Epilogue 185    again upon the wondrous signs of our time, full of hope and promise for the future and I smiled to see in the newspaper photographs of nearly a decade ago, the faces so bright, so solemn of our valiant heroes, the people of Montgomery.” Just a few hundred yards from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, King paid homage to the people of Montgomery whose sacrifices and courage had catapulted him to the forefront of the national 8 civil rights struggle. E. D. Nixon remained in Montgomery until his death, convinced that King’s prominence was directly tied to his participation in a local struggle in the 1950s. Nixon claimed that “King was not the same man when he left here as when he took over the boycott.” He changed because Nixon, Parks, Robinson, Burks, and countless working-class blacks “pushed him a whole lot. Right now people don’t like to hear me say this . . . but it isn’t what Reverend King did for Montgomery, it’s what the people of Mont- gomery did for Reverend King.” King agreed to a point, crediting his time in the Alabama capital for sharpening his approach to social change: “The experience in Montgomery did more to clarify my thinking than all the books that I had read. As the days unfolded, I became more and more convinced of the power of nonviolence. Nonviolence became more than a method to which I gave intellectual assent; it became a commitment to a way of life.” Perhaps the author James Baldwin best captured the signifi- cant influence of Montgomery on King: “It is true that it was they who had begun the struggle of which he was now the symbol and the leader; it is true that it had taken all of their insistence to overcome in him a grave reluctance to stand where he now stood. But it is also true, and it does not happen often, that once he had accepted the place they had prepared for him, their struggle became absolutely indistinguishable from his own, and took over and controlled his life. He suffered with them and, thus, he helped them to suffer.” Baldwin’s 1961 essay accurately conveys the deep and abiding influence Montgomery’s local struggle had on Martin Luther King Jr. It also recognizes the very real contributions King made to both the local and national struggle. Baldwin’s reflections accent the seminal role the people of Montgomery played in King’s emergence and effectiveness as a civil rights leader. The Martin Luther King Jr. remem- 9 bered and celebrated around the world was born in Montgomery.