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

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336 Freedom Riders

In many Northern communities, religious authorities were the Freedom

Riders’ most vocal supporters, but there was also considerable support among

secular leaders, especially among labor union officials, academic intellectu-

als, and liberal politicians such as New York governor Nelson Rockefeller.

Speaking at a CORE rally in Washington in mid-June, United Auto Work-

ers leader Victor Reuther characterized the Freedom Riders as “America’s

Peace Corps to America,” and several other noted speakers, including the

novelist James Baldwin, echoed his praise for the young idealists languishing

in Mississippi jails. “I don’t see how we can blame these young people,”

Rockefeller reasoned in a conversation with reporters. “In fact, I think we

can’t help but admire them.”

In the June 18 issue of the New York Times Magazine, Eric Goldman, a

prominent Princeton University historian, defended the Freedom Riders’

use of direct action by placing it in historical context. “The buses that have

been carrying the Freedom Riders into the South,” Goldman argued, “have

confronted Americans with an old and endlessly tortuous problem: How do

you achieve genuine social progress in a democracy? Is it better simply to

pass the laws and let them grind away or should the legal processes be supple-

mented, and run ahead of, by the fire of dramatic agitation and direct ac-

tion?” Goldman’s answer, grounded in an understanding of successful reform

movements such as abolitionism and woman’s suffrage, was that real progress

frequently comes from a combination of “moderation and agitation.” While

he acknowledged that not all agitation is productive, he concluded that the

“Freedom Riders and the whole present-day movement of passive resistance

seem likely to prove one of those agitations which genuinely pushes ahead

the cause.” Citing the Riders’ identification with a rising international spirit

of freedom and democracy, he argued that “the Freedom Riders not only

have behind them a solid foundation; they also represent the clear trend of

affairs. . . . Plainly, incontestably, the Freedom Riders have the great strength

of riding with history.”

Eugene Rostow—the dean of the Yale Law School and brother of Walt

Rostow, one of John Kennedy’s leading economic advisors—expressed simi-

lar sentiments in the June 22 issue of the Reporter. In a provocative essay

entitled “The Freedom Riders and the Future,” Rostow challenged the popular

argument, common even “among Northern liberals,” that the Freedom Rid-

ers were “provocative intruders, needlessly agitating a situation already well

on its way to solution.” “This criticism is mistaken, for basic reasons,” he

declared. “First, the South is not making rapid progress in the civil rights

field. Second, judicious intervention from outside is needed now, as it has

always been needed, to help Southerners who believe in enforcing the Con-

stitution to overcome the resistance of those who do not. Indeed, outside

help is now more needed than ever in the South, for the Ku Klux spirit has

not been more active or more effective since Reconstruction days.” Saving

his most provocative argument for last, Rostow noted a “third reason why

Make Me a Captive, Lord 337

this criticism of the Freedom Riders is unconvincing. By openly challenging

the final bastion of segregation in the Deep South, the Freedom Riders chose

the most dramatic theater in the struggle for civil rights. But their protest

was national, not regional. It was addressed as much to New York and Chi-

cago as to Mississippi.”

Like Goldman, Rostow went on to point out that the significance of the

Freedom Rides transcended not only regional but national borders. Never-

theless, he rejected the argument, sometimes advanced in less than subtle

terms by the State Department, that the primary objective of the civil rights

struggle was or should be “to please public opinion in Africa and Asia and

score a point in the cold war.” “We are struggling to accomplish these social

changes,” Rostow insisted, “because we know they are right.” Two days after

Rostow’s article appeared, Edward R. Murrow made the same point in a cover

letter introducing a United States Information Agency report on the Free-

dom Rider crisis’s “harmful effect” on America’s international image. “I think

it would be a mistake to base our action against discrimination mainly on the

ground that our image abroad is being hurt,” wrote Murrow. “We should

attack this problem because it is right that we should do so. To do otherwise,

whatever the overseas reaction might be, would violate the very essence of

what our country stands for.” Whether Murrow’s lofty rhetoric represented

the views of the State Department or the White House remained to be seen,

but the reiteration of Rostow’s moral stance was regarded as a hopeful sign

by FRCC leaders and other movement activists.

Two weeks earlier Vice President Lyndon Johnson, in a commencement

address at Howard University, had condemned “mob rule” and affirmed the

administration’s commitment to “the fundamental belief that before the law

all stand equal and all are entitled to their full Constitutional rights, regard-

less of race, creed, color, or section of birth.” Yet he, like Murrow, had stopped

short of an explicit endorsement of the Freedom Rides. Despite the pres-

sures of world opinion, no one within the administration was willing to go as

far as Ralph Bunche, the celebrated black diplomat, Nobel Peace Prize lau-

reate, and undersecretary of the United Nations, who told reporters: “I have

great sympathy for the Freedom Riders, because in effect I have been a free-

dom rider all my life.” According to Bunche, he “had never respected ‘col-

ored’ signs on restaurants and rest rooms in the South and had never been

challenged.”

Outside the narrow world of movement activists and black diplomats,

forthright endorsements of nonviolent direct action were rare, even in the

North. And they were rarer still in the white South, where support for the

Freedom Rides was limited to the goal of racial equality and almost always

stopped short of encouraging direct action. One of the few exceptions was

Ralph McGill, the liberal editor of the Atlanta Constitution. Speaking to a

gathering of editors and media union officials in Manhattan on June 22,

McGill simultaneously defended the Freedom Riders and castigated white

338 Freedom Riders

segregationists, who “reveal the folly of those who, in our times, are trying to

keep the past upon a throne.” “The real agitators,” he declared, “are the

states involved,” especially those that tolerate political demagoguery and mob

action. In retrospect McGill’s sentiments may seem self-evident, but at the

time his open sympathy for the Freedom Riders was tantamount to treason

in most of the white South. In other areas of the nation, there was broader

support for direct action, but even outside the South, Freedom Rider sup-

porters were in the minority.

According to a June 21 Gallup Poll, only 63 percent of those polled re-

sponded that they were familiar with the activities of the Freedom Riders;

and of that group, 24 percent approved of the Rides, 64 percent disapproved,

and 12 percent had no opinion. By contrast, 70 percent of the respondents to

a June 18 poll approved of the Kennedy administration’s decision to send

federal marshals to Alabama, with only 13 percent expressing disapproval.

Among Southern respondents the comparable figures were 50 percent ap-

proval and 29 percent disapproval, suggesting that law and order was a pow-

erful national ideal. When asked “Do you think integration should be brought

about gradually or do you think every means should be used to bring it about

in the near future?” only 23 percent favored the “near future” option, as

opposed to 61 percent favoring “gradually,” 7 percent responding “never,”

and 9 percent with no opinion. Even though a solid majority of Americans

supported integrated transportation, Gallup researchers concluded that “many

persons had misgivings about the way in which the Freedom Riders were

attempting to bring an end to segregation in buses, trains and in waiting

rooms, chiefly on the grounds that it was causing too much trouble. The

public has also been found to be pessimistic about the racial outlook in the

South in the year ahead. As Freedom Riders continue to move into that re-

gion Americans are fearful that racial relations in the South will get worse

rather than better in the next twelve months.” All of this stood in sharp con-

trast to a June 8 Jet magazine reader poll, in which 96 percent of the respon-

dents, presumably almost all black, said yes when asked if the Freedom Rides

should continue. But this simply underscored the wide gulf between black

and white Americans on matters of civil rights strategy.

While the Gallup figures were neither authoritative nor easily interpret-

able, they reinforced the general impression that many whites continued to

resent the Freedom Riders’ disruptive tactics long after the mobs in Anniston

and Birmingham had dispersed. In late June, as the second month of Free-

dom Rides drew to a close, the general public’s acceptance of nonviolent

direct action was still very much in doubt. Indeed, the rift between the atti-

tudes of ordinary citizens and those of movement activists and their religious

and intellectual supporters seemed to be widening.

Even within the movement some leaders had begun to question the ad-

visability of continuing the Rides indefinitely. For some, the strategy of fill-

ing the jails of Mississippi was a dangerous gambit that threatened to

Make Me a Captive, Lord 339

monopolize and squander the broader movement’s energies and funds. With

the Justice Department leaning on the ICC, with the entire administration

pressing for a systemic reorientation toward voting rights, and with the na-

tional and international press losing interest in the crisis, the need for addi-

tional Rides became questionable. As a dramatic construct, the daily arrests

in Jackson and elsewhere were still newsworthy and useful to the movement.

But the nerve-shattering sense of crisis that had followed the confrontations

in Alabama was gone, replaced by the grinding routine of prison life and

legal wrangling. The human dramas being played out in the minds of new

Riders, in Southern courtrooms, and in the cells of Parchman were often

extraordinary and compelling, but for the most part they were only acces-

sible to those directly involved. While almost everyone involved in the free-

dom struggle would eventually recognize the relationship between the

Freedom Rides and the emergence of a powerful movement culture, the sig-

nificance of this connection was not so obvious in the summer of 1961.

In this context of doubt and uncertainty, the Freedom Rider movement—

despite its growing support among religious leaders and intellectuals—nearly

came unraveled during the last week of June. Ironically, the strands of unity

came undone not in Parchman, where the Freedom Riders were withstand-

ing severe physical and psychological strain, but in Nashville, where the Free-

dom Rider movement had been reborn six weeks earlier. The trouble

developed during the annual two-week-long Fisk Race Relations Institute,

where the Freedom Rides were a major topic of discussion. Anticipating the

discussion, FRCC leaders had scheduled a strategy meeting in Nashville to

coincide with the gathering of many of the nation’s most influential black

scholars.

The institute also attracted several reporters, including Claude Sitton, a

Georgia-born New York Times columnist who had been covering the Free-

dom Rides since late May. For three years Sitton had served as the Times’s

primary Southern correspondent, but in the wake of Harrison Salisbury’s

controversial article on Birmingham, his superiors in New York had ordered

him to stay clear of Alabama. At Sitton’s insistence, this order was shelved on

May 21, the day following the riot at the Montgomery Greyhound terminal,

and he rushed from Atlanta to Montgomery to write the first of what would

become almost daily stories on the Freedom Rider crisis. Sitton’s coverage of

the crisis was reliable and comprehensive, and by early June he had assumed

a special position among the journalists writing about the Freedom Rides. As

a Georgian who had known Martin Luther King since 1957, he was espe-

cially close to the leaders of SCLC, who regularly provided him with what

was purported to be inside information on the Freedom Rides and other

movement issues.

For the most part this special access served Sitton well, but on at least

one occasion it led him astray. While covering the Fisk Institute, he held a

series of conversations with various contacts—conversations that convinced

340 Freedom Riders

him that established movement leaders were about to pull the plug on the

Freedom Rides. Even though both Nash and Carey assured him that this was

not the case, Sitton wrote a front-page story that gave the clear impression

that the Freedom Rides were about to end. Under the headline “Negro Lead-

ers Seek Halt in Freedom Ride Testing,” he reported that “powerful forces

within the Negro protest movement against segregation have thrown their

support behind a proposal to de-emphasize the Freedom Rides.” Citing

“sources among the movement’s top leaders,” the article went on to explain

that the change in strategy had been precipitated by a combination of fac-

tors: the Justice Department’s request for an ICC order, the depletion of

movement financial coffers, and the failure of Southern blacks “to volunteer

for the demonstrations.” While Sitton also reported that “considerable sen-

timent still exists among a handful of the more militant student leaders for

continuing the Freedom Rides,” he made it clear that neither he nor anyone

else expected this militant minority to prevail. “Some might ignore any deci-

sion to suspend the activity and carry on independently,” he wrote, but the

general decision to disengage from the Freedom Rides had already been made

and would likely be ratified at an upcoming meeting of the FRCC. The ar-

ticle ended with a parting shot at the FRCC, reporting that “leaders of the

movement were said to feel that the demonstrations had suffered from a lack

of coordination and planning.”

Even though the exact identity of these leaders was never revealed, the

primary source of the story leaked to Sitton was hardly a mystery. As the

Freedom Rides had evolved into a movement priority, some of King’s lieu-

tenants at SCLC had grown increasingly uncomfortable with the emerging

influence of student and secular activists, and with the heightened organiza-

tional profiles of CORE and SNCC. After privately urging King to keep his

distance from the Freedom Rides, they, in effect, decided to force the issue

by planting a story in the nation’s most influential newspaper. At the risk of

exacerbating organizational and generational tensions within the movement,

this strategy represented a calculated attempt to restore SCLC’s regional

dominance. And it almost worked. Immediately following the FRCC meet-

ing on June 24, Bernard Lee, SCLC’s representative at the meeting, told

Sitton that Nash’s statement on the future of the Freedom Rides was mis-

leading. According to Lee, there had been sharp disagreement at the meet-

ing over the continued viability of the Freedom Rides, and the committee’s

next meeting would probably see a decision to suspend the Rides, at least

temporarily.

On Tuesday, June 26, the committee did indeed meet again to recon-

sider the question of continuing the Rides, but the result was hardly what

Lee predicted. Held at a black Masonic hall in Jackson, the four-hour meet-

ing yielded a unanimous decision to continue the Rides indefinitely and with-

out interruption. This time King, Lee, Abernathy, and Walker—who along

with his wife posted bond minutes before the meeting started—represented

Make Me a Captive, Lord 341

SCLC. They were joined by Carey and McCain representing CORE, Sherrod

and Marion Barry of SNCC, and the Nashville Movement’s Bevel and Nash,

who chaired the meeting. Although King was the center of attention and

Carey was the designated liaison to the press, the “kids” did most of the

talking. Taking full advantage of King’s personal commitment to nonviolent

direct action, they talked about the sacrifices being made at Parchman, about

the awakening freedom struggle in Mississippi, and about the gathering mo-

mentum of nonviolent protest across the nation and the world. Predictably,

King quickly concluded that there was no turning back. Indeed, as he lis-

tened to the passionate arguments of Nash and others, whatever reservations

he had about the organization of the Rides suddenly seemed insignificant

and irrelevant to the larger issues at hand. Pledging his support to the ag-

gressive policies spearheaded by CORE and SNCC, he made one of the most

important decisions of his career. Within the movement he alone had the

power to cast the students adrift, but he refused to do so.

Following the close of the meeting, a joyous and almost breathless Carey

informed reporters that there was unanimous agreement among FRCC leaders

that there could be no suspension of the Freedom Rides as long as “segrega-

tion is still a living factor.” When the reporters turned to Sherrod to ask

whether the FRCC planned to step up its recruiting activities among South-

ern blacks, the young SNCC activist replied: “No one can say where the next

people will come from.” Even so, Sherrod’s sly smile suggested that, wher-

ever they came from, future Freedom Riders would descend upon the Jim

Crow South in unprecedented numbers. Moments later, when Carey was

asked about the likelihood of Communist recruits, he deflected the reporter’s

question by insisting that the recruiting centers in Nashville, Atlanta, Mont-

gomery, and New Orleans made a practice of “screening out” all “undesir-

ables.” In the future, as in the past, the Freedom Riders would represent a

cross-section of Americans committed to the nonviolent exercise of “moral

pressure.”

Despite the unfortunate diversion precipitated by Sitton’s pronounce-

ment that the Freedom Rides were all but over, Carey and Sherrod had good

reason to be optimistic. Two days earlier, on June 25, twenty Freedom Riders—

the largest single group to date—had arrived in Jackson by train. Ten of the

Riders were black, nine were women, and fourteen were from California.

Several were Jewish, others were Catholic or Protestant, and still others

were completely secular. The oldest, Marian Kendall, a social worker from

San Leandro, California, was thirty-five. The youngest, Bob Mason, was a

seventeen-year-old high school student from Los Angeles. Among the twenty

Riders arrested, there were nine students, two clerks, a housewife, a painter,

a civil engineer, a social worker, a freelance writer, a teacher, a secretary, a

model, and a professional boxer. In the local press, all were dismissed as

cranks and misfits. In private, though, even the most zealous segregation-

ists must have wondered what was unfolding in the hearts and minds of a

342 Freedom Riders

new generation of Americans. Mississippi, along with much of the nation,

was still rigidly segregated, but intrusions such as the June 25 Freedom Ride

made many white Mississippians feel that their once comfortable world was

shrinking and under siege. And they were right. Despite the misgivings of

politicians and public concern about the implications of direct action, an

impatient vanguard of young Americans had finally brought the struggle for

racial liberation and democratic renewal to the one state widely considered

beyond redemption.

Ain’t Gonna Let No Jail House

Turn Me ’Round

Ain’t gonna let no jail house, Lordy, turn me ’round,

I’m gonna keep on a-walkin’, Lord, keep on a-talkin’, Lord,

Marching up to freedom land.

—1960s freedom song

DIVERSITY WAS THE HALLMARK OF THE FREEDOM RIDES. No previous move-

ment campaign—not even the sit-ins of 1960—had attracted such a variety

of participants. Transcending organizational, regional, and racial boundaries,

Freedom Riders became emblematic symbols of a movement that extolled

the virtues of political inclusion and social equality. While many Freedom

Riders were Southern black college students in their late teens or early twen-

ties, others were white, Northern, or middle-aged. While many were deeply

religious, others were largely or completely secular. Men were in the major-

ity, but more than a quarter of the Riders were women. This diversity, so

fitting for an idealistic cause, was one of the strengths of the Freedom Rider

campaign, one of the reasons why so many men and women were willing to

join the Rides even after it became clear that they were headed for Parchman.

Nevertheless, in the social and political context of Cold War America, diver-

sity was a decidedly mixed blessing. In 1961 the tensions and suspicions that

had given rise to McCarthyism, the Red Scare, and consensus ideology were

still very much alive in the American mainstream. In many communities,

especially in the South, intolerance of difference and unorthodox behavior

was a reflexive reality, and anyone who strayed from the common channels

of national or regional life was subject to intense criticism and even ostra-

cism. Activists of any kind engendered suspicion, but activists such as the

Freedom Riders, many of whom were unconventional even by civil rights

movement standards, inevitably provoked the public’s deepest fears. Even in

344 Freedom Riders

the early going, when the campaign was limited to a small vanguard of CORE

activists, the Freedom Rides encountered a certain amount of criticism. But

once the campaign evolved into a mass movement, the Riders’ individual and

collective vulnerability to charges of social and political subversion became a

serious liability for the entire civil rights movement.

This vulnerability, manifested in both external criticism and internal

conflict, was one of the costs of success. As the scope of the Freedom Rides

expanded, movement leaders lost a measure of control over the recruiting

process and inevitably faced the problem of maintaining cohesion and focus.

Like any movement with hundreds of participants, the Freedom Rides at-

tracted a range of individuals representing a wide spectrum of personalities,

backgrounds, and ideologies. For the most part, these differences did not

pose a serious threat to the common purpose of the Rides, but the personal

histories of individual Riders did provide critics with ammunition that could

be used to discredit the entire movement. Once the Riders were arrested and

identified, investigating and exposing their flawed characters and unsavory

backgrounds became a popular pastime among segregationist politicians and

law enforcement officers. In Mississippi, and to a lesser extent in other Deep

South states, investigators pored over arrest records, college transcripts, and

public statements in an effort to uncover patterns of social and political sub-

version. Presented in daily press installments, these tales of personal infamy,

antisocial behavior, and racial and political conspiracies became an important

part of the Freedom Rider story. In the white Southern version of this story—

and sometimes even in the version propagated by national columnists—the

Freedom Riders were social and political misfits. Some were juvenile delin-

quents, others were beatniks or miscegenationists, and still others were Com-

munist fellow-travelers. Regardless, the clear implication was that all of the

Riders were pathological in some fundamental way.

Though common throughout the South, rhetorical attacks on the Free-

dom Riders reached epic proportions in Mississippi, especially in Jackson. Head-

lines and articles in the Jackson Daily News and the Jackson Clarion-Ledger

routinely referred to the Freedom Riders as “crackpots,” “mixers,” “mix rid-

ers,” “friction riders,” or “freedom raiders,” and local editors and columnists

took advantage of every opportunity to ridicule the individuals and organiza-

tions involved in the movement. Jimmy Ward, a columnist for the Daily News,

excoriated Jim Peck as a “draft-dodger and professional hate monger” and

delighted in quoting a Brookhaven man who coined the phrase “FREE-

DUMB-RIDERS.” After Ward referred to the Riders as “invading CORE

crumbs” in early June, other reporters and editors tried to match his mix of

invective and dismissive humor. On June 16, for example, the Daily News

published an anti-Freedom Rider diatribe written by the conservative syndi-

cated columnist Westbrook Pegler. After interviewing David Myers, a white

Freedom Rider from Ohio incarcerated in the Jackson city jail, Pegler com-

plained “that bands of insipid futilities of the type called bleeding hearts” had

Ain’t Gonna Let No Jail House Turn Me ’Round 345

foolishly invaded “a really fine American city” arousing a “bawling national

uproar of indignation, disgust, pity and shame.” Myers, Pegler reported, “had

sprigs of wispy whiskers and the start of beatnik sideburns” and confessed to

being “a Quaker whose soul suffered at the thought that someone (God, of

necessity) had created a difference between him and his dark brethren.” In a

follow-up article published a week later, Pegler added that Myers and a sec-

ond white Rider, David Fankhauser, “were pallid fellows with pallid voices

and the watery passiveness of the conscientious objector. They wouldn’t fight

anybody for anything, but they didn’t think it wrong of them to affront a

local social system and kick up riots and civil war with painful, even fatal,

results to men and women to them unknown.” Openly questioning their

manhood, he concluded that both men “were negative weaklings who have

hit upon this nuisance as a momentary career.”

The notion that the Freedom Riders were socially maladjusted found

frequent reinforcement in editorials and letters to the editor. To one irate

Jackson segregationist the Freedom Riders were “muddled punks and crack-

pots,” while to a man writing from Missouri they were simply “Northern

Negroes and trash whites.” Indeed, according to Marvin Mobley of Decatur,

Georgia, even the financial backers of the Freedom Riders were social mis-

fits. “These troublemakers seem to have the lush funds in unlimited supply,”

Mobley insisted, “sluiced into their treasuries from Foundations” led by “those

who are in a liquor-cure when not on a psychiatrist’s couch.” Other observ-

ers emphasized the criminality of the Freedom Riders, encouraged by rev-

elations that many of the Riders had been arrested before. Cataloging both

major and minor transgressions, Southern newspapers often portrayed the

Riders as habitual lawbreakers who warranted vigilant surveillance. Though

laughable in retrospect, these charges were serious business to many segre-

gationists, including F. James Dabney, an Eastland, Texas, businessman and

former military intelligence officer who founded an organization called

RAPE—an acronym for “Resist All Pressures Endlessly.” According to

Dabney, it was “about time someone, or some well-organized group, dug

into the background and true purposes of each ‘rider’ and disclose the find-

ings to the public, so they will know just what kind of people these self-

appointed rabble-rousers are.” “We intend to make complete background

checks, using whatever sources are available, on each and every participant in

these riding groups,” he declared. “We feel the public should know the true

facts about these individuals—who they are, who pays their fares, for their

food, their fines, their bail, why they aren’t working at regular jobs instead of

cavorting all over the countryside causing trouble, their political connec-

tions, and their complete police records.”

Dabney’s call for scrutiny was, of course, unnecessary. In Mississippi,

the task of uncovering the criminal backgrounds of the Freedom Riders

had already been delegated to the State Sovereignty Commission, an in-

vestigative and propaganda agency established in 1956. Working in close