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

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366 Freedom Riders

was alive and well and poised to expand its influence into every corner of the

Jim Crow South.

Though undoubtedly genuine, Farmer’s lofty rhetoric represented the

public face of the movement. The behind-the-scenes reality at CORE head-

quarters was, as might be expected, considerably more complicated. Despite

its recent notoriety, CORE remained a relatively small organization with a

limited staff and modest financial resources. During Farmer’s absence the

number of volunteers and chapters, and the general level of activity, had all

increased, but it was a constant struggle for the organization to keep pace

with expanding responsibilities. As the scale of the Freedom Rides reached

well beyond anything that CORE leaders had anticipated, Marvin Rich, Jim

Peck, and others scrambled to find new sources of funding. The level of

contributions was never substantial enough—and the flow of funds never

steady enough—to allow CORE leaders to feel confident that they could

cover all of the expenses related to the Rides.

Part of the problem resided in the inability of the other organizations

affiliated with the FRCC to raise their share of the funds. SNCC and the

Nashville Movement had no money to speak of, and SCLC had already com-

mitted most of its small budget to sustaining King’s activities in Atlanta. In

1961 most of the movement’s money resided in the coffers of older and more

conservative organizations such as the NAACP, the NAACP Legal and Edu-

cational Defense Fund, and the National Urban League, and none of these

organizations was inclined to transfer funds to a risky and controversial project

that did not square with its established set of priorities. Consequently, CORE

had to look elsewhere for funding—primarily to individual donors in New

York and other Northern cities. Unfortunately, few of these donors were in

a position to contribute more than a modest sum to the cause, and CORE

was eventually forced to rely on personal loans to keep afloat financially. The

largest of these loans came from Andy Norman, a Sears and Roebuck heir

who agreed to bankroll the Freedom Rides with several installments of fifty

thousand dollars. With his help, CORE was able to meet most of its obliga-

tions during the lean weeks of July and August, but the unusual nature of this

arrangement underscored the organization’s financial vulnerability. By the

end of July CORE had already spent $138,500 on the Freedom Rides, and

there was no end in sight to the spiraling costs of fighting for freedom in the

Deep South.

For this and other reasons, movement leaders—especially those at

CORE—favored a timely settlement of the legal stalemate in Mississippi.

Somehow they had to find a way to extract the Freedom Riders from the

legal morass concocted by Mississippi’s white segregationists; and they had

to do so without sacrificing the principles and objectives that had brought

the Riders to the state in the first place. The challenge, in effect, was to

secure freedom for the Riders as individuals without abandoning the broader

goal of bringing freedom to Mississippi and the rest of the Jim Crow South.

Ain’t Gonna Let No Jail House Turn Me ’Round 367

A difficult challenge under any circumstances, it was especially so during the

early summer of 1961 when movement attorneys had to deal with an unpre-

dictable legal context that reflected the uncertainties of federal authority. At

this point no one could be sure how far the Kennedy administration was

willing to go to protect the Freedom Riders’ constitutional rights, or whether

the Riders could gain meaningful access to the federal court system. Ironi-

cally, some of this uncertainty stemmed from Robert Kennedy’s decision to

petition the ICC. Though promising in the abstract, the petition essentially

put the administration on the sidelines until the notoriously slow-moving

regulatory agency got around to responding to the attorney general’s request.

On June 19 the ICC announced that it had begun a preliminary investigation

of the issues raised by the Justice Department’s petition, but it also announced

that formal hearings on the matter would not begin until August 15.

In the meantime, movement attorneys were left with limited legal op-

tions. In mid-June the filing of a habeas corpus motion on behalf of Betsy

Wyckoff held out some hope that all of the Freedom Rider arrests would be

nullified, but on June 27 District Judge Sidney Mize ruled against the mo-

tion, arguing that the plaintiff had not yet exhausted potential remedies in

state courts. Ignoring William Kunstler’s insistence that the racially biased

Mississippi courts were of no value to Wyckoff or any other Freedom Rider,

Mize declared that the federal courts had no valid interest in the case until

the state courts rendered a judgment on the legality of the arrests. A week

later, Jack Young, Wyckoff’s other attorney, asked for a reconsideration of

the ruling, but on July 6 Mize denied the appeal. Refusing to give up, Kunstler,

backed by the national office of the ACLU, applied for a certificate of prob-

able cause, a document that would allow Wyckoff ’s case to be heard by the

Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. On July 12, Judge Minor Wisdom, the most

racially liberal member of the Fifth Circuit Court, granted the certificate,

but ten days later Wisdom and his four colleagues issued a unanimous deci-

sion rejecting Kunstler’s appeal. The final blow came two weeks later, on

July 26, when Associate Justice Hugo Black, speaking for the U.S. Supreme

Court, upheld the Fifth Circuit’s denial of a writ of habeas corpus. In private,

Black, like Wisdom, expressed considerable sympathy for the Riders’ pre-

carious legal situation, but as a matter of law he felt compelled to rule against

Kunstler’s unproven allegation that Wyckoff could not get a fair hearing in

the courts of Mississippi.

The Wyckoff case represented a major setback for movement leaders

who had hoped to circumvent the costly and potentially debilitating process

of appealing the Freedom Riders’ convictions in state court. Fortunately for

the movement, it was only one of several important legal developments to

emerge in late June and July. Most were favorable to the cause of racial equal-

ity, and for the first time in years civil rights advocates detected a quickening

in the legal assault on Jim Crow. For more than a decade the trajectory of

civil rights law and federal policy had been tilting toward desegregation, but

368 Freedom Riders

now it appeared that both the Justice Department and the federal courts

were zeroing in on specific violations of social justice and equal protection.

Most obviously, there was a noticeable shift in the Justice Department’s ap-

proach to enforcement. The first sign of this shift was the petition sent to the

ICC in late May, but the new attitude became even more obvious in mid-

June when Robert Kennedy testified before a largely hostile Senate appro-

priations subcommittee. Asked to justify the funds expended on federal

marshals in Alabama, Kennedy was immediately put on the defensive by two

ultra-segregationist senators, John McClellan of Arkansas and Allen Ellender

of Louisiana. Turning the hearing into a debate on the Freedom Rides,

McClellan and Ellender subjected Kennedy to a withering attack. To their

surprise, Kennedy not only stood his ground, defending the federal

government’s actions in Alabama, but also hinted that the Justice Depart-

ment was gearing up for broader civil rights initiatives in the Deep South.

After Ellender insisted that the Freedom Riders “were deserving of their

reception and got exactly what was to be expected,” the attorney general

responded coolly but forcefully: “I have a tough time accepting that this should

be determined in the streets and that people should be beaten.”

One week later, on June 26, his words took on added significance when

Justice Department attorneys filed a suit to end racial discrimination at New

Orleans’s Moisant International Airport. This was the first time that the fed-

eral government had actually gone to court to challenge segregated air ter-

minal facilities. Normally stymied by complicated private leasing arrangements

that seemed to place airport restaurants beyond the reach of federal author-

ity, the department’s attorneys had decided that, as a new facility, the New

Orleans terminal offered a good test case for emerging interpretations of the

Federal Aviation Act. As the Tallahassee Ten had recently discovered, segre-

gation at air terminals was a tough nut to crack, but the Justice Department’s

new resolve in this difficult area of civil rights law suggested that even here

Jim Crow’s days were numbered. Less surprising was the department’s in-

creased activity on behalf of voting rights. On July 6 the department filed

voter registration suits against two Mississippi counties, Forrest and Clarke,

and a week later it filed a similar suit against the city of New Orleans.

All of these suits were encouraging, but for the Freedom Riders the most

promising legal development in late June and early July was the Justice

Department’s decision to join an existing NAACP suit seeking a permanent

injunction barring the city of Jackson, the state of Mississippi, and several

bus and railroad lines from arresting Freedom Riders. Certified by a three-

judge federal panel on July 11, the Justice Department’s petition to serve as

“a friend of the court” declared that “the United States is concerned when

Federal civil rights are violated on a massive scale and a continuing basis.”

Insisting that Mississippi officials had no legal basis to arrest passengers for

violating state segregation laws, the petition contended that “the state and its

officials are acting beyond the scope of their lawful power if they make such

Ain’t Gonna Let No Jail House Turn Me ’Round 369

arrests and obtain such convictions.” Accepted over the strong objections of

the state’s attorney, the petition was especially alarming to segregationists

because the NAACP’s brief made no distinction between interstate and intr-

astate passengers. For the first time the Justice Department appeared to be

sanctioning an all-out assault on segregated transit laws, even laws that did

not affect interstate commerce.

The legality of intrastate bus segregation had been successfully chal-

lenged as early as 1956, when the Supreme Court had ordered the desegre-

gation of Montgomery’s local buses in Gayle v. Browder, but the Justice

Department had demonstrated little interest in applying Gayle to other cit-

ies. If the department’s attorneys recognized the significance of the unprec-

edented challenge to states’ rights in Mississippi, they did not say so in the

petition. Still, everyone involved had some sense that the Federal govern-

ment was sailing into uncharted waters. Whatever their intentions, depart-

ment attorneys soon discovered that they would have to wait for their day in

court. Overruling Judge Elbert Tuttle’s objections, the two Mississippi judges

on the panel—Sidney Mize of Gulfport and Claude Clayton of Tupelo—

voted to postpone hearings on the injunction until August 7, one week be-

fore the Freedom Riders’ appellate trials were scheduled to begin.

The apparent liberalization of the Justice Department’s civil rights poli-

cies gave movement leaders a measure of hope, but few observers had any

illusions about the source of the change. Like the rest of the Kennedy ad-

ministration, the leadership of the Justice Department appeared to be more

political than ideological, and the department’s response to the Freedom Rider

crisis still bore all the earmarks of an exercise in political damage control.

Despite the recent legal maneuvering, this was the same group of men that

had struck a bargain with Ross Barnett and James Eastland, agreeing to stand

by while the Mississippi police violated the Freedom Riders’ constitutional

rights. As a means of resolving the crisis, the bargain had backfired, forcing

the department to deal with the politically embarrassing situation at the Hinds

County Jail and Parchman. But there was no evidence that the new attitude

in Washington represented anything more than a frantic attempt to calm the

passions that threatened to overtake the administration’s low-key approach

to the issue of civil rights.

N THIS CONTEXT, continued pressure from the movement was essential. De-

spite financial difficulties, the FRCC was determined to maintain a steady

flow of Freedom Riders into Mississippi. And, for the most part, the recruit-

ing and training centers in Nashville, New Orleans, Atlanta, and Montgomery

did just that, drawing a wide range of college students, ministers, labor leaders,

and other volunteers into the struggle. The one notable exception was the

first week in July when a temporary shortage of recruits dictated a shift in

strategy. Faced with a potentially embarrassing lull in movement activity, the

FRCC turned to Mississippi’s home-grown activists for help. Cultivating

370 Freedom Riders

Jackson’s local movement was nothing new, but the decision to recruit local

Freedom Riders represented a significant escalation of the campaign to fo-

ment a wide-scale internal rebellion. Even though the vast majority of the

state’s black citizens remained aloof from the movement, the exceptions had

grown too numerous and too vocal to ignore. Despite protestations to the

contrary, this was cause for considerable concern among white Mississippi-

ans, particularly in Jackson, where the connection between the Freedom Rides

and the recent upsurge in local activism was obvious. Led by CORE field

secretaries Tom Gaither and Richard Haley, the campaign to embolden

Jackson’s local activists became a significant factor in the larger struggle when

it became clear that a number of students at Tougaloo, Jackson State, and

several local high schools were eager to become Freedom Riders. Taking

advantage of the notoriety surrounding the June 23 arrest of the Tougaloo

Four, Gaither and Haley, with the approval of the FRCC, recruited more

than a score of local Freedom Riders by the end of the month, setting the

stage for a new round of Rides that would soon shake the state to its founda-

tions. Giddy with anticipation, the FRCC authorized Haley to announce the

formation of the Jackson Non-Violent Movement, an organization that was

sure to arouse the ire of local segregationists.

Three days later, on July 6, Martin Luther King flew into the city to

formalize the new arrangement with a mass meeting. But by the time he

arrived, the new movement had already rocked the city of Jackson. On

Wednesday afternoon, July 5, four black students were arrested after attempt-

ing to desegregate a downtown park, and a few minutes later three others—

all high school students—were taken into custody after trying to desegregate

the white waiting room at the Trailways terminal. That evening six more

young protesters—the oldest of whom was nineteen—made a second attempt

to use the same waiting room, and they too were arrested. The assault con-

tinued on Thursday morning when six local blacks, including a seventeen-

year-old high school student, attempted to test the facilities at the Illinois

Central railway terminal. All of this prompted Mayor Allen Thompson to

repeat an earlier vow that there would be “no mixing” in Jackson as long as

he was in charge and to offer some stern words of advice to his white con-

stituents. “Let’s start right now emphasizing what I’ve said about getting

over to the colored people their responsibility in this matter,” he declared,

sounding very much like a spokesman for the White Citizens’ Councils.

“There is no threat, no economic reprisal involved, but just show them how

lucky they are to be living and working here in this fine city. Then have them

talk to their fathers and mothers and their neighbors about controlling their

children who may be causing trouble. Our colored people are not to be afraid,

but they must get out and emphasize to everyone they want things to be left

as they are.” Reinforcing the seriousness of the situation, Thompson added

that “now is the time to stand up and be counted and I want to hear a re-

sponse from the colored preachers here who believe in this.”

Ain’t Gonna Let No Jail House Turn Me ’Round 371

Thompson never revealed whether he was pleased with the response to

his thinly veiled threat, but what he read in the Friday morning papers could

not have been very reassuring. On Thursday evening, with several white re-

porters in attendance, King spoke to an overflow crowd of fifteen hundred

that did not appear to be intimidated by the mayor’s challenge. Declaring

that “segregation is dead,” he insisted that the only question left to be an-

swered was “how expensive the segregationists will make the funeral.” Offer-

ing words of exhortation seldom heard in Mississippi, by blacks or whites, he

praised the local heroes arrested during the past two days and proclaimed:

“Let the Negroes fill the jail houses of Mississippi.” Participating in nonvio-

lent protest, he maintained, had become the best available means of forcing

government officials to move toward equal justice under the law. Chiding

Ross Barnett and other segregationist demagogues who claimed that the pri-

mary goal of the movement was intermarriage, he assured the crowd that

“our basic aim is to be the white man’s brother, not his brother-in-law.” “We

are not agitators and rabble-rousers,” he added, “but in a true sense the sav-

iors of democracy. We must learn to live together as brothers or die together

as fools.” With this benediction, the crowd erupted. Some, with tears rush-

ing down their cheeks, came forward to shake his hand, while more than a

few stood motionless in the aisles, temporarily stunned by a message of hope

that they could hardly believe was real.

Others wasted no time in acting upon the message. Less than an hour

after listening to King’s speech, six black high school students descended

upon the white waiting room at the Greyhound station. The oldest of the six,

Earl Vance, was nineteen, and the youngest, Hezekiah Watkins, was a thirteen-

year-old eighth grader at Rowan Junior High School. Asserting the right to

purchase a ticket at a window in the white section of the terminal, Vance,

Watkins, and their four friends soon found themselves in the back of a paddy

wagon singing freedom songs and promising to remain in jail until true free-

dom came to Mississippi.

The sudden upsurge of the Jackson Non-Violent Movement was a shock-

ing development for many white Mississippians. Time and again they had

been assured by state and local officials that everything was under control

and that the Freedom Rides were a temporary annoyance concocted by out-

side agitators. Now it appeared that the Freedom Rides had tapped a well-

spring of dissent inside Mississippi itself. Although many wary segregationists

had suspected as much for some time, the events of early July confirmed

their worst fears. Buffeted on all sides, they faced the prospect of an ever-

widening and seemingly permanent challenge to their authority. Almost ev-

ery day brought new intrusions, some in the form of perceived breaches of

racial etiquette that reflected subtle but disturbing changes in racial behav-

ior. Mostly they had to endure the continued invasion of Freedom Riders

from far and near.

372 Freedom Riders

In the four days following King’s speech, the Jackson police arrested

forty-nine Freedom Riders, twenty-three of whom were from Mississippi.

One group of eight, led by CORE veteran Ike Reynolds, came by bus

from Montgomery, arriving at the Jackson Trailways station on the after-

noon of July 7, just hours after six local blacks had been arrested at the Grey-

hound station. Two days later, a group of nine Riders—including seven from

California—came in on the late-morning train from New Orleans, and three

hours later eight more Riders from Montgomery arrived at the Trailways

station. By nightfall all seventeen were behind bars. The most alarming event

of the day, from the perspective of white Mississippians, took place at the Grey-

hound station, where eleven young members of the Jackson Non-Violent

Movement attempted to desegregate the white waiting room. When it was

discovered that seven of the students were under the age of eighteen, the

police promptly arrested not only the students but also the three organizers

who recruited them: Diane Nash, Jim Bevel, and Bernard Lafayette. Although

Nash was granted a continuance until November, Bevel and Lafayette—only

recently released from Parchman—once again found themselves in front of

Judge Spencer, this time charged with multiple counts of contributing to the

delinquency of a minor. Shaking his head in disbelief and vowing to meet the

latest challenge to civil order with the full force of the law, Spencer presided

over a two-day show trial on July 18 and 19.

The determination of state and local officials to crush the Jackson Move-

ment was on full display throughout the trial. As the prosecuting attorney

made clear, the issue of greatest concern was Bevel’s and Lafayette’s decision

to remain in Mississippi after their release from Parchman. With scores of

Freedom Riders scheduled to be released during the coming weeks, Missis-

sippi authorities wanted to make sure that potential agitators left the state as

soon as possible. Accordingly, the prosecutor offered to drop the charges

against Bevel and Lafayette if they agreed to leave Mississippi immediately.

After both men refused to accept the offer, an angry Judge Spencer sen-

tenced them to a five-hundred-dollar fine and six months in jail on each count.

Although an immediate appeal allowed Bevel and Lafayette to return to their

organizing activities, the trial delivered a chilling message: Any Freedom Rider

foolish enough to follow the lead of the two agitators from Nashville could

expect stiff penalties and an eventual return to Parchman.

For the vast majority of the Freedom Riders awaiting release, this mes-

sage of intimidation was probably unnecessary. After nearly six weeks in

Parchman, they were eager to return home, and, despite the fears of white

officials, movement organizers never encouraged them to do otherwise. The

few who stayed in Mississippi did so as carefully selected volunteers or staff

members. While the FRCC wanted a small vanguard of released Freedom

Riders to remain in the state as organizers, the situation was much too vola-

tile to risk a full-scale provocation of the white power structure—or the alien-

ation of indigenous black leaders. Mississippi was an extremely dangerous

Ain’t Gonna Let No Jail House Turn Me ’Round 373

place where even the most courageous of activists had to weigh the pluses

and minuses of every action, a place where the realities of movement politics

generally dictated a relatively cautious approach to mass mobilization. As the

NAACP’s Medgar Evers pointed out on several occasions, building a move-

ment in Mississippi required patience as well as courage. Wary of overly

aggressive activists who did not seem to comprehend the racial realities of

Mississippi, Evers was never entirely comfortable with the Freedom Riders’

invasion of the state. In public he often lauded the Riders as valiant freedom

fighters, but in private he expressed strong reservations about the FRCC’s

reliance on direct action. To some degree, his complaints stemmed from

organizational considerations, and it was no secret that he resented the FRCC’s

challenge to the NAACP’s control of the civil rights struggle in Mississippi.

But his objections also reflected a sincere concern for the future of a state-

wide movement that could ill afford a serious misstep. Whatever his motiva-

tions, FRCC leaders knew that they would lose his support and the cooperation

of the NAACP if they stepped too far in front of the veterans of the Missis-

sippi movement.

With so much at stake, Evers had good reason to feel as he did, and

many other NAACP leaders, both in Mississippi and elsewhere, shared his

ambivalent attitude toward the Freedom Rides. The relationship between

the NAACP and the organizations affiliated with the FRCC was troubled

from the outset, but during the first two months of the Freedom Rider cam-

paign there was little public discussion of the NAACP’s concerns about the

wisdom of placing so much emphasis on a new and untried form of direct

action. Indeed, in the early weeks of the campaign many Americans, espe-

cially in the Deep South, mistakenly believed that the NAACP, not CORE,

had organized and masterminded the Freedom Rides. For many observers,

white and black, the first sure sign that this assumption was incorrect did not

appear until mid-July, when the delegates to the NAACP’s annual conven-

tion, meeting in Philadelphia, debated the organization’s position on the Rides.

In the convention’s keynote address, delivered on Monday, July 10—the day

after Nash, Bevel, and Lafayette were arrested—the Reverend Stephen

Spottswood questioned the ultimate significance of the Freedom Rides. “The

dramatic exposure of segregation practices and of law enforcement proce-

dures is useful in awakening a complacent public opinion among white and

colored Americans,” he conceded, “but to suggest that its function is much

beyond this is to confuse a signal flare with a barrage.” Referring to the

NAACP’s long-standing leadership of the civil rights struggle, he added: “We

are too old in the ways of the long struggle that has engaged our fathers and

forefathers not to realize that wars are won by using every available military

resource and not by the employment of raiding parties.”

The next day, when puzzled reporters asked Roy Wilkins to comment

on Spottswood’s statement and to explain the NAACP’s role in the Freedom

Rides, the executive secretary responded tersely that his organization “had

374 Freedom Riders

nothing to do with the Freedom Rides.” “They are run by CORE,” he pointed

out, adding that the rumor that the NAACP planned to take over the man-

agement of the Rides had no basis in fact. Suggesting that the NAACP had

better things to do with its time and resources, Wilkins soon found an ironic

way to prove his point. On Wednesday morning, he joined more than a thou-

sand delegates on a twenty-two-car “Freedom Train” to Washington. While

Wilkins and sixty other NAACP leaders met with President Kennedy in the

White House, the rest descended upon Capitol Hill to lobby state represen-

tatives and senators. Following the meeting with Kennedy, Wilkins expressed

regret that the President apparently had no plans to introduce a new civil

rights bill, but in general he and the rest of the NAACP delegation were

pleased with the administration’s respectful response to the organization’s

mass lobbying effort. If nothing else, the trip to Washington reinforced the

NAACP’s commitment to working within the rule of law and legislation,

drawing the administration’s attention away from the confrontational tactics

of the Freedom Riders. For Wilkins and his colleagues, as for the adminis-

tration, the Freedom Rider crisis had gone on too long, evolving from an

unexpected curiosity to a chronic diversion that threatened to undermine

civil society and the gradualist paradigm of reform politics. Within the

NAACP, as in the broader American society, the Freedom Riders were

often regarded as extremists and provocateurs, or, more specifically, as un-

restrained idealists who refused to acknowledge the necessity of modera-

tion and compromise.

The conservatism that dominated the national leadership of the NAACP

did not always reflect the views of the organization’s rank and file, especially

among younger members. On the fourth day of the conference, the Youth

Councils mounted a near revolt against their elders’ reluctance to grant high

school and college students a larger voice in the making of policy. One of the

major points at issue was their desire to become more involved in the Free-

dom Rides and to expand and formalize the NAACP’s support for the Rides.

“I would have the NAACP join in the Freedom Rides,” future Freedom Rider

Charles Sherrod told reporters. “The courts alone cannot do the work, can-

not alone fulfill our dream. . . . We must engage in these moral struggles to

push the courts so our cases won’t keep being postponed.” This and similar

statements kept the issue alive, and two days later the convention adopted a

compromise resolution explicitly endorsing direct-action techniques such as

sit-ins, Freedom Rides, and boycotts. The compromise involved the inclu-

sion of a controversial statement on the dictates of nonviolent strategy. “In

supporting the principle of the Freedom Rides,” the statement explained,

“we do not require our members who participate in them to choose jail rather

than bail, but we leave that decision to each individual member concerned.”

By defeating an effort to delete this restriction, the NAACP’s old guard

demonstrated that it was still in control of the organization, but the passage

of even a watered-down resolution endorsing direct action reflected the chang-

Ain’t Gonna Let No Jail House Turn Me ’Round 375

ing realities of movement politics. In many of the NAACP’s local branches,

there was considerable grassroots support for the Freedom Rides, not to

mention a growing restlessness that produced a number of local direct action

campaigns. During the first two weeks of July alone, NAACP members were

involved in several sit-ins protesting segregated parks, “wade-ins” on the

beaches of Ft. Lauderdale and Lake Michigan, an attempt to desegregate a

river steamer in St. Louis, and a successful boycott of downtown merchants

in Savannah. And, while no branch went so far as to organize its own Free-

dom Ride, a number of NAACP activists joined the FRCC-sponsored Rides.

In many cases, of course, individual Freedom Riders held memberships

in several civil rights organizations. Indeed, as the summer progressed, the

Riders’ commitment to nonviolent direct action tended to supersede loyalty

to any particular organization. For many, an attachment to the broader move-

ment became primary, sometimes to the dismay of leaders grounded in the

traditional organization-based approach to activism. To the leaders of CORE,

this ecumenism added an ironic twist to the organization’s recent success. By

sponsoring the Freedom Rides, CORE had greatly expanded its member-

ship and influence. At a broader level, however, the organization had actually

weakened the institutional basis of the movement by inadvertently promot-

ing a style of activism rooted in individual acts of conscience and belief. Even

though the successful practice of nonviolence required a certain amount of

discipline and cooperation, the Freedom Riders were essentially free moral

agents. Driven by personal codes of conduct and commitment, they were

more inclined to listen to an inner voice than to follow orders from above.

This largely noninstitutional approach, when combined with the

unpredictability of state and local officials confronted with an unprecedented

assault on white authority, gave the Freedom Rider saga an unscripted qual-

ity. Despite careful planning, movement organizers, government officials,

and the Freedom Riders themselves never knew what to expect next. As we

have seen, this was certainly true during the early weeks of the campaign. But

it is striking that the element of surprise never seemed to give way to a pre-

dictable routine. As the crisis moved into the summer months and beyond,

individual acts of conscience and the responses they provoked continued to

produce unexpected complications and situations that sometimes bordered

on the bizarre.

NE SUCH EPISODE took place in mid-July when Ben Cox led a Freedom Ride

from St. Louis, Missouri, to New Orleans, Louisiana. Something of a marked

man since his May 17 “marry-in” speech in New Orleans, Cox found himself

at the center of an unforeseen drama that tested his courage as well as his

ability to orchestrate a public demonstration of nonviolent commitment.

Sponsored by the St. Louis chapter of CORE, Cox and four other Riders—

John Curtis Raines, a white Methodist minister from Long Island; Janet

Reinitz, a white artist from New York City; and two black activists from St.