“The Stirring of the Water” 17    In what was described as the best turnout for an election in many years, Nixon was elected as the new president. For a few years, the local chap- ter of the NAACP was under leadership that represented the working- class African Americans in the city. During his tenure as president, Nixon relied on a member of the working class as his secretary, a local seamstress 16 named Rosa Parks. Born and raised near Montgomery, Parks attended a NAACP meet- ing after seeing a picture of her former schoolmate, Mrs. Johnnie Carr, next to a story about the NAACP in a local paper. When Parks arrived at the meeting, not only was her old friend absent, but Parks was the only woman in attendance. The men soon nominated and elected her secre- tary of the chapter. Parks later recalled: “I was too timid to say no. I just started taking minutes.” She began working with Nixon, and supported his leadership of the local and state chapters of the NAACP. She also helped establish and lead the local NAACP Youth Council. When Nixon lost the presidency of the chapter, she took a two-year break from the organization, although she continued to volunteer her time to assist Nixon. After long days working as a seamstress at Crittenden’s Tailor Shop in Montgomery, she would spend the early evening completing essential office tasks for Nixon, who had begun to focus on other activities after his tenure as NAACP president in the late 1940s. Parks was a respectable member of the African American community who worked hard to support her family financially while at the same time laboring tirelessly, often in tandem with 17 Nixon, to bring substantive change to the racial climate in her city. E. D. Nixon led several local organizations over the years, including the Citizens Overall Committee, an attempt to unite Montgomery’s Af- rican Americans to address community challenges. He traced his drive to fight for civil rights to a meeting with the mayor of Montgomery during the 1920s, in which Nixon raised concerns about the safety of a drainage ditch in the city that had recently claimed the lives of two young African American boys. The mayor was not pleased that Nixon had come to city hall with the grievance, and even threatened to throw him in jail. Nixon remembered: “After that incident, I knew there would not be any recre- ation or any form of civil rights for black people unless they were ready and willing to get out and fight for it.” He put this philosophy into action 18 over the following decades.