Becoming King (15 page)

Graetz developed a relationship with Robert Hughes, who served as the state director of the integrated Alabama Council on Human Relations. The organization’s local chapter was one of the city’s few groups that brought blacks and whites together. As Graetz put it, “In the 1950s a white person taking part in an integrated organization, especially in the South, defied all social mores and jeopardized the principles that controlled every aspect of lives.” The countercultural nature of the Montgomery Council on Human Relations meant that businesspeople were reluctant to be identified with the group even if they agreed with its principles. Graetz remembers: “A few of them supported us, but they rarely came to our meetings. More commonly, wives became actively involved in
our
councils, while husbands took part in White Citizens Councils and other organizations working to preserve segregation.”
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A few white women did continue to work behind the scenes to challenge the racial mores of Montgomery. In a letter to Mayor Gayle, Juliette Morgan expressed her “shock and horror” regarding Police Chief Reppenthal’s recent remarks concerning black police officers: “They are just niggers doing a nigger’s job.” While Morgan recognized that her protests amount to “so much whistling at the whirlwind,” she was unwilling to “stand by and not appeal to your sense of common decency in such a case as this. If I did, I would feel like those ‘good Germans’ who stood by and did nothing all during the 1930’s.” In an addendum at the bottom of her letter to Gayle, she added, “I have long felt that there are great inconsistencies in our professions of Christianity and democracy—and our way of life.”
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As a handful of whites spoke out against Montgomery’s racism, several African Americans sought to apply direct pressure on the city regarding the integration of public schools. At a midsummer executive meeting of the NAACP, members worked on developing a petition to present to the school board in an attempt to inspire some action by the fall. Attorney Fred Gray encouraged only those parents “whose jobs will not be in jeopardy” to sign the petition. The NAACP also continued to work through the courts, filing motions for new trials in both the Jeremiah Reeves and the Claudette Colvin cases. The minutes from the July meeting also indicate that the organization’s local president, Robert L. Matthews (whom Nixon had replaced as NAACP president in 1946), nominated Martin
Luther King Jr. as a candidate to serve on the executive committee, noting he had “made a great contribution to the branch, bringing in memberships and contributions.” Taking minutes at the NAACP meeting was Rosa Parks, who served as the organization’s secretary. A few weeks later, she left the city for a pivotal two-week trip to the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee.
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Earlier that summer, Virginia Durr had recommended Parks, who did seamstress work for the Durr family, as an ideal delegate for a workshop on segregation that Myles Horton and the staff at Highlander had assembled. Unable to afford the workshop’s cost, Parks was granted a scholarship, prompting her to write a letter of thanks to the school’s executive secretary. In the note, she expressed her excitement regarding this opportunity: “I am looking forward with eager expectation to attending the workshop, hoping to make a contribution to the fulfillment of complete freedom for all people.” Parks had a wonderful experience at the school: “I was forty-two years old, and it was one of the few times in my life up to that point when I did not feel any hostility from white people. I experienced people of different races and backgrounds meeting together in workshops and living together in peace and harmony. I felt that I could express myself honestly.” She recalled wishing, as her time in Tennessee came to an end, that she could have stayed longer: “It was hard to leave, knowing what I was going back to.”
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Upon her return from Highlander, Parks resumed her role as secretary for the next NAACP branch meeting. At the gathering hosted by the Metropolitan Methodist Episcopal Church, the chapter officially approved King as a new board member. They also publicized an upcoming Women’s Day Program during which the featured speaker was to be introduced by Autherine Lucy, to whom the courts had recently granted the right to be admitted to the University of Alabama after being denied three years earlier. The group also continued to discuss the need for blacks to register to vote.
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Despite the efforts of Nixon, the WPC, and the NAACP, the entire African American community had not come together as a unified front in their fight against white supremacy. A large part of the problem was the gulf between black professionals and the black working class in and around Montgomery. Earlier in the year, Virginia Durr had noted
the class divisions: “the Negro leaders themselves have such a hard time arousing the mass of Negro people to put up any kind of fight for themselves.” Part of the difficulty in mobilizing the masses rested in local social networks that rarely brought the classes together. While all faced the dehumanizing impact of segregation, their social spheres rarely intersected. Census data indicate that less than 10 percent of the African American population worked in professional fields, while most blacks worked as domestics, common laborers, or service workers. The division between the classes significantly affected one’s daily routine. While a professor at Alabama State College would be able to run a hot bath or shower in the morning, more than 82 percent of the black community lacked piped hot water in their homes. Nearly 70 percent of the black community still relied on chamber pots and outhouses, while only 6 percent of the white community lacked flushable toilets.
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Neighborhood demographics and social networks among professionals reinforced these divergent living conditions. Although African Americans lived throughout the city, they primarily clustered in three neighborhoods that had distinct socioeconomic features. The largest group lived just west of downtown, in the second ward. This community consisted primarily of poor unskilled service workers and domestics. Just east of downtown sat the second-largest black enclave. Although this section of town included a poor area, it also housed a professional community near the Alabama State College campus and another middle-class cluster and small business district on or near South Jackson Street, which is where the Dexter parsonage was located. The poorest black section of Montgomery was in the northern part of the city, in the shadows of warehouses, manufacturing mills, and other industries. Those who were part of the professional class often filled their lives with memberships in social service organizations and clubs. Although a few churches brought together the working and professional classes on Sunday, this was one of their few connections. Professional blacks might respond to physical needs and hardships that caught their attention, but for the most part they did not know the daily lives of working-class blacks in their own town. While philanthropy, service, lobbying, and court cases may have benefited the entire African American community, such an agenda was unlikely to “arouse the masses.” In the political arena, particularly following
the
Brown v. Board of Education
decision, most local leaders set their sights on challenging Jim Crow segregation while relegating economic and quality of life issues to a secondary position.
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King happened to be the pastor of an African American church with a professional “silk-stocking” reputation. Although he enjoyed preaching to an educated congregation, he was never comfortable with the perceived exclusivity of Dexter. While he appreciated their staid responses to his preaching, he bristled at the undertones of haughtiness that often went hand in hand with a congregation largely comprised of professionals. Convinced that true worship would transcend class distinctions, King challenged Dexter to become more educationally and socioeconomically inclusive: “Worship at its best is a social experience where people of all levels of life come together and communicate with a common father. Here the employer and the employee, the rich and the poor, the white collar worker and the common laborer all come together in a vast unity. Here we come to see that although we have different callings in life we are all the children of a common father, who is the father of both the rich and the poor.” King’s earliest preaching experiences had been at his father’s primarily working-class church in Atlanta. He did not want Dexter to become Ebenezer, but he did want Dexter to become a place where any member of his father’s congregation would be welcomed and embraced. King’s desire to build ties with the working class played a significant role in uniting the people in the days to come.
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King also hoped to build bridges with the white community. Recognizing the presence in Montgomery of men and women like Aubrey Williams, Clifford and Virginia Durr, and Clara Rutledge reaffirmed King’s belief that goodwill was possible from the white race. While he did not dismiss the persistence of white racism, King encouraged his congregation to overcome the temptation to paint all whites with the same brush: “The Negro who experiences bitter and agonizing circumstances as a result of some ungodly white person is tempted to look upon all white persons as evil, if he fails to look beyond his circumstances.” King offered an extremely positive assessment of the potential of whites who are “some of the most implacable and vehement advocates of racial equality.” Highlighting the role of whites in the founding of the NAACP, King noted the organization still “gains a great deal of support from northern and southern
white persons.” Therefore King could encourage his congregation to “wait on the Lord,” confident that “God’s goodness will ultimately win out over every state of evil in the universe.” King concluded, “We as Negroes may often have our highest dreams blown away by the jostling winds of a white man’s prejudice, but wait on the Lord.” A tragedy in the neighboring state of Mississippi provided a stark reminder to King and to African Americans throughout the country of the “jostling winds of a white man’s prejudice.”
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Earlier in the summer of 1955, fourteen-year-old Emmett Till had traveled to visit family near Money, Mississippi. After the young African American from Chicago allegedly said “bye, baby” to a white lady working at the general store in town, many blacks in the area were prepared for the worst. Tragedy struck about a week later, when the woman’s husband and brother-in-law picked up Till in the middle of the night, shot him in the head, and dumped his body in a river. The arrest and trial of the murderers happened quickly. So did the jury’s acquittal of the men, as they deliberated for less than an hour before declaring the defendants “not guilty.”

For many African Americans, the murder of young Emmett Till served as a brutal reminder of the depths and horrors of racism. Countless blacks would never forget the picture of Till’s battered corpse published in
Jet
magazine. The acquittal of the murderers by an all-white Mississippi jury further demonstrated that justice did not exist for blacks in the South. The verdict amounted to a sanctioning of white supremacy and brutality. The case did not escape King’s notice. In a sermon delivered the week following the verdict, King lamented, “That jury in Mississippi, which a few days ago in the Emmett Till case, freed two white men from what might be considered one of the most brutal and inhuman crimes of the twentieth century, worships Christ.” In response to those who “worship Christ emotionally and not morally,” King paraphrased words from Isaiah 1:13–15: “Get out of my face. Your incense is an abomination unto me, your feast days trouble me. When you spread forth your hands, I will hide my face. When you make your loud prayer, I will not hear. Your hands are full of blood.”
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In the wake of the Till verdict, King angrily lamented the brutal consequences of systematic injustice. He turned to the parable of the rich man, traditionally known as Dives, and Lazarus, in which an affluent man
failed to fully address the needs of a beggar named Lazarus, resulting in eternal punishment for the wealthy man. For King, the man’s sin was not that he created the injustice but that “he felt that the gulf which existed between him and Lazarus was a proper condition of life. Dives felt that this was the way things were to be. He took the ‘isness’ of circumstantial accidents and transformed them into the ‘oughtness’ of a universal structure.” King connected the parable to life in America in 1955: “Dives is the white man who refuses to cross the gulf of segregation and lift his Negro brother to the position of first class citizenship, because he thinks segregation is a part of the fixed structure of the universe.” Like the rich man from Jesus’ parable, Alabama’s white denominations and organizations either failed to directly challenge the injustice of segregation or attempted to maintain the racial status quo.
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Some of the white businessmen in Montgomery became increasingly frustrated by the inability of local politicians to move the city forward following World War II. Concerned with the community’s economic dependence on the air force bases, they believed Montgomery desperately needed to embrace industrialization. In response, a number of leading businessmen chose to form a new organization: the “Men of Montgomery.” The group first met in October 1955 under the slogan “We Mean Business.” As this group of influential citizens examined the challenges facing their city, they did not recognize the crippling effects of systemic discrimination and segregation. Rather than lobby for a more inclusive city, this group hung their hopes for a new Montgomery on the construction of a cutting-edge terminal at the city’s airport.
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Alabama’s Southern Baptists also sought to overcome many of the challenges facing Montgomery and their home state. In a report submitted for the denomination’s statewide meeting, they addressed the issue of race relations, unable to turn a blind eye to what was an increasingly charged atmosphere following the
Brown
decision and the Till verdict. The denomination’s Christian Life Commission rendered the following report: