| Randall Kennedy, Martin Luther
King's Constitution: a Legal History of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, 98
Yale Law Journal 999-1067 (April, 1989)(397 Footnotes Omitted
II. Rebellion in Montgomery
No events better epitomized the struggle of Southern blacks against
segregation during the Second Reconstruction than the boycotts directed
against Jim Crow seating on buses, 'one of the few places . . . where
blacks and whites were segregated under the same roof and in full view
of each other.' The most famous of these boycotts occurred in
Montgomery.
A. The Spark
The spark that ignited the boycott was the refusal of a black
woman--Rosa Parks--to follow a driver's directive that she relinquish
her seat and move further back into the rear, 'black' section of the
bus. The seat she occupied was located in the first row of the black
section, a row filled by three blacks besides Mrs. Parks. According to
one version of the facts, the bus driver demanded that Mrs. Parks and
the other blacks on her row vacate their seats to accomodate several
white passengers. In this account, a sense of segregationist equity
informed the driver's decision. On this predominantly black route, the
bus company allocated ten seats to the whites and twenty-six to the
blacks. But on this particular run, the driver 'undertook to readjust
the seating to a more equitable ratio . . . by altering the racial
division to fourteen white seats and twenty-two black.' A slightly
different version of the facts suggests that the driver demanded that
all of the blacks in Mrs. Parks' row vacate their seats in order to
accomodate only one white passenger. According to this version, the
driver's demand stemmed from an unwritten rule of Jim Crow etiquette
which prohibited blacks and whites from occupying seats on the same row
at the same time.
Whatever version accords with the reality of the driver's conduct and
motivation, there is no disagreement about the nature of Mrs. Parks'
response. While the three blacks on either side of her relinquished
their seats as ordered, she stayed put. 'I felt it was just something I
had to do,' she later recalled. Her refusal to move, however, was more
than a personal whim. As Martin Luther King observed, she had been
'tracked down by the Zeitgeist.' 'She was anchored to that seat by the
accumulated indignities of days gone by and the boundless aspirations of
generations yet unborn.' When police officers boarded the bus and
demanded that she move, she again refused. 'Why do you push us around,'
she asked. 'I don't know,' one of the officers replied, ' b ut the law
is the law, and you are under arrest.'
Mrs. Parks' arrest elevated to new levels widespread dissatisfaction
within Montgomery's black community. By the early 1950's, segregation on
the buses had become a flashpoint of frustration and anger. In 1952, a
black man was shot and killed by the Montgomery policy in an altercation
over bus fare. In 1953, in a similar dispute, a white driver beat a
black woman. The source of deepest resentment, however, was not episodic
outrages but rather the ordinary degradations of Jim Crow
practice--standing up over empty seats reserved for whites only,
confronting drivers who refused to make change for Negroes, entering
buses from the rear after paying fares at the front, encountering abuse
for forgetting even momentarily the code of the color bar. Jo Ann Gibson
Robinson recalled with seering vividness the pain she suffered at the
hands of a driver who assailed her for sitting (mistakenly) in a seat
reserved for whites:
I leaped to my feet, afraid he would hit me, and ran to the front
door to get off the bus. . . . Tears blinded my vision; waves of
humiliation inundated me; and I thanked God that none of my students was
on that bus. . . . I could have died from embarrassment. . . . In all
these years I have never forgotten the shame, the hurt, of that
experience. The memory will not go away.
B. The WPC's Modest Proposals
In the early 1950's, a black women's civic organization--the Women's
Political Council (WPC)--took the lead in seeking to secure better
treatment for blacks from the bus company. The WPC requested and
obtained meetings with city and bus company officials to convey
complaints and requests. It simply asked for 'fairness' within the
bounds of segregation. On May 21, 1954--four days after the announcement
of Brown v. Board of Education--the WPC requested not an end to the
enforcement of segregation laws but merely the cessation of certain
practices that were not compelled by statute: ousting blacks from seats
outside the reserved 'white sections' of buses and requiring blacks to
enter buses through the rear after paying in the front. Despite the
modesty of the WPC's requests, it received little satisfaction. The WPC
informed city officials that a boycott was in the offing unless
something was done to better the situation. Yet in March and October
1955, two black teenagers were arrested for refusing to relinquish their
seats. Then came the arrest of Rosa Parks.
The WPC took the lead in initiating a boycott by blanketing black
neighborhoods with leaflets that urged Negroes to forego riding the
buses on the day of Mrs. Parks' trial:
Another Negro woman has been arrested and thrown in jail because she
refused to get up out of her seat on the bus for a white person to sit
down. . . . If we do not do something to stop these arrests, they will
continue. The next time it may be you, or your daughter, or mother. . .
. We are, therefore, asking every Negro to stay off the buses Monday in
protest of the arrest and trial. Don't ride the buses to work, to town,
to school, or anywhere. . . . You can . . . afford to stay out of town
for one day. If you work, take a cab, or walk. But please, children and
grown-ups, don't ride the bus. . . .
The call for a one-day boycott elicited a dramatic response: on
December 5, 1955, the vast majority of the black bus-riding
public--seventy percent of the bus company's clientele--refrained from
using the buses. Emboldened by success, leading figures in the black
community created a new umbrella organization--the Montgomery
Improvement Association (MIA)--to coordinate the protest and press for
its continuation. The Key figure in this process was E. D. Nixon, the
local elder statesman of civil rights activists. Nixon was a Pullman
porter who had long been active in the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car
Porters, the first black union to wrest a collective bargaining
agreement from a major company, and a leader of local and state chapters
of the NAACP. He marshalled the support of churchmen and other
influential blacks, used his contacts with the local white press to
publicize what was happening, and provided the protest in its earliest
phase with the prestige of his own reputation.
C. King's Role
Although Nixon was the best-known of the dissidents who founded the
MIA, King was selected to preside over it. He was younger, better
educated, more articulate, and a member of the clergy--a position that
gave him a strong institutional base of support. King was also
relatively unscarred by one of the features of black life in Montgomery
that had long stifled effective responses to racial oppression: bitter
personal jealousies and animosities. He had not resided in Montgomery
long enough to be identified strongly with any given faction or to rub
many people the wrong way. He was the consensus choice of Montgomery's
black dissident elite and quickly gained the support of the city's black
masses as well.
King was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, in a solidly
middle-class family that wielded considerable influence due to its
heritage of leading churchmen; King's father and maternal grandfather
were well-known pastors. He was educated at Morehouse College, Crozer
Theological Seminary, and Boston University, where he earned his
doctorate. At the time of Rosa Parks' arrest, King was engaged in his
first pastorship as the minister of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. He
had resided in Montgomery for only a little more than a year and was
only twenty-six years old.
King's selection as president of the MIA was quickly vindicated by
the speech he delivered the night of Mrs. Parks' trial. Before an
overflow audience at the Holt Street Baptist Church, he delivered,
largely extemporaneously, a short but impassioned address that sounded
many of the major themes upon which he would elaborate during the
remainder of his life. He did so with the mix of patriotism and outrage,
simplicity and sophistication that make his speeches among the most
memorable in American history. 'My friends,' he began:
We are here this evening for serious business. We are here in a
general sense because first and foremost, we are American citizens, and
we are determined to acquire our citizenship to the fullness of its
meaning. We are here because of our deep-seated belief that democracy
transformed from thin paper to thick action is the greatest form of
government on earth. But we are here in a specific sense because of the
bus situation in Montgomery. We are here because we are determined to
get the situation corrected.'
King's speech aroused a tremendous swell of enthusiasm. It expressed
sentiments that had long lain dormant: '[T]here comes a time when people
get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression.' It
articulated an urgent yearning for dignity: 'We are here to save
ourselves from the patience which makes us patient with less than
freedom and justice.' It stressed the moral and legal righteousness of
the protest. 'My friends,' King declared:
don't let anybody make us feel that we ought to be compared in our
actions with the Ku Klux Klan or the White Citizens Councils. There will
be no crosses burned at any bus stops in Montgomery. There will be no
white persons pulled out of their homes and taken out to some distant
road and murdered. There will be nobody among us who will stand up and
defy the Constitution of this nation.
The boycott lasted 382 days, from December 5, 1955, to December 21,
1956, far longer than its organizers initially thought possible. As King
later observed:
Many of the Negroes who joined the protest did not expect it to
succeed. When asked why, they usually gave three answers: 'I didn't
expect Negroes to stick to it,' or, 'I never thought we Negroes had the
nerve,' or, 'I thought the pressure from the white folks would kill it
before it got started.'
But to the surprise of many, the boycott was consistently effective.
Upwards of ninety percent of the black, bus-riding population--some
40,000 Negroes-- honored the plea to stay off the buses. To transport
the boycotters, the MIA created an alternative transportation network
connected by about eighty to ninety dispatch and pick-up stations all
over Montgomery. Initially, this alternative system of transportation
depended almost wholly on labor and automobiles donated to the MIA on a
part-time basis. But soon the system took on an air of semi-permanence
as the MIA hired drivers, bought vehicles, and forged a remarkably
effective transportation service that operated, according to the White
Citizens Council, with 'military precision.'
The success of the MIA's transportation system reflected the
extraordinary sense of political commitment that suffused and mobilized
the black community. Black Montgomery psychologically declared its
independence from the white power structure and became, in important
respects, self-governing. King and the other key figures in the MIA
provided direction. But the boycott movement was, throughout its
existence, a strikingly democratic phenomenon. As one friendly observer
commented, 'If there was ever an indigenous mass movement, this was it.'
To keep the community abreast of developments, the MIA published a
newsletter. And to ensure an ongoing and active rapport between leaders
and led, the MIA sponsored weekly mass meetings that rotated from church
to church. The meetings, King later explained:
cut across class lines. The vast majority present were working
people; yet there was always as appreciable number of professionals in
the audience. Physicians, teachers, and lawyers sat or stood beside
domestic workers and unskilled laborers. The Ph.D.'s and the no 'D's'
were bound together in a common venture. The so-called 'big Negroes' who
owned cars and had never ridden the buses came to know the maids and the
laborers who rode the buses every day. Men and women who had been
separated from each other by false standards of class were now singing
and praying together in a common struggle. . . .
For those who seek in the American past glimpses of communities in
which self-determination constituted a liberating passion rather than a
distasteful chore, black Montgomery in 1955-1956 is a fine example. That
community was probably never more free than during the boycott. So high
was the level of engagement, so deep was the urge to reform, 'so
profoundly had the spirit of the protest become a part of the people's
lives that sometimes they even preferred to walk when a ride was
available. The act of walking, for many, had become of symbolic
importance.'
King's greatest contribution to the boycott movement lay in his
ability to conceptualize and articulate a morally attractive vision of
the protest. Two aspects of that vision were particularly influential.
One had to do with his attentiveness to the morality of process. Arguing
in Gandhi-like fashion that the means are the ends in the making, King
emphasized in countless interviews, speeches, and articles the
nonviolent, unembitterred, redemptive character of the protest. 'The
Negro must work passionately and unrelentingly for full stature as a
citizen,' King maintained, '[b]ut he must not use inferior methods to
gain it. He must never come to terms with falsehood, malice, hate, or
destruction.'
The second feature of King's contribution had to do with placing the
protest in a framework that enlarged its meaning, that transformed it
from a parochial to a universal struggle. It is true that he made
frequent appeals to racial pride over the course of the boycott,
challenging his black constituency to strike a blow for the betterment
of the Negro's fortunes. But he also emphatically portrayed the boycott
as a more ambitious and inclusive undertaking. 'We are not struggling
merely for the rights of Negroes,' he declared one evening at a MIA
prayer meeting. 'We are determined to make America a better place for
all people.'
D. The Radicalizing of King and the MIA
The Montgomery story might have turned out far differently had the
Montgomery City Lines been served by a different legal advisor. During
the first few weeks of the boycott, at meetings sponsored by the Alabama
Council on Human Relations (ACHR), the MIA attempted to negotiate a
settlement on the basis of reforms that avoided directly challenging the
legitimacy of de jure segregation. But the Company's attorney, Jack
Crenshaw, successfully thwarted all attempts to compromise. Although he
assured the MIA that, of course, the Company would discipline
discourteous employees brought to its attention, he was unwilling to
concede that there even existed a problem with drivers' demeanor toward
black passengers. He reported that the Company did not anticipate hiring
any black bus drivers. Most importantly, in terms of the evolution of
the protest, he insisted from the outset that the MIA's proposals
regarding altered seating arrangements contradicted state and municipal
segregation statutes. According to Crenshaw, ' i f the blacks don't like
the law we have to operate under, . . . they should try to get the law
changed, not engage in an attack on our company.'
Crenshaw's argument powerfully strengthened the position of hard-line
segregationists. At least one of the city commissioners appears to have
favored compromising on the basis of the MIA's initial demands on
seating. But Crenshaw assailed compromise on the basis of both policy
and legality. Compromise was unwise, he contended, because it would only
feed black defiance. 'If we granted the Negroes these demands,' he
warned, 'they would go about boasting of a victory they had won over the
white people.' Compromise was illegal, he insisted, because the city
ordinance as written could simply not accommodate the reformed seating
arrangement the MIA proposed.
The Code of Alabama provided that all transportation companies
carrying passengers for hire 'shall at all times provide equal but
separate accommodations on each vehicle for the white and colored
races.' The Code further declared that the agent in charge of any
vehicle 'is authorized and required to assign each passenger to the
division of the vehicle designated for the race to which the passenger
belongs.' The City of Montgomery's Code articulated essentially the same
rule: ' A bus line in the city shall provide equal but separate
accommodations for white people and negroes . . . by requiring employees
to assign passenger seats . . . in such manner as to separate the white
people from the negroes.' Nothing in the language of either of these
provisions expressly precluded a system, in which, on a first-come,
first-served basis, whites occupied seats from front to back and Negroes
from back to front until all seats were taken. Moreover, a seating plan
of precisely this sort was already in effect in other segregated
southern transportation systems including, most notably, Mobile,
Alabama.
Segregationists in Montgomery objected to this plan, however, on the
grounds that it made no provision for what was to be done if a bus
filled with Negroes who then departed at various times were left with
only a scattered and mixed array of seats available for incoming white
passengers. The MIA countered this objection by saying that if its plan
were put into effect, Negroes would voluntarily move to vacant seats in
the rear of the bus, while whites would move to vacant seats in the
front. The MIA insisted that ' a t no time, on the basis of its
proposal, will both races occupy the same seat.' Its assurances,
however, were deemed inadequate. Crenshaw's reading of the relevant
statutes frustrated the MIA's impulse to stop short of attacking the
state's enforcement of racial separation per se. 'We are not asking an
end to segregation,' King repeatedly stated early in the boycott.
'That's a matter for the Legislature and the courts. We feel that we
have a plan within the law.' By blocking compromise. Crenshaw helped to
radicalize King and the MIA.
The attack on the boycott was supported by other hardliners. These
were people wholly committed to an unstinting defense of the old order.
In their eyes, more was at stake in Montgomery than money or
convenience. 'What they are after,' Mayor Gayle declared in reference to
King and the MIA, 'is the destruction of our social fabric.' Acting on
that belief, the commissioners ended negotiations and instead imposed a
'get tough' policy aimed at crushing the protest. Gayle vowed that the
City Commission was 'not going to be part of any program that will get
Negroes to ride buses again at the destruction of our heritage and way
of life.'
City officials sought to break the boycott in three ways. First, they
urged the white community to take a unified and aggressive stance toward
the boycotters. Only a miniscule number of whites in Montgomery publicly
supported the MIA. Those who did are noteworthy precisely because of
their peculiarity: they were isolated, ostracized rebels. Both of
Montgomery's white-owned newspapers attacked the MIA editorially. No
predominantly white organization in the city associated itself with the
boycott. The white ministerial association in the city refused even to
meet with King. At the same time, perhaps because they expected the
boycott to fold quickly, white supremacists at both the leadership and
grass-roots levels initially found it difficult to take the boycott
seriously enough to be genuinely alarmed. Upon realizing, however, that
they confronted a protest movement that would not easily be subdued,
white leaders increasingly began to mobilize the white population. Mayor
Gayle, for instance, urged white employers to stop chauffering their
boycotting employees and to avoid paying them "blackmail money' in
extra weekly transportation fares.' More importantly, he and the other
commissioners joined the Montgomery affiliate of the White Citizens'
Council, an action that both reflected and accelerated its rapidly
rising popularity. On February 10, 1956, at a Council rally featuring
Senator James O. Eastland of Mississippi, twelve thousand whites filled
the state coliseum in Montgomery in what was then one of the largest
political gatherings in the history of the state.
No officials publicly encouraged private white violence against the
boycotters, and when violence occurred, they quickly condemned it. On
the other hand, a foreseeable consequence of the commissioners' 'get
tough' policy was to unleash certain well-developed violent impulses.
MIA leaders were threatened, and verbal intimidation was quickly
superseded by potentially lethal force as bombs were detonated at the
homes of King and Nixon.
A second strategy involved efforts to resuscitate the divisiveness
that had characterized the political life of black Montgomery before the
boycott. Rumors were planted accusing King of exploiting the boycott for
personal gain. Leading white citizens suggested to older, conservative
blacks that they were being unfairly overshadowed by an ambitious, young
outsider. Mayor Gayle attempted to bypass King and the MIA altogether by
reaching an agreement with three black ministers unaffiliated with the
protest to end the boycott. These measures, however, were largely
ineffective. Support for King within virtually all sectors of the black
community grew over the course of the struggle. Not only did blacks,
following the direction of the MIA, disregard the alleged settlement,
but, under community pressure, the three ministers who met with the
Mayor publicly disavowed having reached an agreement in the first place.
A third strategy involved harassment and punishment. The local
military draft board reclassified the draft status of Fred Gray, the
MIA's principal local attorney. The local prosecutor initiated (but
later dropped) criminal proceedings against Gray for barratry. The
police, aided by deputized unemployed bus drivers, ticketed black
motorists in unprecedented numbers for speeding, waiting too long at
stop signs, not waiting long enough, or overloading vehicles with
passengers. King himself was arrested and jailed for allegedly driving
thirty miles per hour in a twenty-five mile per hour zone.
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