Before daybreak on Monday, 5 December, the bus boycott began despite
the cold, lack of money, fears of retaliation, and cross-town commute that
many blacks faced. One man waited at a bus stop beside a crudely lettered
sign that read, ‘Remember it is for our cause that you do not ride the buses
today.’ When the bus arrived, the door opened and the driver asked the man
if he were ‘gonna get on?’ The man shot back, ‘I ain’t gettin’ on until Jim Crow
gets off.’ Bus after bus sped by without black riders. Bus company records
showed that 99 per cent of the usual 30,000 black riders walked, hitchhiked,
and pedaled bicycles. At mid-morning, Rosa Parks, the demure woman who
started it all, received a $10 fine.
That afternoon, Nixon assembled fifty ministers – the most influential
leaders in the black community – to decide what to do next. Their response
was disillusioning. Several ministers suggested timidly that one day had been
enough. Another group endorsed a longer boycott if their identities could be
concealed. A boiling mad Nixon reproached the clerics: ‘What the hell you
people talkin’ about? How you gonna have a mass meeting, gonna boycott a
city bus line without the white folks knowing it?...You oughta make up
your mind right now that you gon’ either admit you are a grown man or con-
cede to the fact that you are a bunch of scared boys.’
Nixon’s words splashed the preachers like a cold shower, and when the
national NAACP hesitated to get involved, they formed a new organization
called the Montgomery Improvement Associationto coordinate the bus
boycott. MIA drafted as its leader the 26-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr.,
who replaced Johns as pastor of the Dexter Avenue church. King seemed an
ideal choice, given his prominent position as the city’s highest-paid black
minister and his singular intelligence and oratorical skills, as well as his inde-
pendence from black factions and segregationist patrons who might have
compromised him. Nixon just knew that King ‘wasn’t any white man’s nigger.’
This modern Moses came to his civil rights calling from one of Atlanta’s
most prominent black families. His maternal grandfather, A.D. Williams, had
built the famed Ebenezer Baptist Church almost from scratch a half-century
earlier and, with his son-in-law, Martin Luther ‘Daddy’ King, Sr., turned it
into the city’s leading black congregation. In a day when most black minis-
ters preached on heavenly salvation, Williams combated racism by becoming
a charter member and president of the city’s NAACP. He led a boycott that
bankrupted a local newspaper that called blacks ‘dirty and ignorant’ and
helped found the city’s first black high school, which his grandson would
attend. White officials did not intimidate Daddy King either, as he made
Ebenezer a center for voter registration and led the fight to equalize teachers’
salaries.
When the precocious Martin Luther King grew up, his father steered
him to the ministry, a fateful decision reinforced at Atlanta’s prestigious46 THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
Montgomery Improve-
ment Association: The
organization that coordi-
nated the Montgomery
bus boycott.