he decided, were too limited. They amounted to little more than enforcement of rights already guaranteed, in theory at least, by the Fourteenth Amendment. Now it was necessary to address the underlying causes of inequality, not just legal discrimination. But the real importance of the civil rights movement, as King should have been the first to remember, lay not in its admittedly conventional goals but in its ability to overcome black people's "corroding sense of inferiority," in his own words. The act of standing up for their rights was far more important than any of the tangible gains his people had won—not that these were insignificant either. This is why King could tell himself that victory had already been achieved at the very outset of the Montgomery bus boycott, long before the movement's demands—themselves so modest that they fell short even of the standards set by the NAACP—had been approved. ^* After a mass meeting had agreed to launch the boycott, "I said to myself, the victory is already won,... a victory infinitely larger than the bus situation. The real victory was in the mass meeting, where thousands of black people stood revealed with a new sense of dignity and destiny." As he put it in his 1958 account of the bus boycott, "a once fear-ridden people had been transformed."

As his attention shifted from participation to poverty, King redefined his constituency as an interracial coalition of blacks, Puerto Ricans, Mexi-

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The main issue in Montgomery, incredible as it may seem, was simply whether blacks had to stand white there were seats left unoccupied by whites. Under a Montgomery city ordinance, no black person could sit parallel with a white. When all the front rows were filled, black people sitting in the next row were required to vacate all four seats if a single white passenger boarded the bus. They were required to stand even if three of the four seats in that row remained vacant. This was the situation when Rosa Parks, unlike the other three black passengers in her row, refused to stand and went to jail instead. The Montgomery Improvement Association—forerunner of the SCLC—proposed a change in the city law that would "make it possible for Negroes to sit from back toward front, and whites from front toward back until all seats are taken." Such a plan was already in effect in Mobile and other Alabama cities. "We are not asking for an end to segregation," King told reporters in December 1955. "That's a question for the legislature and the courts. We feel that we have a plan within the [existing segregation] law. All we are seeking is justice and fair treatment in riding the buses. We don't like the idea of Negroes having to stand when there are vacant seats."

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