On this day in Alabama history: Leader left civil rights association
Although he was an integral figure in the civil rights movement, E.D. Nixon never received the media attention given to other leaders after the 1960s. He worked in public housing in Montgomery toward the end of his career. He was recognized by the Montgomery County Public School System in 2001 with an elementary school named in his honor. (From Encyclopedia of Alabama, courtesy of Alabama Department of Archives and History)
June 3, 1957
Lowndes County native E.D. Nixon was a longtime civil rights leader in Alabama, working to register black voters before becoming an organizer of the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) and the Montgomery bus boycott. He was an outspoken activist for blacks before World War II and the beginnings of the modern civil rights movement in the 1950s. He bailed Rosa Parks out of jail on Dec. 1, 1955, after she was arrested for refusing to surrender her bus seat to a white man. He joined Ralph Abernathy and others in starting the MIA that Martin Luther King Jr. headed. Nixon was the MIA’s founding treasurer but, even though he was financially in the middle class, did not have a formal education and thus he identified with lower-class citizens. He left the MIA because its leadership positions were offered mainly to higher-class, well-educated blacks. Until his death on Feb. 25, 1987, Nixon lived in relative obscurity but in 2001 a Montgomery elementary school was named in his honor.
Read more at Encyclopedia of Alabama.
E.D. Nixon (1899-1987) was a civil rights leader in Montgomery who worked to get African-Americans registered to vote and was an organizer of the Montgomery Improvement Association and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Nixon was one of more than 80 leaders of the boycott arrested by Montgomery police in February 1956. (From Encyclopedia of Alabama, courtesy of Montgomery County)
For more on Alabama’s Bicentennial, visit Alabama 200.
