Master of the Senate (155 page)

Going back to court, the NAACP charged that university trustees had conspired with the rioters, and a federal judge ordered the university to lift the suspension—whereupon the trustees expelled her permanently (for, they said, falsely accusing them of conspiracy). Promising to “keep fighting until I get an education,” she moved to the Birmingham home of her brother-in-law, Ulysses Moore, where men with rifles guarded the porch (“I’m not going to have her snatched from my care as they did the Till boy,” Moore said). But the phone rang constantly with callers saying, “We’re coming after you,” or “We’ll get you this time,” and she was unable to put from her mind the enraged faces that had pressed against the windows of the dean’s car. “All I could do then was pray, and I thought, ‘Am I going to die?’” Rioters whom the NAACP had named in its suit sued her for defamation, asking four million dollars. She flew to New York where Thurgood Marshall, glancing with evident concern at her tense, hollow-eyed face, told reporters at LaGuardia Airport, “She left Alabama because at this stage she’s taken as much as a human being can take….” A reporter asked if Miss Lucy had in effect lost the fight despite the court verdicts. “You and other American citizens have lost,” Marshall replied. As the reporters pressed around her, she said to Marshall, “Please get me out of here.” Then he drove her away, not to his office but to a doctor, who ordered her to take a long rest.

Some Alabama whites crowed that the riot had “worked,” and in fact, by their definition, it had: it had restored segregation at the university. The trustees had expelled Miss Lucy “because the mob forced them to,” said one student leader who was on her side. “The mob won.” In addition, the South’s indignation at the Supreme Court’s interference in its affairs “woke people up like nothing else did,” a spokesman for the White Citizens Councils said. Tens of thousands of new members joined; wrote a reporter at one huge Council rally, “They filed in the coliseum doors in long lines, millionaires mingling with farmers, as many women as men, all with eager looks on their faces like people going to a Billy Graham revival.” There was no longer, said John Bartlow Martin, any doubt “that the South … has found in the Citizens Councils a flag to rally round. The Deep South was solid once more.”

Yet it was not only in the South, not only among conservatives and racists, that the Autherine Lucy episode had stirred, and solidified, deep emotions. The death of her modest dream of being a librarian, like the death of Emmett Till,
might on the surface have seemed like a victory for injustice, like simply another defeat for Martin Luther King’s “great cause.” But these victories were Pyrrhic, for in both cases, an entire nation had been reading about the injustice, had seen it all, stark and clear. Into the hearts of those willing to have their hearts opened had been brought home, with new vividness, the cruelty and inhumanity with which black Americans were treated in the South. These two episodes had hardened, among men and women of good will, a desire that, at last, something be done on behalf of these long-downtrodden people.

D
RAMATIC AND SIGNIFICANT
as were the Till and Lucy encounters, trumpet calls to rally Americans behind the banner of justice, they were not the most significant on the southern civil rights front of 1956. Justice marched that year not to a trumpet call but to a drumbeat—a soft, undramatic, but unfaltering drumbeat, that instead of fading away like a trumpet call went on all that year, month after month. It was a drumbeat of footsteps on pavement—the footsteps of maids and washerwomen and cooks, of garbagemen and yardmen and janitors. For, month after month, all through 1956, the Montgomery Bus Boycott went on.

“Come the first rainy day and the Negroes will be back on the buses,” Montgomery’s Mayor, W. A. Gayle, had predicted, shortly after the boycott began in December, 1955. He could hardly be blamed for his confidence. “To a largely uneducated people … [t]he loss of what was for many their most important modern convenience—cheap bus transportation—left them with staggering problems of logistics and morale,” Taylor Branch has written. Their jobs might be five or six miles from their homes. Drivers in a hastily organized car pool, using cars loaned by blacks, took black workers to and from their jobs, but there were never enough cars, and many had no choice but to walk. Others had the choice but chose to walk anyway, preferring to “demonstrate with their feet” their determination to end the indignities and humiliation of bus segregation. Passing an elderly lady hobbling slowly and painfully home after her day’s work, a car pool driver offered her a lift. Refusing, she explained: “I’m not walking for myself. I’m walking for my children and my grandchildren.” There had been black bus boycotts before in other southern cities, but they had all ended quickly—perhaps the longest had been one in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1953, that lasted two weeks—as their participants gave up and admitted defeat. But the Montgomery boycott didn’t end. Rain came indeed, and cold, and, as the seasons changed, the heat of an Alabama summer, and Montgomery’s blacks kept walking.

One reason they kept walking was their leader, that twenty-six-year-old preacher only recently come to Montgomery.

The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was one of the generation of new, better-educated, more confident black leaders who were beginning to appear in
the South—one with unusual political sophistication. Hardly had he become minister of Montgomery’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church when he announced a goal: “Every member of Dexter must be a registered voter.” Registered—and knowledgeable. Weekly forums discussed election issues; a political action committee was formed.

At Boston University, where the Reverend King had been studying for his Ph.D., the faculty, impressed by him, had urged him to become an academic, but, although attracted by that prospect, he rejected it in favor of a southern pastorship; “That’s where I’m needed,” he told his wife, Coretta. He was to discount his role in the Montgomery boycott. “I just happened to be there,” he was to say. “There comes a time when time itself is ready for a change. That time has come in Montgomery, and I have nothing to do with it.” But at the boy-cotters’ nightly mass meetings, he echoed Douglass the Lion, who had said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will”; said Martin Luther King: “Freedom is never given to anybody, for the oppressor has you in domination because he plans to keep you there.” And he went beyond Douglass to espouse a doctrine of passive, non-violent resistance. “Hate begets hate, violence begets violence; toughness begets a greater toughness,” King said. “Our aim must never be to defeat or humiliate the white man, but to win his friendship and understanding…. This is a nonviolent protest. We are depending on moral and spiritual forces.” King’s phrases were ringing, rhythmic, unforgettable; as the young preacher left the pulpit each evening, men and women who had walked for miles that day reached out their hands to touch him, and the next morning walked again. When, in January, 1956, Montgomery’s white leaders arrested King for a minor traffic violation, thinking thus to break the boycott, he was very afraid. As he sat in the back seat of a police cruiser, his mind was so filled with thoughts of lynchings—crossing a bridge, he feared that a mob was waiting for him on the other side; he could not stop thinking about the river below—that when he finally saw the jail, he was overwhelmed by happiness that he was not going to be killed or mutilated. But even as he was entering the jail, carloads of Negroes were racing toward it, and the jailer hastily released him on his own recognizance. So many people attended that night’s mass meeting in order to get a glimpse of him that it was announced that a second meeting would be held at another church, and when that was filled, a third meeting was announced, and then a fourth—seven meetings, packed with men and women who just wanted to see for themselves that the Reverend King was all right. And when he went home after the last meeting, he was accompanied by a group of young men who had decided they would guard him from then on whenever he left his house; he was too precious to lose.

Montgomery’s blacks also kept walking because of themselves.

Though incidents on the city’s buses had been increasing in recent years, they had invariably ended in defeat and humiliation for the black person
involved. Boarding a bus with her arms filled with packages one Christmas, Jo Ann Robinson, a professor at Montgomery’s black college, Alabama State, took a seat in the white section without thinking. Striding toward her, his arm up as if to strike her, the bus driver shouted, “Get up from there! Get up from there!” “I felt like a dog,” Mrs. Robinson was to recall, and, crying, she left the bus. But when she asked friends to help her protest the incident, they demurred, saying that the driver’s conduct was simply what one expected in Montgomery. Once, Martin Luther King’s predecessor in the Dexter pulpit, Vernon Johns, had dropped his dime as he was trying to put it in the fare box. Although it rolled near the driver’s seat, the driver ordered Johns to pick it up, saying, “Uncle, get down and pick up that dime and put it in the box.” When Johns asked the driver to do it himself, the driver said that if Johns didn’t do it, he’d throw him off the bus. Turning to the other passengers, all of whom were black, Johns said he was leaving and asked them to join him. Nobody moved.

But now, partly because of their new leader, partly because of a new determination, emblematic of the widespread new determination among southern blacks, Montgomery’s blacks kept on walking even when ten thousand people attended a White Citizens Council rally in the Montgomery Coliseum—“the largest pro-segregation rally in history”—to hear Mississippi’s senior United States Senator, James O. Eastland, shout that “In every stage of the bus boycott we have been oppressed and degraded because of black, slimy, juicy, unbearably stinking niggers … African flesh-eaters. When in the course of human events it becomes necessary to abolish the Negro race, proper methods should be used. Among these are guns, bows and arrows, slingshots and knives…. All whites are created equal with certain rights, among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of dead niggers.” They kept on walking even when, after that rally, long caravans of cars filled with hooded men brandishing rifles and Confederate flags roamed the city. Montgomery’s Negroes kept on walking even when the city fathers, who thought they were dealing with blacks from the past—ill-educated, easily divided, and without access to national publicity outlets—turned to the “get tough” policies that had always worked with blacks in the past, urging businessmen to fire Negro employees who came to work on foot instead of by bus, ordering police to break up for “loitering” groups of Negroes waiting for car pool pickups, and to give car pool drivers so many traffic tickets—Jo Ann Robinson got seventeen in two months—that the drivers faced the loss of their licenses and insurance. They kept walking even when a grand jury—an all-white grand jury, naturally—subpoenaed more than two hundred Negroes, and it became known that wholesale criminal indictments were being prepared under an obscure anti-boycott ordinance. They kept walking even when, in late February, after 115 indictments, twenty-four against ministers, had been returned by the grand jury but had not yet actually been served by police, the city commissioners called on the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, a key figure in the boycott, and delivered an ultimatum: a broad hint that
the indictments would not be served if the boycott was called off immediately. “We have walked for eleven weeks in the cold and the rain,” Abernathy replied. “Now the weather is warming up…. We will walk on….”

They walked on even when the indictments were served—walked on, and found the courage not to be cowed by the indictments.

“For centuries,” as Taylor Branch has written, “the jailhouse door had conjured up visions of fetid cells and unspeakable cruelties” for southern blacks. Now one of the 115 blacks indicted, E. D. Nixon, a rough-hewn railroad porter, didn’t wait for the sheriff’s deputies to come for him, but walked into the county courthouse and said, “Are you looking for me? Well, here I am.” Released on three hundred dollars’ bail, he emerged, having removed a little of the terror from the act of being arrested. Then a dignified elderly black pastor followed Nixon, joking with the deputies as they were booking and fingerprinting him. News of what the two men had done spread across Negro Montgomery. A crowd gathered around the courthouse, shouting encouragement to the men and women who walked into it, applauding them as they came out. The furious sheriff came outside to shout, “This is no vaudeville show!” but that dreaded jailhouse door had begun to turn, in Branch’s words, “into a glorious passage.”

One of the ministers indicted was Martin Luther King. He was away when the indictments were handed down, and his father, a renowned black minister himself, in Atlanta, pleaded with him not to return to Montgomery lest he be killed. The Atlanta police chief told the younger King that that was a strong possibility: “I think you’re in great danger,” he said. “I think you’re a marked man.” There might be no bail for the boycott’s leader—and if he was kept in jail, what might not happen to him there? King replied that he must go back, and he did—arrested, he was photographed as a criminal, with a number, 7809, under his chin. He was released on bond, but only after an early date had been set for his trial.

One evening not long thereafter, King was speaking at a mass meeting when, looking down from the podium, he saw a man hurry into the hall and say something to Abernathy, who quickly left the room, and, when he returned, seemed very upset and started whispering urgently to ministers near him in the audience. Then King saw other men come in, and he saw some of them start to walk toward the podium, and then hesitate and retreat, as if there was something they didn’t want to tell him. He saw some of them whisper something to Abernathy. Abernathy didn’t come up either. Motioning Abernathy to come up to the podium, King whispered “What’s wrong?” and Abernathy had to tell him. “Your house has been bombed,” he said. When King asked, “Are Coretta and the baby all right?” Abernathy had to say, “We’re checking on that right now”—he had been desperate to have the answer for King before telling him anything.