Across the South—in Atlanta, Mobile, Birmingham, Tallahassee, Miami,
New Orleans—Negro leaders look toward Montgomery, Ala., the cradle of
the Confederacy, for advice and counsel on how to gain the
desegregation that the U.S. Supreme Court has guaranteed them. The man
whose word they seek is not a judge, or a lawyer, or a political
strategist or a flaming orator. He is a scholarly, 28-year-old Negro
Baptist minister, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who in little more
than a year has risen from nowhere to become one of the nation's
remarkable leaders of men. In Montgomery, Negroes are riding side by side with whites on integrated
buses for the first time in history. They won this right by court
order. But their presence is accepted, however reluctantly, by the
majority of Montgomery's white citizens because of Martin King and the
way he conducted a year-long boycott of the transit system. In terms of
concrete victories, this makes King a poor second to the brigade of
lawyers who won the big case before the Supreme Court in 1954, and who
are now fighting their way from court to court, writ to writ, seeking
to build the legal framework for desegregation. But King's leadership
extends beyond any single battle: homes and churches were bombed and
racial passions rose close to mass violence in Montgomery's year of the
boycott, but King reached beyond lawbooks and writs, beyond violence
and threats, to win his people—and challenge all people—with a
spiritual force that aspired even to ending prejudice in man's mind. Tortured Souls. “Christian love can bring brotherhood on earth. There is
an element of God in every man,” said he, after his own home was
bombed. “No matter how low one sinks into racial bigotry, he can be
redeemed . . . Nonviolence is our testing point. The strong man is the
man who can stand up for his rights and not hit back.” With such an
approach he outflanked the Southern legislators who planted statutory
hedgerows against integration for as far as the eye could see. He
struck where an attack was least expected, and where it hurt most: at
the South's Christian conscience. Most of all, Baptist King's impact has been felt by the influential
white clergy, which could—if it would—help lead the South through a
peaceful and orderly transitional period toward the integration that is
inevitable. Explains Baptist Minister Will Campbell, onetime chaplain
at the University of Mississippi, now a Southern official of the
National Council of Churches: “I know of very few white Southern
ministers who aren't troubled and don't have admiration for King.
They've become tortured souls.” Says Baptist Minister William Finlator
of Raleigh, N.C.: “King has been working on the guilt conscience of the
South. If he can bring us to contrition, that is our hope.”
