Parting the Waters (21 page)

After these two financial shockers, King recommended the establishment of a host of new committees, boards, and councils. A social and political action committee would promote membership in the NAACP and sponsor “forums and mass meetings” before elections to discuss the issues. “Every member of Dexter must be a registered voter,” he wrote, at a time when less than 5 percent of Negroes in Alabama were registered. One new committee would raise money to give a Dexter high school graduate a small college scholarship, another would establish a nursery so that parents of small children could attend church more easily, a third would seek new members. Contented Dexter had never done such things.

His final dozen recommendations returned to the pivotal subject of finance and church control. He proposed that each deacon be assigned twenty-five church members who lived near him (“It shall be the duty of the deacon to persuade the member to catch up his or her pledge”), and he outlined the same centralized treasury and budget that his father had used so successfully at Ebenezer. Henceforth, there would be no more ad hoc rallies, special collections, or anonymous giving. “I recommend that all money in the treasury of each auxiliary be turned over to the general church treasurer by November 1, 1954,” he wrote. Dexter would operate by check instead of cash. The pastor alone, and not the deacons or the trustees, would decide how much to pay guest ministers. No one would take collections home to count them; all money would be deposited in the bank immediately. If all this and more were done, King concluded with a flourish, “Dexter will rise to such heights as will stagger the imagination of generations yet unborn.”

His plan was to claim leadership and to demonstrate it in one swift stroke. In perhaps the most critical and daring tactic, King named specific people for all the appointments to his plethora of committees. He showed that on the first day he already knew his congregation well enough to take a huge risk in one of the minister's most delicate areas, personnel assignments. Among those he appointed were Dr. Adair, whom Vernon Johns had denounced for murdering his wife, Dr. Pettus, whose daughter Johns had embarrassed by selling watermelons at her wedding, and Rufus Lewis, the funeral proprietor and former football coach who had accompanied Johns on his fateful watermelon run to the Alabama State campus.

The list, along with the whole package, would be voted up or down. By listing the names in advance, King gave a large number of the most influential church members a vested interest in his reform. By tying both the committees and the finance plan to Moses' definition of pastoral authority, King gave the members a clear choice: they could validate his authority along with his recommendations, or could challenge them both. It was Thermidor, a royalist counterattack, with implicit warning that if the nobles resisted, King would leave Dexter before they could celebrate his arrival.

King was proud of his coup. He had spent months preparing his recommendations, going so far as to consult the organizational reports of successful Negro churches around the country. Even after Dexter capitulated, he sent copies to other clergymen for their comments and advice. Those who responded singled out for applause King's description of the pastor's preeminence. Melvin Watson referred to the preface as “beautifully and appropriately formulated.” Another friend wrote simply that King had done “a very good job” on the authority question. There was little disagreement among pastors on this point. Their one common criticism was that King might be taking things too fast, with too much organization, too many overlapping committees, too much busywork. “Hectic activity in the church is not necessarily an indication that the cause of the Kingdom is being promoted,” cautioned Watson.

King believed that hectic activity could bond him to the congregation and to the town. He had more than enough energy. Every morning he was up by five-thirty to work for three hours on his dissertation. Then he was off to the church, where he might preach at a funeral, supervise the painting of the basement, or play musical chairs with the members of the June Club. He went to NAACP meetings, made social calls on the other Negro ministers in town, and joined the local Morehouse Club. Montgomery was a haven for Morehouse alumni—so much so that one of Alabama State's nicknames was “Little Morehouse”—and King soon discovered that Elliott Finley, a Morehouse acquaintance, had a pool table in his home. He played pool there in the evenings (“Old Finley thought he could whip me at Eight Ball, so I had to give him a lesson”). Late at night, he often worked another few hours on the dissertation. That first year at Dexter, he made two trips back to Boston to confer with DeWolf and to defend his dissertation before the Ph.D. examining committee, attended no less than ten conclaves of the National Baptist Convention, preached forty-six sermons at Dexter, and delivered twenty addresses at churches and colleges from New York to Louisiana. Proud of his blinding schedule, King reported to the church that on top of everything else he had read exactly twenty-six books and 102 magazines.

Even the stolid R. D. Nesbitt was telling the deacons that the new pastor had “revolutionized” Dexter within the first two months. King kept committee members so busy working on projects they liked that they had no time to oppose those they disdained. Six weeks after making his recommendations, King was able to report the collection of more than $2,100 on a single Sunday. This amounted to half his annual salary and was considered by his fellow clergymen to be an amazing feat for a church with only three hundred members on the books. Predictably, King encountered the most foot-dragging, the most ingenious delay pattern of missed deadlines and slipped minds, against his dictum that all monies from the bank accounts and cigar boxes of the scattered church auxiliaries be surrendered to the new central treasury by November 1. But he collected it all on time, on the strength of his mandate and his persistence.

The deadline was of more than passing significance to the new pastor, because on the last day of October Reverend King led a caravan of Ebenezer members down the highway to Montgomery—including Mother King and her choir, and supporters numbering nearly a hundred—for the formal ceremonies in which young King was installed in the Dexter pulpit. King was able to report to his father that he had established financial control of Dexter's legendary baronies.

 

King already had written Paul Tillich to ask for a personal interview. In November, Tillich replied from Aberdeen, Scotland, where he was delivering the Gifford Lectures. Tillich was working feverishly on the second volume of his
Systematic Theology
, with new ideas and definitions coming to him so rapidly that he often muttered to colleagues or himself, “I must revise my system.” Despite his burdensome schedule, Tillich advised Ph.D. candidate King that he would be happy to talk with him for his dissertation on Tillich's ideas of God but regretted to say that he would not be at Harvard during any of King's trips to Boston, as King had hoped, because he would be writing, traveling, and lecturing for another year before taking up new duties at Harvard. He gave dates when he would be available in Chicago or New York.

Although King would finish his dissertation before the interview could be arranged, the mere fact that he had been welcomed by the most eminent Protestant theologian in the world was satisfying. He began his career near the summit of both the white and Negro church worlds. His “twoness” seemed to translate into sturdiness and balance, as his interest in Tillich's abstractions did not crowd out his instinct for power within the practical confines of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. Beneath his genteel, aristocratic manner—never without his big words or his dress fedora—there were only hints at first that King was balanced, holding within himself contending forces of great power. One hint was his rapport with Dexter's less sophisticated members, who noticed that King never greeted them with the dreaded question, “What are you doing?” This password was an invitation for the person so greeted to mention some sabbatical, club project, upcoming convention, or other delicious burden of professional status. It offended those who would have to reply that they were just farming or ironing the white folks' laundry, as they always had. Even an old farmer like Vernon Johns had asked people what they were doing, and was capable of that satisfied tone of voice when he did—but not King. The new pastor always looked his members squarely in the eye and asked them
how
they were doing, usually following with a personal question about their health or the kids. Moreover, he would linger over such conversations against all competing obligations. It was a small thing except to those who treasured the difference.

Another hint was the way he preached. At first some of the older members complained that Pastor King was “not a God man,” meaning that he did not dwell on salvation or describe the furniture in heaven. Soon those complaints died away, however, as the congregation grew accustomed to King's passion. In keeping with Dexter's heritage, he sprinkled classical quotations within his lectures on the hidden meaning of the universe, but he also released a good deal of controlled heat through the cracks in Keighton's sermon types. And his listeners responded to the passion beneath the ideas, to the bottomless joy and pain that turned the heat into rhythm and the rhythm into music. King was controlled. He never shouted. But he preached like someone who wanted to shout, and this gave him an electrifying hold over the congregation. Though still a boy to many of his older listeners, he had the commanding air of a burning sage. He began to come into full power that first year on his own, at Dexter and also at some of the largest Negro churches in the country, where he “brought down the house.”

Late in November 1954, he preached a guest sermon at Atlanta's Friendship Baptist Church that sent aftershocks of recognition through the church world of his hometown. King was becoming a phenomenon, and the magnitude of his success put Reverend King into his usual jumble of emotions—pride, worry, envy, love, and fear. On December 2, he wrote his son a letter, enclosing young King's checkbook, which he had balanced and corrected. (Though King was married and gone, his father handled such chores because he was good at them and because he was a power in Atlanta banking. There were no Negro banks in Montgomery.) Beginning “My dear M.L.,” the elder King passed along some preacher news from Ebenezer. “Sister Luella Allen lost her husband yesterday,” he wrote. “I am sure you remember her, she is the little Sister that usually sits on the left side of the church, shouts up against the wall. With the exception of that, everything seems to be moving on very well around the church.” Then, noting that he had just gotten another phone call “about how you swept them at Friendship Sunday,” he delivered a thunderous message to his son, warning that success threatened not only temptation and sin but annihilation. “You see, young man, you are becoming very popular. As I told you, you must be very much in prayer. Persons like yourself are the ones the devil turns all of his forces aloose to destroy.”

 

On March 2, 1955, a handful of white people sought to board a city bus as it chugged up Dexter Avenue to the Court Street stop. Peering into the rearview mirror, the driver saw that the white section was full of whites and that both the Negro section and the “no-man's-land” in the middle were full of Negroes. The driver turned around and pointed to a row in the middle section. “Give me those seats,” he said to the four Negro women seated there. Two of them moved obediently to stand in the aisle, but two of them pretended not to hear and stared into the middle distance. The driver, having committed himself to secure the seats, cajoled and warned the two recalcitrant women. Then he stepped outside to hail a foot policeman, who in turn hailed a squad car with two other policemen. Soon the policemen began pressuring some of the Negro men to give their seats to the holdout women. Seeking the point of least resistance, they tried to turn a segregation dispute into a question of chivalry. One man complied, but no one would move for the last holdout, a feisty high school student named Claudette Colvin, who defended her right to the seat in language that brought words of disapproval from passengers of both races. One white woman defended her to the police, saying that Colvin was allowed to sit in no-man's-land as long as there were no seats in the Negro section, but another white woman said that if Colvin were allowed to defy the police, “they will take over.” Colvin was crying and madder than ever by the time the policemen told her she was under arrest. She struggled when they dragged her off the bus and screamed when they put on the handcuffs.

Four days later, the
Advertiser
published a letter in which one of the white passengers commended the policemen for handling the bus incident without violence, without even raising their voices. Montgomery Negroes, by contrast, disputed the need to handcuff a high school girl. To them, Colvin had been entitled to her seat even under the hated segregation law, and for her to have been insulted, blamed, and arrested on the whim of the driver and by force of law was a humiliating injustice not only to her but to all the Negro passengers who had witnessed the arrest in helpless, fearful silence. Prosecutors had thrown the book at Colvin, charging her with violating the segregation law, assault, and disorderly conduct. She might be going to jail instead of to Booker T. Washington High School.

Privately, E. D. Nixon consulted Clifford Durr about the Colvin case. The two men made an unlikely pair: Nixon, a Negro railroad porter with fists as big as eggplants and a coal-black face, and Durr, a white lawyer and Rhodes scholar from the Alabama gentry. Between them, they had connections that reached high and wide among the quixotic groups that for decades had tried to build a network of support for civil rights. E. D. Nixon was a union man. For nearly half of his fifty-six years, he had served as president of the Alabama branch of A. Philip Randolph's Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Nixon almost worshipped Randolph, who in his legendary career had dared to attack Du Bois for urging Negroes to fight in World War I, then had fought the Pullman Company for twelve years before winning recognition of the first major Negro trade union. Randolph was an old lion—tall, white-haired, and dignified, speaking elegantly with a slight British accent—and Nixon was a homespun Alabama copy of him. He was famous to Montgomery Negroes as the man who knew every white policeman, judge, and government clerk in town, and had always gone to see them about the grievances of any Negro who asked him for help. Nixon seldom got anything close to justice, but he usually got something. Once, he pushed his way into the governor's office, and he was the first Negro since Reconstruction to put himself on the ballot for local office. He was not an educated or cultivated man, however, and many of the town's more educated Negroes sniped at him for his imperfections.