E.D. Nixon

By Rick Harmon
Montgomery Advertiser

E.D. Nixon, shown here with his son, E.D. Nixon Jr., also known as Nick LaTour, was one of Montgomery's civil rights pioneers. (Contributed)

ED Nixon: The Forgotten Hero A 30 minute documentary on the life of the father of the civil rights movement. Featuring interviews of Rosa Parks, E.D. Nixon, Virginia Durr, Fred Gray and others. E.D. Nixon tells about his life and the civil rights movement in his own words Rosa Parks tells of meeting E.D. Nixon and registering to vote. Virginia Durr remembers E.D. Nixon.

Although he said people remember his father played a major role in civil rights, LaTour said many do not remember what that role was and that he is often asked by children why a Montgomery school is named for his father.

LaTour tells them that his father was a man who "gave a lot of people hope."

"He was a man who never accepted the way things were, who never accepted discrimination and segregation , who never said, 'Well that's how it is,' or 'That's our lot, and we will just have to go along with it.'¥"LaTour said. "None of that ever entered his mind."

"He was a motivator who bettered a lot of people's lives. He did things a lot of people don't know about. Even now, people come up to me and tell me things he did for them. He uplifted a lot of people, people who really didn't have a lot of hope and accepted things."

Nixon, who was born July 12, 1899, played a crucial role in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, although LaTour said it is not as integral a role as some have tried to say it was.

For years, some people contended that Nixon selected Parks and orchestrated her refusal to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus, the refusal that led to the boycott.

"That's not true," LaTour said, adding that the belief probably came about because of the long and close association his father and Mrs. Parks had because he was president of both the state and city chapters of the NAACP and she was secretary for both organizations.

"They had a long association, but he did not pick her. Nobody picked her. The NAACP did not pick her, and she told me this herself. It was just the time. There was so much brutality and ugliness and meanness on those busses. It's hard for young people even to comprehend what went on, and she was just tired. There comes a time when you just say, 'No more.'"

He said the two biggest misconceptions about Rosa Parks being arrested on the bus are that his father orchestrated it and that she was arrested for sitting in the white's only section.

"She was not sitting in the white section," he said. "She was sitting in the colored section, but the colored section was movable. The front three or four seats on either side was for the whites, and the rest of the seats were for the coloreds because they were the majority of the riders. If the white section was full, they would merely move the 'For whites only' sign back so that whites would always have a seat. But if the white section was empty, we had to stand over those empty seats. The colored section never went forward for us.

"She got on, and she was tired. And there was one seat in the colored section, and she sat down in it. Then the bus filled up and one white man was left standing and that was when the bus driver asked her to get up. The three other people moved, but she said, 'Why should I give up my seat? Why should I get up and give a man my seat, when men usually get up and give women their seats?'¥"

The fact some try to give his father credit for Parks' decision to be arrested surprises LaTour because he said his father did so much for which he isn't given credit

"My father didn't get credit for a lot of things he did," said the actor who narrated the Oscar-winning Southern Poverty Law Center documentary "Might Times: The Children's March."

"People sometimes ask me if he became bitter, but he wasn't so much bitter as much as he was hurt. He was hurt because people would say things right to his face, giving credit to (other) people for things he had done. Right in front of him."

Even now, LaTour said, people don't realize many of the things his father accomplished.

"The truth has gotten so muddled," he said. "People don't know that E.D. Nixon was responsible for the first black policeman in this city."

LaTour said his father told a candidate for police commissioner that he would deliver the black vote for him - for a price. The commissioner thought he meant money, but LaTour said the only price his father demanded was that if the commissioner was elected, he had to promise to have blacks hired as policemen.

Why didn't his father get the credit he deserved?

"Dad had only a third-grade education, and to some people he was just a Pullman employee, an uneducated Pullman employee," LaTour said. "It was snobbery. That's the right word for it."

He said a perfect example of it was when his father fought for blacks to have their own USO during WWII.

"There were three buildings for whites in the military, complete with dormitories where you could take a shower and places to play games and have lunch and relax while they were in town, and there were hostesses who would dance with them," LaTour said. "The blacks in the military had to lay around on the train station floor or at the bus station if they didn't know anybody here."

LaTour said his father did everything he could think of to get black soldiers a USO building. Finally, he saw where President Franklin Roosevelt's wife, Eleanor, had flown with the Tuskegee Airmen to show that she had confidence in black pilots, and he wrote her about the problem. She said she would help him.

Not long afterwards, while working at his job as a Pullman porter, he saw a lavish private car on the train, and was told it was hers.

"He went to the private car, asked for an audience, and she let him in and they talked," LaTour said. "Within 90 days there was a USO for the black soldiers. He saw that it was completely furnished with the same nice things that the other USOs had, but he wouldn't take the job of running it. He said, 'The war may be over tomorrow and then I would be out of a job.'¥"

Each USO had a board of directors overseeing it, LaTour said his father couldn't get on the board of the black USO building he had helped create.

"They wouldn't let him be on the board," LaTour said. " They said, 'We can't have E.D. Nixon on the board, he's just a Pullman porter. We need Dr so-and-so or professor so-and-so.' One of his friends nominated him, but the nomination died on the floor because no one would second it, and that's the kind of thing he had to face. It was snobbery, and it hurt him, but it never stopped him. He'd just go on to another project."

By by continuing his fight for equality, Nixon faced much worse than snobbery.

"They bombed this house," LaTour said, gesturing at his home, just off Rosa Parks Avenue. "They bombed it along with some of the other houses and churches."

Nixon, who was off working at his porter's job, wasn't home at the time it was bombed. LaTour was in New York, following his dream to become a performer "like Paul Robeson," whom he idolized.

"I picked up a paper there and the headline said, 'Boycott leader's home bombed,' and I called him and said I was coming home," LaTour said. "He said, 'For what? So they can kill us all? You stay up there, and if something happens at least you will be alive.'¥"

During the bus boycott, LaTour said his father received numerous threats, but unlike the Rev. Martin Luther King, Nixon had not pledged himself to the principle of nonviolence.

"He got threats all the time," LaTour said. "Once he got a threat that they were going to come and drag him out of town in 24 hours, and then they'd call and say, 'You have 23 hours to get out of town,' then 22 hours to get out of town and on down the line.

"He wasn't really afraid. He sat here just waiting for them with his shotgun and his pistol. He told them, 'You might come into this neighborhood, but this street is only a block long, so you may come in, but if you do you aren't going out.'¥"

Before his death on Feb. 25, 1987, people began to realize some of Nixon's accomplishments, and cities from Montgomery to Los Angeles honored him for his role in the civil rights movement.

"He was very happy at any kind of honors that he got, no matter how big or how small," LaTour said. "He did things not for the glory, but when the glory started being handed out to the wrong people, he wanted his share of that glory for what he had done."