Home / Full timeline / Edgar Daniel “E.D.” Nixon, “one of the fathers of the civil rights movement,” dies after prostate surgery in Montgomery, Alabama, at the age of eighty-seven.
Edgar Daniel “E.D.” Nixon, “one of the fathers of the civil rights movement,” dies after prostate surgery in Montgomery, Alabama, at the age of eighty-seven.
1987 (Feb 26)
Edgar Daniel "E.D.” Nixon, “one of the fathers of the civil rights movement,” died after prostate surgery in Montgomery, Alabama, at the age of eighty-seven. Nixon was born July 12, 1899, in Montgomery. He received only about sixteen months of formal education. Between 1923 and 1964, he worked as a Pullman porter on a Birmingham-to-Cincinnati train and was a long-time member of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. In 1949, Nixon was elected president of the Alabama state NAACP. At the time that a Montgomery seamstress, Rosa Parks, refused to give up her seat on a segregated Montgomery bus to a White man, Nixon was still active in the state and local NAACP and was, according to another local NAACP official, “the most militant man in town.” Parks was also secretary of the local NAACP at the time and a close acquaintance of Nixon's. After Parks's arrest, she called Nixon, but he was unable to learn more about the situation because Montgomery police told him he was an “unauthorized person." Following his rebuff by the Montgomery police, Nixon phoned Clifford Durr, a White Montgomery lawyer sympathetic to Blacks. Durr was able to obtain the specific charge against Parks, "failing to obey a bus driver,” and urged Nixon to seek the services of NAACP lawyer Fred D. Gray. Durr further advised that the defense should be based on the unconstitutionality of the state law requiring segregation on city buses, rather than the Montgomery city ordinance relating to retaining and giving up seats. Such a defense, he suggested, could best provide “a test case" for bus segregation laws. In addition to contacting Durr and Gray immediately after Parks's arrest, Nixon is also credited with posting bail for the seamstress; informing Martin Luther King, Jr., of the arrest; proposing the Montgomery bus boycott; and helping to choose King as president of the Montgomery Improvement Association, which directed the successful 381-day boycott. Nixon is quoted as once having told a friend, referring to King, "I don't know just how, but one day I'm going to hook him to the stars.” He made the remark after hearing King preach. Nixon is also credited with avoiding a potential major division at the beginning of the boycott by declining to aspire to the leadership of the movement. This move may also have helped keep one of his rivals, Rufus Lewis, a local funeral director, from seeking the presidency of the Improvement Association, opening the way for King, who had few partisan ties, to lead the boycott. Finally, it was also Nixon who publicly browbeated recalcitrant Blacks and chided fearful ones into action. After some Black ministers urged that the boycott be keep secret, Nixon asked, “What the heck you talking about? How you going to have a mass meeting, going to boycott a city bus line, without the White folk knowing it? You ought to make up your mind right now that you either admit you are a grown man or concede to the fact that you are a bunch of scared boys.” He also told a crowd at a mass meeting, “Before you brothers and sisters get comfortable in your seats, I want to say if anybody here is afraid, he better take his hat and go home. We've worn aprons long enough. It's time for us to take them off.” According to the Reverend Ralph David Abernathy, also one of the leaders of the Montgomery boycott, Nixon “wouldn't take any mess." Nixon's home, which had a bomb tossed in its driveway during the height of the protests, is now an Alabama state historical landmark. Nixon himself was feted at a testimonial dinner in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1985. At that time, he remarked: “Fifty thousand people rose up and rocked the cradle of the Confederacy until we could sit where we wanted to on a bus. ... A whole lot of things came about because we rocked the cradle."
References:
- • Hornsby, Alton. Chronology of African-American History: Significant Events and People from 1619 to the Present. Detroit: Gale Research, 1995.