162 BECOMING KING on was to stand firm before the world and before God with a calm and dignity of person that is unquestionably Christian.” Anderson compared King’s vague objectives with the three demands the MIA made at the beginning of the boycott: seating on a first-come, first-served basis, with blacks beginning at the back and whites at the front of the bus; drivers treating all passengers with courtesy; and the hiring of black bus drivers for primarily African American bus routes. The city still did not have black bus drivers a full year after the end of the boycott. On the positive side, Anderson emphasized the MIA’s successful carpool program “which cost the MIA approximately $1,000 a day to operate. It was effective as an economic weapon in that it caused the bus company to lose $2,000 a day 24 for over a year.” In his next article, Anderson discussed the circumstances surround- ing Rosa Parks’s decision to leave Montgomery. He charged that the MIA, which received thousands of dollars from around the nation and the world, “failed to sustain and nourish the woman who had caused it all!” While the MIA hired a personal secretary for King at $62.50 a week and paid $5,000 annually to Mose Pleasure to serve as the executive secretary of the organization, they failed to offer office work to Parks, who had ex- tensive experience as a secretary with the NAACP. He also insinuated that the MIA had focused almost exclusively on King’s plight while ignoring the trials of other local leaders including Nixon, who told Anderson that “they bombed my house too, but you never heard anything about it. . . . They didn’t put any lights around my house” as they did King’s after his home was bombed. Anderson charged that the leaders of the MIA be- came enamored with publicity: “In Montgomery the theme grew to such a proportion that if one of the MIA leaders went down to the corner he 25 had to do it to the accompaniment of a press conference.” The series unearthed the lack of economic development for many African Americans in the wake of the boycott. Anderson stressed that the MIA had not delivered on a promised credit union to aid the city’s Afri- can American citizens. He also exposed the difficult financial situation fac- ing many of those who had sacrificed most. Although they could now ride on integrated buses, many could not find employment as a result of white backlash propagated by the White Citizens Council. Many black laborers 26 “were feeling the pinch, and there seemed to be no help for them.”