Voices in Our Blood (24 page)

Pastor Graetz merely kept church people informed of what it meant to be a white man trying to live up to what he believed to be Christian principles amid this kind of tension. The twenty-seven-year-old, lean-faced Lutheran said he and his family felt like the circus lion tamer: “Our heads are in the lion's mouth.”

But Pastor Graetz insisted that he did not feel overly courageous. “There are others who have made, and are still making, much bolder confessions while in ‘enemy territory.' Some of them, especially ministers, have been driven out. A few have paid the supreme price of their lives.”

Pastor Graetz could still laugh—laugh at the way the segregationists labeled him a “northern agitator” or a “Yankee carpetbagger,” even though he was born and reared in West Virginia, where segregation also was a way of life until this decade, when the nation's courts and its new conscience began to produce change.

Pastor Graetz could ignore these labels, he said, because “a Negro minister who has lived in Montgomery for several years spent the first part of his life just across the county line, about thirty miles away. He says that every time trouble breaks out, he is branded as an outside agitator.

“People scratch their heads and wonder what this ‘nigger-lovin' ' white preacher is up to. They suspect and have said so privately that the church sent me to Montgomery to stir up racial tension.”

But in the early days of the boycott Pastor Graetz had explained quite simply why he felt obligated to join Negroes in their protest.

“Pie in the sky by and by may be a fine thing to look forward to,” he told an official of the Lutheran church. “But my people [his congregation] deserve the opportunity to live a decent life in this world, too.”

He also gave his answer to a reporter from the Montgomery
Advertiser:

“The reactionary element in the South will stop at nothing to maintain their strangle hold on the Negro population, whom they still hold in virtual economic slavery.

“I have been told that I am a kind of symbol to my people. Many of them had long ago concluded that it was scarcely possible for a white person to be a Christian. But now they know that, with some of us, Christianity is more than pious profession of the lips. . . .

“I know that I shall be criticized for my stand. I may even suffer violence. But I cannot minister to souls alone. My people also have bodies.”

Some weeks later Pastor Graetz's home was dynamited while he and the family were away. But he turned the other cheek—and went back to Montgomery.

III

Now what hope was there for a solution to the racial strife in Montgomery? On one side stood city officials who had announced boldly that they stood for segregation, that they were members of “the uptown Ku Klux Klan.” On the other side were some 60,000 Negroes, united, as Negro people never before had been united, by harassment, bombings, intimidation—and most of all, united by the wise, dignified leadership that caused a sense of pride and achievement to well up inside the lowliest Negro. In the middle, of course, was a bus company, losing money, the first victim in “the battle of Montgomery.”

Surely, now, Mayor Gayle must feel that Negroes were laughing out loud at the white people of Alabama—white people who, as the Montgomery
Advertiser
had warned so many weeks earlier, enjoyed superior economic artillery, white men who held all the offices of government machinery. Even editor Hall must have wondered by now whether or not there would be white rule as far as the eye could see.

Well, the showdown had to come. Sooner or later someone would have to find out whether the white man's control of the machinery of government would be enough to beat down these Negroes and put them “in their place.” Those who visited the transportation centers, Negro drugstores, pool halls and barber shops would have seen much reason to doubt the possibility of this, because this Negro movement not only embodied courage but had cloaked itself with an armor of humor and a willingness to suffer that was becoming almost legendary.

But the city officials made their move. In March, 1956, they indicted ninety-odd Negroes, including twenty-four ministers, under an almost forgotten anti-labor law enacted in 1921 making it a misdemeanor to conspire “without a just cause or legal excuse” to hinder any company in its conduct of business.

The Negroes, men, women and church leaders, were arrested, fingerprinted and released on bond. A wave of anger and indignation rolled over the Negro community like the giant mushroom from a hydrogen bomb. But Dr. King cautioned Negroes against anger and violence: “Even if we are arrested every day, let no man drag you so low as to hate.”

So in the late days of March the white men set up their machinery at the Montgomery County Courthouse—where, for a century, Negroes had gone in meekness—to test it against the black man's weapon of “passiveness and love.”

But this time, Negroes walked straight and even haughtily down a gloomy corridor with its sign asserting that “Gentlemen will not and others must not spit on the floor.” All who could not crowd inside the shabby old building, to huddle in anger beneath the American flag, stood outside to murmur and roar support and determination for the man on trial inside.

The first defendant (the Negroes had demanded separate trials) was Dr. King, who was accused, in effect, of organizing the Montgomery Improvement Association for the purpose of unjustly boycotting the bus company and forcing upon it the illegal demands of the Negro community. Dr. King's attorneys—from the NAACP, which now had stepped into the Montgomery boycott for the first time—were prepared to prove that the “protest” was spontaneous and that it arose from a just cause.

Dr. King, his eight lawyers and the Negro spectators, many wearing crosses urging “Father forgive them,” listened intently as the prosecutor produced evidence that the Montgomery Improvement Association had spent some $30,000 in support of the boycott. He produced witnesses who testified that force had been used to maintain the boycott, and the Negro courthouse janitor bragged that he knocked down a Negro who threatened to whip him if he didn't stop riding the bus. The prosecutor gave no evidence that the defendant was linked to any violence; the record showed that, in fact, Dr. King had urged Negroes against violence.

When time came for the defense to show the “just cause” that provoked a spontaneous protest, Della Perkins took the stand and testified that a driver once called her “an ugly black ape.” Georgia Gilmore said that when she boarded a bus the driver hollered, “Come out, nigger, and go in the back door,” and that when she stepped off he drove away. Sadie Brooks said she saw a Negro man forced from a bus at pistol-point because he did not have the correct change. Martha Walker said her blind husband's leg was injured when a bus driver shut a door on him and drove on. Stella Brooks testified that her husband was shot to death when he refused to obey a bus driver, but the judge ordered this testimony stricken from the record because Stella Brooks did not see the shooting.

After four dramatic days of testimony, Circuit Judge Eugene Carter reached a quick verdict; he found Dr. King guilty, fined him $500 and assessed him $400 for court costs. Dr. King appealed and was released on bond.

Outside that old courthouse, the throng of Negroes raised their voices in rebellious tones such as the Deep South had never heard before. A minister shouted out plans for a mass prayer meeting that night.

“Y'all gonna be there?” demanded a bass-voiced man.

“Yes, Jesus, yes,” replied a roly-poly woman just after the crowd had shouted a loud “Yes.”

“Y'all gonna ride them buses?” bellowed the bass-voiced man.

“No,” roared the crowd.

“You're damn right we ain't,” added the roly-poly woman.

Now the cold winter rains had stopped. Flowers were blooming in Alabama. A deeper green came over the weeping-willow trees. Negro Montgomery began to forget about the worn-out brakes and the slipping clutches in the family cars that were volunteered for the transportation pool. Now a fleet of sleek station wagons rolled down the streets, bearing the names of the Negro churches. City officials had denied a request by the Negroes for permission to operate their own bus company.

A new element of conflict arose when, on April 23, 1956, the United States Supreme Court dismissed as frivolous an appeal from a Court of Appeals decision in Richmond, Virginia, holding that racial segregation on intrastate buses violated the Federal Constitution. This case arose from a lawsuit filed in South Carolina by a Negro who had been ordered by a bus driver to sit in the “Negro section” of a bus.

Newspapermen hastily interpreted this as a decision by the Supreme Court outlawing intrastate transit segregation. Several transit firms in the South quickly announced that they would cease enforcing segregation, among them Montgomery City Lines. It developed, however, that by a technicality, the Supreme Court actually had made no clear ruling on segregation.

Montgomery city officials demanded that the bus company resume its old policy of having drivers enforce segregation. The bus company, still in a financial pinch despite a fifty-per-cent fare increase, refused to do so. The city turned to Circuit Judge Walter B. Jones, who ruled on May 9 that the bus company would have to continue a policy of segregation.

But Montgomery knew, as all the South must know, that the last word had not been spoken, for the legality of bus segregation in the state was being challenged (by the NAACP at the request of Montgomery Negroes) before a three-judge federal court panel. On June 5, these judges, all southerners, voted two to one that bus segregation in Montgomery violated the Constitution. Judge Richard T. Rives of the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and Judge Frank M. Johnson, Jr., of the United States Middle District Court, signed the majority opinion. Judge Seybourn Lynne of the Northern Alabama United States District Court in Birmingham dissented.

The decision was hailed by Dr. King as “a great victory for democracy and justice.” There was hope, the happy Negroes cried, so long as the Citizens Councils could not buy or intimidate the federal courts.

On June 28, attorneys for the state appealed the federal panel's decision to the United States Supreme Court. Pending this decision, segregation continued in the once-quiet capital, the old Cradle of the Confederacy; so did the Negroes' boycott. In the besieged and bewildered Southland, the battle lines were shaping up for a new kind of conflict: a new Negro with an old Constitution against the old South with a new-style Ku Klux Klan.

Once again it was time for the nation's highest tribunal to speak. Meanwhile, black Montgomery would continue to walk and ride those church-sponsored station wagons. But each day brought new troubles for their operators. Most any speed seemed too fast for the city's traffic laws; suddenly, no Negro could make a proper left turn. Finally, the segregationists found a way (and with very little trouble in the Alabama courts) to ban the use of the station wagons altogether.

On November 13, 1956, even as the Negroes turned to the federal courts in an effort to regain use of the station wagons, the Supreme Court spoke: the lower federal court was correct when it said on June 5 that an Alabama law and a Montgomery ordinance requiring racial separation violated the Negroes' constitutional rights.

The next night 2,000 cheering Negroes held another mass meeting and voted to end their eleven-month-old protest as soon as the Supreme Court order was delivered to the local court.

Alabama State Senator Sam Engelhardt called the Supreme Court ruling “another attempt by a group of misguided zealots in Washington to torpedo constitutional government.” To him it meant nothing that all these Washington “zealots” had done was say “amen” to what two white Alabama judges had said five months earlier.

Montgomery's white leaders, beaten but defiant, announced that they would fight the Supreme Court ruling “with every lawful means.” But the Negro citizens had no doubt but that they had scored a great victory, that a “new age” had dawned in which American Negroes would use this technique of “non-violent protest” to end segregation in other areas of life.

A year after the beginning of the boycott, Montgomery Negroes conducted a week-long institute on “non-violence and social change,” at which their leader, Dr. King, said:

“If we are to speed up the coming of the new age we must have the moral courage to stand up and protest against injustice wherever we find it. Wherever we find segregation we must have the fortitude to passively resist it. . . . This will mean suffering and sacrifices. It might even mean going to jail. . . . we must be willing to fill up the jailhouses of the South. It might even mean physical death. But if physical death is the price that some must pay to free their children from a permanent life of psychological death, then nothing could be more honorable.”

On December 21, 1956, the Supreme Court's decree was delivered to Montgomery. Dr. King and other Negro ministers led a return to the buses after workshop demonstrations of courtesy, including advice that Negroes should sit beside whites only if no other seats were available. “We are not returning to the buses to abuse anyone, or to gloat over any so-called victory over the white people of Montgomery,” Dr. King said. “We shall go back in a spirit of love and humility.”

On December 22 newspapers all over the country headlined stories that Negroes had ridden unsegregated without any unpleasant incidents. But there were ominous reports of carloads of white men, members of the Citizens Council, observing buses, sometimes following them.

Then there came a report that three white men had beaten a teen-age Negro girl as she got off a bus. A few days later Dr. King announced in a sermon that during the night someone had fired a shotgun blast into his front door. Then snipers began to shoot at buses, hitting one Negro woman passenger in the leg.