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November 19 - November 19, 2021
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.
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 “Jeb” Russell’s position from start to finish.
In the first week of 1956, bus company managers told the three city commissioners that they faced imminent bankruptcy.
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 lawyer who had been driven from the state by such means.
For King, the moment awakened and confirmed his belief that the essence of religion was not a grand metaphysical idea but something personal, grounded in experience—something that opened up mysteriously beyond the predicaments of human beings in their frailest and noblest moments.
Although as a Quaker he had been inclined toward the gentlemanly pacifism more associated with the Socialists, he was bitterly disappointed by the official Socialist position that racism would disappear automatically upon the establishment of socialism. By a corollary of this doctrine, the Socialists ruled out as wasteful any special agitation on the race issue. As a practical matter, it meant that white Socialists stayed out of Harlem. Disgusted with the Socialists, Rustin joined the Young Communist League.
Practically speaking, the fight within the Eisenhower Administration over civil rights was a contest for the President’s ear between Sherman Adams and Attorney General Herbert Brownell.
He had been a public figure among Montgomery’s Negroes for nearly four months, but now fame spilled into the outside world. 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.
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.
Fear of war turned a probable Eisenhower reelection into a landslide margin of nearly 10 million votes.
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.
On December 20, Supreme Court notifications arrived at the federal courthouse in Montgomery, and deputy U.S. marshals served notices on city officials.
Moreover, the ideal of integration contradicted the official Moscow goal of “separate national development” for American Negroes, modeled on the Soviet republics.
Forty years in a segregated Army conditioned Eisenhower to think of Negroes as inherently subordinate. His condescension was so natural and paternal as to seem nearly well-meaning.
Wilkins and his Washington representative, Clarence Mitchell, convinced White House aides that they had headed off a plan by King to march on Washington in protest against Eisenhower’s “failure.” This line, along with private remarks by NAACP counsel Thurgood Marshall that King was an “opportunist” and a “first-rate rabble-rouser,” helped ingratiate the NAACP with the Administration as the more responsible, businesslike wing of the Negro movement.
Privately, King told Rustin that Nixon was a mixture of enthusiasm with pragmatism, whose general stance was that he would help the cause of civil rights if he could do so without getting hurt politically. King’s major reservation about the Vice President was that his relish and conviction seemed so evenly applied to all subjects as to mask his interior substance.
Nixon, for his part, privately told his colleagues at the White House that King had promised to launch a massive voter registration drive if the voting rights bill became law. Both King and Abernathy confided that they had voted Republican in 1956, he said, and they believed most new Negro voters would vote Republican too.
Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson of Texas worked conspicuously to engineer passage of a bill that would appear more his than Eisenhower’s.
Because too many strikes had been broken, they argued, by state militia acting on the authority of a single judge’s injunction, labor leaders supported an amendment that guaranteed the right of a jury trial to state officials accused of violating court orders on voting rights.
Nevertheless, many labor leaders joined the anti-labor South, and Wilkins sided with an old nemesis, Senator Knowland.
Although King and Wilkins both endorsed the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the effect of the law was to highlight the differences between them. To Wilkins, the law meant that the NAACP’s legislative campaign was making its first meager gains. Civil rights was no longer a “virgin,” he said. To King, the lesson of the bill was that Negroes should place less reliance on white institutions and take more responsibility upon themselves.
Legal experts agreed that Faubus, by using the armed forces of a state to oppose the authority of the federal government, had brought on the most severe test of the Constitution since the Civil War.
Faubus had failed by his own standards and brought international ridicule down upon his state, but Arkansas politicians conceded that his performance made him unbeatable in the next election.
When the first American attempt to match the Soviet feat exploded two seconds after takeoff, in full view of the television cameras, the national humiliation was complete. Reporters asked Eisenhower questions on practically no other subject. Faubus disappeared from the news as suddenly as he had appeared, and the entire race issue receded proportionally.
Tactically, he knew that he must carry the cause beyond bus segregation, but how could Negroes boycott facilities—libraries, schools, parks, restaurants, and others—from which they were already excluded?
Graham, for his part, thought enough of King’s purpose to invite him to deliver a prayer during the sixty-eight-night Madison Square Garden Crusade in 1957. The evangelist was acquiring a reputation among Negroes as an enlightened white fundamentalist.
On King’s side, there were even dreams about a Graham-and-King crusade that would convert racially mixed audiences first in the North, then in border states, and finally in the Deep South.
Like countless Southern moderates, he was being forced to choose, and within a year King would be writing to “Brother Graham” pleading with him not to allow segregationist politicians on the platform of the San Antonio Crusade.
