E. D. Nixon

Activist

• Born: July 12, 1899
• Birthplace: Montgomery, Alabama
• Died: February 25, 1987
• Place of death: Montgomery, Alabama

Nixon applied lessons he learned as a railway union organizer to the civil rights struggle in Montgomery, Alabama. He was instrumental in the success of the famous Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 initiated by Rosa Parks’s refusal to give up her bus seat.

Early Life

Edgar Daniel Nixon was born on July 22, 1899, in Montgomery, Alabama. He was the fifth of eight children. His father, Wesley, was a tenant farmer and sometime Baptist preacher. His mother, Sue Ann, died when Nixon was young; he was raised by his aunt, Winnie Bates. Nixon had only a few years of elementary education before beginning work at the age of thirteen. As a result he was barely literate until he taught himself to read and write as an adult. His first jobs were as a meat packer, construction worker, and store clerk.

At age nineteen, Nixon became a railway baggage handler. In 1923, he secured one of the most elite jobs in the African American community: as a Pullman sleeping car porter, earning sixty dollars a month. The Pullman Car Company hired only African Americans as porters for their luxury sleeping cars. It was a high-paying, prestigious job but also one that demanded total subservience by the porters to their white clientele. As a traveling porter, Nixon worked on train lines running from Montgomery to Chicago, Los Angeles, St. Louis, and Miami. He was appalled by the segregation and Jim Crow law that existed in much of the United States. As a result he became a vocal supporter of civil rights for African Americans. In 1928 he joined the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) union, organized by A. Philip Randolph. In 1927, Nixon married Alleas Curry; they would have one child before the marriage ended. In 1934, he married Arlet Campbell.

Life’s Work

A loyal follower of union president Randolph, Nixon rose through the ranks of the organization. In 1938 he organized and became president of the Montgomery branch of the BSCP. He would continue as president for twenty-six years. At the same time, he became a leader in Alabama’s civil rights organizations. In 1940, Nixon organized the Montgomery Voters League to register African American voters. In 1944, he traveled throughout Alabama in a heated voter registration drive. In 1943, he founded the Montgomery Welfare League to help indigent African Americans benefit from government relief programs. He also founded the Citizens Overall Committee to lobby for jobs and better pay. In 1944, he was elected president of the Montgomery branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and in 1947 he became president of the Alabama NAACP, an office he would keep until 1950. In 1954, Nixon was defeated in a daring run for the Alabama Democratic Party executive committee.

Nixon played a central role in the Montgomery bus boycott. When Rosa Parks was arrested on December 1, 1955, for refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus, Nixon bailed her out of jail. He received Parks’s permission to bring her case to court in a legal test of segregation. Nixon was instrumental in launching the Montgomery Improvement Association, which led the successful boycott of Montgomery buses in the aftermath of Parks’s arrest. In response to the boycott, his house was firebombed. When several African American ministers hesitated to intensify the boycott, Nixon reprimanded them in a historic meeting that consolidated African American support for the movement.

In recognition of his efforts, Nixon was asked to speak at a civil rights rally in Madison Square Garden, New York in May, 1956, along with other civil rights leaders such as Randolph and Eleanor Roosevelt. However, Nixon clashed with other national leaders of the NAACP. He was a blue-collar laborer, probably an atheist, and a longtime union organizer. He resented the organization’s new leaders, many of whom were educated clergy members and from the African American middle class. Although Nixon supported the efforts of Martin Luther King, Jr., he felt that his own contributions to the Civil Rights movement in Montgomery—which had spanned some forty years—had been slighted. In protest, he resigned from the NAACP in November, 1957, to return to local community organizing in Montgomery.

Nixon retired as a Pullman porter in 1964. In the 1970’s, he increasingly complained that accounts of the Civil Rights movement had overlooked his efforts. Nixon died in Montgomery on February 25, 1989.

Significance

Nixon represented the confluence of labor organization and local civil rights activism. For most of his adult life, he was a leader of the Pullman porters’ union and the foremost civil rights activist in Montgomery, Alabama. He was a crucial figure in the famous Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 but resented the civil rights leaders who arrived to receive credit for the success of the boycott, many of whom were better educated and came from the prosperous African American middle class. He believed that his forty years of leadership and advocacy for civil rights in Montgomery were overshadowed by the national African American leaders. Nevertheless, Nixon’s life showed the value that a laborer, union leader, and local organizer could bring to civil rights activism.

Bibliography

Baldwin, Lewis, and Aprille Woodson. Freedom Is Never Free: A Biographical Portrait of Edgar Daniel Nixon, Sr. Nashville, Tenn.: Office of Minority Affairs, 1992. An early and incomplete portrait of Nixon. With photographs.

Tye, Larry. Rising From the Rails: Pullman Porters and the Making of the Black Middle Class. New York: Henry Holt, 2004. An examination of the importance of the role of the Pullman porter in shaping the economic and social life of the African American community. Tye describes how Nixon’s position as a Pullman porter was both an asset and a liability in his civil rights struggles.

White, John. “E. D. Nixon and the White Supremacists: Civil Rights in Montgomery.” In Before Brown: Civil Rights and White Backlash in the Modern South, edited by Glenn Feldman. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004. Describes Nixon’s pivotal role in the civil rights struggle in Montgomery that paved the way for the historic bus boycott.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “Nixon Was the One: Edgar Daniel Nixon, the MIA, and the Montgomery Bus Boycott.” In The Making of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement, edited by Brian Ward and Anthony Badger. New York: New York University Press, 1996. An account of Nixon’s crucial role in the success of the Montgomery bus boycott that began in 1955.

Williams, Donnie, and Wayne Greenhaw. The Thunder of Angels: The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the People Who Broke the Back of Jim Crow. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2006. Focuses on the Montgomery residents who were the backbone of the Montgomery bus boycott, foremost of whom was Nixon.