E. D. Nixon

Edgar Daniel Nixon was born on the twelfth of July 1899 in rural Lowndes County, Alabama, the son of Wesley M. Nixon, a tenant farmer and sometime Baptist preacher, and Sue Ann Chappell Nixon. His mother died in his childhood, and formal schooling reached him for only about sixteen months. What learning the classroom withheld, labor and the open road would supply.

In 1923 Nixon became a Pullman sleeping-car porter, a post he held for some four decades. The work carried him beyond the closed world of the Deep South and into the orbit of A. Philip Randolph and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, whose discipline and dignity shaped him into an organizer. He rose to lead the union's Montgomery work and turned his gaze to his own city's injustices.

Through the 1940s Nixon built the machinery of Black citizenship in Alabama — helping organize voter-registration drives, leading a march of hundreds to demand the ballot, and taking the presidency of the Montgomery NAACP in the mid-1940s and of the state branch in 1947. He knew the value of a case rightly chosen and a community rightly readied.

When Rosa Parks was arrested on the first of December 1955, it was Nixon who posted her bond, secured her assent to make her case a legal test of segregation, gathered the ministers, and helped raise up the Montgomery Improvement Association, serving as its treasurer through the 381-day boycott. His home was firebombed for it, yet he never left the work. We honor E. D. Nixon, the porter who carried a movement.