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PASSAGE 18 Martin Luther King Jr. By the time the Montgomery Improvement Association chose the 26-year-old Martin Luther King Jr. as its leader, the hours-old bus boycott by the black citizens of Montgomery, Alabama, was already an overwhelming success. King would later write that his unanticipated call to leadership happened so quickly that I did not have time to think in through. It is probable that if I had, I would have declined the nomination. Although press reports at the time focused on his inspiring oratory, King was actually a reluctant leader of a movement initiated by others. His subsequent writings and private correspondence reveal man whose inner doubts sharply contrast with his public persona. In the early days of his involvement, King was troubled by telephone threats, discord within the black community and Montgomerys get tough policy, to which king attributed his jailing on a minor traffic violation. One night, as he considered ways to move out of the picture without appearing a coward, he began to pray aloud and, at that moment, experienced the presence of the God as I had never experienced Him before. He would later admit that when the boycott began, he was not yet firmly committed to Gandhian principles. Although he had been exposed to those teachings in college, he had remained skeptical. I thought the only way we could solve our problem of segregation was an armed revolt, he recalled. I felt that the Christian ethic of love was confined to individual relationships. | 
