Notes to Pages 85–88 209    ers had dared not take a stand, they had stood with valor and determination.” He later added: “through the work of men like Johns and Nixon there had developed beneath the surface a slow fire of discontent, fed by the continuing indignities and inequities to which the Negroes were subjected. These were fearless men who created the atmosphere for the social revolution that was slowly developing in the Cradle of the Confederacy. But this discontent was still latent in 1954” (King Jr., Stride toward Freedom, 38–39). 4. “They Are Willing to Walk” 1. Gray, Leventhal, Sikora, and Thornton, The Children Coming On, 13. 2. Jo Ann Robinson, leaflet, Another Negro woman has been arrested, December 2, 1955, Montgomery County District Attorney’s Files. 3. Gray, Bus Ride to Justice, 52. Steven M. Millner also stresses this point: “Nixon, and his political allies, Robinson and Burks, continued to move rap- idly because they sensed they had to outflank the generally conservative local black clergy” (Millner, “The Montgomery Bus Boycott: A Case Study in the Emergence of a Social Movement,” in Garrow, ed., The Walking City, 452). Garrow, ed., The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It, 53. Regarding Robinson’s critical role in the genesis of the boycott, her fellow WPC member Mary Fair Burks reflected: “nobody worked more diligently than she did as a member of the board of the Montgomery Improvement As- sociation and as a representative of the Women’s Political Council. Although others had contemplated a boycott, it was due in large part to Jo Ann’s un- swerving belief that it could be accomplished, and her never-failing optimism that it would be accomplished, and her selflessness and unbounded energy that it was accomplished” (Crawford, Rouse, and Woods, eds., Women in the Civil Rights Movement, 75). Rosa Parks, J. E. Pierce, Robert Graetz, “Mont- gomery Story,” August 21, 1956, Highlander Folk School Papers. 4. Southern Exposure 9, no. 1 (Spring 1981): 14. According to David Garrow, Abernathy called King before Nixon’s second call, and persuaded King to support the boycott (Garrow, Bearing the Cross, 18). Ibid., 53. 5. Garrow, ed., The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It, 48–50. B. J. Simms, in an interview with Steven M. Millner, discussed the Alabama State College president’s response to the boycott: “Trenholm just understood. He did not give any orders. He did not mention it. Did not try to curtail anybody. He was all for it. But officially he would never acknowl- edge it. He just didn’t know, so to speak. He could be hypocritical just like white folks were” (Simms, interview by Millner, January 9, 1979, 584).