Attack on the Conscience

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Across the South--in Atlanta, Mobile, Birmingham, Tallahassee, Miami, New Orleans--Negro leaders look toward Montgomery, Ala., the cradle of the Confederacy, for advice and counsel on how to gain the desegregation that the U.S. Supreme Court has guaranteed them. The man whose word they seek is not a judge, or a lawyer, or a political strategist or a flaming orator. He is a scholarly, 28-year-old Negro Baptist minister, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who in little more than a year has risen from nowhere to become one of the nation's remarkable leaders of men.

In Montgomery, Negroes are riding side by side with whites on integrated buses for the first time in history. They won this right by court order. But their presence is accepted, however reluctantly, by the majority of Montgomery's white citizens because of Martin King and the way he conducted a year-long boycott of the transit system. In terms of concrete victories, this makes King a poor second to the brigade of lawyers who won the big case before the Supreme Court in 1954, and who are now fighting their way from court to court, writ to writ, seeking to build the legal framework for desegregation. But King's leadership extends beyond any single battle: homes and churches were bombed and racial passions rose close to mass violence in Montgomery's year of the boycott, but King reached beyond lawbooks and writs, beyond violence and threats, to win his people--and challenge all people--with a spiritual force that aspired even to ending prejudice in man's mind.

Tortured Souls. "Christian love can bring brotherhood on earth. There is an element of God in every man," said he, after his own home was bombed. "No matter how low one sinks into racial bigotry, he can be redeemed . . . Nonviolence is our testing point. The strong man is the man who can stand up for his rights and not hit back." With such an approach he outflanked the Southern legislators who planted statutory hedgerows against integration for as far as the eye could see. He struck where an attack was least expected, and where it hurt most: at the South's Christian conscience.

Most of all, Baptist King's impact has been felt by the influential white clergy, which could--if it would--help lead the South through a peaceful and orderly transitional period toward the integration that is inevitable. Explains Baptist Minister Will Campbell, onetime chaplain at the University of Mississippi, now a Southern official of the National Council of Churches: "I know of very few white Southern ministers who aren't troubled and don't have admiration for King. They've become tortured souls." Says Baptist Minister William Finlator of Raleigh, N.C.: "King has been working on the guilt conscience of the South. If he can bring us to contrition, that is our hope."

Judicial Recognition. Sturdy (5 ft. 7 in., 164 lbs.), soft-voiced Martin Luther King describes himself as "an ambivert--half introvert and half extrovert." He can draw within himself for long, single-minded concentration on his people's problems, and then exert the force of personality and conviction that makes him a public leader. No radical, he avoids the excesses of radicalism, e.g., he recognized economic reprisal as a weapon that could get out of hand, kept the Montgomery boycott focused on the immediate goal of bus integration, restrained his followers from declaring sanctions against any white merchant or tradesman who offended them. King is an expert organizer, to the extent that during the bus boycott the hastily assembled Negro car pool under his direction achieved even judicial recognition as a full-fledged transit system. Personally humble, articulate, and of high educational attainment, Martin Luther King Jr. is, in fact, what many a Negro--and, were it not for his color, many a white--would like to be.

Even King's name is meaningful: he was baptized Michael Luther King, son of the Rev. Michael Luther King Sr., then and now pastor of Atlanta's big (4,000 members) Ebenezer Baptist Church. He was six when King Sr. decided to take on, for himself and his son, the full name of the Protestant reformer. Says young King: "Both father and I have fought all our lives for reform, and perhaps we've earned our right to the name."

Perched on a bluff overlooking Atlanta's business district, the two-story yellow brick King home was a happy one, where Christianity was a way of life. Each day began and ended with family prayer. Martin was required to learn Scriptural verse for recitation at evening meals. He went to Sunday school, morning and evening services. He was taught to hold Old Testament respect for the law, but it was the New Testament's gentleness that came to have everyday application in his life.

"Never a Spectator." From his earliest memory Martin King has had a strong aversion to violence in all its forms. The school bully walloped him; Martin did not fight back. His younger brother flailed away at him; Martin stood and took it. A white woman in a store slapped him, crying, "You're the nigger who stepped on my foot." Martin said nothing. Cowardice? If so, it would come as a surprise to Montgomery, where Martin Luther King has unflinchingly faced the possibility of violent death for months.

The shabby, overcrowded Negro schools in Atlanta were no match for the keen, probing ("I like to get in over my head, then bother people with questions") mind of Martin King; he leapfrogged through high school in two years, was ready at 15 for Atlanta's Morehouse College, one of the South's Negro colleges. At Morehouse, King worked with the city's Intercollegiate Council, an integrated group, and learned a valuable lesson. "I was ready to resent all the white race," he says. "As I got to see more of white people, my resentment was softened, and a spirit of cooperation took its place. But I never felt like a spectator in the racial problem. I wanted to be involved in the very heart of it."

As a kid, in the classic tradition of kids, Martin wanted to be a fireman. Then, hoping to treat man's physical ills, he planned to become a doctor. Becoming more deeply engrossed in the problems of his race, he turned his hopes to the law because "I could see the part I could play in breaking down the legal barriers to Negroes." At Morehouse, he came to final resolution. "I had been brought up in the church and knew about religion," says King, "but I wondered whether it could serve as a vehicle to modern thinking. I wondered whether religion, with its emotionalism in Negro churches, could be intellectually respectable as well as emotionally satisfying." He decided it could--and that he would become a minister.

Techniques of Execution. King's Morehouse record (major in sociology) won him scholarship offers from three seminaries. But Martin Luther King Sr., a man of considerable parts, held that scholarships should go only to boys who could otherwise not afford to continue their education. King Sr. therefore reached into his own pocket to send his son to Pennsylvania's Crozer Theological Seminary.

For the first time in his life Martin King found himself in an integrated school; he was one of six Negroes among nearly 100 students at Crozer. Fearful that he might fail to meet white standards, King worked ceaselessly. Aside from his general theological studies, he pored over the words and works of the great social philosophers: Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, Locke, Hegel (whose progress-through-pain theories are still prominent in King's thinking). Above all, he read and reread everything he could find about India's Gandhi. "Even now," says King, "in reading Gandhi's words again, I am given inspiration. The spirit of passive resistance came to me from the Bible and the teachings of Jesus. The techniques of execution came from Gandhi."

By Guess & by God. King's Crozer career was extraordinary. He graduated first in his class, was named the seminary's outstanding student, was president of the student body (the first Negro so honored), and earned a chance to go on to Boston University for his Ph.D. His doctoral thesis: A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman.*

His Boston interests were not exclusively devoted to Theologians Tillich and Wieman. He had met Coretta Scott, a pretty and talented soprano who was studying at the New England Conservatory of Music. Their early dates were less than completely successful. "The fact that he was a minister made me shy away," recalls Coretta. "I had an awful stereotype in my mind." The suitor broke the stereotype: in June 1953, Coretta and King were married on the front lawn of her home in Marion, Ala. Just 15 months later they arrived in Montgomery to take up full-time pastoral duties at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, and to assume the role for which, as if by guess and by God, he had been preparing all his life.

Aching Feet. Snuggled against a hairpin bend in the meandering Alabama River, Montgomery was a city where 80,000 whites pretty generally believed there was no problem with 50,000 Negroes. Working mostly as farm hands or domestic servants for $15 or $20 a week, Montgomery's Negroes had neither geographic nor political unity. There was no concentration of Negroes in one area; instead, they were split up in neighborhood pockets scattered the length and the breadth of the city. Served by a lackadaisical Negro weekly paper, they had no ready means of communication. More than that, says Martin King, the "vital liaison between Negroes and whites was totally lacking. There was not even a ministerial alliance to bring white and colored clergymen together. This is important. If there had been some communication between the races, we might have got some help from the responsible whites, and our protest might not have been necessary."

Frustrated at every turn, the Negroes had long since fallen to quarreling among themselves in bitter factionalism. "If," says King, "you had asked me the day before our protest began whether any action could or would have been taken by the Negroes, I'd have said no. Then, all of a sudden, unity developed."

It came about through the aching feet of a Negro woman.

In the early evening of Thursday, Dec. 1, 1955, a Montgomery City Lines bus rolled through Court Square and headed for its next stop in front of the Empire Theater. Aboard were 24 Negroes, seated from the rear toward the front, and twelve whites, seated from front to back. At the Empire Theater stop, six whites boarded the bus. The driver, as usual, walked back and asked the foremost Negroes to get up and stand so the whites could sit. Three Negroes obeyed--but Mrs. Rosa Parks, a seamstress who had once been a local secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, did the unexpected. She refused.

"I don't really know why I wouldn't move," says Rosa Parks. "There was no plot or plan at all. I was just tired from shopping. My feet hurt." Rosa Parks was arrested and in the due course of time fined $10 and costs for violating a state law requiring bus passengers to follow drivers' seating assignments.

What They Were Up To. Other Negroes had suffered worse indignities, but hers was the one that the South would long remember. The Montgomery City Lines Inc. had long been a special irritant to the Negroes, who made up 70% of its patronage. At best, they had to pay their fares in front, get off and board again in the rear; sometimes after they had dropped their money in the fare box and were going around to the rear, the bus drivers drove off. At worst, the Negroes were cursed, slapped and kicked by the white drivers. By the time of the Parks case, they had had all they could take without some sort of reply.

Overnight the word flashed throughout the various Negro neighborhoods: support Rosa Parks; don't ride the buses Monday. Within 48 hours mimeographed leaflets (authorship unknown) were out, calling for a one-day bus boycott. A white woman saw one of the leaflets and called the Montgomery Advertiser, demanding that it print the story "to show what the niggers are up to." The Advertiser did--and publicized the boycott plan among Negroes in a way that they themselves never could have achieved. The results were astonishing: on Monday Montgomery Negroes walked, rode mules, drove horse-drawn buggies, traveled to work in private cars. The strike was 90% effective.

How They Did It. On the day of the strike, some two dozen Negro ministers decided to push for continuance of the bus boycott. The original demands were mild: 1) Negroes would still be seated from the rear and whites from the front, but on a first-come-first-served basis; 2) Negroes would get courteous treatment; 3) Negro drivers would be employed for routes through predominantly Negro areas. To direct their protest, the Negro ministers decided to form the Montgomery Improvement Association. And for president they elected the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., a relative newcomer whose ability was evident and whose newness placed him above the old feuds. That night, at a hastily called mass meeting, more than 5,000 Negroes approved the ministers' decisions.

Slowly the boycott took permanent shape. More than 200 volunteers offered the use of their cars; nearly 100 pickup stations were established. Church and mass-meeting collections kept the Montgomery Improvement Association alive at first; then donations began to flood in from across the U.S. and from as far away as Tokyo. By the end of last year the M.I.A. had spent an estimated $225,000. At every turn King outgeneraled Montgomery's white officials. Example: the officials went to court to have the M.I.A.'s assets frozen, but King had the funds scattered around in out-of-reach banks that included half a dozen in the North.

Get Tough. Montgomery's whites reacted complacently. The city commission went through the barest motions of offering compromises, e.g., the Negroes were promised that the bus drivers would show them "partial courtesy." Mayor W. A. ("Tacky") Gayle appointed a committee to negotiate with the Negroes--and named as a member the head of the local White Citizens' Council.

The Negroes stood firm, and white complacency turned to fury. Rumors were spread that boycott leaders had used mass-meeting funds to buy themselves Cadillacs. Older Negro preachers were taunted for having yielded their seniority to a young whippersnapper. To lure the Negroes back onto the buses, the Montgomery city commission called in three hand-picked Negro ministers (who had been on the edges of the boycott) and persuaded them to agree to settlement terms that had little if any practical meaning. The commission's plan was to announce the settlement in Sunday's papers, but Saturday night word of the plan reached King (who was tipped off by a long-distance call from a Minneapolis reporter who had seen the story on the Associated Press wire). King and his top M.I.A. associates spent most of the night going from tavern to tavern warning Negroes that there had been no real settlement.

When the false armistice failed, Mayor Tacky Gayle ordered a get-tough policy. Gayle and his city commissioners made a great show of joining the White Citizens' Council. (Said Police Commissioner Clyde Sellers: "I wouldn't trade my Southern birthright for 100 Negro votes.") Police harassment followed: King was arrested for speeding; Negro car-pool drivers were haled into court for trivial violations.

Worst of all, the whites' lunatic fringe began to take over. A letter addressed simply to "Nigger Preacher" was promptly delivered to Martin King. Up to 25 profanity-laced telephone calls a day came to the King home. Sometimes there was only the hawk of a throat and the splash of spittle against the ear piece. Montgomery was building toward the one thing that Martjn King wanted most to avoid: a violent blowup.

"One night," says King, "after many threatening and annoying phone calls, I went into the kitchen and tried to forget it all. I found myself praying out loud, and I laid my life bare. I remember saying, 'I'm here, taking a stand, and I've come to the point where I can't face it alone.' " From somewhere came the answer: stand for truth, stand for righteousness; God is at your side. Says Martin King: "I have not known fear since."

His mettle was soon tested. At 9:15 one night a year ago, King was speaking at a mass meeting; Coretta King was talking to a friend in the living room of the parsonage at 309 South Jackson Street. Coretta heard a thud on the porch and thought it was a brick, nothing particularly frightening around the King home during that period. She and the friend moved to a back room to continue their conversation--and a dynamite bomb went off, filling the vacant living room with a hail of broken glass.

"Be Peaceful." Mayor Gayle and Police Commissioner Sellers rushed out with the cops to answer the alarm and found themselves up against a Negro crowd in the ugliest sort of mood. King's nonviolent teachings had sunk deep (since the boycott began, Montgomery's crimes of violence by Negroes have decreased by an estimated 20%), but at this moment the impulse to answer white violence with Negro violence seemed irresistible. A growl of fury came from the Negro crowd; there was a forward surge that left no doubt in the mind of anyone present that Mayor Gayle and his aides were in danger. A white man rushed inside the parsonage and begged Martin King, who had been hastily summoned from his mass meeting, to stop his followers. King did.

"Please be peaceful," he said from the shattered front porch. "We believe in law and order. We are not advocating violence. We want to love our enemies. I want you to love our enemies. Be good to them. Love them and let them know you love them. I did not start this boycott. I was asked by you to serve as your spokesman. I want it to be known the length and breadth of the land that if I am stopped, this movement will not stop. If I am stopped, our work will not stop, for what we are doing is right. What we are doing is just--and God is with us."

Montgomery's Negroes walked back through the night to their homes. "I'll be honest with you," says a policeman who was there. "I was terrified. I owe my life to that nigger preacher, and so do all the other white people who were there."

Voice from Washington. After the bombing, Montgomery Negroes put up floodlights around King's home and refused to let him drive or walk alone. The Kings moved most of their furniture into back rooms, leaving the living room virtually bare. King briefly considered arming himself, but decided against it ("As the leader of a nonviolent movement, I'd look pretty bad carrying a gun"). Coretta King took their infant daughter to Atlanta, but soon returned. "When I'm away from this," she says, "I get depressed. I feel completely helpless."

The boycott continued, bringing the bus company to its economic knees. King and 89 other boycott leaders were indicted on charges of violating a 1921 antiboycott law that came straight from Alabama's legal boneyard (King's $500 fine is still under appeal). Then Montgomery's officials made a stab that very nearly paid off. They went to court for an injunction against the M.I.A. on the ground that it had set up an illegal transit system.

The move was one that King had long feared; he had, in fact, tried to forestall it by having the name of a different Negro church printed on the side of each of the 20 new station wagons that the M.I.A. had bought for the car pool. One day last November as King and his M.I.A. colleagues were in court fighting a losing battle against the injunction, there was a stir among the white lawyers. They had seen a news dispatch: the U.S. Supreme Court had declared bus segregation illegal in Montgomery. Cried a fervent Negro: "God Almighty has spoken from Washington, D.C.!"

The next night King addressed an emotion-packed church meeting ("Look at the way they greet that guy," said a white newsman. "They think he's a Messiah"), admonished his followers to take their victory humbly. "I would be terribly disappointed," said King, "if any of you go back to the buses bragging, 'We, the Negroes, won a victory over the white people.' "

A Long Way to Go. At first, integrated buses on night runs were sporadically peppered with shotgun blasts. Then things seemed to quiet down. It was a false quiet. One night last month the stillness was shattered by a series of dynamite blasts. A bomb exploded outside the home of the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, Negro pastor of the First Baptist Church, who has subordinated his own admitted ambitions for leadership to become King's strong, trusted right hand. Another bomb ripped into the home of a special object of white venom: the Rev. Robert Graetz, white pastor of the all-Negro Trinity-Lutheran Church, who has stood stoutly for integration. ("If I had a nickel for every time I've been called a nigger-loving s.o.b.," says Graetz, "I'd be independently wealthy.") Negro churches were also bombed (see map), and later an unexploded bomb was found on King's front porch. By now the great majority of Montgomery's law-abiding citizens realized that almost any solution was better than that offered by the terrorist minority. With every new outbreak of violence, inevitably followed by a reassuring word of nonviolence from King, white opinion grew stronger for accepting bus integration in an orderly way. The bus fight was to all practical effect, over.

"We have come a long, long way," says King, "but we still have a long, long way to go." The process will take time, since King is willing to move cautiously rather than excite new passions, especially over school integration. "If you truly love and respect an opponent," he says, "you respect his fears too."

Booked Up. King's post-boycott day begins when he arises at 6 a.m., dresses quickly in a grey suit ("I don't want to look like an undertaker, but I do believe in conservative dress"), takes an hour for reading, prayer and breakfast before going to the M.I.A. office, a small brick building on South Union Street. There two secretaries are already at work, pounding on their typewriters (the association receives and answers upwards of 100 letters a day), or cranking a Mimeograph machine to turn out official notices to the Negro population. King's desk is in a cramped, yellow-walled rear room, where he spends long hours conferring with M.I.A. committees, now expanded to include Registration and Voting (to educate Negroes and get out their vote as a political force in the community), Banking (to set up a credit union and consider a savings-and-loan association to provide capital for Negro housing and business) and Relief.

At 1 o'clock King goes home for lunch and an hour's rest. Then back to work. The phone rings and a secretary answers. Columbus, Ohio is calling: Could Dr. King address the local N.A.A.C.P. chapter? The secretary flips through an engagement book: "I'm awfully sorry, but Dr. King is so terribly booked up now. Could he make it some time later on?" A Negro comes in with a crudely printed hate sheet he has found on the street, hands it to a secretary, who smiles wanly: "Just another one. We get these all the time." The telephone rings again. This time the United Press is calling from New York, wanting to know if it is true that the Negroes have placed a guard on their leaders' homes and churches. "Why, yes," says King, "but it isn't new. We've been watching them for some time now." In an alcove next to a Coca-Cola machine, the Rev. Ralph Abernathy works at his desk, making final preparations for that night's mass meeting.

Onward, Christian Soldiers. The meeting is scheduled for 7 o'clock, but by 3 there are already 20 women waiting in the church auditorium (the meetings are moved each week from church to church to give each a sense of participation in the movement), and by 6 the hall is filled. As the starting time approaches, 40 Negro ministers file into their places near the altar. Finally, the electric clock on the balcony reaches 7 o'clock. King and his top assistants enter; the crowd rises and applauds wildly.

The singing starts, and like everything else, it is carefully planned. During the early days of the boycott, when the Negroes needed militant encouragement, there were such hymns as Onward, Christian Soldiers and Stand Up! Stand Up for Jesus. Today, love and forgiveness are stressed in hymns--Love Lifted Me, Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.

The Rev. Bob Graetz, the white minister, reads the 27th Psalm ("The Lord is my light and my salvation"). When Martin King arises for his "Official Remarks," he speaks quietly, making no play for the emotionalism that often marks Negro church meetings. ("If we as a people," he often tells his congregations, "had as much religion in our hearts as we have in our legs and feet, we could change the world.") Ralph Abernathy follows with what is frankly billed on the program as a "Pep Talk," and when Abernathy pep-talks, the hall is filled with the cheers and stomps of the crowd. The meeting ends; the Negroes slowly start from the church toward their homes.

Late at night, the mass meeting a warm memory, Martin Luther King Jr. can relax for a few moments before his prayers. He talks quietly of the broad principles on which his effort is based. "Our use of passive resistance in Montgomery," he says, "is not based on resistance to get rights for ourselves, but to achieve friendship with the men who are denying us our rights, and change them through friendship and a bond of Christian understanding before God." Impossible? Maybe.

But so, only 14 months before, was the notion that whites and Negroes might be riding peaceably together on integrated buses in Montgomery, Ala.

* Harvard Theologian Tillich stresses the transcendence of God, i.e., that God is outside all things, while Neo-Naturalist Philosopher Wieman stresses the immanence of God, i.e., that God is within all things.

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