CITY COMMISSION LAUDED FOR BUS BOYCOTT STAND

City Commission said today they were swamped with "hundreds" of messages congratulating them on the boycott stand taken late yesterday.

And the tenor of the calls indicate that retaliatory measures are being considered against Negro employees participating in the seven-week-old boycott.

Commissioner Frank Parks said he had received "dozens of calls from businessmen" who said they were going to "lay off Negro employees who are being used as NAACP instruments in this boycott."

Mayor W. A. Gayle, who said he had spent "the entire morning" receiving congratulatory messages, stated that many of his callers expressed the same sentiment.

The other member of the Commission, Clyde Sellers, reported the same response.

"The innocent Negroes should wake up," Parks said. They don't know what they are doing, but I'm afraid they're going to find out. The white people have been their friends, and still want to be, but we can't sit here and watch them destroy our transportation system.

"There is no need for us to straddle the fence any longer, I am taking a stand and so are the other commissioners," he said.

Parks was referring to Mayor Gayle's statement last night that the City Commission will make no further attempts to end the boycott because Negro leaders are "after the destruction of our social fabric."

"We have pussyfooted around on this boycott long enough," the mayor charged. He said, "The vast majority of whites in Montgomery don't care whether a Negro ever rides a bus again."

At the same time, it was disclosed that Mayor Gayle and the other two members of the City Commission have joined the Montgomery Citizens Council within the past several days. The council is pledged to preserve racial segregation by legal means.

ALL COMMISSIONERS JOIN

Police Commissioner Clyde Seller said he joined the MCC several days ago and Mayor Gayle and Commissioner Frank Parks have since followed suit.

The mayor said, "There seems to be a belief on the part of Negroes that they have the people hemmed up in a corner and they hare not going to give an inch..."

"We have held meeting with the Negroes at which proposals were made that would have been accepted by any fair-minded group," he added.

Mayor Gayle announced his stand after a Negro boycott leader, Rev. M. L. King, charged that the City Commission had "Hoodwinked" three other Negro pastors into attending a meeting last Saturday and then issued a misleading statement indicating a compromise plan for ending the boycott had been adopted "by all present."

Rev. King said, the Negro ministers did not agree to any compromise proposal and had been duped into attending the meeting because they thought an insurance plan for Negroes was to be discussed.

The bus boycott by Negroes has been in effect here since Dec. 5, in protest to segregated seating arrangements required by city and state laws. The protest movement was touched off by the $14 fine given Mrs. Rosa Parks, a Negro seamstress who refused to move to the rear of a bus.

Boycott leaders, many of them ministers, have organized a pickup system at many points throughout Montgomery. They say as many as 200 automobiles are assigned each day to transport Negroes to and from work so they won't be forced to ride the city buses.

They have demanded that seats on buses be assigned on a "first come, first served" basis. Negroes would take seats from the rear toward the front but would not be required to stand if any seats are available.

The compromise plan announced by the City Commission Saturday would reserve 10 seats at the front for whites and 10 seats at the back for Negroes. Special buses would be used during rush hours to transport Negroes only along predominantly Negro routes.

Rev. King said the offer was not satisfactory. The boycott will continue, he added, "until our proposals are give sympathetic treatment."

Mayor Gayle had this to say about that remark:

"If the Negro leaders mean what I think they mean by sympathetic treatment, then there is no likelihood of an end to the boycott."

As for "hoodwinking" the ministers who attended the Saturday meeting, the mayor replied:

"The Negro leaders have proven they will say one thing to a white man and another thing to a Negro."

"When and if the Negro people desire to end the boycott, my door is open to them," the mayor concluded. "But until they are ready to end it, there will be no more discussions."

Yesterday the bus company resumed full service along three routes where operations had been stopped or curtailed, the company said "numerous" requests had been made over the past weekend for the resumption of service.