and their
  desperate need for wages, Montgomery Negroes were turning the City
  Bus Lines into a ghost fleet.  King, astonished and overjoyed, jumped into
  his car to see whether the response was the same elsewhere in the city.
  It was. He drove around for several hours, watching buses pass by carry-
  ing handfuls of white passengers.
   Police cars, manned by officers with helmets and shotguns, followed
  many of the buses on the orders of the new police commissioner, Clyde
  Sellers.  His theory, which he had announced personally on the radio in
  special police builctins, was that only violence by Negroes could moti-
  vate other Negroes to stay off the buses.  "Negro 'goon squads' reportedly
  have been organized here to intimidate Negroes who ride Montgomery
  City Line buses today," began Joe Azbell's front-page story.  The Sellers
  plan called for roving police squads to intimidate the Negro goons before
  they could intimidate Negro bus ridcrs.  It backfired.  Confused Negro
  passengers took a look at the heavily armed white policci-nen swarming
  around their bus stops and shied away, wanting no part of such a scene.
      plan, having frightened into the boycott some of the very Negroes
  whom Sellers hoped to reassure, proceeded to do worse.  The policemen
  felt bureaucratic pressure to arrest the goons.  Now that practically all
  the Negroes were boycotting the buses, their boss's theory suggested that
  entire armies of gooiis must be at work.  But where were they?  At 7:15
  P.m., police arrested a nineteen-year-old college student as he was helping
  an old Negro woman into his car.  The officers said the student was
  offering the woman a ride as an alternative to the bus, but they knew
  this was not the kind of goon activity Commissioner Sellers had in mind.
  They made no more arrests.
    After Rosa Parks was convicted that morning, and after Fred Gray filed
  notice of appeal, E. D. Nixon walked out of the Courtroom to post bond
for her release.  The sight that greeted him in the courthouse hallway
shocked him almost as much as the empty buses at dawn: a crowd of
some five hundred Negroes jammed the corridor, spilling back through
the doors and down the steps into the street.  Nixon, who wis acctis-
tomed to find there only a few relatives of the accused, knew then that
the empty buses had been no fluke.  The jostling, and the sight of still
more worricd-looking policemen with shotguns, rattled even Nixon tclil-
porarily.  He tried to disperse the crowd, promising to bring Rosl Parks
outside unharmed as soon as the bond was signed.  Some voices shouted
back that the crowd would storm the courthouse to rescue both Parks
and Nixon if they did not emerge within a few minutes.  Something was
new in Montgomery.



All the Negro leaders knew it long before they reassembled that after-
noon to plan for the evening's mass meeting.  Nixon, Abernathy, and a
leading Methodist minister named French had met to draw up a list of
negotiating demands for the bus boycott, reasoning, as usual, that if the
demands were not prearranged they would never escape the chaos of
debate.  No sooner had the presiding officer presented the Nixon-Aber-
nathy-French ideas to the group as a general proposition than another
clique of two or three suggested that the proposals be mimeographed and
handed to all those attending the mass meeting.  That way, Negroes could
vote on the proposals without discussing them out lotid, which would
conceal their plans from any white reporters present.  Another person
from this group proposed that the names of the leaders llso be kept
secret, including all those    present. They discusssed the fine points of
stealth and security until E. D. Nixon rose in anger. "How do you think
you can run a bus boycott      in secret?" he demanded. "Let me tell you
gentlemen one thing.  You ministers have lived off these wash-womien
for the last hundred years and ain't never done nothing for them." He
threatened to expose the ministers as cowards before the mass meeting
if they tried to hide.  He scolded the ministers and everyone else for
letting the women bear the brunt of the arrests and then backing down
like "little boys." "We've worn aprons all our lives," he said.  "It's time
to take the aprons off.... If we're gonna be mens, now's the time to be
mens."
  King arrived late at the meeting, just as Nixon was spewing out the
last of his taunts.  Perhaps to defend himself as the conspicuous new-
comer who had drawn the crowd's eye, or perhaps to quiet what threat-
ened to become a disastrous war of pride, fie spoke before anyone could
answer the tirade.  "Brother Nixon, I'm not a coward," he said easily.  "I
don't want anybody to call me a coward." All the leaders should act
openly, he said, under their own names.
  Rufus Lewis seized the moment.  He and Nixon had never liked each
other much, having been personal and class rivals for decades.  Lewis
feared that Nixon's intimidating speech was a preplanned signal for
someone to propose that Nixon himself head the new boycott organiza-
tion, and in that light it was quite fortunate that King had arrived just
then to speak in a niaiiner that both challenged Nixon and agreed with
him.  All this went through Lewis' heid in a flesh, and lie quickly took
the floor to move that Dr. M. L. King be elected president.  By prearrange-
nient with Lewis, a Reverend Conley jumped up to second the motion.
A momentary silence followed this challenge, as the members of various
small caucuses cycd each other.  There was hesitation and some discus-
sion, but in the end no one else was nominated-not Nixon, nor Aber-
natliy, nor any of the powerful senior ministers.  Idealists would say
afterward that King's gifts made him the obvious choice.  Realists would
scoff at this, siying that King was not very well known, and that his
chief asset was his lack of debts or enemies.  Cynics would say that the
established preachers stepped back for King only because they saw more
blame and danger ahead than glory.  No leider had promised all Mont-
gomery to secure justice for Claudette Colvin, and what would have
become of his reputation if lie had?  In the long run, what was a fourteen-
dollar fine levied on Rosa Parks to a community that had calmed down
,ifter lyiicliings?
  After the election of other officers and the selection of a name for the
organization--Montgomery Improvement Association-someone
rose to suggest that the bus boycott should be suspended during the
upcoming negotiations over the demands.  As of that day, he said, the
boycott was a stunning success, but if they tried to go on with it people
would get tired sooner or later and filter back onto the buses, which
would mike the white people laugli at the new MIA and grant no conces-
sioiis.  Other speakers supported this argument, observing that it would
be better to preserve the boycott weapon as a threat than to spoil it by
overuse.  On the verge of approval, the proposal was suspended so that
the ministers could select hymiis, prayers, and speakers for the mass
meeting.  Then it was finessed altogether in haste.  The leaders would
wait to see how many people turned out that night.
   King raced home to his wife and new baby sometime after six.  Hesi-
taiitly, he informed Coretta that he had been drafted as president of the
new protest committee.  Much to his relief, she did not object to the fait
(iccon7l)li and in fact said quietly that she would support him in whatever
lie did, King said he would have no time for supper.  He had to leave for
the mass meeting within half an hour, and after that he had to address a
banquet sponsored by the YMCA, one of the only integrated organiza-
tions in Montgomery.  Most on his mind was the speech at Holt Street-
his first appearance as the new protest leader, the first words most of the
audience would have heard from him.  He went into his study and closed
the door, wondering how he could possibly create such an important
speech in a few minutes, when he required fifteen hours to prepare an
ordinary sermon.  His mind raced.  Ile knew from his conscience that he
wanted to answer one peevish charge that had appeared in both newspaper
articles thus far-that the Negroes had borrowed the boycott tactic from
the White Citizens Councils, which had openly adopted a policy of harsh
economic reprisal against Negroes who fought segregation.  King scirclied
for the correct words by which he might distinguish the bus boycott
from unchristian coercion.  He had written only a few notes on a piece
of paper, when it was time to go.
  Elliott Finley, King's Morehouse friend with the pool table, drove him
to the rally.  King had a few minutes to think in the car.  A traffic jaiii on
the way to Holt Street extended the time a bit, and then a bit more, until
they realized they could go no farther-the church was surrounded.  The
hostile press later estimated the crowd at five thousand people; Negroes
put it at two or three times that figure.  Whatever the exact number, only
a small fraction of the bodies fit inside the church, and loudspeakers
were being set up to iinplify the proceedings to in outdoor crowd that
stretched over several acres, across streets and irotiiid cars that had been
parked at all angles.  Clifford and Virginia I)tirr never got within three
blocks of the church door.  Reverend Graetz was the only white supporter
inside-the only white face seen there other than reporters and camcra-
men.  "You know something, Finley," said King, as he prepared to aban-
don the car.  "This could turn into something big." It took him fifteen
minutes to push his way through the crowd.  Shortly thereafter, the Holt
Street pastor called him to the pulpit.



King stood silently for a moment.  When he greeted the enormous crowd
of strangers, who were packed in the balconies and aisles, peering in
through the windows and upward from seats on the floor, he spoke in a
deep voice, stressing his diction in a slow introductory cadence.  "We are
here this cvening-for serious business," he said, in even pulses, rising
and then falling in pitch.  When he paused, only one or two "yes" rc-
sponses came up from the crowd, and they were quiet ones.  It was a
throng of shouters, he could see, but they were waiting to see where lie
would take them.  "We are here in a general sense, because first and
 foremost-we are American citizens-and we arc determined to apply
 our citizensliip-to the fullness of its means," he said.  "But we are here
 in a specific sense-because of the bus situation in Montgomery." A
 general murmur of assent came bick to him, iiid the pitch of King's
 voice rose gradually through short, quickened sentences.  "The situation
 is not at all new.  The problem has existed over endless years. just the
 other day-just last Thursday to be exact-one of the finest citizens in
 Montgoi-nery-not one of the finest Negro citizcns-but one of the finest
 citizens in Montgomery-was taken from a bus-and carried to jail and
 arrested-because she refused to give up-to give her seat to a white
 person."
  The crowd punctuated each pause with scattered "Yeses" and
 "Amens." They were with him in rhythm, but lagged slightly behind in
 enthusiasm.  Then King spoke of the law, saying that the arrest was
 doubtful even under the segregation ordinances, because reserved Negro
 and white bus sections were not specified in them.  "The law has never
 been clarified at that point," he said, drawing an emphatic "Hell, no"
 from one man in his audience.  "And I think I speak with-with legal
 authority-iiot that I have any legal authority-but I think I speak with
 legal authority behind me-that the law-the ordinance-the city ordi-
 nance has never been totally clarified." This sentence marked King as a
 speaker who took care with distinctions, but it took the crowd nowhere.
 King returned to the special nature of Rosa Parks.  "And since it had to
 happen, I'm happy it happened to a person like Mrs. Parks," he said, "for
 nobody can doubt the boundless outreach of her integrity.  Nobody can
 doubt the height of her character, nobody can doubt the depth of her
 Christian commitment." That's right, a soft chorus answered.  "And just
 because she refused to get up, she was arrested," King repeated.  The
 crowd was stirring now, following King at the speed of a medium walk.
   He paused slightly longer.  "And you know, my friends, there comes a
 time," he cried, "when people get tired of being trampled over by the
 iron feet of oppression." A flock of "Yeses" was coming back at him
 when suddenly the individual responses dissolved into a rising cheer and
 applause explodcd beneath the cheer--all within the space of a second.
 The startling noise rolled on and on, like a wave that refused to break,
 and just when it seemed that the roar must finally weaken, a wall of
 sound came in from the enormous crowd outdoors to push the volume
 still higher.  Thunder seemed to be added to the lower register-the
 sound of feet stomping on the wooden floor-uiitil the loudness became
 something that was not so much heard as it was sensed by vibrations in
 the lungs.  The giant cloud of noise shook the building and refused to go
 away.  One sentence had set it loose somehow, pushing the call-and-
 response of the Negro church service past the din of a political rally and
 on to something else that King had never known before.  There was a
rabbit of awesome proportions in those bushes.  As the noise finally fell
 back, King's voice rose above it to fire again.  "There comes a time, my
 friends, when people get tired of being thrown across the abyss of humil-
 iation, where they experience the bleakness of nagging despair," he de-
 clared.  "There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out
 of the glittering sunlight of life's July, and left standing aniidst the pierc-
 ing chill of an Alpine November.  There. . ." King was making a new run,
 but the crowd drowned him out.  No one could tell whether the roar
 came in response to the nerve lie had touched, or simply out of pride in
 a speaker from whose tongue such rhetoric rolled so easily.  "We are here
 -we are here because we are tired now," King repeated.
   Perhaps daunted by the power that was bursting forth from the crowd,
 King moved quickly to address the pitfalls of a boycott.  "Now let us say
 that we are not here advocating violence," he said.  "We have overcome
 that." A man in the crowd shouted, "Repeat that!  Repeat that!" "I want
 it to be known throughout Montgomery and throughout this nation that
 we are Christian people," said King, putting three distinct syllables in
 "Christian." "The only weapon that we have in our hands this evening
 is the weapon of protest." There was a crisp shout of approval right on
 the beat of King's pause.  He and the audience moved into a slow trot.  "If
 we were incarcerated behind the iron curtains of a communistic nation
 -we couldn't do this.  If we were trapped in the dungeon of a totalitarian
 rcgime-we couldn't do this.  But the great glory of American (icii-iocracy
 is the right to protest for right." When the shouts of approval died down,
 King rose up with his final reason to avoid violence, which was to distiii-
 guish themselves from their opponents in the Klan and the White Citi-
 zens Council.  "There will be no crosses burned at any bus stops in
 Montgomery," he said.  "There will be no white persons pulled out of
 their homes and taken out on some distant road and murdered.  There
 will be nobody among us who will stand up and defy the Constitution of
 this nation."
  King paused.  The church was quiet but it was humming. "My friends,"
 he said slowly, "I want it to be known-that we're going to work with
 grim and bold determination-to gain justice on the buses in this city.
 And we are not wrong.  We are not wrong in what we are doing." There
 was a muffled shout of anticipation, as the crowd sensed that King was
 moving closer to,the heart of his cause.  "If we are wrong-the Supreme
 Court of this nation is wrong," King sang out.  He was rocking now, his
 voice seeming to be at once deep and high-pitched.  "If we are wrong-
 God Almighty is wrong!" he shouted, and the crowd seemed to explode
 a second time, as it had done when he said they were tired.  Wave after
 wave of noise broke over them, cresting into the farthest reaches of the
 ceiling.  They were far beyond Rosa Parks or the bus laws.  King's last cry
 had fused blasphemy to the edge of his faith and the heart of theirs.  The
 noise swelled until King cut through it to move past a point of unbearable
 tension.  "if we are wrong-Jesus of Nazareth was merely a utopian
 dreamer and never came down to earth! if we arc wrong-justice is a
 lie." This was too much.  He had to wait some time before delivering his
 soaring conclusion, in a flight of anger mixed with rapture: "And we are
 determined here in Montgomcry-to work and fight until justice runs
 down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream!" The audience
 all but smothered this passage from Amos, the lowly herdsman prophet
 of Israel who, along with the priestly Isaiah, was King's favorite biblical
 authority on justice.
   He backed off the emotion to speak of the need for unity, the dignity
 of protest, the historical precedent of the labor movement.  Compara-
 tively speaking, his subject matter was mundane, but the crowd stayed
 with him even through paraphrases of abstruse points from Niebuhr.
 "And I want to tell you this evening that it is not enough for us to talk
 about love," he said.  "Love is one of the pinnacle parts of the Christian
 faith.  There is another side called justice.  And justice is really love in
 calculation. justice is love correcting that which would work against
 love." He said that God was not just the God of love: "He's also the God
 that stiiideth before the nations and says, 'Be still.and know that I am
 God-.iii(i if you don't obey Me I'm gonna break the backbone of your
 power-and cast you out of the arms of your international and national
 relationships.' " Shouts ind claps continued at a steady rhythm as King's
 audacity overflowed.  "Standing beside love is always justice," he said.
 "Not only are we using the tools of persuasion-but we've got to use the
 tools of coercion." He called again for unity.  For working together.  He
 -appeared to history, summoning his listeners to behave so that sages of
 the future would look back at the Negroes of Montgomery and say they
 were "a people who had the moral courage to stand up for their rights."
 He said they could do that.  "God grant that we will do it before it's too
 late." Someone said, "Oh, yes." And King said, "As we proceed with our
 program-let us think on these things."



The crowd retreated into stunned silence as he stepped away from the
pulpit.  The ending was so abrupt, so anticlimactic, The crowd had been
waiting for him to reach for the heights a third time at his conclusion,
following the rules of oratory.  A few seconds passed before memory and
spirit overtook disappointment.  The applause continued as King made
his way out of the church, with people reaching to touch him.  Dexter
members marveled, having never seen King let loose like that.  Abernathy
remained behind, reading negotiating demands from the pulpit.  The boy-
cott was on.  King would work on his timing, but his oratory had just
made him forever a public person.  In the few short minutes of his first
political address, a power of communion emerged from him that would
speak inexorably to strangers who would both love and revile him, like
all prophets.  He was twenty-six, and had not quite twelve years and four
months to live.

THE MONTGOMERY
  BUS BOYCOTT

      A few days after the Holt Street mass meeting, one of the
 teachers at a Methodist missionary school near Nagpur, India, rushed
 outside to investigate a bellowing noise that had pierced the early morn-
 ing stillness.  In the hut next door, he found his colleague James Lawson
 still in a fit of shooting and clapping and foot-stomping.  Such joyous
 abandon was ali-nost as alarming to the teacher as the violence he had
 feared, because he knew Lawson as the essence of the cerebral personal-
 ity-a man who had worn spectacles since the age of four, whose supe-
 rior manner and precise articulation smothered any hint of emotionalism
 in his character.  Yet now, even after Theopolis burst through the door,
 Lawson was still dancing, and could only point to a story in the English
 edition of the Nagpur Times about how thousands of Negroes were re-
 fusing to ride segregated buses in a small American city.
  This was the beginning, cried Lawson. This was what he had  been
 dreaming about, what he had gone to prison for, what he had come
 halfway around the world to find at its source, only to discover that
 Gandliism without Gandhi was dissolving into power politics and petty
 quarrels.  Lawson was overwhelmed by the ironic news that the spirit of
 the Mahatma was breaking out only six or seven hundred miles south of
 his home in Ohio.  He sensed immediately that he would come to know
 M. L. King, who was described in the Nagpur Times as a man of exactly
 Lawson's age, race, and profession.
   In Montgomery, Juliette Morgan, the reclusive city librarian, watched
 the empty buses roll for a few days and then penned a letter to the
 Montgomery Advertiser.  "Not since the First Battle of the Marne has the
 taxi been put tois good use as it his this last week in Montgomery," she
 wrote.  "However, the spirit aniinating our Negro citizens as they ride
 these taxis or walk from the heart of Cloverdale to Mobile Road has been
 more like that of Gandhi than of the 'taxicab army' that saved Paris."
 Morgan declared that the bus boycotters had "taken a lesson from Gan-
 dhi, and from our own Thoreau, wlio influenced Gandhi." She recom-
 mended that her fellow white citizens read Edmund Burke's speech
 "Conciliation with the American Colonies," and warned them against
"pharasaical zeal ... .. One feels that history is being made in Montgomery
 these days, the most important in her career," she conclude.
  These last words confirmed her status as something of a ninny, even
 among those white people who admired the grandeur of her learning
 Who of sound mind could write that a shift by Negro maids in their
 common mode of transportation was more important than all the past
 glories of Montgomery?  Morgan's letter brought down upon her a pro-
 longed harassment by young people who threw rocks through hcr win-
 dows, insulted her on the streets, and played tricks on lier in the library.
 Her flighty sensitivity only provoked them to do worse.  A little more
 than a year later, she would be found poisoned in her house, an apparent
 suicide.  By way of explanation, whites would stress her emotional vul-
 nerability or alleged mental problems, while Negroes remained certain
 that she had been persecuted to death on account of the "battle of the
 Marne" letter.



Only the rarest and oddest of people saw historical possibilities in the
bus boycott.  Of the few people wlio bothered to write the Advertiser at
first, most were white women who saw it as a justifiable deiiiitid for
simple decent treatment.  One woman correspondent did speculate that
there must be i Coinniunist hand behind such strife, but the great mass
of segregationists did not botlier to address the issue.  In its first editorial,
the Atlvertiser described the principal MIA demand-for bus seating by
race, with Negroes from the back of the bus and whites from the front,
eliminating the reserved section-as a compromise within the principles
of segregation.  Editor Grover Hall, Jr., advised white Montgomery siinply
to accept the proposal and be done with it.  The very moderation of the
demands led civil rights groups sucli as the national NAACP to frown
upon the boycott as a wildcat movement for something less than integra-
tion.
  As for the boycotters themselves, the religious fervor they went to bed
with at night always congealed by the next morning into cold practical-
ity, as they faced rainstorms, mechanical breakdowns, stranded relatives,
and complicated relays in getting from home to job without being late or
getting fired or getting into an argument with the employer, then getting
hoi-ne again, perhaps having to find a way to and from the grocery store,
and cooking and eating supper, dealing with children and housework,
then perhaps going back out into the night for a mass meeting and finally
home again, recharged by the "rousements" of Abernathy and the inspi-
ration of King, and then at last some weary but contented sleep before
the aching chill of dawn started the cycle all over again.  To a largely
uneducated people among whom the most common occupations were
ni.iid and day laborer, the loss of what was for many their most important
modern convenience-cheap bus transportation-left them with stag-
geriiig problems of logistics and morale.
  The bus boycott was a day-to-day operation.  When the Montgomery
police commissioner dropped hints during the first week that he would
order the irrest of any taxi drivers who charged less than the minimum
forty-five-cent fare, it became clear that the emergency ten-cent fare-
and therefore the "taxicab army"-was doomed.  King imniediately
called his college friend T. J. Jemison, who, as secretary of the National
Baptist Convention, was a prince of the national church on a much
higher level than the Kings.*  Jemison, who knew King well enough to
call hm Mike, had led a bus boycott in Baton Rouge during the summer
of 1953 and organized a car pool after the authorities banned the use of
cut-rate and unlicensed taxi service.  King gleaned from jemison every
useful detail within memory about how to organize a massive car pool.
That very night he took the pulpit at a mass meeting to explain why they
had to maintain the boycott without benefit of the eighteen Negro taxi
companies.  The good news, King announced bravely, war that they could
organize a car pool similar to the one in Baton Rouge.  To.do this, car
owners niust volunteer cars, and drivers must volunteer to drive.  No
money could change hands directly, but passengers could make contri-
butions to the MIA, and the MIA could in turn subsidize the costs of the
car pool.
   King described his proposal in the most glowing terms possible, but he
knew that the complicated new system would introduce a host of prac-



' In a dynastic compromise of the kind often made in the baronial politics of the
National Baptist Convention, Jemison was serving under President J. H. Jackson,
who had ousted Jemison's blind father at Miami in 1953.  It would take the
younger Jemison twenty-nine years to oust Jackson.
tical problems.  Cars lent to the boycott by the wealthier Negroes doubt-
less would be wrecked, worn, soiled, and abused by student drivers or by
passengers.  The automobile was still among the prime status symbols ill
the United States, and therefore to volunteer oiic's cir as public traiis-
portation was a radical act of togetherness.  Passengers, for their part,
might resent becoming dependent on the largesse of their betters.  Know-
ing such things, King was stunned once again when the crowd greeted
his proposal with a chiirch-rocking roar of ipproval.  Whatever it too]<,
they would do it.  That first night, more than 150 car owners signed up
to lend their cars to the boycott.  The fractious classes of Montgomcry's
Negroes now promised to blend their daily lives.  Several thousand of
them floated from the mass meeting of December 8 on a buoyant new
cloud of optimism, leaving the harsh arithmetic to the future, or to God.
Between 30,000 and 40,000 Negro fares were being denied to the buses
every day.  Subtracting generously for walkers and for people who were
simply staying at home, the car pool would have to supply 20,000 rides,
which worked out to more than 130 rides a day for each of the voluii-
tecred cars.  By herculean efforts, King knew, Jemison had kept his boy-
cott going in Baton Rouge for two weeks before it fell apart.



At the first negotiating session, on December 8, the three co-equal city
commissioners parried King's arguments before a lirge crowd of report-
ers, boycotters, and white spectators.  Commissioner W. A. "Tacky"
Gayle (who was designated mayor because lie supervised the employees
at city hall) finally suggested that the negotiating parties retire to talk
more frankly in private, and there the bus company's lawyer, Jack Crell-
shaw, performed the stickler's role, as he had in the Colvin case. lie liid
no objection to the rather vague MIA demind for greater courtesy on tile
part of bus drivers, but he rejected the demand that the bus company hire
Negro drivers for predominantly Negro routes.  This, siid Crenshiw, was
a matter of private enterprise.  As to the third and principal dcmaiid-bus
seating-Crenshaw said the MIA plan was illegal.  When Crenshaw
leaned back to huddle with the other white negotiators, King thought lie
heard him whisper that if the whites gave in on this point the Negroes
would go around boasting of a victory, which would be unacceptable.
Some time later, Crenshaw recalled objecting that under the MIA plan a
Negro man could be "practically rubbing knees" with a white woman.
Pride and deep feeling stalemated the talks, which were adjourned after
four hours.
  At their next meeting, on December 17, King opened with a conces-
sion.  The MIA was no longer asking that the bus company hire Negro
 drivers immediately, only that the company accept applications from
 qualified Negroes, with the intention of hiring them when job positions
 became available.  Three eminent white ministers dominated the awk-
 ward, exploratory deliberations in the Chamber of Commerce conferet-ice
 room.  A Methodist preacher, whom negotiator lo Ann Robinson de-
 scribed as "stately, reverential, almost godly," sought to cut through the
 tension with an eloquent speech stressing the common religious values
 of the two races.  In the end, however, he disappointed the MIA delegation
 by portraying the boycott as an exaggerated response to the frailties of
 human nature.  Yes, he was sure that bus drivers had behaved discour-
 teously toward Negro passengers, but he was also sure they had mis-
 treated white ones too.  The province of the soul was much larger and
 more spiritual than bus seats, and for that reason he was especially sorry
 to see ministers of the gospel leading a political campaign.  When he
 finished, a Presbyterian minister (brother of Senator Richard Russell of
 Georgia) observed that it was nearly impossible to conduct discussions
 in good Christian faith while one side was inflicting damage on the other.
 Therefore, he proposed that the MIA leaders first call off the boycott to
 establish an atmosphere conducive to negotiations.  This remained Dr.
 Henry "jcb" Russell's position from start to finish.
   Rev.  Henry Parker of the First Baptist Church, out of which Abcrna-
 thy's church had been born eighty-eight years earlier, attempted to bridge
 the substantive differences.  The problem, said Parker, was a narrower
 one than most people believed, and from what he could tell most of the
 bus incidents could be traced to uncertainty imong the Negro passengers
 as to just where the reserved white section ended. To eliminate this
 confusion, he proposed that signs be installed in all buses designating the
 first ten seats for whites and the last ten scats for Negroes, with those in
 between to be filled by overflow passengers of either race.  King and the
 other Negroes objected vehemently to the detested "White Only" signs,
 which had been eliminated from Montgomery buses twenty years before.
 The whites replied that they were open to any other proposal that prom-
 ised to eliminate the confusion.  They drew the attention of the Negro
 delegation to technical flaws in the MIA proposal.  Suppose that a bus
 filled completely with Negroes seating themselves from the back, as the
 MIA winted, and then, at a certain stop, ten Negro passengers left the
 bus from scattered scats while ten white passengers boarded.  Where
 would the white passengers sit?  How could they call such a bus segre-
 gated, in compliance with state law?.On such hypotheticals, the dclega-
 tions circled to exhaustion.
    Six days before Christmas, a newcomer took a seat on the white side
 of the conference table at the Chamber of Commerce.  Someone whis-
 pered to King that he was Luther Ingalls, secretary of the Montgomery
 White Citizens Council.  When Ingalls rose to speak, King jumped up to
 object that he was not a member of the committee.  "Furthermore," King
 said rather testily, "we will never solve this problem so long as there are
 persons on the committee whose public pronouncements are inti-
 Negro." When someone replied that the mayor had approved Ingalls'
 presence, King said the mayor bid acted unfairly by adding to the corn-
 mittee without consulting the MIA representatives.
  King's statement provoked Reverend Parker of First Baptist to defend
 Ingalls.  "He has just as much right to be on this committee as you do,"
 Parker said heatedly.  "You have a definite point of view, and you are on
 it." Some of the other whites, following Parker's lead, criticized King for
 introducing hostility and mistrust into the meeting before Ingalls lead
 spoken a word.  These comments set off an icriiiioilious exchange be-
 tween white and Negro delegates over what was objective and who had
 cast the first stone.  Each side moved to adopt its own liroposals, and the
 other side always voted as a bloc to stop them.  Some of the whites
 criticized King for dominating the discussion on the Negro side. fie wis
 inflexible, they said, an obstacle to negotiation.  This accusation hung in
 the room until Abernathy stood tip to say that Dr. King spoke for nine
 and all the other Negro members.  From there, negotiations resumed in a
 rather bitter mood.  Finally, King made a motion to recess.  The whites,
 he said, had come to the meeting with "preconceived ideas."
  This time there was no need for Reverend Parker to lead the counter-
 attack.  Mrs. Logan A. Hipp, a white woman who had been serving as
 secretary for the meeting, rose to speak.  "You are the one who has conic
 here with preconceived ideas," she told King, trembling with indigna-
 tion.  "I resent very deeply the statement that we have come here witli
 preconceived ideas.  I most certainly did not." As proof, she mentioned
 that she had come to the conclusion that she would vote in favor of
 hiring Negro bus drivers.  Negroes already served as chauffeurs, she said,
 and therefore could no doubt adapt to the buses.  A white man seconded
 Mrs. Hipp, saying that he had come prepared to vote for some of the MIA
 proposals.
  A few hours later, King left the utterly unproductive meeting burdened
 by what lie called -a "terrible sense of guilt." He had come to the negoti-
 ations expecting to find that the more enlightened whites would ac-
 knowledge the soundness of his moral claims, like the whites at Crozer
 and Boston University, and that the less enlightened ones would expose
 themselves in defensive hatred, like the more abusive segregationist
 whites he,had encountered in his life.  Instead, lie found that the whites
 sincerely believed that morality was neutral to the issue, that the White
Citizens Council was more or less a natural counterpart of the MIA as a
racial interest group.  The whites had spoken as the diplomats of a large
country might defend their interests to diplomats from a small one.  Their
technical approach had deprived King of the moral ground he had occu-
pied all his life.  Frustrated, King had spoken in anger and resentment,
which had served only to ruin the negotiations and convince the more
reasonable whites that if there was indeed a moral battle at hand, they
and not King held the advantage.  Filled with self-reproach, King called
Reverend Parker on the telephone to apologize for any of his comments
that had given offense.  Parker seemed taken aback by the very sound of
Kiiig's voice, and by the unprecedented overture that was at once humble
and gentlemanly, suggesting equality.  He fell into a nervous, perfunctory
recitation of the points lie had made earlier in the day.
  Parker called no more meetings, and the pressure of continuing the
boycott fell heavily on the MIA.  They passed the Baton Rouge car-pool
record and struggled onward.  Every day's transportation brought slightly
less chaos but more strain and fatigue; every mass meeting brought re-
iiew.ii. Speakers built morale at the predominantly female meetings by
singling out some of the walking women as heroes.  One of the more
conservative ministers told the crowd about a group of women he had
seen walking to work early one morning.  They were walking in pride
and dignity, fie declared, with a gait that would "do justice to any
queen." The same preacher quoted an elderly woman who had told him
that if her feet gave out she would crawl on her knees before riding the
buses.  Another preacher told the crowd of his effort to give a ride to an
ancient woman known to almost everyone as Mother Pollard.  She had
refused all his polite suggestions that she drop out of the boycott on
account of her age, the preacher announced.  He inspired the crowd with
a spontaneous remark of Mother Pollard's, which became a classic refrain
of the i-novement: "My feets is tired, but my soul is rested."
  King took to the pulpit to say that he knew everyone was worrying
about how to do their Christmas shopping.  He proposed that they all
rally to the boycott and to the original meaning of Christmas at the same
time by refusing to shop at all.  They should take the money they were
planning to spend on presents and divide it into thirds-putting one part
into their savings account, giving another part to charity and the third to
the MIA.  If they had to go somewhere, they should visit someone in need
or go to church or a mass meeting.  By restoring the true spirit of Christ-
i-nas, they could give each other a lasting gift that no amount of money
could buy.
  A sharp decline in Christmas purchases by Negroes caused Montgom-
cry store owners to wince, but they were not greatly alarmed.  Negro
 purchasing power accounted for a small fraction of their business, and
 the effect of the drop-off was spread among a large number of merchants.
 City Bus Lines enjoyed no such cushion, however.  Its fiiiiiiciit distress
 reached quickly to Ciiicigo, headquarters of the parent conipiiiy, and the
 men running the Montgomery subsidiary spoke the blunt, empirical ]an-
 guage of financial pain.  From the beginning, their public stitenicnts thit
 the boycott was 99 percent effective gave no comfort to the Montgomery
 politicians who were minimizing the boycott to the same news reporters.
 In the first week of 1956, bus company managers told the three city
 commissioners that they faced imminent bankruptcy.  White people were
 not even beginning to make up the loss of Negro riders, they said.
 No matter how much the mayor and the White Citizens Council
 urged whites to patronize the buses, most of them drove cars and
 could not bring themselves to climb aboard a bus.  Therefore, tile bus
 company demanded an emergency fare increase.  The commissioners
 had no choice but to approve, but they felt a strong political incen-
 tive to make sure that if there was to be blame, the voters would lay it
 elsewhere.
  Three days after the increase was approved, a crowd of some 1,200
 people gathered at the Montgomery City Auditorium for a rally of the
 White Citizens Council.  The first of two guest speakers from Arkansas
 told the audience of the real boycott, the white boycott, in which Arkan-
 sas council members were cooperating to cut off credit, supplies, sales,
 and all other forms of economic sustenance to Negroes identified as anti-
 segregation activists. just as the speaker was making sarcastic remarks
 about the few fainthearted Arkansas businessmen who were afraid of
 alienating Negro customers, a booming voice rang out from the back of
 the auditorium.  "I don't have any Negro customers!" shouted Clyde
 Sellers, the Montgomery city commissioner in charge of police.  Sellers
 walked grandly down the aisle to the stage, and as the hushed crowd
 recognized him they erupted row by row into a prolonged standing ova-
 tion.  Lifted to the podium and introduced, Sellers assured the crowd that
 he would never "trade my Southern birthright for a hundred Negro
 votes." This brought a roar of applause that was topped only by his
 dramatic pledge to join the White Citizens Council that very night.  A
 large photograph of Sellers shaking hands with one of the Arkansas
 speakers appeared the next day at the top of the Advertiser's front page,
 above the headline "Sellers Draws Applause at White Citizen Parley."
 The story said he "stole the show."
  Daddy King, arriving on January 8 to preach at Dexter, found his son
 under nearly unbearable pressure.  The boycott had lasted a month.
 Transportation chairman Rufus Lewis had dragooned nearly every
 Negro-owned vehicle into the car pool-between 275 and 350 a day-
 and there were no replacements for those who wanted to drop out.  The
 MIA treasury was exhausted, which meant that Lewis relied increasingly
 on goodwill, and the inspiration of the mass meetings was wearing down
 under the hardships of another day's resistance.  Accordingly, the day
 after Daddy King's sermon, the MIA leaders sued for peace.  They asked
 for a fourth negotiating session, this time with Sellers and the two other
 city commissioners.  Fred Gray, not King, presented a new MIA plan.
 This was a conciliatory gesture in itself, and Gray's legal presentation
 made it clear that the MIA was bending to the city's technical view of
 the seating problem.  He announced that the MIA was now willing to
 make a major concession: Negroes would move voluntarily to fill seats
 that became vacant toward the back of the bus, and white passengers
 would move forward to fill vacancies toward the front.  This meant that
 under busy conditions the passengers would be resegregating themselves
 continuously, and, as a practical matter, the Negroes would be doing
 nearly all the moving.  On a full bus, many Negro riders would never be
 able to relax in their seats.  They would be obli&cd to keep looking to the
 rear to see if they had to move.  But at least they would not have to stand
 up over empty seats in the white reserved section, nor would they have
 to vacate seats on the order of bus drivers who anticipated the arrival of
 whites.
  The city commissioners rejected the new offer categorically.  There
 were remote technical objections, such as what would happen if disagree-
 mciit Irose among the passengers as to which of them needed to move,
 but the more powerful objections were political and psychological.  Under
 the new proposal, white passengers would be obliged to move forward to
 fill vacant seats to make room for Negroes standing in the back.  This
 was unbeird of-the law had never required whites to move for Negroes.
 The commissioners held fast to the wliites-oiily section as a requirement
 of the segregation laws.  Their position was hardening, the more so be-
 cause they saw the MIA weakening.
   At the next MIA executive board meeting, the members admitted
 gloomily thit they had misconstrued the nature of the contest. it was no
 longer-if indeed it ever had been-a question of finding the proper
 wording for the best possible compromise.  According to the official niin-
 utes of the meeting, the board agreed that the negotiations had broken
 down into a siege, testing "which side can hold out the longer time, or
 wear the other down." This new strategic situation boded ill for the MIA.
 It could hold fast until forced to surrender, or it could try to reverse its
 retreats by taking a wild gamble to offset the steady erosion of strength.
 ironically, the Montgomery Negroes faced a strategic disadvantage not
unlike that of the Confederates in 1862, when darijig cotinterstrokcs
made Southern legends of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.

This kind of historical twist was just the thing to appeal to Grover Hall,
Jr., the editor of the Montgomery Advertiser.  Hall was anything but a
conventional white citizen of the town.  Scorning piety and most social
orthodoxy, he cultivated his own eccentricity to the point of decorating
his apartment with mynah birds and large stands of camellias.  Hall was
a dandy.  He seemed to enjoy the stories that circulated of his elegant
bachelorhood-of his wry humor and his scotcli and his music collec-
tion, and the effects of the combination upon a succession of fine young
women who possessed just a touch of wildness. flail cherished the image
of himself as a self-taught historiaii and philosol)he, who had inlierited
the editorship despite his lack of college training.  His idol was H. L.
Mencken, notwithstanding Mencken's celebrated satires on the South as
a land filled with pretentious buffoons.  In fact, Hall took I rather perverse
pleasure in tweaking his fellow Southerners with Mencken-like obser-
vations on their peculiarities.  When Clyde Sellers made his Hollywood
entrance at the City Auditorium, Hall wrote derisively that "in effect,
the Montgomery police force is now an arm of the White Citizciis.Couii-
cil."
  In January, concluding reluctantly that the boycott had endured long
enough to require special journalistic attention, flail summoned .1 young
reporter named Tom Johnson to his office for an assignment: find out
llwho is behind the MIA." Perhaps the Negroes would talk with him.
Johnson received the challenge with trepidation.  Never before had the
Advertiser approached Negro life as a subject for serious journalism.  As
the paper had no reliable news sources iiiiong Moiitgoinery's Negroes,
Johnson talked first with the police and with every knowledgeable white
leader in town.  The most common opinion he found was that the
NAACP was secretly directing the boycott.  This was everywhere, but it
was vague.  Probing further, Johnson found in intriguing current of sus-
picion pointing toward a man who worked ceaselessly for the boycott
but professed to have little to do with its direction.  The suspect's humil-
ity, it was thought, might be the perfect disguise.  After discussing his
preliminary findings with Hall, Johnson wrote the first article of his
boycott series about Reverend Graetz, who, as a white man, seemed
uniquely qualified for the role of hidden mastermind.  With this thesis,
Hall and Johnson bravely took their readers across the racial barrier.
  Johnson's story, "The Mechanics of the Bus Boycott," appeared on
January 10 and gave white citizens their first specific news about the
 inner workings of the MIA-its budget (nearly $7,000 spent so far), the
 number of cars in the car pool (up to 350 daily), and the ideas of the
 leadership.  Johnson wove these facts into a profile of Graetz, but he did
 not write explicitly that Graetz was the "brains behind the boycott." He
 had come to disbelieve the rumors himself, partly because he found
 Graetz to be almost suicidally ingenuous.  Unfazed by interrogation,
 Graetz volunteered stories animated by a childlike faith and utter disre-
 g.ird of political reality.  He recalled, for instance, that he had once been
 introduced to the NAACP's Walter White, and that White had compli-
 i-nciitcd young white people for doing so much to advance the NAACP
 cause.  "Naturally, I just beamed," Gractz told Johnson, "because that
 really fit me." Such statements floored Johnson (who regarded White as
 an "incendiary"), convincing him beyond doubt that Graetz was incapa-
 ble of the deviousness required to run the boycott covertly.
  The next Saturday morning, Johnson kept his appointment at the Dex-
 ter Avenue pastor's office, where King was finishing work on his sermon
 for the next day, "How to Believe in a Good God in the Face of Glaring
 Evil." It was the day before King's twenty-seventh birthday.  Johnson,
 who was about King's age, was among the first of many reporters who
 found that King looked and acted much older than his years.  He spoke
 slowly and formally, seeming to protect himself with a great wall of
 dignity.  Johnson returned to the Advertiser offices with a notebook full
 of information, including the full title of the dissertation on Tillich and
 Wicni,in.  He told Hall that he was "relatively unimpressed." For the
 editor's benefit, he read notes of Kiiig's quotations on Tillicii and Kalit,
 even Nietszche, which Johnson interpreted as evidence of King's eager-
 iiess to use philosophical patter to impress people.  Maybe it worked on
 the Montgomery Negroes, he conceded, beciuse Johnson had seen some
 of the oldest Negro ministers in town treat King with extraordinary
 respect, bordering on sycophancy.  King spoke with authority on the boy-
 cott and might well be the leader.  Unlike Graetz , he seemed to have the
 capacity for tactical maneuver., King had told Johnson that although as
 MIA leader he was seeking concessions within segregation, he was per-
 sonally for "immediate integration" because as a minister of the gospel
 he believed segregation to be evil.  This candor supported what Montgom-
 ery whites had been saying all along-that the radical Negro leaders were
 not really for segregation, that they were lying.
   Johnson wrote up many of the pertinent facts of King's history, inclu(l-
 ilig the exact number of years that grandfather A. D. Williams had been
 pastor of Ebenezer, and went so far as to search out Will Durant's Story
 of Philosopljy to give his readers a definition of "dialectics," about which
 King talked so much. The publication in the Advertiser of a full-scale
 portrait of a Negro was a historic event in itself.  And while hostile read-
 ers could draw from it inferences that King was uppity and devious, as
 Johnson himself believed, the tone of the article was generally neutral.
 Hall wanted it straight.  If angry whites objected, flall Would tell them
 that the city fathers had bollixed things up in pretending to know every-
 thing about the local Negroes.  Perhaps it was time to learn something
 about those inciting this rebellion.  In the article, Johnson committed
 himself to only one judgment about King, in the headline: ,,rlic Rev.
 King Is Boycott Boss." Then he hedged.  "There seems to be uncertainty
 in tile minds of the white community of Montgomery over the identity
 of the director of the bus boycott," he began.  "Who is the acknowledged
 boycott leader?  He seems to be the Rev.  Martin Lutticr King, Jr."
  The Advertiser published Johnson's article on January 19, just in time
 for it to be stirred into the cycles of frustration and mistrust that were
 rising in Montgomery.  Ignorance and fear in various combinations gave
 rise to the possibility of a blind man's brawl.  That same week, Police
 Commissioner Sellers told the Jaycees that the boycott was continuing
 only because white citizens were "sitting by." Ninety percent of the
 Negroes wanted to ride the buses, he declared, but were intimidated by
 goon squads under the command of the Negro elite, which had never
 ridden the buses and never would.  The Sellers speech i-nade the front
 page.  In combination with the Johnson article, it inspired a rumor cam-
 paign directed personally against King.  He was an outsider, whites said
 to each other and to Negroes they knew.  He had never even been on a
 bus in Montgomery.  He was a highfalutin preacher who was mainly
 interested in getting his name in the newspaper.  Whites repeated among
 themselves what became the standard joke, purporting to quote one of
 the poor foot soldiers of the boycott: "Those Negroes are making things
 awful tough on us niggers."
  Myths circulating between and within the races reinforced one another
 to produce bizarre, unintended effects.  Some of the white women who
 needed the services of their maids badly enough to drive them to and
 from Rufus Lewis' car-pool pickup spots seized upon the commissiolier's
 story, saying that they transported the maids only to protect them from
 the goon squads-not, of course, to support the boycott.  Some Negroes,
 frightened by the rising white anger against the boycott, rallied to the
 conservative NAACP idea of bringing the case to court, even though that
 meant the radical step of challenging segregation, while others rallied
 more strongly to the boycott precisely to avoid the tinderbox of the
 NAACP.  The city comniissioiiers, meanwhile, focused their attention
 on the fact that practically none of the former bus riders -would tell a
 white person that they thought tile boycott was a good idea. ordinary
Negro folk would tell even known MIA supporters like the Durrs that
their regular bus had "broken down" that day, or that they were walking
for medical reasons, or, in a pincli, that they "just stays off the buses and
leaves that boycott alone." The commissioners, blanketed by myth and
deception, devised a brazen political gamble to put the Negroes back on
the buses.



On Saturday night, January 21, a reporter named Carl Rowan saw an
item moving on the AP wire in Minneapolis: the Sunday Advertiser
would break the news that the Negroes had agreed to end the boycott.
All Negroes would return to the buses Monday morning, said the story,
which spelled out settlement terms including more courtesy from the
bus drivers, special "all-Negro" buses during rush hours, and preserva-
tioii of the existing seating arrangements on normal bus runs.  Rowan
already had been to Montgomery to cover the boycott.  Finding it difficult
to believe that the MIA leaders would accept such a minimal settlement,
he called King in Montgomery to find out whether the story was true.
  Listening to Rowan read the AP ticker, King felt the bottom fall out of
his composure.  He admitted that he knew nothing of such a deal.  Pri-
vately, he feared that some of his MIA colleagues might have betrayed
him behind his back. it was possible, King knew, for rivals to plot pri-
vately with the white people, especially because he was so exposed as a
young outsider.  Now that there was scant hope of negotiating an honor-
-il)le settlement or of holding out long enough to force one, he was the
natural scapegoat for ali-nost certain humiliation.  Compressed tensions
could have caused a hemorrhage within the MIA leadership-but who?
Rowan told him that the Advertiser story identified no one on the Negro
delegation, saying only that it included "three prominent Negro minis-
ters." King asked Rowan to call Coi-nmissioner Sellers to find out if the
story was really true and, if possible, to learn the names of the ministers.
   Rowan agreed.  King hung up and waited.  The timing of the story was
clever. it would spring upon Montgomery just in time to cause mass
confusion in tile Negro churches at Sunday morning services.  Many of
the boycotters would be angry with the meager terms, while others
would be happy that the ordeal was over and proud that they had given
the white folks a run for their money.  The fragile psychology of the
boycott would be broken.  And the MIA leaders would face the impossible
choice of endorsing the settlement or admitting that it was not theirs.
   Rowan called back.  Sellers had confirmed the story, he reported, but
had refused to name the three ministers on grounds of confidentiality,
The most Rowan could pry out of Sellers was their church affiliations:
 one was a Baptist, one a Presbyterian, and the third the pastor of a Holi-
 ness church.  King's mind pounced on these clues.  A Holiness church?
 Was Rowan sure?  There wis no such thing as a "proi-niiient" Floliness
 minister among Montgomery Negroes-iior were there iiiy Holiness
 preachers among the MIA leadership.  A crack of hope appeired to King.
 With Rowan's clues, lie thought he might find out who the coiispiritors
 were, if they existed.  The Biptist prcacher could be any one of a nililti-
 tude, but there were very few Negro Presbyterians to investigate.
   Fortified by such hope, King placed calls to the MIA leadership. His
 tone and his words put this crisis so far above all the other ones attendant
 to the 20,000 daily rides of the car pool that the essential preachers were
 all sitting in his living room within half in hour.  King told them tile
 shocking news of the story that would be in the paper the next morning.
 The immediate response of his colleagues brought great relief to King.
 No one rallied to the settlement as inevitable.  They ill denounced it.
 Everyone was alarmed, but no one wanted to give in to the destructive
 potential of the story without a fight.  In short, they reacted Is King
 himself had reacted, which confirmed his belief that the conspirators
 were not among them.
   The first thing to do was to identify the three preachers in league with
 the commissioners.  They learned all three names before midnight, and
 the results were as favorable as the King group could have wished.  The
 three preachers who had met with the city commissioners were neither
 MIA members nor influential citizens.  They were country preachers,
 who said Mayor Gayle had called them to city hall to discuss unspecified
 "insurance matters" and then handed them a copy of the bi-is settlement
 when they got there.  That was it.  The audacity of the city commissioners
 registered: they were engineering a naked hoax on tile calculation that it
 would dissolve the boycott instantly or, failing that, at least divide the
 Negroes so that the boycott could never last.  The ministers in King's
 home faced the calamitous prospect that the ruse might work.  The com-
missioners had surprise and authority working for them and the Negroes
 lacked a means of mass communication that could compete with the
 Advertiser.
  They decided to wake up every single Negro minister in Montgomery,
 plus Graetz, in the hope thit ill of them would from their ptilpits de-
 nounce the Advertiser story as a fake.  Half the ministers went back to
 +the telephones for this task, while King went off into the night with a
 group that admitted knowing the locations of the country "dives." This
 was Saturday night.  By virtue of Rowan's warning, they had I chance to
 catch large numbers of their fellow citizens at the only traditional Negro
 meeting places other than the churches.  A few of them, such as Rufus
 Lewis' Citizens Club, approached the atmosphere of a ballroom, but the
 masses gathered at unmarked spots far out in the country, where, people
 of King's dress and demeanor were never seen.  There the laborers, farm-
 ers, and maids, often still in their work boots and dirty uniforms, came
 to lose themselves in loud music and strong drink and hugging and
 sweaty dancing.  King and his coterie of prim preachers must have made
 quite a sight as they shouldered their way into the flesh and the noise,
 got the music to stop as it did only for police raids and major fights,
 cleared their throats and finally introduced themselves to say that tile
 white people were trying to call off the boycott with a trick, that the
 boycott was still on no matter what the Advertiser said in the morning,
 and that they should tell everybody that Reverend King and the others
 said in person to stay off the buses and come to the mass meeting Mori-
 day night.  Then, after a few cheers and some grunts, and perhaps a qucs-
 tioti or two, the preachers moved out across the back roads to the next
 juke joint.
   On Monday morning, the day after the Advertiser announced that the
 boycott had been settled, empty buses rolled through the streets once
 again.  The bus company manager announced tersely that there was "no
 noticeable increase on the Negro routes." The city commissioners were
 of no mind to accept stark physical realitics that contradicted their pub-
 lic assurances of the previous day.  Cornered, faced with public ridicule,
 they fought back in all directions at once.  Mayor Gayle immediately
 issued what Joe Azbell, on the next day's front page, called a "dynamic
 statement." He first blamed the collapse of the weekend agreement on
 the duplicity of the three Negro ministers he said had approved it.  Tile
 commissioners had tried "with sincerity and honesty to end tile boy-
 cott," but now it was "time to be frank." The government had "pussy-
 footed around long enough." The Negroes believed they had "the white
 people hemmed up in a corncr," said the mayor, but the whites "have no
 concern" and "do not care" ind "are not alarmed" about Negro bus
 riders.  "it is not that important to whites that the Negroes ridc the
 buses," he repeated.  "When and if tile Negro people desire to end tile
 boycott, my door is open to them.  But until they are reidy to end it, there
 will be no more discussions."
   Hard upon this statement came the announcement from city hall that
 Commissioner Frank Parks and Gayle were following Sellers into the
 ranks of the White Citizens Council, making it unanimous.  The next
 day, Mayor Glylc was back on the front page urging the white woi-nen of
 the city to stop helping their servants.  "The Negroes are laughing at
 white people behind their I)acks," lie said.  "They think it's very funny
and amusing that whites who are opposed to the Negro boycott will act
    as chauffeurs to Negroes who are boycotting the buses." Commissioner
    Sellers announced at the same time that he was instructing tile Mont-
    gomery police to toughen up on Negroes standing around on the streets
    waiting for ridcs.  Commissioner Pirks announced that dozens of busi-
    nessmen had volunteered to lay off employees who supported the boy-
    cott.  All three commissioners said they were surprised by the outpouring
    of public support for their new hard line.  Mayor Gayle held up a thick
    stack of congratulatory telegrams.  Sellers said people lia(i walled into
    his office volunteering to help the police.  The city hall switchboard op-
    erator siid she was swamped with calls praising the mayor, while  Joe
    Azbell found excited white people all over town.  "I hope the Negroes
    walk until they get bunions and blisters," one  told him.
         Among MIA leaders, gratification over the success of the weekend
    rescue mission was restrained severely by fear.  It was one thing to defy
    the city authorities for eight weeks, and still another to humiliate them
    and call them outright liars from every pulpit in town.  A grim King
    offered his resignation to the MIA board that same morning. Now there
    was no chance it all of a negotiated settlement with him is the MIA
    leader, but his offer lay on the table.  No one would pick it up, as the
    other prospective leaders knew that to change was to split, and to split
    inevitably was to lose.  Rev.  S. S. Scay, one of the most respected of tire
    senior ministers, was moved to call King back to duty in the language of
    the Messiah. "You are young and well-trained in the spirit," he told King.
    "I will drink my portion of this cup, but you can drink of it deeper."
    The executive boird gave King a unanimous vote of confidence. -Their
    it turned to the more difficult task of devising a new strategy.  One fault
    hope was tliit the city would allow a group headed by Rufus Lewis to
    operate i Negro-owned bus line, which would take the pressure off the
    car pool.  The city would ilmost certainly deny Lewis' application for I
    franchise, however, lest it be accused of donating the economic benefits
    of segregation to the Negroes.  Assuming that the Lewis plan would fail,
    the board members discussed their ultimate weapon-- a federal lawsuit 
against bus segregation . Fred Gray, knowing that white Alabama would 
react to such a step as the social equivalent of atomic warfare, had been 
quietly seeking advice on the possibility since the first week of the 
boycott, when he wrote NAACP lawyers in New York. Also he had talked
extensively with Clifford Durr and with sveral of the more experienced 
Negro lawyers in the state. All agreed that the federal suite offered 
the best hope of a court-ordered solution, certainly much better than 
the Rosa Parks appeal, which was bogged down in the state courts.
Durr warned Gray to be sure of his plaintiffs, saying that if the 
white authorities could bring enough pressure to make a plaintiff 
back out of a suit, they could then bring criminal prosecution against 
Gray himself on the obscure charge of "barratry," or false legal
representation.  Durr knew of a Negro lakvyer who had been 
driven from the state by such means.
   A thousand pitfills lay in the path of the federal suit, some technical
 and others political.  Gray reported to the board that he was having trou-
 ble locating potential clients-people who had been mistreated on the
 buses and were willing to stand firm as plaintiffs.  He had been unable to
 find a single Negro male in Montgomery willing and able to be a suitable
 plaintiff.  But lie had found several women, including Claudette Colvin
 and her mother. He told the board that he could be ready to file a case in
 a matter of days.  Legally, the case appeared to be sound, but it would
 take i-niily i-nonths, if not years, to rcsolv4c.  This presented the MIA
 leaders with unpleasant choices.  If they called off the boycott pending
 the outcome of the legal proceedings, they might as well not have had
 the boycott in the first place.  If they continued it, they would face for
 the first time the likelihood of a more or less permanent car pool, at a
 time when striiii wis putting new cracks in the operation every (lay.
 Under pressure, the MIA board members were second-guessing them-
 selvcs even as they voted to direct Fred Gray and the strategy committee
 to prepare finil recommendations on the lawsuit by the next week.  There
 was no celebration.  The white people across town were doing the cele-
 bratiiig that Monday.  By the peculiar jujitsu of the boycott, the white
 people were excited after their weekend fiisco, while the Negroes were
 bemoaning the implications of their successful rescue mission.  Every
 action seemed dwarfed by reaction in the next round. it had been so since
 the bus driver's first words to Rosa Parks.


From the next day forward, Montgomery policemen stopped car-pool
drivers wherever they weiit-questioniiig them, checking their head-
lights and windshield wipers, writing traffic tickets for minute and often
imaginary violations of the Iiw.  Car-pool drivers crept along the road Illd
gave exaggerated turn signals like novices in driving school.  Policemen
ticketed them anyway. Jo Ann Robinson known as a stickler in every-
thing from driving to diction, would get no less than seventeen tickets
in the next couple of moiiths-some for going too fist, others for going
too slow. -Traffic fines mounted, diverting into the city treasury money
that might have gone into the MIA car-I)ool fund.  Drivers fearcd thit
their insurance would be canceled or their liceiiscs suspended.  Backbit-
ing increased, with some people saying that Rufus Lewis was too dicta-
torial to run the car pool and others saying that he syi-npathized too
readily with the drivers as opposed to the ridcrs.
    On Thursday afternoon, January 26, King finished his day at the Dexter
  church office and started home with his secretary and Bob Williams, his
  friend from Morehouse.  King was driving.  When he stopped to pick up a
  load of passengers at one of the downtown cir-pool stops, two motorcycle
  policemen pulled up behind him.  All the passengers in King's car tried
  to behave normally, but three blocks down the street the motorcycles
  were still close behind.  Williams told King to creep along; maybe they
  would go away.  Nothing happened during the drive to the next pickup
  station, but when the passengers stirted to leave the cir, one of the
  motorcycle policemen pulled up next to the driver's window and said,
  "Get out, King.  You're under arrest for speeding thirty miles an hour in
  a twenty-fiv e-mile zone."
    Stunned, King did not protest.  Telling Williams to notify Coretta, he
  stepped out of the car and soon found himself in the back of a radio-
  summoned police cruiser, whispering to himself that everything would
  be all right.  King said nothing to the policemen, even when lie realized
  that the cruiser was heading away from downtown.  Panic seized him.
  Why weren't they going to the jail?  The farther they went, past strange
  neighborhoods toward the country, the more King gave in to visions of
  nooses and lynch mobs.  When the cruiser turned a corner on a dark street
  and headed across a bridge, his mind locked onto a single fear of the river.
  He was trembling so bidly that it took him some time to absorb the
  meaning of the garish neon sign ahead, "Montgomery City Jail." He felt
  a tumbling rush of emotions-first joy that he was not going to be killed
  by a mob, then embarrassment that he had never even known where tile
  city jail was and had assumed it was downtown, then guilt that he had 
  blocked the jail out of his mind so thoroughly even when some of the
  boycotters were going there, then a colder though less piercing fear again
  as lie realized he was going there, too.  This last fear swelled up inside
  him in the corridor as he smelled the foul cell long before he got there,
and when the jailer said, "All right, get on in there with all the others,"
  he stood numb.  King heard the iron door clang shut for tile first time on
  him and a lifetime of distinctions.
  The moment did not list forever, though, and before he finished staring
  at the wood-slat bunks and the toilet in the corner, the other prisoners
  recognized his face.  Then King himself recognized a schoolteacher from
  the bus boycott.  The teacher joined the drunks ind common criminals
  who rushed up to King wanting to hear his story.  Jail was not the end of
  the world to them, of course, and every new prisoner had a story.  Before
  King could finish his, one of the prisoners interrupted to ask his help in
  getting out.  Another did the same, and then others, until King finally
  shouted out, "Fellows, before I can assist in getting any of you out, I've
 got to get my own self out." At this, the entire cell erupted in laughter.
 King was such a mixture of the exalted and the common-the formal
"assist" of the educated leader and the plaintive "own self" of all pris-
 oners.  For him, the shock of his first arrest was already over.
    Abernathy was the first to arrive at the jail after Williams and Coretta
 spread the alarm.  His frantic urgency to get King out ran smack into the
 bureaucracy of the constabulary, and after finally accepting the fact that
 it was too complicated and too late in the evening to get King out on a
 property bond, Abernathy raced off to scrounge up enough currency to
 make a cash bond.  Leaving, he passed carloads of Dexter members and
 MIA supporters who were converging on the jail.  On the inside, King
 thought lie was being bailcd out when the jailer came after him.  So did
 the prisoners, one of whom shouted, "Don't forget us when you get out."
 King shouted back that he wouldn't, but soon found himself rolling his
 fingers across an inkpad.  Fingerprinted, hopes dashed, he was soon back
 in the cell.  By the time the jailer came for him again, he had already
 learned to expect nothing.  He held himself in check even when he began
 to realize that now it was the jailer, not he, who was frightened-a large
 crowd of Negroes had practically surrounded the building.  The jailer
 ]ilirried King out the front door on his own recognizance, and King, who
 had entered the jail in the grip of terror a couple of hours earlier, walked
 out to address a huge throng of well-wishers.  It was some time later, at
 that night's mass meeting, before Abernathy caught up with the switches
 and reversals that rendered his cash unnecessary.
   Word of King's arrest radiated through all of Ncgro Montgomery, stiiii-
 Lilatiiig rumors, horror stories, in(i vows of retribution.  A restive crowd
 gathered Outside the packed mass meeting. Inside, King and the other
 MIA leaders feared that the latecomers who could not squeeze into the
 meeting might do something violent.  Besides, they wanted to share
 Kiiig's story and the joyous unity of the mass meeting with everyone
 possible.  So tile leaders took the unprecedented step of sending criers
 outside to announce that there would be a second mass meeting at an-
 other church immediately after the present one.  With this news, the
 outside crowd moved off, mostly on foot, to the second church, which
 they filled, then to a third one.
   This phenomenon repeated itself that night until there had been no
 fewer than seven mass meetings.  Many people attended more thin one
 of them.  No one could believe it.  In, a floating conversation among sev-
 eral of King's friends and peers, mostly Dexter members, it was decided
 that it was too dangerous to let King drive anymore. To protect him, they
 would form themselves into a corps of drivers and bodyguards.  It was
 agreed that they must override any objections from King and start that
 very night.  Richmond Smiley went off to fetch his little .25-calibcr Bar-
 etta.  Bob Williams, another of those who would be a driver for the next
 few years, wis so moved by the night's events that he went back to his
 studio and worked until morning, arranging what would become his first
 published choril work, "Lord, I Just Can't Turn Back." His choir at
 Alabama State performed the composition that week.
   King woke up the next morning to a fresh day of pressure.  For him,
 time was fluctuating too ripidly between inomciits of deep fcir Iii(i those
 of high inspiration.  Late the next night, his mind was turning over as lie
 lay in bed.  Coretta had fallen asleep.  The phone rang again.  "Listen,
 nigger," said the caller, "we've taken all we want from you.  Before next
 week you'll be sorry you ever came to Montgomery." King hung up on
 the angry voice.  Hope of sleep receded further.  He paced the floor awliile
 before giving in completely to wakefulness, which drove him to the
 kitchen to make a pot of coffee.  Sonic of the Negro callers were just
 curious about his arrest, while others wanted to complain about the car
 pool.  He never knew what to expect.  The sensations of tile incoming
 images pressed in upon him--the hatred of the whites, the burdened 
 offended rectitude of the middle-class Negroes, the raw Courage or need-
 iiiess of the plain folk.  He issociatecl the Negro voices with the sea of
 enraptured black faces lie had seen from the pulpit at mass meetings.
 The pressure of the Negro callers worked against this image, as did the
 white callers against his memories of Crozer. There was no idea nor
 imaginable heart large enough to satisfy all of them or to contain them.
 The limitless potential of a young King free to think anything and there
 fore to be anything was constricted by realities that paralyzed and de-
 fined him.  King buried his face in his hands it the kitchen table.  He
 admitted to himself that he was afraid, that he had nothing left, thit the
 people would falter if they looked to him for strength.  Then lie said as
 much out loud.  He spoke the name of no deity, but his doubts spilled out
 as a prayer, ending, "I've come to the point where I can't face it alone."
 As he spoke these words, the fears suddenly began to melt away.  He
 became intensely aware of what he called an "inner voice" telling him
 to do what lie thought wis right.  Such simplicity worked miracles, bring-
 ing a shudder of relief and the courage to face anything.  It was for King
 the first transcendent religious experience of his life. The moment lacked
 the splendor of i vision or of a voice speaking out loud as Vernon Johns
 said they did, but such differences could be ascribed to rhetorical license.
 For King, the inoii-ient awakened and confirmed his belief tlllt the es-
 sciice of religion was not t grand metaphysical idea but something per-
 soiial, grounded in experieiicc-sonictliing that opened tip mysteriously
 beyond the predicaments of human beings in their frailest and noblest
 moments.
  The next day, a Saturday, King worked until early evening at the MIA
and at the Dexter office.  Among other chores, he wrote a letter to thank
Roy Wilkiiis for the NAACP's "fine contribution" to the MIA, which
had arrived not long after King publicly criticized the NAACP for scorn-
iiig the boycott.  Appropriately to their long future together, this first
exchange between King and the famous civil rights leader, whom he
addressed as "Mr.  Wilkins," was concerned with money, tinged slightly
with suspicion, and smothered with politeness.  Among the day's crises,
the one commanding the most attention was a rumor that the police
were going to raid the MIA offices at Rufus Lewis' Citizens Club.  King
worked the phones to find an alternate site, which was not easy to do
given the scarcity of centrally located, Negro-owned real estite in Mont-
goii-iery.  Intelligence reports of an imminent raid came so thickly that
King and the other MIA leaders spirited away the MIA records that night
in the trunlks of the automobiles of trustworthy Citizens Club patrons.
The next morning, they transferred them stealthily to the basement of
the First Baptist Church while Abernathy was conducting the morning
service upstairs.  Sonic weeks later, E. D. Nixon secured permanent space
for MIA headquarters in a building owned by the all-Negro Bricklayers
Union.
  At the Monday executive board meeting, members voted to proceed
with the fedcril suit against bus segregation in Montgomery.  They all
knew it was a fateful step.  For reasons of tactical consistency, they re-
solved to tell both the city fatliers and their own followers that the
boycott would continue as a separate matters If the city agreed to the
MIA's current segregation rcform proposal, Negroes would return to the
buses on those terms pending the outcome of the lawsuit.  If the city tried
to combine the two matters, offering to modify segregation on the buses
if the MIA would drop the lawsuit, the MIA would consider such offers
as they came.  Frankly, King and his colleagues expected no such offers,
anticipating correctly that their NAACP-style lawsuit would bring down
nothing but increased hostility from the city.  Against the punishment
ahead, the MIA leaders offered the vision of a great victory over all bus
segregation, no more technical hypotheticals about who might have to
move where on the bus under whit conditions.  Freedom would be so
simple.  People could sit anywhere there was a seat.



King tried to explain this at the mass meeting that night in Abernatily's
Church, which wis packed with a crowd of two thousand people.  He tried
to rally evcryone's courage behind the lawsuit decision and the boycott,
polling the distant hopes nearer while dispelling the fears close by.  It was
not one of his best speeches.  After he finished, old Mother Pollard got up
 and made her way slowly to the front of the church.  This was not un-
 heard of.  Since being enshrined as walking heroes of the boycott, some
 of the more outspoken old people were moved to speak from the floor at
 the mass meetings.  Their folk wisdom and their tales of daily life inside
 the homes of powerful white people-how the boss lady had slipped
 them five dollars for the boycott with a warning not to tell the boss man,
 and later that same day the boss man had slipped them another five with
 a warning not to tell the boss lady-had become a special treat at the
 mass meetings, bringing both entertainment and inspiration.
   Mother Pollard drew a hush of recognition and the automatic right to
 speak.  "Come here, son," she said to King, and King walked over to
 receive a public, motherly embrace.  "Something is wrong with you,"
 said Pollard.  "You didn't talk strong tonight."
   "Oh, no, Mother Pollard," King replied.  "Nothing is wrong.  I am feel-
 ing as fine as ever."
   "Now you can't fool me," she said.  "I knows something is wrong.  Is it
 that we ain't doing things to please you?  Or is it that the white folks is
 bothering you?"
   Pollard looked right through a smiling but flustered King.  Before he
 could say anything, she moved her face close to his and said loudly, "I
 done told you we is with you all the way.  But even if we ain't with you,
 God's gonna take care of you." With that, Mother Pollard inched her way
 back toward her seat, as the crowd roared and King's eyes filled with
 tears.  Later, King said that with her consoling words fearlessness had
 come over him in the form of raw energy.
   He first noticed that something was wrong a few minutes later when
 a messenger slipped in to Abernath , who rushed down into the base-
 ment and then returned, looking worried.  King was standing in the front
 of the church as the collection plate was being passed.  He saw Abernathy
 whispering furtively with other MIA preachers.  More messengers came
 and were dispatched.  Perhaps the MIA records had been seized.  The organ
 played and King watched calmly.  A couple of the messengers seemed to
 start toward him and then to hesitate and retreat.  Finally, one of the
 ushers waved King to the side of the platform to give him a message, but
 S. S. Seay stepped between them, shaking his head in the negative.  This
 caused King to wave Abernathy over to him.  "What's wrong?" he whis-
 pered.
   Abernathy and Seay looked at each other, stalling.  "Your house has
 been bombed," said Abernathy.
   "Are Coretta and the baby all right?"
   "We are checking on that now," said a miserable Abernathy, who had
 wanted to have the answer before telling King.
     In shock, King remained calm, coasting almost automatically on the emotional
overload of the past few days.  Nodding to Abernathy and Seay,
 he walked back to the center of the church, told the crowd what had
 happened, told them he had to leave and that they should all go home
 quietly and peacefully, and then, leaving a few shrieks and a thousand
 gasps behind, walked swiftly out a side door of the church.
  Near his house, King pushed his way through a barrage of ominous
 sights and sounds.  Little boys dashed around carrying pop bottles broken
 in half for a fight.  Negro men brandished guns and knives, and some
 confronted the barricade of white policemen shouting for them to dis-
 perse.  One berserk man, struggling to break the grasp of a policeman,
 challenged whites to shoot it out with .38s. Shouts of anger and recogni-
 tion competed with sirens and the background noise of earnest Negro
 women singing "My Country 'Tis of Thee." Flanked by MIA leaders,
 King walked across the broken glass on his front porch and into the living
 room, which was jammed with Dexter members.  Among them was an
 isolated group of first-time visitors to the King home, including several
 white policemen, reporter Joe Azbell, Mayor Gayle, Commissioner Sell-
 ers, and the fire chief.  King brushed by them and into a back room, where
 a group surrounding Coretta and little Yoki, now ten weeks old, parted
 to make way for him.  King hugged Coretta, and gave thanks that they
 were all right.  Then he assumed the remote calm of a commander.  There
 was much to do.  Bombers were loose, and a riot was threatening to erupt
 outside.  He leaned forward and whispered, "Why don't you get dressed,
 darling?" to Coretta, who was still in her robe.
   King moved back into the front room to receive a crime scene report
 from Sellers and the mayor, both of whom assured him that they con-
 demned the bombing and would do everything in their power to punish
 the bombers.  "Regrets are fine, Mr. Sellers," an authoritative voice called
 out from behind King's shoulder.  "But you created the atmosphere for
 this bombing with your 'get tough' policy.  You've got to face that respon-
 sibility." It was C. T. Smiley, King's board chairman at Dexter and the
 older brother of the driver with the Baretta.  More important to every
 Negro in the room, Smiley, as principal of Booker T. Washington High
 School, was utterly dependent on the city commissioners for his contin-
 ued livelihood.
   Sellers and Gayle said nothing.  Joe Azbell and a couple of other white
 reporters wanted to leave the house to file their stories.  They worked as
 stringers for national publications, and they knew this bomb story would
 sell.  But they could not get out of the house, which was surrounded by
 angry, armed Negroes.  A policeman rushed in buffing and said that some
 people in the crowd were saying they wouldn't leave without assurance
 from King that everything was all right.
King walked out onto the front porch.  Holding up his hand for silence,
he tried to still the anger by speaking with an exaggerated peacefulness
in his voice.  Everything was all right, he said.  "Don't get panicky.  Don't
do anything panicky.  Don't get your weapons.  If you have weapons, take
them home.  He who lives by the sword will perish by the sword.  Remem-
ber that is what Jesus said.  We are not advocating violence.  We want to
love our enemies.  I want you to love our enemie