Arsenault Raymond. Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice

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116 Freedom Riders

of a January 1959 “Emancipation Day” march in Richmond and later as the

keynote speaker at CORE’s national convention in July 1960.

The head of the welcoming committee on May 5, the Reverend W. Lloyd

James of Bethany Baptist Church, lacked Walker’s near legendary status,

but, as the Freedom Riders soon discovered, he was both a gracious host and

a powerful exponent of faith-based activism. Accompanied by a half dozen

deacons, James escorted the Riders to a group of waiting cars that whisked

them off to dinner and a mass meeting at Bethany Baptist. The joyous meet-

ing at the tiny red-brick church was the first of many such gatherings for the

Freedom Riders. CORE’s plan called for a mass meeting at every nightly

stop along the route to New Orleans. Gaither had prearranged most of the

meetings, but in a few instances, where local leaders were reluctant to com-

mit themselves, the Riders had to improvise. At each meeting, one or more

of the Riders spoke to the crowd about the goals and implications of the

Freedom Ride. Through a mixture of preaching and teaching, they tried to

engage the men and women and children of the black South in the widening

struggle for freedom. As Lewis later recalled, the primary message was that

“no place was too small and no people were too powerless to do what we on

those buses were doing.” At the Petersburg meeting, the spokesperson for

the Riders was Bert Bigelow, who had the unenviable task of following the

Reverend James at the pulpit. Surrounded by a sea of black faces, the former

navy captain, who had never been in a Southern church before, spoke from

the heart. The Freedom Riders were committed not only to the fight for

equal justice, he insisted, but also to the redemptive spirit of nonviolence.

Later, as the Riders split up to join the families that had agreed to put them

up for the night, Bigelow’s words reverberated in thoughts and conversa-

tions that had been all too rare even in movement towns like Petersburg.

Bigelow’s words might have had even greater impact if another navy

captain had not already made history that day. At 9:32 in the morning, just as

the Freedom Riders were packing up to leave their dormitory rooms at Vir-

ginia Union, astronaut Alan B. Shepard became the first American to rocket

into space. As the nation watched and waited and later celebrated, the Rid-

ers, like everyone else, wondered how Shepard’s flight would affect the space

race and the broader Cold War. One thing was clear, however: They wouldn’t

have to worry about too much press attention in the days to come. It would

take something pretty spectacular, the likes of which they did not want to

think about, to bring the press and the public back to earth anytime soon.

Petersburg did not worry them, but Farmville, their first scheduled rest stop

on Saturday morning, was the kind of place where almost anything could

happen. The seat of Prince Edward County, the small farming and college

town was the birthplace of Virginia’s Massive Resistance campaign. In 1959

local officials had closed the county’s public schools rather than submit to

desegregation, establishing Farmville as a symbol of white supremacist defi-

ance. The white children of Prince Edward County attended an array of

Hallelujah! I’m a-Travelin’ 117

private segregationist academies, but most local black children had no af-

fordable options, a situation that didn’t seem to bother county school offi-

cials or other local whites. The Freedom Riders expected trouble in Farmville,

but to their surprise the signs designating segregated terminal facilities were

hidden under a fresh coat of paint. Although the Riders could still make out

the letters that had traditionally directed “white” and “colored” where to go,

they met no resistance when they violated the color line in the restrooms and

at the lunch counter. Farmville’s white establishment clearly wanted nothing

to do with the Freedom Riders and was willing to overlook a momentary

lapse in racial etiquette to ensure the Riders’ quick departure.

The next stop was Lynchburg, where the Riders hoped to find true com-

pliance with the law rather than the cynical maneuvering they had encoun-

tered in Farmville. Despite its foreboding name, Lynchburg had a reputation

for moderate race relations. Nestled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Moun-

tains, the city of fifty thousand was home to two private colleges, Randolph-

Macon Woman’s College and Lynchburg College, and a busy tobacco market.

Although blacks accounted for only one-fifth of the local population,

Lynchburg boasted a black seminary—the Virginia Theological Seminary

and College—and a small, homegrown movement that had hosted an SCLC

“Institute on Nonviolence” and sustained a brief jail-in earlier in the year.

Upon their arrival, the Freedom Riders were pleased to discover that the

city’s bus terminals were free of Jim Crow signs, but at the Trailways lunch

counter they encountered a towering partition “making persons on one side

virtually invisible to those on the other.” Whether the absence of signs rep-

resented social progress or merely white supremacist cunning was a subject

of debate and some puzzlement as the Riders mingled with their hosts later

that evening.

In Lynchburg, local leaders dispersed the Riders among eight black

churches, an arrangement that led to varied experiences. For many of the

Riders there was a welcome reprise of the powerful emotions that had erupted

in Petersburg the night before. Indeed, for Frances Bergman, who spoke at

one of the churches, Lynchburg provided “the warmest reception thus far.”

But for others, including Ben Cox, Lynchburg turned out to be a strange and

disturbing stop. At the Court Street Baptist Church, where Cox was the des-

ignated speaker, the Riders drew a small and unenthusiastic crowd, plus a

stern admonition from the host preacher, who was clearly having second

thoughts about the wisdom of associating with outside agitators. “If God had

wanted us to sit in the front of the bus,” the preacher exclaimed, “he would

have put us there.” Flabbergasted, Cox did his best to salvage the evening,

but the preacher’s rebuke served as a warning that unabashed racial accom-

modation was still a powerful force in many areas of the black South. More

than anything else, his words reminded them of how far they had come in

three days of traveling. Though still within two hundred miles of Washing-

ton, they were worlds away from the restless energy and relative freedom of

118 Freedom Riders

the capital’s black community. In the isolated hill country of southwest Vir-

ginia, the paradox-laden Southern mystique seemed to be drawing them into

a divided and almost surreal world of faith-based hope and mind-numbing

resignation. If the quickening spirit of the movement was palpable even in

Lynchburg, so too were the lingering effects of decades of white intimida-

tion and black accommodation. The raw emotionalism and political contra-

dictions of the black South were familiar to the Southern-born Freedom

Riders, especially to Lewis and Cox, but among the more secular Northern

volunteers the Ride was turning out to be quite an educational experience.

All this, and the Freedom Ride had yet to penetrate the Deep South. Indeed,

as the buses headed toward Danville on Sunday morning, even the most ex-

perienced of the Southern Riders must have wondered what unexpected les-

sons and ironic twists were waiting for them down the road.

The Freedom Riders’ experience in Danville, a mill town sixty-five miles

south of Lynchburg, represented a milestone of sorts. Here for the first

time the Riders encountered open hostility and resistance. At the com-

bined Greyhound-Trailways station, a black waiter refused to serve Ed

Blankenheim when he insisted on sitting at the “colored counter.” After sev-

eral minutes of waiting and after the waiter explained that his white boss had

promised to fire him if he served a Freedom Rider on the wrong side of the

color line, Blankenheim gave up and reboarded the bus. An hour or so later,

three white Riders from the second bus—Jim Peck, Genevieve Hughes, and

Walter Bergman—renewed the challenge. Following a curt refusal and a brief

standoff, Peck convinced the station manager to relent. While the seeming

irrationality of insisting on eating at an inferior facility undoubtedly puzzled

the manager and his staff, the Freedom Riders knew they had won a small

but significant victory.

By mid–Sunday afternoon, both buses had crossed the North Carolina

border, leaving proud but perplexed Virginia to its own devices. The day’s

final destination was Greensboro, the birthplace of the 1960 sit-in move-

ment. Prior to the sit-ins, Greensboro had been one of the first communities

in the South to initiate voluntary compliance with Brown, and local white

leaders had taken great pride in the city’s reputation for progressive politics

and enlightened paternalism. But more than a year of militant civil rights

agitation had shaken the white community, which had great difficulty coping

with Greensboro’s new image as a center of the Southern freedom struggle.

By the time the Freedom Riders arrived, the city’s “civil” approach to racial

accommodation had long since given way to the politics of racial polarization

and white backlash. While a few local white leaders continued to push for

moderate gradualism, the dominant mood was anything but conciliatory. The

result was a curious mix of lingering moderation and rising defiance. This

confusion was obvious at the Greensboro Trailways station, where the Rid-

ers encountered huge signs pointing to a “colored” lunch counter that had

Hallelujah! I’m a-Travelin’ 119

been closed down earlier in the week. One local black told Peck that “he was

amazed when upon entering the colored lunch room one day, he was advised

to walk around to the formerly white restaurant.” Two years earlier this same

restaurant had refused to serve Joseph McNeil, one of the four students who

later initiated the Greensboro sit-ins. Some friends even speculated that the

episode, which followed a long bus ride from New York, had triggered

McNeil’s decision to join the sit-in.

Still enrolled at North Carolina A&T, McNeil was among those who

escorted the Freedom Riders to Bennett College for an afternoon meeting

with student leaders and later to Shiloh Baptist Church for an eight o’clock

mass meeting. This was the same church that had welcomed CORE riders in

1947, following the beatings at Chapel Hill. Shiloh’s pastor, the Reverend

Otis Hairston, was a fearless activist who had spearheaded a local NAACP

membership drive in 1959 and turned his church into an unofficial command

center during the early stages of the sit-in movement. He was proud that two

of the four students who participated in the original February 1, 1960, sit-in

were Shiloh members, and he was equally pleased to host the Freedom Rid-

ers. After a rousing invocation, he turned the meeting over to Dr. George

Simkins Jr., the NAACP leader who had urged CORE to become involved

in the Greensboro sit-ins. Perhaps more than any other NAACP official,

Simkins had been an active supporter of the Freedom Ride, beginning with

his insistence to Gaither that the Riders spend at least one night in Greens-

boro. He could hardly contain himself as he introduced the Riders to an

overflow crowd of well-wishers.

Nothing, not even the mass meeting in Petersburg, had prepared the

Riders for the warm reception they received at Shiloh. When Farmer ex-

pressed both his fear that the desegregation fight had lost some of its “steam”

and his determination to make segregation “so costly the South can’t afford

it,” the sanctuary reverberated with amens and other words of encourage-

ment. “Life is not so dear and sweet,” Farmer added, “that we must passively

accept Jim Crow and segregation. . . . If our parents had gone to jail we

wouldn’t have to go through the ordeal now. Our nation cannot afford seg-

regation. Overseas it gives Uncle Sam a black eye. Future generations will

thank us for what we have done.” On and on he went, crying out for a resur-

gence of the spirit that had nurtured and sustained the city’s famous sit-ins.

By the end of the evening, both Farmer and the audience were emotionally

spent, but as the Freedom Riders and their hosts filed out of the sanctuary,

the dual message of empowerment and responsibility was clear. Before they

could hope to redeem the white South, Farmer and the Freedom Riders felt,

they had to embolden the black South, to stir things up to a point where a

critical mass of activists demanded fundamental change. Although they real-

ized that mobilizing and sustaining such a critical mass would not be easy, the

warm welcome that the Riders received in Greensboro suggested that at least

one local movement was poised to take an unequivocal stand for freedom.

120 Freedom Riders

HE UPPER NORTH CAROLINA PIEDMONT was as far south as CORE’s 1947

Journey of Reconciliation had dared to go, so when the Freedom Riders headed

down Highway 29 on Monday morning, May 8, they were entering uncharted

territory. Gaither’s report—and in a few cases their own experiences—gave

the Riders some sense of what to expect, but they were understandably ap-

prehensive about the dangerous days ahead. In Salisbury, fifty-two miles south-

west of Greensboro, the Riders encountered Jim Crow signs at both bus

terminals but were able to desegregate the restrooms and lunch counters

without incident. Even more encouraging was the unexpected bravado of

two black women, both regular passengers on the bus, who followed the Rid-

ers’ example of demanding service at the white counter. They, too, received

prompt and reasonably courteous service, which was more than the Riders

had expected from a town that had once housed one of the Confederacy’s

most notorious prison camps. Ben Cox, who had spent four years at Salisbury’s

Livingstone College in the mid-1950s and who had vivid memories of the

town’s rigid color line, was as surprised as anyone.

From Salisbury, the buses continued southward, through Rowan Mill,

China Grove, and Kannapolis, and on to Charlotte. The largest city in the

Carolina Piedmont, Charlotte was a banking and textile center with a flair

for New South commercialism. The “Queen City,” as North Carolinians

often called it, was 28 percent black and almost 100 percent segregated in

1961. As in Greensboro, city leaders cultivated an image of moderation and

urbane paternalism, but they did so with the expectation that all local citi-

zens, black and white, knew their place. The immutability of racial segrega-

tion, even in the most mundane aspects of life, was a given, and anyone who

crossed the color line in Charlotte or Mecklenburg County was asking for

trouble. Charles Person discovered just how true this was when he tried to

get a shoeshine in Charlotte’s Union Station. As Jim Peck later explained,

the young Atlanta student “didn’t even think of it as a test. He simply looked

at his shoes and thought he needed a shine.” But after being rebuffed, he

decided to remain in the whites-only shoeshine chair until someone either

changed the policy or arrested him. Within minutes, a policeman arrived

and threatened to handcuff him and haul him off to jail if he didn’t move. At

this point, Person decided to avoid arrest and scurried back to tell the other

Riders what had happened.

After an impromptu strategy session, the Riders designated Joe Perkins

as the group’s official shoeshine segregation tester. The whole scene carried

a touch of the absurd—the Riders later referred to the incident as the South’s

first “shoe-in”—but Perkins agreed to sit in the shoeshine chair until some-

body came and arrested him. A few minutes later, the young CORE field

secretary became the first Freedom Rider to be arrested. The formal charge

was trespassing, and bail was set at fifty dollars. Ed Blankenheim, the desig-

nated observer in Charlotte, was on hand with the required bail money, but

Perkins bravely chose to spend two nights in jail instead. On Monday evening,

Hallelujah! I’m a-Travelin’ 121

while the rest of the Riders met with Charles Jones and other Johnson C.

Smith University student activists—including twenty-year-old Gus Griffin

of Tampa, Florida, who volunteered to replace Perkins on the Freedom Ride

to Rock Hill, South Carolina—Perkins was at the city jail. On Tuesday Perkins

was transferred to the county jail, where he remained until his trial on Wednes-

day morning.

With Blankenheim looking on, Perkins went before Judge Howard B.

Arbuckle expecting the worst. To his surprise, and to the amazement of his

NAACP attorney, Thomas Wyche, Arbuckle promptly rendered an acquit-

tal based on the Boynton decision. Elated, Perkins and Blankenheim headed

for Union Station, but as they left the courthouse the same police officer

who had arrested Perkins on Monday confronted them. The officer advised

the interracial duo “to get the hell out of town” and declared that he wasn’t

about “to let no New York nigger come down here and make trouble for us

and our good nigras.” Though tempted to argue the point, Perkins and

Blankenheim decided to let the comment pass and proceeded on to the ter-

minal, where they caught a late-morning bus to Rock Hill. Arriving in the

South Carolina mill town just in time to rejoin the other Riders for the trip

to Sumter, the two stragglers soon discovered that a great deal had happened

during their absence.

Rock Hill, which had been seething with racial tension since the cel-

ebrated jail-in three months earlier, turned out to be the first serious trouble

spot for the Freedom Ride. Gaither, who had spent considerable time there,

both in and out of jail, warned the Riders that the town was literally crawling

with Klansmen and other hard-line white supremacists. But the relative ease

of the journey through Virginia and North Carolina left many of the Riders

unprepared for the rude welcome they encountered during their first stop in

South Carolina. A cotton mill town with a chip on its shoulder, Rock Hill

harbored a large contingent of what Senator Ben Tillman once called “the

damned factory trash,” displaced farmers who had been pushed off the land

by declining cotton prices and a brutal crop-lien system. Over the years their

economic and cultural grievances spawned a hardy tradition of racial

scapegoating that sustained political demagogues such as Cole Blease and

“Cotton Ed” Smith. The fact that the local white elite continued to tolerate

all-black Friendship Junior College suggested that Rock Hill may not have

been the most Negrophobic town in South Carolina, but it was still a tough

place to discuss the fine points of constitutional law. As Lewis, who had trav-

eled to Rock Hill earlier in the year to visit his jailed SNCC colleagues, put

it, “I could tell we were in trouble as soon as I stepped off the bus.”

In his 1998 memoir Walking with the Wind, Lewis reconstructed the dis-

turbingly simple origins of what turned out to be the first of many assaults

against nonviolent Freedom Riders:

As Al Bigelow and I approached the “WHITE” waiting room in the Rock

Hill Greyhound terminal, I noticed a large number of young white guys

122 Freedom Riders

hanging around the pinball machines in the lobby. Two of these guys were

leaning by the door jamb to the waiting room. They wore leather jackets,

had those ducktail haircuts and were each smoking a cigarette.

“Other side, nigger,” one of the two said, stepping in my way as I

began to walk through the door. He pointed to a door down the way with a

sign that said “COLORED.”

I did not feel nervous at all. I really did not feel afraid. “I have a right

to go in there,” I said, speaking carefully and clearly, “on the grounds of

the Supreme Court decision in the Boynton case.”

I don’t think either of these guys had ever heard of the Boynton case.

Not that it would have mattered.

“Shit on that,” one of them said.

The next thing I knew, a fist smashed the right side of my head. Then

another hit me square in the face. As I fell to the floor I could feel feet

kicking me hard in the sides. I could taste blood in my mouth.

At that point Al Bigelow stepped in, placing his body between mine

and these men, standing square with his arms at his sides.

It had to look strange to these guys to see a big, strong white man

putting himself in the middle of a fistfight like this, not looking at all as if

he was ready to throw a punch, but not looking frightened either.

They hesitated for an instant. Then they attacked Bigelow, who did

not raise a finger as these young men began punching him. It took several

blows to drop him to one knee.

At that point several of the white guys by the pinball machines moved

over to join in. Genevieve Hughes stepped in their way and was knocked to

the floor.

Whether out of chivalry or just plain common sense, a white police of-

ficer who had witnessed the entire assault finally intervened and grabbed one

of the assailants. “All right, boys,” he stated with some authority. “Y’all’ve

done about enough now. Get on home.” After a few parting epithets, the

boys retreated to the street, leaving the Freedom Riders and the policeman

to wait for several other officers who had been called to the scene. To Lewis’s

surprise, one of the officers appeared to be sympathetic to the injured Riders

and asked them if they wanted to file charges against their attackers. They

declined the offer. Though still shaken, Lewis, Bigelow, and Hughes then

staggered into the terminal restaurant to join the rest of the Riders. Lewis,

who had suffered bruised ribs and cuts around his eyes and mouth, was in

need of medical attention, but he stubbornly insisted on remaining at the

restaurant until he finished his hard-earned cup of coffee. Several hours later,

after someone at Friendship Junior College fetched a first-aid kit, he allowed

a friend to place Band-Aids over the wounds on his face. Throughout the

whole ordeal he downplayed his injuries; no bones had been broken, he in-

sisted, displaying the quiet courage for which he would later become famous.

Most important, he pointed out, no pledges had been violated: The Free-

dom Riders had passed their first major test, refusing to strike back against

an unprovoked assault.

The Trailways Riders who arrived later in the afternoon faced a simi-

larly threatening situation but were able to avoid a violent confrontation,

Hallelujah! I’m a-Travelin’ 123

thanks to the intervention of the Reverend C. A. Ivory, the courageous leader

of the Rock Hill movement. Upon their arrival, the Trailways group discov-

ered that the Rock Hill Trailways terminal was locked shut and that the

terminal’s restaurant had been closed for weeks, a casualty of the Friendship

Junior College students’ sit-in campaign. As the Riders stepped off the bus, a

welcoming committee of drivers rushed up to inform them about the assault

on the Greyhound group—and to protect them from essentially the same

gang of white “thugs” responsible for the earlier attack. Across the street was

a line of cars filled with tough-looking young white men hoping for a second

shot at the outside agitators who had dared to invade their town. Several of

the men shouted epithets and motioned menacingly at the Riders, but Ivory

told the Riders not to worry, that he was not afraid of these cowardly “hood-

lums.” He soon proved his point by glaring at the whites as he and the rest of

the welcoming committee hustled the Riders into several waiting cars. As

they drove to Friendship Junior College, where the Riders were scheduled to

spend the night, the threatening whites followed for a few blocks but eventu-

ally turned off without attacking their prey. Later in the evening, both groups

of Riders gathered at Ivory’s home to share the details of what had happened

earlier in the day. While they all had stories to tell, Lewis, Bigelow, and

Hughes drew most of the attention. From the outset, the Riders had known

that violent resistance to the Freedom Ride was almost inevitable. Now, as

the three Riders told and retold the story of their confrontation with the

young toughs, the dangers of challenging Jim Crow—and the responsibili-

ties of nonviolent protest—took on a new and unsettling specificity.

At the mass meeting held at the college that night, the Reverend Ivory

and others praised the courage and restraint of the bloodied but unbowed

Freedom Riders. Confined to a wheelchair and in poor health, Ivory himself

was no stranger to threats of violence or acts of courage. For four years—

ever since he had led a successful boycott of Rock Hill’s local bus company—

the outspoken minister had been a primary target of militant segregationists

who hoped to drive him out the community. But nothing seemed to faze

him—not hate mail, not death threats, not even a recent phone call that

pledged to bomb his home and family. “The other night the person on the

other end threatened to plant a bomb under my house,” he told the Riders.

“‘Why don’t you plant two while you’re at it?’ I asked. Nothing ever came of

it.” Six months later, Ivory would die of natural causes, but those who knew

him well placed part of the blame on the extraordinary burden of leadership

he had agreed to bear.

Ivory’s eloquent tribute to the injured Riders touched everyone in the

hall, and Jimmy McDonald, joined by nine veterans of the Rock Hill jail-in,

capped off the evening with a joyous round of freedom songs. The exuber-

ance of the students was just what Lewis and the Freedom Riders had hoped

to discover in the recesses of the Deep South, though Lewis himself had

other things to think about that night. Within minutes of his arrival at the

124 Freedom Riders

college, he had received a telegram from the American Friends Service Com-

mittee (AFSC) notifying him that he been selected as a finalist for a two-year

foreign service internship—the same internship that his mentor Jim Lawson

had held in the mid-1950s. It had taken the AFSC a while to track him down,

but there was still enough time for him to make the required final interview

in Philadelphia. Accompanying the telegram was a money order that would

buy him a plane ticket, but if he wanted to pursue the internship he would

have to leave the Freedom Ride almost immediately. Following a long night

of soul-searching, Lewis decided to fly to Philadelphia for three days, after

which he planned to rejoin the Ride. Barring any unforeseen problems, he

would be back on the bus by Monday, May 15, the day the Riders were sched-

uled to leave Birmingham, Alabama.

The next morning, as the rest of the Riders prepared to head south to-

ward Chester and Winnsboro, a Friendship Junior College student drove

Lewis to the Charlotte airport, where he caught a plane to Philadelphia. Be-

fore leaving Rock Hill, the remaining Riders desegregated the waiting rooms

in both bus terminals without incident. As a relieved Peck put it, “the hood-

lums did not stage a repeat performance,” though as the Riders left the scene

of their first violent confrontation they had no illusions about the hard road

to freedom in towns like Rock Hill. Just how hard this road could be became

increasingly obvious as the day progressed. The Riders had planned to stop

for lunch in Chester, a mill town and county seat twenty-three miles south-

west of Rock Hill. Chester’s closest brush with notoriety had occurred in

1807, when former vice president Aaron Burr, while under arrest for acts of

treason, momentarily escaped from his guards while passing through the town.

But the Riders did not get the chance to stay long enough to see the famous

rock from which Burr “harangued a curious crowd before he was recaptured.”

Having learned that troublemakers were on their way, local officials had locked

the doors of the Chester bus terminal. Over the doors several makeshift signs

announced that the terminal was “closed” until further notice. Shaking off this

lapse in Southern hospitality, the Trailways and Greyhound drivers changed

the lunch stop to Winnsboro, twenty-eight miles farther down the road.

The seat of hilly Fairfield County, Winnsboro was a conservative com-

munity with a deep Confederate heritage. On his march north from the capi-

tal city of Columbia in February 1865, General William Tecumseh Sherman

had stopped in Winnsboro just long enough to burn most of the town, an act

that was not soon forgotten. Later in the nineteenth century, local patriots

constructed one of the state’s largest Confederate monuments, which stood

guard against any transgressions of the “Southern way of life.” Nearly 60

percent black in 1961, Winnsboro had earned a reputation as an ultra-

segregationist stronghold, a place where the local White Citizens’ Council

invariably got its way. Challenging the white supremacist traditions of

Winnsboro would have been dangerous under any circumstances, but in the

wake of the Rock Hill incident it was especially so.

Hallelujah! I’m a-Travelin’ 125

As the Freedom Riders rolled into the sand hills of central South Caro-

lina on the morning of the tenth—which happened to be Confederate Me-

morial Day—newspapers all across the nation ran a wire story describing the

beatings of the previous day. Thanks in part to the hoopla surrounding

Shepard’s space flight, the Rock Hill story generally appeared on the back

pages far removed from the front-page limelight. Still, much of South Caro-

lina, not to mention the rest of the South, now knew that Riders were com-

ing their way, which helped to explain the locked doors in Chester. Officially

CORE welcomed the publicity, but from this point on the Riders would

have to deal with an awakened white South. Suddenly the potential for con-

frontation had ratcheted upward.

In Winnsboro, the first sign of trouble came when Hank Thomas, the

young Howard student from St. Augustine, sat down at a whites-only lunch

counter. Accompanied by Peck, who later recalled that they had hardly settled

in their seats when “the restaurant owner dashed away from the counter to

call the police,” Thomas soon found himself in a conversation with a brawny

“police officer who was a stereotype for such a role in Hollywood.” “Come

with me, boy,” the officer drawled. At this point Peck tried to explain that

Thomas had a constitutional right to eat lunch wherever he pleased. This

didn’t seem to faze the policeman, who promptly arrested both men. Within

minutes, the two Freedom Riders were behind bars in the city jail—in sepa-

rate Jim Crow cells. After several hours of confusion and indecision, local

officials charged Thomas with trespassing and Peck with “interfering with

arrest.” By this time the rest of the Riders—with the exception of Frances

Bergman, the designated observer for the Winnsboro lunch counter test—

had gone on to Sumter, where they were scheduled to spend the night. For

several hours, Bergman, as a grateful Peck later put it, “braved the hate-filled

town alone trying to find out what the authorities intended to do” with the

two arrestees. She got little cooperation from the local police, who seemed

pleased that Winnsboro’s unwelcome visitors had gotten more than they had

bargained for in the heart of Dixie. One officer, after calling her a “nigger

lover” and an “outside agitator,” told her “to get out of town,” adding: “We

have no use for your kind here.”

Following a CORE policy agreed upon at the beginning of the Ride,

Farmer left Thomas, Peck, and Bergman behind, hoping that they would be

able to rejoin the Ride in Sumter. But he did so reluctantly. Farmer knew

from his conversations with field secretary Jim McCain that Winnsboro—

like Rock Hill—was a dangerous town, especially for an assertive young black

man like Thomas. As a white woman, Bergman, despite her lack of experi-

ence in the South, would probably be all right, and Peck—a veteran civil

disobedient who had served three years in prison as a young man—could

probably take care of himself. Thomas, though, was young and full of pent-

up emotion left over from a troubled boyhood. A last-minute replacement

for his roommate, he was an unknown quantity compared to most of the