“Brother Nixon,” King declared, “I’m not a coward.” He
called on the ministers to act in open and use their names.
On the spot someone proposed that King be named presi-
dent of the protest movement. Nearly everyone agreed.
That evening, hundreds of Montgomery blacks filled the
largest Baptist church, with hundreds more spilling onto the
lawn and streets. A loudspeaker was set up. Inside, after Parks
and others had described the events of the previous week,
King strode to the podium. He outlined the situation, and then,
slipping into a preaching mode, began to roll off one booming
phrase after another. “And you know, my friends, there comes a
time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron
feet of oppression,” he said in a deep voice. By the time he fin-
ished, his words were drowned out by the stomping of feet and
the roars of the crowd outside. As if he feared that the passions
he had unloosed were too volatile, he reminded the crowd,
“We are a Christian people.” This protest, he insisted, would not
condone violence.
King’s rhetorical mastery stunned nearly everyone. He
was only twenty-six, and had served as a pastor for only a year.
His father had been minister of the largest Baptist
church in Atlanta, and Martin’s circumstances as a child had
been comfortable. He briefly attended a special school run
by Atlanta University, then the local public high school
before going to Morehouse College in Atlanta. After a period
of indecision he decided to follow in his father’s footsteps
and become a minister.
He attended Crozer seminary in Pennsylvania. After fin-
ishing at the top of his class, he went to Boston University,
where he earned a doctorate in philosophy. (Many years later
Boston University concluded that some portions of his disser-
tation had been plagiarized.) His favorite subject had been
homiletics—the delivery of effective sermons. He resolved to
become a successful preacher in a big-city church.
In 1953 King married Coretta Scott; the next year he
was appointed pastor at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church
in Montgomery.
But in the first week of December, 1955, his life had taken
an unexpected turn. He would be given the task of forging into
a single movement the disparate elements of the black com-
munity: well-educated and influential women such as those on
the Women’s Political Council, working-class militants such as
E. D. Nixon, impatient young men, and a wide variety of conser-
vative ministers. He would adapt the passive nonviolence tac-
tics used by Indian nationalist Mohandas Gandhi to gain
independence from Britain, and apply them to very different
circumstances in the American South. He would use the lan-
guage of Christian brotherhood to reach out to whites. He
would lead the movement that would change the nation.
But that was in the future. In December 1955, a conver-
gence of fateful circumstances had pushed him into leader-
ship of a bus boycott. Twelve years later, he would be dead,
victim of an assassin’s bullet.W
ell after midnight on December 2, 1955, Jo Ann
Robinson, an English professor at Alabama State in
Montgomery, was working feverishly in her office with
several other women. Eight hours earlier, Rosa Parks had
been arrested for violating Montgomery’s segregation laws.
Robinson had called an emergency meeting of the Women’s
Political Council. Now they were drafting a leaflet to mobilize
the black community: “Another Negro woman has been
arrested and thrown into jail because she refused to get up
out of her seat and give it to a white person,” they wrote.
“The next time it may be you.” The next day they distributed
the leaflet throughout the black community.
On Monday morning, the buses were nearly empty. That
afternoon Montgomery’s black leaders met to discuss strategy
for the meeting that evening. One minister urged that they
keep their plans secret. E. D. Nixon, a railroad porter and presi-
dent of the local NAACP, jumped to his feet: “How do you think
you can run a bus boycott in secret?” Then he lost his temper.
“You ministers have lived off these wash-women for the last
hundred years and ain’t never done nothing for them.” The
ministers, he insisted, should stand up and be men.
As Nixon was finishing his diatribe, the new minister in
town strode into the room. Young, well-dressed Martin
Luther King, Jr. was regarded as something of a dandy. Now,
all eyes turned to the dapper latecomer.
AMERICAN LIVES
Martin Luther King, Jr.
759The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., Coretta Scott King, and their
children share a moment of calm in Montgomery, 1956. That year,
while King was addressing a mass meeting, his house was bombed;
Coretta and the children were unhurt.