Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63

by Taylor Branch

To do this, car owners must volunteer cars, and drivers must volunteer to drive. No money could change hands directly, but passengers could make contributions to the MIA, and the MIA could in turn subsidize the costs of the car pool.

Whatever it took, they would do it. That first night, more than 150 car owners signed up to lend their cars to the boycott. The fractious classes of Montgomery’s Negroes now promised to blend their daily lives. Several thousand of them floated from the mass meeting of December 8 on a buoyant new cloud of optimism, leaving the harsh arithmetic to the future, or to God. 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.

King buried his face in his hands at the kitchen table. He admitted to himself that he was afraid, that he had nothing left, that the people would falter if they looked to him for strength. Then he said as much out loud. He spoke the name of no deity, but his doubts spilled out as a prayer, ending, “I’ve come to the point where I can’t face it alone.” As he spoke these words, the fears suddenly began to melt away. He became intensely aware of what he called an “inner voice” telling him to do what he thought was right. Such simplicity worked miracles, bringing a shudder of relief and the courage to face anything. It was for King the first transcendent religious experience of his life.

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.

This made no sense to Rustin, but more taunts and a few questions at home turned his entire world upside down. The woman he had always known as his older sister Florence was in fact his mother.

His mother and father, the uneducated caterers, were actually his grandparents, and his other brothers and sisters were actually his aunts and uncles.

The Communist Party ran the only integrated social clubs in Harlem.

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.

Disgusted with the Socialists, Rustin joined the Young Communist League.

Having found himself, he could not quit his work just because the party cared more about the Soviet Union than about race.

Until recently, the Communist Rustin had scorned Randolph as a lifelong Socialist. Now, suddenly, it was Randolph who was the most militant of the Negro leaders, having threatened publicly to lead a massive march on Washington unless President Roosevelt issued an order banning racial discrimination in defense industries. Randolph’s

As FOR’s youth secretary, Rustin began his career as an itinerant Gandhian.

The FOR developed during the war a new organization called the Congress of Racial Equality. Rustin worked both for FOR and CORE, as did a young Negro aristocrat named James Farmer. Together they sat at the feet of a traveling Gandhi disciple named Krishnalal Shridharani, author of War Without Violence. This book became the semiofficial bible of CORE, and by example the hard-drinking, cigar-smoking, woman-chasing Shridharani taught the wide-eyed young Americans that Gandhian politics did not require a life of dull asceticism.

did require sacrifice, however, and in 1943 Rustin renounced as an unconscionable privilege his right to Quaker war duty in a hospital, spending the remainder of World War II in Lewisburg Penitentiary.

In 1947, Rustin joined a CORE-sponsored bus ride through the South to test a new Supreme Court ruling that Negro passengers on interstate routes could not be forced to sit in the back of the bus.

Stories of his travels became legend within the restricted circles of Gandhian intellectuals.

Rustin welcomed more jailings and a few beatings, including one in New Orleans that left him without some of his front teeth.

This made the third time that Rustin had been crushed—once by his family, once by the Communist Party, and now by his own inner drives. Unemployed, a bastard, a Negro, an ex-Communist, an ex-con, and a homosexual, he was a misfit by any social standard, but Rustin still believed that he could not only rescue himself but also have a positive moral impact on the entire country. To him, this was cosmic logic and the romance of the ages. He saw a chance in the Montgomery bus boycott before anyone else.

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.

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.

became big news when Powell, a Democrat, emerged to endorse Eisenhower for reelection, saying that he would do more for civil rights.

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

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.

“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.

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.

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.

The next day, Christmas Eve, a car pulled up to a Montgomery bus stop where a fifteen-year-old Negro girl was standing alone, and five men jumped out, beat her, and quickly fled.

A few days after the taxi-stand bombing, Montgomery police charged seven white men with that crime as well as most of the prior bombings. Hopes for justice swelled within the MIA, until a jury acquitted the first two defendants in spite of their signed confessions.

The steady drain of disillusioned party members swiftly became a flood. By the end of the year, party membership was down from a postwar high of 80,000 to some 5,000. So many of this remnant were FBI informants that J. Edgar Hoover briefly entertained a proposal to take control of the party by throwing the votes of informants behind one faction at the upcoming party convention in February 1957.

tiny caucus of the three warring factions

John and Lillian Gates represented the liberals, who wanted to break loose from subservience to the Soviet Union and “Americanize” the party, taking Communist principles into mainstream politics. Ben Davis represented the hard-liners, who scorned such proposals as reformist surrender. Against the evils he had known, Davis could imagine no cure less cataclysmic than another Russian Revolution, and, having given up everything to follow the Kremlin, he snarled at the suggestion that he retreat to Atlanta and join a timid little NAACP picket line. Albert “Doc” Blumberg represented a middle faction loyal to Communist Party leader Eugene Dennis. Blumberg, a former philosophy professor at ...

As the nature of Levison’s call registered on the people in the adjoining room, a new debate erupted. The Gateses argued furiously that Levison was subjecting King to needless, unconscionable danger. If a spy or an FBI wiretap revealed such a call from a gathering of top national Communists, King might be destroyed. King had enough problems already, they said, and party people should stay away lest they ruin him—as they had ruined Paul Robeson—by encouraging him to endorse the Soviets. All this infuriated Ben Davis, who retorted that the Gates faction always blamed the party instead of the reactionaries. America needed a hundred Robesons, he insisted, and if Levison could make one of King, so much the better. The argument raged until Levison returned to shrug it off.

said, “You can’t legislate morality.” News of this instantly famous comment crossed the ministers’ telegrams. Although it dismayed King, the remark provided him with the grist for numerous sermons about how the President misconstrued the essential function of law.

vote. “A law may not make a man love me,” said King, “but it can stop him from lynching me.”

King wanted to make his case to Eisenhower personally—and to be seen doing so—but the President ducked. Eisenhower supported the basic citizenship rights of Negroes, which was why he allowed the resubmission in 1957 of his proposed voting rights legislation, but he bridled at the company of Negroes. This discomfort extended to school desegregation laws and to any other proposals that would foster more than minimal contact between whites and Negroes, even in public places. 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. Only his private secretary winced with embarrassment when he passed along the latest “nigger jokes” from his friends at the Bobby Jones golf course in Augusta. During his vacation at Thomasville, Georgia, where King’s telegram reached him, Ike shot his first wild turkey. His hunting party rode around Treasury Secretary Humphrey’s farm in wicker carriages pulled by white mules and driven by what a friend called “the old colored retainers.” Eisenhower never had received a Negro delegation at the White House to discuss civil rights, and he did not reply to King’s telegram.

“When I stood there in Westminster Abbey, with all of its beauty, I thought about all of the beautiful hymns and anthems that the people would go into there to sing, yet the Church of England never took a stand against this system. The Church of England sanctioned it. The Church of England gave it a moral stature. And all of the exploitation perpetuated by the British Empire was sanctioned by the Church of England. Something else came to my mind. God comes into the picture even when the Church won’t take a stand. God…has said that all men must reflect the dignity and worth of all human personality…. Seems this morning that I can hear God speaking.”

some black, not some yellow and some brown, but all flesh shall see it together. They shall see it from Montgomery! They shall see it from New York! They shall see it from Ghana! They shall see it from China! For I can look out and see a great number, as John saw, marching into the great eternity, because God is working in this world and at this hour and at this moment. And God grants that we will get on board and start marching with God, because we got orders now to break down the bondage and the walls of colonialism, exploitation, and imperialism, to break them down to the point that no man will trample over another man, but that all men will respect the dignity and worth of all human personality. And then we will be in Canaan’s freedom land. Moses might not get to see Canaan, but his children will see it. He even got to the mountain top enough to see it, and that assured him that it was coming.” King closed the service by asking the congregation to sing the traditional Baptist hymn of invitation, and the members of the prim little church filed out to the strains of the organ postlude, having sampled not only London and Ghana but King’s own vision of apocalypse.

“If there is one concept of dominating importance it is that of the non-partisan approach,” they wrote King, concerned that Nixon might lure him into making public statements favoring the Republican Party. The two advisers knew that King was vulnerable to blandishments from the Republicans, because Daddy King and nearly all the most powerful preachers of the National Baptist Convention were lifelong Republicans.

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. King and Wilkins were among those sending telegrams calling for the President to take a firm stand.

Lawson and the other adults argued for delay, on the grounds that only a small fraction of the students had received any training. This was not a game, they said. Sooner or later the city would put demonstrators in jail, and their organization—the Nashville Christian Leadership Conference, a local affiliate of King’s SCLC—had less than $100 in reserve. They needed time to raise a bail fund. These and other words of caution gave way to a tide of student sentiment, however, and Lawson found himself giving a crash course on nonviolence late into the night. He told the crowd how to behave in the face of a hundred possible emergencies, how to avoid violating the loitering laws, how to move to and from the lunch counters in orderly shifts, how to fill the seats of students who needed to go to the bathroom, even how to dress: stockings and heels for the women, coats and ties for the fellows. When in doubt, he stressed, the newcomers should take their cue from the behavior of the workshop members who had demonstrated before.

Sit it training

In Montgomery, the Alabama State student body pledged at a mass meeting not to register for spring classes until their nine expelled peers were reinstated, whereupon the administration, under relentless pressure from the state, banned unregistered students from the cafeteria.

King tried to go in both directions at once, by a path of his own invention. On March 5, he offered Ella Baker’s SCLC post to Wyatt Tee Walker. In so doing, he signaled his refusal to wait any longer for Abernathy.

Walker was a hotspur. As a New Jersey high school student in the 1940s, he had heard Paul Robeson say that if being for freedom and equality meant being a Red, then he was a Red. Walker promptly joined the Young Communist League. One of his high school papers was a five-year plan for a Soviet-type economy in the United States, and he dreamed of carrying out technically ingenious assassinations against leading segregationists. In college, he acquired dark-rimmed glasses that gave his face the look of a brooding Trotskyite.

Six years later, Walker proved his own enthusiasm for the sit-ins by going to jail before King’s job offer reached him in Petersburg.

Spurning the role of supervisor, he took his wife, his two children, a few other preachers, and several students to the all-white Petersburg public library. His budding media consciousness inspired him to appear wearing a clerical collar for the first time in his life. His flamboyant admiration of Vernon Johns inspired the peculiar act by which he violated the segregation laws: before the eyes of the gathered police and reporters, Walker asked the librarian to give him the first volume of Douglas Southall Freeman’s biography of Robert E. Lee. Johns, who admired some of Lee’s qualities while despising his cause, often had cited Freeman’s book to Walker in his Civil War discourses, and it tickled Walker to think that white Southerners would arrest him for trying to read about their most cherished hero.

Pat Stephens issued a public statement: “We could be out on appeal, but we strongly believe that Martin Luther King was right when he said, ‘We’ve got to fill the jails in order to win our equal rights.’”

King praised them, declaring that there was “nothing more majestic and sublime” than their willingness to suffer for a righteous cause.

Only in Atlanta did King mute his praise of the sit-in movement.