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

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

376 Freedom Riders

Louis, Bliss Anne Malone, a twenty-three-year-old teacher, and Annie

Lumpkin, an eighteen-year-old high school student—encountered little re-

sistance as they conducted desegregation tests at a series of rest stops in Mis-

souri and northern Arkansas. Their smooth ride came to an abrupt end,

however, when they arrived in the troubled city of Little Rock on the after-

noon of July 10.

Met by a surly crowd of several hundred white protesters, the five Riders

managed to make their way into the terminal with the help of the police.

Once inside, they discovered that local authorities had divided the terminal

into two areas, one designated for interstate passengers and a second for white

intrastate passengers. In effect, local officials had taken steps to bring the

facility into technical compliance with the Boynton decision without capitu-

lating to the demand for complete desegregation. In this way, they hoped to

avoid a major incident, but, as often happened with the halfway measures

employed by segregationists, it didn’t work. Following a brief discussion,

Cox and the other Riders simply sauntered into the waiting room reserved

for white intrastate passengers, essentially daring the authorities to arrest

them. This turned out to be too much provocation for Little Rock’s police

chief, Paul Glascock, who, despite clear orders to avoid a confrontation,

promptly invoked a breach-of-peace statute and carted four of the five Rid-

ers off to jail. Fearing bad publicity, Glascock decided to release the young-

est of the five Riders, Annie Lumpkin, whom he ordered to return to St.

Louis on the first available bus. But this gesture did not stop the Little Rock

Arkansas Gazette from sharply criticizing the chief’s decision to delay the

other Riders’ departure from the city. “The quicker the defendants can be

freed,” the Gazette editorialized, “the better for the community.”

Although many local citizens agreed with the Gazette’s position, and even

Governor Orval Faubus urged his followers to ignore the Riders’ provoca-

tions, getting rid of the Little Rock Four proved to be easier said than done.

In an emotional trial held on Wednesday, July 12, the Riders’ attorney,

Thaddeus Williams, maintained that the arrests constituted an abridgement

of interstate commerce. Judge Quinn Glover countered that the case was a

matter of state, not federal, law. Under Arkansas’s breach-of-peace statute

the Riders were guilty, and Glover wasted no time in handing out the maxi-

mum sentence of six months in jail and a five-hundred-dollar fine to each

defendant. He did, however, offer to suspend their sentences if they prom-

ised to “leave the state of Arkansas and proceed to their respective homes.”

At first Williams and the Riders did not know what to make of Glover’s

offer, but after consulting with CORE officials in St. Louis they reluctantly

decided to accept the suspended sentences. A few hours later, however, the

deal fell apart when it became clear that the Riders had no intention of re-

turning home. As Williams explained to Glover, the Riders were willing to

leave the state, but only if they were allowed to proceed to Louisiana by bus.

Unmoved, Glover declared that the Riders had only two options: to return

Ain’t Gonna Let No Jail House Turn Me ’Round 377

home or to return to jail. To the Riders, of course, there was only one legiti-

mate option, and by nightfall they were once again behind bars. From his jail

cell, a defiant Cox told reporters that he was contemplating a hunger strike

and that he “would much rather be dead and in my grave” than submit to a

system that made him a “slave to segregation.”

By the morning of July 13, what was fast becoming known as the “sec-

ond Little Rock crisis” was in its fourth day, and the local business commu-

nity was beginning to fear that things were getting out of hand. Forming an

ad hoc organization called the Civic Progress Association, thirteen civic and

business leaders issued a public statement expressing their gratitude to Chief

Glascock and Judge Glover for upholding the law. Privately, however, they

pressured Glover to do whatever it took to bring the crisis to a close. Later in

the day an obviously conflicted Glover reluctantly conceded that he could

not legally prevent the Riders from continuing their trip to Louisiana. Be-

fore releasing the defendants, he issued an order prohibiting them from con-

ducting any additional desegregation tests in Arkansas. Still, there was little

doubt in anyone’s mind that the Riders had successfully challenged the au-

thority of a powerful die-hard segregationist. When the four Riders boarded

an afternoon bus for Pine Bluff, Texarkana, and Shreveport, they left behind

a still segregated city, but they also left a city that had could not afford to

ignore the resolute and disruptive power of the movement.

Even so, whatever satisfaction Cox and the others could take from their

partial victory in Little Rock was soon dispelled by the reception they re-

ceived in the notoriously tough town of Shreveport. Prior to the Riders’ ar-

rival, the local police had sealed off the terminal, precluding any test of local

facilities. With police snipers placed along the edge of the terminal roof,

there would be no protests or arrests in Shreveport, at least on this day; and

it would be several weeks before the Freedom Rider movement returned to

the city. Despite this intimidating scene, Dave Dennis, a Shreveport native

and Freedom Rider recently released from Parchman, met the Riders at the

terminal and took them to a meeting with several local clergymen who had

promised to put them up for the night. But the extreme nervousness of their

hosts led to a change of plan, and the Riders quietly boarded a night bus for

Baton Rouge. Refused service at the Baton Rouge terminal, they proceeded

to New Orleans, where they used the Greyhound terminal’s whites-only fa-

cilities without incident. Relieved that the weeklong journey was over, the

four weary Riders were greeted by Jim McCain and members of New Or-

leans CORE, several of whom organized a joyous Saturday night party to

celebrate the survival and fortitude of their heroic colleagues.

As the episodes in Arkansas and Louisiana demonstrate, the one thing

the Freedom Riders came to expect was the unexpected. What happened in

one city was rarely repeated in another. While Ben Cox was confronting

and confounding the authorities in Little Rock, Hank Thomas, his friend

and fellow veteran of the original CORE Freedom Ride, was undergoing an

378 Freedom Riders

entirely different experience on a Ride from New York to Chattanooga,

Tennessee. Only recently released from Parchman, Thomas led four other

Riders—two New Jersey rabbis, a black psychologist, and a twenty-year-old

white Michigan State student—on a Ride that deliberately retraced part of

the 1947 Journey of Reconciliation. Conducting tests in Roanoke and other

communities in western Virginia and eastern Tennessee, they encountered

little resistance to transit desegregation in this part of the South. In contrast

to the situation in the Deep South, there were no mobs at any of the termi-

nals, and compliance with the Boynton decision, though grudging, seemed

genuine. After eating lunch at a Greyhound lunch counter in Chattanooga,

Thomas told reporters that his group appreciated the hospitality and planned

to stay in the city “for two or three days, and see the sights.” When asked

what they planned to do after that, he simply smiled and said, “We may go

on back home or we may go farther south.”

As Thomas knew all too well, traveling farther south could lead to seri-

ous trouble, and in this instance the Riders decided to head west through

Tennessee and Arkansas with the ultimate goal of retesting the same Little

Rock facilities that had foiled Cox’s group. In general, though, there was no

letup in the Rides’ southward push into the heart of the Deep South. On

Saturday, July 15, the same day Cox’s group arrived in New Orleans, twelve

Freedom Riders were arrested at the Jackson Greyhound terminal, and on

Sunday eight more, including five white Riders from New York City, joined

them in the city and county jails. In Jackson such arrests had become routine,

and local and state officials felt that they had developed a firm and effective

way of dealing with the Freedom Riders. Yet, at the same time, they were

becoming increasingly concerned about what was happening in the rest of

the South. Governor Ross Barnett, in particular, was convinced that an in-

consistent response was weakening the South’s defense of segregation. Fear-

ful that many Southern officials had let down their guard, he invited the

region’s governors to a special conference held in Jackson on July 19.

Billed as a wake-up call for the leaders of the segregationist South, the

meeting turned out to be a major disappointment, drawing only the gover-

nors of Alabama, Arkansas, South Carolina, and Mississippi, plus lower-level

representatives from Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and Kentucky. Barnett had

hoped to demonstrate that the white South constituted a solid bloc, but he

accomplished exactly the opposite by convening a rump meeting of extrem-

ists. Obviously bitter at being snubbed, he opened the conference with a

public complaint against “the lack of unity among the leaders of the South,”

many of whom he found to be “soft” and “timid” in their defense of the

Southern way of life. Several hours of segregationist posturing followed, in-

cluding suggestions that Barnett was ready to form a third party based on

resistance to segregation. But neither he nor any of the other delegates could

hide the fact that the conference had failed to rally the region’s political elite.

Ain’t Gonna Let No Jail House Turn Me ’Round 379

To make matters even worse, the timing of Barnett’s gathering coin-

cided with several other newsworthy events related to the Freedom Rides. In

addition to the two-day trial of Bevel and Lafayette, there was a competing

interracial conference at Tougaloo College that attracted thirty-five promi-

nent ministers and theologians, including Martin Luther King Jr. Organized

by Dr. Charles McCoy of the Pacific School of Religion in San Francisco,

the Tougaloo conference was advertised as an opportunity for “religious lead-

ers from all parts of the nation and from varying religious backgrounds to

search for constructive steps to relieve racial tensions.” In truth, it was also a

means of buttressing the moral authority of the Freedom Rides, and, as it

turned out, of recruiting a new and distinguished group of Riders. After a day

of discussing the beloved community, nine of the attendees—seven whites

and two blacks—felt inspired to conduct a segregation test before departing

from the airport. Ignoring Captain Ray’s familiar order to “move on,” they

soon found themselves on the way to jail. Singing freedom songs and praying

for the souls of their oppressors, they reveled in the opportunity to act upon

their beliefs, inviting comparison with the earlier experiences of the Talla-

hassee Ten. Eight of the nine arrested at the airport were from northern

California, including one professor (the historian of the antebellum South,

Charles G. Sellers Jr.) and two chaplains from the University of California at

Berkeley.

To Barnett’s dismay, July 19 was also an unusually busy day in Washing-

ton, where a White House press conference revealed the president’s newfound

determination to use the interstate commerce clause as a guarantor of the

right to travel freely from state to state. In his most forceful statement to

date, Kennedy insisted that “there is no question of the legal rights of the

freedom travelers, freedom riders, that move in interstate commerce.” Draw-

ing an analogy with freedom of the press, he reasoned: “We may not like

what people print in a paper, but there is no question about their constitu-

tional right to print it. So that follows, in my opinion, for those who move in

interstate commerce.” While he stopped short of endorsing the Freedom

Riders’ reason for traveling, he maintained that all Americans, regardless of

“the purpose for which they travel[,] . . . should enjoy the full constitutional

protections given to them by the law and by the Constitution.” Alluding to

the Justice Department petition awaiting consideration by the ICC, he added

that he was “hopeful” that the administration’s position would eventually

“become the generally accepted view” and that “any legal doubts about the

right of people to move in interstate commerce” would soon disappear.

To the editors of the New York Times, the president’s long-awaited state-

ment on the Freedom Rides “had no precise meaning” and fell far short of “a

profile in political courage.” But the president’s words communicated an

entirely different message to the besieged segregationists of the Deep South.

To them, Kennedy’s oblique language represented a semantic smoke screen

380 Freedom Riders

for the administration’s aggressive advocacy of civil rights and social equal-

ity. Earlier in the year, many white Southerners had held out hope that po-

litical considerations would force the administration to adopt a cautious

approach to civil rights matters, and for a time administration leaders ac-

tively reinforced this view through legislative inaction and the appointment

of racial conservatives to the federal judiciary. Despite repeated entreaties

from civil rights lobbyists, the administration steadfastly refused to intro-

duce any new civil legislation. And as late as June, the president, ignoring the

strong objections of virtually every civil rights leader in the nation, appointed

W. Harold Cox, one of Mississippi’s most outspoken white supremacists, to

the federal bench. Yet none of this seemed to matter very much by midsum-

mer. Unable to avoid the constitutional questions posed by the Freedom

Rider crisis, the administration, despite its strong political ties to the white

South, edged closer and closer to actual enforcement of equal protection

under the law.

Politics still mattered, of course, but as the summer progressed the

administration’s civil rights policy-makers seemed to be increasingly con-

cerned with the international politics of the Cold War as opposed to the

traditional domestic variety. While the Kennedy brothers did not want to

alienate Southern conservatives such as James Eastland and John Patterson,

the goal of securing the trust of the Third World often took priority over

efforts to maintain existing domestic political arrangements. Clearly, the

Kennedys did not want to have to choose between white Southern votes and

the approval of the dark-skinned masses of Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

But, with the eyes of the world watching, the administration simply could

not afford to repudiate the basic principles of racial equality and equal pro-

tection affirmed in Boynton and other Supreme Court decisions. In this con-

text, the rhetoric, if not the reality, of social justice prevailed, and desegregation

took on an air of inevitability. To this point the administration’s accomplish-

ments in the field of civil rights had been modest and largely symbolic, but

the white supremacists of the South were increasingly fearful that this situa-

tion was about to change and that it was only a matter of time before the

federal government launched an all-out assault on segregation. Such fears

were exacerbated in late July, when administration supporters in the Senate

overcame stiff opposition from Southern senators and pushed through the

appointment of NAACP attorney and Howard University Law School dean

Spottswood Robinson to the Civil Rights Commission. And there were even

rumors that the president had decided to appoint Robinson’s longtime

NAACP colleague Thurgood Marshall to a federal judgeship.

The suspicion that the Kennedy administration was actively encourag-

ing the civil rights movement was especially strong in Alabama, where Gov-

ernor Patterson and others were still fulminating about the unwarranted

federal invasion of Montgomery. In the two months since the confrontation

over the use of federal marshals, Patterson had done his best to sustain a

Ain’t Gonna Let No Jail House Turn Me ’Round 381

running feud with the attorney general, the favorite whipping boy of Ala-

bama politics. But this was not always easy. Unlike the situation in Missis-

sippi, most of the action in Alabama during June and July took place behind

the scenes as FBI agents and other investigators gathered evidence against

the Anniston bombers and the Birmingham rioters. On June 16, in an obvi-

ous attempt to stir things up, Patterson announced that he was prepared to

fire any Alabama highway patrolman who cooperated with the FBI, which he

depicted as a meddling agency that sympathized with outside agitators. To

most civil rights activists, the notion that the FBI was actively working on

behalf of the movement was laughable, but this notion was almost an article

of faith in Alabama, where many whites were convinced that they were up

against a broad federal conspiracy led by the Justice Department.

According to Patterson, the continuing assault on the state’s segregation

laws reflected a special animus toward Alabama. When the Justice Depart-

ment filed a discrimination suit against Montgomery’s Dannelly Field on

July 26, Patterson charged that Robert Kennedy was “picking on Alabama,”

even though the governor was well aware that the suit was identical to an

earlier action brought against airport segregation in New Orleans. “This must

be his way of getting even with us for the humiliation which came from his

support of the so-called Freedom Riders,” Patterson explained. “These rabble

rousers really took Mr. Kennedy for a ride, and now he is trying to vent his

ire again on the Southern people.” Upon hearing this, Kennedy once again

vehemently denied that he had encouraged the Freedom Riders to travel

through the South, though he could not resist reminding the public that

Patterson, not the federal government, was to blame for the breakdown of

law and order in Alabama. In predictable fashion, Patterson responded with

another round of personal invective, but Kennedy, sensing that he was being

used for political purposes, allowed the matter to drop. Faced with a trou-

bling and uncertain situation in Mississippi, where the Freedom Riders’ ap-

pellate trials were scheduled to begin in three weeks, he saw no advantage in

fanning the flames of sectional discord in a state that had already tested the

limits of his patience.

382 Freedom Riders

Woke Up This Morning with

My Mind on Freedom

Woke up this morning with my mind stayed on freedom,

Walkin’ and talkin’ with my mind stayed on freedom,

Ain’t no harm to keep your mind stayed on freedom,

Everybody’s got his mind stayed on freedom.

—1960s freedom song

THE MIDSUMMER EXCHANGE between John Patterson and Robert Kennedy

drew surprisingly little reaction from the national press, suggesting that the

two-month-old Freedom Rider crisis had lost much of its novelty. Despite

the periodic arrests in Jackson and the fulminations coming out of Mont-

gomery, the Freedom Rides were no longer front-page news outside of Mis-

sissippi and Alabama. For most Americans, the Rides had receded into the

background of national life, taking their place alongside school desegrega-

tion suits and sit-ins as manifestations of a continuing struggle. With no easy

resolution in sight, the controversy surrounding the Rides appeared to be a

virtual stalemate. After interviewing representatives of both the Freedom

Rider movement and the white supremacist resistance in mid-July, Associ-

ated Press staff writer Hugh Mulligan concluded that “oddly enough, in the

absence of any racial progress either way both sides are claiming victory in

Mississippi. Meanwhile, the buses continue to arrive, the patrol wagon still

waits, and the rest of the South, and the country, watches to see how long

either philosophy can hold out.”

What Mulligan detected, more than anything else, was the willingness

of both sides to prolong the struggle indefinitely, regardless of the conse-

quences. “It is now plain to even the few so-called moderates in our midst,”

insisted White Citizens’ Councils leader William Simmons, “that the inte-

grationists will stop at nothing in their efforts to force the South to integrate.

Woke Up This Morning with My Mind on Freedom 383

There is now a clearer public understanding of the tactics of the integrationists

and of the steps necessary to defeat them. The issue has finally been joined,

and the white South has tasted victory. Our appetites are whetted.” Speaking

for the Freedom Riders, Jim Lawson was no less resolute in his determination

to engage the enemy, albeit nonviolently. Acknowledging that he and other

nonviolent activists had broken an unjust peace, he warned Mulligan that it

was all but impossible “to solve the problem” of racial injustice “without people

being hurt.” “Only when this hostility comes to the surface,” he advised, “as it

did in Montgomery and Birmingham, will we begin to see that the system of

segregation is an evil which destroys people and teaches them a contempt for

life. We are trying to reach the conscience of the South. Brutality must be

suffered to show the true character of segregation.”

In this combative context, with the result still very much in doubt, mo-

mentum was a precious commodity. Neither side could afford to let up or to

give even the appearance of weakness or doubt. For the segregationists of

Mississippi, the situation dictated an open-ended commitment to the arrest

and prosecution of Freedom Riders, while for movement leaders it under-

scored the necessity of maintaining a steady flow of Riders into Jackson. This

calculus tested the human and logistical resources of both sides, but in late

July and early August the FRCC and CORE faced the special challenge of

rounding up and preparing the released Freedom Riders for trial. Making

sure that all of the appellate defendants returned to Mississippi in time for

the legal proceedings scheduled to begin in mid-August was an enormous

task. Indeed, the staff members and volunteers at the CORE office in New

York and at the FRCC recruiting centers in the South soon discovered that

they had time for little else. This realization, combined with financial con-

siderations, forced movement leaders to suspend the Mississippi Freedom

Rides for the month of August. However, they did so only after orchestrat-

ing a burst of new Rides in late July.

Designed to convince Mississippi authorities that there was no shortage

of Freedom Riders willing to come to Jackson, the four groups that descended

upon the city during an eight-day period raised the total number of Riders

arrested since May 24 to nearly three hundred. On Sunday morning, the

twenty-third, seven white Riders—six from California and one from New

York City—were arrested at the Jackson train depot. And on Monday after-

noon four Riders who had flown to Jackson from Montgomery were arrested

at the city airport after trying to desegregate the airport restaurant. Three of

those arrested were members of the Petway family: the Reverend Matthew

Petway, pastor of the AME Zion Church in Montgomery; his sixteen-year-

old son, Alphonso; and his twenty-year-old daughter, Kredelle, a student at

Florida A&M in Tallahassee. The fourth was Cecil Thomas, a white college

student from Ohio who had spent a year at Fisk. Jailing three Freedom Rid-

ers from the same family was a new experience for the Jackson police, but

this was only the first of several unusual arrests that punctuated the week.

384 Freedom Riders

On Saturday, July 29, the police apprehended ten white Riders at the

Greyhound terminal, including Wollcott Smith, a Michigan State student

who had participated in the Newark–to–Little Rock Freedom Ride earlier in

the month and who would later co-author a cartoon guide to racial discrimi-

nation in Mississippi; Byron Baer, a thirty-one-year-old special effects tech-

nician from Englewood, New Jersey, who would eventually become the

majority leader of the New Jersey State Senate; Hilmar Pabel, a fifty-year-

old photo-journalist from Munich, West Germany; Widjonarko Tjokroadisu-

marto, a graduate student at the University of Washington and the son of the

former Indonesian ambassador to Pakistan; and Norma Wagner, a forty-

four-year-old blind woman from Rochester, New York. Wary of bad public-

ity and fearing an international incident, the police reluctantly arrested Pabel,

later engineering his acquittal, and they refused to arrest Tjokroadisumarto

and Wagner. “We’re more humane than to arrest a blind woman,” Chief of

Detectives M. B. Pierce explained, adding that the Indonesian student was

accorded special courtesy as “a guest of this country.”

Earlier in the week, both the State Department and the Indonesian

Embassy had urged Tjokroadisumarto to stay away from the Freedom Rides,

either as a participant or as an observer, but the young student ignored their

entreaties. In a telegram sent to the embassy, he cited “the Supreme Court

decision on interstate travel, and President Kennedy’s opinion on the exer-

cise of the individual to travel” as proof that his participation in a Freedom

Ride was “neither illegal nor political.” Adding to the drama, the Jackson

police confessed that they were not sure whether their dark-complexioned

visitor was “black” or “white.” “I do not intend to change Mississippi cus-

toms,” Tjokroadisumarto explained with a grin. “That’s for Mississippians

to do. In my opinion, however, the customs of segregation and discrimina-

tion are wrong, ethically and otherwise.”

On Sunday morning, while local officials were still pondering the impli-

cations of racial ambiguity and international scrutiny, not to mention the

special challenges posed by handicapped Riders, the largest single group of

Freedom Riders to date arrived at the Jackson railroad terminal. Accompa-

nied by Richard Steward, a Dillard student and New Orleans CORE activist,

fourteen Riders from southern California filled several paddy wagons after

challenging the terminal’s segregated facilities. Most of the California Rid-

ers were student activists affiliated with UCLA. Ten were white, and four

were black: Lonnie Thurman, a Montgomery native and Alabama State Col-

lege graduate; Michael Grubbs, the nephew of the noted black historian John

Hope Franklin; Helen Singleton, an art student at Santa Monica City Col-

lege; and her husband, Bob, a twenty-five-year-old graduate student in inter-

national economics at UCLA.

The primary organizer of the Los Angeles–to–Jackson Freedom Ride,

Bob Singleton had served as the chairperson of UCLA’s NAACP chapter

during a controversial picketing campaign in 1960. Targeting discrimination

Woke Up This Morning with My Mind on Freedom 385

at Woolworth’s stores in Santa Monica and Hollywood, he and other picket-

ers raised the ire of a disapproving Roy Wilkins as well as university admin-

istrators. Evicted from its campus office, the chapter was reorganized first as

the Southern California Boycott Committee and later as a CORE chapter.

In the early summer of 1961 Henry Hodge, a black social worker and CORE

vice president who had moved to Los Angeles from St. Louis in the late

1950s, encouraged Singleton and other local activists to become Freedom

Riders. But not even he could have foreseen how useful and timely the Los

Angeles Ride would be. By bringing Southern California into play just prior

to the August hiatus, the FRCC sent a clear message that the movement had

more Freedom Riders in reserve than Mississippi officials had imagined.

The mass arrest of the Los Angeles Riders on July 30 was the last major

confrontation between the Jackson police and Freedom Riders prior to the

trials. However, the last individual arrest took place the next day when Jim

Wahlstrom tried to use the telephone in the “Negro” waiting room at the

Greyhound terminal. The arrest and conviction of the twenty-four-year-old

University of Wisconsin student represented a milestone of sorts, since he

was the first Freedom Rider to be rearrested. Originally arrested on June 6,

he was out on bond and awaiting his appellate trial when a patrolman appre-

hended him in the phone booth. Wahlstrom’s second arrest caused a consid-

erable stir, not only because it set a precedent but also because state

investigators had identified him as a “Soviet trained” Freedom Rider. Hav-

ing traveled to Havana with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in 1960, he

was especially suspect in the eyes of vigilant Mississippians. “Moscow is still

interested in Mississippi’s race problem,” the Jackson Daily News had recently

reminded its readers, after learning that Governor Barnett had just received

a telephone call “from behind the Iron Curtain seeking information on the

‘freedom riders.’ ” Although no one could be sure that Wahlstrom’s call en-

tailed similarly subversive activity, the many white Mississippians who con-

sidered their society to be under siege were ready to believe it.

The air of extreme suspicion surrounding the Wahlstrom episode re-

flected white Mississippi’s long-standing fixation with Communist subver-

sion, but it was also indicative of a noticeable intensification of the Cold War

during the summer of 1961. Centering around the crisis in Berlin, where

Soviet and East German officials were threatening to prohibit migration from

the eastern to the western zone of the city, the tense relationship between

the United States and the Soviet Union appeared to be approaching a break-

ing point by late July. The Berlin crisis had been building since early spring,

but now things were coming to a head, threatening to push all other issues,

including the civil rights struggle, into the background. In most areas of the

United States this is exactly what happened, especially after the East Ger-

mans began to construct the Berlin Wall on August 13. In the white South,

however, a different dynamic often prevailed. Here civil rights and Cold War

crises tended to merge into a single confrontation between outside forces