“They Are Willing to Walk” 99    their unique positions in the community to arrange a December 8 meet- 26 ing between the MIA and the city commissioners. The meeting was held at city hall as a dozen MIA leaders met with the city commissioners as well as the local bus manager, J. H. Bagley, and the attorney for Montgomery City Lines, Jack Crenshaw. Crenshaw would not yield, claiming the bus company could not violate a city ordinance to accommodate the protesters’ request. According to King, “the more Crenshaw talked, the more he won the city fathers to his position. Mayor Gayle and Commissioner Sellers became more and more intransigent.” With the meeting going nowhere, the mayor asked a smaller contingent to meet behind closed doors. Again Crenshaw quelled any hope for an agreement, claiming, “If we grant the Negroes these demands they will go about boasting of a victory that they had won over the white people; and this we will not stand for.” As a next step, the MIA sent a letter to the bus company headquarters in Chicago, apprising them of the bus condi- tions that had led to the boycott. After delineating the three proposals that bus company officials and the city commissioners had denied, they pleaded, “Since 44 % of the city’s population is Negro, and since 75 % of the bus riders are Negro, we urge you to send a representative to Mont- gomery to arbitrate.” A few days later, MIA leaders issued a press release re- garding the rationale for the protest in which they argued that a settlement was possible: “We feel that there is no issue between the Negro citizens and the Montgomery City Lines that cannot be solved by negotiations between people of good will and we submit that there is no legal barrier to such negotiations.” Despite good-faith efforts to further negotiations, both bus 27 and city officials refused to yield to the MIA’s seating proposal. A few of Montgomery’s white citizens supported the boycott, in- cluding Hughes, Virginia Durr, and the Trinity Lutheran pastor, Robert Graetz, each of whom assisted with the car pool by driving protesters around the town. Graetz, who served as pastor of a predominantly Afri- can American congregation, attended the Holt Street meeting. Impressed by the reasonableness of the MIA demands, he pushed fellow clergy in the white ministerial association to support the boycott’s objectives, but they refused. Inspired by his congregation’s resolve and the just cause of the protest, Graetz decided to join the MIA himself, proving to be the lone white pastor to participate in the organization during the boycott.28