The Fifties

by David Halberstam

One reason that Americans as a people became nostalgic about the fifties more than twenty-five years later was not so much that life was better in the fifties (though in some ways it was), but because at the time it had been portrayed so idyllically on television.

When The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit appeared in 1955, it hit a vital nerve. “I wasn’t thinking about what was happening to the country when I wrote

This new threat to the human spirit came not from poverty but from affluence, bigness, and corporate indifference from bland jobs through which the corporation subtly and often unconsciously subdued and corrupted the human spirit.

America was producing a class whose sudden economic advancement, coming as it did within a generation, had outstripped the social and psychological preparations that might normally precede it? Had the very speed overwhelmed the capacity to enjoy and fully understand such affluence? Riesman himself clearly thought that Mills had touched on something important, but he was also dubious that the new white-collar class was as alienated as Mills suggested.

They found a largely unsympathetic view of themselves in the mainstream media, which was, of course, owned by large corporations. What made America’s power structure so interesting in the years after World War Two were its contradictions, most of which defied the traditional dogma of either the left or the right.

She paid her ten cents, boarded the bus, and took a seat in the rear, or black, section of the bus, near the dividing line between the white and black sections. On Montgomery’s public buses, the first ten rows were for white people, the last twenty-six for blacks. In many cities in the South, the line dividing sections on buses was fixed. This was not true in Montgomery; by custom, the driver had the power, if need be, to expand the white section and shrink the black section by ordering blacks to give up

First come, first served might have been the rule of public transportation in most of America, but it was not true in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955. To the blacks, it was just one additional humiliation to be suffered—because the system did not even guarantee the minimal courtesies and rights of traditional segregation.

She had just spent her entire day working in a department store tailoring and pressing clothes for white people and now she was being told that she had no rights. “Look, woman, I told you I wanted the seat. Are you going to stand up?” Blake said. Finally, Rosa Parks spoke. “No,” she said. “If you don’t stand up, I’m going to have you arrested,” Blake warned her. She told him to go right ahead, but she was not going to move. Blake got off the bus and went to phone the police, thereby involuntarily entering the nation’s history books; his was the most ordinary example of a Southern white man fending off any threat to the system of segregation.

Something inside her finally snapped. But if she had not planned to resist on that particular day, then it was also true that Rosa Parks had decided some time earlier that if she was ever asked to give up her seat for a white person, she would refuse to do so.

Mrs. Durr was a formidable activist who frequently defied local racial mores). Rosa Parks’s relationship with the Durrs showed the complexity of human relationships in the South, for she was both employee and friend. The Durrs were friends of Ed Nixon, one of the most militant blacks of his generation, and Virginia Durr once asked Nixon, the head of the local NAACP, if he knew of anyone who “did good sewing.” (She had three daughters, so a good deal of raising and lowering of hems went on in her home.) Yes, he said, and mentioned his fellow officer in the NAACP chapter. Soon Rosa Parks started to sew for the Durrs. The two women became good friends, and their friendship defied Southern custom.

But Virginia Durr helped Parks attend the integrated Highlander Folk School, in Monteagle, Tennessee, a school loathed by segregationists because it held workshops on how to promote integration. At Highlander she not only studied the techniques of passive resistance employed by Gandhi against the British, she also met whites who treated her with respect.

As the bus driver continued to shout at her, Parks thought to herself, how odd it was that you go through life making things comfortable for white people yet they don’t even treat you like a human being. There was something inevitable about this confrontation—a collision of rising black expectations with growing white resistance.

Soon two Montgomery policemen arrived. Was it true that the driver had asked her to get up? they asked. Yes, she said. Why hadn’t she obeyed? She felt she shouldn’t have to. “Why do you push us around?” she asked. “I don’t know, but the law is the law, and you’re under arrest,” one of the policemen said. Only then did she get up. The police escorted her to the patrol car. The police went back to talk to Blake. Did he want to press charges? Yes, he answered. The police took Parks to jail, where she was fingerprinted and charged with violating the city’s segregation laws. She was allowed one phone call, and she called her home. Her mother answered and asked instinctively, “Did they beat you?” No, she said, she was physically all right. She was the first person ever so charged—the first of many tactical mistakes on the part of city officials, for it gave the local black community what it had been seeking: the case on which to hang a lawsuit.

E. D. Nixon, Parks’s friend, called the police station to find out what had happened. Nixon was a Pullman car porter, a union man, and a powerful presence in the black community. For some twenty years he had been a black leader and activist in a town that despised the idea of racial change, and he became, in the process, absolutely fearless.

When Nixon called the police station to inquire about Rosa Parks, he was told it was none of his business. So he telephoned Clifford Durr, who said he would post bond. Nixon was not displeased by what had happened: This was the case he had been looking for.

Would she agree, he asked, to be a test case? The idea frightened Raymond Parks, her husband, a local barber who knew the violence that traditionally awaited those blacks foolhardy enough to challenge the system. He warned her, “Oh, the white folks will kill you, Rosa. Don’t do anything to make trouble, Rosa. Don’t bring a suit. The whites will kill you.”

Nixon went home and sketched a map of Montgomery—where blacks lived and where they worked. The distances were not, he decided, insurmountable. “You know what?” he told his wife. “What?” she asked. “We’re going to boycott the buses,” he said. “Cold as it is?” she answered skeptically. “Yes,” he said. “I doubt it,” she said.

In Montgomery the majority of bus riders were black, particularly black women who went across town, from a world of black poverty to white affluence, to work as domestics. Nevertheless, a black challenge to the bus company was a formidable undertaking.

Before the whites would take the blacks seriously, the blacks had to take themselves seriously—that was the task facing the black leadership of Montgomery in December 1955.

For many blacks, the bus line symbolized their powerlessness: Men were powerless to protect their wives and mothers from its indignities; women were powerless to protect their children.

There were, for instance, bus drivers who took a black customer’s money and then, while the customer was walking around to enter through the back door, would roar off.

He subsequently went before the all-white Alabama board of education and, in words that had a biblical ring to them, protested that changes were surely coming. “There is going to be a second day of judgment,” the Rev. Seay warned, “and a worst day of judgment, if we don’t all do what we can peacefully.... There are ways in which integration can be worked out in a peaceful process, and if we don’t find these ways, then we will be punished.

a black leader named Jo Ann Robinson wrote a letter to Montgomery’s mayor telling him of the growing resentment blacks felt about their treatment on the buses, reminding him that more than three quarters of the system’s riders were blacks and mentioning the possibility of a boycott.

She was on her way home to Cleveland. She had gotten on the nearly empty bus, and, without thinking, sat down in the white section. Suddenly, the white bus driver appeared, his arm drawn back as if to hit her, and shouted, “Get up from there! Get up from there!” “I felt,” she later said, “like a dog.” She stumbled off the bus, and, in her own words, completed the trip to Cleveland largely in tears. But later, as she replayed the events in her mind, she became angrier and angrier; she was a human being too and, if anything, a better educated one than the driver.

She was surprised by their lack of response: They assured her that this was life in Montgomery, Alabama. Not forever, she thought. Six years later, at the time of Rosa Parks’s protest, Mrs. Robinson had become president of the Women’s Political Council, an organization of black professional women. Her group had only recently won a major victory, entitling black customers to have the titles Mr., Mrs., or Miss used with their names when they received their bills from downtown white merchants.

A few months before Rosa Parks made her stand, a fifteen-year-old black girl had refused to give up her seat to a white and had been dragged from the bus (“She insisted she was colored and just as good as white,” T. J. Ward, the arresting policeman, had noted with some surprise during the local court proceedings on her arrest). She had been charged with assault and battery for resisting arrest. For a time the black leadership thought of making hers the constitutional test case it sought, but backed off when someone learned that she was pregnant.

Meetings closed to the press! Ed Nixon got up and began to taunt them. “How in hell are you going to have protest meetings without letting the white folks know?” he began. Then he reminded them that those being hurt were the black women of the city, the most powerless of the powerless, the domestics who went off every day to work for whites. These were the people who suffered the greatest pain from segregation and made up the core of every black church in town. “Let me tell you gentlemen one thing. You ministers have lived off the sweat of these washwomen all these years and you have never done anything for them,” he said.

Somebody has got to get hurt in this thing and if you the preachers are not the leaders then we will have to pray that God will send us more leaders.” That stunning assault contained all too much truth. It was a young minister named Martin Luther King, Jr., who answered Nixon and said that he was not a coward, that they should act in the open, use their own names, and not hide behind anyone else. With that, the Rev. King had at once taken a strong position for the boycott, but he had also shown he was not completely Nixon’s man.

But with a certain inevitability the movement sought him. He was a brilliant speaker. He had the ability to make complex ideas simple: By repeating phrases, he could expand an idea, blending the rational with the emotional. That gave him the great ability to move others, blacks at first and soon, remarkably enough, whites as well.

The white police watched the crowd gather with increasing nervousness, and the officer in charge finally ordered the organizers to turn off the public address system, hoping thereby to disperse the crowd. One of the black organizers answered that if the police wanted the PA system off, they could do it themselves. The cops, looking at the size of the crowd, decided to let them have their PA broadcast after all.

“Now, let us say that we are not here advocating violence. We have overcome that. I want it to be known throughout Montgomery and throughout the nation that we are a Christian people. The only weapon that we have in our hands this evening is the weapon of protest.”

They were, in effect, setting out to make America whole. “If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong. 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.” When it was over, it was clear that the right man had arrived in the right city at the right time; this would be no one-day boycott but one that would continue until the white community addressed black grievances.

(Five years before the bus boycott, at the time of the 1950 census, the city of Montgomery had had some 40,000 black citizens, including three doctors, one dentist, two lawyers, one pharmacist, and 92 preachers.) There were not a lot of black lawyers around in those days, and the usual political avenues were blocked in the Deep South. Therefore, the new black ministry was where talented young black men went to learn how to lead their people: It was outside the reach of the white community, a rare place where a young, well-educated black man could rise by merit alone.

The Rev. Williams had been a charter member of the local NAACP. When a local white newspaper criticized Atlanta’s blacks as being “dirty and ignorant,” he led the boycott that helped close the newspaper down.

The only place young Mike King decided he could find any kind of peace was in the church. He would feel, he wrote later, bitterness and anger descend upon him at other times of the day, but not when he was in church. He became a licensed minister at fifteen, traveling and preaching in small rural churches. At eighteen he went to Atlanta. There, he was regarded as a hick, bright but unlettered. He wanted badly to be somebody, yet he felt the awful shame of his rural ignorance, his rustic language.

But King pursued her relentlessly. For his first date he took his best pair of pants, put them between two boards, and then put the boards under his mattress for a few days in order to ensure a crease. He asked the lady who ran the boardinghouse to iron his best shirt. “Why, Reverend King, you must be fixin’ to court some nice young lady,” she had said. “No, ma’am,” he answered. “I’m fixin’ to get married.”

In a rage, he charged into the office of the president of the college and told his story. Then he stomped out. But because of his assertiveness, he was at last given a chance. “Apparently,” said the unsympathetic registrar, “you can begin classes at Morehouse. Don’t ask me why, but you can ...”

Young Martin lived the odd duality of a black prince: He at once was exceptionally privileged within the black world yet virtually everything outside it was denied him.

danced as a young seminarian and ventured increasingly into the world of social gospel, which Daddy King thought at heart a world of leftists, which, if it threatened the white order, might threaten as well the existing black hierarchy in which he had so handsomely succeeded.

Instead, King sought a Christianity that allowed him to love his fellow man and yet to protest the abundant inhumanities and injustices being inflicted on blacks. He studied Marxism diligently and found it formidable as a critique of capitalism but empty as theology—shamelessly materialistic in its antimaterialism, unloving and, finally, totalitarian.

Gandhi had had not merely the ability to lead but also to love, and to conquer inner darkness and rage.

His father warned him about them: The Dexter congregation was highly political, snobbish, and they had a reputation for devouring their pastors. They did not like a lot of whooping and hollering in their sermons. “At First Baptist,” Vernon Johns acidly told the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, “they don’t mind the preacher talking about Jesus, though they would never stoop so low as to talk about Him themselves. At Dexter Avenue they would prefer that you not mention his name.”

“Keep Martin Luther King in the background and God in the foreground and everything will be all right. Remember you’re a channel of the gospel, not a source.” The Montgomery people were so impressed they offered him their pulpit at $4,200 a year, which would make him the best-paid black minister in town.

As the bus boycott began, he would get up at 5:30 A.M. to work for three hours on his doctoral thesis and then join Coretta for breakfast before going off to his pastoral duties. (Critical parts of his thesis, it would turn out, were plagiarized, a reminder, like his womanizing, of the flaws in even the most exceptional of men.)

The white community had no idea how to deal with the boycott. The city leadership thought it was dealing with the black leadership from the past—poorly educated, readily divided, lacking endurance, and without access to national publicity outlets. When the boycott proved to be remarkably successful on the first day, the mayor of Montgomery, W. A. Gayle, did not sense that something historic was taking place, nor did he move to accommodate the blacks, who were in fact not asking for integrated buses but merely a minimal level of courtesy and a fixed line between the sections. Gayle turned to a friend and said, “Comes the first rainy day and the Negroes will be back on the buses.” Soon it did rain, but the boycott continued.

Inevitably, the city leaders resorted to what had always worked in the past: the use of police power. The city fathers decided that it had to break the back of the carpool, and soon the police started arresting carpool drivers.

Martin Luther King, Jr., was arrested for driving 30 miles an hour in a 25-mile-an-hour zone. He was taken to the police station and fingerprinted; at first it appeared that he would be kept overnight, but because the crowd of blacks outside the station kept growing larger and noisier, the police let King go on his own recognizance. Two days later, King’s house was bombed by a white extremist, the first in a series of such incidents at the homes of black leaders and at black churches. In unity and nonviolence the blacks found new strength, particularly as the nation began to take notice. Things that had for so long terrified them—the idea of being arrested and spending the night in prison, for example—became a badge of honor.

King was, in effect, taking a crash course in the uses of modern media and proving a fast learner.

But that power deserted the local newspapers now, in no small part because the Montgomery story was too important for even the most virulently segregationist newspaper to ignore completely, affecting as it did virtually every home in the city; second, because even when the local newspapers tried to control the coverage, and at the very least minimize it, the arrival of television meant that the newspapers were no longer the only potential journalistic witnesses.