Martin Luther King Jr.

John A. Kirk

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317876496
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

Combining the latest insights from KIng biographies and movement histories, this book provides an up-to-date critical analysis of the relationship between King and the wider civil rights movement. Delivering a fresh perspective on the relationship between 'the man and the movement', Kirk argues that it is the interactionbetween national and local movement concerns that is essential to understanding King's leadership and black activism in the 1950s and 1960s. Kirk examines King's strengths and his limitations, and weighs the role that king played in then movement alongside the contributions of other civil rights organizations and leaders, and local civil rights activists.

Suitable for undergraduate courses in20th century US history.

Chapter 1

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Becoming a Leader, 1929–56

The Montgomery bus boycott thrust King into a leadership position that he did not expect and for which he was largely unprepared. His early life was dedicated to study in pursuit of a career as a Baptist church minister. Growing up in a family with a ministerial tradition, King attended a northern, predominantly white theological seminary for his divinity degree, before gaining a PhD in theology at the also predominantly white Boston University. He had been in his first job at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, for only fifteen months before the bus boycott began. As the protest developed, King found himself called upon by others rather than volunteering himself to perform a leadership role. Once King had agreed to assume that responsibility, however, it changed the entire trajectory of his life. As the bus boycott grew beyond its initially projected, short-term life, King was drawn into an ever more demanding position of responsibility. By the end of the bus boycott, at the age of 27, King would be one of the most well-known black leaders in the United States and a national symbol of an emergent civil rights movement.

Civil Rights in the Mid 1950s

King’s civil rights leadership emerged at a critical point in the continuing struggle for black freedom and equality. The onset of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union after the Second World War had a profound and often contradictory impact on civil rights activism. On the one hand, the Cold War led to a more politically conservative and socially repressive climate in the United States, which found its apotheosis in the anti-communist witch-hunts of Republican senator Joseph T. McCarthy in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Any perceived left-of-centre cause risked the accusation of harbouring communist sympathies, and opponents of civil rights used McCarthyite sentiments and anti-communist rhetoric to curtail the activities of many existing civil rights leaders and organisations. On the other hand, the Cold War made the United States acutely aware of the contradiction between existing racial discrimination and claims to represent global democracy for all. The Soviet Union responded to criticism about its denial of human rights in Eastern Europe by pointing to the United States’s own track record in race relations. Anti-colonial struggles by non-whites in Africa, Asia and the Far East created newly emerging nations where the stance of the two superpowers on the question of race would be influential in winning support.

One of the civil rights organisations that did continue to flourish in Cold War America, largely because of its staunch anti-communist stance, was the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the oldest civil rights organisation in the United States. Founded by black activists and northern white liberals in 1909, with its headquarters in New York, the NAACP’s early campaigns centred on lobbying Congress to pass anti-lynching legislation and defending black civil rights in the courts. It was not until the 1940s, however, that the NAACPbecame a truly effective and potent force as a mass-membership organisation. As blacks strived during the Second World War to win their share of wartime prosperity in the rapidly expanding economy, and fought in segregated US armed services for what the black press termed the ‘Double V’ – victory against a racist foe abroad as well as racism at home – NAACP membership swelled tenfold from 50,000 in 1940 to 500,000 in 1946. The bulk of new members flocked to southern local NAACP branches, which they used as a base to pursue better employment opportunities, voter registration campaigns and fairer treatment from whites.

While the NAACP’s mass southern membership base grew, the national organisation underwent significant changes. Under pressure from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), which denied the NAACP tax-exempt status because of its lobbying activities, in 1939 the NAACP created the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., known later as the LDF or ‘Inc. Fund’. The LDF dealt with legal and educational matters only, thus ensuring its tax-exempt status. The LDF provided black attorney Thurgood Marshall, who became director–counsel of the LDF and special counsel to the NAACP, with a platform to pursue civil rights in the courts. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Marshall won a number of favourable rulings to equalise the salaries of black and white teachers. Throughout the late 1930s, and the 1940s and 1950s, Marshall successfully argued a number of landmark cases before the US Supreme Court. Smith v. Allwright (1944) outlawed the use of all-white Democratic Party primaries that blocked black access to politics in a number of southern states. Morgan v. Virginia (1946) made segregated seating on interstate bus routes illegal. In a series of court cases in higher education, Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada (1938), Sipuel v. Oklahoma State Regents (1948), McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents (1950), and Sweatt v. Painter (1950), Marshall successively rolled back the parameters of segregation in higher education.

The critical legal breakthrough came with Brown v. Board of Education (1954), when the US Supreme Court ruled that segregation in schools was unconstitutional. Marshall introduced evidence from black psychiatrist Kenneth B. Clark, based on his experiments in southern schools, that convinced the Court that segregation ‘generates a feeling of inferiority as to [black children’s] status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone’. The Court concluded that ‘in the field of public education the doctrine of “separate but equal” has no place’. In attacking the legal doctrine of ‘separate but equal’, the Court reversed its earlier ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), when it had declared that the southern states’ practice of segregation did not contravene the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, which guaranteed ‘equal protection of the law’. The Court then ruled that ‘separate’ facilities for the races were constitutional so long as they were of an ‘equal’ standard. In reality, few of the facilities that the southern states provided for blacks were equal to those provided for whites, if indeed they were provided at all. By reversing the legal doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ in school education, the Court challenged the legal underpinnings of segregation as a whole, and paved the way for yet more challenges to segregation in other areas of southern life.

After handing down the Brown decision the Court delayed its implementation for a year to take advice on how next to proceed. Many white southerners opposed Brown. Some vowed a campaign of ‘massive resistance’ and Mississippi led the way in the formation of the first White Citizens’ Council dedicated to preventing school desegregation. Mississippi senator James O. Eastland denounced Brown and advised his constituents that they were ‘not required to obey any court which passes such a ruling’.¹ Not all whites took this hard line. Alabama governor James ‘Big Jim’ Folsom declared that ‘when the Supreme Court speaks, that’s the law’, and even Mississippi governor James P. Coleman appealed for ‘cool thinking’ on the matter.² Many white southern newspaper editors echoed these sentiments. Yet as massive resistance grew such voices of reason were increasingly drowned out. Declaring total opposition to any change in the segregated order fast became an electoral necessity for southern politicians wishing to successfully stay in or to stand for public office. The NAACP bore the brunt of the white southern backlash to Brown. Many of its southern members were persecuted for their activities and local branch membership figures began to dwindle, leading to the collapse of a number of local branches altogether. In 1956, Alabama effectively barred the NAACP from operating in the state.

The reaction to Brown at a national level was not encouraging either. President Dwight D. Eisenhower refused to back the Brown decision strongly in public. In private he confided that his recent appointment of Earl Warren as US Supreme Court chief justice was the ‘biggest damn fool mistake’ he had ever made.³ A US Congress containing many powerful southern politicians also refused to back the Court’s decision. In March 1956, 101 southern congressmen signed the ‘Southern Manifesto’ in outright opposition to Brown. There were even rumours of dissent within the Supreme Court. Some justices who had been persuaded to sign up to a unanimous decision in Brown now argued for a lenient implementation order to appease opponents. Consequently, when the Court issued its implementation order in May 1955, it appeared to backtrack. The Court set no definite guidelines for when school desegregation should begin, nor did it indicate how it should be carried out. It devolved these responsibilities to local school boards and to local and state judges. Many of these were white southerners opposed to desegregation. School desegregation, the Court informed them, should proceed ‘with all deliberate speed’. Many interpreted this as a mandate for indefinite delay.

By the mid 1950s, the legal struggle for black freedom and equality appeared to have stalled. The leading civil rights organisation, the NAACP, had won its greatest victory in the courts after decades of litigation. Yet having won the legal argument against segregation in schools through the courts, white southerners now insisted that they would even go so far as to oppose the law of the land if it meant having to grant black equality. It was at this delicately poised impasse in race relations that the Montgomery bus boycott began in December 1955.

The Origins of the Montgomery Bus Boycott

On the late afternoon of 1 December 1955, 42-year-old Rosa L. Parks, a seamstress in a downtown Montgomery, Alabama, department store boarded her bus home from work. As the bus moved along its route it began to fill with people. White bus driver J. Fred Blake told Parks and other black passengers sitting next to and across the row from her to ‘let me have those front seats’. In the system of racial segregation that existed in Montgomery at the time, the ten seats at the front of the bus were reserved for white passengers and the ten seats at the back of the bus were reserved for black passengers. In the middle section, whites filled the seats from the front, and blacks filled the seats from the back, on a first-come, first-served basis. On that particular evening, blacks occupied all of the seats in the middle section. Parks was sitting in the row next to the white section. The white section was crowded with standing passengers but there was space for blacks to stand at the back. ‘You all make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats,’ Blake warned. Those sitting next to and across from Parks moved. Still, that was not enough. The city bus segregation ordinance decreed that black passengers could not sit parallel to white passengers. Every black person in the row had to move before a white person could sit down. Parks, however, refused to budge. ‘Well, if you don’t stand up, I’m going to call the police and have you arrested,’ Blake told her. ‘You may do that,’ Parks replied. Blake then went to inform the police. A few minutes later, a squad car arrived, and two policemen boarded the bus. ‘Why don’t you stand up?’ asked one of the officers. ‘Why do you push us around?’ Parks demanded. ‘I do not know, but the law is the law and you are under arrest,’ the officer replied.⁴ The policemen then hauled Parks off to the police station where she was charged with breaking Montgomery’s city bus segregation ordinance.

News of Parks’s arrest quickly reached one of Montgomery’s leading black activists, Edgar Daniel (E.D.) Nixon. A railroad porter, Nixon was head of the black Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) union in Alabama, and president of the Progressive Democratic Association, the political voice of black Democratic Party supporters in Alabama. A former president of the Montgomery NAACP, Nixon had known Parks for a number of years as she had served as his branch secretary. When Nixon called the Montgomery police station to find out exactly what had happened, he was curtly told by a police officer that it was ‘None of your so-and-so business.’⁵ Nixon then attempted to contact black attorney Fred D. Gray. The young, recently qualified attorney was, alongside Charles D. Langford, one of only two black attorneys practising in Montgomery at the time, and the only one willing to accept civil rights cases. When Nixon discovered that Gray was out of town on business, he contacted white attorney Clifford Durr. Clifford and his wife Virginia belonged to a small section of the Montgomery white community, a section found in white communities in many other southern cities, that sympathised with the plight of southern blacks. Such a stance came at a cost. According to Fred Gray, the Durrs ‘endured public scorn and social ostracism’ as a result.⁶ The Durrs knew Parks personally since they had hired her on a regular basis as a seamstress to alter their daughter’s dresses. The Durrs accompanied Nixon to the police station, where Nixon signed the bail bond for Parks’s release. Enthusiastic about using the incident as a legal test case, Nixon told Parks, ‘with your permission we can break down segregation on the bus[es]’. Despite her husband’s objections – ‘Rosa, the white folks will kill you,’ he warned her – Parks agreed.⁷

In a separate development, attorney Fred Gray, upon his return to Montgomery, contacted Jo Ann Robinson of the Women’s Political Council (WPC) about the Parks incident, and told her, ‘if you ever planned to do anything with the council, now is your time’.⁸ The WPC, formed by Mary Fair Banks in 1949, was made up of a small number of black women educators, all of whom were affiliated with Montgomery’s black Alabama State College. In its relatively short life the WPC had established itself as one of the most active political groups in the city. Banks’s friend and colleague, Jo Ann Robinson, was president of the group and had spearheaded previously unsuccessful attempts to petition the city to alter segregation practices on buses in the light of previous incidents. Gray and Robinson had held ‘many discussions … with reference to what should be done in the event another incident occurred’.⁹ Robinson contacted Nixon, and both agreed that the Parks case offered the possibility of mobilising the black community in a united protest at her treatment. They agreed that a mass meeting should be organised to engage the support of the black community, and that a one-day bus boycott should be organised for the following Monday. Nixon took the job of making the necessary arrangements for the mass meeting and Robinson, along with other members of the WPC, made leaflets reading ‘Don’t ride the bus to work, to town, or any place Monday December 5’ and began to distribute them in the black community.¹⁰

Members of Montgomery’s black community knew that Park’s refusal to surrender her seat was not the first time a black person had challenged their treatment by whites on a city bus. Ten years previously, Geneva Jordan had been arrested for ‘talking back’ to a white driver who had complained about her lack of correct change. In the ensuing years, Viola White, Katie Wingfield, and two children visiting from the state of New Jersey, had all been arrested for sitting in the section of the bus reserved for whites. In 1952, a city policeman shot dead a black man who argued with a bus driver over the correct fare. The following year, Epsie Worthy was fined after a fracas with a bus driver in another fare dispute. In 1955, in the months leading up to Parks’s arrest, both Claudette Colvin and Mary Louise Smith had been arrested for refusing to move to the back of the bus. Of these incidents, the Claudette Colvin case had come closest to sparking a challenge to segregation on the buses, since she was the only person to be charged under the city segregation ordinance and, on the advice of attorney Fred Gray, to plead ‘not guilty’ in court. For various legal and personal reasons, however, the attempt to use the Colvin incident as a legal test case had collapsed.

Montgomery’s black population was not alone in its discontent with bus segregation. As a site of frequent close contact between blacks and whites, public transportation was often a place of racial friction in southern cities. When segregation statutes had first been introduced on streetcars at the turn of the century, the black community in Montgomery had organised a boycott in protest, as had a number of other black communities in cities across the South. During and after the Second World War, instances of interracial pushing, shoving and jostling on buses increased in correspondence with increasing black discontent with and action against the segregated order. In 1953, the Revd Theodore J. Jemison organised a bus boycott in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to protest against segregated seating arrangements there. Utilising taxis and then a car pool as alternative transportation systems for black passengers, the boycott lasted for ten days until whites finally acquiesced in black demands to modify segregation practices. Under the new arrangements, reserved sections for the races were abolished and whites sat from the front of the bus to the back, and blacks sat from the back of the bus to t...