Parting the Waters (28 page)

A thousand pitfalls lay in the path of the federal suit, some technical and others political. Gray reported to the board that he was having trouble locating potential clients—people who had been mistreated on the buses and were willing to stand firm as plaintiffs. He had been unable to find a single Negro male in Montgomery willing and able to be a suitable plaintiff. But he had found several women, including Claudette Colvin and her mother. He told the board that he could be ready to file a case in a matter of days. Legally, the case appeared to be sound, but it would take many months, if not years, to resolve. This presented the MIA leaders with unpleasant choices. If they called off the boycott pending the outcome of the legal proceedings, they might as well not have had the boycott in the first place. If they continued it, they would face for the first time the likelihood of a more or less permanent car pool, at a time when strain was putting new cracks in the operation every day. Under pressure, the MIA board members were second-guessing themselves even as they voted to direct Fred Gray and the strategy committee to prepare final recommendations on the lawsuit by the next week. There was no celebration. The white people across town were doing the celebrating that Monday. By the peculiar jujitsu of the boycott, the white people were excited after their weekend fiasco, while the Negroes were bemoaning the implications of their successful rescue mission. Every action seemed dwarfed by reaction in the next round. It had been so since the bus driver's first words to Rosa Parks.

 

From the next day forward, Montgomery policemen stopped car-pool drivers wherever they went—questioning them, checking their headlights and windshield wipers, writing traffic tickets for minute and often imaginary violations of the law. Car-pool drivers crept along the road and gave exaggerated turn signals, like novices in driving school. Policemen ticketed them anyway. Jo Ann Robinson, known as a stickler in everything from driving to diction, would get no less than seventeen tickets in the next couple of months—some for going too fast, others for going too slow. Traffic fines mounted, diverting into the city treasury money that might have gone into the MIA car-pool fund. Drivers feared that their insurance would be canceled or their licenses suspended. Backbiting increased, with some people saying that Rufus Lewis was too dictatorial to run the car pool and others saying that he sympathized too readily with the drivers as opposed to the riders.

On Thursday afternoon, January 26, King finished his day at the Dexter church office and started home with his secretary and Bob Williams, his friend from Morehouse. King was driving. When he stopped to pick up a load of passengers at one of the downtown car-pool stops, two motorcycle policemen pulled up behind him. All the passengers in King's car tried to behave normally, but three blocks down the street the motorcycles were still close behind. Williams told King to creep along; maybe they would go away. Nothing happened during the drive to the next pickup station, but when the passengers started to leave the car, one of the motorcycle policemen pulled up next to the driver's window and said, “Get out, King. You're under arrest for speeding thirty miles an hour in a twenty-five-mile zone.”

Stunned, King did not protest. Telling Williams to notify Coretta, he stepped out of the car and soon found himself in the back of a radio-summoned police cruiser, whispering to himself that everything would be all right. King said nothing to the policemen, even when he realized that the cruiser was heading away from downtown. Panic seized him. Why weren't they going to the jail? The farther they went, past strange neighborhoods toward the country, the more King gave in to visions of nooses and lynch mobs. When the cruiser turned a corner on a dark street and headed across a bridge, his mind locked onto a single fear of the river. He was trembling so badly that it took him some time to absorb the meaning of the garish neon sign ahead, “Montgomery City Jail.” He felt a tumbling rush of emotions—first joy that he was not going to be killed by a mob, then embarrassment that he had never even known where the city jail was and had assumed it was downtown, then guilt that he had blocked the jail out of his mind so thoroughly even when some of the boycotters were going there, then a colder though less piercing fear again as he realized he was going there, too. This last fear swelled up inside him in the corridor as he smelled the foul cell long before he got there, and when the jailer said, “All right, get on in there with all the others,” he stood numb. King heard the iron door clang shut for the first time on him and a lifetime of distinctions.

The moment did not last forever, though, and before he finished staring at the wood-slat bunks and the toilet in the corner, the other prisoners recognized his face. Then King himself recognized a schoolteacher from the bus boycott. The teacher joined the drunks and common criminals who rushed up to King wanting to hear his story. Jail was not the end of the world to them, of course, and every new prisoner had a story. Before King could finish his, one of the prisoners interrupted to ask his help in getting out. Another did the same, and then others, until King finally shouted out, “Fellows, before I can assist in getting any of you out, I've got to get my own self out.” At this, the entire cell erupted in laughter. King was such a mixture of the exalted and the common—the formal “assist” of the educated leader and the plaintive “own self” of all prisoners. For him, the shock of his first arrest was already over.

Abernathy was the first to arrive at the jail after Williams and Coretta spread the alarm. His frantic urgency to get King out ran smack into the bureaucracy of the constabulary, and after finally accepting the fact that it was too complicated and too late in the evening to get King out on a property bond, Abernathy raced off to scrounge up enough currency to make a cash bond. Leaving, he passed carloads of Dexter members and MIA supporters who were converging on the jail. On the inside, King thought he was being bailed out when the jailer came after him. So did the prisoners, one of whom shouted, “Don't forget us when you get out.” King shouted back that he wouldn't, but soon found himself rolling his fingers across an inkpad. Fingerprinted, hopes dashed, he was soon back in the cell. By the time the jailer came for him again, he had already learned to expect nothing. He held himself in check even when he began to realize that now it was the jailer, not he, who was frightened—a large crowd of Negroes had practically surrounded the building. The jailer hurried King out the front door on his own recognizance, and King, who had entered the jail in the grip of terror a couple of hours earlier, walked out to address a huge throng of well-wishers. It was some time later, at that night's mass meeting, before Abernathy caught up with the switches and reversals that rendered his cash unnecessary.

Word of King's arrest radiated through all of Negro Montgomery, stimulating rumors, horror stories, and vows of retribution. A restive crowd gathered outside the packed mass meeting. Inside, King and the other MIA leaders feared that the latecomers who could not squeeze into the meeting might do something violent. Besides, they wanted to share King's story and the joyous unity of the mass meeting with everyone possible. So the leaders took the unprecedented step of sending criers outside to announce that there would be a second mass meeting at another church immediately after the present one. With this news, the outside crowd moved off, mostly on foot, to the second church, which they filled, then to a third one.

This phenomenon repeated itself that night until there had been no fewer than seven mass meetings. Many people attended more than one of them. No one could believe it. In a floating conversation among several of King's friends and peers, mostly Dexter members, it was decided that it was too dangerous to let King drive anymore. To protect him, they would form themselves into a corps of drivers and bodyguards. It was agreed that they must override any objections from King and start that very night. Richmond Smiley went off to fetch his little .25-caliber Baretta. Bob Williams, another of those who would be a driver for the next few years, was so moved by the night's events that he went back to his studio and worked until morning, arranging what would become his first published choral work, “Lord, I Just Can't Turn Back.” His choir at Alabama State performed the composition that week.

King woke up the next morning to a fresh day of pressure. For him, time was fluctuating too rapidly between moments of deep fear and those of high inspiration. Late the next night, his mind was turning over as he lay in bed. Coretta had fallen asleep. The phone rang again. “Listen, nigger,” said the caller, “we've taken all we want from you. Before next week you'll be sorry you ever came to Montgomery.” King hung up on the angry voice. Hope of sleep receded further. He paced the floor awhile before giving in completely to wakefulness, which drove him to the kitchen to make a pot of coffee. Some of the Negro callers were just curious about his arrest, while others wanted to complain about the car pool. He never knew what to expect. The sensations of the incoming images pressed in upon him—the hatred of the whites, the burdened, offended rectitude of the middle-class Negroes, the raw courage or neediness of the plain folk. He associated the Negro voices with the sea of enraptured black faces he had seen from the pulpit at mass meetings. The pressure of the Negro callers worked against this image, as did the white callers against his memories of Crozer. There was no idea nor imaginable heart large enough to satisfy all of them, or to contain them. The limitless potential of a young King free to think anything, and therefore to be anything, was constricted by realities that paralyzed and defined him. King buried his face in his hands at the kitchen table. He admitted to himself that he was afraid, that he had nothing left, that the people would falter if they looked to him for strength. Then he said as much out loud. He spoke the name of no deity, but his doubts spilled out as a prayer, ending, “I've come to the point where I can't face it alone.” As he spoke these words, the fears suddenly began to melt away. He became intensely aware of what he called an “inner voice” telling him to do what he thought was right. Such simplicity worked miracles, bringing a shudder of relief and the courage to face anything. It was for King the first transcendent religious experience of his life. The moment lacked the splendor of a vision or of a voice speaking out loud, as Vernon Johns said they did, but such differences could be ascribed to rhetorical license. For King, the moment awakened and confirmed his belief that the essence of religion was not a grand metaphysical idea but something personal, grounded in experience—something that opened up mysteriously beyond the predicaments of human beings in their frailest and noblest moments.

The next day, a Saturday, King worked until early evening at the MIA and at the Dexter office. Among other chores, he wrote a letter to thank Roy Wilkins for the NAACP's “fine contribution” to the MIA, which had arrived not long after King publicly criticized the NAACP for scorning the boycott. Appropriately to their long future together, this first exchange between King and the famous civil rights leader, whom he addressed as “Mr. Wilkins,” was concerned with money, tinged slightly with suspicion, and smothered with politeness. Among the day's crises, the one commanding the most attention was a rumor that the police were going to raid the MIA offices at Rufus Lewis' Citizens Club. King worked the phones to find an alternate site, which was not easy to do given the scarcity of centrally located, Negro-owned real estate in Montgomery. Intelligence reports of an imminent raid came so thickly that King and the other MIA leaders spirited away the MIA records that night in the trunks of the automobiles of trustworthy Citizens Club patrons. The next morning, they transferred them stealthily to the basement of the First Baptist Church while Abernathy was conducting the morning service upstairs. Some weeks later, E. D. Nixon secured permanent space for MIA headquarters in a building owned by the all-Negro Bricklayers Union.

At the Monday executive board meeting, members voted to proceed with the federal suit against bus segregation in Montgomery. They all knew it was a fateful step. For reasons of tactical consistency, they resolved to tell both the city fathers and their own followers that the boycott would continue as a separate matter. If the city agreed to the MIA's current segregation reform proposal, Negroes would return to the buses on those terms pending the outcome of the lawsuit. If the city tried to combine the two matters, offering to modify segregation on the buses if the MIA would drop the lawsuit, the MIA would consider such offers as they came. Frankly, King and his colleagues expected no such offers, anticipating correctly that their NAACP-style lawsuit would bring down nothing but increased hostility from the city. Against the punishment ahead, the MIA leaders offered the vision of a great victory over all bus segregation—no more technical hypotheticals about who might have to move where on the bus under what conditions. Freedom would be so simple. People could sit anywhere there was a seat.

 

King tried to explain this at the mass meeting that night in Abernathy's church, which was packed with a crowd of two thousand people. He tried to rally everyone's courage behind the lawsuit decision and the boycott, pulling the distant hopes nearer while dispelling the fears close by. It was not one of his best speeches. After he finished, old Mother Pollard got up and made her way slowly to the front of the church. This was not unheard of. Since being enshrined as walking heroes of the boycott, some of the more outspoken old people were moved to speak from the floor at the mass meetings. Their folk wisdom and their tales of daily life inside the homes of powerful white people—how the boss lady had slipped them five dollars for the boycott with a warning not to tell the boss man, and later that same day the boss man had slipped them another five with a warning not to tell the boss lady—had become a special treat at the mass meetings, bringing both entertainment and inspiration.