King: A Biography

3. Stride Toward Freedom

3 Stride Toward Freedom Lift every voice and sing tiIl earth and heaven ring, ring with the harmony of liberty. JAMES WELDON JOHNSON ONE SATURDAY AFTERNOON in January, 1954, as he drove to Montgomery, Alabama, listening to the strains of a favorite Donizetti aria on his radio, Mike King was positive that he had made the correct choice in Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. Dexter's standards, he knew, were formidably high. His predecessor there, Reverend Vernon Johns, immensely respected if not loved, was emotional only in the domain of civil rights and given to sparse, iconoclastic eloquence. For his first test, therefore, Mike had burnished his finest sermon, edited out its more purple phrases, tightened its concepts. But he retained a judicious combination of grand images, resonant polysyllables, and reasonably obscure references. Oratorical restraint and intellectual clarity were important, but Dexter's congregation was not so sophisticated as to relish the bland and slumberous variety of homiletics typical of more sedate white Protestant services. King's "The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life" was carefully composed to satisfy his parishioners . Reverend Hal Carter, then an assistant pastor of Dexter, remembers this sermon as splendidly composed and masterfully delivered. The congregation was highly impressed. Mike 46 Stride Toward Freedom 47 returned to Atlanta for the remainder of the Christmas holidays , and then went on to Boston University, reasonably confident that the church's trustees would invite him to be its pastor. He had been pastor of Dexter for a little more than a year when the incident of Rosa Parks occurred. Had Rosa Parks been less primly composed, had her diction betrayed the mangled speech of the ordinary black passenger, the outcome of Thursday, December 1, 1955, could have been different. The infraction of the Montgomery City Bus Lines' seating regulations might not have been handled with what was, by Southern etiquette, uncustomary circumspection. Even unprotesting compliance with the command to move toward the rear was not infrequently accompanied by threats, blows, and, in one recent instance, death. Driver J. F. Blake did not know Mrs. Rosa Parks. But it was apparent to him that his quietly adamant passenger was not drunk, was not deranged, and certainly was not ordinary. Moreover, he was not generally given to violence, and to use expletives before the amazed and slightly embarrassed white passengers (several of whom were female) struck him as unprofessional. Court Square, in the heart of town, was exceedingly busy that evening, because of Christmas shopping. Traffic was hectic and thickening. Blake's decision to summon the police appeared to offer the most expedient solution to this extraordinary dilemma. Officers Day and Mixon arrived almost im· mediately, to place Mrs. Parks in custody. As Blake drove to the next stop, black passengers shook their heads commiserative1y and muttered the "Lawd, Lawds" thlt had been reserved for generations for acts of futile resistance to white injustice. It is probable that some of them deplored Mrs. Parks' behavior. More than a year before, a black witness had lectured Reverend Johns, who had refused to surrender his seat to a white: "You ought to knowed better ." What Mrs. Parks had done defied a canon that white Montgomery had enforced with such ruthless vigor through King the decades that it was now obeyed with alacrity and almost without reflection by the majority of the city's black citizens. By her dignified bearing during her arrest and arraignment and because of her impeccable reputation in the black community , Mrs. Parks' defiance compelled the city to charge her explicitly with the violation of the municipal ordinance governing racial accommodation on publicly owned vehicles, and not, as was usually the case, with the elastic offense of disorderly conduct. The cursory mention of this event deep between the pages of the Montgomery Advertiser could not belie its portent. Mrs. Parks' action was highly unusual, but, despite the city's tyrannizing racism, there was evidence that it was neither unprecedented nor unlikely to be repeated. Indeed , it was the fourth in a series of similar acts of defiance that year. Three ladies, Miss Colvin, Mrs. Smith, and Mrs. Browder, had refused on different occasions to evacuate their seats upon the command of a bus driver. A change in race relations, subterranean, cautious, and only tentatively directed, was under way in Montgomery. The community had recently been stirred by the outrageous interrogation and trial of young Jeremiah Reeves, a black...