Recalling the ‘No’ That Shook the South

In 1955, Martin Luther King was a relative unknown, the novice pastor of Dexter Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala. But by year’s end, his name was a household word. His rise from obscurity to national prominence began in December, when Rosa Parks defied segregation laws in her home town, Montgomery, Ala. Her action and King’s response would help forever change the nation .

On Dec. 1, 1955, Rosa Parks left the Montgomery Fair department store late in the afternoon for her regular bus ride home. All 36 seats of the bus she boarded were soon filled, with 22 Negroes seated from the rear and 14 whites from the front.

Driver J. P. Blake, seeing a white man standing in the front of the bus, called out for the four passengers on the row just behind the whites to stand up and move to the back. Nothing happened. Blake finally had to get out of the driver’s seat to speak more firmly to the four Negroes.

“You better make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats,” he said. At this, three of the Negroes moved to stand in the back of the bus, but Parks responded that she was not in the white section and didn’t think she ought to move.

She was in no-man’s-land. Blake said that the white section was where he said it was, and he was telling Parks that she was in it.

As he saw the law, the whole idea of no-man’s-land also gave him emergency police power to enforce the segregation codes. He would arrest Parks himself if he had to. Parks replied that he should do what he had to do; she was not moving. She spoke so softy that Blake would not have been able to hear her above the drone of normal bus noise. But the bus was silent. Blake notified Parks that she was officially under arrest. She should not move until he returned with the regular Montgomery police.

At the station, officers booked, fingerprinted and incarcerated Rosa Parks. It was not possible for her to think lightly of being arrested. Having crossed the line that in polite society divided Negroes from niggers, she had reason to expect not only stinging disgrace among her own people but the least civilized attentions of the whites. When she was allowed to call home, her mother’s first response was to groan and ask, “Did they beat you?”

A Man Who Could Help

Deep in panic, the mother called E. D. Nixon’s house for help. Nixon was a Pullman porter, famous to Montgomery Negroes as the man who knew every white policeman, judge and government clerk in town, and had always gone to see them about the grievance of any Negro who asked him for help. Mrs. Nixon absorbed the shock and promptly called her husband at the downtown office he maintained.

“What was it she was arrested about?” Nixon asked.

“I don’t know,” Mrs. Nixon replied impatiently. “Go and get her.”

Nixon sighed. It was just like his wife to give him orders, as though he could always tell the white authorities to do things, such as to release prisoners.

Nixon called Clifford Durr, an influential liberal white lawyer who often helped Nixon on civil rights issues, and told him what he knew. Durr promised to find out what he could from the jail, and soon called back with a report: Rosa Parks was charged with violating the Alabama bus segregation laws. That was all. When he volunteered to accompany Nixon to make bond for Mrs. Parks, Nixon accepted the offer readily.

Officers fetched Parks from the cellblock as Nixon was signing the bond papers. She and Nixon and Durr were soon inside the Parks home with her mother and her husband, Raymond, a barber.

Nixon asked the husband and the mother to excuse Rosa briefly, so that she could speak privately with him and Durr.

Momentous Decision

He put the question to her: Would she be willing to fight the case? Rosa Parks did not have to be told twice what he meant, but she knew that it was a momentous decision for her family. She said she would have to approach her relatives with the idea privately, and chose to talk first alone with her mother and then with her husband.

The proposal upset both of them. Raymond Parks came nearly undone. Having just felt primitive, helpless terror when his wife had been snatched into jail, he could not bear the thought that she would re-enter the forbidden zone by choice. Now there was hope that the arrest could be forgiven as an isolated incident, but if she persisted, it would be deliberate. It would be political. “The white folks will kill you, Rosa,” he said, pleading with her not to do it.

Rosa Parks finally announced her decision. “If you think it will mean something to Montgomery and do some good, I’ll be happy to go along with it,” she said. After talking with Parks and agreeing to represent her, Durr called several of his friends on the Women’s Political Council, including Jo Ann Robinson, a professor of English at Alabama State.

She was among the leaders of the women’s group who served on the Rev. Martin Luther King’s new political affairs committee at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. Robinson called her closest friends on the Women’s Political Council. All of them responded like firefighters to an alarm. This was it.

Robinson and her friends met about midnight at their offices at Alabama State, each under the pretext of grading exams. They drafted a letter of protest. They revised the letter repeatedly, as ideas occurred to them.

“Until we do something to stop these arrests, they will continue,” the women wrote. “The next time it may be you, or you or you. This woman’s case will come up Monday. We are, therefore, asking every Negro to stay off the buses on Monday in protest of the arrest and trial.”

Approved Idea

Robinson decided to call E. D. Nixon to let him know what they were doing. He instantly approved Robinson’s idea of the one-day bus boycott, saying that he had something like that in mind himself. He told her that he planned to summon Montgomery’s leading Negroes to a planning meeting the very next day, at which both the legal defense and the boycott would be organized. Robinson was the first to know.

About 50 of the Negro leaders assembled in the basement of King’s church, where, after a protracted and often disorderly argument about whether or not to allow debate, they approved the plans more or less as Nixon had laid them out in advance. All undertook to spread the word.

Nixon was up before dawn on Monday morning. So were the Kings, M. L. drinking coffee and his wife, Coretta, keeping watch at the front window, nervously waiting to see the first morning bus. When she saw the headlights cutting through the darkness, she called out to her husband and they watched it roll by together.

The bus was empty! The early morning special on the South Jackson line, which was normally full of Negro maids on their way to work, still had its groaning engine and squeaky brakes, but it was an empty shell. So was the next bus, and the next.

In spite of the bitter morning cold, their fear of white people and their desperate need for wages, Montgomery Negroes were turning the City Bus Lines into a ghost fleet. King, astonished and overjoyed, jumped into his car to see whether the response was the same elsewhere in the city. It was. He drove around for several hours, watching buses pass by carrying handfuls of white passengers.

After Rosa Parks was convicted that morning, E. D. Nixon walked out of the courtroom to post bond for her release. The sight that greeted him in the courthouse hall shocked him almost as much as the empty buses at dawn: a crowd of about 500 Negroes jammed the corridor, spilling back through doors and down the steps into the street.

Not a Fluke

Nixon, who was accustomed to find there only a few relatives of the accused, knew that the empty buses had been no fluke. The jostling, and the sight of still more worried-looking policemen with shotguns, rattled even Nixon temporarily. He tried to disperse the crowd, promising to bring Rosa Parks outside unharmed as soon as the bond was signed. Some voices shouted back that the crowd would storm the courthouse to rescue both Parks and Nixon if they did not emerge within a few minutes. Something was new in Montgomery.

Mass Meeting

All the Negro leaders knew it long before they reassembled that afternoon to plan a mass meeting. That evening at Holt Street Baptist Church they formed the Montgomery Improvement Assn., elected King its president, and decided to extend the bus boycott indefinitely.

That evening a crowd of about 15,000 people surrounded the packed Holt Street Baptist Church as King took the pulpit.

He stood silently for a moment. When he greeted the enormous crowd of strangers, who were packed in the balconies and aisles, peering in through the windows and upward from seats on the floor, he spoke in a deep voice, stressing his diction in a slow introductory cadence. “We are here this evening--for serious business,” he said, in even pulses, rising and then falling in pitch.

When he paused, only one or two “yes” responses came up from the crowd, and they were quiet ones. It was a throng of shouters, he could see, but they were waiting to see where he would take them.

‘People Get Tired’

“You know, my friends, there comes a time,” he cried, “when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression.” A flock of “yeses” were coming back at him when suddenly the individual responses dissolved into a rising cheer and applause exploded beneath the cheer--all within the space of a second.

That startling noise rolled on and on, like a wave that refused to break, and just when it seemed that the roar must finally weaken, a wall of sound came in from the enormous crowd outdoors to push the volume still higher. Thunder seemed to be added to the lower register--the sound of feet stomping on the wooden floor--until the loudness became something that was not so much heard as it was sensed by vibrations in the lungs. The giant cloud of noise shook the building and refused to go away.

One sentence had set it loose somehow, pushing the call-and-response of the Negro church service past the din of a political rally and on to something else that King had never known before. As the noise finally fell back, King’s voice rose above it to fire again.

“There comes a time, my friends, when people get tired of being thrown across the abyss of humiliation where they experience the bleakness of nagging despair,” he declared. “There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life’s July, and left standing amidst the piercing chill of an Alpine November. There. . . .” King was making a new run, but the crowd drowned him out. No one could tell whether the roar came in response to the nerve he had touched, or simply out of pride in a speaker from whose tongue such rhetoric rolled so easily.

The noise swelled until King cut through it to move past a point of unbearable tension. “If we are wrong--Jesus of Nazareth was merely a utopian dreamer and never came down to Earth! If we are wrong--justice is a lie.”

Soaring Conclusion

This was too much. He had to wait some time before delivering his soaring conclusion, in a flight of anger mixed with rapture: “And we are determined here in Montgomery--to work and fight until justice runs down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream!” The audience all but smothered this passage from Amos, the lowly herdsman prophet of Israel, who, along with the priestly Isaiah, was King’s favorite biblical authority on justice.

The applause continued as King made his way out of the church, with people reaching to touch him. Dexter members marveled, having never seen King let loose like that. The boycott was on.

King would work on his timing, but his oratory had just made him forever a public person. In the few short minutes of his first political address, a power of communion emerged from him that would speak inexorably to strangers who would both love and revile him, like all prophets. He was 26, and had not quite 12 years and four months to live.

(The Bus Boycott lasted more than a year. It was not until Dec. 21, 1956, the day after the U.S. Supreme Court told Montgomery officials that their bus segregation law was unconstitutional, that Negroes would again ride Montgomery buses.)

From “Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63” by Taylor Branch. Copyright, 1988, by Taylor Branch. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Simon and Schuster Inc. True to the Times

The word Negro is employed throughout “Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63” because that was the term that prevailed in common usage when events described in this book took place. Author Taylor Branch said that, far from intending a political statement, he merely “hoped to re-create the feeling of the times.”