E.D. Nixon; Leader of Civil Rights

Edward Daniel Nixon, who organized the 1955 Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott after a black woman was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white man, has died. He was 87.

Officials at Baptist Medical Center in Montgomery said the venerated civil rights leader, who placed the telephone call to Martin Luther King Jr. that first brought the then young, inexperienced minister into the boycott fray and from there to world prominence, died late Wednesday.

Rosa Parks, the black woman who told Montgomery bus driver J. F. Blake “I am not going to move” when ordered to give up her seat to a white man never identified, was known to Nixon as a fellow member of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People. In a September, 1980, interview with The Times, conducted when Parks was being honored by the City of Los Angeles, Nixon said that when he first heard of her arrest he decided that “she was perfect for a test case” because “she was morally clean and no one could get anything on her.”

Searched for Leader

Nixon, a former state president of the NAACP, put up the $100 bail to free Parks, got her to agree to become a symbol of black resistance and then began making phone calls to find a leader for his boycott committee. The first two people he asked declined. The third was Dr. King, who Nixon said was “young and intelligent with leadership ability.”

King, Nixon and attorney Clifford Durr were the first members of the Montgomery Improvement Assn. and from that small group grew the struggle for racial equality that quickly engulfed the nation.

The bus boycott, which was the first major civil rights demonstration after the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling banning segregation, lasted 381 days and brought national attention to King, then known just as a Baptist minister. Nixon gained little fame for his efforts, but said he was not concerned with publicity.

“I did it all for the good of the community, not what I could get out of it,” Nixon said in another interview. “But the bus boycott is history. I want the children to know what happened. I can tell you what happened. I was there. I was fighting when everyone else was scared to death.”