her quota was frail, shallow, and hesitates at first the wood

as free will itself.







TANGENT V


(All quotations in Tangent V are from David I. Garrow's Bearing the
Cross, William Morrow and Company, New York, 1986. Used without
permission)

Before MIA became more widely synonymous with --missing in action,-- it
was, first, the acronym of the Montgomery Improvement Association, an
organization which -- on the basis of the May 17, 1954 U.S. Supreme Court
decision in Brown V. Board of Education of Topeka (which held that the
segregationist doctrine of --separate but equal-- was unconstitutional)
-- campaigned to desegregate the city buses of Montgomery, Alabama. The
Association chose to do this by means of a boycott of the Montgomery
City Lines buses by its Negro patrons, insightfully grasping the fact
that the greatest leverage possible in effecting change in a capitalist
society is the withholding of capital (the Negro population of
Montgomery represented fully three quarters of all bus patrons in that
city).

The MIA was composed of leaders from the Montgomery Negro community,
many of whom were Baptist ministers. While the means (the boycott) and
the end (desegregation) were clear, this was Alabama and the conquest of
their own individual and collective fear was, clearly, their most
pressing on-going concern. When word came that newspaper photographers
would be attending an early MIA mass meeting, some of the ministers
seemed reluctant to volunt


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