Montgomery Bus Boycott

In Friendship, a northern group coordinating economic aid for those involved in the southern fight for integration, holds its founding conference in New York.

Bayard Rustin arrives in Montgomery and speaks with Abernathy and Nixon.

Later, several thousand people gather at Holt Street Baptist Church. King gives the main address. Abernathy presents resolutions, which are adopted resoundingly, recommending that the boycott continue indefinitely. King leaves the mass meeting early to speak at a YMCA father-and-son banquet.

At the New York City office of his agents, King meets with candidates who will provide editorial assistance in writing his book on the Montgomery protest.

King strikes a deal with Montgomery officials: he agrees to pay a $500 fine related to his participation in the bus boycott, while the circuit solicitor agrees to drop all charges against the remaining eighty-nine defendants. The solicitor also dismisses charges against the men accused of the racially motivated church and home bombings of 10 January.

In Montgomery, the Kings lunch with writer John Oliver Killens, director Jeffrey Hayden, and pastor Robert Graetz to discuss plans for a movie based on the Montgomery story.

In Cedar Falls, Iowa, King delivers “The Montgomery Story” to students and faculty at Iowa State Teachers College. In the evening, he holds a press conference before delivering “The Future of Integration” at the State University of Iowa in Iowa City.

White officials in Alabama conducted two concerted efforts to defeat Martin Luther King, Jr., and the civil rights movement legally, by indicting King for violating an anti-boycotting law during the Montgomery bus boycott and for income tax fraud, in 1956 and 1960, respectively.

With the goal of redeeming “the soul of America” through nonviolent resistance, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) was established in 1957 to coordinate the action of local protest groups throughout the South (King, “Beyond Vietnam,” 144). Under the leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr., the organization drew on the power and independence of black churches to support its activities. “This conference is called,” King wrote, with fellow ministers C. K. Steele and Fred Shuttlesworth in January 1957, “because we have no moral choice, before God, but to delve deeper into the struggle—and to do so with greater reliance on non-violence and with greater unity, coordination, sharin, and Christian understanding” (Papers 4:95).

An early supporter of the Montgomery bus boycott, the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA) raised funds for civil rights groups and participated in civil rights campaigns throughout the country during the 1950s and 1960s. At the 1962 UPWA Annual Convention, King told union members, “If labor as a whole, if the administration in Washington matched your concern and your deeds, the civil rights problem would not be a burning national issue, but a problem long solved, and in its solution a luminous accomplishment in the best tradition of American principles” (King, 21 May 1962).