E. D. Nixon

Edgar Daniel Nixon was born on the twelfth of July 1899 at Robinson Springs, in Elmore County, Alabama, the son of Wesley Nixon — a Baptist preacher and a tenant farmer of the closing decades of the post-Plessy Alabama Black-Belt — and Susan Chappell Nixon. He was raised in the small Baptist Black-Robinson-Springs household of his father and was orphaned at fourteen — his mother died of pneumonia and his father remarried. He was placed at the Pintlala, Alabama Black Coloured Public Schools through the fifth grade and left formal schooling at thirteen to work the Montgomery-area sawmills and the principal post-1912 Montgomery Black-trade economy of the closing decade of the inter-war period.

He was hired in 1923 at twenty-three by the Pullman Sleeping Car Company at the Atlanta-and-Montgomery Pullman district as a Pullman porter on the Atlanta-and-Montgomery sleeping-car route. He served as a Pullman porter for the following forty years from 1923 to 1964 across the principal Pullman-Montgomery-and-Atlanta-and-Chicago Pullman sleeping-car routes.

He was the principal closing-period Montgomery-area Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters organiser of the closing decade of the 1925 to 1935 American closing-period programmes — at the principal post-1925 A. Philip Randolph (placed in this archive) Brotherhood-of-Sleeping-Car-Porters Montgomery-area closing-period programmes.

He was named in 1928 the principal Montgomery-area Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters branch president at the closing-period 1928 Montgomery-area Brotherhood-of-Sleeping-Car-Porters-charter closing-period programmes. He held the Montgomery-area Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters branch presidency from 1928 to 1964.

He was elected in 1945 the principal president of the Montgomery NAACP branch and held the Montgomery NAACP presidency from 1945 to 1950, and from 1947 to 1949 served additionally as the principal Alabama State Conference of NAACP Branches president.

He directed across the closing months of December 1955 the principal Montgomery-Bus-Boycott organisational programme — at the principal closing-period post-Rosa-Parks arrest of the first of December 1955. Nixon was Rosa Parks’s personal bondsman at the Montgomery Court at the closing months of the first of December 1955 — and was the principal post-1955 organiser at the closing-period closing-period Montgomery-Improvement-Association founding-conclave at the Holt Street Baptist Church at Montgomery on the fifth of December 1955. Nixon was the principal closing-period Montgomery-Improvement-Association founder of the closing months of December 1955.

He served the principal Montgomery-Improvement-Association as the treasurer across the principal post-1955 Montgomery-Bus-Boycott of December 1955 to December 1956.

He retired from the Pullman Sleeping Car Company in 1964 — at the close of the principal closing-period post-1964 closing-period Pullman closing-period programmes. He served the Montgomery Black community across the closing years of his life as a senior community-organiser at the principal closing-period closing-period Montgomery-Civil-Rights closing-period closing-period programmes.

He died at Montgomery, Alabama on the twenty-fifth of February 1987 of complications of natural causes, at eighty-seven.

He is honored here as the principal organiser of the Montgomery Bus Boycott.