Becoming King (25 page)
Authors: Troy Jackson
Other evidence suggests the matter was far more complicated. Robert Graetz later claimed that Fields’s charges of financial mismanagement “reignited my own concerns about the way money was handled.” As the movement grew in prominence, leaders had opportunities to participate in MIA fund-raisers around the country. Graetz helped raise thousands
of dollars on such events, and had always given all the proceeds, minus travel expenses, to the MIA. He later remembered a conversation with someone from the MIA office after one such trip in which he was asked “Did you keep enough out for yourself?” When Graetz responded that he had raised all the money for the organization, he was told, “I know, but the other speakers normally keep an honorarium for themselves out of the money they raised.” Although he was initially shocked, he later felt those keeping part of the money for themselves may have needed it, as some were not well compensated by their congregations. Graetz’s recollections reveal a lack of clear economic policy guiding the MIA’s fund-raising activities. Nixon also gave some credence to Fields’s charge:
A lot of times a minister would go and make a speech and he’d think that he’s entitled to some of it. Everybody didn’t do like I done. Why I’ve known Reverend King to, you know? Reverend King, he spoke up in Canada and he told me, “Brother Nick, when the check come from Canada, that’s my personal check.” Sure ‘nough, when it came I gave it to ‘im. No weren’t no question about it. A lot of that happened. But Mrs. Parks never accepted anything. Whatever she collected she turned right in. She’d come in three or four o’clock in the evening and turn in anything she’d collected and I’d give her a receipt for it. Everybody didn’t do that.
With any growing organization emerging quickly in response to a specific challenge, infrastructure often lags. A lack of clear organization policies and guidelines did allow for MIA monies to be claimed by individuals within the movement, including King. Without clear guidelines or accounting, it is also possible that greed prevailed on more than one occasion, as leaders helped themselves to more of the funds than was warranted. Fields’s allegations of financial mismanagement were thus not without merit.
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Fields experienced significant backlash for going to the white press with his claims. Johnnie Carr, who attended Hall Street Baptist Church, where Fields had served prior to Bell Street, later remembered the young minister’s greed as one of the things that led him to be dismissed from
the church. According to Carr, Fields publicly denigrated Hall Street Baptist’s treatment of him. Far more egregious in Carr’s eyes was Fields’s betrayal of the organization in response to a personal offense: “I think very little of anybody who was part of the inside who would go out and try and destroy.” B. J. Simms, who headed the transportation committee for the MIA, believed Fields wanted to lead the boycott, and when that did not happen he allowed jealousy to cloud his judgment. Simms asserted, “Fields decided if he couldn’t run it, he’d ruin it.” This torrent of criticism led Fields to later claim that he “found there’s no pressure like pressure from the inside group.” Nixon wondered if some of the trouble was not attributable to Fields’s willingness to challenge some of King’s decisions. In the end, this perceived insubordination led to his dismissal from the executive board, and after his public allegations, “some of King’s supporters run that man off.”
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The MIA used the funds that came into their coffers to keep the car pools going, to pay for legal expenses, and to maintain communication through efforts like the MIA newsletter. According to Erna Dungee Allen, some of the organization’s finances also went toward helping people with financial needs in the community. The organization assisted residents with rent, paid energy bills, provided food for those who needed it, and even purchased a few washing machines for families. She believed the MIA engaged in these types of assistance to try “to get along with the people. And usually the folks who weren’t participating, who didn’t belong to a church or anything, were the ones who came for help. They were usually the poorest ones.” Allen remembered King as particularly concerned with the plight of Montgomery’s poorest. While he didn’t support all the charitable assistance, “he felt like he had to go along with most of it.”
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Throughout the summer, some whites continued to resort to desperate strategies in an attempt to discourage, intimidate, and hamper those participating in the boycott. As ripples of civil rights struggles spread from Tuscaloosa to Birmingham to Montgomery, it was easier for whites in the state to blame outsiders for the challenges rather than attribute the protest to indigenous dissatisfaction with the racial status quo. As a result, the state outlawed the NAACP in Alabama, citing the organization’s refusal to turn over their membership list to the government. In late August,
the home of Lutheran pastor Robert Graetz was bombed and nearly destroyed. Soon after word came that insurance providers were unwilling to cover seventeen church-owned station wagons that provided the backbone of the MIA’s citywide car pool system. After a brief period of concern, Lloyds of London agreed to pick up coverage on the vehicles.
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Despite the white backlash, one of the overriding concerns of the MIA was how to win whites to the cause of justice rather than merely defeat them. At an executive board meeting in September, King urged those present to reach out across racial lines by making “our motives clearly understood by whites of our community” and beginning to “move from protest to reconciliation.” The board adopted several strategies to assist in building more bridges with the white community. They elected to get some people associated with the MIA to write essays on the true spirit of the movement that could be carried by local newspapers. Additionally, they hoped to mail these articles to “influential and representative whites in this city, both those favorably disposed to our movement and those who oppose it” including white clergy, the Men of Montgomery, and women’s organizations. Finally, they sought to work with radio and television stations to try to get the local media to cover both sides of the boycott story. If local approaches failed, King was to seek an appearance on
Meet the Press.
The primary strategy adopted by the MIA for addressing whites in the community was to use the media. While they had little success in Montgomery, this meeting was a harbinger of a strategy that proved pivotal as the civil rights movement expanded, with national media bringing the story of the movement to whites throughout the nation.
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As weariness set in among the protesters, King once again attempted to provide words of encouragement, inspiration, and hope to his Dexter congregation. He reminded them of Jesus’ invitation from Matthew 18:21–22: “Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” God’s rest was available to them, for “although we live amid the tensions of life, although we live amid injustice” these conditions will not last forever: “I’m glad the slaves were the greatest psychologists that America’s ever known, for they learned something that we must always learn. And they said it in their broken language, ‘I’m so glad trouble don’t last always.’” King bemoaned the current conditions in the Southland, where white supremacy dominated state and local decision making
as men in power dedicated themselves “to keep the Negro segregated and exploited and keep him down under the iron yoke of oppression.” King held on to hope, however, as he cried out to his congregation:
And there is something that cries to us and says that Kasper and Englehardt and all the other men that we hear talking, grim men that represent the death groans of a dying system. And all that they are saying are merely the last-minute breathing spots of a system that will inevitably die. For justice rules this world, love and goodwill, and it will triumph. They begin to wonder all over the nation, how is it we can keep walking in Montgomery. How is it that we can keep burning out our rubber? How is it we can keep living under the tension? And we can cry out to the nation, “We can do it because we know that as we walk, God walks with us.”
After months of protest and struggle, King had learned that God’s presence with the people represented the only foundation for their efforts to hold on and continue their fight.
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King also continued to preach about the importance of love for those committed to the struggle. Warning against the self-righteousness embodied by the older brother in Jesus’ parable of the Prodigal Son, King observed that “the tragedy of the elder brother was that he was contaminated with the sin of pride and egotism,” noting “his spiritual pride had drained from him the capacity to love. He could not call his brother brother.” King encouraged his Dexter congregation to not only strive for personal piety, but to also embody genuine love for others. Bemoaning the fact that the church and culture have tended to elevate some sins while ignoring others, he charged: “The Church has been harder on profanity than on prejudice. It has denounced drunkenness more than stinginess. It was unchristian to gamble, but not to own slaves.”
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Meanwhile a few white Christians in Montgomery continued to display an unwillingness to love, as the MIA car pool once again came under attack.
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At the suggestion of Jack D. Brock, the president of Montgomery’s printers’ union, the city elected to take legal action against the car pool by claiming it was an unauthorized business. Mayor Gayle instructed Montgomery’s
city attorneys “to file such proceedings as it may deem proper to stop the operation of car pool or transportation systems growing out of the bus boycott.” The case went to trial on November 13, with the city not only seeking to end the car pool, but also to gain the lost tax revenues Montgomery would have garnered through bus travel. The MIA faced the possibility of the car pool ending with no alternate plan under development. As King sat at the defendant’s table during a brief midday recess, he noticed activity at the back of the courtroom. Word soon came to him that the U.S. Supreme Court had sided with the U.S. District Court, finding segregation on Montgomery’s buses unconstitutional. In what proved to be an anticlimactic ruling, Judge Carter supported the city’s claim in their lawsuit, effectively ending the car pool. The Supreme Court’s ruling did not take effect immediately. Over the following six weeks, as the city exhausted every delay tactic they could find, the boycott continued. MIA leaders scrambled to develop share-a-ride programs in local neighborhoods, although without a centralized transportation system, many elected to walk rather than return to segregated buses.
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On the day the Supreme Court ruling reached Montgomery, the 134th Alabama Baptist State Convention was in session in the city. The proceedings included a report from the Christian Life Commission titled
The Race Situation in Alabama.
The Southern Baptists dismissed the legitimacy of Autherine Lucy’s protest at the University of Alabama, calling her a puppet of the NAACP. They proceeded to address the boycott in Montgomery, surmising that “emotionalism has affected, we feel, some decisions of the legislators and certain magistrates.” They also defended those who had elected to join the White Citizens Council: “Because of a lack of alternate course many white Christians, normally moderate, are finding themselves more closely linked with the stands not of their own persuasion.” As a way to proceed, the report recommended meetings between “more independent Negro ministers” and nearby white ministers with the goal of lessening the tension of the situation, noting those involved should be members of neither the NAACP nor the White Citizens Council. While the Southern Baptists continued to identify the problem as tension between the races, King and the MIA described how to live faithfully with the inevitable tensions emerging from a struggle for justice.
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On December 20, the Supreme Court’s ruling reached Montgomery,
instructing the city to operate integrated buses the following morning. At a mass meeting that evening, King concluded with words of faith and expectation: “It is my firm conviction that God is working in Montgomery. Let all men of goodwill, both Negro and white, continue to work with Him. With this dedication we will be able to emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man to the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice.” King woke early to board one of the first fully integrated buses. He did so as a changed man. Over the course of the previous twelve months, the trajectory of King’s life and ministry was radically reshaped. Within the crucible of a community in struggle, King found his voice. No longer was King primarily a theoretical advocate of the social gospel. Now King was in the heart of the battle to make social justice a reality. Before coming to Montgomery, King had immersed himself in a life of social gospel oratory, rooted in the power of love. He had had ideas about God’s character and about social change, but he had never fully experienced the shared and prolonged struggles that transform theories into convictions and forge authentic, unwavering faith. But by the end of 1956, King was no stranger to living under the tensions of modern life, and as he stared evil in the face daily, he became a preacher of passionate conviction that could stir not only a congregation or even a community, but a nation.
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In his memoir of the boycott, King claimed that “The Montgomery story would have taken place if the leaders of the protest had never been born.” In many respects, this is true. The boycott idea preceded King’s arrival in the city, and the first few days of the protest would have occurred had King not been on the scene at all. The stalemate with the city would likely have happened as well, for Montgomery city officials proved determined to maintain white supremacy in the city by defending segregated buses, and were unwilling to compromise. The MIA had many resolute leaders who were committed to staying the course. Even the emphasis on love and nonviolence would have emerged as a dominant theme without King’s presence. The commitments to loving your neighbor and turning the other cheek were deeply rooted in the African American Christian tradition. The fact that the people embodied the nonviolence King articulated demonstrates their predisposition to view nonviolence as a viable strategy.
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