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

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436 Freedom Riders

“New Frontier” boosted such expectations, and Shuttlesworth stepped up

his demands for a realization of democratic ideals. Nevertheless, as the sum-

mer of the Freedom Rides came to a close, he and other movement leaders

began to wonder if the new administration was capable of taking an unequivo-

cal stand on matters of racial justice. Repeating the same pattern of mixed

signals that had delayed the implementation of school desegregation during

the Eisenhower years, the administration had adopted a policy of temporiza-

tion that unintentionally sustained white supremacist resistance to social

change. Indeed, by mid-September some segregationist leaders were declar-

ing victory in the war against the Freedom Riders.

On Monday, September 18, the Jackson Daily News smugly trumpeted

that local and state officials had rejected a desperate overture from CORE,

which had “offered to halt their Freedom Rider program into Jackson” if

Mississippi authorities agreed to withhold further prosecutions and let 250

pending appeal cases be adjudicated by the circuit and state supreme court

justices. Quoting a weekend television interview with Mayor Allen Thomp-

son, the Daily News reported that Jackson officials did not intend “to yield

one inch in prosecuting those who violate our local laws.” “There will be no

letup in a single case,” Thompson declared, “nor will we permit any other

type of disturbance here which violates our laws. We feel we have completely

broken the Freedom Rider movement here.” The threat to the Mississippi

way of life had been turned back, he insisted, adding: “If anything, things

have improved in Jackson since the advent of the first Freedom Rider group

here four months ago.” Mississippians were allegedly more convinced than

ever that “our way of life here is best for us, and for the most part, no one

pays any attention to them anymore since our splendid police department is

handling the situation.”

Thompson’s growing confidence rested on a sanguine but credible as-

sessment of the situation. On the surface, at least, the Freedom Riders’ pros-

pects appeared to be declining on all fronts, from public opinion and politics

to legal decisions and the financial condition of the movement. For several

weeks the American public had been preoccupied with the home-run race

between two New York Yankees sluggers, Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris.

The pursuit of Babe Ruth’s record of sixty home runs, set in 1927, had eclipsed

all other stories, including the pursuit of freedom in Mississippi and Ala-

bama. However, on Tuesday evening, September 19, some Americans were

momentarily distracted by two remarkable television documentaries. Shown

on the NBC network as part of its White Paper series, Angola: Road to War

profiled the “indescribable brutality, hate and suffering that have accompa-

nied the revolt against Portuguese colonial rule in Angola.” The second docu-

mentary, entitled Walk in My Shoes, aired on the rival ABC network, though

many Southern affiliates refused to broadcast the program. Billed as an ex-

ploration of black America “told purposely from the standpoint of the Ne-

gro” and co-produced by the black journalist Louis Lomax, the program

Oh, Freedom 437

included an interview with Percy Sutton, the black New York lawyer arrested

in Jackson, along with New York state representative Mark Lane, on June 8.

In a moving sequence, Sutton explained the guilt that he had felt after not

joining the early Freedom Rides, the feelings of both fear and satisfaction

that he later experienced as a Freedom Rider, and the sense of triumph and

liberation that came over him after “being served orange juice at a ‘white’

counter in Alabama.” After hearing Sutton’s testimonial and other “chant[s]

of freedom” featured in the two programs, one New York television critic

reminded his readers that freedom’s “insistency transcends geography.” “Its

denial,” he insisted, “is the West’s major shame.”

How other Americans responded to the documentaries’ “searing indict-

ment” of racial oppression and exploitation was unclear, but the paucity of

similar broadcasts in the following months suggests that the networks re-

ceived little encouragement from the viewing public. As Thompson and oth-

ers detected, the dominant attitudes among white Americans reflected

complacency and a visceral distrust of radical reform. Even among liberals

there was a strong preference for gradualism and a hesitance to embrace

confrontational activism. Despite all that had happened during the past four

months, there was no groundswell of public support for the Freedom Rides;

indeed, the popular basis for altering long-standing political arrangements

and legal traditions seemed to be slipping away. Most obviously, the legal

strategy had revealed the movement’s financial vulnerability. When all but

two of the “prayer pilgrimage” defendants filed appeal bonds and flew to

Detroit on September 19, the Jackson press explained that high-ranking

Episcopalians had come up with the bail money, the implication being that

this was a special case. Run-of-the-mill Freedom Riders who depended on

CORE for financial resources were presumably much more vulnerable to

economic pressure.

The common assumption that CORE stood on the verge of financial

collapse by mid-September was understandable, but the organization’s ac-

tual financial condition was less grave than Thompson and many other white

Mississippians believed. Although Marvin Rich’s effort to find a bail-bond

company willing to underwrite CORE’s growing obligations proved futile

(one Connecticut company agreed to advance the bond money but withdrew

the offer the next day when Mississippi officials threatened to cancel its li-

cense to do business in the state), Jim Farmer found an unlikely angel at the

NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., commonly known as

the “Inc. (or Ink) Fund.” Despite his strong misgivings about the wisdom of

the Freedom Rides, Thurgood Marshall, who would soon leave his position

as head of the fund to take a seat on the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Ap-

peals, magnanimously offered to step into the breach. “What the hell!” he

told Farmer, after learning of CORE’s plight. “The Ink Fund has about

$300,000 in bail-bond money. It’s not doing anything but sitting there. You

might as well use it as long as it lasts.”

438 Freedom Riders

Stunned by Marshall’s offer, Farmer “could hardly wait” to relay the

good news to his CORE colleagues. But at a staff meeting the next morning

he was surprised to discover that Rich was reluctant to accept the money.

The fear that there would be strings attached to the loan and the suspicion

that Marshall’s organization planned to take partial credit for the Freedom

Rides made Rich more than a little uncomfortable. Indeed, in light of the

public criticism of the Rides by Marshall, Wilkins, and other national NAACP

leaders, he found the offer galling, if not insulting. Earlier in the summer,

one NAACP leader had jibed to reporters that “CORE gets people in jail

and we have to get them out,” but now for some reason the Inc. Fund was

willing to put itself in financial jeopardy to save CORE. Rich smelled a rat.

Farmer himself was mindful of the danger of becoming a junior partner to an

organization that did not share CORE’s commitment to direct action. But,

having run out of viable alternatives, he waved off Rich’s objections and ac-

cepted Marshall’s offer.

Whatever Marshall’s motivations, acceptance of the offer was, as Rich

predicted, only a prelude to even greater Inc. Fund involvement in the Free-

dom Rider campaign. Following several weeks of discussion and negotiation

between Farmer and Marshall, CORE’s policy-making body, the National

Action Committee, agreed to let the Inc. Fund take over the responsibility of

representing the Mississippi Freedom Riders in court. By the end of Novem-

ber the transfer of responsibility was complete, lessening CORE’s legal

and financial burden but confirming the widespread suspicion among white

Southerners that the NAACP had been masterminding the Freedom Rides

all along.

Even with this infusion of funds, CORE faced a difficult road ahead.

The only real solution to the organization’s financial and legal problems was

federal intervention on a massive scale, and the probability of such interven-

tion was still in doubt as the summer of 1961 came to an official end on

September 22. More than a month had passed since the members of ICC had

listened to the oral arguments for and against Attorney General Kennedy’s

desegregation petition, and it had been almost four months since the filing of

the petition itself. “The time has come for this commission to declare un-

equivocally by regulation,” Kennedy had declared on May 29, “that a Negro

passenger is free to travel the length and breadth of this country in the same

manner as any other passenger.” But time, it seemed, was marching on with

no unequivocal resolution in sight. Growing increasingly impatient, CORE

leaders in New York, as well as SNCC activists in Nashville, began to look

for some means of forcing the ICC to issue a favorable ruling. In early Sep-

tember tentative plans for a mass demonstration known as the “Washington

Project” took shape. Patterned after A. Philip Randolph’s planned 1941 March

on Washington, the project would bring hundreds, perhaps even thousands,

of nonviolent demonstrators to the capital city to apply pressure on the ICC

and the Kennedy administration. The exact date of the march was yet to be

Oh, Freedom 439

determined, and movement leaders were still working out the logistical de-

tails as the summer drew to a close. But among the members of the FRCC

there was general agreement that situation required a “spectacular” demon-

stration of nonviolent commitment and solidarity. As Farmer declared in a

September 5 press release, the Washington project would transfer “the

struggle for dignity on the nation’s highways from the courts to the con-

science of America.”

WHETHER THE FINANCIALLY STRAPPED nonviolent movement could have pulled

off a march of this magnitude in the fall of 1961 remains an open question.

The proposed demonstration that seemed so critical as late as September 21

became moot a day later when the eleven commissioners of the ICC issued a

unanimous ruling prohibiting racial discrimination in interstate bus transit.

Endorsing virtually every point in the attorney general’s petition, the com-

mission announced that, beginning on November 1, 1961, all interstate buses

would be required to display a certificate that read: “Seating aboard this ve-

hicle is without regard to race, color, creed, or national origin, by order of

the Interstate Commerce Commission.” Displaying the signs would be man-

datory until January 1, 1963, but the commission reserved the right to extend

the requirement indefinitely. Beginning in 1963, federal law would require

the same text to be printed on all bus tickets “sold for transportation in inter-

state or foreign commerce.” This provision, which made an allowance for

the thousands of tickets already printed, was the only delay granted by the

commission. As of November 1, all terminals serving interstate buses would

be required to post and abide by the new ICC regulations. Interstate carriers

were forbidden to use racially segregated terminal facilities, which, accord-

ing to the commissioners, were still common “in a substantial part of the

United States.” “In many motor passenger terminals,” they reported, with a

suggestion of feigned surprise, “Negro interstate passengers are compelled

to use eating, rest room and other facilities which are segregated.”

In an important point of clarification that raised more than a few eye-

brows in movement circles, the commissioners indicated that their deseg-

regation order “would not be applicable . . . to every independently operated

roadside restaurant at which a bus stops solely to pick up or discharge pas-

sengers, or to every independently operated corner drug store which sells

tickets for a motor carrier. Where a carrier’s ticket agent does nothing more

for the benefit of the carrier’s passengers than sell tickets and post sched-

ules, we would not consider his place of business to be a terminal facility.”

However, the commissioners made it clear that the new rules applied to any

ticket agent who “offers or provides facilities for the comfort and conve-

nience of passengers, such as a public waiting room, rest room, or eating

facilities.” The ICC order also required bus operators to report any at-

tempts to interfere with the new regulations and provided fines of up to five

hundred dollars for each violation. The obligation to report interference

440 Freedom Riders

within fifteen days of an incident pertained to governmental as well as indi-

vidual violators, a provision that would prove crucial to enforcement in the

months to come.

The ICC ruling applied only to interstate bus transportation and did not

extend to air or train travel, but within these limitations the commissioners

had gone about as far anyone in the Kennedy administration could have rea-

sonably expected. William Tucker, the Kennedy appointee to the commis-

sion, had consulted with Burke Marshall and other Justice Department officials

throughout the deliberations, and those same officials had encouraged Tucker

to press for a sweeping ruling that would resolve the Freedom Rider crisis

and ensure meaningful desegregation. Still, until the ruling was actually an-

nounced there was concern within the Administration that the conservative

bent of the other commissioners would foil Tucker’s efforts. Since anything

short of a complete endorsement of the attorney general’s petition would

have sustained or even exacerbated the conflict over bus segregation, Marshall

and his colleagues regarded the ruling as a major accomplishment.

“This was a much more imaginative and controversial step than the com-

mission was used to taking,” Marshall insisted in a 1964 interview. “And it

was our judgment, my judgment, after we heard the oral argument that there

was a good chance the commission wouldn’t issue any rules, or that if it did

issue rules they would cut way back and they wouldn’t be effective and the

commission wouldn’t deal with the problem. . . . I think on the whole it was

really rather incredible for anyone that had experience with the commission

that the commission came out unanimously with the rules suggested by the

Department of Justice.” As Marshall conceded, part of the explanation for

the commission’s surprising display of leadership rested in the administration’s

behind-the-scenes efforts—both formal and informal—to nudge the com-

missioners toward a forthright advocacy of desegregation. A political prom-

ise to one commissioner interested in a federal court appointment and the

assurances given to others concerned about reappointment were an impor-

tant part of the story, even though such considerations remained hidden from

public view.

Whatever its origins, the ICC ruling drew considerable praise from the

national press. Even editors who had expressed serious misgivings about the

Freedom Rides hailed the ruling as a legal and administrative milestone. Al-

though many expressed surprise at the scope of the ruling, outside of the

South there was a strong current of editorial support for the commission’s

advanced position. Almost everyone credited the attorney general with pre-

cipitating the ruling, but there was also widespread recognition that the Free-

dom Rides had been a crucial factor in both the timing and character of the

ICC’s deliberations. “Much of the credit for overcoming the inertia and po-

litical resistance that hamstrung the I.C.C. before on this issue must obvi-

ously go to the Freedom Rider movement of last spring,” a New York Times

editorial declared two days after the ruling. “Though, as we argued at the

Oh, Freedom 441

time, the movement raised dangers when it continued beyond the realization

of its point of focusing attention on the need for integrated interstate bus

transportation, nevertheless that demonstration started the chain of events

which resulted in the new I.C.C. order.”

The notion that the Freedom Rides had catalyzed the ruling was even

stronger among white Southern editors, the vast majority of whom rejected

the rationale for the commission’s newfound activism. Repeating the pattern

established in the mid-1950s following the Brown decision, many segrega-

tionist editors tried to downplay the significance of the ruling. Some made

passing references to a minor adjustment in administrative policy, and others

ignored the ruling altogether. But, other than the expected expressions of

outrage by Citizens’ Council stalwarts, there were few calls for outright defi-

ance or massive resistance.

Among the more thoughtful segregationists, this restraint reflected a spirit

of resignation, a sense that desegregation was inevitable. For many others,

however, an entirely different set of expectations was at work. To most white

Southerners, the ICC ruling appeared to be just another unenforceable edict.

In May 1955 the Supreme Court had ordered the implementation of school

desegregation “with all deliberate speed,” yet six years later all but a handful

of Southern schools remained segregated. In November 1955 the ICC had

ordered the desegregation of interstate railway travel, yet racial segregation

was still the general rule on Southern trains in 1961. Perhaps this time it

would be different, but historical experience suggested that there was no rea-

son for segregationists to panic.

Such skepticism was also prevalent among black Americans. In the black

press, as in the broader black community, past disappointments tempered

the response to the ICC ruling. Virtually all of the editorials and public state-

ments praising the ruling included a word or two of warning. The true value

of the ruling, black editors and civil rights leaders pointed out, depended on

the degree of enforcement—a condition that would only be revealed in the

weeks and months following implementation on November 1. Every major

civil rights organization, from CORE to the NAACP, sent telegrams of con-

gratulation to the Justice Department, but in private conversations, and in

some cases in press releases, these same organizations expressed concerns

about the likelihood of effective enforcement. Farmer went even further,

reminding the attorney general that, in and of itself, the ICC ruling did not

solve the legal problems of the Freedom Riders convicted in Jackson. Al-

though Farmer promised that “no additional riders would be recruited and

sent to Mississippi,” he informed Kennedy that “those already in jail would

continue serving their forty days.” Beginning on November 1, Farmer added,

CORE “would send out interracial teams to crisscross the South and test the

enforcement of the order.” If enforcement proved lacking or haphazard, he

warned, the Freedom Rides “would resume immediately.”

442 Freedom Riders

The ICC ruling had an immediate impact on the Freedom Rider move-

ment. Suspending the preparations for the Washington Project, movement

leaders began to plan a new wave of Freedom Rides designed to test enforce-

ment of the ruling. At the CORE office in New York and at the FRCC re-

cruitment centers in the South, the next six weeks would be a time of feverish

activity and hopeful speculation about the future. A decade after Brown and

fourteen years after Morgan v. Virginia, a major federal agency other than the

Justice Department had finally weighed in on the side of racial justice, man-

dating desegregation as something more than an unrealized ideal. Whether

the rhetoric of equal treatment could be translated into something tangible

remained to be seen. But this time, unlike the “with all deliberate speed”

waffling of the 1955 Brown implementation decision, there was a firm date

for compliance. Government officials had set a date for desegregation, and

Farmer and other movement leaders were determined to hold them to it.

The prospects for enforcement depended upon a number of unknowns,

including the level of commitment at the Justice Department, the response

of local and state officials, and the willingness of white Southerners to obey

federal law and to eschew violence. The last of these was perhaps the most

difficult to predict, but the initial signs following the ruling were not encour-

aging, at least as far as John Doar was concerned. Just hours before the an-

nouncement of the ICC decision, Doar arrived in Mississippi to conduct an

investigation of the situation in Amite, Pike, and Walthall counties. For three

days he roamed around McComb and Liberty, gauging both the status of the

voting rights campaign and the mood of local white supremacists. By Sunday

morning he was convinced that southwestern Mississippi was a racial time

bomb that could explode at any time, but the seriousness of the situation did

not become fully apparent until he met with E. W. Steptoe and Bob Moses at

Steptoe’s farm that afternoon. Shocked by the sight of Moses’s unhealed

wounds, Doar was even more troubled after listening to descriptions of the

repeated threats of violence against SNCC voter registration activists. Sev-

eral local black volunteers had also received threats, including Herbert Lee,

a fifty-two-year-old father of nine who had helped to found the Amite branch

of the NAACP. According to Steptoe, State Representative E. H. Hurst, Billy

Jack Caston’s father-in-law, had made threatening statements after learning

that Lee had offered to drive Moses around the county. Alarmed, Doar asked

to be driven over to Lee’s farm. Although Lee was not at home when they

got there, Doar, who was scheduled to return to Washington later in the day,

urged Moses to do what he could to keep Lee out of harm’s way.

Twelve hours later Moses received a chilling message from a black mor-

tuary in McComb: A hearse from Amite County had just delivered an uni-

dentified black corpse with a bullet wound above the left ear. Rushing over

from his makeshift office at the Masonic Temple, Moses had his worst fears

confirmed: The corpse was Herbert Lee. Earlier in the morning, Hurst had

shot Lee after following the black farmer to a cotton gin on the outskirts of

Oh, Freedom 443

Liberty. According to two eyewitnesses, one black and one white, Lee lunged

at Hurst with a tire iron forcing Hurst to fire his gun in self-defense. On Tues-

day, the day after the incident, a coroner’s jury ruled that the white legislator’s

response was justifiable homicide. Moses suspected otherwise and soon found

three black witnesses who confirmed that Hurst had committed cold-blooded

murder. One of Moses’s informants was Louis Allen, a forty-three-year-old

timber worker who had been forced to corroborate Hurst’s story in front of the

coroner’s jury. Although he was afraid to say so publicly, Allen told Moses that

prior to the shooting Lee had tried to reason with Hurst, asking him to put

down his gun. Angered by Lee’s insolence, Hurst screamed, “I’m not playing

with you this morning!” and fired a fatal shot at Lee’s head. According to Allen

and the other black witnesses, Hurst was the aggressor throughout, and the

tire iron found at the scene was put there just prior to the arrival of the sheriff.

A close friend of Hurst’s and a cousin of Caston’s, the sheriff unhesitatingly

accepted Hurst’s story and made sure that the local press reported the incident

as “the routine dispatch of a crazed Negro.”

After Moses relayed all of this to Washington by phone, Doar ordered

the FBI to “examine Lee’s body and photograph the wounds before burial.”

But Lee was in the ground by the time the assigned agent arrived in McComb.

Hampered by the absence of a physical report on the remains, Doar reluc-

tantly postponed the investigation until a federal grand jury could be con-

vened sometime in October. In the meantime, he promised Moses, the federal

government would continue to push for meaningful desegregation and the

protection of constitutional rights. With the implementation of the ICC or-

der looming, such promises were more credible than in the past, though the

likelihood of real change still hinged on the government’s ability to bring

people like Hurst to justice. As both Doar and Moses knew all too well, the

power and arrogance of Mississippi’s white supremacists continued to domi-

nate the state, and an all-encompassing cradle-to-grave racial segregation

remained in force.

The determination of state and local officials to maintain the status quo

was on full display in a Jackson courtroom on the morning of Lee’s death.

After a fifteen-week delay, the NAACP’s lawsuit challenging the legality of

segregated public transportation in Mississippi finally gained a hearing from

a three-judge federal panel headed by Circuit Judge Richard Rives of

Montgomery. Flanked by two conservative Mississippi jurists, Sidney Mize

of Gulfport and Claude Clayton of Tupelo, the liberal Rives made a valiant

effort to give the NAACP suit a fair and proper hearing, but no amount of

judicial decorum could dampen the tension and hostility that filled the court-

room. A close friend of Justice Hugo Black’s, Rives was widely regarded as a

traitor to the white South, and Mize and Clayton made no effort to conceal

their disdain for his heretical views.

During the four-day hearing, NAACP attorney Constance Baker Motley

presented a string of witnesses, including several bus and railway company

444 Freedom Riders

representatives and NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers. All testified to

the pervasiveness of segregated transit in Mississippi, and Evers described a

harrowing personal incident that had taken place on a Trailways bus in

Meridian in March 1958. Prior to the Jackson-bound bus’s departure, Evers

took a seat in the front section reserved for whites and refused the driver’s

order to move to the back. Removed from the bus by the Meridian police,

Evers endured twenty minutes of interrogation before being allowed to re-

turn to his original seat. Though clearly disgusted with the police’s decision

to ignore Evers’s defiance, the driver reluctantly put the bus in gear and

headed toward Jackson. Moments later, however, the driver stopped to dis-

cuss the situation with a white taxicab driver who had followed the bus out of

the terminal. “If you can’t get him out, I can,” the cabdriver vowed before

entering the bus. After striking Evers in the face, he tried to drag the feisty

field secretary into the aisle. Evers, a World War II combat veteran, fought

back, forcing his stunned attacker to flee from the bus. With Evers still sit-

ting in the front seat, the bus continued on to Jackson without any additional

confrontations. Although Evers later reported the incident to NAACP offi-

cials in New York and to the ICC, neither the bus driver nor the cabdriver

suffered any consequences other than the humiliation of being bested by a

black man.

Evers’s testimony was disturbing to white supremacists on several counts,

including the suggestions that native black Mississippians were dissatisfied

with the present system of racial segregation and that even the police were

sometimes uncertain about their authority to enforce Jim Crow laws. Even

so, several witnesses for the state did their best to reassure the court that

racial separation and social order were still synonymous in Mississippi. “It

has been a policy of mine and the city council, the police department and the

people,” Mayor Allen Thompson of Jackson declared on Tuesday morning,

“to maintain what has worked for the past 100 years to bring happiness, peace

and prosperity. That has been to maintain a separation of the races—not

segregation, we don’t call it segregation—to maintain peace and order and to

keep down disturbances. . . . Laws can come and laws can go and laws can

change. But the policy we have adopted here has been to maintain happiness

and contentment between the races and to live together in peace and quiet.”

The notion that Mississippi’s traditions fostered tranquility drew a strong

objection from Motley, who countered with several witnesses who had been

arrested or beaten for challenging Jim Crow transit. Noting that most of the

incidents in question occurred outside of Jackson, Attorney General Joe

Patterson and city attorneys reiterated an earlier objection to the statewide

scope of the NAACP suit. Since the court had already ruled that the attorney

general could not be held responsible for the breach-of-peace arrests in Jack-

son, Motley was in a difficult position, but she continued to press for an

injunction that would invalidate segregated transit throughout the state. Later

in the day Patterson himself took the stand to defend the state’s and the city’s

Oh, Freedom 445

response to the Freedom Riders’ provocations. After commending Missis-

sippi’s citizenry for allowing “constitutional authority [to] deal with the

matter rather than have incidents occur like those which did occur in Ala-

bama,” he expressed “amazement and surprise that the Attorney General

of the United States seems to find himself on the side of those who would

create these disorders and troubles rather than on the side of the State of

Mississippi.”

On Wednesday morning Patterson renewed his attack on the federal

government, objecting to a courtroom conversation between Motley and

Justice Department attorney Howard Glickstein. After Rives ruled that the

Justice Department had “entered the case as a friend of the court and the

conference was not improper,” Glickstein assured Patterson that he would

“be happy to confer with any parties in this hearing.” “We prefer to confer

with friendly parties,” Patterson shot back, prompting an admonition from

Glickstein that “the Justice Department is friendly to anyone interested in

justice.” For Patterson and others interested in preserving segregation in

Mississippi, Glickstein’s mere presence was unnerving. Since the NAACP’s

class action suit extended to intrastate transit, the federal government’s in-

terest and involvement in the case was both surprising and potentially sig-

nificant. Accordingly, defense attorneys for the city and state tried to refocus

the court’s attention on the Freedom Riders’ role as interstate provocateurs.

Three Alabama law enforcement officers—including Ell Cowling—testified

as defense witnesses, recalling the violence in Anniston, Birmingham, and

Montgomery. During cross-examination, Motley pointed out that “violence

is no excuse for maintaining segregation” and urged the court to issue a sweep-

ing injunction that addressed issues related to both intrastate and interstate

transit. Before adjournment on Wednesday afternoon, her request received

support from a surprising source.

Abandoning the strategy employed by the other defense attorneys, J.

Will Young, the attorney for Jackson City Lines, pleaded for an immediate

decision that would resolve the conflict between local and state ordinances

and the impending ICC order. Describing the situation in Jackson as “explo-

sive,” Young predicted that, unless the court intervened, his company would

be forced to cease operations within twenty-four hours. At issue was the le-

gality of the posted signs designating separate seating areas for blacks and

whites. According to Young, if local blacks challenged the color barrier on

city buses en masse, as he expected they would, the company would have no

choice but to halt all of its runs. After Patterson and Jackson city attorney

Tom Watkins registered their opposition to an immediate decision, Judge

Rives ruled that all parties would be given twenty days to file written briefs, a

decision that pleased not only Patterson and Watkins but also Judge Mize.

“Nobody has yet prosecuted anybody,” Mize reminded Young, “and if you

want to go and take the signs down that is your privilege.”