You can’t negotiate with a movement. Rosa Parks, E.D. Nixon, Martin King and the other Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) leaders knew that. That’s one of the reasons they formed the MIA—to have an organization that could negotiate with officials from the city and the bus company.
You can’t negotiate abstract principles either. You can only negotiate terms and demands. And after the mass meeting on Dec. 5, the MIA had demands: “1) Courteous treatment on the buses; 2) First-come, first-served seating, with whites in front and blacks in back; Hiring of black drivers for black bus routes.”
On Thursday, Dec. 8, Rev. King, Fred Gray and other MIA leaders met with bus company officials and the city commissioners to present the MIA’s demands. Attorney Gray pointed out that the same bus company had a “first-come, first-served” seating policy in Mobile.
But, as Mrs. Parks writes, “they wouldn’t change their minds. The city commissioners wouldn’t go along with any of the demands either. They didn’t want to give an inch, not even to reasonable demands. They were afraid of compromising in any way with black people.”
Here’s another reason why it’s important for people to form their own organizations and elect their own leaders. Your opponents will try to choose leaders to negotiate for you; and that’s just what the Montgomery city fathers did next.
“Late in January the three city commissioners met with three black ministers who were not part of the MIA. These ministers agreed to a plan for bus seating that would reserve ten seats in front for white and ten seats in back for blacks, with the rest available first-come,first-served. The the commission told the “Montgomery Advertiser”, and that Sunday the paper ran big headlines announcing the end of the boycott. But Dr. King and the Reverend Abernathy and the other leaders of the MIA heard what was happening. They went all over the black community Saturday night saying it was a lie. Then on Sunday the ministers told their congregations the story wasn’t true. So they got the word out and very few black people rode the buses on Monday.”
No community is monolithic. There are always those who—for whatever reasons—will betray a cause. Because of the broad base of support and legitimacy the Montgomery Improvement Association enjoyed throughout the black community, the bus boycott survived white attempts to end the boycott without concessions to black demands.
