“They Are Willing to Walk” 103    struggle, King remembered and experienced the power and hope Daddy 35 King had been preaching for decades: that “God is able.” The people of Montgomery also sharpened King’s faith and under- standing. Early in the boycott, King had a conversation with Myles Hor- ton, who ran the Highlander Folk School. King asked him for any advice he might lend, to which Horton replied: “draw your strength from the people. You are not going to get it from any kind of ideology. That is fine to have. We all need it and I am all for it, but practically speaking you’ve got to listen to the people and learn to respond to their feelings and needs and be intuitive.” Horton believed King followed his advice and indeed 36 drew “his strength from the people.” Among the people King leaned on most were Robinson and Burks, who wielded great influence during the early months of the protest. Ac- cording to Erna Dungee Allen, who served as the secretary of the WPC, the women “were kind of like the power behind the throne. We really were the ones who carried out the actions.” Allen also asserted: “When all the dust settled the women were there when it cleared. They were there in positions to hold the thing [MIA] together. We took the posi- tion that if anything comes up, all you have to do is whistle and the men will be there. They’d come. But the little day-to-day things, taking care of the finances, things like that, the women still take care of that.” In Allen’s view, King benefited from the committed people around him, men and women alike: “He listened a lot and he thought a lot. He got by himself a lot. But he had a lot of help from the other men. And they exchanged ideas and he accepted ideas. And they usually came up with a good decision out of all of the exchanging of ideas.” While King may have had the responsibility of making final decisions and communicat- ing those to the people, in the early days of the boycott King benefit- ed from the collective wisdom, passion, and ideas of the gifted people around him.37 No one played a greater role than Robinson. Less than two months into the boycott, the Fisk researcher Donald Ferron wrote: “I sense that in addition to Reverend King, there is another leader, though unknown to the public, of perhaps equal significance. The public recognized King as the leader, but I wonder if Mrs. Robinson may be of equal impor- tance.” King later described Robinson as “indefatigable” and as a person