6.) You will be assigned what your position is. Post an argument of at least 300 words. You must counter the arguments of at least 2 other students with responses of at least 200 words each. Respond as many times as you wish. Your two best responses will be graded. Do not forget that you must demonstrate in your arguments that you have learned from all the required work. It is important that you properly cite so your opponents will know from where you took your information.

8.) Read the lesson for this week.

Topic Folder Debate initial post with with well referenced facts is due by Wednesday, 11:55 p.m. ET and 2 peer responses are due by Friday, 11:55 p.m. ET. Do not research on the Internet. View Full Description

Your arguments should come from your textbook, the lectures, videos, interactive exercise, and the research you conducted in the APUS Library.

Debate instructions:

You have been divided into two groups. Group A will support SNCC and what evolved into the Black Power movement. Group B will support the SCLC (Martin Luther King, Jr.'s movement). To participate in the debate, you need to research both positions. The required work will help you. Who will you be in this debate? What character will you pick? It does not have to be an actual historical figure. You can be, for example, a white SNCC worker, or a Black Panther working in the breakfast program. Stay in character for your responses because each response is part of the debating.

The initial post will be at least 300 words. You are then required to continue the debate by posting responses to the arguments of the opposing group. At least two responses must be at least 200 words. Respond as many times as you wish. Your two best responses will be graded. Do not make assumptions. Instead, assume the historical role of someone who lived in the United States during this period. Whatever you write should be in character. Be creative! Remember that everything you argue, although in character, must be grounded in academic research and must demonstrate you have done the required work.<o:p></o:p>

Group A: Your last name begins with the letter N-Z.

Group B: Your last name begins with the letter A-M.

I AM THE LETTER W

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 4 We Changed the World 1945– 1970 Vincent Harding Robin D. G. Kelley Earl Lewis N ear the end of the Second World War, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., one of black America’s most internationally conscious spokesmen, tried to place the ongoing African-American freedom movement into the context of the anticolonial struggles that were rising explosively out of the discontent of the nonwhite world. Already, movements for independence had begun in British colonies in West Africa and French colonies in West and Equatorial Africa. Later, colonies in North Africa and British East Africa joined the freedom struggle. Powell, who was both a flamboyant and effective congressman from Harlem and the pastor of that community’s best-known Christian congregation, the Abyssinian Baptist Church, declared: The black man continues on his way. He plods wearily no longer— he is striding freedom road with the knowledge that if he hasn’t got the world in a jug, at least he has the stopper in his hand. … He is ready to throw himself into the struggle to make the dream of America become flesh and blood, bread and butter, freedom and equality. He walks conscious of the fact that he is no longer alone no longer a minority. Although they might not have been able to express it in Powell’s colorful language, many black Americans were quite aware of the changes taking place. There were glaring differences, for instance, between where they grew up in the South and the Northern cities where they were trying to establish themselves for the first time. Most of the new arrivals realized that the North was not heaven, but they believed that it was a place where they could escape some of the most hellish aspects of their life in the South. For instance, they did not expect ever again to have to see the bodies of men hanging from trees after they had been riddled with bullets and often mutilated. They did not expect that women would be vulnerable to rape and exploitation simply because they were black and defenseless. In the Northern cities they did not expect to have to teach their children to move out of the path when white people were approaching.

A member of the 12th Armored Division stands guard over Nazi prisoners who were captured by U.S. forces in 1945. Blacks also migrated to the West and settled in cities such as Los Angeles and Seattle. One of the most exciting gifts that these new locales offered was the opportunity for black people to vote as free men and free women for the first time in their lives. Registering to vote in Philadelphia, Detroit, or Oakland did not mean risking your life and the lives of your family, risking your job or your home. In those postwar years, black people took significant advantage of this new freedom and became voters in even larger proportions than white Southerners who had migrated North. As a result, black voters in some Northern cities like Chicago and New York held the balance of power in close municipal elections. This new political involvement brought with it another change. In most of the Northern cities where the black Southerners settled, the political structures were largely dominated by the Democratic party. Generally, the men who controlled these tightly organized political machines were eager to add the newly arrived black people to their voting tallies as long as they thought they could control their votes. And, in fact, millions of African Americans eventually broke away from their generations-long allegiance to the Republican party, the party of Lincoln, the Great Emancipator. Ironically enough, this transfer of allegiance meant that Northern blacks were now aligned with the same Democratic party that had long been dominated on the national scene by the white racist sons of the slaveholders, men who kept their control of the party largely through terrorist acts to deny black voting rights in the South. In the North, black voters were now part of that Democratic party structure and were in a position to begin to challenge its worst traditions. Despite such rewards as finding better jobs and educational opportunities, and gaining the right to vote, this liberating movement into the Northern cities carried some clear penalties. Racism lived in many white urban neighborhoods and postwar suburbs. The rising black middle class, anxious to buy property in a “nice” neighborhood with good schools and efficient services, often bumped up against a threatening white mob and its racist rhetoric. Sometimes white resistance to black neighbors turned deadly. In Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit, and several other cities (in both the North and the South), newly purchased homes were burned, vandalized, or had crosses burned on their lawns— a common tactic adopted by white supremacist organizations, notably the Ku Klux Klan. Of course, there were real estate agents and white residents who insisted that their form of segregation was not racist but driven by economic realities. They claimed to have nothing against black people but were simply worried about their homes declining in value. Sadly, their arguments were tacitly backed by the federal government, notably the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), the agency that insured homeowners’ loans to low-income Americans and set housing standards. Indeed, after the Second World War, the FHA refused to provide mortgages to blacks moving into white neighborhoods and claimed that African Americans were regarded as poor risks for loans. The FHA also claimed that the future value of homes owned by blacks was uncertain. Most of the new migrants could not afford to buy homes immediately, especially in the sprawling suburbs. No matter where they ended up, however, primarily the inner areas of urban centers like Chicago and Detroit, they sought to create the rich sense of community they had left behind. For even in the midst of harsh white oppression and poverty, black people, nurtured by their extended families and by their churches, had managed to build astonishing reservoirs of love, faith, and hope in the South. Such support was not readily available in the North. Reflecting on his own Harlem childhood in Nobody Knows My Name (1961), James Baldwin caught some of the perplexing dilemma of a city block in the long-anticipated “Promised Land” of the North. They work in the white man’s world all day and come home in the evening to this fetid block. They struggle to instill in their children some private sense of honor or dignity which will help the child to survive. This means, of course, that they must struggle, stolidly, incessantly, to keep this sense alive in themselves, in spite of the insults, the indifference, and the cruelty they are certain to encounter in their working day. They patiently browbeat the landlord into fixing the heat, the plaster, the plumbing; this demands prodigious patience, nor is patience usually enough. … Such frustration so long endured, is driving many strong, admirable men and women whose only crime is color to the very gates of paranoia. … It required the sensitivity and skills of gifted artists to capture the complexities of the changes that millions of black women, men and children were experiencing in their movement North. Baldwin was only one of the writers who tried to explain that complexity to the world. Ann Petry provided a painfully honest account of a young woman’s encounter with the Northern urban reality in her novel The Street . Ralph Ellison’s classic novel Invisible Man reflected the humor, anger, hope, and the search for new beginnings that the urban experience represented for the transplanted black Southerners. Ellison’s protagonist discovers a major difference between the South and the North when he first arrives in Harlem and begins to mingle with the evening crowds who have gathered to listen to the street-corner teachers and lecturers. Most of the rousing speeches eventually turn to the injustices of white people against people of color at home and abroad, and the young man in the novel, who has come North from Alabama, says, “I never saw so many Negroes angry in public before.” The expanding ability to be angry in public was a major part of the change that black people found in the North. In his novels, short stories, and essays, Richard Wright, who had originally gone to Chicago from Mississippi in the twenties, expressed this anger and its consequences more vividly and consistently than anyone else in his novel Native Son (1940). Still, there were emotions and experiences that could never be captured by the written word. The music surging out of black communities became a powerful vehicle for communicating these feelings. The blues that had come up with the solitary old guitars from Memphis and the Mississippi Delta took on the new electricity and complexity of the cities, eventually becoming the music of small combos and big bands, pressing on toward what would soon be known as rhythm and blues. At the same time, out of the familiar settings of classic African-American jazz, piercing new sounds began to break through, offering unexpected, unresolved, and often jagged tonal edges in place of the smoother flows of the music from which it sprang. This was called “bebop” or “bop” for short. The names of its practitioners— Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie (“Yardbird”) Parker, and the young Miles Davis— and the boldness of their lifestyles soon became as well known in the black community and among white jazz fans as their predecessors Lester Young, Louis Armstrong, and Coleman Hawkins. Whatever else bop was, it was the music of change. Everything in it sounded protest, marked a determination to break out of the older, predictable harmonies. Based in places like Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem, the 52nd Street jazz strip further downtown in New York City, and Los Angeles’s famed Central Avenue, the irrepressible music grew out of the urgency of a postwar generation to sing its new songs, to wail and scream when necessary. Nowhere were the songs more important than in the thousands of black churches in the Northern cities. Following the lead of vibrant women vocalists such as Mahalia Jackson, Sallie and Roberta Martin, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, supplied with a stream of songs by the prolific gospel songwriter Rev. Thomas A. Dorsey, the churches were filled with resounding, rhythmic witness to the new time, as gospel singers shouted, “There’s been a great change since I been born.” In the decade following the Second World War, more than sixty percent of the black population was still living in the South, however. And the nation’s attention focused on that region as the African-American community won a series of significant battles in the courts and at the executive level of the federal government. In 1946, for example, the Supreme Court ruled that segregation on buses was unconstitutional. Two years later, the Court outlawed the use of “restrictive covenants”—codicils added on to a deed to limit the sale of a home to specific racial groups. Restrictive covenants were generally used to keep African Americans from buying homes in all-white neighborhoods. Although these gains were long overdue, they were partial outgrowths of national and international circumstances that forced President Harry S. Truman and the Democrats to pay attention to blacks. First, Truman, his cabinet, and Congress were all concerned about America’s image abroad, especially now that the United States was competing with the Soviet Union for influence over the new nations in Asia and Africa, for example, created by the collapse of European colonialism. They could not promote their version of democracy abroad as long as the United States treated its own black citizens so badly. Second, Truman’s reelection in 1948 depended on black votes more than ever. This time around, the Democratic party was in utter disarray. On one side stood former Vice President Henry Wallace, who decided to run for president as a member of the newly formed Progressive party. Wallace was highly regarded in the black community; his civil rights record was impeccable, and he sought to bring the Cold War with the Soviet Union to an end through cooperation rather than military threats. On the other side were the Southern Democrats led by South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond. Their break from the Democrats further divided the vote, creating a situation in which black voters would have a decisive role in the elections. Calling themselves the States’ Rights party (also known as the Dixiecrats), these Southern Democrats believed Truman’s civil rights agenda had gone too far. Because Truman had to respond to African-American and international pressure, he and his cabinet contributed to the Southern white flight from the Democratic party. The main catalyst was Truman’s decision to create the first Civil Rights Commission. The commission’s report, To Secure These Rights (1947), proposed some specific ways in which the federal government might respond to the demands of the postwar black community. For example, the report called for the establishment of a permanent federal civil rights commission— a bold and progressive proposal in those days. The report urged an end to segregation in the U.S. armed forces and pressed for laws to protect the voting rights of black people. To Secure These Rights provided solid evidence to black people that their needs were finally being dealt with at the highest level of U.S. political life. Meanwhile, almost every year in the crucial postwar decade seemed to produce new, affirming responses from the federal courts to the dozens of challenges to segregation and disenfranchisement that the NAACP and thousands of black plaintiffs were pressing in the courts. One of the most important of these cases, Morgan v. Virginia , was heard by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1946. Irene Morgan had firmly refused to move to the back of a Virginia-toBaltimore Greyhound bus, as Virginia law required. She was convicted of a misdemeanor. The Court declared that the practice of segregated seating in interstate public transportation was unconstitutional and that black people traveling across state lines could not be legally forced into segregated rear seats when they arrived in a Southern state. The “back of the bus” experience was one of the most humiliating and widely known manifestations of legalized white supremacy, so word of the decision was welcomed in the nation’s black communities. Irene Morgan became a hero among black Americans. But a Supreme Court decision did not guarantee change. Neither the bus companies nor the Southern states leaped to comply with the ruling. So others had to take up Irene Morgan’s initiative and move it forward. That was precisely what happened in the spring of 1947 when a group of sixteen men, evenly divided between black and white, began what they called a Journey of Reconciliation. The trip was organized by a Chicago-based interracial organization known as the Congress of Racial Equality, or CORE. A relatively new offshoot from the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR)—a Christian pacifist organization, founded during the First World War, that advocated nonviolent social change through civil disobedience— CORE was deeply committed to nonviolent direct action. Its members took inspiration from the spirit of the Indian nationalist leader Mahatma Gandhi in their quest for racial justice and reconciliation. At the same time, with the black members of the team sitting in front and the whites in back of the two Greyhound and Trailways buses that they rode from Washington, D.C., to stops in Virginia, North Carolina, and Kentucky, they were testing compliance with the recent Morgan decision and member of the newly formed Progressive party. Wallace was highly regarded in the black community; his civil rights record was impeccable, and he sought to bring the Cold War with the Soviet Union to an end through cooperation rather than military threats. On the other side were the Southern Democrats led by South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond. Their break from the Democrats further divided the vote, creating a situation in which black voters would have a decisive role in the elections. Calling themselves the States’ Rights party (also known as the Dixiecrats), these Southern Democrats believed Truman’s civil rights agenda had gone too far. Because Truman had to respond to African-American and international pressure, he and his cabinet contributed to the Southern white flight from the Democratic party. The main catalyst was Truman’s decision to create the first Civil Rights Commission. The commission’s report, To Secure These Rights (1947), proposed some specific ways in which the federal government might respond to the demands of the postwar black community. For example, the report called for the establishment of a permanent federal civil rights commission— a bold and progressive proposal in those days. The report urged an end to segregation in the U.S. armed forces and pressed for laws to protect the voting rights of black people. To Secure These Rights provided solid evidence to black people that their needs were finally being dealt with at the highest level of U.S. political life. Meanwhile, almost every year in the crucial postwar decade seemed to produce new, affirming responses from the federal courts to the dozens of challenges to segregation and disenfranchisement that the NAACP and thousands of black plaintiffs were pressing in the courts. One of the most important of these cases, Morgan v. Virginia , was heard by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1946. Irene Morgan had firmly refused to move to the back of a Virginia-toBaltimore Greyhound bus, as Virginia law required. She was convicted of a misdemeanor. The Court declared that the practice of segregated seating in interstate public transportation was unconstitutional and that black people traveling across state lines could not be legally forced into segregated rear seats when they arrived in a Southern state. The “back of the bus” experience was one of the most humiliating and widely known manifestations of legalized white supremacy, so word of the decision was welcomed in the nation’s black communities. Irene Morgan became a hero among black Americans. But a Supreme Court decision did not guarantee change. Neither the bus companies nor the Southern states leaped to comply with the ruling. So others had to take up Irene Morgan’s initiative and move it forward. That was precisely what happened in the spring of 1947 when a group of sixteen men, evenly divided between black and white, began what they called a Journey of Reconciliation. The trip was organized by a Chicago-based interracial organization known as the Congress of Racial Equality, or CORE. A relatively new offshoot from the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR)—a Christian pacifist organization, founded during the First World War, that advocated nonviolent social change through civil disobedience— CORE was deeply committed to nonviolent direct action. Its members took inspiration from the spirit of the Indian nationalist leader Mahatma Gandhi in their quest for racial justice and reconciliation. At the same time, with the black members of the team sitting in front and the whites in back of the two Greyhound and Trailways buses that they rode from Washington, D.C., to stops in Virginia, North Carolina, and Kentucky, they were testing compliance with the recent Morgan decision and member of the newly formed Progressive party. Wallace was highly regarded in the black community; his civil rights record was impeccable, and he sought to bring the Cold War with the Soviet Union to an end through cooperation rather than military threats. On the other side were the Southern Democrats led by South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond. Their break from the Democrats further divided the vote, creating a situation in which black voters would have a decisive role in the elections. Calling themselves the States’ Rights party (also known as the Dixiecrats), these Southern Democrats believed Truman’s civil rights agenda had gone too far. Because Truman had to respond to African-American and international pressure, he and his cabinet contributed to the Southern white flight from the Democratic party. The main catalyst was Truman’s decision to create the first Civil Rights Commission. The commission’s report, To Secure These Rights (1947), proposed some specific ways in which the federal government might respond to the demands of the postwar black community. For example, the report called for the establishment of a permanent federal civil rights commission— a bold and progressive proposal in those days. The report urged an end to segregation in the U.S. armed forces and pressed for laws to protect the voting rights of black people. To Secure These Rights provided solid evidence to black people that their needs were finally being dealt with at the highest level of U.S. political life. Meanwhile, almost every year in the crucial postwar decade seemed to produce new, affirming responses from the federal courts to the dozens of challenges to segregation and disenfranchisement that the NAACP and thousands of black plaintiffs were pressing in the courts. One of the most important of these cases, Morgan v. Virginia , was heard by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1946. Irene Morgan had firmly refused to move to the back of a Virginia-toBaltimore Greyhound bus, as Virginia law required. She was convicted of a misdemeanor. The Court declared that the practice of segregated seating in interstate public transportation was unconstitutional and that black people traveling across state lines could not be legally forced into segregated rear seats when they arrived in a Southern state. The “back of the bus” experience was one of the most humiliating and widely known manifestations of legalized white supremacy, so word of the decision was welcomed in the nation’s black communities. Irene Morgan became a hero among black Americans. But a Supreme Court decision did not guarantee change. Neither the bus companies nor the Southern states leaped to comply with the ruling. So others had to take up Irene Morgan’s initiative and move it forward. That was precisely what happened in the spring of 1947 when a group of sixteen men, evenly divided between black and white, began what they called a Journey of Reconciliation. The trip was organized by a Chicago-based interracial organization known as the Congress of Racial Equality, or CORE. A relatively new offshoot from the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR)—a Christian pacifist organization, founded during the First World War, that advocated nonviolent social change through civil disobedience— CORE was deeply committed to nonviolent direct action. Its members took inspiration from the spirit of the Indian nationalist leader Mahatma Gandhi in their quest for racial justice and reconciliation. At the same time, with the black members of the team sitting in front and the whites in back of the two Greyhound and Trailways buses that they rode from wondered what black people would do if the racial tables were turned. Many whites found it easy to rally around the virulently racist rhetoric of a politician like Theodore G. Bilbo, U.S. senator from Mississippi. He voiced the fears of many Southern whites, especially the poorer ones, when he declared that the Second World War “and all of its great victories will not in any way or in any manner change the views and sentiments of white America on the question of social equality … of the negro and white race.” In a time when so much was changing, Bilbo and his fellow white supremacists were seeking guarantees that they would continue to dominate. Throughout the South, white supremacists were desperate to preserve an old world that was coming to an end. They had no intention of giving up their control of the region and would use all legal means of undermining the constitutional defenses on which black people increasingly depended. Many also conspired to use illegal means, from economic coercion to acts of terrorism, to keep their black fellow Southerners “in their place.” Nowhere was this new world more evident than in the ranks of the thousands of African Americans who returned from the battlegrounds of the Second World War. They were the ones who seemed most ready to demonstrate the truth of Adam Clayton Powell’s statement that black people were “ready to throw [themselves] into the struggle to make the dream of America become flesh and blood.” A recently discharged army corporal from Alabama spoke for many of his black comrades in 1945 when he declared, “I spent four years in the army to free a bunch of Dutchmen and Frenchmen, and I’m hanged if I’m going to let the Alabama version of the Germans kick me around when I get home. No sirree-bob! I went into the Army a nigger; I’m comin’ out a man.” Among those determined to win voting rights for blacks in the South was a solid core of veterans who felt like they had earned the right to vote after risking their lives for democracy overseas. In 1946, brothers Charles and Medgar Evers returned home from the war to their town of Decatur, Mississippi, determined to vote. But they were driven away from the registrar’s desk, and one of the white men predicted that there would be “trouble” if these black citizens persisted in their attempts to register and vote. But he could never have guessed the nature of the coming trouble. For the Evers brothers and thousands like them would return all over the South to challenge the keepers of the old terror. The powerful thrusts of postwar change were not confined to politics. A remarkable change in the world of sports captured the attention of the rest of the nation. Jackie Robinson, another veteran of the war and a baseball player with the Kansas City Monarchs of the segregated Negro Leagues, was signed by the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1945. The action broke the racial barrier in major league baseball, the “national pastime.” An outstanding athlete who had lettered in baseball, basketball, track, and football at the University of California at Los Angeles, an outspoken critic of America’s racial betrayals of democracy, the twenty-eightyear-old Robinson spent a year with the Dodgers’ farm team in Montreal before finally joining the Brooklyn lineup in the spring of 1947. Black people were ecstatic. The black community followed local and national developments in civil rights by reading African-American newspapers such as the Pittsburgh Courier , the Chicago Defender , the Baltimore Afro-American , and the Norfolk Journal and Guide . These papers were circulated through many hands in households, barbershops, beauty parlors, churches, and restaurants. In the hands of Pullman car porters, they found their way into the Deep South as well. By reading the papers, black people followed the anticolonial, independence-oriented exploits of the darker-skinned majority of the world in places like India, Africa, and China. There were constant references to Gandhi, who had spent decades challenging his people in India to wage a nonviolent struggle for independence against the great British Empire that governed them. Repeatedly, the black newspapers carried letters and editorials contending that Gandhi’s movement offered a model for black America, especially in the South. Mordecai Johnson, president of Howard University in Washington, D.C.; Howard Thurman, mystically oriented preacher and dean of Howard University’s chapel; and Benjamin Mays, president of Morehouse College in Atlanta, were some of the best-known black Americans who had made the pilgrimage to the ashrams, the humble communal villages where Gandhi based himself. Gandhi’s life and teaching mirrored some of the best African-American traditions. Like the nineteenth-century abolitionists David Walker and Frederick Douglass, like W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and Howard Thurman, Gandhi believed that the despised of the earth actually carried within their own lives and history the seeds of healing transformation for themselves, their oppressors, and their world. So when black Americans identified their struggle as part of a larger, worldwide movement, it was not simply the idea “that [we are] no longer alone” that compelled them. It was also the vision that as the rising children of their enslaved forbears, they— like Gandhi’s masses— might have some liberating gift to offer to the world. While blacks were developing an understanding of worldwide repression, the U.S. government seemed to be, in some instances, supporting that repression. On the one hand, U.S. foreign policy appeared to link the United States with the interests and points of view of its white, Western allies, such as England, France, Portugal, and white South Africa, countries still identified with colonial domination. On the other hand, as part of the deepening Cold War against the Soviet Union, the United States was also projecting itself as “the leader of the free world,” avowedly concerned for the rights of oppressed people everywhere, especially people of color who might be tempted to turn to the Soviet Union and to other socialist and communist movements for assistance in their freedom struggles. So when black leaders with socialist sympathies, such as W. E. B. Du Bois and the politically active actor, singer, and scholar Paul Robeson, spoke out on behalf of the nonwhite peoples and their freedom struggles, when they articulated too positive a view of the Russian Revolution’s social and economic ambitions, when they sharply criticized U. S. foreign and domestic policy, the U.S. government considered them un-American and dangerous. The passports of both men were confiscated to prevent them from traveling and speaking abroad on behalf of the anticolonial movements and against the reign of white supremacy in America. Still, both men continued to speak out. But the price they paid was very high. Robeson essentially lost his lucrative concert career, and ultimately his health. Du Bois, in the fearful climate of anticommunism in America, found himself deserted by many people who had benefited from his decades of unstinting service to the cause of freedom, justice, and democratic hope, and he moved permanently to Africa. Anticommunist fervor virtually crushed these two intellectual giants, but it could not crush the movement. In the streets and in the courts, black activists forced the federal government to admit that segregation was wrong and must be remedied. By 1954, it became evident to all that African Americans, like their counterparts in the colonial world, would no longer wait for the birth of a new freedom. Jim Crow Must Co!: The Road from Brown to Montgomery Revolutions always exact a price from their participants. People have lost their livelihoods, lost friends and family, lost their connection to community, even lost their lives. The movement to end segregation and press America to live up to its creed of justice for all was no different. Nowhere was this personal cost more obvious than in the five legal cases that would force their way into the U.S. Supreme Court and become known collectively as Brown v. Board of Education . The case known as Briggs v. Elliott provided the legal bedrock on which the entire set of Brown cases was built. The setting for this initial drama was Clarendon County, South Carolina, known for its bitter resistance to any attempts at changing the brutal traditions of white supremacy. There, love for their children drove black parents to take the simple but dangerous risk of confronting the school board with their children’s need for bus transportation to their segregated school. The white children had several buses, while the black children, who outnumbered the others, had no buses at all. Of course, the black parents and their supporters were also aware that the allwhite school board spent more money on each white child in the county than on each black one. What the adults had to figure out was how to deal with the rude and repeated rebuffs from the school board and its chairman, R. W. Elliott, who said at a meeting with black people, “We ain’t got no money to buy a bus for your nigger children.” Then Rev. J. A. Delaine, a local black pastor and school superintendent in Summerton, met Rev. James A. Hinton, a regional representative for the NAACP, at a meeting at Allen College, one of the black colleges in Columbia, about sixty miles from Summerton. Hinton told the gathering that the NAACP was trying to find men and women to become plaintiffs in a case that would challenge the legality of the segregated schools. Delaine knew after the meeting that he had to become the bridge between the unrelenting but frustrated neighbor parents and the national organization. Delaine and his wife worked for the school board they were suing, and both lost their jobs. They also lost their home and their church when the buildings were burned to the ground. Meanwhile, in Farmville, Virginia, in 1951, a courageous sixteen-year-old high-school junior organized her fellow students to fight for equal facilities for black schools. Under Barbara Rose Johns’s dynamic leadership, the black students at the woefully inadequate Moton High not only went on strike but arranged with the NAACP to file a desegregation lawsuit in their county. That suit was eventually tied to the one initiated by Oliver Brown of Topeka, Kansas, on behalf of his daughter Linda and all the black children of their city. The Topeka school board had denied Linda Brown admission to a school just five blocks from her home, forcing her to make a long commute across town, because her neighborhood school was for whites only. Charles Houston and Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund were the attorneys for the Browns. In his Supreme Court argument, Marshall presented evidence that separating black and white students placed the blacks at a great disadvantage. Marshall’s strategy was to force the Supreme Court to overturn the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling, which upheld the legality of segregation as long as states provided “separate but equal” facilities to African Americans. Such practices, he said, violated the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which guarantees equal protection of the laws. Once he was able to get the Court to overturn Plessy , Marshall did not have to prove that facilities set aside for “colored only” were unequal to those set aside for whites. To buttress his argument, Marshall brought in pioneering black psychologists Mamie and Kenneth Clark, whose research demonstrated that African-American children in inferior, segregated schools had a negative self-image and generally performed poorly as a result. When the Supreme Court handed down its unanimous decision in Brown on Monday, May 17, 1954, it was a stunning accomplishment. All eyes focused on the solemn announcement that “in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place.” After more than half a century of determined struggle, black people and their allies had finally turned the Supreme Court around. Two days after Brown , the Washington Post declared, “It is not too much to speak of the court’s decision as a new birth of freedom.” Perhaps it was only the opening of a new chapter in the long black struggle for authentic democracy in America. But it forced individual men and women to make hard, exciting choices about how they would lead their own lives. In Boston, Martin Luther King, Jr., and his new bride, the former Coretta Scott, had been facing such choices together ever since their marriage in June 1953, and his completion of the coursework for his doctorate in theology at Boston University. Soon Coretta would complete her three years of work in music education at the New England Conservatory of Music, and the choices they had been wrestling with were now leading to a move from Boston to Montgomery, Alabama. Born in Atlanta in January 1929, Martin was the beloved first son of Martin Luther King, Sr., one of that city’s leading Baptist ministers, and his wife, Alberta Williams King, whose father had been the founding pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, the congregation now headed by King Senior. The younger King entered Morehouse College in Atlanta, one of the most respected black colleges in the nation, when he was only fifteen. He became a popular student leader and a serious student. When he was eighteen, not long before he graduated from Morehouse with a B.A. in sociology, King decided to stop resisting an inner calling to the Christian ministry. So his father proudly ordained the young man who had finally decided that he would not take the path of law or medicine, possibilities that had intrigued him for a while. At that point in his life young “M.L.” was often torn between the image of ministry he saw in his father, a pietistic man with an engaging, emotionally charged approach, and the one he found in Benjamin Mays, Morehouse’s president. Mays’s combination of profound spirituality, intellect, and commitment to social justice left a deep mark on the lives of many of his “Morehouse Men.” Martin King, Jr., left Atlanta in 1948 to enroll at Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania (one of the few white theological schools that accepted more than one or two black men in each entering class). He carried with him a profound sense of identity with the black church, community, and extended family that had done so much to shape and nurture him. Although he knew that he did not want to be the kind of preacher that his father was, King was deeply appreciative of the older man’s unwavering religious faith and his readiness to confront racism. So although Crozer was King’s first extended experience in an overwhelmingly white institution, he was spiritually and mentally prepared for it. By now the young Atlantan, whose eloquence was praised by his professors, was firmly grounded in the way of thinking that marked the lives of many young black people in those days. He knew that his life and career were not simply matters of personal success and advancement. Instead, he recognized and acknowledged an inextricable connection to the “cause” of black advancement, to the responsibility he bore for fighting for “the uplift of the race.” King graduated from Crozer in 1951 as valedictorian of his class and received a coveted fellowship to pursue his doctorate at Boston University. The decision to do doctoral work reflected King’s continuing exploration of the possibility that he might somehow combine his love for academic work with his passion for the Christian ministry. In Boston, King was introduced to Coretta Scott, a bright, attractive young woman who had grown up not far from Selma, Alabama. Living in the rural South of the thirties and forties, Coretta saw many instances of violently enforced white domination, including the beating of her father. With these disturbing memories of the past and her own professional ambitions on her mind, Coretta King was strongly inclined to stay out of the South. And King was attracted by invitations to consider positions in the North. But, King later remembered, “The south, after all, was our home. Despite its shortcomings we loved it as home. …” At the same time, Martin and Coretta King were part of the long black Southern tradition that called on its educated young people to work to change the South they had known. So Coretta was neither very surprised nor very resistant when her husband finally declared that they were going to live in the South. By the spring of 1954 King had accepted an invitation to the pastorate of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, the city known as “The Cradle of the Confederacy.” Montgomery was where Jefferson Davis had been sworn in as president of the pro-slavery states that seceded from the Union in 1861. By the time King began his official tenure as pastor of Dexter’s middle-class congregation in September 1954, it was clear that the city’s black population of close to fifty thousand was on the brink of a new time. Like their counterparts throughout the South, many of the most activist-oriented members of Montgomery’s black population had been prodded into new forms of organizing. For instance, the expanding, state-by-state defeat of the segregated white primary system inspired the creation of a number of voter registration organizations and campaigns in Montgomery. It also encouraged a variety of risky experiments to challenge the humiliating segregation of everyday life. One of the most important of these experiments was the formation of the Women’s Political Council (WPC), a well-organized group of black, middle-class women. They developed an important telephone communications link (called a “telephone tree” in those days) among their members, initially used for voter registration campaigns. But eventually the group expanded its concerns to other issues faced by a black community in a white-dominated segregated city. In the early fifties these issues ranged from black citizens’ seeking access to the public parks that their taxes helped to maintain to the constantly vexing matter of the harsh treatment black people received on the local buses.

It was not long before King discovered that the creative and outspoken chairperson of the WPC, JoAnn Robinson, a faculty member at Alabama State College, the local black college, was a member of Dexter’s congregation. He quickly recruited her to lead the church’s Social and Political Action Committee, which he had organized. In turn, as Robinson and her conscientious group of women took their concerns into the chambers of the Montgomery City Council, she often called on her young pastor to go with them to add his sharp mind, eloquent voice, and passionate commitment to justice to their arguments for change. In Montgomery, as elsewhere in the South, those black citizens demanding justice included many military veterans. The Reverend Ralph David Abernathy, pastor of First Baptist Church, was one of the best known of these veterans. He had served with the U.S. Army in Europe, then returned to study at Montgomery’s Alabama State College and earn his master’s degree in sociology at Atlanta University. As Abernathy later recalled of those days in Montgomery, “Many of the older clergy were in favor of sweeping social change, but they were willing for it to come about slowly, when white society was ready to accept it.” He also remembered that “those of us in our twenties were less patient and less afraid of making trouble. …As we talked with one another, we began saying that we were willing to help tear down the old walls, even if it meant a genuine uprising.” Another highly regarded veteran freedom worker who was ready for change was E. D. Nixon, the gruff-voiced, outspoken Pullman car porter who had worked for years with the legendary A. Philip Randolph organizing the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Now in his fifties, Nixon was probably best known for his role as president of the Alabama branch of the NAACP and as an unrelenting campaigner for black citizenship rights, especially the right to vote. In his NAACP role, Nixon was quietly and efficiently assisted by a highly respected woman in her early forties who served as secretary to the local NAACP branch and as adviser to the organization’s youth council. A seamstress by profession, she was named Rosa Parks, and she turned out to be less patient than she sometimes seemed. By 1955, it was not just Montgomery’s black pastors, NAACP members, and community leaders who sensed with Martin and Coretta King that something remarkable was happening. Many of the city’s ordinary black citizens recognized that they were entering a new time. Of course, they (and the rest of the nation, even the world) also knew about the brutal lynching of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, who was beaten and killed in Mississippi in 1955 by two white men after Till made the mistake of speaking familiarly to a white woman, the wife of one of the men. The black newspapers and journals spread the word (and the photos) of the murdered teenager whose Chicago upbringing had not prepared him for the proper approach to a white woman in rural Mississippi. The papers also reported that black Congressman Charles Diggs, Jr., of Michigan, and national NAACP officials went to Money, Mississippi, to attend the trial of Till’s accused killers, along with Till’s mother, Mamie Till, who helped to turn the tragedy of her son’s death into a rallying point for the Civil Rights movement. Because she insisted on an open casket, and allowed photographs, people nationwide saw firsthand the horrors of Southern lynching. In spite of the predictable not-guilty verdict in the Till murder case that summer, the black people of Montgomery realized they had seen signals of a new time: In the heart of Bilbo’s Mississippi, keepers of the past had been forced to hold a trial and to face a black member of the U.S. House of Representatives; they had been pressed to recognize the rising power of an inflamed black community at home and to answer hard questions from people of color and of conscience from around the world. For many ordinary black citizens, some of their most painful and consistently humiliating encounters with white power and injustice took place in public, especially on city buses. In the mid-fifties the automobile had not yet become the ubiquitous presence that it is now especially not for the thousands of black people in Montgomery who earned their living as maids, cooks, janitors, porters, and the like. High-school and college students were also part of the seventeen thousand or so black people who made up some seventy-five percent of the passengers on the segregated buses. During their daily rides, blacks were relegated to the often-crowded back area and were forbidden to take vacant seats in the forward white section, even if no white passengers were present. Beyond this were the all-too-common encounters with rude and hostile white bus drivers (there were no black ones) who often called their black passengers “apes,” “niggers,” “black cows,” and other demeaning names. Often they demanded that blacks get up and surrender their seats to white passengers when the white section was full. Black passengers were also required to pay their fare in front and then get off to re-board through the rear door. Such practices were common on the buses in cities all over the South, but that did not make them any more palatable. In the spring of 1955 a teenaged Montgomery high-school student named Claudette Colvin loudly resisted both the driver’s orders to give up her seat and the police who were called to arrest her. Colvin’s screams and curses were not quite what leaders like Robinson and Nixon had in mind as they searched for a case that could be used to challenge the constitutionality of Montgomery’s segregated seating. Their aim was to rally the black community to experiment with a brief boycott of the buses that would focus not only on the segregated seating but on the humiliating treatment. Colvin was not the test case they needed, but Nixon and the waiting WPC forces knew that someone else would eventually be pressed beyond the limit and would resist. Evicted in the early forties for sitting too far forward, Rosa Parks, who had long served as a freedom worker, provided the opportunity that Nixon and the WPC needed. On December 1, 1955, quiet, soft-spoken Rosa Parks did what she had to do. After all, she was a veteran freedom worker and in many ways one of the most prepared for this historic moment. During the previous decade, she had served as secretary of the Montgomery branch of the NAACP, worked on voter-registration campaigns, and had run the local NAACP Youth Council. Because of her earlier challenge to bus segregation ordinances, a few bus drivers refused to stop for her. Perhaps she remembered how right she had felt the previous summer at the Tennessee training center for social change called Highlander Folk School, as she talked with other black and white participants about Montgomery and what was needed there. They talked about their South and how they might contribute to the powerful transformation unfolding everywhere. Perhaps she remembered the young people of her NAACP Youth Council and the models they needed. So when a bus driver told Parks and three other black people in her row to get up and relinquish their seats to a white man who was standing, she had to say no. There were no shouts, no curses, no accusations, just an inwardly powerful woman sensing the strength of her conviction and refusing to move. When, inevitably, policemen boarded the bus and one ordered her to get up, she still had to say no, realizing that arrest would be the next step. Rosa Parks, the magnificently proper and respectable church member, prepared to go to jail, in a time when such people did not go to such places. But first she responded to the policeman who asked her why she did not obey the driver. She said, “I didn’t think I should have to.” Then she asked the officer, “Why do you push us around?” His response may have been the only one he could give: “I don’t know.” Yet he revealed his own entrapment in the system: “But the law is the law, and you are under arrest.” And he took Rosa Parks to the police station. Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, was accompanied by NAACP activist E. D. Nixon (second from left) as she appealed her conviction. At the station Parks called her friend and NAACP coworker, E. D. Nixon. For the veteran freedom worker, the shock of Parks’s arrest was immediately mixed with the conviction that this was the test case that would challenge the city’s bus segregation laws. After informing Parks’s husband, Raymond, and her mother, Nixon immediately contacted two local whites he knew he could depend on, Clifford and Virginia Durr. Clifford Durr was a white lawyer in private practice, and he and Nixon went to the station to bail out Rosa Parks. Immediately they began discussing with her the possibility that her arrest could develop into the test case they all needed, and that she needed to recognize the physical and economic risks this might entail. After some hesitation on the part of her husband, Parks and her family were ready. But history, JoAnn Robinson, and the black people of Montgomery soon overtook those original plans. For when Robinson heard the news of Parks’s adventure she realized that the arrest of her friend was potentially more powerful than a legal case. She began to use the telephone tree that her WPC had developed for its voter-registration work, and soon dozens of black people knew that the highly respected Rosa Parks had been arrested for refusing to cooperate with the humiliating bus segregation practices that troubled them all. Working all that night and into the next morning, Robinson managed to compose, type the stencil, and run off more than thirty thousand mimeographed copies of a leaflet that said: 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. It is the second time since the Claudette Colvin case that a Negro woman has been arrested for the same thing. This has to be stopped. Negroes have rights, too, for if Negroes did not ride the buses, they could not operate. Three-fourths of the riders are Negroes, yet we are arrested, or have to stand over empty seats. 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. This woman’s case will come up on Monday. We are, therefore, asking every Negro to stay off the buses Monday in protest of the arrest and trial. Don’t ride the bus to work, to town, to school, or anywhere on Monday. You can afford to stay out of school for one day if you have no other way to go except by bus. You can also 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 at all on Monday. Please stay off all buses Monday. That morning, Friday, December 2, with the assistance of some of her students and WPC coworkers, Robinson blanketed the black community with the leaflets. By then, Nixon had begun to mobilize the traditional black community leaders, especially the ministers. It soon became clear that both his and Robinson’s best instincts had been right: There was a powerful and positive reaction to the call for the leaders to meet and respond both to Parks’s arrest and to Robinson’s call for a boycott. By that evening the local community leaders, including King, had decided to confirm Robinson’s initiative and agreed that the next Monday, December 5, would be the day for a one-day experimental boycott. Since that was also the day for which Parks’s trial was scheduled, it seemed logical to call for a mass community meeting that evening. In order to spread the word of Monday’s boycott and mass meeting, the leadership group was depending upon another leaflet, many phone calls, and crucially, the dozens of black church services scheduled for Sunday, December 4. Then, when one of the leaflets got into the hands of a white employer and was passed on to the Montgomery Advertiser , the city’s daily newspaper, a great gift of publicity was handed to the planners: a Sunday-morning front-page story on the planned boycott and mass meeting. Of course, no one could be certain how the black community would respond to the call. There was significant fear among the leaders, including King, that a combination of apathy and fear might overwhelm the sense of righteous indignation that people felt. Nor could anyone predict how white people, especially the more rigid and violence-prone segregationists, would respond. All over the South, many white men and women had been eagerly rallying to the calls of the White Citizens Council to defend segregation by any means necessary. The local Ku Klux Klan was also very much alive and well, carrying on its periodic marches and car caravans through Montgomery’s black community, knowing that their reputation for lynchings, beatings, and bombings was enough to drive most blacks off the streets and porches behind the relative safety of closed doors. It was clear to blacks that there was real physical danger involved in the simple act of not riding the buses. But for a lot of black riders there might also be economic danger if their employers objected to such black initiative and protest. As a result, it was impossible to predict what the results of the boycott attempt would be. The leaders of the courageous experiment felt the action would be successful if sixty percent of the riders stayed off the buses. That cold and cloudy morning, as Martin and Coretta King looked out their front window toward a nearby bus stop, the uncertain victory now seemed clear. Most of the buses moving by were empty. Neither apathy nor fear had prevailed. Then, as King went out to drive along the black community bus routes, he saw an extraordinary scene: everywhere, black people were walking, thumbing rides, riding mules, resurrecting old horse and buggy contraptions, taking taxis. Some older men and women were walking more than five miles each way, at times saying, “I’m walking for my grandchildren.” Meanwhile, all the buses from the black communities were at least ninety-five percent empty. King recognized instinctively that more than bus seating, more than painful memories of humiliation, even more than solidarity with Rosa Parks was at stake here. As he said later, “A miracle had taken place. The once dormant and quiescent Negro community was now fully awake.” At the same time, King’s own personal awakening, inextricably tied to the rising of the people of Montgomery, was still in process. That Monday afternoon, he gathered with twenty or so other local leaders to assess and celebrate the overwhelming success of the almost spontaneous boycott and to plan for the evening’s mass meeting. King was then surprised to find himself— one of the youngest and newest community leaders— nominated and elected president of the new organization that they had just brought into being at that session, the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA). The immediate task of the new MIA leaders was to build on the powerful momentum of the one-day boycott. They decided to move rather slowly, to focus first on the simple need for more courteous and humane treatment of black bus riders. They also called for what Coretta King and later others ruefully described as “a more humane form of segregation,” which would allow white riders to fill the buses from the front to the middle, black riders from back to middle, with no need for anyone to have to give up a seat. They also pressed for the hiring of black drivers in black neighborhoods. The new MIA leadership decided to call for black people to continue the boycott until these changes were made. That night at the first mass meeting at the large Holt Street Baptist Church, the leaders immediately recognized that an extraordinary spirit was taking hold. The crowd was so dense and animated that King and the other speakers had a hard time pushing their way to the pulpit. One of the few white reporters on hand, Joe Azbell of the Advertiser , was almost awestruck by the experience he witnessed, including the consideration shown to him as a white person. The next day he wrote, “The meeting was much like an old-fashioned revival with loud applause added. … It proved beyond any doubt that there was a discipline among Negroes that many whites had doubted. It was almost a military discipline combined with emotion.” As the new MIA president and featured speaker, King had to decide how to position himself in the midst of the dynamic power he had recognized among the people since early in the morning. The twenty-six-year-old pastor later described his struggle to figure out the correct approach: How could I make a speech that would be militant enough to keep my people aroused to positive action and yet moderate enough to keep this fervor within controllable and Christian bounds? I knew that many of the Negro people were victims of In what might be called a freedom sermon, combining the vivid preaching style found in the black churches with the content of the freedom movement, the young pastor set the people and their movement in their largest context that night. He identified them “first and foremost” as American citizens, citizens who had the right and the responsibility to protest injustice and to work for a better society. At every point he grounded himself in the concrete experience of Montgomery’s black people and their experiences on the buses and elsewhere in their unjust, humiliating, and segregated city. So there was constant enthusiastic and empathetic verbal response all through his presentation, particularly when King uttered the words, “There comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression.” He pushed even further, pressing on the audience a sense of identity beyond their status as victims of oppression, declaring, “I want to say that we’re not here advocating violence. … We have never done that. … I want it to be known throughout Montgomery and throughout this nation that we are a Christian people. … We believe in the Christian religion. We believe in the teachings of Jesus. The only weapon that we have in our hands this evening is the weapon of protest.” All through that statement of their central religious identity the people shouted and applauded, moved with King, pressed him forward even as he urged them toward their own best possibilities. He said, “We, the disinherited of this land, we who have been oppressed so long, are tired of going through the long night of captivity. And now we are reaching out for the daybreak of freedom and justice and equality.” So the issue was already far beyond the buses, encompassing freedom, justice, and equality. Calling upon the people to continue to work together for much more than a desegregated bus seat, King set an example for the freedom movement leadership. For he declared to his community: Right here in Montgomery, when the history books are written in the future … somebody will have to say, “There lived a race of people … who had the moral courage to stand up for their rights. … And thereby they injected a new meaning into the veins of history and of civilization.” And we’re going to do that. God grant that we will do it before it is too late. The excited, inspired people hardly had time to consider this grand calling to be the bearers of new universal values when they were brought right back to the concrete realities of their new movement. Right there in the meeting they were called upon to vote their approval of the proposals the MIA leadership was using as a basis for their negotiating with the city administration and the bus company. They were also told that private automobiles and blackowned taxis had to be volunteered, along with drivers, for use in a car pool that would soon become the most highly organized element of the boycott movement. And, of course, money had to be collected, for gas, for maintenance, and for all the other expenses connected to the development of an essentially volunteer organization. So the marvelously ordinary black men and women who were just being called upon by King to inject “a new meaning into the veins of history and of civilization” were also being asked to drop their hard-earned quarters and dollars into the MIA collection baskets. The sense that something new was being born in Montgomery’s black churches had drawn black leaders from other parts of Alabama to the initial meeting that night. They came from such places as Birmingham, Mobile, Tuskegee, and Tuscaloosa, both to encourage the people of Montgomery and to gain new inspiration for their own struggles. Still, it is quite possible that the expansion of the boycott’s inspiring potential might have simply been confined to Alabama if its white opponents had not made a series of mistakes, mistakes based on their stubborn refusal to realize that a new time and a new black community were emerging. First, in the earliest attempts at negotiation, the representatives of the city and the bus company refused to make even the slightest accommodation to the relatively modest changes the MIA leadership was proposing. This stiff resistance on the part of the white leaders helped to steel the resolve of the aroused and walking people. Then the city commissioners inaugurated what they called a “get tough” policy with the boycotters and their leadership. Legal harassment of the crucial cabs and car pool, and an unjustified arrest of King for speeding were part of the strategy of intimidation. This was soon followed by a publicly announced decision by all three city commissioners to join the local White Citizens Council, a slightly more respectable version of the Klan. Such actions only compelled black Montgomery to form a deeper resolve to stay off the buses. Then the most important of the early opposition mistakes took place on Monday night, January 30, 1956, almost two months into the boycott. That night, while King was at one of the mass meetings, his wife and young child were at home accompanied by a member of Dexter Church. The two women heard something hit the front porch. They ran to the back room where three-month-old Yolanda Denise was sleeping. What they had heard was a stick of dynamite landing on the front porch, and its explosion blew a hole in the porch floor, shattered four windows, and damaged a porch column. Running to the back had saved Coretta King and her friend from possible injury. Called out of the mass meeting, King arrived at his house some fifteen minutes after the blast. There he found hundreds of angry black people, some of them armed, milling around his front porch. After determining that his family was safe, he came back out to address the crowd, some of whom were fiercely challenging the chief of police and the mayor to match them gun for gun, and defiantly refusing to obey police orders to disperse. “Getting tough” was obviously an approach that had epidemic possibilities, but when King appeared he maintained an extraordinary and crucial composure that transformed the situation. After assuring the crowd that his family had not been harmed, he said, We believe in law and order. Don’t get panicky. … Don’t get your weapons. He who lives by the sword will perish by the sword. Remember, that is what God said. We are not advocating violence. We want to love our enemies. Be good to them. Love them and let them know you love them. After urging that stern and demanding post-dynamite discipline upon himself and the crowd, pressing them to apply the tenets of their religion to the crisis of that night, King went on to remind the quieting crowd, “I did not start this boycott. I was asked by you to serve as your spokesman.” Then he added, “I want it to be known the length and breadth of this land that if I am stopped this movement will not stop … What we are doing is just. And God is with us.” The gathered people responded by spontaneously breaking into song, including hymns and “My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing.” It was the terrorist bombing and King’s mature and challenging response to it that effectively began to push the Montgomery story beyond the confines of the African-American press and the local newspapers into the nation’s mainstream mass media and into the consciousness (and consciences) of hundred of thousands of its citizens, irrespective of color. Meanwhile, the white defenders of Montgomery continued to misread the times and the people with whom they were dealing. Shortly after the dynamite attack on King’s house, a bomb was thrown into the front yard of MIA treasurer and movement stalwart E. D. Nixon. Two weeks later eleven thousand white people gathered in Montgomery for a White Citizens Council rally, where they cheered the mayor and police chief for holding the line in the cause of bus segregation. Perhaps encouraged by their own mass meeting, the city officials decided to ask a grand jury to indict nearly one hundred leaders of the MIA on charges of conspiracy. That broadside approach and the refusal of the MIA leadership to be intimidated by it only intensified the national media interest in Montgomery and in King. The first time that the Montgomery story appeared on the front page of the internationally respected New York Times and New York Herald Tribune was when these papers reported the mass meeting held the evening after the leaders were arrested, and immediately bailed out, on the conspiracy charge. Readers around the world were able to catch the spirit of determined, nonviolent resistance as thousands of boycotters gathered to hear the news from the courtroom and to stand in solidarity with their leaders. Thus the nation received King’s message: “This is not a war between the white and the Negro but a conflict between justice and injustice.” Expanding his vision to include the largest possible participation, King went on, “If our victory is won— and it will be won— it will be a victory for Negroes, a victory for justice, a victory for free people, and a victory for democracy.” In a sense, there were hundreds of thousands of distant listeners as he proclaimed, “If we are arrested every day, if we are exploited every day, if we are trampled over every day, don’t ever let anyone pull you so low as to hate them. We must use the weapon of love.” The nation began to respond in a variety of ways. The proprietor of Sadie’s Beauty Shop in the black community of Gastonia, North Carolina, took up a collection in her shop for Montgomery’s walkers. The first African-American winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Ralph Bunche, who served as an official of the United Nations, wrote to praise and encourage King and the people of the movement: “Your patient determination, your wisdom and quiet courage are constituting an inspiring chapter in the history of human dignity.” In hundreds of black churches across the country the combination of praying and organizing produced scenes like the one in Concord Baptist Church in Brooklyn, New York, where a collection of four thousand dollars was taken up for Montgomery in trash cans and cake boxes after the collection plates were filled. This vital connection between King and Montgomery’s church-based movement and the black churches throughout the country was crucial in transforming the nation after the Second World War. Supplementing the news that came from black newspapers and magazines like Jet, Ebony , and Sepia , as well as from the newly attentive white-owned media, black churches served as a massive network for information and mobilization regarding Montgomery. Other committed groups— the skycaps at Newark Airport and some longshoremen in San Francisco, for example— made their own contributions, sometimes just an hour’s pay. King and the movement attracted the attention of two of the most important religiously based pacifist groups in the country: The Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and the American Friends Service Committee, better known as Quakers. Many of their members had hoped and worked for a long time to see Mahatma Gandhi’s religiously inspired organizing combined with the courageous, nonviolent spirit of Jesus in the cause of racial justice and equality in the United States. Though predominantly white, they were often joined and even led by a number of African Americans, such as Howard and Sue Thurman, Benjamin Mays, Mordecai Johnson, and Bayard Rustin, the radical Quaker and peace activist. Indeed, when Montgomery broke into the mainstream news, the national chairman of the FOR was Charles Lawrence, a 1936 Morehouse College graduate who was then teaching sociology at Brooklyn College in New York. Lawrence, a firm, articulate, and jovial believer in the nonviolent struggle for justice, wrote to King as soon as he saw the newspaper reports on the post-indictment mass meeting and claimed that he found the stories “among the most thrilling documents I have ever read.” He wrote, “Who knows? Providence may have given the Negroes of Montgomery the historic mission of demonstrating to the world the practical power of Christianity, the unmatched vitality of a nonviolent loving approach to social protest.” Inspired by such grand hopes, Lawrence and his FOR colleagues sent their national field secretary, Glenn Smiley, on an exploratory visit to Montgomery that winter. Smiley, a white Texan who was an ordained minister in the Southern Methodist Church, had been involved with the Fellowship since the early forties and had been a conscientious objector on religious grounds during the Second World War. According to Lawrence’s instructions, Smiley’s FOR mission in Montgomery would be “primarily that of finding out what those of you who are involved directly would have those of us who are ‘on the outside’ do.” Meanwhile, Rustin, one of the best-known activists in the pacifist movement, also went independently to offer his services to King and the Montgomery struggle. A personable, brilliant, nonviolent strategist and writer, Rustin did not, unfortunately, stay long in Montgomery. Ironically, in the eyes of some of the MIA officers, Rustin’s past involvement with communist-related organizations and his prior arrest for a homosexual liaison made him more of a risk than Smiley. Nevertheless, both men helped King on what he later called his “pilgrimage to nonviolence,” introducing him to leading religious pacifists, such as Howard Thurman and Harry Emerson Fosdick; introducing him to the classic published writings on nonviolence, such as Fosdick’s Hope of the World; and assisting the MIA in developing its own training workshops in nonviolence. Rustin, in particular, helped King prepare important articles on the Montgomery struggle for a number of religious journals. By the end of the winter of 1956, as the boycott moved into its fourth month, King’s picture had appeared on the cover of a number of national magazines, and his name and message were familiar in many other parts of the world. He carried the message across the nation, his powerful baritone voice reverberating in scores of large churches, on college and university campuses, in municipal auditoriums, at conventions of the NAACP and the National Urban League, at fraternal and religious conventions, even at a black funeral directors’ convention. By the fall of 1956 Montgomery had become the unmistakable symbol of transformation in the nation, a symbol of its African-American citizens and its Southern-based traditions of legal segregation, white domination, and the subversion of democratic hope. That symbol belonged to all the licensed practical nurses, the maids and skycaps, the scholars and Nobel laureates, the prisoners, students, artists, and pastors who would eventually create their own versions of Montgomery across the nation. By this time the Montgomery movement had also provided a crucial set of opportunities for King and his coworkers to experiment with Gandhian nonviolent action (or “passive resistance,” as King sometimes described it) on behalf of freedom and justice. King could now announce with confidence, “We in Montgomery have discovered a method that can be used by the Negroes in their fight for political and economic equality. … We fight injustice with passive resistance.… Mohandas Gandhi … used it to topple the British military machine.… Let’s now use this method in the United States.” At the same time, while he increasingly referred to Gandhi, King kept returning to his fundamental grounding in the black church experience. “The spirit of passive resistance came to me from the Bible,” he said, “from the teachings of Jesus. The techniques came from Gandhi.” Summing up what the events in Montgomery meant for a religiously sensitive region and nation, King continued to affirm that “This is a spiritual movement, depending on moral and spiritual forces.” But such a spiritual vision did not exclude the use of practical methods. For instance, the white authorities’ unwillingness to negotiate and the continued harassment and violence directed at the black community compelled the MIA leaders to take their struggle into the courts. In consultation with the local and national NAACP lawyers, the MIA initiated a legal suit to challenge the constitutionality of Montgomery’s segregated bus system. They had moved far beyond the initial quest for “a more humane form of segregation.” Now they were challenging the Jim Crow transportation system itself. The case was identified as Gayle v. Browder (1956). And when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the black citizens of Montgomery, it was clear the South was about to change forever. The Court’s ruling in Gayle v. Browder was announced on November 13, 1956, but no one knew when the official papers of notification would reach Montgomery. The city commission refused to allow the bus company to make any changes in its practices until the court documents actually arrived in their offices. But the people of the movement prepared themselves for the next phase of the journey they had begun on December 5, 1955. On the night when the Supreme Court decision was announced, a caravan of forty cars of Klan members drove through the city’s black neighborhoods. But no one ran into their houses. No one pulled down the shades. Instead, many “New Negroes” stood and watched calmly. Some even waved to the disconcerted white-robed visitors, and soon the visitors drove away. The next night there were two mass meetings to accommodate all the people full of courage who had come to give thanks for the past and plan for the future. It was natural that the MIA executive committee called on King to address the meetings that night. Speaking at Holt Street Church, where they had begun together, King said, “These eleven months have not all been easy. … We have lived with this protest so long that we have learned the meaning of sacrifice and suffering. But somehow we feel that our suffering is redemptive.” Forever the teacher, King felt that he had to encourage the people to consider what it would mean to “press on” to their next steps “in the spirit of the movement.” For him, two elements were crucial. One was the need to avoid arrogance as they made their victorious return to the buses. Taking on a personal tone, he said to the people, “I would be terribly disappointed if anybody goes back to the buses bragging about, we, the Negroes, have won a victory over the white people.” Instead,