Parting the Waters (29 page)

Mother Pollard drew a hush of recognition and the automatic right to speak. “Come here, son,” she said to King, and King walked over to receive a public, motherly embrace. “Something is wrong with you,” said Pollard. “You didn't talk strong tonight.”

“Oh, no, Mother Pollard,” King replied. “Nothing is wrong. I am feeling as fine as ever.”

“Now you can't fool me,” she said. “I knows something is wrong. Is it that we ain't doing things to please you? Or is it that the white folks is bothering you?”

Pollard looked right through a smiling but flustered King. Before he could say anything, she moved her face close to his and said loudly, “I done
told
you we is with you all the way. But even if we ain't with you, God's gonna take care of you.” With that, Mother Pollard inched her way back toward her seat, as the crowd roared and King's eyes filled with tears. Later, King said that with her consoling words fearlessness had come over him in the form of raw energy.

He first noticed that something was wrong a few minutes later when a messenger slipped in to Abernathy, who rushed down into the basement and then returned, looking worried. King was standing in the front of the church as the collection plate was being passed. He saw Abernathy whispering furtively with other MIA preachers. More messengers came and were dispatched. Perhaps the MIA records had been seized. The organ played and King watched calmly. A couple of the messengers seemed to start toward him and then to hesitate and retreat. Finally, one of the ushers waved King to the side of the platform to give him a message, but S. S. Seay stepped between them, shaking his head in the negative. This caused King to wave Abernathy over to him. “What's wrong?” he whispered.

Abernathy and Seay looked at each other, stalling. “Your house has been bombed,” said Abernathy.

“Are Coretta and the baby all right?”

“We are checking on that now,” said a miserable Abernathy, who had wanted to have the answer before telling King.

In shock, King remained calm, coasting almost automatically on the emotional overload of the past few days. Nodding to Abernathy and Seay, he walked back to the center of the church, told the crowd what had happened, told them he had to leave and that they should all go home quietly and peacefully, and then, leaving a few shrieks and a thousand gasps behind, walked swiftly out a side door of the church.

Near his house, King pushed his way through a barrage of ominous sights and sounds. Little boys dashed around carrying pop bottles broken in half for a fight. Negro men brandished guns and knives, and some confronted the barricade of white policemen shouting for them to disperse. One berserk man, struggling to break the grasp of a policeman, challenged whites to shoot it out with .38s. Shouts of anger and recognition competed with sirens and the background noise of earnest Negro women singing “My Country 'Tis of Thee.” Flanked by MIA leaders, King walked across the broken glass on his front porch and into the living room, which was jammed with Dexter members. Among them was an isolated group of first-time visitors to the King home, including several white policemen, reporter Joe Azbell, Mayor Gayle, Commissioner Sellers, and the fire chief. King brushed by them and into a back room, where a group surrounding Coretta and little Yoki, now ten weeks old, parted to make way for him. King hugged Coretta, and gave thanks that they were all right. Then he assumed the remote calm of a commander. There was much to do. Bombers were loose, and a riot was threatening to erupt outside. He leaned forward and whispered, “Why don't you get dressed, darling?” to Coretta, who was still in her robe.

King moved back into the front room to receive a crime scene report from Sellers and the mayor, both of whom assured him that they condemned the bombing and would do everything in their power to punish the bombers. “Regrets are fine, Mr. Sellers,” an authoritative voice called out from behind King's shoulder. “But you created the atmosphere for this bombing with your ‘get tough' policy. You've got to face that responsibility.” It was C. T. Smiley, King's board chairman at Dexter and the older brother of the driver with the Baretta. More important to every Negro in the room, Smiley, as principal of Booker T. Washington High School, was utterly dependent on the city commissioners for his continued livelihood.

Sellers and Gayle said nothing. Joe Azbell and a couple of other white reporters wanted to leave the house to file their stories. They worked as stringers for national publications, and they knew this bomb story would sell. But they could not get out of the house, which was surrounded by angry, armed Negroes. A policeman rushed in huffing and said that some people in the crowd were saying they wouldn't leave without assurance from King that everything was all right.

King walked out onto the front porch. Holding up his hand for silence, he tried to still the anger by speaking with an exaggerated peacefulness in his voice. Everything was all right, he said. “Don't get panicky. Don't do anything panicky. Don't get your weapons. If you have weapons, take them home. He who lives by the sword will perish by the sword. Remember that is what Jesus said. We are not advocating violence. We want to love our enemies. I want you to love our enemies. Be good to them. This is what we must live by. We must meet hate with love.” By then the crowd of several hundred people had quieted to silence, and feeling welled up in King to an oration. “I did not start this boycott,” he said. “I was asked by you to serve as your spokesman. I want it to be known the length and breadth of this land that if I am stopped, this movement will not stop. If I am stopped, our work will not stop. For what we are doing is right. What we are doing is just. And God is with us.”

King stepped back to a chorus of “Amens,” but as soon as Sellers stepped forward to speak, the mood vanished as suddenly as it had arrived. The mob booed him. When policemen tried to shout them down, they booed even louder.

King raised his hand again. “Remember what I just said,” he cried. “Hear the Commissioner.”

Sellers began anew, promising full police protection for the King family. Mayor Gayle seconded him and announced that the city would pay a $500 reward for information leading to the arrest of the bombers. When they finished, King urged the crowd to disperse. “Go home and sleep calm,” he said. “Go home and don't worry. Be calm as I and my family are. We are not hurt. I am all right and my wife is all right.”

“Show her to us!” cried a voice in the crowd, and Coretta came outside to stand with him. The crowd began to trickle away, followed by the reporters and white officials. Everyone took with them yarns that would be repeated throughout the city the next day, including the white policeman who said he would sure enough be dead if it hadn't been for that nigger preacher. Many of the Negroes would liken the sight of King with his hand raised to the famous poses of Gandhi or to Jesus calming the waters of the troubled sea. And the story of C. T. Smiley raced from mouth to mouth: imagine a Negro school principal telling off the police commissioner like that in front of everybody. For many, this was the most shocking event of the long night.

King took his rattled family to the Brooks home—where he had spent his first night in Montgomery two years earlier after eating the prophet's dinner with Vernon Johns. Long before dawn, both Daddy King and Coretta's father Obadiah Scott showed up there separately, each pounding on the door, scaring the sleepers inside. The two fathers had come to take their children away from bombings. Daddy King in particular was all thunder. “Well, M.L.,” he said, “you just come on back to Atlanta.” King, stalling, said that the bomb had not done much damage and that he had to think of the important principles at stake there in Montgomery. Daddy King cut him off. “It's better to be a live dog than a dead lion,” he said. They argued for several hours, both afraid, with Daddy King stressing that the movement had gotten out of hand, that the danger was all out of proportion to Rosa Parks, and his son saying yes, it was bigger than bus seats now. Meanwhile, Coretta resisted her own father's command to go home with him. After the fathers retreated, King took his wife aside and emotionally thanked her for being such a soldier. She was deeply moved to hear that King, with all his strength, needed her.

Fred Gray filed the papers in federal court the next day, February 1, just as President Eisenhower asked Congress to raise the price of first-class postage stamps by a penny, to four cents. Both actions made the front pages of newspapers across the country, as had the King bombing two days earlier. Ike's news was bigger news, of course, but the boycott was rising to consciousness outside Montgomery.

February dawned cold and dangerous. The night of February 1, a bomb exploded in E. D. Nixon's yard, drawing another angry crowd. Three days later, the
Advertiser
reported that one of Gray's clients said she “was surprised” to see herself listed as a plaintiff, and that she had told Mayor Gayle, “You know I don't want nothing to do with that mess.” Jeanatta Reese, who worked as a maid for one of the mayor's relatives, broke down under the pressure as visitors of both races trampled a path to her door, urging her to stick to the contrary assurances she had given them. The police car that had been parked outside King's house since the bombing disappeared and then reappeared for continuous station outside the ex-plaintiff's house. MIA boycotters took this as a telltale sign that the woman was in great fear, which under the circumstances meant that she was throwing in with the whites, who promptly decided that she was more deserving of police protection than was King. Fred Gray was in trouble, as Durr had warned.

Three days later, white students rioted at the University of Alabama against the court-ordered admission of the first Negro student in the school's history. Rumors circulated that the violence had been triggered by the angry reaction of a few whites to the sight of Autherine Lucy's arrival in a Cadillac, or to a report that she had paid her registration fee with a hundred-dollar bill. In reaction, the university trustees suspended Lucy, citing reasons of her own safety. She and the NAACP, which had litigated her case for three years, expressed shock that the university held her rather than the mob responsible for the riot, and promptly went to court seeking reinstatement. Outraged and bewildered, Roy Wilkins said in New York that he never dreamed anything like a riot would occur. It had been “a routine case” like many others, he said, and therefore he had “figured it was a well-established principle, it's oiled, it's greased, it's going.”

In Montgomery, Fred Gray's draft board revoked his minister's deferment on the day after the riot. Four days after that, the Mississippi and Alabama White Citizens Councils drew ten thousand people to the Montgomery Coliseum for what was described as the largest segregation rally of the century, with all three Montgomery city commissioners on the stage as featured stalwarts. “I am sure you are not going to permit the NAACP to control your state,” declared the star speaker, Senator James Eastland of Mississippi, whose “one prescription for victory” was for Southern white people to “organize and be militant.” Three days after the rally, a Montgomery judge impaneled a special grand jury to investigate racial unrest in the city, and local prosecutors summoned before the jury more than two hundred Negro witnesses to testify about who was leading the boycott. Word leaked out that the grand jury was preparing criminal indictments against MIA leaders under a 1921 statute prohibiting boycotts “without just cause or legal excuse.” During the parade of witnesses, police arrested, booked, and fingerprinted Fred Gray on the charge of barratry. In the
Advertiser
, Joe Azbell wrote that the city was on the verge of a “full scale racial war.”

 

King escaped on February 20 to preach at Fisk University's Religious Emphasis Week. He was still in Nashville when Bayard Rustin made his appearance in Montgomery. Of those outsiders who would be drawn prominently into King's life, Rustin was the first to show up in person. He opened up two-way traffic with movement tacticians of the outside world, bringing with him experiences and influences far beyond the confines of the Negro church spirit that had sustained the boycott thus far. Rustin was an internationally respected pacifist, as well as a vagabond minstrel, penniless world traveler, sophisticated collector of African and pre-Columbian art, and a bohemian Greenwich Village philosopher. Nearly forty-six years old when he got to Montgomery, he had lived more or less a hobo's life, committed to the ideals of world peace and racial brotherhood. Abernathy and E. D. Nixon could tell from the first sight of him—tall and bony, handsome, animated, and conspiratorial, full of ideas that spilled out in a high-pitched voice and a proud but squeaky West Indian accent—that Rustin was a colorful character. It would have taxed the creative powers of Dickens or Hugo to invent him.

Born in 1910, the last of nine children in a family of Negro caterers, Rustin grew up in a sixteen-room mansion on one of the broad, tree-lined streets of West Chester, Pennsylvania. Unlike its grimy sister city of Chester, site of Crozer Seminary, the town had all the advantages of enlightened wealth. It was the home of an influential Quaker meeting, to which the Rustins belonged, and of experiments in progressive, integrated education. Rustin knew that his family did not own the enormous house in which they lived, but he never found out exactly how they got there. The usual answer was that the white folks “didn't need it” and liked having their favorite cook and caterer nearby. There were also stories that Rustin's mother's family had sued the town long ago to repossess properties once owned by an Indian tribe from which the family was descended, but Rustin could never figure out to his satisfaction how or whether the stories related to his house.