deep religious faith held by many blacks, King united the lower and middle
classes to challenge Jim Crow.
On the night the boycott began, thousands of plain folks attended a
raucous revival at the Holt Street Baptist Church. King took fifteen hours to
write his Sunday sermons, but this night he had twenty minutes to write the
most important speech of his life. King proved equal to the occasion. ‘We are
here this evening,’ he intoned in his powerful baritone voice, ‘to say to those
who have mistreated us so long that we are tired – tired of being segregated
and humiliated; tired of being kicked about by the brutal feet of oppression.’
Endorsing Christian nonviolence as the ‘weapon of protest,’ King closed
his lyrical address with a paraphrase from the biblical prophet Amos: ‘And
we are determined here in Montgomery – to work and fight until justice
runs down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream!’ The ecstatic
crowd jumped to its feet, applauding and shouting, ‘Amen, brother, amen.’
An elderly woman said she ‘saw angels standing all around him when he
finished, and they were lifting him up on their wings.’
The assembled then considered three modest objectives for the boycott:
(1) direct bus drivers to treat black riders courteously, (2) make seating avail-
able on a first-come, first-served basis with blacks filling the bus from the
rear and whites from the front, and (3) hire black bus drivers for black
routes. The first two demands, as Coretta Scott King admitted, called for ‘a
more humane form of segregation.’ The third demand represented a negoti-
ating ploy. City officials might be willing to grant the first two demands, if
they could save face by denying the third. When Ralph Abernathy asked
those who were in favor to stand, no one moved at first. Then people stood
in ones and twos until everyone in the room was standing. A relieved
Abernathy recalled that ‘the fear left that had shackled us across the years –
all left suddenly when we were in that church together.’
White Montgomery ridiculed the boycott plan as too complicated for
local blacks. The city newspaper speculated that the real mastermind was not
King but Robert Graetz, the crusading young white minister of the all-black
Trinity Lutheran Church. Mayor W.A. ‘Tacky’ Gayle predicted the venture
would collapse before long: ‘Comes the first rainy day and the Negroes
will be back on the buses.’ Confident of an early victory, the bus company
flatly refused every demand, even though it operated desegregated buses
downstate in Mobile. The bus company attorney ruled out any compromise
because blacks ‘would go about boasting of a victory they had won over the
white people, and this we will not stand for.’ A shocked King saw that white
supremacists never intended to be reasonable. The boycott, he now realized,
would take months, not days. The prospect was disheartening, for there had
never been such a sustained, highly organized black protest.48 THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT