THUNDER OF ANGELS


Preface
America's Bus
E.D. Nixon Jr., Wayne Greenhaw, and Donnie Williams at Capitol Book & News, Montgomery, for booksigning, October 2005.

My father-in-law, Roy Hubert Summerford, was a man's man, but he loved his daughter as much as any man could love a child. In my eyes, he was a gentle giant. Brought up in the blue-collar community of Chisholm in north Montgomery, Alabama, he was surrounded by racism most of his life. But, as far as I know, he never displayed a racist trait. Neither did he simply look the other way. On the other hand, he did not try to change that world. However, he did pass along something to his daughter, Vivian, me, and his grandchildren that changed us all.
In the early 1970s Hubert read in the Montgomery Advertiser that the city bus company would soon scrap several buses that were no longer used to transport riders. From the gossip among the mechanics at the Montgomery bus station, he discovered that one of the buses was the vehicle on which Rosa Parks had been riding when she was arrested on December 1, 1955. As far as the other mechanics were concerned, it was good riddance to that bus; they were glad to know that it would soon be junked and forgotten forever.
Hubert Summerford had other ideas. Without saying a word to anyone, he went to the offices of the bus company, inquired about the buses, and told officials there that he needed some discarded equipment to use in his own private automotive shop. The officials at the bus company quoted him a price that he thought was fair. He paid for and took possession of his property. He dismantled the rollers that held the fabric signs drivers displayed as they headed toward different neighborhoods, announcing to the waiting riders where they would be going next. Hubert stored the fabric and rollers of bus 2857 in a box, which he put high up in a closet in his Garden Street house.
As far as a passerby could discern, the two old buses, which now served as tool sheds or storage rooms, were nothing out of the ordinary.
But Hubert Summerford knew the difference. Many times he took Vivian, me, and our boys, Shane and Wesley, out to the field and told us about bus 2857 and its importance to the history of Montgomery, Alabama, the South, the nation, and the world. Once when we were out there, Hubert ran his rough, gnarled fingers gently over the old, cracked cushions of the vehicle. He looked me in the eye and said, "Donnie, always take care of this bus."
On a number of occasions, he warned us against making the bus's true history known too soon. He knew that if people discovered that bus 2857, which had been carrying Rosa Parks on the day she was arrested, was sitting in a field in rural north Montgomery County, some would become so inflamed that they would want to destroy it. The time was still too close to the days of church bombings and daily demonstrations, when Jim Crow ruled the courts, the schools, and everyday social life. "You will know when the time is right," he said. Later, after Hubert died and my wife inherited the bus, I decided to prepare for that day, and I began to research the history of the bus and the Montgomery bus boycott.
Now, I was only two years old when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on that bus in my home town. I had grown up a white child of the Old South, but I was now -- thanks to E.D. Nixon, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., and many others -- raising my children in the much-improved New South. Dr. King’s dream of black and white children in Alabama, Mississippi, and all across the South, holding hands and moving together was almost a reality.
In 1990, producers of the movie The Long Walk Home heard that we owned the bus. Written by a young Montgomerian, John Cork, it told the story of a fictional family and their life in the city during the boycott. The producers visited in our home and discussed renting the bus to use in the film that they would shoot on location. Intially, we refused. Hubert’s words of warning still echoed in mour minds. But when the producers came back the third time, promising they would keep the bus’s true identity a secret, we gave in.
After the movie was successfully released, given critical acclaim, and the people of Montgomery generally embraced it as an accurate portrayal of the events of the mid-1950s, I deepened my quest to discover all of the facts about the bus boycott and the people involved in the beginning of the struggle.
If the people of our city accepted The Long Walk Home without protest or even an outcry, even applauding its star, Whoopi Goldberg, Vivian and I knew we could soon make the bus’s identity known. I wanted to prepare for that day. I became a regular in the first-floor reference room at the Alabama Department of Archives and History. The librarians there became familiar with my dogged investigations into the background. I dug out articles, diaries, photographs, and even transcripts of the trial of Martin Luther King Jr. in the Montgomery Circuit Court. In my own quiet, offhanded way, always trying to be polite and understanding, I hounded the keepers of records outside the confines of libraries. I tracked down bus drivers, policemen, bus riders, black people and white people who were involved with the events that took place in the mid-1950s.
Many times I’d drive out to the field, sit inside the bus, and think about how I missed my father-in-law and about what had happened on this bus so many years ago. For me, it reverberated with history. Some nights, bubbly with the enthusiasm of a child talking about Santa Claus in the days before Christmas, I’d take my children out there and would tell them stories about the people I had discovered in the pages of old newspapers, in the vaults of the archives, and through the words of participants in the events of long ago. I wanted them to know everything about their grandfather and about the bus he saved. It was difficult for my children to comprehend, and there were times when they gasped at the horror of some of the tales, but I emphasized that it was all very real.
In the late 1990s my wife and I felt that the bus was no longer in jeopardy. We decided to go public and put the bus on the market. Again, following Hubert’s dream, we wanted to sell it to the right buyer. In June of 2001, I offered the bus for sale on eBay with a lowest bid at $100,000. Within days, I discovered that there were hundreds, even thousands of people interested in the bus. Instead of receiving cash offers, I began receiving mail from all over the world, from Japan to Great Britain. Schoolteachers, students, historians and just plain folks who wanted to know more. One such email was from David Rapaport and his 150 students in Bret Harte Middle School in San Jose, California. I even spoke to them over an intercom phone connection. They asked me dozens of questions about the bus and my family and with my permission they wanted to tell our story of the bus to the world.
Although my first attempt to sell the bus failed, I began studying the options and decided the next time I would go about it more professionally. I contacted an internet auction company. From there, I was put in touch with Robert Lifson of Robert Edward Auctions in Watchung, New Jersey.
Vivian and I gathered our children together. We discussed the situation and had a family vote. We decided to go ahead with our plans to sell. The auction company and I collected historical documents to prove the authenticity of the bus. Finally, not only the auction executives but the historians at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C. were completely satisfied, and we signed contracts.
The dramatic auction took place in October of 2001 over the quiet but exciting information superhighway. Bidding started at 8 a.m. on Thursday. The first bid was $50,000. Into the day, bids grew in size. On Thursday night, the Smithsonian Institute put in a serious bid. Another came from the city of Denver, Colorado, hoping to make the bus the centerpiece of its African-American research library. Denver Mayor Wellington Webb told the press: “The whole civil rights struggle came from this. That’s what’s so unique about this item.” At about 2 a.m. Friday, the 45th bid was posted: Henry Ford Museum of Dearborn, Michigan, hit the high mark at $492,000.
The nest day, Steve Hamp, president of the Ford Museum, stated he was proud to own “the most important artifact in civil rights history.” Bill Pretzer, senior conservator for the Ford Museum, said, “The person associated with this bus is the cornerstone of the most important social movement in the 20th century. It’s a mundane city bus, and yet is embodies her act of courage and imagination -- imagining a better life for herself and her people.”
This book tells the story of bus 2857; the trials and tribulations of the people in Montgomery, Alabama, who rode it when Jim Crow ruled; and how, when they stopped riding it, they changed the world.

-- Donnie Williams



Introduction
A Personal History

My name is Wayne Greenhaw. When Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery I was fifteen years old in Tuscaloosa, ninety miles northwest of Alabama’s capital city. During the previous year, Autherine Lucy attempted to enroll as the first black student at the University of Alabama in my home town. White people took to the streets. Mobs rioted on University Avenue and around the flagpole downtown. Photographs of angry white students shaking their fists at the base of the flagpole covered page-one of The Tuscaloosa News where I worked as a part-time sports reporter gathering Friday-night three-paragraph stories about area high school football games. Also on page-one, in a black-bordered box, News publisher Buford Boone wrote an editorial begging local citizens to remain calm and to avoid violence. In retrospect, the editorial today seems mild. But in those days it made the blood of white Tuscaloosa boil, and it brought home a Pulitzer Prize for Mr. Boone’s clear-headed bravery.
It was not until nine years later that I actually witnessed history in the making at the end of the Selma-to-Montgomery march. On the night before the final day the marchers were met by demonstrators from around the world in the broad field beyond St. Jude Catholic Church where the Mobile Highway met West Fairview Avenue. As I traversed the crowd, weaving in and out of tents, blankets spread on the ground, and people sitting in clusters, the music of Peter, Paul and Mary, the long-standing anthem-singers of protesters in the 1960s, lifted most to their feet with “If I had a Hammer” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Tell it on the Mountain.” Sammy Davis Jr. sang “What Kind of Fool Am I.” Pete Seeger tore up a flat-top banjo while singing “This Land is Your Land.” Joan Baez sang the haunting ballad, “Joe Hill,” about the death of a labor union organizer. And Harry Belafonte did several of his all-time favorite hymns, then called all the performers onto the stage to join hands and sing “We Shall Overcome.” As the song crescendoed through the night air the entire crowd rocked back and forth. We were all brothers and sisters that night, swaying together to that rousing spiritual of togetherness.
Out of the crowd I heard a voice say, “Let’s go to the Durrs.” I had no idea what it meant, but I followed. At an old frame house that had been divided into apartments, I followed a new friend from Brown University inside. As we moved down the hall, I began spotting people whose faces I recognized from magazines or television shows: the historian C. Vann Woodward, New Yorker columnist and jazz-writer Nat Hentoff, and there was Pete Seeger himself, a tall, skinny guy with a long face and flaming red hair, talking animatedly with a movie star whose name I couldn’t recall but whose films I’d seen. The entire place was a sea of noise out of which I heard phrases like “but all people have rights” and “it’s been a long hard fight but the battle is yet to be won” and “in the end, we will overcome.”
As we passed an open doorway into the kitchen I saw that it was as crowded as the rest of the house. A woman who seemed a head taller than others barked orders. Those around her did as she wished. It was obvious that she was the leader. It was not until later that I was introduced to Virginia Durr, who in the midst of all the chaos asked, “Now, honey, where’d your people come from?”
At the moment I was swept by the flow of the crowd into a living room where a dozen people sat on the floor. Sitting in a straw-backed rocking chair was a slender man in gold-rimmed glasses, smoking an unfiltered cigarette and speaking in a soft southern twang. He spoke about his own problems with coming to terms with his strong southern roots and making friends with his conscience over the black-white issue. As he spoke, those gathered around him leaned in to hear every single syllable of his voice. I soon learned: Clifford Durr was that kind of man; he didn’t speak unless he had something to say, and when he said it, you wanted to hear the precise words. It was the first of many evenings in the Durr household when Cliff would talk and I would listen.
About six months after the night I met them, after I became a reporter for The Alabama Journal, Montgomery’s afternoon daily, I drove fourteen miles northwest to the country home in Elmore County where the Durrs had invited me for Sunday dinner. The place they called the Pea Level sat on a knoll beyond an orchard. Here Cliff Durr built room after room with his own hands, adding to the original cabin he had inherited along with several acres bordering a small rocky creek. I sat in the shade of a scuppernong arbor and sipped red wine and listened to the conversation. Knowing them for a brief time, I learned that spirited conversation filled any visit -- especially Pea Level Sundays, and I always felt especially privileged to be asked to join them here. The house was not only plain, it was a bit odd-shaped, following Cliff’s own creative design as he extemporaneously planned the next phase of construction.
As the fragrant smells of a pot of spaghetti sauce wafted from the kitchen window through the heavy afternoon air, a white-haired man with coal-black skin sat at the end of the rustic table. I had met E.D. Nixon before but had never heard him say many words. Answering a question, he said, “We had to stay with ‘em to keep the whole community focused. All of us did it together: Reverend King, Coach Lewis, Mrs. Parks and Mrs. Robinson, Reverend Abernathy. I could go on and on. Folks had to believe to make it work, Lord knows.” His big black head held high, his African features strong in the dappled sunlight blinking through scuppernong leaves, his eyes were big and brown and focused.
Out here in the country, folks talked slowly and deliberately. Out here, people listened. In the years to follow, I would listen to many tales in the voice of Edgar Daniel Nixon, a man whom I learned to respect with solemn appreciation. Like his friend Cliff Durr, he was a man who did not speak without having something to say. For me, he would come to represent the quiet dignity, the burning drive, and the powerful force that embodied the Civil Rights Movement. On that afternoon, sitting outdoors under the arbor, I listened, enjoying the words.
Nearby, stretching his long legs out from his lean body, Frank Minis Johnson Jr., the federal district judge who first ruled in 1956 on Alabama laws requiring segregation of races on public transportation, said, “To me, it was a matter of the U.S. Constitution. I believed then, and I believe now: the local laws requiring segregation of races on any public conveyance were unconstitutional.” After he carved off a slice of Red Man tobacco and placed it between his teeth and began to chew in slow motion, he spat into a nearby flower bed. He added, deliberately, “The U.S. Constitution is very clear on that,” as if to dot an exclamation mark. When Johnson spoke in his flat hill country twang, I always thought that it was a sound akin to what I imagined Abraham Lincoln would sound like; his words were always chosen with great care. On his desk in the federal courthouse in downtown Montgomery he kept a Lincoln quote: “I’ll do the very best I know how -- the very best I can; and I mean to keep doing so until the end. If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won’t amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.”
From the kitchen, carrying a large wooden bowl filled with tossed salad, stepped the large woman with the large voice, Virginia Durr. Her voice a bit screechy and loud, she said, “But Frank, if it was so clear, why did so many people interpret it so differently for so long?”
“Well, Virginia,” Judge Johnson said, bending slightly to spit. “They either chose not to read the text or to look in another direction. They didn’t attack it straight on.”
“Nobody cared,” E.D. Nixon growled in his guttural baritone.
“What’d you say, Mr. Nixon?” Virginia asked, plopping the salad onto the table.
“I said, ‘Nobody cared.’ They didn’t want to care, until we made ‘em. We pushed their face into the slop-jar, and only then did they see that it was sour and rancid and ought to be emptied.”
Several people gazed questioningly into Nixon’s face.
In his old gravel-rumbling voice, he said, “Folks will take what’s given to ‘em, even if it’s slop-jar food, until they have to face the fact that they’re eatin’ feces. When they become aware of that fact, they’re alarmed -- even shocked. And when you tell ‘em, ‘If you don’t throw it away and demand something good and nourishing and wholesome, you ain’t ever gonna get it,’ then -- sometimes -- they act. That’s what happened to the black folks through the years. They’d been treated like dirt so long they got to thinking it was all right. You’ve got to feel the hurt deep down before you respond. You’ve got to see the light at the end of the tunnel. If you don’t, you’ll turn around and run away from the struggle. But if you see the light and it gets brighter and brighter -- and you know that pretty soon you might come out in Jericho, or some place just as fine -- then you’ll keep on trudging toward that goal. All we did was open their eyes where they could see the light. Then we kept tellin’ ‘em over and over, it’s right out there -- just over yonder hill. Just keep on climbin’ and pretty soon you’ll get there.”
When he finished speaking everybody at the table was staring into his big chiseled ebony face that was grinning broadly. He’d been in the front lines of the battle for Civil Rights. He’d fought the fight and was still fighting it. He felt deeply the strong emotions he expressed in his dirt-poor bone-deep language. It was not until many years later, after listening to hour after hour of his talk and after hearing others who had been there, that I learned the true depth of his world-class leadership in the early days of the struggle.
When I became a Nieman Fellow in 1972, the first thing many Harvard University professors asked was, “Do you know the Durrs?” Frank Friedel, whose multi-volume biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt would never be completed, expressed his admiration for Clifford Durr. “He’s one of the most intelligent and courageous of the New Deal professionals,” stated the man who taught an enormously popular course in American political history. Economics professor and former ambassador to India, John Kenneth Galbraith, said, “Clifford Durr stood like a quiet white giant in the South when the Civil Rights Movement was undergoing the pains of birth. He was always insightful in his advice. He never rushed to judgment.” With a playful flicker in his bright eyes, he added, “Now, Virginia, she’s the fiery one! Virginia has the spark, the flame, the strength of a real dynamo. They are an outrageously wonderful couple.” Then, with another flicker, he asked, “Do you know E.D. Nixon? Now, he’s a most interesting man.”
Sometime in the early 1970s, my wife Sally and I picked up Mr. Nixon at his house and carried him out to the Pea Level. Not only did we listen to his deep gravel voice all the way out to the country place, we were met there by Chicago journalist and oral historian Studs Terkel, who was staying with the Durrs. As it turned out, Terkel was interviewing Cliff and Virginia and Mr. Nixon for his radio program but also for an upcoming book. Sally and I sat back in a corner and observed, and later we told each other how privileged we had been to witness such a quiet event as that night of talk.
In the 1980s I was having lunch at a posh restaurant in Washington D.C. with my friend Howell Raines, then bureau chief of The New York Times. Howell and I had been friends since he was a graduate student at the University of Alabama and I was a young reporter. To our table stepped a tall, almost regal black man. I recognized him immediately as Vernon Jordan. He and Howell exchanged pleasantries and Howell introduced me as a writer from Montgomery. He spoke fondly of my town and his friends there, then asked if I knew E.D. Nixon. I told him briefly about my acquaintance with Mr. Nixon. He smiled and said, “You ought to go home and write the real story of the bus boycott and tell about the great leadership of E.D. Nixon. He’s the real hero and the father of the Civil Rights Movement, but nobody has ever told his story.”
Through much of the late 1960s and 1970s I took breakfast almost every morning with Joe Azbell, who in 1968 was George C. Wallace’s public relations adviser to his third-party candidacy for the presidency. Azbell came up with the slogans “Stand Up For America” and “Send Them A Message.” On the surface it seemed that Azbell, who had become a neighborhood columnist for the weekly The Montgomery Independent, would have always been on the opposite side of the fence from my other friends. However, like many people in most communities, there were not-so-secret facts in his past that showed a different side of the man and his profession. From many personal encounters with him and with E.D. Nixon through the years, I learned about their friendship that had started in the Jim Crow days and had grown deeper and deeper through the years.
When Donnie Williams called me at the end of the summer of 2002, telling me with rousing enthusiasm about his selling of the Rosa Parks bus and about his research into facts surrounding the birth of the Civil Rights Movement, I chuckled and thought: I’ve heard all this before. However, Donnie would not be turned away. We met and talked. I sat with him in his tiny cramped office overlooking his grocery store and meat market in north Montgomery. I watched as customers -- most of them black women -- came and went. I saw how they acted toward him and he with them: each with a great deal of respect toward the other. When he told me about the people he’d interviewed, explaining how he’d gone back to them time and again to ferret out new facts and bits and pieces of information, I listened with respect.
I was a reporter in Montgomery for a number of years. After I left The Alabama Journal in the mid-1970s I became Jimmy Carter’s Alabama press secretary during the 1976 election. Later, with two partners, I bought the Alabama Magazine and was editor and publisher for four years. Off and on, I wrote columns for The Alabama Journal and The Montgomery Advertiser through the late 1980s. And in 1993, after he ascended to governor, Jim Folsom appointed me to his cabinet as director of the Alabama Bureau of Tourism and Travel. And shortly after Donnie called me, my 15th book, The Long Journey, a novel set in 1919 north Alabama, would be published. I was not interested in writing another long nonfiction book.
But Donnie was very persuasive. He is an interesting young man who has become dedicated to the truth and to the history of his community and its position in the world. He was convinced -- and he convinced me -- that the true inside story of the bus boycott had never been told. According to most historians and journalists who had viewed the subject, the Civil Rights Movement leapt full-blown onto the stage in the days after Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the Montgomery city bus. They fail to look at the years building up to that fateful night in 1955 and the man who had been setting the stage for years and years through one small struggle after another until the right moment was upon him. Too many times before now E.D. Nixon’s role in the birth of the Civil Rights Movement has been ignored or down-played.
As Donnie had probed to discover the history of the bus that sat for years next to the pond in north Montgomery, I began putting together a history of people I had known personally since my first days in the town once known as the Cradle of the Confederacy. I uncovered old interviews from years ago at Cliff and Virginia Durr’s country home in the toehills of the Appalachians and found people I had not spoken with since I was a young reporter covering city court. Although the bus boycott had been written about in the past, its entire history -- especially the story of E.D. Nixon’s enormous contributions and how the Durrs and their friend Aubrey Williams lent their support -- had never been told in the fullest. I remembered Joe Azbell and E.D. Nixon telling me about a young black soldier riding on a bus in August of 1950 and the tragic circumstances of that ride. I remembered old Ku Klux Klan members who had never been discreet about their identities or their overt racism, found them in their current homes, and rode through the streets of today while they talked about a time fifty years ago. Listening to their voices resonate in memory, I realized that I had known most of the people who had been responsible for this historical happening. Not only were they important to the changing of the South, they were necessary for the forming of the New South in the Twenty-First Century.
At last, I felt, Donnie and I had the opportunity to tell the true behind-the-scenes story of the birth of the Civil Rights Movement in Montgomery.

-- Wayne Greenhaw