114 BECOMING KING to bargain away. It was not dependent on his rhetoric in a time of crisis. Rather, the movement’s future rested with the African American citizens 58 of Montgomery, and with God, who walked with them. Several months later, the MIA’s effort to get bus segregation de- clared unconstitutional went to trial. In the courtroom, the defense law- yer Walter Knabe interrogated Claudette Colvin, who had been arrested for violating the city’s bus segregation laws a year earlier. He charged that the MIA had changed their goals since December 5, to which Col- vin responded: “No, sir. We haven’t changed our ideas. It has been in me ever since I was born.” Later Colvin responded to a question about leadership of the boycott: “Did we have a leader? Our leaders is just we ourself.” When Knabe pressed another witness to affirm that King had originally made three demands at the beginning of the boycott, none of which were for desegregation, another witness noted, “The Reverend King did not ask that, the Negroes asked that.” She later added, “We employed him to be our mouth piece.” The women who signed on to the lawsuit that would change the segregation laws in Montgomery rejected the notion that King or anybody else was the leader of the movement. Rather, they credited the people with being their own leaders. By the end of January 1956, the most significant change for King was that he was now fully a part of the people. As one movement participant commented in a mass meeting, if anybody in the city wanted to kill King, they were too late “because Martin Luther King is in all of us now, and in order to kill Martin Luther King, you’ll have to kill every black in the city of Montgomery.” Thanks to the crucible of the past few months, the people were in King as well. Their courage and commitment had inspired King, motivating him as a leader and inspiring him as a speaker. They proved 59 willing to walk together.