On February 1, 1960, hours before King delivered his final address as president of the Montgomery Improvement Association, four young African American college students staged a sit-in at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. Over the following weeks, hundreds of college students staged similar protests in cities throughout the South, including Montgomery. Alabama State University (ASU) students began their protest on February 25 by requesting service at the cafeteria of the Montgomery County Courthouse. Although no arrests were made, Alabama governor John Patterson demanded that ASU president H. Councill Trenholm expel the students who participated in this direct action or risk losing state funding for his institution. In early March, Trenholm wrote letters to several students informing them that the State Board of Education had directed him to expel them from the school, citing their participation in “conduct prejudicial to the school and for conduct unbecoming a student or future teacher in schools of Alabama, for insubordination and insurrection, or for inciting other pupils to like conduct.”1
Immediately after the expulsions of their fellow classmates, several Alabama State students gathered to protest the expulsions at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church and then proceeded to march to the nearby Capitol building. In response, the Montgomery police deputized dozens of white citizens in response to the sit-ins, and used many of these new deputies to cordon off the Capitol building and prevent the protestors from reaching their destination. Virginia Durr commented regarding the response to the sit-ins and demonstrations: “You never saw such unanimity in your life as there seems to be in the white community, although privately some dissent, but not many.” Meanwhile, the campus of Alabama State was divided over the issue, with some professors supporting the protestors, while others worked to preserve their jobs. Still, for the first time since the end of the bus boycott over three years earlier, students from Alabama State took the lead in a sustained protest that lasted several weeks. The leadership for this new protest came not from the MIA or other established local civil rights organizations, but from young college students, who were part of a much larger movement that would soon organize as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).2
Young college students were willing to risk a great deal in an effort to break down segregation in their city. The timing of their sit-ins was undoubtedly influenced by events in Greensboro and Nashville and throughout the South. The fact that these Alabama State students sat down at segregated lunch counters, risking arrest and abuse, was also a part of the legacy of their community. Many of their professors had been at the forefront of the boycott just a few years earlier. Several of these students had been on campus or in the broader community during the epic year of the bus protest. They were ready for this moment, in part because of the brave men and women who had stepped forward four years earlier. Despite white backlash and the floundering of local civil rights organizations over the previous three years, there were still young men and women ready to act in Montgomery to bring about substantive change and greater justice.
The State of Alabama seized on the sit-ins and protests by students to finally go after some of the more active faculty members at Alabama State whom they suspected had been a part of the boycott years earlier. Even before the sit-ins had begun, the state had sent representatives from the state’s department of education into the classrooms of Alabama State professors they believed had been involved in the local movement, taking notes throughout class in an attempt to intimidate the instructors. Recognizing her teaching job was in jeopardy, Mary Fair Burks wrote a letter to her former pastor expressing her concerns. Claiming “Jo Ann [Robinson], [Lawrence] Reddick and I expect to be fired,” her biggest surprise was that they had not yet lost their jobs. King was disappointed in the ASU president: “I had hoped that Dr. Trenholm would emerge from this total situation as a national hero. If he would only stand up to the Governor and the Board of Education and say that he cannot in all good conscience fire the eleven faculty members who have committed no crime or act of sedition, he would gain support over the nation that he never dreamed of. And indeed jobs would be offered to him overnight if he were fired.” King tried to reassure Burks, claiming he would “do all that I possibly can to assist you and your colleagues in getting work for the Fall.” After the spring term, Burks, Reddick, and Robinson were among seventeen professors who either resigned under pressure or were dismissed from ASU.3
Burks and Robinson, the two women most responsible for the effectiveness of the Women’s Political Council and the initial launching of the bus boycott, had to leave the city in search of employment. The same year, Thomas Thrasher, an active participant in the Alabama Conference on Human Welfare and one of the few white pastors to challenge white supremacy, was transferred by the Episcopal Church to the chaplaincy of the University of North Carolina due to his outspokenness on racial issues.4 Four years after the conclusion of the boycott, supporters continued to experience retribution for their involvement, preventing any reemergence of a sustained local movement for civil rights.
Over the coming years, Montgomery remained a part of the struggle for civil rights, but more as a staging ground for national protests than as a result of local agitation. On May 20, 1961, an angry white mob physically assaulted Freedom Riders as they departed their bus at the Montgomery bus station. The following day, King joined his friend and the MIA president Ralph Abernathy at First Baptist Church for a mass meeting, noting that “over the past few days Alabama has been the scene of a literal reign of terror.” As King spoke inside First Baptist Church, a white mob gathered outside, threatening violence and preventing meeting participants from departing. King took the microphone to try to calm the agitated crowd: “Now, we’ve got an ugly mob outside. They have injured some of the federal marshals. They, they’ve burned some automobiles, but, we are not, we are not giving in for what we are standing for.” King continued a few moments later: “The first thing we must do here tonight is to decide that we aren’t going to become panicky, and we’re gonna be calm, and that we are going to continue to stand up for what we know is right, and that Alabama will have to face the fact that we are determined to be free. The main thing I want to say to you is, fear not, we’ve gone too far to turn back, let us be calm, we are together, we are not afraid, and we shall overcome.” By dawn the mob had dispersed, allowing officials to restore order. The Freedom Rides did result in an integrated bus terminal in Montgomery, a fact the MIA celebrated in a November 1961 newsletter. Despite this symbolic victory, the City of Montgomery had still not met one of the original demands issued at the commencement of the boycott six years earlier: the hiring of black bus drivers.5
On July 6, 1962, Montgomery finally hired their first two black bus drivers.6 Later that year, the MIA president, Solomon Seay, still found himself lobbying with city commissioners to hire additional black drivers to serve a clientele that remained primarily African American.7 Less than two months into the bus boycott, the demand for black bus drivers had already proven to be a low priority. When the MIA developed a plan to chart a new direction for the organization in early 1957, they made no concrete mention of their desire to see integrated employment policies in public transportation. The failure to hold out until officials met this demand, or even to continue to vigorously lobby for greater access to working class jobs in Montgomery, demonstrates the absence of a local plan that would affect the daily lives of marginalized blacks in the years after the boycott. As professional leaders sought to integrate public parks, economic goals faltered. No sustained movement emerged to build on the successes of 1956. The Montgomery movement floundered, leaving few tangible benefits for those who had sacrificed most during the boycott.
The national civil rights spotlight returned to Montgomery one last time on March 25, 1965. A few weeks earlier, police officers had bludgeoned marchers in Selma, Alabama, when they attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in a march to Montgomery to lobby for voting rights. This time, several thousand gathered again in Selma to conduct a march to the State Capitol. They successfully completed their protest, which culminated with a rally on the steps of the State Capitol building. King began his address by paying tribute to the struggle that had launched his civil rights leadership a decade earlier: “Montgomery was the first city in the South in which the entire Negro community united and squarely faced its age-old oppressors. Out of its struggle more than bus integration was won. A new idea more powerful than guns or clubs was born. Negroes took it and carried it across the South in epic battles that electrified a nation and the world.” As he neared his conclusion, King reflected: “In the glow of lamplight on my desk a few nights ago, I gazed again upon the wondrous signs of our time, full of hope and promise for the future and I smiled to see in the newspaper photographs of nearly a decade ago, the faces so bright, so solemn of our valiant heroes, the people of Montgomery.” Just a few hundred yards from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, King paid homage to the people of Montgomery whose sacrifices and courage had catapulted him to the forefront of the national civil rights struggle.8
E. D. Nixon remained in Montgomery until his death, convinced that King’s prominence was directly tied to his participation in a local struggle in the 1950s. Nixon claimed that “King was not the same man when he left here as when he took over the boycott.” He changed because Nixon, Parks, Robinson, Burks, and countless working-class blacks “pushed him a whole lot. Right now people don’t like to hear me say this … but it isn’t what Reverend King did for Montgomery, it’s what the people of Montgomery did for Reverend King.” King agreed to a point, crediting his time in the Alabama capital for sharpening his approach to social change: “The experience in Montgomery did more to clarify my thinking than all the books that I had read. As the days unfolded, I became more and more convinced of the power of nonviolence. Nonviolence became more than a method to which I gave intellectual assent; it became a commitment to a way of life.” Perhaps the author James Baldwin best captured the significant influence of Montgomery on King: “It is true that it was they who had begun the struggle of which he was now the symbol and the leader; it is true that it had taken all of their insistence to overcome in him a grave reluctance to stand where he now stood. But it is also true, and it does not happen often, that once he had accepted the place they had prepared for him, their struggle became absolutely indistinguishable from his own, and took over and controlled his life. He suffered with them and, thus, he helped them to suffer.” Baldwin’s 1961 essay accurately conveys the deep and abiding influence Montgomery’s local struggle had on Martin Luther King Jr. It also recognizes the very real contributions King made to both the local and national struggle. Baldwin’s reflections accent the seminal role the people of Montgomery played in King’s emergence and effectiveness as a civil rights leader. The Martin Luther King Jr. remembered and celebrated around the world was born in Montgomery.9