Union leader and civil rights advocate E. D. Nixon was a prominent figure in the Montgomery bus boycott, the event that launched Martin Luther King, Jr. into the national spotlight. Described by King as a “foe of injustice” and as a man who “worked fearlessly to achieve the rights of this people and to rouse the Negroes from their apathy,” Nixon worked behind the scenes to organize and sustain the boycott and to launch the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA).
Born 12 July 1899 in Montgomery, Alabama, Nixon received only fourteen months of formal education. After working his way up from jobs in the train station baggage room, he became a Pullman car porter, a job he held until 1964. While working as a porter, Nixon formed the Pullman Car Porters Union and served as president for twenty-five years. In 1928, he joined A. Philip Randolph's Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters Union and organized Alabama's first chapter. Nixon later described Randolph 's impact on his future activism: “I never knew the Negro had a right to enjoy freedom like everyone else. When Randolph stood there and talked that day it made a different man out me. From that day on, I was determined that I was gonna fight for freedom until I was able to get some of it myself."
Nixon's familiarity with civil rights activism and his community connections placed him at the center of the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955. When Rosa Parks was arrested on 1 December for refusing to give up her seat to a white man, Nixon was head of the Montgomery NAACP. Believing that Parks was the perfect case to challenge Montgomery’s segregated bus system, Nixon and the NAACP worked with the Women’s Political Council (WPC) to launch the boycott. "She [Parks] was morally clean and she had fairly good academic training," he recalled. “Now she wasn't afraid and she didn't get excited about anything. If there ever was a person that would been able to break the situation that existed on the Montgomery City line, Rosa L. Parks was the woman to use."
Together with Jo Ann Robinson of the WPC and Clifford Durr, a white attorney, Nixon bailed Parks out of jail and quickly began to mobilize Montgomery's black community, asking all black citizens to refrain from riding buses on Monday, 5 December. Nixon then asked Martin Luther King, Jr., the newly appointed pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, to host a bus-boycott planning meeting at his church. It was at this meeting when Nixon nominated King to lead the boycott as president of the Montgomery Improvement Association. In describing the choice of King, Parks recalled, “The advantage of having Dr. King as president was that he was so new to Montgomery and to civil rights work that he hadn’t been there long enough to make any strong friends or enemies.”
When the success of the boycott established King as a national civil rights spokesman, Nixon often resented the amount of individual publicity attention paid to King. He once commented that "if Mrs. Parks had given up her seat, people would never have heard of Rev. King." But despite tensions between the two men that led Nixon’s resignation from the Montgomery Improvement Association in 1957, Nixon maintained respect for King. Recalling King’s handling of an arrest in Montgomery, Nixon wrote in a 1958 letter to King, ". . . and because of your courage in face of known danger I want to commend you for your stand for the people of color all over the world, and especially the people in Montgomery, Your action took the fear out of the Negroes and makes the white man see himself as he is."
Until his death in 1987 at the age of 87, Nixon continued to work for civil rights, focusing in his later years on improving conditions at housing projects and organizing programs for African American children.