Parting the Waters (33 page)

King learned immediately that the astonishing personal impact of the trial reached far beyond Montgomery. At his first Northern fund-raiser since the boycott began, he received in New York what one newspaper called “the kind of welcome [the city] usually reserves for the Brooklyn Dodgers.” Some ten thousand people tried to crowd into Gardner Taylor's Concord Baptist Church to hear him. Collection plates gathered $4,000 for the MIA. The president of the City Council made an appearance at the church. Mobs of admirers pressed upon King, and the Negro press reported sighs among groups of doting women.

The phenomenon of mass adulation far from home struck like a sudden bolt, but King had to work for other support gained on the New York trip. Harry Belafonte responded cautiously to his invitation for a private meeting at Adam Clayton Powell's church in Harlem. Belafonte could be temperamental. He had recorded but not yet released the calypso album that would make him an international star—the first solo album ever to sell a million copies—and he wondered why King insisted that they meet alone. He was wary of preachers and established Negro leaders, partly because he thought they never had supported his idols Du Bois and Paul Robeson. Only curiosity about this new kind of preacher lured him to the church. King said he had heard that Belafonte cared deeply about the race struggle, quite apart from his career in show business. This flattered Belafonte's political side, but what broke down his resistance was King's air of humility, in sharp contrast with the circus of adulation surrounding him. While he found King sophisticated, clearly not the hick or holy roller he had feared, King's offstage personality struck him as a mixture of determination and almost doe-like vulnerability. “I need your help,” King said repeatedly. “I have no idea where this movement is going.”

 

Within a week of the mass arrests in Montgomery, King and the NAACP's Roy Wilkins had entered what would become a long-standing quarrel over money. King protested in a letter to Wilkins that the NAACP seemed to be gathering money for itself “in the name of our movement.” Wilkins defended his instructions that all proceeds from the boycott fund-raisers be routed through his office, saying that the NAACP expected to absorb many of the MIA legal expenses, but he did not specify which ones. He added a warning to King: “I am certain I do not need to stress that at this time it would be fatal for there to develop any hint of disagreement as to the raising and allocating of funds.” NAACP officials, who saw themselves in the climactic stages of a twenty-year legal battle to integrate public institutions such as the schools, were reluctant to endorse the radically new approach of a mass boycott. Negotiations over legal support stalled further, so that by the time of King's trial only one of his eight lawyers came from Thurgood Marshall's legal staff. During the trial itself, the NAACP issued a droll statement that it would await the final outcome of the boycott before deciding whether passive resistance techniques could be useful.

Wilkins became more accommodating when the trial established King as a national symbol. Three weeks after the conviction, he notified King that the NAACP would pay all costs for its attorneys to represent King and any of the other mass-indictment defendants brought to trial, as well as the MIA in its federal suit against bus segregation and Rosa Parks in her own ongoing case. In addition, Wilkins offered to pay half the $9,000 fee charged by one of the local Alabama firms in the King case. Oddly enough, Wilkins extended this generous offer at a time when fame had made the fledgling MIA wealthier than the national NAACP, and King accepted the offer even though he did not need the money at the time. The MIA cases might wind up in the U.S. Supreme Court, King reasoned, where the NAACP lawyers had an unsurpassed record in civil rights cases. “We are quite conscious of our dependence on the NAACP,” King wrote Wilkins in a conciliatory letter, mentioning that his church had just purchased a $1,000 life membership in the NAACP. Within a week, Wilkins invited King to address the NAACP's annual convention in San Francisco.

On June 1, 1956, some weeks before the NAACP convention, Alabama attorney general John Patterson obtained an extraordinary court order banning most NAACP activities within the entire state of Alabama, including fund-raising, dues collection, and the solicitation of new members. Patterson based his request for the order on the assertion that the NAACP was “organizing, supporting, and financing an illegal boycott by Negro residents of Montgomery.” The order transformed this old rumor into the factual predicate for effectively outlawing the organization, and when the NAACP resisted a corollary order to surrender its membership and contribution lists to Patterson, the judge imposed a $100,000 contempt fine as well. It took the NAACP eight years and several trips to the U.S. Supreme Court to void these sanctions. During all that time, the Alabama NAACP was disbanded. On one level, this shocking development threw King and Wilkins together as common defendants. But Wilkins could hardly forget that it was King's boycott that had put the NAACP out of business in an entire state, at a critical time in the school desegregation cases, and this handicap would grow more serious as other Southern states tried to follow Alabama's example.

One hidden effect of the Patterson order was to drive some of Alabama's former NAACP leaders into closer alliance with King. The most unusual and significant of them was Fred Shuttlesworth in Birmingham, a volatile, rough-cut man who had been raised in the backwoods of Alabama. Convicted of running the family still in 1941, Shuttlesworth had wandered around Alabama as a truck driver and cement worker, discovering in the process that the natural gift his mother so prized in him, his memory, was well suited to the work of a country preacher. Accepting the “call,” Shuttlesworth bought a cow to help support him and his young wife while he pitched himself into colleges and seminaries, built a house out of World War II scrap materials, and preached as many as five times each Sunday. At his first full-time pulpit in Selma, Shuttlesworth had quarreled ceaselessly with his deacons over the prerogatives of the minister, finally receiving what he called a vision from God telling him to persevere and subdue them.

Only a few days after the Patterson court order, Shuttlesworth received another divine message, saying, “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.” He interpreted this to mean that the demise of the faction-ridden NAACP was a blessing in disguise, and that he should replace it with his own organization, like King's in Montgomery. He knew King, having gone to Montgomery several times to deliver contributions, and the idea of an organization free of the NAACP bureaucracy appealed strongly to him. His public summons to create a new group attracted publicity in the white press as a blatant circumvention of the court order banning Negro agitation, as well as an unprecedented challenge to Birmingham's pugnacious police commissioner, Eugene “Bull” Connor. One troubled Negro preacher went so far as to tell Shuttlesworth that he had received his own vision from heaven, in which God told him to tell Shuttlesworth to cancel the meeting. “When did the Lord start sending my messages through you?” Shuttlesworth hotly replied. “The Lord has told me to call it on.” Ordinary folk, drawn by the tension and the publicity, packed the church on the night of June 5 to hear Shuttlesworth announce the formation of his own Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. This deed first singled him out as the preacher courageous enough or crazy enough to defy Bull Connor.

In Montgomery, King and the other MIA leaders were celebrating a tangible victory. On June 4, a panel of three federal judges ruled in the MIA's favor in the suit Fred Gray had filed back in February, two days after King's house was bombed. By a 2-1 vote, the judges struck down Montgomery's bus segregation ordinances as unconstitutional. Attorneys for Montgomery and for the state of Alabama immediately appealed the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court. Although the segregation laws remained in effect pending that ruling, which for the boycotters meant that months of walking and car-pooling stretched ahead, thousands of hallelujahs were raised at mass meetings in Montgomery. For the first time, they were on the winners' side in a white man's forum, and now would go into the Supreme Court seeking to sustain the ruling of three white Southern judges. The odds for ultimate legal victory shifted heavily in their favor.

Optimism broke out like an epidemic. Every hardship, every funeral of a faithful walker who had died, became grist for inspiration to keep walking another six months if necessary. Everybody knew that the first six months had been the hard ones. They were cresting. The MIA was rich. It was buying and operating its own fleet of more than a dozen new station wagons, sparing much of the wear on the cars of private volunteers. At the time of the court victory, the MIA had stowed away deposits totaling more than $120,000 in banks scattered from New York to Oklahoma—outside Alabama and therefore safe from legal raids by Attorney General Patterson. King decided that the MIA was secure enough for him to take a vacation. With Coretta and the Abernathys, he vanished by car toward the coast of California, planning to make his way to San Francisco for the NAACP convention.

Shortly after they left, MIA secretary Uriah J. Fields held a press conference in Montgomery to charge that the boycott leadership was riddled with corruption. It involved thousands of dollars in misappropriated funds, he said, and leaders who had become “too egotistical and interested in perpetuating themselves.” “I can no longer identify myself with a movement in which the many are exploited by the few,” Fields declared. His public resignation created the most sensational news since the mass arrests. Fields was an outspoken, unconventional, bootstrap leader, about King's age. He had worn a goatee since his student days at Alabama State, which marked him as an outsider among the more image-conscious leaders. Campaigning as a rebel, Fields had defeated in a student election the heavily favored fraternity candidate, who was now a protégé of King's at Dexter Avenue. Fields believed that on their records as activists he, and not King, should have been elected MIA president, and he openly begrudged Abernathy his growing role as second in authority. It galled him that King was in demand for speaking engagements all over the country, whereas he had landed only one out-of-town appearance in Pittsburgh.

By timing his gambit to coincide with the absence of King and Abernathy, Fields hoped other disgruntled leaders would rally to demand a restructuring of the executive board. However, he grossly underestimated the bond between King and the great masses of Montgomery's boycotters. Ordinary people called Fields a traitor, and his own church voted without dissent to strip him of the pastorate. By the time King landed in Montgomery, having aborted his California vacation to face the insurrection at home, Fields already was so thoroughly discredited that King's task was more to protect than to prosecute him. At a mass meeting, King made a long speech denying the charges but calling on the MIA membership to forgive Fields as a prodigal son. Defending his leadership was easy for King—too easy, in a sense, because he did not have to address the elements of truth in Fields's charges. Thousands of dollars had in fact been misappropriated out of the MIA treasury, as car-pool drivers and assorted hustlers were charging the MIA for oceans of gasoline and truckloads of imaginary spare tires. A reorganized transportation committee was trying to plug the holes in the reimbursement system. As for the alleged high-handedness and egotism of the MIA leadership, there was a good deal of it, and it was resented not only by Fields. Some, like E. D. Nixon, believed they were being shunted aside for lack of polish or education, and a few of the lay people thought they were out because they were not preachers. Now such criticism would be confined forever to privacy. The defection and swift decapitation of Fields demonstrated that public criticism of the MIA would not only be seized upon by white opponents but also taken as a personal criticism of King, which would not be tolerated.

King flew back to San Francisco to address the forty-seventh NAACP convention. Hundreds of delegates pressed upon him to shake his hand, including Medgar Evers, the NAACP field secretary in Mississippi. Evers invited King to Mississippi, saying that “your presence would do more…than any” to raise hopes in his state. The idea of a mass movement by nearly fifty thousand Negroes in a single city captivated the delegates, whose customary role in the NAACP was limited to support of the lawyers fighting segregation in court. Delegates on the convention floor drafted numerous resolutions in favor of the nonviolent methods of the bus boycott. Wilkins and Thurgood Marshall opposed them in a protracted struggle that put King in the awkward position of the insurrectionary guest. He tried to make himself as scarce as possible, but when reporters cornered him with questions about whether he thought nonviolent methods might help desegregate the schools, he replied that he had not thought about it much but that they probably could do so. This comment prompted an annoyed Thurgood Marshall to declare that school desegregation was men's work and should not be entrusted to children. Some reporters quoted him to the effect that King was a “boy on a man's errand.” Wilkins worked more diplomatically to smother the threat of a runaway convention, finally engineering passage of a resolution calling merely for the executive board to give “careful consideration” to the use of the Montgomery model.

In July, sensitive to criticism that he had been neglecting his church, King started a newsletter, the
Dexter Echo
, to keep in touch with his members. He devoted his own column, “From the Pastor's Desk,” mostly to problems of church finances. To offset slow collections during the summer months, King supervised the second annual Prettiest Baby Contest, which netted more than $2,000. The winning baby, on the strength of the $645.60 raised by the sponsoring August Club, was King's daughter Yoki, now eight months old.