"Edgar Daniel Nixon" (July 12,1899-February 25,1987)

He was the son of Wesley M.Nixon and Sue Ann Chappell Nixon.His adolescent years were spent in Montgomery.Edgar's mother died when he was a boy,and he and his seven siblings lived with several family as youths.He received little formal education,at 6"4,and possessing a charismatic spirit and a deep baritone voice,he had a natural ability to organize and to rally people around a cause.In 1926,he and his first wife,Alease (who died in 1934),had a son,E.D.Nixon Jr. (1928-2011),an actor who went by the stage name Nick La Tour.His second wife Arlette,became a fixture at his side in the Montgomery civil-rights movement.He was the head of the Montgomery branch of the Pullman porters union and the President of the local NAACP.Edgar was director of the Montgomery Welfare League and the Montgomery Voters League at various times too.Edgar had been campaigning for civil rights,particularly voting rights,for years before the bus boycott.He served as an unelected advocate for Montgomery's African American community,interceding for those who asked for his help with white office holders,police and civil servants.He organized a group of 750 men who marched to the Montgomery county courthouse in 1940 to attempt to register to vote.He ran for a seat on the county Democratic executive committee in 1954 and questioned candidates for the Montgomery City Commission on their position on civil rights issues the following year.At the same time Edgar and and members of the Women's Political Council began looking for a way to challenge the discriminatory seating practices on Montgomery's buses that a local ordinance required.He rejected several potential plaintiffs-one because she appeared to lack the fortitude the see the case though,another because she was an unwed mother,a third because her father had drinking problems,before Rosa Parks,the elected secretary of the Montgomery NAACP,was arrested on December 1,1955.He went to bail her out after a family friend called to tell him she had been arrested.Edgar felt certain,based on his years of working with Rosa,that she was the idea candidate to challenge the discriminatory seating policy,even so,Edgar had persuade her to lead the fight and only succeeded in doing so after she conferred with her mother and husband.Edgar arranged Clifford Durr,a local white lawyer to represent her.Edgar then called a number of local ministers to organize support for the boycott;the third one was a relatively young and newly arrived minister,Martin Luther King Jr.,who asked for time to think about it.By the time Martin called back Edgar informed him that the meeting had already been arranged to meet at his church.Edgar,was unable to attend because work took him out of town,took precautions to see that no one was elected to lead the campaign until he returned.On his return trip he met with Rev.Ralph David Abernathy and Rev.E.N.French to plan the program for the next meeting.Between them they came up with a list of demands,a name for the organization,the Montgomery Improvement Association and a president for the organization.Edgar recommended Dr.King to Rev.Ralph & Rev.French because dealing with the local white power structure had not, in his view,compromised Dr.King.Things did not go as Edgar envisioned when he met with with a larger group of ministers to prepare for that next meeting,the ministers were timid,trying to organize a boycott that would be so discreet that white Montgomery would not notice it.Edgar threatened to denounce them all as cowards,which spurred Dr.King to respond that he was no coward.Dr.King accepted the presidency of the MIA and delivered the keynote address that evening.Edgar became treasurer of the MIA.A bomb was set off in front of his home on February 1,1956.The boycott ended successfully,after lasting for 381 days,following the U.S. Supreme Court's decision holding that Montgomery's segregation policy was unlawful.Edgar later described the Montgomery Busy Boycott to an audience of supporters in New York City's Madison Square Garden;I'm from Montgomery, Alabama,a city that's known as the cradle of the Confederacy,that stood still for more than ninety-three years until Rosa was arrested and thrown in jail like a common criminal.Fifty thousand people rose up and caught hold to the Confederacy and began to rock it till the Jim Crow rockers began to reel and the segregated slats began to fall out.Edgar continued to have sharp disagreements with others in the MIA during those years,expressing resentment at those,including Dr.King & Rev.Ralph,who received more credit than those local activists who had put in years struggling against racism.He ultimately resigned as treasurer of the MIA with a bitter letter to Rev.King complaining that he had been treated as a child.Edgar continued to feud with Montgomery's Afrrican American middle class community for the next decade,losing his leadership status in the wake of political defeats in the late 1960s.After retiring from the railroad he worked as the recreation director of a public housing project.