Real Life Heroes Wiki
Advertisement
Edgar Nixon arrest photo

Edgar Daniel Nixon (12 July 1899 - 25 February 1987) was a union organizer and civil rights activist from Alabama who played a crucial role in organizing the Montgomery bus boycott.

Nixon was a local Montgomery activist who campaigned for voting rights for African-Americans and helped the black community negotiate with white police officers and civil servants. He was president of the local chapter of the NAACP and eventually became president of the NAACP Alabama chapter.

In 1940 Nixon organized 750 African-Americans to march to the county courthouse and register to vote. This failed as the Southern Democrats used racist laws to exclude all of them from the registration process.

In 1950, Nixon and Women's Political Council leader Jo Ann Robinson decided to mount a legal challenge to the segregated buses in Montgomery. Nixon attempted to find somebody who would voluntarily violate the laws and be arrested so that they could mount the challenge. He rejected Claudette Colvin after her arrest because she was an unwed mother and would therefore be less sympathetic. He eventually selected his secretary Rosa Parks after she was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white man.

After Parks's arrest, Nixon contacted several local black ministers and asked them to support the boycott. The third man he approached, Martin Luther King, Jr., agreed and arranged a meeting of his church on the issue. Nixon, King and Ralph David Abernathy formed the Montgomery Improvement Association in order to arrange a boycott of the bus company. The successful boycott lasted for 381 days and led to the Montgomery bus company losing hundreds of dollars. Meanwhile, the boycott drew the attention of the NAACP, who picked up on the court case and filed a similar petition to the Supreme Court on behalf of several black women discriminated against by the company. This case, Browder vs. Gayle, led to the Supreme Court ruling against the bus company and declaring segregation on public transport to be illegal nationwide.

After the boycott Nixon began to resent King and Abernathy, who were credited with everything rather than the local activists who spent years campaigning against segregation. He had many political disagreements with other MIA members and his leadership role was eventually terminated in the 1960s. He continued to campaign for equal housing and education in Montgomery until his eventual death in 1987.

Advertisement