Parting the Waters (34 page)

King was off on a speaking tour of the Midwest. In his absence, the
Echo
published a
FLASH
bulletin announcing that his photograph was on display at the Brussels World's Fair. When King went on to Canada to address a convention of Negro morticians, E. D. Nixon called to say that A. Philip Randolph had secured an invitation for King to testify before the platform committee of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. King, more conscious than ever of seniority and protocol among leaders, told Nixon that he did not want to testify unless Roy Wilkins approved. Nixon called Wilkins, who said, “I agree with you, Brother Nixon. He ought to be there, although it will take some of the spotlight off me.” With this clearance, Nixon then made the arrangements for King to tell the Democrats that civil rights was “one of the supreme moral issues” of the age. Perhaps because he was so intent on soothing leaders of national stature, such as Wilkins, King neglected to give enough credit for his convention appearance to E. D. Nixon—or so Nixon came to believe. Thereafter, he spoke to King only when necessary, and the coolness between the two of them became the subject of private gossip. This was to be King's portion—new realms of success, blurred by aggravations striking randomly on all sides.

On August 25, two or three sticks of dynamite exploded in Reverend Graetz's front yard, shattering the windows in nearby homes. Graetz returned from out of town to find that the police had confiscated personal records and correspondence from his home as part of the bombing investigation. Detectives promptly interrogated Graetz himself, in a manner that provoked the two-year-old Graetz boy to shout, “Go away, you bad policemen!” The ever-repentant Graetz later confessed to a fleeting surge of pride in his son's combative spirit. The next day's
Advertiser
reported Mayor Gayle's suspicions that Graetz had bombed his own home in order to stimulate out-of-state contributions to the MIA. “Perhaps this is just a publicity stunt to build up interest of the Negroes in their campaign,” he said. Two days after the bombing, King composed his first letter of protest to the White House, telling Eisenhower that Montgomery Negroes were living “without protection of law.” Cabinet secretary Maxwell Rabb replied perfunctorily for the President that “the situation in Montgomery has been followed with interest.”

 

Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic candidate for President, worried about the Negro vote, especially after Roy Wilkins sharply criticized his desire to keep the civil rights issue out of the campaign. “We must recognize that it is reason alone that will determine our rate of progress,” Stevenson replied to Wilkins, who proceeded to denounce the candidate's blithe vagueness in such blistering language that Stevenson's friend Eleanor Roosevelt threatened to resign from the board of the NAACP. In October, Stevenson's concern over the issue prompted his appearance at a rally in Harlem, where he criticized as too passive Eisenhower's statement that it “makes no difference” what he thought personally of the Supreme Court's school desegregation decision. “I support this decision!” cried Stevenson. His supporters argued that his statement set him apart from Eisenhower as more friendly to Negroes, while his detractors replied that it meant little for a candidate to say he supported the law of the land, as did Eisenhower, while refusing to say what he would do to enforce it.

Eisenhower campaigned differently. On October 10, he attended a World Series game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Yankees at Ebbetts Field. Sitting with him as a guest in the presidential box was E. Frederic Morrow. There was no official announcement of his presence, but word spread immediately through the Negro press, which noted that Stevenson could not afford to socialize with Negroes for fear of alienating Southern Democrats. The next day, Eisenhower invited Harlem congressman Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., to the White House for a private meeting that became big news when Powell, a Democrat, emerged to endorse Eisenhower for reelection, saying that he would do more for civil rights.

The Negro issue was lost for the remainder of a campaign that finished memorably in the grip of two major world crises, the Hungarian revolt against Soviet domination and the combined effort of Israel, Great Britain, and France to take the Suez Canal from Egypt by war. Eisenhower made scathing private remarks about the “mid-Victorian style” of the Suez attack. If the United States supported such blatant colonialism, he said, the reaction “might well array the world from Dakar to the Philippine Islands against us.” His implicit threat to cut off American oil supplies to Europe helped rescue Nasser, a man Eisenhower loathed, and made a fiasco of Britain's last effort to salvage an empire.

Fear of war turned a probable Eisenhower reelection into a landslide margin of nearly 10 million votes. On election night, an aide danced joyfully into Eisenhower's hotel suite with the news that the Republican ticket had carried the city of Montgomery, Alabama, for the first time in history. No one quite knew why, since Montgomery's white citizens were known to be furious over the Administration's private efforts to help Negroes in their eleven-month boycott of the bus system.
*
Post-election analysis showed that Negroes had voted Republican in substantial numbers for the first time since the New Deal, giving Eisenhower about 60 percent of their votes. Republican strategists looked forward to a major realignment of American politics, in which fiscal conservatives, educated suburbanites, and Negroes would combine to form an enlightened majority. This was among the many aspects of the election results that disheartened Stevenson. “I am quite bewildered about the Negroes,” he said.

In Montgomery, city officials petitioned a state court for an injunction banning the MIA car pool as an unlicensed municipal transportation system. The injunction was the legal weapon King's lawyers had feared most, knowing that court orders had the power to regulate behavior in advance of substantive court decisions. A prime illustration of such power was Attorney General Patterson's order that outlawed the Alabama NAACP pending the outcome of protracted litigation. A similar injunction in Montgomery would mean that boycott leaders who persisted in operating the car pool would be subject to peremptory jailing on contempt charges. It would shift all the advantages of judicial delay from the MIA to the city.

At the
Advertiser
, Grover Hall fulminated that the move came almost a year too late, being just “another blunder” now that the issue of segregation itself was before the U.S. Supreme Court. Hall wanted to prod the city fathers into thinking about more fundamental lines of defense. His purpose was not to give solace to King, of course, and King took none. To him, the Supreme Court decision lay somewhere in the unpredictable future, whereas the dreadful impact of the proposed injunction could be only hours away. It threatened to destroy all the accrued benefits of the car pool—the MIA-owned station wagons, the entire support budget, and the organized driver system. The boycotters would have to walk into their second winter, which was fast approaching.

On Tuesday, November 13, one week after the Eisenhower landslide, King sat glumly at the defendant's table as city lawyers told Judge Eugene Carter why he should not only ban the car pool by injunction but also impose a $15,000 fine on the MIA to compensate the city for lost tax revenues. A surprise city witness testified that the MIA had deposited $189,000 in his Montgomery bank, a sum that city lawyers used to ridicule King's contention that the car pool was a voluntary, “share-a-ride” cooperative. Both sides mounted arguments that seemed highly ironic even at the time. Conservative city lawyers charged that the car pool was a “private enterprise” and therefore should be regulated or banned; King renewed his amnesiac defense that the boycott occurred spontaneously and without any organization or leadership that he could remember very well.

During a recess, an AP reporter slipped to the front of the courtroom and handed King a note. Inside was a bulletin the reporter had ripped off the AP ticker: “The United States Supreme Court today affirmed a decision of a special three-judge panel in declaring Alabama's state and local laws requiring segregation on buses unconstitutional. The Supreme Court acted without listening to any argument; it simply said ‘the motion to affirm is granted and the Judgment is affirmed.'”

It was over. With blood pounding in his ears, King rushed to the back of the courtroom to tell Abernathy, E. D. Nixon, and Coretta. There was commotion at the plaintiff's table, as word was reaching the city lawyers. The news sprinted through the courtroom on whispers, until one Negro, unable to bear the silence any longer, rose to declare, “God Almighty has spoken from Washington, D.C.!” Judge Carter was obliged to bang his gavel many times to restore order, and he handed down his injunction against the car pool even though the Supreme Court decision made it irrelevant.

Montgomery's Negroes did not care about the injunction now. They were celebrating. That night, at the first of two enormous mass meetings, S. S. Seay reported that the Ku Klux Klan was preparing to march on Montgomery. No matter, he cried out, “we are not afraid, because God is on our side.” Seay burst into tears at the pulpit, and, said the
Advertiser
, “several women screamed with what appeared to be a religious ecstasy.” The newspaper noted that King entered the meeting at precisely 7:23
P.M.
, touching off a standing ovation that lasted until Abernathy managed to quiet the crowd for the reading of the Scripture. A hush settled tentatively over the assembly as Robert Graetz walked to the pulpit. The skinny, jug-eared white preacher began to read from the famous love chapter of I Corinthians: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man I put away childish things.” Before he finished the sentence, everyone in the church rose en masse to cheer the passage, which struck the chord of their new self-respect with the force of an epiphany.

 

Legal technicalities delayed the implementation. The Supreme Court decision would not take effect until appropriate orders reached Montgomery, King learned, whereas the spiteful injunction banning the car pool was in operation already. This meant that during the interim, bus segregation remained the law and the MIA could provide no alternative transportation system. To endure this delay without provoking the whites to legal harassments, MIA leaders summoned up the last reserves of energy within their followers to keep boycotting the buses until the integration orders arrived. They would walk. In effect, they would struggle through a victory lap.

Euphoria propelled them. The statement King issued after hearing word of the decision was filled with the youthful enthusiasm that sometimes overran the bounds of his rhetoric. “Often we have had to stand amid the surging murmer [
sic
] of life's restless sea,” he said. “Many days and nights have been filled with jostling winds of adversity.” But he recommended the prudent course: “For these three or four days, we will continue to walk and share rides with friends.” This time estimate from King's legal experts proved highly optimistic, as slow Court paperwork extended the victory lap through five arduous weeks.

Celebrities called King from the first day. Mahalia Jackson wanted to come to Montgomery to sing in celebration. Several Negro seminary presidents offered to deliver theological evaluations of the boycott's Christian spirit. Such a flurry of impressive offers inspired King to organize an entire week of seminars and church services, which he called the Institute on Nonviolence and Social Change. Reporter Carl Rowan, novelist Lillian Smith, and white Unitarian leader Homer Jack agreed to participate, as did the most powerful national figures in the Negro Baptist Church. Daddy King's rival William Holmes Borders came from Atlanta to speak. Gardner Taylor came from his enormous “million-dollar” Concord Baptist Church in Brooklyn, and T. J. Jemison came up from Baton Rouge.

King opened the Institute program on December 3 with an address at the Holt Street Baptist Church, where his speech almost exactly a year earlier had electrified the first mass meeting. He announced that the last year had taught six lessons: “(1) We have discovered that we can stick together for a common cause; (2) Our leaders do not have to sell out; (3) Threats and violence do not necessarily intimidate those who are sufficiently aroused and non-violent; (4) Our church is becoming militant, stressing a social gospel as well as a gospel of personal salvation; (5) We have gained a new sense of dignity and destiny; (6) We have discovered a new and powerful weapon—non-violent resistance.”

To King, the lessons of leadership and unity came first, the militancy of the church next, and the “discovery” of nonviolence last. His list was aptly chosen and properly ordered as a distillation of the boycott experience. Nonviolence, like the boycott itself, had begun more or less by accident. The function of the boycott leaders had been to inspire, to react, and to persevere. Not until Birmingham, more than six years later, would King's idea of leadership encompass the deliberate creation of new struggles or the conscious, advance selection of strategies and tactics. For now, his notion of leadership emphasized the display of learning. He said many wise things in his address—on technology, colonialism, the pace of time, but the speech as a whole went sprawling. King quoted notables from Heraclitus to Bob Hope. His anthem was a yearning for justice, and he extolled the value of martyrdom in a meditation on courage, but his oratory suffered markedly from abstraction once he was cut loose from the specific pressures of the boycott.