“Bigger Than Montgomery” 155    in several southern cities, registering more voters, testing integration at southern restaurants, and “continuous intelligent agitation for imple- mentation of the Supreme Court Decision.” While Borders lobbied for a more clearly defined agenda for the Washington, D.C., event, his civil rights agenda reflected the typical concerns of activist professionals who were only marginally concerned with economic issues, but instead fo- 10 cused on integration and the right to vote. Bayard Rustin did encourage King to adopt a more aggressive eco- nomic agenda by emphasizing connections between the objectives of civil rights leaders and the national labor movement. Given the critical role that labor leader A. Philip Randolph played in bringing the march togeth- er, Rustin saw this event as a great opportunity to elevate the potential partnership between labor and civil rights. He argued that “equality for Negroes is related to the greater problem of economic uplift for Negroes and poor white men. They share a common problem and have a com- mon interest in working together for economic and social uplift. They can and must work together.” When King took the podium in front of the Lincoln Memorial for his address before a crowd of roughly twenty thousand participants, he eschewed any emphasis on furthering a rela- tionship between the civil rights agenda and labor or broader economic concerns. Instead he focused squarely on the desperate need for African Americans to have full voting rights, demanding again and again, “Give 11 us the ballot.” While King’s star continued to rise nationally, trouble brewed in Montgomery. Six months after the end of the boycott, Nixon sent King a letter of resignation from his post as treasurer of the MIA. In the caus- tic correspondence, Nixon expressed anger that local leaders continued to minimize his contributions while treating him “as a newcomer to the MIA.” Noting he had been a treasurer only “in name and not in real- ity,” he reminded King and the MIA board that it had been his “dream, hope and hard work since 1932” that had tilled the soil for change in the community. A few weeks later, King and Abernathy met with Nix- on in an attempt to pacify the fiery Pullman porter. They managed to convince Nixon to remain with the organization as treasurer, suggesting they would change some of the organization’s financial practices that had caused him concern for some time. Despite the truce, distrust between