City on Trial

Caucasian officialdom in Montgomery, Ala. (pop. 120,000) moved drastically last week to break the twelve-week-old Negro boycott of the Jim Crow city buses (TIME, Jan. 16 et seq.). Hastily dusting off an old (1921) antilabor state law forbidding restraint of trade, a grand jury voted indictment of 115 of the city's Negro leaders—including a score of Negro ministers. "In this state," the indictment read, "we are committed to segregation by custom and by law; we intend to maintain it." Arrested on George Washington's birthday, one of the Negro ministers responded: "The Negroes are not on trial here, but Montgomery is on trial. The eyes of the world are focused here."

In keeping with the passive tone of their whole rebellion, the Negro defendants—each freed on $300 bond after fingerprinting—proceeded from the jailhouse to church for the next move. About 3,000 Negroes gathered in Montgomery's red brick First Baptist (Negro) Church to protest the arrests, to kneel beneath stained glass windows and peeling yellow walls and sing "Hallelujah." Said the Rev. Martin Luther King, 27: "This is not a tension between the Negro and whites. This is only a conflict between justice and injustice. We are not just trying to improve Negro Montgomery. We are trying to improve the whole of Montgomery . . . If we are arrested every day; if we are exploited every day; if we are triumphed over every day; let nobody pull you so low as to hate them."

As dawn broke over Montgomery next day, tension lay thickly beneath an apparent calm. Thousands of Negroes walked to work through the rain in a nonviolent demonstration. Then, at week's end, Alabama's Governor James Folsom called for a Bi-Racial Commission to try to work out some new ways of putting the pieces back together in a city that would somehow never be the same again.