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

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176 Freedom Riders

fourteen Freedom Riders, and the four accompanying journalists lifted off

the runway. One hour later they were in New Orleans—still in the Deep

South but far removed from the angry, tormented city that had nearly cost

some of them their lives.

At the New Orleans airport, several reporters, photographers, and tele-

vision cameramen were on hand to document the Freedom Riders’ arrival.

But the presence of the press did not stop the New Orleans police from

putting the unwelcome fugitives from Alabama through a few moments of

gratuitous harassment. Forming a cordon along the tarmac, a long line of

white police officers dressed in riot gear surrounded the Riders as they walked

towards the terminal. When some of the officers shouted racial epithets,

Seigenthaler became concerned and more than a little angry. Only after he

identified himself as a Justice Department official did the police reluctantly

back off, allowing the Riders to make their way to a small but deliriously

relieved welcoming committee of CORE volunteers. Several of the Riders,

with tears of joy streaming down their faces, looking much like returning

prisoners of war, collapsed into the outstretched arms of their comrades.

Against all odds they had made it to New Orleans after all. The great CORE

Freedom Ride of 1961 was over.

Get on Board, Little Children

Get on board, little children, Get on board, little children,

Get on board, little children, Let’s fight for human rights.

Can’t you see that mob a-comin’, Comin’ ’round the bend.

If you fight for freedom, They’ll try to do you in.

—1960s freedom song

THE JOYOUS LATE-NIGHT RENDEZVOUS in New Orleans captured the raw emo-

tion of the moment, but in the cold light of day on Tuesday the complex

realities of the situation swept over the Freedom Riders like a dense cloud.

Morning conversations among the Riders and their hosts revealed consider-

able confusion about the implications of what had just happened. At the home

of Oretha and Doris Jean Castle—the unofficial headquarters of New Or-

leans CORE, where several of the Riders spent the night—there was nervous

speculation about the future of the nonviolent movement in the Deep South.

Even in cosmopolitan New Orleans, the political atmosphere was more threat-

ening than anyone had expected. Within hours of the Riders’ arrival, the

South Louisiana White Citizens’ Council asked Mayor deLesseps Morrison

to “rid the community of these agitators before violence erupts.” And later in

the day, during a press briefing held at Xavier University (where some of the

Riders were housed until a bomb threat forced an evacuation of their dormi-

tory), Gordon Carey and Ben Cox were bombarded by questions from hos-

tile reporters who seemed to accept the Citizens’ Council’s claim that CORE

was “a lawless, radical group.” When one reporter suggested that the vio-

lence-plagued Freedom Ride had failed, Cox countered: “It proved what we

set out to prove—that American citizens cannot travel freely in the United

States. Laws are on the books, but they are not being enforced.” Before fly-

ing home to New York for medical care, Jim Peck tried to reassure his fellow

178 Freedom Riders

Riders that the Freedom Ride had indeed accomplished much of what it had

been designed to do. But, in truth, he too was worried. With much of the

CORE staff out of commission due to injuries and with Jim Farmer still in

Washington at his father’s funeral, the organization was in obvious disarray,

despite Carey’s and Marvin Rich’s best efforts to hold things together.

Farmer himself was overcome with a jumble of conflicting emotions in the

immediate aftermath of the Ride. He was proud of CORE’s partial victory,

relieved that his colleagues were safe, a little ashamed that he had not been

with them during the hours of crisis, and more than a little concerned about

how all of this would play in the national media. While he welcomed the na-

tional publicity generated by the Ride, he worried about mainstream America’s

visceral fear of direct action. To his dismay, most of the press reports on Tues-

day morning characterized the decision to end the Ride as a triumph of prag-

matic realism over misguided idealism. Although many observers acknowledged

and admired the Freedom Riders’ courage, virtually everyone expressed seri-

ous reservations about a style of protest that courted martyrdom. Even in the

wake of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the more recent sit-in movement,

few Americans, it seemed, had anything more than a superficial understanding

of the theory and practice of Gandhian nonviolence. In a nation committed to

nuclear superiority and Cold War posturing—a nation that promoted the in-

dividual pursuit of happiness above all else—the concept of progress through

unmerited suffering was simply too alien to take seriously.

Freedom Riders Jim Peck and Jimmy McDonald are interviewed by reporter Bill

Cook after arriving at the New Orleans Airport, Tuesday morning, May 16, 1961.

(Bettmann-CORBIS)

Get on Board, Little Children 179

Even in black America, where the idea of Christian martyrdom had long

been a powerful force and where Martin Luther King’s image as an Ameri-

can Gandhi had some currency, nonviolent struggle remained a novel idea.

The lone exception was the black student movement that had taken hold in a

number of Southern communities. Here there were clear signs that nonvio-

lence was on the verge of becoming a mass movement, especially in Nash-

ville, where Jim Lawson and a growing band of student activists had launched

wave after wave of stand-ins, sit-ins, and other acts of nonviolent resistance.

Widely regarded as the leading edge of the student movement, the Nashville

group had played a pivotal role in the founding of SNCC, producing an

extraordinary number of dedicated activists, including the Freedom Rider

John Lewis. Thus, when Nashville became the flash point that reignited the

Freedom Ride, few close observers of the movement were surprised. As the

legendary SNCC organizer Bob Moses would later put it, “Only the Nash-

ville student movement had the fire to match that of the burning bus.”

While the rest of the nation breathed a collective sigh of relief that the

Freedom Ride was over, the young activists of the Nashville Movement cried

out for continued sacrifice and commitment. Indeed, Nashville’s student ac-

tivists were already talking about mobilizing reinforcements for the Free-

dom Ride on Sunday afternoon, a full day before the CORE Riders retreated

to New Orleans. One of the key figures in this early effort was Lewis, who,

by a strange twist of fate, was in Nashville, not Birmingham, when the Free-

dom Ride collapsed. Sitting among several dozen friends and fellow activists

who had gathered at a picnic ground to celebrate the successful conclusion of

a five-week campaign to desegregate Nashville’s downtown movie theaters,

he could hardly believe his ears when the first reports of the Anniston bomb-

ing came on the radio. It had been four days since he had said good-bye to

the Freedom Riders in South Carolina, promising them that he would return

to the fold as soon as was humanly possible. Now he had to face the possibility

that there might not be a Freedom Ride to rejoin, that some of his colleagues

might not even be alive by the end of the day. Though almost overcome by

feelings of pain and guilt, he soon regained enough composure to help Diane

Nash, Bernard Lafayette, and other members of the Nashville student

movement’s central committee sound the alarm. Interrupting a speech by

committee chairman Jim Bevel, who was holding forth on the theological

implications of the Nashville Movement’s victory, Lewis, Nash, and Lafayette

rounded up the rest of the committee and rushed to the First Baptist Church

for an emergency meeting.

Within minutes Bevel and the committee were huddled around a church

radio waiting for additional reports from Alabama. Before long they learned

that the Trailways Riders had been attacked by a mob in Birmingham and

that some of the Riders had sustained serious injuries. Desperate for more

information, Nash tried to reach Jim Farmer by phone, but there was no

answer at his Washington number. For the time being, she and the others

180 Freedom Riders

would have to proceed without any firm knowledge of what had actually hap-

pened in Anniston and Birmingham. Fearing the worst, they moved to a

nearby conference room to discuss their options. For the remainder of the

afternoon and evening, and into the early morning hours, the students exam-

ined and reexamined every aspect of the situation. From the outset, Nash,

Lewis, and several others argued that the civil rights community could not

afford to let the Freedom Ride fail. The nonviolent movement had reached a

critical juncture, they insisted, a moment of decision that in all likelihood

would affect the pace of change for years to come. If the movement allowed

segregationist thugs to destroy the Freedom Ride, white supremacist extrem-

ists would gain new life, violent attacks on civil rights activists would multi-

ply, and attracting new recruits to the nonviolent cause would become much

more difficult. The violence in Alabama had forced the movement to face a

soul-testing challenge: Did those who professed to believe in nonviolent

struggle have the courage and commitment to risk their lives for the cause of

simple justice? The original Freedom Riders had done so willingly and with-

out self-pity, Lewis assured his friends. Could the members of the Nashville

Movement be satisfied with anything less from themselves?

When no one in the room disagreed with the logic of this rhetorical

question, the die was cast: The Nashville Movement would do whatever was

necessary to sustain the Freedom Ride. At this point they did not know how

many Freedom Riders had been injured or disabled, but the situation seemed

to call for reinforcements. As they began to map out a precise plan of action,

the excitement and nervous energy in the room became palpable. Young

student activists who had previously focused their attention on the limited

goals of a local movement were about to stride onto the national stage—if

they could work out the logistics. As Lewis recalled the scene, there were

suddenly so many questions to consider: “How many of us would go? When?

And where would the money come from to pay our way? There were dozens

of details to iron out, and just as many opinions on each one.”

In typical student movement fashion, the meeting was democratic in tone

and structure, with little sense of hierarchy. Some opinions, however, clearly

carried more weight than others. Although Bevel was technically in charge,

Lewis and Nash came closest to embodying the spirit of soul power that

Lawson, who was away visiting family in Ohio, had prescribed. They were

able to exert a quiet but firm leadership among their peers. Despite his unas-

suming demeanor, Lewis’s status as a Freedom Rider gave his carefully cho-

sen words a special force, and the beautiful and poised Nash, already something

of a local movement icon, relied on her reputation as the most effective orga-

nizer among Nashville’s student activists. Light-skinned enough to be mis-

taken for a white woman and, according to Lewis, “just about the most

gorgeous woman any of us had ever seen,” Nash had worked hard to over-

come suspicions that she was miscast as a movement leader. As Lewis re-

called, other women active in the Nashville movement “couldn’t help being

Get on Board, Little Children 181

envious in the beginning at all the attention Diane was getting. But none of

this turned Diane’s head. She was dead serious about what we were doing

each week, very calm, very deliberate, always straightforward and sincere. As

time passed, she came to be seen more as our sister than as an object of lust.”

Born and raised in Chicago, where she grew up in a middle-class Catho-

lic family, Nash transferred to Fisk University in the fall of 1959 after spend-

ing two years at Howard. Sheltered from the worst indignities of Jim Crow

for most of her life, she became interested in the local movement after being

forced to use segregated restroom facilities at the Tennessee State Fair. By

the end of her first semester at Fisk, she had become one of Lawson’s most

devoted disciples, and when the Nashville sit-in movement took off in Feb-

ruary 1960 she quickly emerged as one of the local movement’s most visible

leaders. In mid-April, at the founding meeting of SNCC in Raleigh, she was

the only woman to receive serious consideration as a candidate for SNCC

chairperson. Her Nashville colleague Marion Barry got the nod as SNCC’s

first official leader, but soon after her return from Raleigh the soft-spoken

but determined woman from Chicago almost single-handedly transformed

the local movement by challenging Mayor Ben West during a rally on the

courthouse steps. With the press looking on, she extracted a grudging ad-

mission from West, a moderate trying to navigate the dangerous political

waters of gradual desegregation, that he had no personal objection to the

desegregation of Nashville’s downtown lunch counters. Later seen as a piv-

otal turning point in the decline of local white resistance, Nash’s ability to

outmaneuver West into a breach of segregationist solidarity added to her

growing reputation as a rising star in the student movement. In February

1961, her stature rose even higher after she became one of four SNCC activ-

ists to join the “jail–no bail” protest in Rock Hill, South Carolina. Following

her release from jail in April, she withdrew from Fisk and accepted a joint

staff position with SNCC and SCLC. Working out of a rented room at the

Nashville YWCA, she told friends that the movement had become her life.

Local stature aside, Nash remained largely unknown outside of SNCC

and SCLC circles. When she finally reached Farmer on Monday afternoon

to discuss the Nashville Movement’s plan to resume the Freedom Ride, he

wasn’t quite sure who she was or what to make of the students’ offer to help.

Farmer later claimed that Nash had called to see if he “had any objections to

members of the Nashville Student Movement . . . going in and taking up the

Ride where CORE left off.” But Nash, Lewis, and others insisted that the

call was simply a means of letting “him know our intent and to ask for his

support—not his permission.” Whatever her intention, Nash clearly caught

Farmer off guard. “You realize it may be suicide,” he stammered into the

phone. These words of warning only served to steel her nerves and to con-

firm her suspicion that Farmer was out of touch with the spirit of the student

movement. “We fully realize that,” she replied, brushing off his objection,

“but we can’t let them stop us with violence. If we do, the movement is dead.”

182 Freedom Riders

When it became clear that Nash was undeterred by his prediction that the

students faced a probable “massacre” in Alabama, he wished her well and

promised that CORE would do what it could to help. He also made it clear

that he still considered the Freedom Ride to be a CORE project, regardless

of any Nashville student involvement. As soon as his father’s funeral was

over, he would return to Alabama, presumably to resume control of the Ride.

“I’ll fly down and join you wherever you are,” he vowed.

All of this took on a somewhat hollow ring a few hours later when the

CORE Riders actually flew to New Orleans. “I couldn’t believe it,” Lewis

later wrote. “I understood the thinking behind the decision, but it defied one

of the most basic tenets of nonviolent action—that is, there can be no surren-

der in the face of brute force or any form of violent opposition.” This and

other arguments reinvigorated the ongoing meeting of the central commit-

tee, which was moving toward concrete action by Monday evening. As the

discussions progressed, the idea of sending a new wave of Freedom Riders to

Alabama and beyond took on a seemingly irreversible momentum, especially

after a call to Jim Lawson in Ohio drew a ringing endorsement from the one

person who could have nixed the students’ plan. Far from reining in his dis-

ciples, Lawson promised to join the Freedom Ride as soon as he returned to

the South.

BY CONTRAST, the reaction of the more senior members of Nashville’s civil

rights community was anything but encouraging. As word of the students’ plan

spread, several members of the Nashville Christian Leadership Council—

the Nashville Movement’s semiofficial sponsoring organization—expressed

serious reservations about putting the city’s young activists in harm’s way. By

early Tuesday morning someone in Nashville, either inside or outside the

movement, had contacted the Justice Department in Washington, identify-

ing Nash as the ringleader of a proposed new Freedom Ride. The reaction in

the attorney general’s office, which less than two hours earlier had learned

that Seigenthaler and the CORE Freedom Riders were safely on the ground

in Louisiana, was one of shock and dismay. Fearing that the crisis was being

resurrected, Robert Kennedy placed a frantic call to Seigenthaler, who had

just drifted off to sleep in his New Orleans motel room. A new Freedom

Ride was about to be launched, he informed his half-conscious assistant, and

something had to be done to stop it. At 4:00

A.M. Seigenthaler received a

second call, this time from Burke Marshall, Kennedy’s special deputy for

civil rights. After reiterating the seriousness of the situation, Marshall gave

Seigenthaler Nash’s phone number and a few additional words of advice:

“You come from that goddam town. . . . If you can do anything to turn them

around, I’d appreciate it.”

Seigenthaler knew enough about Nash, Lewis, and the Nashville stu-

dent movement to know that he had been given a nearly impossible task.

But, after two hours of fitful tossing and turning, he placed a call to George

Get on Board, Little Children 183

Barrett, an old Nashville friend, labor lawyer, and white liberal with close

ties to the local movement, the Highlander Folk School, and the Southern

Regional Council. At Seigenthaler’s urging, Barrett phoned Nash, whom he

knew well, and later spent several minutes at her office trying to persuade her

to abandon the proposed Alabama Freedom Ride. He got nowhere, how-

ever. A few minutes later Seigenthaler called Nash directly, with the same

result. After describing the explosive atmosphere in Birmingham, he asked

her to consider a temporary postponement of the Ride. She refused, insisting

that delaying the hour of freedom was out of the question. Exasperated, Seigen-

thaler predicted: “You’re going to get your people killed.” Once again, she

was unmoved. If the first wave of Nashville Freedom Riders were to die, she

calmly informed him, “then others will follow them.”

This first encounter with Nash left Seigenthaler a bit shaken, but, with

Robert Kennedy and Burke Marshall waiting expectantly for a quick resolu-

tion to the Nashville crisis, he was not about to give up. On Tuesday morn-

ing John Kennedy was en route to Canada for a two-day visit, and Seigenthaler

knew that his superiors expected him to clean up the mess in Nashville be-

fore the president’s return. Throughout the morning—before boarding a

plane for Birmingham—he placed call after call to friends and contacts in

Nashville, imploring them to do whatever they could to deter the would-be

Freedom Riders’ plans. By midafternoon, this campaign—along with the

growing concern among NCLC ministers, the students’ parents, and others

who had seen press reports of the violence in Birmingham—began to take its

toll on the small group of activists meeting at the First Baptist Church. Work-

ing out the details of the Ride—especially finding enough money to pay for

bus tickets—was proving to be more difficult than the students had antici-

pated, and the frequent interruptions by frightened relatives and other nay-

sayers added a heavy burden to an already difficult enterprise. With the

exception of John Lee Copeland, Grady Donald, C. T. Vivian, and J. Metz

Rollins, four combative and fearless ministers who had won the respect of

the students with their willingness to join the Nashville sit-ins, the NCLC

members who drifted in and out of the central committee deliberations coun-

seled patience. “As always,” Lewis recalled, “there was caution and resistance

from several of the older NCLC members taking part in our meetings. We

needed their support, at least in terms of money, and they were using that as

a lever for their position.”

The generational struggle reached a climax that evening when the stu-

dents met with the NCLC’s executive board. As students and ministers alike

strained to keep their emotions in check and to remember that they were all

part of the same movement, Nash announced that the committee planned to

send Freedom Riders to Alabama within twenty-four hours. All they needed

was a few hundred dollars from the NCLC, but she assured the board that

even if the money did not materialize, the students would find some way to

resume the Freedom Ride. When it became clear that virtually all of the

184 Freedom Riders

student leaders shared Nash’s determination to follow through with the Ride,

the NCLC executive board, by a vote of nine to one, reluctantly authorized

a nine-hundred-dollar check to fund the project. But they did so knowing

that the students could not cash the check without two signatures. Since only

one board officer was available to sign the check at the meeting, the NCLC

leaders went home with some hope that the Freedom Ride would be delayed

at least a day and that there was still time for the students to come to their

senses. This hope was soon dashed, however, when a local “numbers man”

agreed to cash the check despite the missing signature, proving, as one of the

students later put it, that “there’s no price tag on freedom.”

With the funds safely in hand, an elated Nash telephoned Fred

Shuttlesworth in Birmingham to let him know that a new batch of Freedom

Riders would soon be on their way. Prior to this point, Shuttlesworth had

heard only vague rumblings that something was afoot in Nashville, so he was

more than a little surprised when Nash informed him that the Freedom Rid-

ers might be coming to Birmingham as early as the next morning. “The stu-

dents have decided that we can’t let violence overcome,” she declared. “We

are going to come into Birmingham to continue the Freedom Ride.” In-

trigued, but not sure that the Nashville students knew what they were get-

ting themselves into, Shuttlesworth responded sternly: “Young lady, do you

know that the Freedom Riders were almost killed here?” Nash assured him

that she did, adding: “That’s exactly why the ride must not be stopped. If

they stop us with violence, the movement is dead. We’re coming. We just

want to know if you can meet us.” After he agreed, she promised to call back

with further details.

The next step was to select the students who would actually participate

in the Ride. At a late-night meeting, the central committee calculated that it

had enough funds to support ten Freedom Riders, but the gathering mo-

mentum of the previous two days had produced far more than ten volun-

teers. While the entire committee discussed the possible choices, it was agreed

that Bevel, as the temporary chairman, would have the final say as to who

would board the buses on Wednesday morning. Somewhat surprisingly,

Bevel’s ten choices did not include Nash, who was deemed too crucial to the

entire operation to be placed in jeopardy, or himself. As Bevel explained,

rather lamely to some, he had already promised a close friend that he would

drive to New York to pick up a load of furniture. If there were later Freedom

Rides, he would be eager to join them, but he would not be available for at

least a week. Trying to avoid a split and realizing that the eccentric Bevel was

too stubborn to change his plans, Nash and others did their best to conceal

their disapproval. With only a few hours to go before the Riders’ departure,

it was essential to maintain a solid front. Besides, everyone agreed that Bevel’s

selections were all good choices. While there was disappointment among the

volunteers who had not been chosen, even they were consoled by the likely

Get on Board, Little Children 185

prospect that a second wave of Nashville Freedom Riders would be dispatched

later in the week.

The chosen included two whites—Jim Zwerg and Salynn McCollum—

and eight blacks: John Lewis, William Barbee, Paul Brooks, Charles Butler,

Allen Cason, Bill Harbour, Catherine Burks, and Lucretia Collins. Zwerg

was a twenty-one-year-old exchange student from Wisconsin who had joined

the Lawson workshops and the theater stand-ins soon after his arrival at Fisk

in early 1961; preparing for a career as a Congregational minister, he had

grown close to Lewis in the months leading up to the Freedom Ride.

McCollum, also twenty-one, was a transplanted upstate New Yorker attend-

ing George Peabody College; active in the sit-in movement, she would later

work for SNCC in Atlanta. Barbee, nineteen, was a theology student at Ameri-

can Baptist Theological Seminary, as was Brooks, a twenty-two-year-old East

St. Louis, Illinois, native who had become one of Nashville’s most outspoken

activists.

The remaining five Riders were all students at Tennessee Agricultural

and Industrial (A&I) State University, an all-black public institution that had

recently gained fame as the home campus of Olympic track star Wilma

Rudolph. Tennessee State, as the university was commonly known, had also

provided the Nashville Movement with many of its most committed partici-

pants. Butler was a twenty-year-old sophomore from Charleston, South Caro-

lina, and Cason was a bookish nineteen-year-old freshman from Orlando,

Florida, who insisted on taking his typewriter on the Freedom Ride. Harbour,

also nineteen, was from Piedmont, Alabama, where his father worked in a

yarn factory. Like fellow Alabamian John Lewis, Harbour was the first mem-

ber of his family to go to college, and earlier in the year he and Lewis had

struck up a friendship during a long bus ride to the jail-in rally in Rock Hill,

South Carolina. Burks was an outgoing and vivacious Birmingham native,

who, like Nash, posed for Jet magazine. A twenty-one-year-old senior, she

would marry fellow Freedom Rider Paul Brooks later in the year. Collins,

who had lived on an army base in El Paso, Texas, before coming to Nash-

ville, was also a twenty-one-year-old in her last semester at Tennessee State.

Tall and strikingly attractive, with a soft voice that masked a steely determi-

nation to confront the white supremacist power structure, she always seemed

to be on the front lines of the local freedom struggle. While the ten Riders

represented a range of personalities and class backgrounds, all were seasoned

veterans of the Nashville Movement. None had yet reached the age of twenty-

three.

Once the lineup of Freedom Riders was set, Nash placed a call to

Shuttlesworth. This time much of their conversation was relayed in a prear-

ranged code. Realizing that his phone had been tapped by local police, the

Birmingham minister had worked out a set of coded messages related to, of

all things, poultry. “Roosters” substituted for male Freedom Riders, “hens”

for female Riders, “pullets” for students, and so on. What the eavesdropping