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

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406 Freedom Riders

in several workshop sessions. Listening to and interacting with seasoned ac-

tivists such as McDew, Sherrod, Bevel, Lewis, Nash, and Ruby Doris Smith

was exhilarating, and both men came away from the experience with a new

sense of the movement’s potential to transform the South. This was a fitting

prelude to their upcoming meeting with a man who made no effort to dis-

guise his revolutionary aims, and they could hardly wait to meet Williams in

person to see how far he had actually traveled on the road to revolution.

Before proceeding eastward to Monroe, however, Brooks and Forman

traveled southward by car to Atlanta. Offered a ride by Nash and Bevel, who

were on their way to an FRCC meeting, the two men visited the adjoining

headquarters of SNCC and SCLC, where they picked up a letter of endorse-

ment signed by Martin Luther King. At the SNCC office, they met Ed King,

who seemed “lonely” and “dejected.” As Forman later recalled the scene:

“He was leaving [to return to school at Kentucky State] and did not know

who would replace him. No decision had been made; it was not his problem,

but he was worried. SNCC faced serious problems as an organization, he

said. It should have developed more staff and instigated more activity in its

name. It had not developed a fund-raising base and had to rely heavily upon

contributions from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which

was like pulling teeth. In addition, it was identified in many eyes as an arm of

SCLC rather than as an independent organization. King seemed to feel frus-

trated on many levels.” All of this was sobering news, but a visit with Ella

Baker that evening went a long way toward restoring the two travelers’ spir-

its. Neither man had met Baker before, but she more than lived up to her

image as a movement sage. After a frank discussion of the problems and pros-

pects of the student movement, she gave her blessing to the Monroe expedi-

tion, leaving her two visitors, as Forman put it, “more wise about the history

of civil rights organizations in this country and with that deepened sense of

perspective which was Miss Baker’s constant gift to people.”

This whirlwind education continued the next evening when Brooks and

Forman arrived at the Monroe railway depot. Befriending a porter who warned

them that Monroe was “a rough town” but who nonetheless offered to drive

them to Williams’s house, they soon found themselves walking through a

living room arsenal cluttered with “forty rifles lying on the floor, stacked on

top of each other.” Following a hearty welcome, Williams explained that the

guns were a necessary deterrent to marauding Klansmen who had threat-

ened to kill him and torch his house. That evening, after visiting a local black

civil rights leader who claimed that he too feared for his life, Brooks and

Forman helped guard Williams’s house. Sitting on the porch until four in

the morning with rifles in hand, Williams and the two visitors heard loud

gunfire in the neighborhood. But, to their relief, no Klansmen appeared.

Over the next three days Brooks and Forman talked to a number of

Monroe residents, including the police chief and the city manager, and came

away with the sense that the city was a racial tinderbox. They also had lengthy

Woke Up This Morning with My Mind on Freedom 407

discussions with Williams about “the difference in connotation between

meeting violence with violence and self-defense.” “It is the latter they are

doing,” Forman wrote in a field report to the National Freedom Council,

“a right guaranteed in the Constitution and practiced by many other civil

rights fighters. People and organizations ought to try to understand the

historical context of the struggle here and the necessity to formulate courses

of actions predicated upon given situations at given times in history. Monroe

is not Nashville nor Montgomery.” At the end of the report, Forman offered

the sobering warning that “there is growing support for Williams through-

out the South, for the Negro is becoming impatient and he is not always going

to turn the other cheek.”

On Tuesday, August 8, Brooks and Forman boarded a train for Jack-

son, but before they left they promised to return to Monroe later in the

month accompanied by a group of Freedom Riders. Despite his misgivings

about nonviolence, Williams was open to the idea of using Freedom Riders

to bring attention to the situation in Monroe. The tentative plan was to

place the Riders on an interracial picket line surrounding the county court-

house, with the goal of forcing the city police to issue a warrant for the

arrest of the Klansman who had tried to kill Williams in June. After ex-

plaining the plan to a gathering of Freedom Riders in Jackson, Brooks and

Forman were able to recruit seventeen Riders—fifteen whites and two blacks—

willing to travel to Monroe. Among the seventeen were Fred Leonard, two

of the Minnesota Riders, and NAG veterans Paul Dietrich and Bill Mahoney.

The motivations of the volunteers, all of whom had just experienced the mass

arraignment, were not altogether clear or consistent, but many claimed that

they hoped to steer Williams toward nonviolence and to effect some sort of

reconciliation between his supporters and detractors. Unlike Brooks and

Forman, they had no intention of joining or rationalizing Williams’s armed

defense of the Monroe civil rights struggle. Instead, they hoped to demon-

strate the power and moral authority of nonviolence.

This rationale made little difference to white North Carolinians, who

regarded the Freedom Riders’ visit to Monroe as a needless and dangerous

provocation. When the Riders arrived at Charlotte’s Union Station on Au-

gust 17, they discovered that little had changed since Joe Perkins had been

arrested at the station three months earlier. While there was no obvious threat

of violence in Charlotte, local officials made it clear that they did not want

the Riders to remain in the city any longer than was absolutely necessary.

Fortunately, the Riders had already arranged to stay in Matthews, a farming

town located ten miles southeast of Charlotte, halfway between Charlotte

and Monroe. Matthews was the home of Harry and Janet Boyte, two SCLC

supporters who had been active in the effort to desegregate Atlanta’s schools

in the late 1950s. Eager to provide the Riders with a safe refuge, the Boytes

turned their farmhouse into a movement encampment and staging ground

for the project in Monroe.

408 Freedom Riders

Despite an uneasy and ambiguous relationship with Williams, the Rid-

ers wasted no time in launching the project, establishing the Monroe Non-

violent Action Committee (MNAC) and opening a headquarters, which they

named “Freedom House,” just down the street from Williams’s home. Pub-

licly Williams welcomed the Riders as allies and urged his followers to ad-

here to nonviolent discipline when participating in demonstrations sponsored

by the MNAC, but in private he told friends that the Riders’ nonviolent

efforts were bound to fail. As he wrote to William Worthy, the veteran jour-

nalist who had participated in both the Journey of Reconciliation and Bayard

Rustin’s 1956 mission to Montgomery, “I am not a pacifist and don’t believe

their philosophy will work with conscienceless racists.”

Amidst rising fears among local whites, the MNAC organized its first

demonstration on Monday, August 21, when ten activists—six Freedom Rid-

ers, three local blacks, and Constance Lever, a young English anti-apartheid

activist—set up a picket line outside the Union County Courthouse in down-

town Monroe. Carrying signs proclaiming “Freedom for All,” the picketers

remained at the courthouse for several hours without incident. When they

returned the next day, however, a small but angry crowd of whites provoked

a melee that resulted in several beatings and the arrest of four picketers, in-

cluding Richard Griswold, a white Freedom Rider from Brooklyn who took

an “unauthorized” picture of Paul Dietrich being beaten. On Wednesday a

second confrontation at the courthouse led to the arrest of a white protester

who assaulted Danny Thompson, a white Freedom Rider from Cleveland,

Ohio. Despite the arrest, the police at the scene made it clear that they sym-

pathized with the attackers. The MNAC, angered by the police’s refusal to

protect the right to protest against city officials, returned to the downtown

on Friday to establish a new picket line outside the dentist office of Mayor

Fred Wilson. In response, Wilson ordered city workers to tear up and resur-

face the sidewalk in front of the office, and before the afternoon was over

several picketers “had been roughed up.” One of those assaulted, Ed

Bromberg, a white Freedom Rider from New York, suffered a flesh wound

from a high-powered air rifle fired by an unidentified sniper.

Despite the escalating violence, MNAC picketers returned to the court-

house on Saturday morning. This time they encountered the largest and most

aggressive crowd to date, and by mid-afternoon the local police were forced

to call in highway patrolmen to keep the situation from getting completely

out of hand. After several assaults and arrests, Forman asked the police to

escort the picketers back to Freedom House and the black section of town.

As the picketers marched in double file away from the courthouse, two po-

licemen accompanied them. But so did hundreds of angry whites. “Seeing us

prepare to leave,” Forman recalled years later, “the racists began to line up in

their cars. . . . Car after car of whites passed—some loaded with guns, some

with occupants throwing stones at us, all hurling insults and threats.” As the

marchers left the downtown and entered a white neighborhood, one woman

Woke Up This Morning with My Mind on Freedom 409

wielding a large knife ran toward them screaming: “I told you niggers not to

come past my house singing those damn songs.” Other white bystanders threw

rocks, bricks, and Coke bottles at the advancing marchers, some of whom

were injured.

For several blocks the marchers maintained a tight nonviolent discipline,

refusing to respond in kind and channeling their anger into louder and louder

singing, but as they approached Boyte Street, the main thoroughfare of

Williams’s neighborhood, the discipline began to break down. After several

neighborhood blacks tried to protect the marchers by returning “stone for

stone,” two of the marchers—both local supporters of Williams—rushed over

to one of the cars that had been following them, pulled out the driver, and

began beating him. Soon a second car was being pummeled with rocks,

prompting Danny Thompson, who was still recovering from the beating he

had received on Wednesday, to jump in front of the car in an effort to shield

the driver from harm. In the heat of the moment not all of the marchers

approved of Thompson’s intervention, but, fortunately for the driver, the

entire confrontation came to an abrupt end a few seconds later when a black

sentry fired his rifle into the air, “sending the whites fleeing back toward

downtown Monroe.”

That evening the MNAC held an emergency strategy session that re-

vealed sharp differences of opinion about the implications of what had just

happened in the streets of Monroe. While Williams and other local activists

reiterated the black community’s right to an armed defense, the visiting Free-

dom Riders condemned the acts of retaliation that had placed civil rights

advocates and white segregationists on the same moral plane. After much

debate, and with Williams reluctantly agreeing to go along with the majority’s

wishes, the group adopted a two-part plan for the following day. In the morn-

ing the MNAC would send interracial delegations to several of Monroe’s

white churches, and in the afternoon the picketers would return to the court-

house square. Although Williams warned them not to expect too much from

the city’s religious leaders, the church visits went off surprisingly well, with

only one interracial team being forced to conduct a kneel-in on the steps of

an all-white Episcopal church. As one Freedom Rider recalled: “We were

received rather warmly everywhere. In most churches, the minister greeted

us personally after the service and invited us to return the following week.”

This encouraging experience raised the expectations for the afternoon

demonstration at the courthouse, but the picketers soon discovered that the

churches’ openness represented only one side of a sharply divided and vola-

tile white community. When the picketers arrived at the courthouse around

two o’clock, they encountered a shrieking, unruly crowd of more than two

thousand white protesters. Waving Confederate flags and carrying signs con-

demning “nigger lovers” and proclaiming “Open Season on Coons,” the pro-

testers included hundreds of Klansmen who had descended upon Monroe

from as far away as central Georgia. To make matters worse, a group of

410 Freedom Riders

young blacks loyal to Williams soon joined the throng. Though unarmed,

they immediately attracted the attention of the Klansmen, who moved men-

acingly in their direction. Although the police managed to keep the Klansmen

and the rest of the crowd at bay for more than two hours, the standoff col-

lapsed as soon as the picketers and the group of black teenagers tried to leave

the scene.

Earlier in the day the MNAC had arranged for four taxicabs to pick up

the picketers at 4:30, but the organizers had not counted on the presence of

the black teenagers. As the designated leader at the scene, Forman decided

to fill the cabs with the teenagers and as many of the picketers as could be

jammed in. That left twenty picketers waiting for a second set of cabs. In the

meantime, one of Williams’s lieutenants, Woodrow Wilson, rushed to the

courthouse square accompanied by several armed colleagues. By the time

Wilson arrived, the crowd had broken through the police lines, attacking

several of the picketers, including Constance Lever. At this point Forman

managed to shepherd Lever to Wilson’s car, but before he could put her

inside, a police officer screamed: “You ain’t going to put a white woman in a

car with a bunch of niggers!” Advancing toward the car, the officer noticed

that several of the black men inside were armed with shotguns. After grab-

bing one of the guns, he handed it to a white protester, who promptly turned

to Forman, threatening to kill him if he didn’t move away from the car. “If

you move one step,” the man warned, “I’m going to blow your black brains

back to Africa.” Seconds later the crowd closed in around Forman and began

chanting: “Kill him! Kill him! Kill the nigger.”

Sure that he was going to die, Forman stood motionless for several min-

utes before deciding to make a run for the car. Pushing Lever into the front

seat, he scrambled in after her, but not before the man who had threatened

to kill him struck him in the head with a gun barrel. As blood poured from a

deep gash in Forman’s forehead, three of the policemen at the scene decided

that they had seen enough. Commandeering Wilson’s car, they drove Forman,

Lever, and the others to the police station, leaving the crowd screaming for

more blood. For the next twenty minutes the crowd surged out of control,

roughing up Heath Rush and several other Freedom Riders and eventually

forcing the police to place all of the picketers under “protective custody.” By

the end of the afternoon the Union County jail was jammed with twenty-six

picketers and one newsman, all arrested for inciting a riot.

During the next five hours, the real perpetrators of the riot spread may-

hem across the city. After roving bands of armed whites, including some

uniformed policemen, drove through black neighborhoods firing at inno-

cent bystanders, Williams began to mobilize the black community for armed

resistance. One gun battle between four of Williams’s lieutenants and two

police officers left one of the officers with a bullet wound in the thigh, and

before the night was over rumors of an unrestrained race war were rampant.

By ten o’clock the worst of the fighting was over, but fear of an all-out assault

Woke Up This Morning with My Mind on Freedom 411

on the black community had already led Williams to order the construction

of barricades at both ends of Boyte Street. Placing armed sentries in the trees

overlooking the barricades, he urged his followers to prepare for the worst.

While he counseled them to stay at home and avoid contact with the roving

whites, he passed out enough weapons to ensure that the community could

defend itself if the Klan forced a showdown. Earlier in the day Williams’s

wife, Mabel, had called Harry Boyte in Manning, hoping that he could

convince federal or state officials to provide protection for local blacks and

their MNAC allies. Boyte was able to relay the message to Governor Terry

Sanford through an intermediary, and by late afternoon several dozen state

troopers had set up roadblocks in the streets surrounding the black Newtown

neighborhood.

Unfortunately, the troopers’ effort to keep all whites out of the neigh-

borhood proved less than foolproof. Just after six o’clock Charles and Mabel

Stegall, a white couple from the nearby town of Marshville, drove toward the

crowd that had filled the stretch of Boyte Street near Williams’s home. As-

suming that the Stegalls were part of a Klan raiding party, several members

of the crowd rushed forward with rifles at the ready. After being pulled out of

the car— which to their misfortune closely resembled a known Klan car that

had been seen downtown the day before—the two frightened visitors tried to

explain that they had simply driven down the wrong street and that they

harbored no ill feelings toward “niggers.” This patronizing explanation only

made matters worse, prompting several angry onlookers to suggest that the

Stegalls should be killed on the spot. Others objected, and Williams soon

emerged from his house to rescue the couple.

Assuring them that no one planned to harm them, Williams offered

the Stegalls a temporary refuge in his home and even allowed Bruce Stegall

to phone the chief of police, A. A. Mauney. But when the Stegalls begged

Williams to provide an escort out of the neighborhood, he refused, advising

them that they could leave of their own accord anytime they wished. A few

minutes later they did just that, returning safely to Marshville. Before leav-

ing Monroe, however, they spoke to two policemen, who relayed their story

to members of the sheriff’s department and the highway patrol, some of whom

began to refer to the incident as a “hostage situation.” Despite the absence

of any firm confirmation from the Stegalls, the rumor soon spread that

Williams had kidnapped the couple, held them at gunpoint, and threatened

to kill them.

Even before this rumor exacerbated the situation, Williams, convinced

that Chief Mauney and the police planned to kill him before the night was

over, had arranged for a possible escape. But any chance of remaining in

Monroe ended with the Stegall incident. To save himself and his family, not

to mention the lives of his loyal supporters, Williams slipped out the back

door into the darkness sometime before midnight. Accompanied by his wife,

his two young sons, and Mae Mallory, he made his way to a prearranged

412 Freedom Riders

rendezvous, where Julian Mayfield was waiting with a getaway car. Both

Mayfield and Mallory had come down from New York the previous week to

help Williams cope with the worsening situation in Monroe, but Mallory, a

fiery and sometimes bitter woman, had lost her composure, urging Williams

to kill any white segregationists who challenged his authority. At one point

she apparently threatened to kill the Stegalls, an indiscretion that angered

Williams and implicated her in the alleged kidnapping. Fearing that she would

get herself and others killed if he left her behind, Williams wisely took her

with him to the rendezvous with Mayfield, though this decision would later

contribute to the case for a grand conspiracy.

Dodging an army of law enforcement officers, Mayfield drove all night

through the back roads of North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, and New

Jersey. Arriving at a safe house in Harlem on Monday morning, August 28,

the band of fugitives soon discovered that they were the object of a national

manhunt. Within minutes of the escape, local and state law enforcement

officers had ransacked Williams’s house, uncovering a cache of weapons but

no clues as to where he had gone. When early-morning interrogations of

several Williams lieutenants failed to reveal his whereabouts, the officers

turned their attention to the Stegalls, who were brought before a grand jury

on Monday afternoon. As the all-white jury listened with rapt attention, the

Stegalls told a lurid story of kidnapping and murderous threats, insisting they

had been held hostage by a madman. According to Mabel Stegall, the kid-

napping represented a desperate attempt to force the authorities to release

the picketers arrested at the courthouse square. After narrowly escaping death

at the hands of a black mob, she and her husband had been taken to Williams’s

home to serve as human bargaining chips. Showing no mercy, Williams

had called Chief Mauney and threatened to kill both of his captives if the

picketers were not released within thirty minutes. Although Williams and

others would later dispute this version of events, the Stegalls’ testimony

was more than enough to convince the grand jury to issue an indictment

for kidnapping.

By Monday evening Monroe was swarming with FBI agents. Dispatched

by J. Edgar Hoover, who firmly believed that Williams was part of a

Communist-inspired plot to incite violence among disgruntled Southern

blacks, the agents searched for weapons and other evidence that would con-

firm the director’s suspicions. Monroe remained a powder keg of racial ten-

sion and animosity, and Hoover and many others feared that renewed

violence might break out at any time. The greatest fear, of course, was that

the violence and racial polarization in Monroe would spread to other South-

ern communities if Williams’s extremist behavior went unpunished. Indeed,

the Monroe incident had already provoked segregationist politicians and

other white supremacists across the South, several of whom wasted no time

in exploiting the situation. Even before the grand jury returned its indict-

ment, Governor John Patterson sent telegrams to Governor Terry Sanford

Woke Up This Morning with My Mind on Freedom 413

Robert Williams was the subject of a national FBI manhunt during the fall of 1961.

414 Freedom Riders

and Mayor Fred Wilson offering the services of Alabama National Guards-

men and state troopers. Eager to expose the Freedom Riders who had be-

come entangled with Williams, he also wired Robert Kennedy to express

his outrage against the “lawless elements” from the North who had fo-

mented the violence and racial strife in Monroe.

To Patterson’s delight, the Freedom Riders’ involvement in the Monroe

crisis was a source of considerable embarrassment for the nonviolent move-

ment. With the early press reports depicting Williams as a violent criminal

who trafficked in conspiracy and political subversion, CORE, SCLC, and

SNCC leaders took immediate steps to disassociate themselves from his com-

mitment to armed self-defense. Since Brooks had gone to Monroe with a

letter of endorsement from King, SCLC felt especially vulnerable to criti-

cism. On Monday evening SCLC executive board member Kelly Miller Smith

released a statement deploring the situation in Monroe and condemning both

blacks and whites for resorting to violence. “There are considerable wrongs

on both sides of the situation,” he acknowledged, after talking to several of

the Monroe Freedom Riders by phone, adding: “Violence is never a final

solution to any problem. Any perpetrator of violence, regardless of his stated

purpose, contributes to the shame of America and to the frustration of hu-

man decency.” Several CORE and SNCC leaders also publicly reiterated

their commitment to nonviolence, but there were no detailed comments on

the situation since at this point no one outside of Monroe had much sense of

what had actually happened to the Freedom Riders.

Even among the Freedom Riders themselves there was considerable con-

fusion about the unfolding drama in Monroe. Five of the Riders—including

Paul Brooks and Danny Thompson—escaped arrest on Sunday afternoon,

but Forman and the rest spent the night in the county jail. When they first

arrived at the police station, it was unclear whether they and the other pick-

eters were under arrest or simply in protective custody, but after inquiring

about a police escort back to Boyte Street, they learned that they had been

charged with inciting a riot. Bail was a thousand dollars each, they were told,

with the trial set for September 11. Only Constance Lever, who was sched-

uled to fly back to England on September 9, seemed concerned about the

trial date or the prospect of spending two weeks in jail. Later, after being

transferred to the county jail, they serenaded the guards with freedom songs

and protested their unwarranted incarceration by declaring a hunger strike.

Still bleeding from his head wound, Forman was treated at a local hospital

before rejoining his fellow prisoners, all of whom were jammed into a cell

block designed for less than half their number. Sleeping three abreast on the

concrete floor, they survived the night without any contact with the outside

world and without knowing anything about Williams’s escape or the alleged

kidnapping. They had no inkling of the seriousness of the situation until a

police captain filled them in on Monday afternoon. Earlier in the day, unbe-

knownst to them, Thompson had vowed that the Freedom Riders would

Woke Up This Morning with My Mind on Freedom 415

remain in Monroe until “something is done” about the discriminatory and

inhumane conditions forced upon the local black community. But Forman

and the jailed Riders had no real opportunity to discuss their options until

CORE attorney Len Holt visited the jail on Tuesday morning.

Holt made it clear that the situation was too volatile for the Freedom

Riders to remain in Monroe any longer than necessary. For the good of the

movement, he urged Forman and the others to forgo the normal strategy of

“jail–no bail.” Although the bail figure was hefty and the trial date was nearly

two weeks away, he was confident that he could convince the authorities to

arrange for reasonable bail and an earlier trial. Later in the day, SCLC’s

executive director, Wyatt Tee Walker, also paid a visit to the jail, and he too

confirmed the movement’s desire to get the Riders out of Monroe as soon as

possible. Walker had only been in town for a few hours, but any doubts he

might have harbored about the poisonous nature of race relations in Monroe

had disappeared earlier in the afternoon during a confrontation with an en-

raged white supremacist. When Walker and two black reporters tried to en-

ter the county courthouse, Vann Wickery, a towering three-hundred-pound

restaurant manager, picked the diminutive SCLC leader up and threw him

down a flight of concrete steps into a bed of ivy surrounding a granite Civil

War monument. Picking himself up, Walker reclimbed the steps only to be

thrown down a second time, and moments later a third. Finally, the police

intervened, placing Wickery in handcuffs and carting him off to jail, where

he was charged with public drunkenness and resisting arrest. In the end,

Walker escaped serious injury and entered the courthouse, but the incident—

especially the symbolism of Walker’s landing place—quickly became a staple

of movement lore.

At a hearing later in the afternoon, a local judge reduced the picketers’

bail to twenty-five dollars and moved the trial date to September 1, setting

the stage for a mass bailout. By midnight all but five of the picketers were

out on bond. The remaining five—Forman, Paul Dietrich, Ken Shilman,

Richard Griswold, and William Mahoney—were all movement veterans

who felt uncomfortable about accepting bail. At one point on Tuesday

evening they reluctantly agreed to post bond, but all five changed their

minds and decided to remain in jail for at least one more night after discov-

ering that the warrant for their release contained several new charges, in-

cluding the charge that they had carried concealed weapons. Though still

concerned about the implications of the new charges, Forman and Griswold

accepted bail on Wednesday morning, leaving only three Freedom Riders

behind bars. As Forman later explained, with so much uncertainty about

what had happened to Williams and with the unpredictable Danny Thompson

making provocative statements to the press, there was even more concern

about what was happening back on Boyte Street.

“Monroe seemed like a ghost town when I emerged from the police sta-

tion that Wednesday afternoon, and Newtown was like a ghost that had died,”