Prologue
1. Among works that have explored the impact of Montgomery on the broader civil rights movement, see Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement; Branch, Parting the Waters; Fairclough, To Redeem the Soul of America; Garrow, Bearing the Cross; and D. Williams, with Greenhaw, The Thunder of Angels. Several recent works have elevated the roles played by Jo Ann Robinson, Mary Fair Burks, Rosa Parks, and E. D. Nixon in laying the groundwork for the bus boycott. See, for instance, Garrow, ed., The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It; Dyson, I May Not Get There with You, 202–4; Burns, To The Mountaintop, 19–25; and D. Williams, with Greenhaw, The Thunder of Angels.
2. Over the past few decades, several historians have examined the significant role people in local communities played in preparing the way for and leading the civil rights movement. Others have also helpfully examined the connections of labor to the civil rights movement. See, for example, Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom; Dittmer, Local People; Fairclough, Race and Democracy; Eick, Dissent in Wichita; Whitaker, Race Work; Theoharis and Woodard, eds., Groundwork; Honey, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights; Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism; and Minchin, The Color of Work.
3. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, 417–18.
4. Pittsburgh Courier, December 7, 1957.
5. Eskew, But for Birmingham. Over the last few years of King’s life, he began to participate more directly in efforts to bring about economic justice, as evidenced in his support for the striking Memphis sanitation workers and in his organization of the interracial Poor People’s Campaign.
6. Branch, Parting the Waters, 558.
7. Garrow, ed., The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It; Crawford, Rouse, and Woods, eds., Women in the Civil Rights Movement. For more on the contributions of women to the struggle, see Collier-Thomas and Franklin, Sisters in the Struggle. For a detailed study of the life and contributions of Ella Baker, see Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement. Gender analysis of the civil rights era is beginning to consider the construction of masculinity (see Estes, I Am a Man!).
8. Johnny E. Williams, African American Religion and the Civil Rights Movement in Arkansas; Chappell, A Stone of Hope; and Marsh, The Beloved Community.
9. The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., vol. 6.
10. Branch, Parting the Waters, 225; Branch, Pillar of Fire, 24.
11. MIA mass meeting at Holt Street Baptist Church, December 5, 1955, in The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 3: 71.
12. Rosa Parks to Mrs. Henry F. Shepherd, July 6, 1955, Mss 265, Folder 22, Box 22, Highlander Research and Education Center.
1. “The Stirring of the Water”
1. Montgomery Advertiser, April 14, 1952: “The new section of seats in the bowl will be reserved for Negroes”; “Just three minutes before the annual Easter Sunrise Service was to begin in Cramton Bowl yesterday, the rain, which had been falling steadily, stopped.” Portia Trenholm, “Memoirs,” April 17, 1958, Portia Trenholm Papers. This twelve-page document, composed during the bus boycott, includes a cover letter from the Alabama State College professor L. D. Reddick to Portia Trenholm dated April 17, 1958. While the Montgomery Advertiser stories regarding the service indicate blacks attended in 1952, articles about the 1953 event do not mention African American attendees or the availability of bus services for the event (Montgomery Advertiser, April 14, 1952, April 3, 6, 1953).
2. While many historians have examined the Montgomery bus boycott in great detail, few have given serious attention to the climate in the city in the years prior to King’s arrival in 1954. Those who do consider this period tend to consider only particular aspects of the situation. For instance, Taylor Branch focuses primarily on the tenure of Vernon Johns at Dexter (Parting the Waters, 1–26). Dividing Lines, J. Mills Thornton’s recent work on Montgomery, Selma, and Birmingham, does an excellent job chronicling the political and demographic shifts facing Montgomery following World War II. Thornton recognizes the major African American voices that set the scene for the civil rights movement, yet his attention remains fixed on the political ramifications of the city’s demographic shifts. Montgomery’s white citizens who worked against white supremacy escape Thornton’s notice. Willy Leventhal has highlighted many of the white participants who had an impact on Montgomery, including Clifford and Virginia Durr, Aubrey Williams, Juliette Morgan, and Clara Rutledge. His narrative does not extend back to the early 1950s, however, when these white activists were finding their voices (Leventhal, “The White Folks,” in Gray, Leventhal, Sikora, and Thornton, The Children Coming On, 195–223). Most other significant contributors to the historiography of the Montgomery movement deal sparingly with events prior to King’s arrival in 1954.
3. Rogers, Confederate Home Front, 5, 52. Rogers notes that in 1860, workers in Montgomery handled more than 1 million cotton bales. In 1958, Ralph David Abernathy described Montgomery as “a non-industrial city. Montgomery is just a shopping center for what we call the Black-Belt areas” (Abernathy, “The Natural History of a Social Movement: The Montgomery Improvement Association,” master’s thesis, Department of Sociology, Atlanta University, August 1958, in Garrow, ed., The Walking City).
4. For a detailed history of Maxwell Air Force Base, see Ennels and Newton, The Wisdom of Eagles. Taylor Branch asserts that Maxwell and nearby Gunter Air Force bases contributed almost $50 million a year to the local economy (Branch, Parting the Waters, 13).
5. Thornton, Dividing Lines, 23. For a thorough exploration of the significant political shifts in Montgomery during the decade prior to the boycott, including the election of Dave Birmingham, see ibid., 20–40.
6. Abernathy, “The Natural History of a Social Movement,” in Garrow, ed., The Walking City, 109; Preston Valien, “The Montgomery Bus Protest as a Social Movement,” ibid., 94; Steven Milner, “The Montgomery Bus Boycott: A Case Study in the Emergence of a Social Movement,” ibid., 433.
7. Kathy Dunn Jackson, “You Can Go Home Again,” in Westhauser, Smith, and Fremlin, eds., Creating Community, 19–20.
8. Alabama Tribune, September 19, 1952; Thornton, Dividing Lines, 38.
9. Thornton, Dividing Lines, 33–35.
10. Garrow, The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It, 21; Thornton, Dividing Lines, 35.
11. For a thorough discussion regarding the founding and history of Tuskegee Institute, see Norrell, Reaping the Whirlwind; and Harlan, Booker T. Washington. Portia Trenholm, “Memoirs,” 2. Trenholm claims that during the 1930s, “the buying power of Tuskegee instructors was higher than” that of teachers at Alabama State Teachers College in Montgomery.
12. Rogers, Ward, Atkins, and Flynt, Alabama: The History of a Deep South State, 329; Juan Williams and Ashley, I’ll Find a Way or Make One, 312–13; Jo Ann Robinson to H. Councill Trenholm, August 3, 1950, H. Councill Trenholm Papers.
13. Roberson, Fighting the Good Fight, 21, 56; Virginia Durr to Clark and Mairi Foreman, February 26, 1953, in Sullivan, ed., Freedom Writer, 47. Montgomery’s NAACP chapter was not alone in its middle-class orientation. According to Manford Berg in his recent study of the NAACP, the years immediately following World War II saw a vast increase in working-class memberships, a period that corresponds with when E. D. Nixon was president of his local and state chapters. Despite this surge, Berg admits that “the local leaders continued to be male and middle-class.” The spike in membership nationally was short-lived, with a 1946 high-water mark of roughly 540,000 members decreasing to 350,000 in 1948, and falling to 150,000 in 1950 (Berg, “The Ticket to Freedom,” 109–11).
14. E. D. Nixon to Walter White, December 14, 1944, Group II, Box C-4, Montgomery Branch, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Papers, 1940–1954, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Hereafter cited as Montgomery NAACP Papers.
15. Rosa Parks to Ella Baker, May 2, 1945, Donald Jones to Ella Baker, 1945, Montgomery NAACP Papers.
16. E. D. Nixon to W. G. Porter, 1945, W. G. Porter to Ella Baker, December 1945, Montgomery NAACP Papers; Parks, with Haskins, Rosa Parks, My Story, 80–95.
17. Brinkley, Rosa Parks, 48, 71.
18. The Citizens Overall Committee letterhead used in 1944 lists most major African American organizations in Montgomery as members. The presidents and leaders of the NAACP, the Negro Civic League, and the City Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs were joined by President Trenholm of Alabama State Teachers College, several prominent businessmen, teachers, and ministers, as well as local newspaper editors in serving as members of the Citizens Overall Committee. The particular correspondence concerned the need to upgrade “the condition of the Ladies rest room in the Colored Waiting Room in the Union Station.” Nixon also drew attention to the filth of the wash basin and the unsanitary state of the drinking water provided (E. D. Nixon to the President of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, February 7, 1944, Box 27, Nixon Collection; Nixon, interview by Lumpkin).
19. Garrow, ed., The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It, 27; Alabama Tribune, December 5, 1952.
20. Nixon, interview by Lumpkin; Warlick, “‘Man of the Year’ for ‘54,” 27; Donald Jones to Ella Baker, 1945, Ella Baker to E. D. Nixon, January 21, 1946, Montgomery NAACP Papers; Gray, Leventhal, Sikora, and Thornton, The Children Coming On, 225.
21. Charles G. Gomillion was the dean of students and a sociology professor at Tuskegee Institute. He was involved in the leadership of the local NAACP chapter and in the Tuskegee Civic Association. In 1957, the Alabama state senator Sam Englehardt Jr. sponsored a successful bill before the state legislature that redrew the boundaries of Tuskegee in an attempt to nullify the black vote in the community. In response, Gomillion led a boycott of Tuskegee’s white merchants. With Fred Gray as their attorney, they filed suit against the Alabama legislature’s ruling. In 1961, the U.S. Supreme Court found for the plaintiffs in a case known as Gomillion vs. Lightfoot (Robert E. Hughes, Alabama Council on Human Relations newsletter [January 1958], Fellowship of Reconciliation Papers; Gray, Bus Ride to Justice, 112–24). The 1946 election was the first Alabama Democratic primary in the twentieth century in which blacks could legally vote. In 1944, the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled white primaries unconstitutional (Thornton, Dividing Lines, 27). Turnipseed, interview by Durr.
22. Egerton, Speak Now against the Day, 101, 321, 464.
23. Gould Beech and Mary Beech, interview by Durr.
24. Virginia Durr to Otto Nathan, August 29, 1951, in Sullivan, ed., Freedom Writer, 35–36.
25. Durr, Outside the Magic Circle, 241–47.
26. Montgomery Advertiser, June 9, 1952.
27. The Southern Conference Education Fund (SCEF) grew out of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW), an organization formed during the New Deal era in an effort to mobilize a liberal coalition in the South. Founded in 1946, when the SCHW began to focus on political lobbying, the SCEF was a tax-exempt organization focused primarily on challenging racial discrimination in the South through the dissemination of information (Egerton, Speak Now against the Day, 441, 529–30). Dombrowski to Morgan, June 19, 1952, Morgan to Dombrowski, July 8, 1952, Morgan Papers; Clifford and Virginia Durr, interview by Lumpkin.
28. Andrews, interview by Durr.
29. Ibid.
30. Clifford and Virginia Durr, interview by Lumpkin; Nixon, interview by Lumpkin.
31. For a thorough description of the founding of both Columbus Avenue Baptist Church (First Baptist Church) and Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, see Roberson, Fighting the Good Fight, 1–23.
32. Branch, Parting the Waters, 1–5, 107.
33. Roberson, Fighting the Good Fight, 23–50.
34. Vaughn and Wills, eds., Reflections on Our Pastor, 6.
35. Pierce, interview by Lumpkin.
36. Ibid. Pierce characterized Johns as a “rough, knock-down, drag-out” type of person who was “a very militant guy.” While Pierce admitted that “Johns pulverized the soil and planted the seed” for the Montgomery movement, he characterized him as “too brusque,” which prevented him from galvanizing the people of Dexter and the broader community. Zelia Evans and J. T. Alexander, in their history of Dexter, add: “One sermon preached during his pastorate was entitled, ‘It’s safe to Murder Negroes in Alabama.’ Its announcement on the bulletin board landed him before a grand jury which tried to prevent him from preaching it. Neither the grand jury nor the Klu [sic] Klux Klan cross that was burned the day of the sermon kept him from delivering his planned discourse” (Evans and Alexander, eds., The Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, 64).
37. Pierce, interview by Lumpkin; Lewis and Ligon, interview by Lumpkin; Evans and Alexander, eds., The Dexter Avenue Baptist Church 1877–1977, 64. Lewis Baldwin credits Johns for paving the way, noting King’s “success in bringing the Dexter Avenue Church to the forefront of the struggle owed much to the contributions and inspiration of persons who preceded him in Montgomery. One such person was Vernon Johns, the imposing, scholarly, and controversial figure who was King’s immediate predecessor at the Dexter Avenue Church” (Baldwin, There Is a Balm in Gilead, 183).
38. Gray, interview by Lumpkin. These outside perspectives on Dexter may be a bit simplistic. According to the member Thelma Rice, the congregation “was a mixed church across the board. There were those who were domestics, there were those who were skilled workers, there were those who were in the educational field. There were the professionals, but there was a mixture.” While Rice may be overstating her case, given the small percentage of middle-class blacks in the city, the congregation undoubtedly did include some from the working class (Rice, interview by Lumpkin).
39. Mary Fair Burks, “Trailblazers: Women in the Montgomery Bus Boycott,” in Crawford, Rouse, and Woods, eds., Women in the Civil Rights Movement, 76, 78.
40. D. Williams, with Greenhaw, The Thunder of Angels, 81; Elaine M. Smith, “Living A Womanist Legacy,” in Westhauser, Smith, and Fremlin, eds., Creating Community, 74–75.
41. While Burks and Jo Ann Robinson claim the organization was founded in 1946 and that Robinson became president in 1950, both dates are incorrect. Burks’s contention that she was inspired by a Vernon Johns sermon eliminates the possibility that the group was founded in 1946, as Johns did not become Dexter’s pastor until 1947. Additionally, in 1953 Mary Fair Burks composed a letter to the editor of the Montgomery Advertiser that she signed, “Mary Fair Burks, President, Negro Women’s Political Council” (Montgomery Advertiser, April 21, 1953). J. Mills Thornton claims the WPC emerged after local black women were excluded from the newly formed Montgomery League of Women Voters, which began in December 1947. When national leaders of the League of Women Voters refused to charter a black chapter in the city, the WPC was born (see Thornton, Dividing Lines, 32, 78, 590n23). While this broader consideration explains the need for an independent organization, Burks’s story fleshes out the specific events that sparked the timing of the WPC, which started closer to 1949 than 1946.
42. Thelma Glass notes the scope of the organization’s vision: “We had two very strong chapters going, but the whole idea was to have a political council in each area of Montgomery. Four, I think, was in the original plan: east, west, north and south, with its own membership and what not” (Gray, Leventhal, Sikora, and Thornton, The Children Coming On, 131). Ibid., 229.
43. Garrow, ed., The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It, 15–16.
44. Crawford, Rouse, and Woods, eds., Women in the Civil Rights Movement, 75; Garrow, ed., The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It, 22.
45. Burns, ed., Daybreak of Freedom, 59–61; Thornton, Dividing Lines, 46.
46. Gray, Leventhal, Sikora, and Thornton, The Children Coming On, 130, 228–29; Garrow, ed., The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It, 28.
47. Vaughn and Wills, eds., Reflections on Our Pastor, 14–16.
48. Rice, interview by Lumpkin; Evans and Alexander, eds., The Dexter Avenue Baptist Church 1877–1977, 64. See also Roberson, Fighting the Good Fight, 100–101.
49. Vaughn and Wills, eds., Reflections on Our Pastor, 6, 45.
50. Branch, Parting the Waters, 11; Roberson, Fighting the Good Fight, 105–6.
51. Montgomery Advertiser, November 11, 1952. The front-page story claimed Reeves confessed to robbing and assaulting Prescott, but he denied raping her, and the chief deputy sheriff, George Mosley, said that medical examiners concluded “the woman definitely was not raped.” Authorities eventually charged Reeves with assaulting six white women over the previous sixteen months. Prescott later claimed that Reeves had tried to rape her. A story by Joe Azbell noted “some 150 Negroes were quizzed by policemen in the 16 month investigation” (Montgomery Advertiser, November 13, 1952). When Reeves took the stand in his trial, he “repudiated six confessions allegedly made to investigating officers” (Montgomery Advertiser, November 29, 1952). The jury reached a guilty verdict in thirty-eight minutes, and Reeves was sentenced to death (Montgomery Advertiser, November 30, 1952; December 4, 5, 1952). Burns, To the Mountaintop, 1.
52. Vaughn and Wills, eds., Reflections on Our Pastor, 25.
2. “The Gospel I Will Preach”
1. King to Coretta Scott, July 18, 1952, in The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 123–26.
2. The change of names from Michael to Martin for both father and son appears to have taken place gradually during the mid-1930s. See The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 1: 31; and King Sr., with Riley, Daddy King: An Autobiography, 26. Martin Luther King, “An Autobiography of Religious Development,” in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 1: 361. Much of the historiography of the past few decades has corrected earlier works that overemphasized the white liberal theological roots of King’s intellectual development. Lewis Baldwin’s There Is a Balm in Gilead highlights the black southern roots of King’s thought: “The black experience and the black Christian tradition were the most important sources in the shaping of King’s life, thought, vision, and efforts to translate the ethical ideal of the beloved community into practical reality” (2). Baldwin notes that previous works, such as Kenneth Smith and Ira Zepp’s The Search for the Beloved Community and John Ansbro’s Martin Luther King, Jr., represent “a narrow, elitist, and racist approach that assumes that the black church and the larger black community are not healthy and vital contexts for the origin of intellectual ideas regarding theology and social change. The consequence of that approach has been to abstract King’s intellectual development from his social and religious roots—family, church, and the larger black community—and to treat it primarily as a product of white Western philosophy and theology” (3). Other scholars have made similar arguments regarding the primacy of Atlanta, King’s family, and Ebenezer in King’s development, including Cone, Martin and Malcolm and America; Miller, Voice of Deliverance; Lischer, The Preacher King; and Dyson, I May Not Get There with You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr.
3. For a detailed account of the 1906 riot, see Mixon, The Atlanta Riot. For a thorough study of Atlanta in the 1930s and 1940s, see Ferguson, Black Politics in New Deal Atlanta.
4. Introduction to vol. 1 of Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 1: 6, 15, 33. For a discussion of Williams’s influence on Martin Luther King Sr., see ibid., 1: 24–28.
5. Martin Luther King Sr., moderator’s address, Atlanta Missionary Baptist Association, October 17, 1940, as quoted ibid., 1: 34; King Jr., “Acceptance Address at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church,” May 2, 1954, ibid., 6: 154–57. While King referred to his father’s church as part of the “fundamentalist line,” Daddy King’s faith was more nuanced than rigid (King Jr., “An Autobiography of Religious Development,” November 22, 1950, ibid., 1: 361). Although Daddy King’s theological views on salvation, Scripture, and the nature of Jesus were more conservative, these did not lead to division with those holding more modern views on God, the Bible, and theology. Despite King Jr.’s more liberal theological leanings, his father heartily supported his ordination to the ministry. Keith Miller helpfully notes: “What separates white fundamentalists from liberal white Protestants is the issue of the literal truth of scripture. But, despite the clash between J. H. Jackson and Gardner Taylor, black Protestants have never found the issue of Biblical literalism to be paramount or divisive. In fact, Biblical literalism is essentially a non-issue among black Protestants. Throughout his public career King never publicly stated whether he believed the Bible to be literally true. Nor in hundreds of interviews and press conferences was he ever asked to do so. The entire question did not matter to him, his followers, or other blacks” (Miller, Voice of Deliverance, 222–23n56). Although Miller’s analysis is a bit simplistic, his framework is helpful for understanding the cohesion of black pastors around social issues even though they differed theologically.
6. King Jr., “An Autobiography of Religious Development,” November 22, 1950, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 1: 359–60: “I was much too young to remember the beginning of this depression, but I do recall how I questioned my parent about the numerous people standing in bread lines when I was about five years of age. I can see the effects of this early childhood experience on my present anti capitalistic feelings.” See also King Jr., Stride toward Freedom, 90; and Baldwin, There Is a Balm in Gilead,122. Baldwin demonstrates the influence of the plight of the poor and working class on King in his analysis of King’s summer jobs: “The fact that he chose the work of a common laborer is indeed remarkable, especially since, being the son of a prominent pastor and civic leader, he could have easily gotten less demanding jobs” (27).
7. King Jr., “An Autobiography of Religious Development,” November 22, 1950, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 1: 361; Warren, King Came Preaching, 15. Most of the recent scholarship on King has made this point as well, including Baldwin’s There Is a Balm in Gilead, Lischer’s Preacher King, and Cone’s Malcolm and Martin and America. Lischer also elevates the significance of the African American preaching tradition, noting King “learned more from the Negro preacher’s methods of sustaining a people and readying it for action than from any of his courses in graduate school; he absorbed more from his own church’s identification with the Suffering Servant than from anything he read in Gandhi. What came earliest to him remained the longest and enabled him to put a distinctively Christian seal on the struggle for civil rights in the United States” (Lischer, The Preacher King, 6). Lischer also emphasizes that King experienced the potential transforming power of God’s Word from his childhood at Ebenezer: “He believed that the preached Word performs a sustaining function for all who are oppressed and a corrective function for all who know the truth but lead disordered lives. He also believed that the Word of God possesses the power to change hearts of stone. This was not an abstract theology but an empirical experience. He had seen it happen in his father’s church.” Lischer specifically cites William Holmes Borders, Sandy Ray, and Gardner Taylor, three learned and influential black preachers of the day, and family friends all, as having an influence on young King (48). Borders was also a rival of Daddy King, as his Wheat Street Baptist Church sat a mere block west of Ebenezer on Auburn Avenue. As a teen, King would often sneak out of Ebenezer so he could slip into the balcony at Wheat Street to catch Borders’s Sunday morning sermon.
8. King Jr., “An Autobiography of Religious Development,” November 22, 1950, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 1: 263.
9. King Jr., “My Call to the Ministry,” August 7, 1959, ibid., 6: 367–68.
10. Benjamin Elijah Mays (1894–1984) served as the dean of Howard University’s School of Religion from 1934 to 1940, at which time he became the president of Morehouse College, a position he held until 1967. Mays received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and was the author of several books, including The Negro’s God (1938). For more on Mays, see his autobiography, Born to Rebel, esp. 191, 265; and Carter, ed., Walking Integrity, xi. Years later, in his essay “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” King downplayed the influence of Morehouse, reducing the school’s influence on his adoption of nonviolence to his exposure to Thoreau’s Essay on Civil Disobedience. Throughout, King stressed the influence of predominantly white theologians, philosophers, and social thinkers, while downplaying many of the significant African American influences on his life and thought, including Mays (King Jr., Stride toward Freedom, 90–107). King sought input from George Kelsey, Stanley Levison, and Bayard Rustin in composing the essay (see King to Kelsey, March 31, 1958; Kelsey to King, April 4, 1958, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 4: 391–92, 394–95; and Levison to King, April 1, 1958, Box 29A, King Papers, Boston University).
11. King Jr., “Preaching Ministry,” November 24, 1948, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. 6: 69–77.
12. Pittsburgh Courier, June 15, 1946. In a later article, Mays made a similar case for the type of commitment necessary to experience liberty: “Freedom is an achievement and not a gift. Whether it is freedom from external circumstances or freedom from an internally cramped spirit or soul, it must be achieved. It is seldom, if ever, given freely and it is never inwardly achieved without struggle and years of discipline. This is true of nations. It is true of races and it is equally true of individuals” (Mays, “Nehru,” Pittsburgh Courier, December 7, 1946).
13. Mays, “Signs of Hope,” Pittsburgh Courier, June 29, 1946; Mays, “Justice for All,” Pittsburgh Courier, February 22, 1947. In a later article, Mays sounded a similar note: “The faith of faiths is the deep-seated conviction that wrong cannot ultimately triumph over right, that that which is essentially evil will not survive, and that the universe itself sustains the good and fights on the side of right. If this is not so, there is little to hope for in this life” (Mays, “Ray of Hope,” Pittsburgh Courier, January 17, 1948). King Jr., “Will Capitalism Survive?” February 15, 1950, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 104–5; “The Death of Evil upon the Seashore,” July 24, 1955, Folder 110, Sermon File; King Jr., “Going Forward by Going Backward,” April 4, 1954, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 159–63. These quotes closely correspond to a selection from Harry Emerson Fosdick’s sermon “Why We Believe in a Good God,” found in his book On Being Fit to Live With: Sermons on Post-war Christianity. While King’s language more closely corresponds to Fosdick’s, King’s attraction to these quotes was undoubtedly influenced by his exposure to the moral underpinnings that informed the chapel sermons of Mays.
14. Mays, “Law Is Weapon,” Pittsburgh Courier, August 10, 1946; Mays, “Inferiority among Negroes,” Pittsburgh Courier, May 10, 1947; King Jr., “Overcoming an Inferiority Complex,” July 14, 1957, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 303–16.
15. Mays, “Man’s Greatest Enemy,” Pittsburgh Courier, February 8, 1947; King Jr., “Mastering Our Fears,” July 21, 1957, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 319–21.
16. Mays, “Advice to Graduates,” Pittsburgh Courier, June 7, 1947.
17. King Jr., “Transformed Nonconformist,” November 1954, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 195–98.
18. Mays, “Two Fears,” Pittsburgh Courier, July 20, 1946.
19. Mays, “Non-Violence,” Pittsburgh Courier, February 28, 1948. Mays met Gandhi on December 31, 1946, while visiting India. Mays’s article highlighted the courage, faith, and forgiveness Gandhian nonviolence demonstrates: “The nonviolent man must be absolutely fearless…. Non-violence is the essence of faith. He knows the method of non-violence will win. Nothing else can. This one can readily see, is faith in the moral and spiritual nature of the universe.” Finally Mays noted: “He died practicing what he preached. The press said that when falling he gave a sign which meant ‘forgive’” (Mays, “Power of Spirit,” Pittsburgh Courier, December 21, 1946).
20. King Jr., “Six Talks in Outline,” November 23, 1949, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 1: 249. In his essay “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” King credits a lecture by the Howard University president Mordecai Johnson as the launching point for his exploration of Gandhi. Delivered while King was attending Crozer, Johnson’s words may have served as a catalyst for King, not because they were new, but rather because they resonated with a message he had heard years earlier while a student at Morehouse (King Jr., Stride toward Freedom, 96).
21. Mays, “The Church amidst Ethnic and Racial Tensions,” speech delivered at the Second Assembly of the World Council of Churches, Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill., August 1954, transcribed as appendix B in Mays, Born to Rebel, 354.
22. Mays, “Another Victory,” Pittsburgh Courier, January 31, 1948; King Jr., “Loving Your Enemies,” August 31, 1952, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 126–28; King Jr., “Meaning of Forgiveness,” ibid., 6: 580–81.
23. W. Thomas McGann, “Statement on Behalf of Ernest Nichols, State of New Jersey vs. Ernest Nichols,” July 1950, in King Jr., Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 1: 327–29; King Jr., introduction to vol. 1 of Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 1: 53.
24. For more on personalism, see Deats and Robb, eds., The Boston Personalist Tradition in Philosophy, Social Ethics, and Theology; and Borrow, Personalism: A Critical Introduction. Keith Miller, in assessing King’s affinity for personalism, argues King “appreciated Personalist ideas because they were reassuringly familiar. His gravitation to Personalism is unsurprising inasmuch as the Personalists emphasized the same fatherly, personal God he heard praised in every sermon, hymn, and prayer offered at Ebenezer Church during his childhood and adolescence” (Miller, Voice of Deliverance, 62). Lewis Baldwin echoes Miller, noting King’s “conviction about the reality of the personal God was cultivated by the black church and black religion long before he entered a seminary and a university” (Baldwin, There Is a Balm in Gilead, 170).
25. Lischer, for instance, deemphasizes the influence of theologians on King’s thinking: “Profound changes in the graduate student’s thinking cannot be attributed to Niebuhr despite the mature King’s need to make it appear that Niebuhr had once made a decisive difference. Such was the dominance of Niebuhr: one was virtually obligated to retroject Niebuhr into one’s intellectual formation and stake out a position in relation to his, which is precisely what King did in his brief 1958 sketch, ‘Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,’ in which he credits Niebuhr for dampening his ‘superficial optimism,’ concerning human nature” (Lischer, The Preacher King, 61). Keith Miller comes to a similar conclusion: “Despite what he wrote in ‘Pilgrimage,’ King arrived at seminary with his most important ideas already intact. Although the African-American church does not appear in ‘Pilgrimage,’ it provided him with the foundation for virtually all the ideas of the essay.” Miller goes on to write: “King did not need the prodding of Niebuhr to awaken from a state of fatuous optimism because he never suffered from such a state. Under segregation blacks in the South confronted collective evil every single day. They did not enjoy the luxury of naïve optimism” (Miller, Voice of Deliverance, 54–55, 59). James Cone also challenges King’s assertions in “Pilgrimage,” noting, “In regard to deepening King’s optimism about the elimination of racism, the political philosophy of integrationism and the faith of the black church were much more important than Hegel or any other white thinker” (Cone, Martin and Malcolm and America, 30). King Jr., Stride toward Freedom, 90–107. King borrowed portions of “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” regarding his commitment to the social gospel from Harry Emerson Fosdick’s Hope of the World and Robert McCracken’s Questions People Ask. King Jr., “The Weaknesses of Liberal Theology I,” 1948, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 78–80.
26. King Jr., “Sermon Introductions,” November 30, 1948–February 16, 1949, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 83–84. In the case of “Sermon Introductions,” King’s use of Sheen constitutes academic plagiarism. The editors of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project have identified many egregious examples of plagiarism in King’s academic work at Crozer and Boston, including portions of his doctoral dissertation. When King’s plagiarism came to light, the Journal of American History devoted an issue to the topic (78 [June 1991]). King Jr., “The False God of Science,” July 5, 1953, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 130–32. King began his sermon with, “Dr. William Ernest Hecking has said that all life is divided into work and worship; that which we do for ourselves and that which we let the higher than ourselves do.” Fosdick’s sermon begins, “Professor Hocking is right in saying that all man’s life can be reduced to two aspects, work and worship—that which we do ourselves, and what we let the higher than ourselves do to us” (Fosdick, Successful Christian Living, 173–74). King kept an annotated copy of Successful Christian Living in his home study, along with many other collections of sermons by Fosdick and other prominent preachers. For further examination of this topic, see Dyson, I May Not Get There with You, 137–54; Miller, Voice of Deliverance, 132–48, 193–97; and Lischer, The Preacher King, 93–118. King Jr., “The False God of Nationalism,” July 12, 1953, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 132–33. King leans on Fosdick’s “Christianity’s Supreme Rival” in developing this sermon. King notes, “If time permitted, I would trace the history of this new religion, unravel the strands that, woven together, have produced it. In its present form it is a modern phenomenon developing from the eighteenth century on, but that it is now dominant in the world is clear.” By comparison, Fosdick wrote, “Were there time, one might trace the history of this dogma, unravel the strands that, woven together, have produced it. In its present form it is a modern phenomenon developing from the eighteenth century on, but that it is now dominant in the world is clear” (Fosdick, Hope of the World, 159). King had a copy of Hope of the World in his home study. King Jr., “First Things First,” August 2, 1953, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 143–46; King Jr., “Communism’s Challenge to Christianity,” August 9, 1953, ibid., 6: 146–50. King used three paragraph-long sections of Fosdick’s “Righteousness First” (Fosdick, A Great Time to Be Alive, 21–30). For his message on communism, King used several sections of McCracken’s “The Christian Attitude to Communism” (McCracken, Questions People Ask, 164–69). For further consideration of King’s homiletic plagiarism, see Miller, Voice of Deliverance; Lischer, Preacher King; Dyson, I May Not Get There with You; and Warren, King Came Preaching.
27. Introduction to vol. 2 of Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 2: 12–13.
28. Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000–1887; Scott to King, April 7, 1952, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 124; King to Coretta Scott, July 18, 1952, ibid., 6: 123–26. See also King Jr., “Civilization’s Great Need,” 1949, ibid., 6: 86–88.
29. King Jr., “Mastering Our Evil Selves,” June 5, 1949, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 94–97; King Jr., “Splinters and Planks,” July 24, 1949, ibid., Papers, 6: 97–99.
30. King Jr., “Loving Your Enemies,” August 31, 1952, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 126–28. King continued to challenge racism and call for social change during the summer of 1953. In a sermon on the influence of nationalism, King noted, “In America it is preached by the McCarthys and the Jenners, the advocators of white supremacy, and the America first movements” (King Jr., “The False God of Nationalism,” July 12, 1953, ibid., 6: 132–33). In a later sermon, King declared his allegiance to a socially engaged Christianity: “I happen to be a firm believer in what is called the ‘social gospel.’ Indeed, no one can intelligently care for personal life without caring about genetics and social reform” (King Jr., “Accepting Responsibility for Your Actions,” July 26, 1953, ibid., 6: 139–42). In a sermon assessing communism, King acknowledged their “strong attempt to eliminate racial prejudice. Communism seeks to transcend the superficialities of race and color, and you are able to join the Communist party whatever the color of your skin or the quality of blood in your veins.” Later in the sermon, King lamented: “Slavery could not have existed in America for more than two hundred fifty years if the Church had not sanctioned it. Segregation and discrimination could not exist in America today without the sanction of the Church. I am ashamed and appalled at the fact that Eleven O’Clock on Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in Christian America” (King Jr., “Communism’s Challenge to Christianity,” August 9, 1953, ibid., 6: 146–50).
31. Jo Ann Robinson, “Negroes Eat Too,” Montgomery Advertiser, October 13, 1952.
32. In addition to Vernon Johns, the tenure of Alfred Charles Livingston Arbouin as the pastor of Dexter was cut short when his wife struck up a friendship with a Maxwell Air Force Base soldier while Arbouin attended the 1946 National Baptist Convention. The deacons ended up forcing Arbouin out through the courts, although the whole matter was done in secret (Roberson, Fighting the Good Fight, 75–79; Branch, Parting the Waters, 5–6). Vaughn and Wills, eds., Reflections on our Pastor, 3–4. The Dexter deacon Joseph T. Brooks wrote King’s parents in mid-November in an effort to find out when King Jr. would be home from Boston so that the church could arrange to have him preach as a candidate for their vacant pulpit. Brooks commented, “I have heard so many fine things about him and his ability and possibility, that I am intensely interested in having him down.” King Jr. responded to the letter the next week, noting he would be able to preach at Dexter on the second or third Sunday in January (J. T. Brooks to Martin Luther King Sr., and Alberta Williams King, November 16, 1953; King to J. T. Brooks, November 24, 1953 in The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 2: 211, 221).
3. “Making a Contribution”
1. For a description of King’s job opportunities, his interest in Dexter, and the history of the congregation, see the introduction to vol. 2 of Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 2: 28–31. Lischer explains why King elected to serve as a pastor rather than pursue a job as a professor: “Ebenezer had taught King that the basic unit of Christianity in the world is the congregation. Although he had absorbed the universal principle of liberalism, when the time came for him to embark upon a career, he turned again to the congregation as the only vehicle of redemption he knew. Perhaps he understood that Christianity was never meant to work in the lecture hall or at the level of abstract principles but, rather, among a community that is joined by race, family, neighborhood, and economics, but whose truest identity transcends all of these” (Lischer, The Preacher King, 74). Branch, Parting the Waters, 105–8.
2. Montgomery Advertiser, January 24, 1954.
3. Coretta Scott King claims “Three Dimensions” was the first sermon she heard King preach (Coretta Scott King, My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr., 59). King also delivered a sermon with this title in September 1953 while serving at Ebenezer (“King Jr. to End Series of Summer Sermons; Ebenezer,” Atlanta Daily World, September 5, 1953). King borrowed the primary outline of “Three Dimensions” from Phillips Brooks’s sermon “The Symmetry of Life,” found in Brooks, Selected Sermons, 195–206. King Jr., Stride toward Freedom, 17; King Jr., “The Dimensions of a Complete Life,” January 24, 1954, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 150–56.
4. Nesbitt and Randall to King, March 7, 1954, and King to Pulpit Committee, Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, March 10, 1954, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 2: 256, 258. James Dombrowski recorded this incident in his diary on February 8, 1954 (Mss 566, Folder 4, Box 15, Dombrowski Papers). Virginia Durr to Marge Frantz, February 1954, in Sullivan, ed., Freedom Writer, 64.
5. Alabama Tribune, April 2, 1954.
6. Jo Ann Robinson to Mayor Gayle, May 21, 1954, in Garrow, ed., The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It, viii.
7. King Jr., “Going Forward by Going Backward,” April 4, 1954, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 159–63. The sermon’s content parallels the body of a sermon he delivered five weeks earlier in Detroit (King Jr., “Rediscovering Lost Values,” ibid., 2: 248–56). King also delivered a version of this sermon on August 16, 1953, at Ebenezer Baptist Church.
8. King Jr., “Accepting Responsibility for Your Actions,” July 26, 1953, ibid., 6: 139–42. On the inside of the folder containing this sermon, King wrote: “ARYA: Preached at Dexter May 2, 1954.”
9. King Jr., “Acceptance Address at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church,” May 2, 1954, ibid., 6: 164–67.
10. E. D. Nixon, “It Took Guts to Do These Things,” in Wigginton, ed., Refuse to Stand Silently By, 221.
11. Alabama Tribune, December 18, 1953.
12. Montgomery Advertiser, April 15, 1954, April 17, 1954, May 2, 1954. The four male officers were Lee E. Jarrett, Walter L. Jarrett, Willie C. Miller, and Arthur G. Worthy. The editorial board of the Alabama Tribune, in its October 1, 1954, issue, praised the City of Montgomery for “taking the lead in Alabama in the area of sound civic progress. It recently placed three Negro women on its police force to bring its number of Negro law enforcement officers up to seven. It is the first Alabama city to employ Negro women for school traffic purposes.”
13. King Jr., “Mental and Spiritual Slavery,” May 1954, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 167–70.
14. King Jr., “A Religion of Doing,” July 4, 1954, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 170–74. King adapted this quotation from Fosdick’s sermon “There Is No Death,” in which Fosdick wrote: “I plead instead for a church that will be a fountainhead of a better social order. Any church that pretends to care for the souls of people but is not interested in the slums that damn them, the city government that corrupts them, the economic order that cripples them, and international relations that, leading to peace or war, determine the spiritual destiny of innumerable souls—that kind of church, I think, would hear again the Master’s withering words: ‘Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!’” (Harry Emerson Fosdick, The Hope of the World, 25). King, “What Is Man?” July 11, 1954, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 174–79.
15. Wigginton, ed., Refuse to Stand Silently By, 221. See also Gray, Leventhal, Sikora, and Thornton, The Children Coming On, 13–14. Virginia Durr to Mairi and Clark Foreman, September 8, 1954, in Sullivan, ed., Freedom Writer, 75; Alabama Tribune, September 10, 1954.
16. King Jr., “God’s Love,” December 23, 1962, ET-40, Martin Luther King Estate Collection. King may have gotten this illustration from Howard Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited, 50. King, “God’s Love,” September 5, 1954, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 179–81.
17. King Jr., “Vision of a World Made New,” September 9, 1954, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 181–84.
18. Warlick, “‘Man of the Year’ for ‘54,” 27; Alabama Tribune, July 30, 1954; Montgomery Advertiser, “Colored Section,” November 23, 1954.
19. Garrow, ed., The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It, 37.
20. King Jr., Stride toward Freedom, 27, 34.
21. King Jr., “Recommendations to the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church for the Fiscal Year 1954–1955,” September 5, 1955, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 2: 287.
22. For a critique of King’s model of leadership that draws on his acceptance address at Dexter, see Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement, 170–95.
23. Baldwin, There Is a Balm in Gilead, 312; Lischer, The Preacher King, 78.
24. King Jr., “Recommendations to the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church for the Fiscal Year 1954–1955,” September 5, 1955, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 2: 290. King Jr., Stride toward Freedom, 30.
25. Coretta Scott King, “Answers, Voter Registration Questionnaire of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church Social and Political Action Committee,” October 17, 1954, Folder 15, Box 77, King Papers, 1954–1968, Boston University; Mary Fair Burks, “Social and Political Action Committee, Report 3,” October 31, 1954, Folder 15, Box 77, ibid.
26. King Jr., Stride toward Freedom, 26–27. Lewis Baldwin argues that “some of King’s most profound and inspiring sermons were delivered at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in the year prior to the Rosa Parks incident. He went to Dexter with the notion that sermonizing involved the proclamation of God’s word in relationship to a myriad of human concerns, and with the idea that every sermon should have as its purpose the head-on constructive meeting of some spiritual, social, cultural, or personal problem that puzzles the mind, bears upon the conscience, and interferes with the complete flow of life” (Baldwin, There Is a Balm in Gilead, 288). Likewise, Lischer notes: “King came to his first congregation with a cache of sermon manuscripts he had developed in his college and graduate school days. During his first year he worked very hard at producing and memorizing new manuscripts, which he pointedly left on his chair when he rose to enter the pulpit. He also brought with him a repertoire of poetic verses and longer set pieces already committed to memory and distributed throughout his body of sermons” (Lischer, The Preacher King, 80–81).
27. Rice, interview by Lumpkin; Underwood, interview by Lumpkin; Gray, Leventhal, Sikora, and Thornton, The Children Coming On, 133.
28. King Jr., “Propagandizing Christianity,” September 12, 1954, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 184–87.
29. King Jr., “New Wine in New Bottles,” October 17, 1954, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 192–94.
30. The glowing memories of King before the boycott by Nixon, Carr, and other Montgomery residents may not have been as pronounced at the time. Although King undoubtedly impressed them, they would always view King through the lens of his civil rights leadership, coloring their earliest recollections. Rosa Parks, minutes, Montgomery branch meeting, January 9, 1955, Montgomery NAACP Papers (NN-Sc). Nixon, interview by Lumpkin. In this interview, Nixon claimed he heard King speak on the second Sunday in August 1955. While King was unanimously elected to the branch’s executive committee at that meeting, there is no indication in the very thorough minutes of the event that King offered any remarks, suggesting Nixon was recalling his response to this January speech (Rosa Parks, minutes, Montgomery branch executive committee meeting, August 14, 1955, Montgomery NAACP Papers, [NN-Sc]). Johnnie Carr, interview by Steven M. Millner, July 17, 1977, in Garrow, ed. The Walking City, 529. Carr also claims she first heard King in August 1955, but credits the Dexter deacon R. D. Nesbitt with introducing King. In this January meeting, however, King was introduced by Ralph Abernathy. Carr may have remembered King’s June address to the NAACP, when he was introduced by Nesbitt (Rosa Parks, minutes, mass meeting at First CME Church, June 19, 1955, Montgomery NAACP Papers [NN-Sc]).
31. Montgomery Advertiser, January 12, 1955.
32. Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, “Social and Political Action Committee Digest, Number 2,” January 1955, Folder 15, Box 77, King Papers, Boston University; King Jr., Stride toward Freedom, 34–35.
33. Alabama Tribune, January 28, 1955.
34. Virginia Durr to Corliss Lamont, February 9, 1955, in Sullivan, ed., Freedom Writer, 81.
35. “Negroes’ Most Urgent Needs,” LPR 127, Baskin Papers.
36. Thornton, Dividing Lines, 49.
37. The Montgomery Advertiser city editor Joe Azbell devoted a significant portion of his March 1, 1955, editorial to the housing dilemma faced by the city’s African American residents. Noting that some believed “the Negro housing situation will become so critical this year some move will have to be started to open new subdivisions,” Azbell referenced James Holt, the president of the First Federal Savings and Loan Association, who called the housing crisis for blacks in Montgomery the largest housing problem the city faced.” The editor suggested no possible solutions to the problem (Joe Azbell, “City Limits,” Montgomery Advertiser, March 1, 1955). Montgomery Advertiser, March 20, 1955; J. Mills Thornton, “Challenge and Response in the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955–1956,” in Garrow, ed., The Walking City, 336. Thornton examines the demographic and political shifts that occurred in Montgomery in the 1950s. He notes that the “Demographic exploitation of racial tensions promised to counter Birmingham’s exploitation of class tensions and thus to capture support in the eastern wards” where many working-class whites were moving in (335–36). Parks, an ally of Birmingham, defeated the incumbent Cleere, while Gayle returned as mayor. Thornton adds: “The lesson of Parks’s victory appeared to be that, given the new social realities produced by the city’s rapid postwar growth, an East Montgomerian would always defeat a South Montgomerian when the issues remained class oriented. The lesson of Sellers’s victory appeared to be that a vigorous exploitation of racial antipathies could give a South Montgomerian at least a fighting chance of defeating an East Montgomerian. Gayle was, of course, a South Montgomerian. But Gayle’s dilemma was much more complicated than this analysis would imply. First, he was unlikely to abandon a set of beliefs that he had held sincerely for many decades merely because political strategy seemed to dictate this course. Second, developments within the business community rendered it less than certain that a sound strategy actually dictated this course” (337–38).
38. West, interview by Lee; Virginia Durr to Jessica Mitford, March 1955, in Sullivan, ed., Freedom Writer, 84–85. See also Rosa Parks, minutes, Montgomery branch executive committee meeting, March 22, 1955, Montgomery NAACP Papers (NN-Sc).
39. Virginia Durr to Jessica Mitford, March 1955, April 8, 1955, May 5, 1955, and May 6, 1955, in Sullivan, ed., Freedom Writer, 84–87. At an NAACP meeting in July, the attorney Fred Gray indicated he “paid 47.50 for the Claudette Colvin case transcript. Since the violation of the segregation of transportation law charge was dismissed against her, the NAACP has no case but to have her exonerated of the assault and battery charge.” Noting Colvin was on probation and a ward of the state, Gray informed the executive committee that he had filed a motion for a new trial, hoping she would be exonerated due to false arrest. The branch agreed to appeal the Colvin case on these grounds (Rosa Parks, minutes, Montgomery branch executive committee meeting, July 13, 1955, Montgomery NAACP Papers [NN-Sc]).
40. Abernathy, “The Natural History of a Social Movement,” in Garrow, ed., The Walking City, 109–10.
41. King Jr., “Other Mountains,” May 15, 1955, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 214. See also Trenholm to King, May 2, 1955, ibid., 2: 556–57.
42. Rosa Parks, minutes, mass meeting at First CME Church, June 19, 1955, Montgomery NAACP Papers (NN-Sc); King, “The Peril of Superficial Optimism in the Area of Race Relations,” June 19, 1955, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 214–15; King Jr., “Discerning the Signs of History,” June 26, 1955, ibid., 6: 216–19.
43. King Jr., “The Death of Evil upon the Seashore,” July 24, 1955, Folder 101, Sermon File.
44. Graetz, A White Preacher’s Memoir: The Montgomery Bus Boycott (Montgomery: Black Belt Press, 1998), 35–37.
45. Ibid., 50.
46. Juliette Morgan to William A. Gayle, July 13, 1955, Box 4, Morgan Papers.
47. Rosa Parks, minutes, Montgomery branch executive committee meeting, July 13, 1955, Montgomery NAACP Papers (NN-Sc). Founded in 1932, the Highlander Folk School served as a critical southern training center for labor and civil rights activists.
48. Rosa Parks to Mrs. Henry F. Shepherd, July 6, 1955, Mss 265, Folder 22, Box 22, Highlander Research and Education Center; Parks, with Haskins, Rosa Parks: My Story, 102–7.
49. Rosa Parks, minutes, Montgomery branch executive committee meeting, August 14, 1955, Montgomery NAACP Papers (NN-Sc).
50. Virginia Durr to Jessica Mitford, May 6, 1955, in Sullivan, ed., Freedom Writer, 87–88; Yeakey, “The Montgomery Alabama Bus Boycott, 1955–56,” 9–13, 16–18.
51. Yeakey, “The Montgomery Alabama Bus Boycott, 1955–1956,” 22–23. Lamont Yeakey, in his dissertation on the bus boycott, claims that Montgomery’s black clubs and social organizations “crisscrossed class, geographic, and occupational lines.” His only support for this assertion is based on an anecdote of a time when a club reached out to help a poor family who had lost their home to a fire when they heard about the family’s plight. While such charitable contributions did provide some connection between the classes, they were predicated on a paternalistic model of racial uplift. For the most part, the clubs and social circles reinforced rather than broke down class distinctions (ibid., 50–53).
52. King Jr., “Worship,” August 7, 1955, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 222–25. In Stride toward Freedom, King used similar language to describe his earliest impressions of Dexter: “I was anxious to change the impression in the community that Dexter was a sort of silk-stocking church catering only to a certain class. Often it was referred to as the ‘big folks church.’ Revolting against this idea, I was convinced that worship at its best is a social experience with people of all levels of life coming together to realize their oneness and unity under God. Whenever the church, consciously or unconsciously, caters to one class it loses the spiritual force of the ‘whosoever will, let them come’ doctrine, and is in danger of becoming little more than a social club with a thin veneer of religiosity” (25).
53. King Jr., “Looking Beyond Your Circumstances,” September 18, 1955, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 225–30.
54. For more on the death of Emmett Till and its significance, see Whit-field, A Death in the Delta. King, “Pride versus Humility,” September 25, 1955, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 230–34.
55. King Jr., “The Impassable Gulf (The Parable of Dives and Lazarus),” October 2, 1955, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 235–39. In developing this sermon, King relied on George Buttrick’s insights on the parable (see Buttrick, The Parables of Jesus, 87–91).
56. J. Mills Thornton III, “Challenge and Response in the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955–1956,” in Garrow, ed., The Walking City, 338–39.
57. “Annual of the Alabama Baptist State Convention, 1955,” “Special Session,” September 15, 1955; “Regular Session,” November 15, 16, 17, 1955, Birmingham, Ala., p. 125, LPR 135, Folder 7, Box 7, Alabama State Archives.
58. Alabama Council on Human Relations newsletter, no. 4 (October 1955), Folder 5, Box 4, Baskin Papers.
59. King Jr., “The One-Sided Approach of the Good Samaritan,” November 20, 1955, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 239–40.
60. Largely unaware of the content of many of King’s early Dexter sermons, Richard Lischer erroneously concluded: “During the summer and fall of 1955 Pastor King reverted to a more philosophical style of preaching. He delivered well-rounded statements on the meaning of life, such as ‘Discerning the Signs of History,’ ‘The Death of Evil upon the Seashore,’ and ‘The One-Sided Approach of the Good Samaritan.’ During the first year he rarely attacked the problem of racism in Montgomery, though he did encourage and finally require NAACP membership and voter registration. When the bus crisis broke in December of that year, he suddenly found a focus and a climax for his sermons. The abstractions give way to the demands of the struggle. The sign of history par excellence is liberation. The evil that must die upon the seashore is segregation. The Good Samaritan now teaches not merely love but a dangerous love between the races. Everything has changed.” He also mistakenly concludes that “In King’s early speeches, the viciousness of racism is minimized” (Lischer, The Preacher King, 83–84, 87). King later described his first eighteen months in Montgomery as a time when “there was a ground swell of discontent. Such men as Vernon Johns and E. D. Nixon had never tired of keeping the problem before the conscience of the community. When others had feared to speak, they had spoken with courage. When others had dared not take a stand, they had stood with valor and determination.” He later added: “through the work of men like Johns and Nixon there had developed beneath the surface a slow fire of discontent, fed by the continuing indignities and inequities to which the Negroes were subjected. These were fearless men who created the atmosphere for the social revolution that was slowly developing in the Cradle of the Confederacy. But this discontent was still latent in 1954” (King Jr., Stride toward Freedom, 38–39).
4. “They Are Willing to Walk”
1. Gray, Leventhal, Sikora, and Thornton, The Children Coming On, 13.
2. Jo Ann Robinson, leaflet, Another Negro woman has been arrested, December 2, 1955, Montgomery County District Attorney’s Files.
3. Gray, Bus Ride to Justice, 52. Steven M. Millner also stresses this point: “Nixon, and his political allies, Robinson and Burks, continued to move rapidly because they sensed they had to outflank the generally conservative local black clergy” (Millner, “The Montgomery Bus Boycott: A Case Study in the Emergence of a Social Movement,” in Garrow, ed., The Walking City, 452). Garrow, ed., The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It, 53. Regarding Robinson’s critical role in the genesis of the boycott, her fellow WPC member Mary Fair Burks reflected: “nobody worked more diligently than she did as a member of the board of the Montgomery Improvement Association and as a representative of the Women’s Political Council. Although others had contemplated a boycott, it was due in large part to Jo Ann’s unswerving belief that it could be accomplished, and her never-failing optimism that it would be accomplished, and her selflessness and unbounded energy that it was accomplished” (Crawford, Rouse, and Woods, eds., Women in the Civil Rights Movement, 75). Rosa Parks, J. E. Pierce, Robert Graetz, “Montgomery Story,” August 21, 1956, Highlander Folk School Papers.
4. Southern Exposure 9, no. 1 (Spring 1981): 14. According to David Garrow, Abernathy called King before Nixon’s second call, and persuaded King to support the boycott (Garrow, Bearing the Cross, 18). Ibid., 53.
5. Garrow, ed., The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It, 48–50. B. J. Simms, in an interview with Steven M. Millner, discussed the Alabama State College president’s response to the boycott: “Trenholm just understood. He did not give any orders. He did not mention it. Did not try to curtail anybody. He was all for it. But officially he would never acknowledge it. He just didn’t know, so to speak. He could be hypocritical just like white folks were” (Simms, interview by Millner, January 9, 1979, 584).
6. Garrow, ed., The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It, 55; Ralph Abernathy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Jo Ann Robinson, leaflet, Don’t Ride the Bus, December 2, 1955, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 3: 67. Abernathy, “The Natural History of a Social Movement,” in Garrow, ed., The Walking City, 118. In his thesis, Abernathy often referred to his own observations in the third person, as in his telling of this encounter between him and King, which he credits to “a distinguished Baptist preacher and perhaps the most effective leader of the movement in respect to strategies and operational tactics.” Participants in the meeting at Dexter have remembered the gathering differently. King asserted that Bennett was so excited about the boycott, and so eager to direct the efforts, that he charged, “This is no time to talk; it is time to act.” Only after nearly an hour of protests from the forty plus at the meeting did Bennett yield the floor, at which point plans for the boycott developed (King Jr., Stride toward Freedom, 46–48). Robinson remembered more than a hundred turning out for the meeting, highlighting the positive outcomes of the meeting rather than emphasizing any of its tension (Garrow, ed., The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It,55–56). Rosa Parks recalled a more divided meeting: “Some of the ministers wanted to talk about how to support the protest, but others wanted to talk about whether or not to have a protest. Many of them left the meeting before any decisions were made” (Parks, Haskins, Rosa Parks: My Story, 129). Uriah Fields asserts that Bennett opposed the boycott, which may have added to the aggravation of those gathered (Fields, Inside the Montgomery Bus Boycott, 36). Ralph Abernathy elevated his role in the meeting, saying Nixon had left it to him to make sure things went well in Nixon’s absence. Believing he had arranged for Reverend Hubbard to lead the meeting, Abernathy was shocked when Hubbard announced Bennett would be presiding. After Bennett rambled on for some time, and with only around twenty people remaining, Abernathy claims he interrupted and took the chair for the rest of the meeting (Abernathy, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down, 138–39).
7. Crawford, Rouse, and Woods, eds., Women in the Civil Rights Movement, 82–83; Edgar N. French, “The Beginning of a New Age,” 1962, in Garrow, ed., The Walking City, 177.
8. Crawford, Rouse, and Woods, eds., Women in the Civil Rights Movement, 83.
9. Ibid., 72–74.
10. King, “Why Does God Hide Himself?” December 4, 1955, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 241–42. King borrowed the title and theme of his sermon from Robert McCracken, “Why Does God Hide Himself?” Radio Sermon, April 27, 1947. King kept a copy of McCracken’s sermon in his homiletic files (King Jr., Folder 165, Sermon File).
11. Abernathy, “The Natural History of a Social Movement,” in Garrow, ed., The Walking City, 119.
12. Warrant, City of Montgomery vs. Rosa Parks, December 5, 1955; Transcript of Record and Proceedings, City of Montgomery vs. Rosa Parks, December 5, 1955; Appeal Bond, City of Montgomery vs. Rosa Parks, December 5, 1955 (File 4559, Circuit Court, Montgomery County Records, Montgomery County Court House). Fred Gray mistakenly claimed Parks was found guilty of disorderly conduct (Gray, Bus Ride to Justice, 55–56). See also Thornton, Dividing Lines, 596–97n71. Nixon, interview by Millner, 547. Nixon also claimed regarding Parks’s court case: “But you know, King, he wasn’t there.” According to Fred Gray, Ralph Abernathy, and personal recollections in his memoir of the boycott, King was in fact at the courthouse that morning (Gray, Bus Ride to Justice, 55–57; Abernathy, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down, 142; King Jr., Stride toward Freedom, 55).
13. Fields, Inside the Montgomery Bus Boycott, 41; Abernathy, “The Natural History of a Social Movement,” in Garrow, ed., The Walking City, 129–30.
14. King Jr., Stride toward Freedom, 56–57.
15. Ibid., 56–58.
16. Fields, interview by Millner, 534.
17. Garrow, Bearing the Cross, 21–22. Steven M. Millner suggests the demand for black bus drivers was included to placate E. D. Nixon, “whose grass-roots organizing had put him in contact with hundreds of black men who had hopes that they could hold dignified and clean jobs. Many of these, who were called the ‘forgotten fellows’ by Nixon, had been ignored by their government and many local ‘tie and collar’ blacks, these individuals were appealed to by this request, and in other ways by leaders like E. D. Nixon” (Garrow, ed., The Walking City, 468). J. Mills Thornton also speculates that the demand to hire black bus drivers reflected the influence of Nixon in his meeting with French and Abernathy. He argues that Nixon was far more passionate about this demand than the clergy involved in the boycott (Thornton, “Challenge and Response in the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955–1956,” in Garrow, ed., The Walking City, 599); Edgar N. French, “The Beginning of a New Age,” 1962, ibid., 179.
18. Robinson, interview by Lee; Alabama Tribune, December 16, 1955.
19. King Jr., Stride toward Freedom, 59, 101.
20. MIA mass meeting at Holt Street Baptist Church, December 5, 1955, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 3: 71–74; King Jr., Stride toward Freedom, 63.
21. Lewis and Ligon, interview by Lumpkin.
22. Gray, Leventhal, Sikora, and Thornton, The Children Coming On, 137; American Socialist 3, no. 4 (April 1956): 10.
23. Norman Walton, “The Walking City: A History of the Montgomery Bus Boycott,” in Garrow, ed., The Walking City, 30. Walton’s article was originally published in five installments in the Negro History Bulletin, beginning in October 1956 and ending in January 1958. Walton was a professor of history at Alabama State College. For more on the significance of early cab and carpool rides, see Millner, “The Montgomery Bus Boycott,” in Garrow, ed., The Walking City, 474.
24. James Cone incorrectly assumes King did not develop his love ethic until later, stressing the central role of justice as his grounding principle early in the boycott: “No interpreter of King has identified justice as the primary focus of his thinking at the start of the Montgomery bus boycott. Most are so eager to stress love as the center of his thought and actions (as King himself did when he reflected on the event) that they (like King) fail to note that this was a later development in his thinking” (Cone, Martin and Malcolm and America, 63). While King did focus more of his Holt Street address on justice than love, his sermons prior to the bus protest reveal that the centrality of love was a core principle King brought to the movement, rather than one he gained through the struggle. Cone is right to emphasize the centrality of justice in King’s pre-boycott preaching as well. In King’s view, the love ethic of Jesus demanded a commitment to justice. For evidence of King’s emphasis on love prior to the boycott, see King, “Loving Your Enemies,” August 31,1952, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 126–28; and “God’s Love,” September 5, 1954, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 179–81. In his study of King’s preaching, Richard Lischer also argues a transformation occurred during the boycott. Although unaware of the gradual sharpening of King’s preaching in the months prior to his Holt Street address, Lischer captures the essence of the growth King experienced during this season: “After the Boycott had commenced, King’s Sunday morning sermons found a new purpose and vitality. The specificity of race, which he had assiduously avoided in his graduate education, now sharpened the point of his biblical interpretation and preaching. No one sermon captured the transformation that was taking place within him, but his first major rhetorical triumph, the address to the massed protesters at the Holt Street Baptist Church in Montgomery, left him changed utterly” (Lischer, The Preacher King, 85).
25. Robinson, interview by Garrow. King included the story of Mother Pollard in his published sermon collection (King Jr., “Antidotes for Fear,” in Strength to Love, 125).
26. Minutes, Alabama Council on Human Relations, December 7, 1955, in Burns, ed., Daybreak of Freedom, 97; Friedland, Lift up Your Voice Like a Trumpet, 27–28.
27. King Jr., Stride toward Freedom, 109–12; Tom Johnson, “4-Hour Huddle: Bus Boycott Conference Fails to Find Solution,” Montgomery Advertiser, December 9, 1955, in Burns, ed., Daybreak of Freedom, 98–99; King to the National City Lines, Inc., December 8, 1955, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. 3: 80–81; King, “Statement of Negro Citizens on Bus Situation,” December 10, 1955, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 3: 81–83.
28. Friedland, Lift up Your Voice Like a Trumpet, 28.
29. Juliette Morgan, “Lesson from Gandhi,” Montgomery Advertiser, December 12, 1955.
30. Robert Graetz, letter to editor, Time, December 22, 1955, Folder 30, Box 107, King Papers, Boston University.
31. Vaughn and Wills, eds., Reflections on Our Pastor, 5–6, 16–17, 28.
32. Rosa Parks, minutes, Montgomery branch executive committee special meeting, December 13, 1955, Montgomery NAACP Papers (NN-Sc).
33. Garrow, ed., The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It, 67. Michael Eric Dyson highlights the significant contributions of grassroots leaders in Montgomery whose efforts were minimized in Stride toward Freedom: “Without WPC’s ingenious tactical maneuvers, quick response, and organizational efficiency, the Montgomery bus boycott may have never occurred. But beyond a token nod to their efforts and those of Rosa Parks, King barely recognized WPC’s achievements in his account of the year-long boycott, Stride toward Freedom. Moreover, without the spur of grass-roots leaders like E. D. Nixon, the ministers who seized the helm of leadership, or were forced to take up the reins of the boycott—might never have acted bravely to exploit Parks’s act of social rebellion for the black community” (Dyson, I May Not Get There with You, 203).
34. King, “Our God Is Able,” January 1, 1956, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 243–46.
35. Richard Lischer argues King’s sermons functioned similarly in 1968: “Although he is preaching to others the value of rising above the forces that threaten to destroy ‘our personalities,’ it is clear that the preacher, beleaguered by criticism of his anti-war activities and his plans for the Poor People’s Campaign, is ministering to his own spirit…. As King desperately exhorts his congregation to choose life over death, it is himself he is urging to persevere” (Lischer, The Preacher King, 167–68). Cone, Malcolm and Martin and America, 124.
36. Parks, Horton, and Nixon, interview by Terkel.
37. Allen, interview by Millner, 522–23.
38. Burns, ed., Daybreak of Freedom, 139; King Jr., Stride toward Freedom, 78.
39. Uriah J. Fields, “Negroes Cannot Compromise,” Montgomery Advertiser, January 5, 1956, in Burns, ed., Daybreak of Freedom, 113–14; Erna Dungee, MIA Executive Board minutes, January 23, 1956, ibid., 121–24.
40. “To the Commissioners of the City of Montgomery,” January 9, 1956, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 3: 97–98. Montgomery Advertiser, January 10, 1956.
41. Alabama Tribune, January 13, 1956.
42. King Jr., “How to Believe in a Good God in the Midst of Glaring Evil,” January 15, 1956, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 247–49.
43. Hughes, interview by Holden.
44. Anna Holden, “Notes from ACHR meeting,” January 20, 1956, Montgomery, Ala., Valien Collection.
45. King Jr., Stride toward Freedom, 125–26. The historian Steven M. Millner argues the response of the people to the settlement announcement was “a pointed warning to the MIA’s leaders that they too had no room for shabby backroom deals that might be perceived as the proverbial sellout. The protest’s leaders were thus put on notice that a firm refusal to back down was their sole leadership alternative. This strengthened the faction of militants with whom King increasingly aligned in backroom debates” (Millner, “The Montgomery Bus Boycott,” in Garrow, ed., The Walking City, 478). MIA press release, “The Bus Protest Is Still On,” January 22, 1956, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 3: 100–101.
46. King Jr., “Redirecting Our Missionary Zeal,” January 22, 1956, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 249–50.
47. Thrasher, interview by Holden. J. Mills Thornton claims Thrasher was at the meeting on January 21 with the three black ministers who agreed to the settlement. Thrasher and Hughes probably met with white ministers the previous week, came up with a proposed compromise solution, and presented it to the city commissioners and bus officials. Then, without Thrasher or Hughes present, these commissioners presented the plan to three hand-selected African American ministers, who accepted the plan without communication with the MIA. See Thornton, Dividing Lines, 72.
48. T. T. Allen to Ella Baker, March 29, 1942, Group II, Box C-4, Montgomery NAACP Papers; West, interview by Lee; King Jr., Stride toward Freedom, 78.
49. “Notes on MIA Executive Board Meeting, by Donald T. Ferron,” January 23, 1956, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 3: 101–5. Uriah Fields claims King was in favor of dropping the demand for black bus drivers (Fields, Inside the Montgomery Bus Boycott, 79). King Jr., Stride toward Freedom, 114; Hughes, interview by Holden, January 18, 1956.
50. Thornton, Dividing Lines, 73.
51. Whatley, interview by Holden; Hughes, interview by Holden, March 27, 1956; Parks, Pierce, and Graetz, “Montgomery Story.”
52. King Jr., Stride toward Freedom, 134–35.
53. Miller, Voice of Deliverance, 138; Cone, Martin and Malcolm and America, 124; Warren, King Came Preaching, 40; Baldwin, There Is a Balm in Gilead, 189n87.
54. “‘Montgomery Dangerous’ Negro Warns after Weekend of Violence,” New York Post, January 28, 1957.
55. Burns, ed., Daybreak of Freedom, 128–29; Donald T. Ferron, “Notes on MIA Executive Board Meeting,” January 30, 1956, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 3: 109–12.
56. Willie Mae Lee, “Notes on MIA Mass Meeting at First Baptist Church,” January 30, 1956, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 3: 113–14.
57. Joe Azbell, “Blast Rocks Residence of Bus Boycott Leader,” Montgomery Advertiser, January 31, 1956, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 3: 114–15. For other accounts of the bombing and King’s response, see Willie Mae Lee, “The Bombing Episode,” January 31, 1956, Valien Collection; and King Jr., Stride toward Freedom, 136–38.
58. Miller, Voice of Deliverance, 87.
59. Burns, Daybreak of Freedom, 76–77. Burns cites transcript of Browder v. Gayle federal court testimony, Montgomery, Ala., May 11, 1956, p. 23 (Burns, ed., Daybreak of Freedom, 266); Lewis and Ligon, interview by Lumpkin.
5. “Living under the Tension”
1. King Jr., “It’s Hard to Be a Christian,” February 5, 1956, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 251–52.
2. Thornton, Dividing Lines, 78. Thornton argues the primary focus of the boycott was not integrating the buses, but rather challenging white supremacy. He asserts that the protesters “sought not the right to sit with whites, but rather the right not to be unseated in favor of whites, as well as at least a degree of protection from public humiliation at the hands of white bus drivers.” While this may have been true for some in the boycott, Nixon and others in his camp always saw the legal side of the Parks case as the critical portion, with a trajectory that began four days before the decision was made to extend the bus boycott indefinitely. While satisfying the conditions may have ended the boycott, it would not necessarily have ended the legal battle. Thornton more accurately describes the perspective of the white leadership in writing: “Segregation on the initiative of blacks and under black control was unacceptable because authorities’ genuine motive, whether consciously or unconsciously, was not the separation of the races but the subordination of blacks to whites.”
3. Donald T. Ferron, “Notes on MIA Executive Board Meeting,” February 2, 1956, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 3: 120.
4. Gray, Bus Ride to Justice, 70; Nixon, interview by Lumpkin, 2–3. See also Newton, Montgomery in the Good War, 137–38. According to J. Mills Thornton, Arthur Madison was persuaded by one of his brothers to return to the South to help the family gain the requisite number of registered voters to gain a municipal charter for Madison Park as an all-black town (Thornton, Dividing Lines, 28).
5. Donald T. Ferron, “Notes on MIA Executive Board Meeting,” February 2, 1956, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 3: 120, 122. See also Gray, Bus Ride to Justice, 78.
6. Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 3: 121; Glasco, interview by Ferron; Wilson, interview by Ferron.
7. King, interview by Ferron. For further information on King’s meeting with Folsom, see Cliff Mackay, “Ala. Bus Boycotters Sing ‘My Country ‘Tis of Thee,’” Baltimore Afro-American, February 11, 1956.
8. Donald T. Ferron, “Notes on MIA Executive Board Meeting,” February 2, 1956, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 3: 120. King later claimed that, after the bombing, friends and church leaders encouraged him to hire a bodyguard, which he resisted, claiming, “I had no fears now, and consequently needed no protection.” He eventually acquiesced, however, and “also went down to the sheriff’s office and applied for a license to carry a gun in the car; but this was refused” (King Jr., Stride toward Freedom, 140). King Jr., interview by Ferron.
9. Burns, ed., Daybreak of Freedom, 159. See also Garrow, Bearing the Cross, 66–67. Rustin, “Montgomery Diary,” in Liberation, April 1956, 7.
10. Rustin, “Montgomery Diary,” in Liberation, April 1956, 8.
11. Garrow, Bearing the Cross, 68.
12. John M. Swomley Jr. to Glenn Smiley, February 29, 1956, Fellowship of Reconciliation Papers; Garrow, Bearing the Cross, 70.
13. Burns, ed., Daybreak of Freedom, 153–54; Draper, Conflict of Interests, 22–24; Clifford Durr, interview by Holden. See also Montgomery Advertiser, February 11, 1956. Draper, Conflict of Interests, 31–32.
14. Frazier, interview by Holden.
15. Burns, ed., Daybreak of Freedom, 181; Southern Exposure 9, no. 1 (spring 1981): 18.
16. Lawrence Reddick, report on Fred D. Gray, July 17, 1956, Folder 7, Box 2, Reddick Papers.
17. Birmingham, interview by Holden.
18. Azbell, interview by Holden.
19. Box 3, Morgan Papers; Clifford Durr and Virginia Durr, interview by Lumpkin, 14–16; Morgan, interviews by Holden, February 7, 1956, March 26, 1956.
20. “Fellowship of the Concerned: The Supreme Court Decision—Building Community Understanding, Meeting Minutes,” Folder 1, Andrews Collection; The Children Coming On, 203.
21. Parks, Pierce, and Graetz, “Montgomery Story.”
22. King Jr., Stride toward Freedom, 121–22; Matthews, interview by Holden.
23. Ralph Abernathy, Memo to the Men of Montgomery, February 20, 1956, Garrow Collection; Matthews, interview by Holden; King Jr., Stride toward Freedom, 122.
24. State of Alabama v. M.L. King, Jr., March 22, 1956, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 3: 186–87; Lawrence D. Reddick, “The Bus Boycott in Montgomery,” March 15, 1956, in Garrow, ed., The Walking City, 80; Abernathy, Memo to the Men of Montgomery, February 20, 1956.
25. Indictment, State of Alabama v. M.L. King, Jr., et al., in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 3: 132–33; Bayard Rustin, “Montgomery Diary,” Liberation, April 1956, 8.
26. King Jr., Stride toward Freedom, 143–46; Wayne Phillips, “Negroes Pledge to Keep Boycott,” New York Times, February 24, 1956.
27. King Jr., “Faith in Man,” February 26, 1956, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 253–55. See also Wayne Phillips, “Negro Pastors Press Bus Boycott by Preaching Passive Resistance,” New York Times, February 27, 1956.
28. King’s growing awareness of security issues led him to cancel a scheduled speaking engagement in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, noting “my present position of leadership in Montgomery demands that I take all precaution possible. The letter was sent a day after riots in Tuscaloosa had led to the temporary dismissal of Autherine Lucy from the University of Alabama. The invitation for King to speak in Tuscaloosa had come on January 10 and was subsequently accepted. Clearly, the climate in both Montgomery and Tuscaloosa changed significantly within a short month (King to Fred Drake, February 7, 1956, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 3: 127–28). Donald Ferron, “Report on MIA Mass Meeting,” February 27, 1956, in Burns, ed., Daybreak of Freedom, 174.
29. In February, nearby Tuscaloosa played host to a showdown over the court-ordered integration of the University of Alabama. Autherine Lucy, in a case argued by the NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall, had won admission to the school leading the university to admit her as the school’s first black student on February 3. Peaceful protests soon gave way to rioting in the city. A few days later, the board of trustees decided Lucy could no longer attend classes out of concern for her own safety, and eventually the school suspended her. Montgomery residents committed to resisting racial change were undoubtedly emboldened by this reactionary course of action by University of Alabama officials (Burns, ed., Daybreak of Freedom, 43). An editorial in the February 7, 1956, Tuscaloosa News concluded: “Yes, there’s peace on the University campus this morning. But what a price has been paid for it!” King, “When Peace Becomes Obnoxious,” March 18, 1956, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 257–59.
30. King, “When Peace Becomes Obnoxious,” March 18, 1956, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 257–59. King repeated the story of his encounter with a white Montgomery resident in Stride toward Freedom, 40.
31. “Testimony in State of Alabama v. M.L. King, Jr.,” March 22, 1956, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 3: 183–97. For further testimony from the trial, see Burns, ed., Daybreak of Freedom, 59–73.
32. King Jr., “Reactions to Conviction,” March 22, 1956, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 3: 198–99; King Jr., “Address to MIA Mass Meeting at Holt Street Baptist Church,” March 22, 1956, ibid., 3: 199–201.
33. King Jr., interview by Azbell.
34. Reverend Thomas R. Thrasher, “Alabama’s Boycott,” March 1956, in Garrow, ed., The Walking City, 59–67.
35. Introduction to vol. 3 of Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 3: 46; King Jr., “Address to MIA Mass Meeting at Day Street Baptist Church,” April 26, 1956, ibid., 3: 230–32; King Jr., “Fleeing from God,” April 29, 1956, ibid., 6: 259–61. See also Art Carter, “Rev. King is ‘King’ in Montg’ry,” Baltimore Afro-American, May 12, 1956.
36. Almena Lomax, “Mother’s Day in Montgomery,” Los Angeles Tribune, May 18, 1956, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 3: 263–67.
37. “Recommendations to MIA Executive Board,” May 1956, ibid., 3: 271–73.
38. On April 25, 1956, National City Lines informed the MIA that they would be unable to guarantee the hiring of African American bus drivers due to union contracts (Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 3: 45). Burns, ed., Daybreak of Freedom, 138, 245. See also Lewis, interview by Ferron.
39. Garrow, ed., The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It, 113–14; Robinson, interview by Lee.
40. King Jr., Stride toward Freedom, 73. For more on Solomon Seay’s contributions, see Yeakey, “The Montgomery Alabama Bus Boycott,” 83–93; Gray, Leventhal, Sikora, and Thornton, The Children Coming On, 226.
41. Gray, Leventhal, Sikora, and Thornton, The Children Coming On, 134; King Jr., Stride toward Freedom, 86.
42. Parks, Pierce, and Graetz, “Montgomery Story.”
43. Ibid.; Lawrence D. Reddick, “The Bus Boycott in Montgomery,” March 15, 1956, in Garrow, ed., The Walking City, 81.
44. Azbell, interview by Holden.
45. Underwood, interview by Lumpkin.
46. Thomas, interview by Lee.
47. Race Relations Law Reporter (August 1956): 669–78, in Burns, ed., Daybreak of Freedom, 272–73.
48. American Socialist, April 1956, 11.
49. Gray, Leventhal, Sikora, and Thornton, The Children Coming On, 13. Palmer, interview by Ferron.
50. MIA Nominating Committee to MIA President and Executive Board, May 24, 1956, Montgomery Improvement Association Collection. In the meeting, held on May 16, Fields was officially replaced by Reverend W. J. Powell as recording secretary. Nominating committee members included Reverend A. W. Wilson (chairman), Dr. Moses Jones, Mrs. Jo Ann Robinson, Reverend A. W. Murphy, Reverend B. J. Simms, Reverend R. J. Glasco, and Mrs. Erna A Dungee (secretary).
51. MIA newsletter, vol. 1, no. 2 (June 23, 1956), Montgomery Improvement Association Collection.
52. Nixon, interview by Millner, 550; Graetz, A White Preacher’s Memoir, 107–8.
53. Carr, interview by Millner, 530; Simms, interview by Millner, 579; Fields, interview by Millner, 536; Nixon, interview by Millner, 548.
54. Allen, interview by Millner, 524–25.
55. King Jr., Stride toward Freedom, 157–58, 186. Following the bombing, Graetz sent a letter to the U.S. Justice Department seeking an investigation of all racially motivated violence in the city. In the letter to U.S. Attorney General Herbert Brownell, Graetz reported rumors that Commissioner Sellers may have had foreknowledge of the bombings of King’s and Nixon’s homes the previous winter. Regarding the bombing of his own home, Graetz claimed he was most concerned about Mayor Gayle’s assertion that blacks had done it for publicity: “And apparently the police have been ordered to find the colored people who did it, or at least someone that it can conveniently be blamed on. At least four colored men have been arrested with the bombing” (Graetz to Brownell, September 4, 1956, Graetz Papers).
56. William J. Powell, Montgomery Improvement Association, Special Committee Meeting minutes, September 25, 1956, Folder 16, Box 30, King Papers, Boston University.
57. King Jr., “Living under the Tension of Modern Life,” September 1956, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 262–70.
58. King Jr., “The Fellow Who Stayed at Home,” October 1956, ibid., 6: 272–75.
59. King penned these words in the margin of J. Wallace Hamilton’s “The Fellow Who Stayed at Home,” a sermon published in his book Horns and Halos in Human Nature, 172–73.
60. King Jr., Stride toward Freedom, 158–60; Garrow, Bearing the Cross, 80.
61. “Annual of the Alabama Baptist State Convention,” One Hundred Thirty-Fourth Annual Session, November 13–16, 1956, 134–35, Alabama State Archives.
62. King Jr., Stride toward Freedom, 170–72.
63. Ibid., 69.
64. King Jr., “Conquering Self-Centeredness,” August 11, 1957, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 4: 255. Lerone Bennett later recalled his impressions of King during the boycott, remembering he had “a tremendous rapport with people from a platform. He had this—and even later—no matter how much it might have cost him personally—this ability to swing with people in the streets. People that he’d never seen. They’d say, ‘Hey, Reverend,’ and you know, he could deal with them” (Gray, Leventhal, Sikora, and Thornton, The Children Coming On, 238). Dexter Echo 1, no. 8, October 17, 1956, Folder 3, Box 2, Reddick Papers.
65. The historian Stewart Burns aptly notes how much King learned from the people of Montgomery: “King’s responsiveness to ordinary people, his determination to learn from them and to absorb their varying perspectives, represented a distinguishing mark of his leadership from Montgomery until the end of his life.” He continues: “Subleaders and foot soldiers not only strengthened his commitment but also emboldened him to take further risks and to rise above his comfort zone and socialization” (Burns, ed., Daybreak of Freedom, 15).
66. King Jr., “We Are Still Walking,” Liberation, December 1956. The articles listed six initiatives that would shape the MIA’s future direction: to establish the black-owned bank in Montgomery; to organize a credit union that would mobilize resources for cooperative economic programs; to expand the number of registered African American voters in the city; to establish institutions to train people in nonviolent direct action; to shoulder some of the load of black leadership in Alabama after the outlawing of the NAACP; and “to give aid to those who have sacrificed in our cause.” In Robert Graetz’s memoir of the boycott, he recalls division within the MIA leadership regarding the optimal direction the organization should take. While a group comprised largely of clergy wanted to focus on “largely ceremonial goals” such as integrating the airport facilities, the larger group, composed of nonclergy and Graetz, wanted a program that would connect with the needs of the masses. “Though the clergy, the natural leaders in this church movement, attracted most of the spotlight, the lay participants included some of the most courageous and hard-working people in the Negro community” (Graetz, A White Preacher’s Memoir, 109). Burns, ed., Daybreak of Freedom, 331–32.
6. “Bigger Than Montgomery”
1. King Jr., Stride toward Freedom, 175–76. For a detailed account of the agenda for the gathering in Atlanta, see “Montgomery Improvement Association Press Release, Bus Protestors Call Southern Negro Leaders Conference on Transportation and Nonviolent Integration,” January 7, 1957, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 4: 94–95.
2. King Jr., Stride toward Freedom, 176–77, 179–80.
3. King Jr., “The Ways of God in the Midst of Glaring Evil,” January 13, 1957, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 4: 107–9. King Jr., “Outline, Address to MIA Mass Meeting,” January 14, 1957, ibid., 4: 109–10.
4. King Jr., Stride toward Freedom, 178; “King Says Vision Told Him to Lead Integration Forces,” Montgomery Advertiser, January 28, 1957, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 4: 114–15.
5. King Jr., interview by Richard Heffner, The Open Mind, February 10, 1957, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 4: 126–31; Kwame Nkrumah to King, January 22, 1957, ibid., 4: 112–13; Vaughn and Wills, eds., Reflections on Our Pastor, 32. Fosdick published a book titled A Great Time to Be Alive.
6. MIA Future Planning Committee, meeting minutes, March 14, 1957, Folder 10, Box 2, King Papers, Boston University.
7. MIA Future Planning Committee, report, April 18, 1957, Folder 30, Box 16, King Papers, Boston University.
8. King Jr., “The Birth of a New Nation,” April 7, 1957, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 4: 155–67.
9. King Jr., “Questions Easter Answers,” April 21, 1957, ibid., 6: 283–93.
10. King to Samuel McCrea Cavert, November 27, 1959, Folder 32, Box 33A, King Papers, Boston University; A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Roy Wilkins, “Call to a Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom,” April 5, 1957, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 4: 151–53; William Holmes Borders to King, April 6, 1957, ibid., 4: 153–54.
11. Bayard Rustin to King, May 10, 1957, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 4: 199–201; King Jr., “Give Us the Ballot,” May 17, 1957, ibid., 4: 208–15. King’s reticence to draw strong connections between labor and the civil rights movement may be connected in part to the significant opposition he had faced from white unions in Montgomery during the bus boycott.
12. E. D. Nixon to King, June 3, 1957, ibid., 4: 217–18; King Jr., “Statement on Meeting with Richard M. Nixon,” June 13, 1957, ibid., 4: 222–23; King Jr., “Remarks in Acceptance of the Forty-second Spingarn Medal at the Forty-eighth Annual NAACP Convention,” June 28, 1957, ibid., 4: 228–32.
13. Clifford and Virginia Durr, interview by Lumpkin, 15–16.
14. King Jr., Stride toward Freedom, 85.
15. King Jr., “Conquering Self-Centeredness,” August 11, 1957, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 4: 248–59.
16. Durr to Horton, February 18, 1956, November 5, 1956, in Burns, ed., Daybreak of Freedom, 155, 298; Durr to Clark and Mairi Foreman, December 17, 1956, Durr Papers. The historian Steven M. Millner notes regarding the MIA’s leadership at the end of 1956: “By the boycott’s final days, the ‘tie and collar’ crowd and local ministers had become the dominant forces in the MIA. Grass roots leaders such as E. D. Nixon and Reverend Cherry became increasingly bitter about being pushed aside and left the MIA’s leadership circle. Though King and his successors tried, no major effort paralleling the bus protest emerged in Montgomery. Lacking local issues to organize around and faced with a growing usurpation of organizational positions by status seekers, the MIA became further removed from the local black masses. This process escalated after King’s permanent departure for Atlanta in early 1960” (Millner, “The Montgomery Bus Boycott,” in Garrow, ed., The Walking City, 516).
17. King to Ralph Abernathy, February 26, 1957, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 4: 143–44.
18. Parks, interview by Millner, 564; Rosa Parks to King, August 23, 1957, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 4: 261. King Jr., “A Look to the Future,” September 2, 1957, ibid., 4: 269–76; Nixon, interview by Lumpkin. See also Highlander Folk School, Program, “The South Thinking Ahead,” September 2, 1957, Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church Collection.
19. King Jr., “Annual Report, Dexter Avenue Baptist Church,” October 23, 1957, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 4: 287–90.
20. King Jr., “Loving Your Enemies,” November 17, 1957, ibid., 4: 315–24.
21. MIA newsletter, vol. 1, no. 7 (November 18, 1957), Montgomery Improvement Association Collection.
22. King Jr., “Some Things We Must Do,” December 5, 1957, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 4: 328–43.
23. Trezzvant W. Anderson, “How Has Dramatic Bus Boycott Affected Montgomery Negroes?” Pittsburgh Courier, November 9, 1957.
24. Ibid. See also John Henrik Clarke to King, December 20, 1957, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 4: 344–45.
25. Pittsburgh Courier, November 16, 1957.
26. Ibid., November 23, 30, 1957.
27. “Anderson Criticized for ‘Boycott’ Article,” Pittsburgh Courier, December 7, 1957.
28. Anderson, “How Has Dramatic Bus Boycott Affected Montgomery Negroes?” Pittsburgh Courier, December 14, 28, 1957.
29. King Jr., press release, “Announcement of the Crusade for Citizenship,” November 5, 1957, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 4: 307–8; King to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, February 4, 1958, ibid., 4: 358–60; King Jr., “Address Delivered at a Meeting Launching the SCLC Crusade for Citizenship at Greater Bethel AME Church,” February 12, 1958, ibid., 4: 367–71.
30. E. D. Nixon to King, November 4, 1957, Folder 15, Box 106, King Papers, Boston University; King to E. D. Nixon, March 6, 1958, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 4: 376–77; Vaughn and Wills, eds., Reflections on Our Pastor, 8.
31. Burns, To the Mountaintop, 1; King Jr., “Statement Delivered at the Prayer Pilgrimage Protesting the Electrocution of Jeremiah Reeves,” April 6, 1958, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 4: 396–98. See also King Jr., Stride toward Freedom, 31–32; “Ministerial Group Scores Easter Negro Mass Meet” and “King’s Group Accepts Invitation to Talks,” Montgomery Advertiser, April 13, 1958.
32. For examples of the types of questions King fielded, and his responses, see King Jr., “Advice for Living,” from September 1957 to December 1958, in vol. 4 of Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. A. Philip Randolph, Lester B. Granger, Martin Luther King, and Roy Wilkins, “A Statement to the President of the United States,” June 23, 1958, ibid., 4: 426–29.
33. Davis accused Abernathy of having an extramarital affair with his wife, who was a member of Abernathy’s First Baptist Church. Davis threatened Abernathy with a gun and a hatchet. A few months later, the jury dismissed assault charges against Davis (“Negro Jailed after Attack on Leader of Bus Boycott,” Montgomery Advertiser August 30 1958; “Jury Rejects Abernathy Charges,” Montgomery Advertiser, November 22, 1958); “King Charges Police Brutal after Arrest,” Montgomery Advertiser, September 4, 1958; King Jr., “Statement to Eugene Loe,” in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 4: 487–90.
34. E. D. Nixon to King, September 9, 1958, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 4: 492. Nixon refers to Rustin’s 1947 conviction for breaking North Carolina’s segregation laws, following which Rustin spent twenty-two days on a chain gang to complete his sentence. For Rustin’s journal entries during his incarceration, see Carbado and Weise, eds., Time on Two Crosses, 31–57. King to E. D. Nixon, September 16, 1958, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 4: 494–95.
35. King, “Some Things We Must Do,” December 5, 1957, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 4: 328–43; Pittsburgh Courier, December 7, 1957.
36. Friedland, Lift up Your Voice Like a Trumpet, 30. See also Durr, Outside the Magic Circle, 309. Andrews, interview by Durr.
37. Andrews, interview by Durr.
38. King Jr., “A Knock at Midnight,” September 14, 1958, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 347–50. King borrowed portions of this sermon from Niles, “Summons at Midnight.”
39. King Jr., “Statement upon Return to Montgomery,” October 24, 1958, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 4: 513–14.
40. Vaughn and Wills, Reflections on Our Pastor, 31.
41. King, annual report, Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, November 18, 1958, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 4: 537–39.
42. Kenneth L. Buford, William C. Patton, and King to Dwight D. Eisenhower, January 25, 1959, ibid., 5: 111–12; King to G. Mennen Williams, January 28, 1959, ibid., 5: 112–13.
43. “Account by Lawrence Dunbar Reddick of Press Conference in New Delhi on 10 February 1959,” ibid., 5: 125–29; James E. Bristol to Corinne B. Johnson, March 10, 1959, ibid., 5: 137–42.
44. King, “A Walk through the Holy Land,” March 29, 1959, ibid., 5: 164–75.
45. MIA newsletter, vol. 1, no. 12 (April 30, 1959), Montgomery Improvement Association Collection; Montgomery Advertiser, March 21, 1959.
46. Session of Trinity Presbyterian Church to Mrs. Arnold Smith, April 13, 1959, Folder 1, Andrews Collection; Fred L. Shuttlesworth to King, April 24, 1959, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 5: 189–90. In the mid-1940s, Horace G. Bell had been one of Nixon’s greatest critics, denouncing him in several letters to the NAACP national office in New York. See, for instance, Horace G. Bell to Ella Baker, November 25, 1945, Group II, Box C-4, Montgomery NAACP Papers; King to John Malcolm Patterson, May 28, 1959, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 5: 216–17.
47. King, “A Tough Mind and a Tender Heart,” August 30, 1959, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 372–78. King borrowed portions of this sermon from Gerald Kennedy, “The Mind and Heart,” in Kennedy’s The Lion and the Lamb.
48. Ibid. A number of Alabama State College professors lost their jobs in the spring of 1960 for supporting thirty-five ASC students who were arrested for staging a sit-in at the Montgomery County Court House snack bar. Among those losing their jobs were Lawrence Reddick, Jo Ann Robinson, and Mary Fair Burks (MIA newsletter, vol. 2, no. 3 [September 21, 1960], Gregory Papers, 1955–1965).
49. King to Simeon Booker, October 20, 1959, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 5: 313–15.
50. King, “Draft, Resignation from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church,” November 29, 1959, ibid., 5: 328–29. Based on his own experience and having explored the symbolic role Gandhi played in the Indian independence movement, King believed a successful freedom movement was enhanced by the presence of a symbolic leader. During the summer of 1959, King replied to a letter from an Angolan student who sought some assistance and advice for her nation’s independence movement. Significantly, King suggested a good starting place would be to find an individual who would “stand as a symbol for your independence movement. As soon as your symbol is set up it is not difficult to get people to follow, and the more the oppressor seeks to stop and defeat the symbol, the more it solidifies the movement” (King to Deolinda Rodrigues, July 21, 1959, ibid., 5: 250–51). T. H. Randall to King, December 1, 1959, ibid., 5: 332.
51. King, “Address at the Fourth Annual Institute on Nonviolence and Social Change,” December 3, 1959, ibid., 5: 333–43.
52. King to the Montgomery County Board of Education, August 28, 1959, ibid., 5: 270–72.
53. King, “Address at the Fourth Annual Institute on Nonviolence and Social Change,” December 3, 1959, ibid., 5: 333–43.
54. Gray, Leventhal, Sikora, and Thornton, The Children Coming On, 131.
55. Underwood, interview by Lumpkin; Vaughn and Wills, eds., Reflections on Our Pastor, 12, 51. Richard Lischer believes a large part of the reason for King’s departure was the difficulty sustaining growth at the church, given King’s frequent absences: “Despite the fame of its pastor, the church was not thriving. In response to King’s absenteeism and his delegation of his duties to others, the power of the deacons reasserted itself, and the pastor found himself ‘under fire.’ King was encouraged either to cut back on his outside commitments or to leave Dexter. When his responsibilities in the Movement led him back to Atlanta and his father’s church, he left a congregation both saddened and relieved by his departure” (Lischer, The Preacher King, 79).
56. Vaughn and Wills, eds., Reflections on Our Pastor, 62, 80–81, 100.
57. “Dexter Honors Dr. & Mrs. King!!” Dexter Echo, February 3, 1960, MS 22 #722, Coretta Scott King Collection.
58. King, “Address Delivered during ‘A Salute to Dr. and Mrs. Martin Luther King’ at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church,” January 31, 1960, ET-56, Martin Luther King Estate Collection.
59. King, “Address Delivered at the Montgomery Improvement Association’s ‘Testimonial of Love and Loyalty,’” February 1, 1960, ET-53, ET-54, Martin Luther King Estate Collection.
60. SCLC press release, “Dr King Leaves Montgomery for Atlanta,” December 1, 1959, Folder 40, Box 35, King Papers, Boston University.
61. Lewis and Ligon, interview by Lumpkin.
Epilogue
1. Lawrence Dunbar Reddick, “The Montgomery Situation,” April 1960, Folder 5, Box 2, Reddick Papers; H. Councill Trenholm to James McFadden, March 4, 1960, Folder 15, Box 2, ibid.
2. Virginia Durr to Clark Foreman, March 1960, in Sullivan, ed., Freedom Writer, 198–99.
3. Garrow, ed., The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It, 168; Mary Fair Burks to King, March 31, 1960, Box 20, King Papers, Boston University; King to Mary Fair Burks, April 5, 1960, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 5: 406–8; Mary Fair Burks, “Trailblazers: Women in the Montgomery Bus Boycott,” in Crawford, Rouse, and Woods, eds., Women in the Civil Rights Movement, 76.
4. Friedland, Lift up Your Voice Like a Trumpet, 30. See also Durr, Outside the Magic Circle, 309.
5. King, “Statement at Mass Meeting Supporting Freedom Riders,” May 21, 1961, Montgomery to Memphis Film Research Files; Montgomery Improvement Association Bulletin, November 25, 1961, box 4, White House Staff Files, Harris Wofford Files.
6. Thornton, Dividing Lines, 599n76.
7. Millner, “The Montgomery Bus Boycott,” in Garrow, ed., The Walking City, 517.
8. King, “Address at the Steps of the State Capitol at the conclusion of the Selma to Montgomery March,” March 25, 1965, Coretta Scott King Collection.
9. Nixon, interview by Millner, 551; King Jr., Strength to Love, 151–52; James Baldwin, “The Dangerous Road before Martin Luther King,” Harper’s Magazine, February 1961.