94 BECOMING KING plications of his new role, King became president of the newly formed 15 MIA. Not everyone was enthusiastic about the decision to place King in charge of the new organization. Uriah Fields coveted the job as well. Years later, Fields claimed: “It was given to King because some of the older ministers didn’t want it. I feel that there was a strong feeling as to whether King or I should’ve had that position. Because of what I had been involved in. But it went to King. And notice that immediately af- ter they selected King president, they elected me secretary.” Despite the undercurrents of jealousy that were bound to emerge among the town’s leaders, all united behind King. Before adjourning, they organized a sub- committee to continue meeting in order to draw up a list of demands 16 they would bring to the city and the bus company. Nixon, Abernathy, and Reverend Edgar French had the responsibility of drawing up a list of demands as conditions for ending the boycott. The first was a plan that the WPC had been pushing for several years: Seating on the buses would be first-come, first-served, with blacks filling the bus from the back to the front, and whites from the front to the back. Once patrons had filled all the seats, no one would be expected to yield their seat to an oncoming passenger. Second, they called for more courteous treatment of customers by the bus drivers. The third demand concerned hiring black bus drivers for predominantly African American routes. This idea, which Uriah Fields had included in a letter to the editor of the Montgomery Advertiser over a year and a half earlier, reflected Nixon’s de- sire for black economic development to be one of the significant desired objectives of the protest. French typed up these three demands later in 17 the day so they could be presented at that evening’s mass meeting. The demands did not include an end to segregation on the city’s buses. In an interview conducted during the boycott, Jo Ann Robinson attempted to explain why: “There is a state law requiring segregation, and all we do must come under that law. We cannot change the law by protesting. It must be declared unconstitutional through the courts. We can get our demands under the present law, however, this protest is more far reaching than that. It is making the white man more respective of the Negro, and it shows him that the Negro can be a threat to his economic security which has kept him in his position of superiority to some ex-