Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr.: Volume III: Birth of a New Age, December 1955-December 1956, The

The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr.: Volume III: Birth of a New Age, December 1955-December 1956. Edited by Clayborne Carson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. xxxii, 566 pp. $40.00. ISBN 0-520-07952-3.

Students of Alabama history will welcome the publication of an anticipated book that offers fresh insights into the seminal Montgomery Bus Boycott. The young and recently arrived minister of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church has always appeared as the leading actor in an evolving morality play, but he also remained acutely responsive to its supporting cast of players. As the editors assert, although Martin Luther King Jr. became "increasingly aware of his own importance to the movement. . . he consulted regularly with other local leaders, synthesized conflicting positions, delegated considerable responsibility, and moderated as well as stimulated mass militancy" (p. 10).

In addition to annotated transcriptions of King's speeches, sermons, interviews, and correspondence, this volume also includes newspaper articles, impressions of the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) as recorded by contemporary observers, and minutes of MIA meetings. It is also enhanced by a comprehensive chronology of events relating to the boycott, a "Calendar of Documents," drawings of scenes in Montgomery by the New York artists Burton Silverman and Harvey Dinnerstein, and a dramatic portfolio of photographs. Local African American activists who conceived, supported, or sustained the boycottFred D. Gray, L. Roy Bennett, Uriah J. Fields, Edgar Nathaniel French, Erna A. Dungee, Ralph David Abernathy, Solomon S. Seay Sr., Fred L. Shuttlesworth, E. D. Nixon, Jo Ann Gibson Robinson, Rosa Parks, and, not least, Coretta Scott King-receive succinct biographical profiles.

Dr. King's own pronouncements on the import of the protest practically leap off the pages, as two random examples will demonstrate. He informed the first mass meeting of the MIA at Holt Street Baptist Church on December 5, 1955: "Mrs. Parks was a lady, and any gentleman would allow a lady to have a seat.... I've never been on a bus in Montgomery. But I would be less than a Christian if I stood back and said, because I don't ride a bus, that it doesn't concern me.... [I]t takes money to do what we're about to do. We can't do it by clapping hands now and we can't do it by saying `Amen"' (pp. 74, 79). Commending Fred L. Shuttlesworth-leader of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR), who later helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)-for his dedication to the cause of desegregation, King wrote: "Those who stand amid the bleak and desolate midnight of man's inhumanity to man must gain consolation from the fact that there is emerging a bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice." Anticipating the SCLC's Birmingham crusade of 1963, King encouraged Shuttlesworth in late December 1956 to "keep riding" the city's segregated buses and "if necessary, fill up the jails of Birmingham" (p. 496).

The significance of events in Alabama was vividly apparent to correspondents who expressed their admiration for the dignity of Montgomery's protesters. An English teacher at Wiley College, Texas, congratulated King on his "calmness and coolness" under pressure and believed that the "ability to control your emotions effectively has kept the whole boycott from breaking into violence" (p. 157). A movingly unlettered resident of Boise, Idaho, Earline Browning, informed King that she had read about the boycott and the MIA's appeals for money in the Pittsburgh Courier and related: "Sorry I can't send no money I were hurt year before last and haven't been able to work since. But I'm sending 2 pairs of Shoes some of my better ones to two of the ladies who can wear them and tell them may God bless all of you and I'm with you even if I'm so far off" (p. 160).

A notable white supporter, Lillian Smith, Georgia-born journalist, teacher, and novelist, praised King for his espousal of "nonviolent, persuasive resistance" and his inspired use of religious metaphors and terminology that, she suggested, were particularly suited to southerners, who shared "the deep ties of common songs, common prayer [and] common symbols that bind our two races together on a religio-mystical level, even as another brutally mythic idea, the concept of White Supremacy, tears our two people apart." Smith advised King to keep "outsiders" from infiltrating the MIA because "you know the fury a northern accent arouses in the confused South-especially if that accent goes along with a white face" (pp. 169-70).

There are also the complete texts of King's address, "The Montgomery Story," delivered at the 47th Annual Convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in San Francisco (June 1956), his testimony before the Democratic National Convention in Chicago (August 1956), and a fiery sermon-"When Peace Becomes Obnoxious"-preached at Dexter, condemning the expulsion of Autherine Lucy from the University of Alabama campus (March 1956).

The evolution of the boycott's aims from-in NAACP executive director Roy Wilkins's lapidary phrase-a request "for more polite segregation" to an all-out assault on segregation per se and the litigation that culminated in Browder et al. v. Gayle, in which four Montgomery black women successfully challenged Alabama city and state bus segregation statutes, receive full coverage. The MIA's contacts-notably through E. D. Nixon-with A. Philip Randolph and organized labor, tensions between the MIA and the NAACP, King's testimony at his boycott "conspiracy" trial, and his unique synthesis of Gandhian principles with the precepts of African American Christianity flesh out the bare bones of the Birth of a New Age.

Laypersons and specialists alike will draw valuable information from this magisterial and monumental text. It is a tribute at once to academic scholarship and to the heroes and heroines of an event that heartened its friends and dismayed its enemies. Yet as King informed New York Post writer Ted Poston shortly before the end of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, he faced the future with justifiable trepidation: "A man who hits the peak at 27 has a tough job ahead. People will be expecting me to pull rabbits out of the hat for the rest of my life" (p. 33). Forthcoming volumes of the King papers will doubtless reveal more clearly the successes and failures of a consummate conjurer.

JOHN WHITE

University of Hull

United Kingdom

Copyright University of Alabama Press Jan 1999
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