Newsletter Library | Black History
Martin Luther King & Rosa Parks
excerpted from "The American Century"
by Harold Evans

The Emergence of Martin Luther King
pgs 472-473;Reprinted by permission of the author from "IThe American Century" All rights reserved. This may not be reprinted without the express written permission of the author © 1998 Harold Evans. Harold M. Evans, Vice Chairman & Editorial Director. U.S. News & World Report/Daily News/The Atlantic Monthly/Fast Company 450 West 33rd Street, New York, NY 10001

The received mythology
is that late on the afternoon of December 1, 1955, a simple seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama, refused to give up her bus seat to a white man because she was too tired, and unknowingly sparked the historic confrontation of the Montgomery bus boycott. The real story is more complex – and more inspiring.

No doubt Rosa Parks was tired,
but her own accounts stress her rights more than her arches. "Why do you push us around?" she asked the arresting policemen, making a statement for all the 50,000 blacks of Montgomery condemned to the menial work and the daily indignities of segregation. She knew what she was doing challenging Alabama's Jim Crow laws. She did work as a seamstress, but she was also the secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP and its head, the Rev. E.D. Nixon, a fearless 56-year-old Pullman car operator. Since the Supreme Court’s ruling on schools, Nixon had been looking for a good witness for a court fight over bus segregation. Rosa Parks was a perfect, 43-year-old married, churchgoing Methodist of dignified humility and intelligence. Nixon rushed down to her cell in the police station with a white lawyer no less valiant in the fight for social justice – the old New Dealer Clifford Durr. They bailed her out and that night asked her to let them make her a federal case. By a historic tactical blunder, she had been charged under a segregation ordinance, opening the way for the federal court to rule on Jim Crow laws. She agreed "if it will mean something to Montgomery." Her mother and her husband Raymond, were appalled. "The white folks will kill you, Rosa," said Raymond Parks.

VICTORY: Rosa Parks waiting to board a bus in Montgomery on December 21, 1956, the day the city buses were legally integrated. She continued her civil rights work in Detroit, starting her own charitable foundation and working for 20 years on the staff of Congressman John Conyers.

Nobody had mentioned a boycott at this stage.
That idea was born in the small hours after midnight on the campus of Alabama State, an all-black college. Jo Ann Robinson, a professor of English, was head of the NAACP’s Women’s Political Council, an organization of black professional women, mainly teachers. She gathered a number of them in the college under the guise of grading papers, and they stayed up all night churning out 35,000 petitions. "We are asking every Negro to stay off the buses on Monday…." Nixon who had been thinking on the same lines, had meanwhile been working the telephones. By morning, before he had put on his white coat and porter’s cap for duty on the morning train to Atlanta, had enlisted about 50 black ministers in a campaigning body that became the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA). Among them were Ralph Abernathy at the First Baptist Brick a Day Church and a new 26-year-old reverend at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church named Martin Luther King, Jr.

Monday morning came and the boycott organizers were relieved.
The buses were empty. That afternoon the ministers prepared for a mass meeting to gauge support for continuing the boycott. Some of the ministers were so fearful they wanted to keep their names secret; Rosa Parks had been convinced that morning. A boiling mad Nixon rebuked them: "You ministers have lived off these washwomen for the last hundred years and ain’t never done nothing for them." Nobody contested the nomination of King for the exposed position of MIA president.

The church could not hold the 10,000 to 15,000 who turned up to hear King a few hours later; they spilled into the places outside. They were silent as he began in a slow, deep voice. Then he spoke to their anguish: "And you know, my friends," he cried, "there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression…." The yesses coalesced into a roar, thousands of stomping feet made thunder, and soon the church and the grounds were trembling. When he could make himself be heard again he quietly insisted: "Now let us say we are not here advocating violence. We have overcome that. I want it to be known throughout Montgomery and throughout this nation that we are Christian people. The only weapon we have in our hands this evening is the weapon of protest." Like so many leaders of protest of this country and this century, like so many who loved this country so well and had to fight it so fiercely, King invoked the promise of American life: "But the great glory of American democracy is the right to protest for right. There will be no crosses burned at any bus stops in Montgomery. There will be no white persons pulled out of homes and taken out on some distant road and murdered. There will be nobody among us who will stand up and and defy the Constitution of the nation." He closed by speaking of Christian love and justice and rocked the exultant crowd in the rhythm of his peroration. "We are not wrong in what we are doing. If we are wrong – the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong – God Almighty is wrong! If we are wrong – Jesus of Nazareth was merely a utopian dreamer and never came down to earth! If we are wrong – justice is a lie."

The fire that King had sparked that night
had to be kept lit by the physical and moral courage of the blacks of Montgomery for a whole year. The MIA set up a car pool that impressively carried 20,000 of the 30,000 to 40,000 daily fares of the boycotted bus company, but the laborers and the cleaners and the teachers walked countless miles in all weathers, they endured the harassment of a hostile police force and the threats and terrorism of white extremists, and never did they lose their unity of spirit. A woman called Mother Pollard spoke for them when she old King: "My feets is tired, but my soul is rested." King was arrested twice. His home was firebombed. He calmed an angry crowd of several hundred on the brink of rioting: "Don’t get panicky. Don’t get your weapons. We want to love our enemies."

Joe:
Now we will move on to our second excerpt which covers a pivotal time in our nation's history, The Cold War.

Mr. Khrushchev Comes to Town

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by Joanne Spataro
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hosted by Joanne Spataro
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The American Century
by Harold Evans, Gail Buckland, Kevin Baker

Although most of this sprawling book is set in the 20th century, it begins on April 29, 1889, when Benjamin Harrison commemorated the first centennial of American government. This 11-year jump-start allows Harold Evans to write about the last major push to settle the Western territories, the gradual dwindling of Native American societies, the rise to prominence of William Jennings Bryan, and other quintessentially American moments of the 19th century.