Parting the Waters (22 page)

Clifford Durr, for his part, was a grim harbinger to white Southern liberals on the race issue. He retained many influential contacts from his glowing past as a second-echelon braintruster of the New Deal. The Johnsons, Lyndon and Lady Bird, were old friends, for example, and Durr was related by marriage to Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black. But these surviving ties counted for very little when Durr rebelled against the most sensitive taboos of the Cold War era. First he had resigned his post as FCC Commissioner to represent some of the early victims of the Truman loyalty program. To Durr, the loyalty hearings were un-American inquisitions in which innocent people were branded as perverts or subversives on the word of anonymous FBI informants. His cases isolated him from mainstream politics, and things grew worse when he returned home to practice law.

With Aubrey Williams, a fellow New Dealer from Montgomery, Durr sponsored the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee. For more than twenty years, Highlander had functioned as a unique “workshop” of the Social Gospel, being one of the few places in the South where Negroes and whites mixed freely. Its founder, Myles Horton, had been a student of Reinhold Niebuhr at Union Theological Seminary. Niebuhr was chairman of the Highlander advisory board that at times had included Eleanor Roosevelt, Norman Thomas, and Harry Emerson Fosdick. Durr tried to defend Highlander as a sensible, patriotic experiment in racial democracy, but during the passions of the Joseph McCarthy hearings and the
Brown
case his associations landed him, his wife Virginia, Myles Horton, and Aubrey Williams before James Eastland's Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. On television, Eastland let it be known that he considered Highlander freakish, mongrelized, and basically Communist. The normally judicious Durr exploded in rage, challenging Eastland to a fist-fight, and photographs of guards restraining him landed on the front page of
The New York Times
. After that, Durr lost most of his remaining clients in Montgomery. He became a threadbare patrician, explaining patiently why he thought the confluence of events had reduced him to such a state. His wife was far less tolerant. She combined the background of a Southern belle with the sharp tongue of an early feminist, and had called Eastland a “nasty polecat” long before the Highlander hearings.

After the Colvin arrest in Montgomery, Nixon and Durr conferred with Colvin, Colvin's relatives, witnesses from the bus, and Fred Gray, a young Negro lawyer only one year out of school, who moonlighted on weekends as a preacher. Durr considered Gray bright, aggressive, and promising. He had been advising the younger man on the eccentricities of the Montgomery courts, and now they weighed the prospects of turning the Colvin defense into an attack on segregation. Gray agreed to represent Colvin and was eager to make a run at it.

Nixon's first move was to try negotiation. He called for an appointment with Police Commissioner Dave Birmingham, a man he knew to be an amiable populist in the style of Governor James “Kissin' Jim” Folsom. Shortly thereafter, with an ad hoc Colvin committee that included the new Baptist minister in town, Rev. M. L. King, Jr., Nixon arrived in Birmingham's office for talks, which led quickly to a tentative agreement. Bus drivers should be courteous to everyone, and bus seats should be filled by Negroes from the back and whites from the front, eliminating the no-man's-land where passengers could be removed or inserted by the driver. If the bus company adopted such a policy, said Birmingham, he would instruct the police to act accordingly.

The plan sailed along until it reached the desk of Jack Crenshaw, the bus company's lawyer, whose instincts ran quickly to objection. What would happen if whites tried to board a bus completely filled with Negroes? Would they stand in the aisle? If so, where would be the white section required by state law? Crenshaw said the bus company would not endorse something that could be construed as illegal, especially not with its operating license soon up for renewal. This was sneaky, he said. If the police wanted to change the segregation laws, they should change them outright. Stung, Nixon's committee went back to Birmingham and asked him to implement the plan on his own, but the police commissioner retreated painfully.

Meanwhile, Claudette Colvin had been found guilty at a brief trial. On May 6, Judge Eugene Carter crossed up the Colvin supporters with an appeal ruling worthy of a fox. He dismissed the segregation charge, nullifying their plans to take that issue into federal court on constitutional grounds. Dismissing the charge of disorderly conduct, he showed a willingness to forgive. Upholding the charge of assault—the most preposterous of the three—he let it be known that he would tolerate no challenge to authority. Finally, he sentenced Colvin to pay a small fine—a sentence so much lighter than anticipated that it ruined her martyr status. Many Negroes who supported her cause nevertheless came to believe she was lucky.

Fred Gray wanted to press an appeal anyway, but Durr and Nixon believed that the case had already lost its momentum. There was much internal turmoil among Negro leaders. Members of the influential Women's Political Council—most of whom served on the social and political affairs committee at King's church—had completed a discouraging canvass of the likely witnesses in the case. Most of them were frightened, and might at any moment deny what they had said. Colvin herself would not recant, they reported, but she was immature—prone to breakdowns and outbursts of profanity. Worse, she was pregnant. Even if Montgomery Negroes were willing to rally behind an unwed pregnant teenager—which they were not—her circumstances would make her an extremely vulnerable standard-bearer. Some of Colvin's friends resented this assessment as condescending. Women leaders criticized the local ministers for failing to press the segregation issue harder and more eloquently during the negotiations, which the women stressed above the lawsuit, and the ministers defended themselves by recalling the lawyers' advice against poisoning the trial atmosphere with too much excitement. In the end, E. D. Nixon made the decision. Although Nixon was sensitive about his country dialect and often asserted his worth defensively against the airs of the more educated Negroes, saying, “You won't find
my
car parked out in front of no loan shop,” his practicality prevailed. Colvin would not do, he decreed. Her family agreed and paid the fine.

That July, one month after getting his doctorate, King flew to New Orleans to explore a special new job at Dillard University. Dillard, founded by Congregationalists shortly after the Civil War, had enjoyed the patronage of Chicago philanthropist Julius Rosenwald and his heirs. Its campus of whitewashed classical buildings laid out on a vast tree-lined lawn was as handsome as Spelman's, and its reputation was the equal of any coeducational Negro college in the South. The Dillard president, A. W. Dent, a Morehouse man from Daddy King's class, wanted King to become dean of the new Lawless Memorial University Chapel. In that post, he would be allowed to teach courses in the religion and philosophy departments without being lashed to the full schedule of a regular faculty member. He would preach in the chapel, but he would escape the more tedious duties of a church pastor. The combination was ideal for King. From Dent's point of view, the job's only drawback was that construction of the chapel would not be completed by September, and it was complicated to start anything at a college in the middle of the school year. King welcomed the delay, however, as he thought he should stay at Dexter at least another year. He would also have to figure out how to tell Dr. Mays and his father, among others.

To search so soon for a teaching job was a departure from King's plan to preach for a number of years, like Mordecai Johnson, Niebuhr, and Howard Thurman, before rising to life in the academy. He was advancing the schedule because he was impatient—not because of failure at Dexter but by the very fact of his success. His father's budget system had worked; Dexter had already paid off a debt of nearly $5,000 from the Johns era, hired new staff, and paid $1,000 into the new building fund. King had made the church into a beehive, and now he saw the only catch: the hive could get no bigger. The legendary Stokes had baptized a thousand a year during the heyday of Montgomery's First Baptist, and Daddy King had baptized enough to build Ebenezer from two hundred souls to four thousand, but King would finish his banner year having baptized only twelve. Fewer than thirty new members joined the rolls, and many of those were part of the annual turnover at Alabama State. The only way for Dexter to grow larger was to transform itself into a mass church of all classes, and the only way to do anything substantial with the new building fund was to move away from the prestigious but tiny site there beneath the state capitol. King knew his congregation would do neither.

 

Restless, King decided to step up his activity in the local chapter of the NAACP. He gave a stirring speech at one of its small gatherings and then accepted a position on the executive committee. His letter of appointment came from Rosa Parks, secretary of the chapter. A seamstress at a downtown department store, Parks made extra money by taking in sewing work on the side. She had come into the NAACP through E. D. Nixon, who had served as chapter president for five years before stepping aside for a friend. Her background and character put her firmly astride the class fault that divided the politically active Negroes of Montgomery. Had the professionals and the upper strata from Alabama State taken over the organization—as they were threatening to do now that the
Brown
case had brought fresh excitement to the NAACP—Parks might well have been replaced by one of the college-trained members of the Women's Political Council. As it was, she remained the woman of Nixon's circle most congenial to the Council members. She wore rimless spectacles, spoke quietly, wrote and typed faultless letters on her own, and had never been known to lower herself to factionalism. A tireless worker and churchgoer, of working-class station and middle-class demeanor, Rosa Parks was one of those rare people of whom everyone agreed that she gave more than she got. Her character represented one of the isolated high blips on the graph of human nature, offsetting a dozen or so sociopaths. A Methodist herself, she served as teacher and mother figure to the kids of the NAACP Youth Council, who met at a Lutheran church near her home.

That church, Trinity Lutheran, was an oddity in itself. To Negroes, a principal attraction of Trinity Lutheran had always been its affiliated private school, which was supported as a mission by the World Lutheran Council. For years it had been the only decent school available to Negroes, and many ambitious families had swallowed their distaste for the staid Lutheran liturgy in order to educate their children. Along with an even tinier Congregational church, Trinity was high church in doctrine and worship. Dexter got most of the college professors; Trinity got a few of the high school teachers.

For several years, the minister at Trinity had been Nelson Trout, a Negro Lutheran who felt somewhat excluded as the head of a minuscule congregation outside the mainstream of Negro religion. His peers from the big Baptist and Methodist churches took neither Trinity nor its pastor very seriously, Trout believed, and it was all he could do to get some of them to turn out for the ceremony that marked the crowning achievement of his work in Montgomery—the dedication of the new parsonage, next door to the church. Ralph Abernathy arrived with King. The two young Baptists attended such functions together so frequently that Trout had come to think of them as a team—Mr. Rough and Mr. Smooth. Abernathy tended to lead King through the crowds, introducing him to selected new people, in a manner that offended Trout because Abernathy was at once so deferential to King and so lordly toward everyone else. Trout found it much easier to talk informally with King, and in a private moment once felt enough at ease to ask as a Lutheran how King, a Negro Baptist, had acquired the name Martin Luther. King looked searchingly at Trout for some time, then smiled and parried with a question of his own: how did a Negro like Trout come to be a Lutheran? Trout laughed. The competition was too rough among the Baptist preachers, he replied, and the Lutherans were begging for Negroes.

Many years later, Trout would become the first black Lutheran bishop in the Western Hemisphere. On leaving Montgomery in 1955, he failed to anticipate the social friction that his new parsonage would cause—mostly because he assumed that his successor would be a Negro. Lutheran policy changed again, however, and when a white minister named Robert Graetz finished his seminary training that year in Ohio, he found his name on the missionary assignment list among those of his colleagues going to Africa and South America—posted to Trinity Lutheran down in Alabama. Dutifully, Graetz had personal stationery printed up bearing a biblical quotation: “And the angel of the Lord spoke unto Philip saying, ‘Arise, go toward the South.'” Along with his wife and their two toddlers, Graetz headed for Montgomery, where they became the first of Trinity's white pastoral families to live in Trout's parsonage among the Negro parishioners.

The Graetzes discovered instantly that the social effects of the new location were severe. Previously, Montgomery whites had allowed Trinity pastors to live among them and preach to Negro Lutherans, on much the same social calculus that allowed doctors to visit a brothel in a medical emergency. Now that they were living in the brothel, however, the Graetzes forfeited their modicum of acceptability. Local whites shunned them everywhere from the laundromat to the supermarket. In most respects, the Graetz family lived as though they were Negroes, but their white skin produced some unprecedented legal contortions. Because they always chose to sit in the upstairs Negro section of movie theaters, for instance, theater owners worried that to sell them tickets might bring down Alabama's legal sanctions against establishments that “sponsored” interracial public meetings. (Those same laws made it technically illegal for Graetz to preach in his own church.) The theater owners' solution was to let them in free. Montgomery's ticket takers soon learned the face of every Graetz and knew to whisk them all rapidly into the theater, so as to minimize the ire of paying white customers. Reverend Graetz tried repeatedly to pay, believing that he should not profit from his Christian witness. The owners would not hear of it.