Having been up late at the Parks’ home Thursday night, E. D. Nixon was up before dawn on December 2, 1955. Here’s how Nixon remembered what he did that morning (source: Larry Tye’s “Riding The Rails: Pullman Porters and the Making of the Black Middle Class”).
“Number one, I called Ralph D. Abernathy. And he said he’d go along with. Second, I called the late Reverend H. H. Hubbard. And I called Reverend King, number three. Reverend King said, ‘Brother Nixon, let me think about it awhile and call me back.’ Well I could see that. He’s a new man in town, he don’t know what it’s all about. So I said, ‘Okay.’ So I went on and called eighteen other people, and I called him back and he said, ‘Yeah, Brother Nixon, I’ll go along with, and I said, ‘I’m glad of that Reverend King, because I talked to eighteen other people, I told them to meet at your church at three o’clock.'”
Nixon had to work and wasn’t at that meeting, but Mrs. Parks was. “I explained how I had been arrested, and then there were long discussions about what to do. Some of the ministers wanted to talk about how to support the protest, but others wanted to talk about whether or not to have a protest. Many of them left the meeting before any decisions were made. But most of those who stayed agreed to talk about the protest in their Sunday sermons and to hold another meeting on Monday evening to decide if the protest should continue.”
Notice what Mr. Nixon, Mrs. Parks, and their allies in the ministry did in this first meeting:
*They held the meeting at Dexter Avenue Baptist, the leading congregation of middle-class African-Americans in Montgomery. They knew they needed middle-class leadership, as well as working-class leadership to organize and lead the boycott.
*They had Mrs. Parks tell her story. Ministers can easily get diverted into abstract arguments (justification by faith or by works?); a real live person giving her own testimony is hard to talk your way around.
*They didn’t try to get the ministers to agree to a long-term boycott and campaign. At this first meeting, it was enough to get (most of) them to agree to talk about the planned one-day boycott from their pulpits on Sunday, and to announce a mass meeting Monday night at Holt St. Baptist Church “for further instructions”.
*To agree on “further instructions”, they would have to meet again. Their next meeting, they agreed, would be Monday afternoon. By Monday afternoon, E. D. Nixon would be back in town.
There’s an old organizing maxim: “Don’t meet FOR a plan. Meet WITH a plan.” It means if you’re going to call a meeting, have an idea of what you’d like to happen as a result of the meeting. Thirty-two years as a leader in the Brotherhood had prepared Nixon well for this moment. His plan for the first meeting had been adopted in his absence.
The second meeting would happen after the one-day boycott had started. When he got back into town, he made plans for that second meeting.