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

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

186 Freedom Riders

police thought of all this can only be imagined, but when Nash called

Shuttlesworth again on Wednesday morning to tell him “the chickens are

boxed,” he knew that the Freedom Riders were on their way.

The decision to put the Riders on an early-morning Greyhound reflected

the students’ determination to seize the moment. “As far as I was concerned,”

Lewis later insisted, “it was time to go. . . . Time was wasting. This was a

crisis, and we needed to act.” Unfortunately, as Lewis realized all too well,

acting with such haste left the Riders and their families with little time to

prepare for what was about to unfold. After the steering committee broke up

around 10:00

P.M., many of those chosen to participate in the Ride made

emotional calls to friends and relatives, most of whom were shocked to learn

that someone they knew and cared about would soon be at risk. Some of the

students notified teachers and deans that they weren’t sure they would be

around to take final exams or finish the semester. Others, in what was be-

coming a movement tradition, composed last-minute wills or letters to loved

ones. Several solemnly handed Nash sealed letters “to be mailed if they

were killed.” “We thought some of us would be killed,” Collins explained

years later. “We certainly thought that some, if not all of us, would be

severely injured.”

While all of this was going on, Nash was busy placing calls to SNCC and

SCLC leaders in Atlanta, and to Justice Department officials in Washington,

who pleaded with her to cancel the Ride. Unmoved, she placed a final call to

Shuttlesworth just before dawn. The shipment of ten “chickens”—seven

“roosters” and three “hens”—was scheduled to leave Nashville at 6:45

A.M.,

she reported, and would arrive in Birmingham by late morning. Responding

in code, Shuttlesworth promised that he would be at the bus station to accept

the shipment. As Shuttlesworth later explained, the code was designed to

hide the details of the operation, not the operation itself. He wanted Bull

Connor and the Birmingham police to know that the Riders were coming.

Whatever else happened, he did not want a repeat of the Mother’s Day mas-

sacre, when the absence of police protection nearly got the CORE Freedom

Riders killed. Accordingly, he sent an early-morning telegram to Connor

informing him that the Birmingham police would soon be given a second

chance to protect the constitutional rights of visiting Freedom Riders. Sus-

pecting a trick, Connor asked his daughter Dora Jean to phone Shuttlesworth’s

house to see if the information in the telegram was true. Pretending to be a

sympathetic white liberal, she was able to confirm that a new Freedom Ride

was indeed imminent.

SHUTTLESWORTH ALSO ALERTED THE PRESS that the Freedom Riders were com-

ing, but by that time the “freedom bus” had already left the Nashville termi-

nal. When the students boarded the bus there were no reporters present, and

neither the bus driver—E. S. Lane—nor any of the other passengers had any

idea that a new Freedom Ride had begun. Nash and Lewis, the designated

Get on Board, Little Children 187

leader on the bus, had counseled the students to behave like normal passen-

gers and to avoid any overt challenges to Jim Crow during the Nashville-to-

Birmingham run. If all went well, the actual Freedom Ride would begin later

in the day when they boarded the bus to Montgomery. But all did not go

well. Salynn McCollum, the only white female Rider, missed the bus, al-

though after a frantic seventy-mile car chase she managed to join the other

Riders when the bus stopped at Pulaski, a small town in south central Ten-

nessee that had served as the birthplace of the original Ku Klux Klan in

1866. With McCollum safely on board, the bus crossed the Alabama line

without incident by midmorning. The only hint of trouble was the impa-

tience of Jim Zwerg and Paul Brooks, who insisted on sitting as a conspicu-

ously interracial duo near the front of the bus. Somewhat surprisingly,

according to Lewis, “no one, not the white passengers nor the driver” seemed

to object to this seating arrangement. “It was not until we reached the Bir-

mingham city limits, two hundred miles south of Nashville, that the trouble

began,” he recalled.

Waiting at the city line were several police cars and a boarding party of

police officers who promptly arrested Zwerg and Brooks for violating Ala-

bama law. The officers then checked all of the passengers’ tickets, revealing

that nine passengers held identical tickets marked Nashville–Birmingham–

Montgomery–Jackson–New Orleans. The only Freedom Rider to escape the

dragnet was McCollum, who had purchased her ticket in Pulaski. Confident

that he had apprehended a band of agitators, the officer in charge ordered

the driver to head for the Birmingham Greyhound terminal under police

escort. The bus arrived at the terminal at 12:15, too late for the Riders to be

transferred to the noon bus to Montgomery. But a late arrival was the least of

the Riders’ problems. At the terminal, the police temporarily sealed the bus,

taping newspaper over the windows to conceal what was going on inside.

After reexamining each passenger’s ticket before letting anyone off, the po-

lice maintained an armed guard over the seven remaining “suspects.” By this

time Zwerg and Brooks had already been carted off to the city jail, and

McCollum, avoiding identification as a Freedom Rider, had disembarked with

the other passengers. Rushing undetected through the crowd, she called Nash

from a pay phone. Trying not to panic, Nash immediately phoned Burke

Marshall in Washington. Why, she asked, were the Freedom Riders being

forcibly detained by the Birmingham police? Caught off guard, Marshall prom-

ised to investigate, but he couldn’t resist reminding Nash that she and the

Nashville students had been warned that Birmingham was a dangerous place.

As news of the Freedom Riders’ arrival spread, a large crowd began to

gather at the terminal, providing the police with a rationale for protective

custody. The only way to safeguard the Riders’ safety, the officer in charge

insisted, was to keep them on board. For more than an hour, the Riders

pleaded with the police to respect their constitutional rights, but whenever

one of them made a move for the door, a billy-club-wielding officer blocked

188 Freedom Riders

the aisle. The only place the Riders were likely to go, one guard suggested,

was back to the Tennessee line with a police escort. Outside of the bus, the

press was being told that the Riders were being detained so that they could

be safely transferred to the three o’clock bus to Montgomery. At one point,

the police actually allowed the Riders’ luggage to be transferred to the Mont-

gomery bus. But a telephoned bomb threat and the driver’s insistence that

the Montgomery-bound Greyhound would not move from its bay if the Free-

dom Riders were permitted to board ended any chance that they would actu-

ally leave at three.

In the meantime, Shuttlesworth, accompanied by two aides and Emory

Jackson of the Birmingham World, was trying to find out what was going on.

Arriving at the terminal just before noon, he managed to have a few guarded

words with McCollum, but there wasn’t much he could do until the Riders

were allowed to leave the bus. Finally, at five minutes after four, Police Chief

Jamie Moore shepherded the Riders through two rows of police officers and

into the terminal building. With the crowd straining to get a piece of them,

the seven students made their way to the white waiting room, where they

were welcomed by McCollum and a relieved and defiant Shuttlesworth. Ig-

noring Moore’s warning that interracial mingling would incite the crowd,

Shuttlesworth led the Riders, white and black, to the terminal’s whites-only

restaurant, but the door was locked. Cordoned off by the police, the Riders

retreated to the terminal’s white restrooms, which, to their relief, were open.

The Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth (standing with arm extended) offers counsel

to Nashville Freedom Riders (seated, from left to right) Charles Butler, Catherine

Burks, Lucretia Collins, and Salynn McCollum in the white waiting room at

the Birmingham Greyhound bus station, Wednesday afternoon, May 17, 1961.

The man standing on the right wearing a coat and tie is the Reverend Nelson

Smith, a Birmingham ACMHR leader. (Courtesy of the Nashville Tennessean)

Get on Board, Little Children 189

Preoccupied with the surging crowd, the police made no move to prevent

this historic desecration of segregated toilets. Later, back in the waiting room,

Shuttlesworth and the Riders celebrated their small victory with round after

round of freedom songs. Seemingly unfazed by either the police or the pro-

testers, they invited reporters and other onlookers to join them on the next

“freedom bus” to Montgomery.

As the drama at the Greyhound station unfolded, the Birmingham

police—and Alabama officials in general—found themselves in a delicate po-

sition. Simultaneously restraining the crowd and intimidating the Freedom

Riders was turning out to be a difficult proposition, especially with the press

looking on. Everyone in a position of authority, from Governor Patterson to

Chief Moore, had been under intense scrutiny since Sunday afternoon, and

it was becoming increasingly obvious in the wake of the Mother’s Day riot

that neither Birmingham nor Alabama could afford another round of mob

violence and bloodshed. Indeed, on Tuesday, in the face of mounting criti-

cism, the Birmingham police had made a show of arresting Melvin Dove,

Jesse Thomas Faggard, and his son Jesse Oliver Faggard—three Tarrant City

Klansmen involved in the beating of George Webb. Associates of Dr. Edward

Fields, the National States Rights Party leader who defied the Birmingham

police order to keep his followers away from the terminal area on Sunday

afternoon, the three men were clearly identifiable in the Langston photo-

graph that appeared on the front page of the Birmingham Post-Herald on

Monday morning. Other assailants, including several Birmingham Klansmen,

could also be identified from the photograph, but the police conveniently

limited the initial arrests to the three suburban “outsiders” from Tarrant

City. The token prosecution of Dove and the Faggards, combined with the

later arrests of Howard Thurston Edwards, an Irondale Klansman who can

be seen wielding a lead pipe in the photograph, and Herschel Acker, a Klans-

man from Rome, Georgia, took at least some of the pressure off of the Bir-

mingham police, countering the charge that the riot was the result of collusion

between local vigilantes and public officials. In the end, the Tarrant City

Klansmen escaped with nothing more than misdemeanor disorderly conduct

convictions, small fines, and brief jail terms. Acker and Edwards faced the

more serious charge of assault with intent to murder, but both men ulti-

mately walked away without serving a day in prison—Acker after being ac-

quitted by an all-white jury in November, and Edwards after three separate

trials ended with hung juries.

This calculated blend of defiance and legal pretense was on full display

as state and local officials tried to outmaneuver the Nashville Riders on May

17. Ignoring the larger issue of constitutional rights, Alabama authorities

restored “law and order” by branding the Tennessee students as troublemak-

ers and criminals. In a midafternoon statement to the press, an exasperated

Governor John Patterson declared that no one could “guarantee the safety of

fools.” And a few minutes later, just as the Riders were contemplating a move

190 Freedom Riders

to the loading platform where the five o’clock

bus to Montgomery was scheduled to depart,

Bull Connor strode into the terminal waiting

room. Lewis later claimed that he knew who

Connor was, even “though I’d never seen him

before in my life. He was short, heavy with big

ears and a fleshy face. He wore a suit, his white

hair was slicked straight back above his forehead,

and his eyes were framed by a pair of black,

horned-rimmed glasses.” At first Connor seemed

content to mingle with the police guards, but as

soon as the Riders began to move toward the

loading platform he stepped in and ordered his

officers to place the unwanted visitors from

Nashville in “protective custody.” Pointing to

the unruly crowd, he assured the students that

he was arresting them for their “own protection.”

When Shuttlesworth stepped forward to object,

Connor directed Chief Moore to arrest him for

interfering with and refusing to obey a police

officer. All nine “agitators” were then led to a

line of waiting paddy wagons that whisked them off to Birmingham’s notori-

ous Southside jail.

At the jail, guards separated the detainees by gender. As the only white

female, McCollum was placed in a special facility, and Collins and Burks

were put in a cell with several other black women. With the exception of

Shuttlesworth, all of the men ended up in a dark and crowded cell that Lewis

likened to a dungeon: “It had no mattresses or beds, nothing to sit on at all,

just a concrete floor.” At ten o’clock Shuttlesworth was released on bond, but

the other prisoners remained in jail, even though no formal charges had been

brought against them. Isolated from the outside world with no access to the

press—or to Nash, who was desperately trying to find out what had hap-

pened to them—Lewis and his cellmates adopted a strategy of Gandhian non-

cooperation. Although they had not eaten since morning, the students defiantly

refused to eat or drink anything. And, since sleeping under these conditions

was difficult at best, they decided to pass the time singing freedom songs, a

morale booster that had served them well during the Nashville sit-ins. After

all, they informed the guards, it was May 17—the seventh anniversary of Brown,

a day worth celebrating in or out of jail. “We went on singing,” Lewis later

confessed, “both to keep our spirits up and—to be honest—because we knew

that neither Bull Connor nor his guards could stand it.”

While the Nashville students were singing and shouting their way into

Bull’s doghouse, CORE was orchestrating a drama of its own in more than a

score of cities and college towns across the nation. With the help of the

Birmingham commissioner of

public safety Theophilus Eugene

“Bull” Connor, 1963. (Photograph

by Bob Adelman, Magnum)

Get on Board, Little Children 191

Freedom Riders Hank Thomas and Jim Peck picket the New York Port Authority

bus terminal, May 17, 1961. (Bettmann-CORBIS)

192 Freedom Riders

National Student Association and several labor unions, CORE chapters si-

multaneously commemorated the May 17 anniversary of the Brown decision

and protested the violence in Alabama by setting up picket lines in front of

bus terminals from Boston to Los Angeles. In the South the demonstrations

were limited to small groups of college students in Nashville, Chapel Hill,

Austin, and Lynchburg, but in several Northern cities picket lines stretched

around the block. The largest demonstration took place in New York, where

more than two thousand people gave up their lunch hour to march in front of

the Port Authority bus terminal. Walking at the head of the New York picket

line were Jim Peck and Hank Thomas, who had flown in from New Orleans

the night before. Carrying signs declaring that “segregation is morally wrong,”

and that they were victims “of an attempt at lynching by hoodlums in Anniston,

Ala.,” Peck and Thomas later joined the activist author Lillian Smith for an

emotional postmarch press conference. Straining to keep her composure,

Smith offered Peck’s bruised and bandaged face as proof that “the dominant

group in Alabama seems to care more for their color than they care for the

survival of our nation,” adding: “They don’t believe much in the dignity and

freedom of all men, their belief is in white supremacy.”

Wednesday was also an emotional day in New Orleans, where most of the

CORE Freedom Riders attended a private banquet followed by a mass meet-

ing at the New Zion Baptist Church. Frances Bergman was still too shaken to

attend, Genevieve Hughes was in a New Orleans hospital ward recovering

from smoke inhalation and nervous exhaustion, and Jerry Moore was in New

York attending his grandfather’s funeral. But Carey and the rest of the Riders,

with the exception of the Port Authority picketers Peck and Thomas, were on

hand to help their New Orleans hosts commemorate the judicial death of Jim

Crow education. With Rudy Lombard, the chair of New Orleans CORE, serv-

ing as master of ceremonies, and with CORE stalwart and sit-in leader Jerome

Smith making a surprise appearance after his release from jail earlier in the

day, the overflow crowd of fifteen hundred at New Zion listened with rapt

attention for more than two hours as, one by one, the “survivors” of the Ala-

bama Freedom Ride came forward to say a few words. After Blankenheim and

Bigelow described the bus-burning scene in Anniston, and Person and Bergman

described the Birmingham riot, Ben Cox nearly brought down the house when

he urged the audience to stage “sit-ins, kneel-ins, vote-ins, ride-ins, motor-ins,

swim-ins, bury-ins, and even marry-ins.” In a similar vein, Carey explained

that the Freedom Ride “was also meant to challenge you, to ask you, ‘please

don’t segregate yourselves.’ ” According to Moses Newson, the Baltimore Afro-

American correspondent who had been with the Riders for more than a week,

the crowd “roared approval” of Carey’s admonition, providing a fitting climax

to CORE’s campaign to arouse the black masses by exposing “Deep South

lawlessness.” At the rally’s end, New Zion’s pastor, the Reverend Abraham

Lincoln Davis Jr., collected nearly seven hundred dollars in donations, which

Carey gratefully and tearfully accepted on CORE’s behalf.

Get on Board, Little Children 193

IGHT HUNDRED MILES TO THE NORTH, the mood was a bit more somber as

Justice Department officials puzzled over how to deal with the latest crisis in

Alabama. At a Wednesday night dinner party hosted by Birmingham native

Louis Oberdorfer, the head of the department’s tax division, the conversa-

tion inevitably turned to the legal and political dilemmas posed by the new

Freedom Ride. Two of Oberdorfer’s guests, Birmingham attorney Douglas

Arrant and Deputy Attorney General Byron “Whizzer” White, a former class-

mate of Oberdorfer’s at Yale Law School and a future Supreme Court jus-

tice, had good reason to turn their attention to the developing situation in

Alabama. Arrant voiced concerns that a full-scale race war was brewing in his

hometown, and White was scheduled to meet with Burke Marshall on Thurs-

day morning to discuss the Kennedy administration’s response to the recent

arrests and Governor Patterson’s apparent refusal to guarantee the Freedom

Riders’ safety. When White remarked that the administration had “to get

those people out of there and keep them moving somehow,” and that the use

of federal soldiers might be the only way to do it, Oberdorfer suggested the

politically more palatable alternative of a civilian force made up of federal

marshals. By relying on a limited number of marshals, the administration

could protect the Riders and also continue to disavow any plan of imposing a

second military Reconstruction on the South. A political moderate, White

was willing to consider any plan that promised to avoid the heightened ten-

sions that had plagued Eisenhower’s handling of the Little Rock crisis. By

the end of the evening, the three men had roughed out a proposal to send

several dozen marshals to Alabama.

The next morning, as the Nashville students completed their first night

in jail, White met with Marshall and Robert Kennedy, who decided to inter-

rupt his brother’s breakfast with an emergency meeting. With the president

still in his pajamas, the attorney general launched into an impromptu brief-

ing on the deteriorating situation in Birmingham. A new group of Freedom

Riders was in jail and conducting a hunger strike, the bus company was de-

manding police protection for any bus carrying Freedom Riders, and John

Patterson was waffling on his earlier pledge to provide the Riders with safe

passage through the state. The reports from John Seigenthaler and John Doar,

the most reliable federal officials on the scene in Alabama, were increasingly

discouraging. Seigenthaler’s plea for the students’ release had gotten nowhere.

“Well, sonny boy,” Connor had drawled, “they violated the law, so they’re

going to have to pay the price. You just tell all your friends up in Washington

that.” In sum, the crisis that seemingly had been resolved just before the

president’s departure for Ottawa had reappeared with a vengeance. Clearly,

something had to be done before the situation got completely out of control.

As the president nodded in agreement, his younger brother proceeded

to unveil a tentative plan for federal intervention that stopped short of mili-

tary engagement. White then filled in the details, describing potential sources

of federal paramilitary personnel such as the U.S. Marshal Service, the Border

194 Freedom Riders

Patrol, the Bureau of Prisons, and the revenue agents of the Bureau of Alco-

hol, Tobacco, and Firearms. Under White’s plan the army would only be

used as a means of transport and logistical coordination, and, if all went well,

even this limited deployment would prove unnecessary. The idea was to cre-

ate a credible force that would convince Patterson that the threat of federal

intervention was real. Once the governor realized that federal marshals and

army support staff were poised to invade Alabama, White reasoned, he would

have little choice but to use the state’s police power to protect the Freedom

Riders. While no one could be certain that the bluff would work, in all like-

lihood the proposed peacekeeping force would never actually be used.

With this reassurance, and with the president still sitting in front of his

uneaten breakfast, White gave way to Marshall, who outlined the legal re-

quirements and ramifications of authorizing the use of a federal peacekeep-

ing force in Alabama. According to Marshall, using the army or the National

Guard would require a presidential proclamation, but the civilian alternative

proposed by White could be legalized with a simple note to the attorney

general. And since federal law did not require public notification of presi-

dential involvement, the president retained the option of distancing himself

from the decision to send in the marshals. As added insurance, the Justice

Department also planned to seek two federal court injunctions, one against

the Alabama Klansmen threatening the Freedom Riders and a second order-

ing the local police to do whatever was necessary to protect the Riders. Judge

Frank Johnson Jr., Marshall insisted, could be trusted to issue the necessary

injunctions. When this would occur, if ever, depended on the pace of events

in Alabama, but the legal basis for limited federal intervention was secure.

John Kennedy’s preference, as he soon made clear, was to avoid the use

of even a civilian federal force; somehow Patterson had to be coaxed into

doing the right thing and lifting the burden from the Kennedy brothers’

shoulders. To this end, he asked the White House operator to call Patterson’s

office. Confident that his “old friend” and political ally would listen to rea-

son if the personal touch were administered, he was surprised and a bit miffed

when Patterson dodged his call. The governor, according to his secretary in

Montgomery, was away on a fishing trip in the Gulf of Mexico and could not

be reached by phone. Kennedy, who suspected otherwise, now realized what

he was up against. Eisenhower had been forced to deal with Orval Faubus,

and now four years later Patterson seemed to be following the same path of

states’-rights demagoguery. Reluctantly Kennedy ordered White and Marshall

to begin preparations for sending the marshals to Alabama. Still hoping to

avoid federal intervention, he counseled his aides to proceed as discreetly as

possible without mentioning his involvement. But he was determined to be

ready if the crisis in Alabama exploded.

John Kennedy was not the only leader mapping strategy on that fateful

Thursday morning. Back at the Bethel parsonage after his four-hour stint

behind bars, Fred Shuttlesworth convened a meeting of SCLC leaders to

Get on Board, Little Children 195

decide what to do about the jailed Freedom Riders and the slow pace of

desegregation in Birmingham. Joining him were SCLC executive director

Wyatt Tee Walker, Joseph Lowery from Mobile, J. Metz Rollins from Nash-

ville, and Len Holt, a black lawyer from Norfolk, Virginia, who had agreed

to represent the Nashville students after Arthur Shores, Birmingham’s most

prominent black lawyer, and other local NAACP attorneys made it clear that

they disapproved of the Freedom Ride. To Shuttlesworth’s dismay, the visit-

ing SCLC leaders, with the exception of Rollins, shared many of Shores’s

concerns about the nature and timing of the Freedom Riders’ campaign.

Speaking for Martin Luther King and the SCLC executive committee, Walker

suggested that it might be best for all concerned if Shuttlesworth could work

out a compromise similar to the one that King had recently endorsed in At-

lanta. The tentative agreement there called for a cessation of sit-ins and other

protests once city leaders agreed to desegregate lunch counters and other

public accommodations at the same time that the public schools were deseg-

regated. After listening politely to the suggestion that this might work in

Birmingham, Shuttlesworth did his best to bury the idea. Unwilling to post-

pone the day of reckoning, he eventually convinced his reluctant colleagues

to stand behind the students. As he told the press later in the day: “These

students came here to ride out on a regularly scheduled bus and that’s what

they still hope to do. That is our irrevocable position. The challenge has to

be made.” Shuttlesworth chose his words carefully, realizing that Holt had

already muddied the waters during negotiations with the police department

on Wednesday evening by suggesting that the students might accept alterna-

tive means of leaving the city. Concerned that Connor and other local white

leaders had been given the wrong impression, Shuttlesworth ordered Holt to

go back to the police with the clear message that “we are not going anyplace

until we ride out on the bus.”

By Thursday afternoon, at least one thing was already clear: Bull Connor

had decided to use the Freedom Rider crisis to discredit both Shuttlesworth

and the local civil rights struggle. Brandishing the minister’s telegram an-

nouncing the arrival of the outside agitators from Nashville, Connor claimed

that Shuttlesworth had masterminded a conspiracy to breach the peace. “As

early as 9 a.m.,” Connor declared, “he began precipitating trouble by making

statements to newspapers and radio stations and sending telegrams and oth-

erwise warning people.” This was proof, he insisted, that Shuttlesworth was

a rabble-rouser who deserved prosecution for inciting a riot. The editors of

the Birmingham News, among others, agreed, arguing in a special front-page

editorial that Shuttlesworth’s actions were equivalent to shouting “fire” in a

crowded auditorium.

Shuttlesworth already faced charges of interfering with the Freedom

Riders’ arrests, and in a brief but raucous trial on Thursday evening he was

convicted. Connor, on hand to watch his nemesis squirm, appeared smug as

Shuttlesworth stood in the dock, but any thought that the troublesome