More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
January 22 - February 14, 2021
While King struggled with his German, the outside world rushed through what the movie newsreels would call a “Year of Change.” Stalin died in March. England celebrated the coronation of Queen Elizabeth in June. Eisenhower, the new President, felt so optimistic about the prospects for a truce in Korea that he restored the traditional Easter egg roll for children on the White House lawn. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, convicted of giving atomic secrets to the Soviet Union, were executed at Sing Sing on June 19, the day after King’s wedding.
Because resorts, motels, and hotels in Alabama were prohibited by law from serving Negroes, they were obliged to spend their wedding night at the closest thing to a public accommodation within reach of Negroes—a funeral parlor, owned by a friend of the Scott family.
Making his introductions, he advised King that he had been recommended as a possible new pastor for the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, of whose pulpit selection committee Nesbitt was chairman. Although King knew that Dexter was vacant because of the troubled departure of Vernon Johns, he had made no scouting effort toward the church—probably because he considered it too small.
First Baptist Church, where he would be staying with the family of the pastor, Ralph Abernathy.
Brilliant, lonely, romantic, and impractical, the prophet was the highest form of the preacher without a church, but, according to preacher folklore, he inevitably wound up a tragic and rather ridiculous creature, like a king without a kingdom. Second, King should be mindful of the fact that Dexter never expected to keep preachers long, and should avoid the trap of trying to be the kind of preacher Dexter wanted—an intellectual in the pulpit who gave little attention to the organization of the church itself. To survive at Dexter, a preacher needed to pitch himself headlong into the committees,
...more
About that time, King himself tasted rejection when the First Baptist Church of Chattanooga passed him over to call another minister. This fulfilled King’s premonition that his tryout had not gone well, but he could not figure out whether he had been too young, too intellectual, too political, or perhaps tainted by some obscure grudge traceable to his father or even his grandfather.
Nesbitt made a bold move to pressure King for an early decision: he would break with church precedent by dispensing with further trials, and he offered a salary of $4,200 a year. In church parlance, this worked out to $100 for each first (or communion) Sunday of the month and about $75 for all other Sundays, and it would make King—straight out of school—the highest-paid Negro minister in Montgomery.
King underwent a complete physical examination at Boston’s Lahey Clinic. Dr. Rosemary Murphy measured him at 5’6 1/2”, 166 1/2 pounds, pulse 70, normal and strong in all respects. He was fit and confident, which was fortunate because he needed all his strength to overcome objections to Dexter on the part of his wife and father. Segregated, backward Alabama was among the last places Coretta wanted to live, as she had spent her entire life struggling to get away.
New England Conservatory presented her as one of the soloists in the premiere of Cuban composer Amadeo Roldan’s “Motivos de Son,” with orchestra. She sang regularly in the choir of a white Presbyterian church. In Montgomery, she knew, both these distinctions lay beyond the realm of dreams, and therefore she lobbied strenuously to get her husband to choose a position in the North more in keeping with their attainments. Although King tried to reassure her that the Dexter position would be temporary, she forced him to invoke what he called his authority as head of the household. King’s idea of
...more
King began his career at the age of twenty-five, in the year that witnessed the invention of the TV dinner and the microchip, the marriage of Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe, and the closing of the immigration center on New York’s Ellis Island. The first news films of a hydrogen bomb test showed shirtless American engineers smoking pipes and wearing pith helmets as they adjusted the rigging for a blast far out in the Pacific Ocean. At a ceremony for the official insertion of the words “under God” into the Pledge of Allegiance, President Eisenhower commented that the American form of government
...more
On May 17-two weeks after King’s first sermon as pastor-designate of Dexter—Chief Justice Earl Warren handed down the Court’s decision in the Brown case, without advance notice.
“had not read far enough into the court’s opinion” for reporters to discern its conclusion, and a final bulletin at 1:20 declaring that the Court had struck down school segregation as unconstitutional by a vote of 8—0.
The day after Warren’s announcement, President Eisenhower informed the District of Columbia that he wanted the nation’s capital to set an example of compliance with the law by desegregating in advance of specific court orders.
Reston of The New York Times attacked the Brown decision as a venture into sociology, saying that “the Court insisted on equality of the mind and heart rather than on equal school facilities.” Southern politicians first announced that they would obey the Court and then changed their minds.
Ironically, Americans seemed surer of what they wanted foreigners to think of the Brown decision than of what they thought themselves. The Voice of America immediately translated Warren’s opinion into thirty-four languages to broadcast the good news overseas, but some domestic media outlets fell silent. Universal Newsreels never mentioned the most important Supreme Court decision of the century. It was too controversial.
“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.”
“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 regime—we couldn’t do this. But the great glory of American democracy 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 distinguish themselves from their opponents
...more
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 are wrong—justice is a lie.”
“And we are determined here in Montgomery—to work and fight until justice runs down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream!”
“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 standeth before the nations and says, ‘Be still and know that I am God—and 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.’”
negotiating demands from the pulpit. The boycott 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.
only to discover that Gandhism without Gandhi was dissolving into power politics and petty quarrels.
recommended 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 concluded.
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 vulnerability or alleged mental problems, while Negroes remained certain that she had been persecuted to death on account of the “Battle of the Marne” letter.
One woman correspondent did speculate that there must be a Communist hand behind such strife, but the great mass of segregationists did not bother to address the issue.
Editor Grover Hall, Jr., advised white Montgomery simply to accept the proposal and be done with it. The very moderation of the demands led civil rights groups such as the national NAACP to frown upon the boycott as a wildcat movement for something less than integration.
As for the boycotters themselves, the religious fervor they went to bed with at night always congealed by the next morning into cold practicality, 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 home 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
...more
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, was that they could organize a car pool similar to the one in Baton Rouge.
The automobile was still among the prime status symbols in the United States, and therefore to volunteer one’s car as public transportation was a radical act of togetherness.
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 volunteered cars. By herculean efforts, King knew, Jemison had kept his boycott going in Baton Rouge for two weeks before it fell apart.
This time there was no need for Reverend Parker to lead the counterattack. 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 come here with preconceived ideas,” she told King, trembling with indignation. “I resent very deeply the statement that we have come here with 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
...more
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 movement: “My feets is tired, but my soul is rested.”
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 Arkansas council members were cooperating to cut off credit, supplies, sales, and all other forms of economic sustenance to Negroes identified as anti-segregation activists.
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.
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 Citizens Council.”
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 among Montgomery’s Negroes, Johnson talked first with the police and with every knowledgeable white leader in town.
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 the 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 Monday night.
Rustin was impressed by the intuitive Gandhian method at work in the plan. Privately, he told King that he had been all over the world and not seen a movement that could compare with what he had seen already in Montgomery. He wanted to help spread the word, particularly among believers in nonviolence. There were articles to be written, funds to be raised, specialized techniques to be taught. He realized the dangers involved with “outside agitators,” particularly Northerners, but he would work behind the scenes if King thought it wise. King, beholding Rustin for the first time, said they needed
...more
What distinguished this meeting from all previous ones was not so much its fervor or content but the presence of some thirty-five reporters from all over the country. For the first time, the Montgomery bus boycott had drawn a press contingent of accredited correspondents. Unfortunately for Rustin, none of these reporters knew him as the man from Le Figaro, but several of them did know of him as a resplendent figure in Greenwich Village.
Rustin attended Dexter services that Sunday and then spent the evening in the King home, going over the history of the boycott in some detail. Coretta remembered hearing Rustin give a speech at Antioch some years earlier. Neither she nor King expressed any objection to Rustin’s long history in left-wing politics, and King spoke knowledgeably of figures like Muste. He was trying to practice nonviolence, he told Rustin, but he did not subscribe to Muste-style pacifism because he believed no just society could exist without at least a police power.
About that time, an influential Negro reporter from Birmingham got word that Rustin was in town. Knowing Rustin’s background, he burst into a leadership huddle to announce that the white people were sure to find out about him and would use the information to discredit everything the boycott had accomplished thus far. Now Rustin was in a cross fire. On Monday, word came that the whites might arrest him for fraud or for inciting to riot, and the Negro reporter clinched things by threatening to expose Rustin in his newspaper if MIA leaders did not get him out of town.
Rabb was tired of getting Morrow’s memos urging the President to speak out in favor of desegregation, he said, and what galled him most was that Negro voters still seemed to prefer the Democratic Party of Eastland and Byrd in spite of all Eisenhower had done in civil rights, such as the desegregation of nearly all public facilities in the nation’s capital and the official support for the NAACP position in the Brown case. Negro voters were ungrateful, Rabb charged. He said he was disgusted with the whole issue and would not stick his neck out anymore.
Alabama whites were crowing about how the riot had “worked”; it had restored segregation. As for the Negroes, the latest FBI intelligence reports revealed that the Communist influence was pervasive, Adams said, and the Negro leaders were not sophisticated enough to control planted insurrectionists. Morrow did not argue. He valued Adams for his personal kindnesses, not for his advanced views on civil rights. In fact, Morrow knew that Adams was the most powerful figure among those urging that Eisenhower do as little as possible in civil rights.
The President asked FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to present a classified briefing about race on March 9, 1956, for the cabinet meeting at which the Administration would decide whether to approve, modify, or cancel Brownell’s plans to ask Congress for a new civil rights bill. No such legislation had passed since Reconstruction. Hoover arrived with a brace of aides, easels, and display charts. His peek into the inner world of Negro protest, though couched in the language of secret revelation, was superficial and riddled with error. Cursory remarks on Montgomery, for instance, misstated several
...more
Instead, he put the imprimatur of the FBI upon some of the worst allegations of anti-Negro brutality by militant segregationists, particularly in Mississippi. He described the White Citizens Councils ambiguously as new organizations that “either could control the rising tension or become the medium through which tensions might manifest themselves.” Overall, his performance left just enough political room for Brownell’s program, minus any anti-lynching legislation.
“Southern Manifesto,” which equated integration with subversion of the Constitution and pledged the entire region to fierce resistance. The document was signed by some ninety Southern congressmen and all the senators except the two Tennessee mavericks, Estes Kefauver and Albert Gore, and the Senate Majority Leader, Lyndon Johnson of Texas. Johnson was saying privately that the manifesto’s only effect would be to push Negro votes into the Republican column in key swing states of the North. In the White House, Adams was hoping just that.
W. E. B. Du Bois himself, who had known Negro leaders stretching back to Frederick Douglass, wrote that if passive resistance could conquer racial hatred, which he doubted, then Gandhi and Negroes like King would have shown the world a way to conquer war itself. Jet magazine put King on its cover, calling him “Alabama’s Modern Moses.” The New York Times, in a “Man in the News” profile published during the trial, described King as a man who believed that “all men are basically good,” and whose pulpit oratory “overwhelms the listener with the depth of his convictions…. He is particularly well
...more
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.
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.
Among the strangers who had descended on King during the bus boycott was Harris Wofford. A New Yorker of distinguished Southern lineage, Wofford had been educated at Yale Law School, but his interest in the World Federalist Movement dated from childhood.
