E.D. Nixon’s lawn. Despite beatings, job dismissals, home foreclosures, and
arrests, most boycotters carried on. ‘They can bomb us out and they can kill
us, but we are not going to give in,’ Nixon declared resolutely.
As the stakes rose, King became the logical target. False rumors spread
that King embezzled enough money to buy a new Cadillac. To defend himself
against such charges, King lived modestly throughout his life. When he received
personal threats, King applied for a gun permit and accepted around-the-
clock volunteers to guard his home. He rescinded his permit application and
dismissed the guards after northern pacifists from FOR tutored him on the
finer points of nonviolence. King’s faith in nonviolence was tested almost at
once as his parsonage was bombed with his wife and infant daughter inside.
Maintaining his composure, King told blacks bent on revenge to put their
guns away and ‘love our white brothers no matter what they do to us.’
Terrified, Daddy King drove through the night from Atlanta to demand that
his son give up the fight. ‘Better to be a live dog than a dead lion!’ the senior
King roared to no effect. Weeks later, a hundred boycotters, including King,
were indicted for violating the state’s anti-boycott law. Although King was
found guilty and fined $500 or a year at hard labor, the decision was over-
turned on a technicality. As King left the courthouse, a crowd of boycotters
sang, ‘We ain’t gonna ride the buses no more, Ain’t gonna ride no more. Why
don’t all the white folk know That we ain’t gonna ride no more?’
When compromise was impossible, the NAACP filed suit in federal court
against bus segregation itself. Montgomery blacks no longer sought to mod-
ify segregation on the local level. In June 1956, a three-judge panel, includ-
ing Frank Johnson, Jr., an Alabama native and Eisenhower appointee,
ruled that segregated buses violated the 14th Amendment. It was the first
of several trail-blazing decisions for Johnson during the civil rights era. To
intimidate ‘the most hated man in Alabama,’ the KKK bombarded Johnson
with death threats, burned a cross in his yard, and later dynamited his
widowed mother’s house.
Judge Johnson’s ruling was a serious defeat for white Alabama. The city
appealed the decision to the US Supreme Court. State attorney general John
Patterson demanded the NAACP produce its membership list, which would
have meant even greater reprisals against blacks. When the New York-based
organization refused to identify its members, a state court fined it $100,000
and shut it down in Alabama. As bus revenues dropped by two-thirds, the
company offered to desegregate its seating, but the mayor said no. He did not
care if blacks ever rode a city bus again ‘if it means that the social fabric of
our community is to be destroyed.’ The city of Montgomery finally sued the
MIA to stop the car pool as a business without a license.
As the city’s suit was being heard in November 1956, the US Supreme
Court ruled in Gaylev. Browderthat Montgomery’s segregation laws were50 THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
Johnson, Frank, Jr.
(1918–99): Federal judge
who supported civil rights
in Alabama.