On This Day In Alabama History: Leader Left Civil Rights Association

Alabama News Center | June 3, 2018 @ 5:00 am

By Alabama NewsCenter Staff

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.

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