Arsenault Raymond. Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice
Подождите немного. Документ загружается.
66 Freedom Riders
age as Rustin and shared his colleague’s pacifist faith, Smiley came from a
radically different world. A soft-spoken Texan with a wry smile, he grew up
in the cattle country west of Fort Worth, attended an all-white Methodist
college in Abilene, and entered the ministry in his early twenties. A strong
belief in pacifism and a commitment to the social gospel led him to the FOR
in 1942, and for the next twelve years he worked as FOR’s southwestern field
secretary, operating mostly in southern California and Arizona. Like Rustin,
he served a federal prison term for draft evasion during World War II, emerg-
ing from the ordeal with a renewed faith in nonviolent resistance. After the
war he worked with pacifists, labor organizers, and civil libertarians across
the Southwest, lectured for FOR in Mexico and Europe, and barely survived
the ravages of Cold War inquisition. Named FOR’s national field secretary
in 1954, he redirected his attention to the East Coast. His first foray into the
Deep South came in November 1955, when he went to Orangeburg, South
Carolina, to aid a black boycott of local white businesses. Unfortunately, his
experience in Orangeburg, where a counter-boycott by the White Citizens’
Council threatened blacks with unemployment and starvation, was a sober-
ing introduction to the repressive atmosphere of the post-Brown South and a
preview of what he would encounter in Montgomery.
14
By the time Smiley arrived in Montgomery on February 27, Rustin’s
situation had become untenable. The FBI, the local police, and several suspi-
cious reporters were following his every move, and there were rumors that
he would soon be arrested for inciting to riot. Le Figaro had offered a reward
to anyone who could identify the impostor posing as its correspondent, and
there was increasing pressure from Emory Jackson, a black newspaper editor
from Birmingham who knew about Rustin’s—and Worthy’s—background.
Appalled by King’s apparent lack of concern about left-wing infiltration, Jack-
son threatened to publish an exposé if MIA leaders failed to expel the North-
ern intruders. All of this alarmed E. D. Nixon, who phoned Phil Randolph
for an explanation. Randolph assured Nixon that Rustin was a trusted associ-
ate and an asset to the movement, but he was deeply troubled by Nixon’s call.
The following morning a hastily assembled group of twenty civil rights leaders
met in Randolph’s New York office to decide what to do about Rustin’s mav-
erick crusade. Thomas, Swomley, Farmer, and nearly everyone else present
concluded that Rustin had outlived his usefulness in Montgomery. The crisis-
born meeting also forced the leaders to reevaluate their potential role in the
Montgomery protest. As Swomley wrote to Smiley on February 29: “It was the
conviction yesterday that we should not try from the North to train or other-
wise run the non-violent campaign in Montgomery, as Bayard had hoped to
do, but rather to expect them to indicate ways in which we could be of help.
Only Bayard’s roommate argued for his staying in the South. Phil Randolph
indicated that the Montgomery leaders had managed thus far more success-
fully than any of our ‘so-called non-violence experts’ a mass resistance cam-
paign and we should learn from them rather than assume we know it all.”
Beside the Weary Road 67
Smiley had strict instructions to avoid public association—or even pri-
vate contact—with Rustin while he was in Montgomery; no one, not even
the leadership of the MIA, was to know that they shared the same organiza-
tional sponsors. But on Wednesday morning Smiley ran into Rustin and
Worthy at MIA headquarters. This chance encounter gave Rustin the op-
portunity to brief Smiley on his activities. To Smiley’s relief, King was the
only MIA leader to witness the meeting. Nevertheless, when FOR officials
learned of the encounter later in the day, the pressure to get Rustin and
Worthy out of Montgomery took on a new urgency. After consulting with
representatives of FOR and several other civil rights organizations, Randolph
phoned Rustin and begged him to leave. At first Rustin pleaded for a few
more days in Montgomery, but in the end, realizing that he had pushed his
patron to the limit and confident that Smiley would carry on in his absence,
he relented. After a round of bittersweet good-byes, he and Worthy set out
for Birmingham, where the trial of Autherine Lucy, a young black woman
seeking admission to the University of Alabama, was about to begin. Rustin’s
role in the boycott was far from over, as he continued to advise King and the
MIA, both by phone and in periodic meetings in Birmingham. but it would
be several weeks before he returned to Montgomery. With King’s blessing,
he spent most of the spring and summer of 1956 in New York publicizing
the boycott and trying to raise funds for the MIA.
15
FOLLOWING RUSTIN’S DEPARTURE, Smiley worked tirelessly to expand FOR’s
role in the bus boycott. During the remainder of the boycott, he shuttled in
and out of Montgomery, sometimes staying for weeks at a time. At first some
boycott leaders were understandably suspicious of the inquisitive white
stranger with the Texas twang, but it did not take him long to endear himself
to the MIA staff. He grew especially close to King and Abernathy, whom he
engaged in lengthy discussions of movement strategy and moral philosophy,
and his wry humor and gentle prodding on behalf of nonviolence eventually
disarmed even his toughest critics.
16
Smiley, in turn, came to respect and admire his MIA hosts, though he
often fretted about what he perceived as ideological naïveté. Soon after his
arrival in Montgomery, he informed the FOR office in New York that King
was “a grand guy” who “had Gandhi in mind when this thing started.” But he
warned his superiors that King and the boycotters had a lot to learn about
the moral strictures of nonviolence: “[King] is aware of the dangers to him
inwardly, wants to do it right, but is too young and some of his close help is
violent. King accepts, as an example, a body guard, and asks for permits for
them to carry guns. This was denied by the police, but nevertheless, the place
is an arsenal. King sees the inconsistency, but not enough. He believes and yet
he doesn’t believe. The whole movement is armed in a sense, and this is what
I must convince him to see as the greatest evil. At first King was merely asked
to be the spokesman of the movement, but as sometimes happens, he has
68 Freedom Riders
really become the real leader and symbol of growing magnitude. If he can
really be won to a faith in non-violence there is no end to what he can do.”
Despite this caveat, Smiley communicated an almost breathless enthusiasm
for the boycott, which, thanks to his and Rustin’s influence, was now offi-
cially known as a “non-violent protest” among MIA leaders. “The story is
not a clear one, not nearly as clear as we would like,” he admitted, “but po-
tentially it is the most exciting thing I have ever touched.”
17
The more Smiley saw of King and the boycotters, the more he was im-
pressed, even awed, by their raw courage and spiritual strength. “Strange,”
he wrote Swomley on March 2. “Whites are scared stiff and Negroes are
calm as cucumbers. It is an experience I shall never forget. The mass meeting
last night was like another world. 2500 people, laughing, crying, moaning,
shouting, singing. . . . Not once was there an expression of hatred towards
whites, and the ovation I received when I talked of Gandhi, his campaign,
and then of the cross, was tremendous. They want to do the will of God, and
they are sure this is the will of God.”
Even so, he continued to insist that the boycott could not succeed with-
out increased support and counsel from movement leaders in the North.
The brief involvement of FOR had already made a difference; in the short
span of ten days he and Rustin had helped to give the Montgomery protest a
new image and a renewed sense of purpose. Now that he was on the scene, he
was convinced that Randolph, who had been arguing for several weeks that
the boycotters needed little help or advice from the outside, was “wrong in
several respects.” As he told Swomley:
Montgomery leaders have managed a mass resistance campaign, but it was
petering out until (1) the indictments & arrests, (2) King suddenly remem-
bered Gandhi and what he had heard from Chalmers and others. Although
the protest had been going on for 9 weeks, little help, if any of conse-
quence, had come from the outside until the announcement of the non-
violent features, and the quotation of King’s magnificent address. When
that hit the press, simultaneous with the arrests, handled with a non-vio-
lent response, help began to pour in. Hundreds of telegrams, letters, checks,
etc. poured in. . . . The non-violent method has caught the imagination of
people, especially negroes everywhere. No one will know how much paci-
fism through the FOR has had to do with this. All I can say is that we have
had a lot, and can have more. Secondly, we can learn from their courage
and plain earthy devices for building morale, etc., but they can learn more
from us, for being so new at this. King runs out of ideas quickly and does
the old things again and again. He wants help, and we can give it to him
without attempting to run the movement or pretend we know it all.
18
Smiley’s skills as an interracial organizer and his ability to lend a helping
hand without being condescending or controlling proved invaluable to the
MIA during the spring and summer of 1956. He was seemingly everywhere:
addressing the weekly mass meetings on the relevance of nonviolence to the
Southern freedom struggle, organizing workshops on the tactics of direct
Beside the Weary Road 69
action and passive resistance, distributing pacifist literature, encouraging white
ministers to take a public stand against segregation, and overseeing the pro-
duction of a fifteen-minute documentary film entitled Walk to Freedom. On
occasion, he even served as an intelligence agent: Posing as a segregationist
sympathizer, he attended several Citizens’ Council meetings and one Klan
rally. These periodic forays into the segregationist camp provided the MIA
with important information, but Smiley spent most of his time, and made his
greatest contributions, either cultivating local white liberals or strengthen-
ing the bond between the MIA and movement leaders in the North.
At his suggestion, in early March the national office of FOR drew up a
statement of support for the boycott and mailed it to sixteen hundred clergy-
men around the country. The statement, which began with the words “As
Christian ministers we rejoice in the leadership our brother pastors in Mont-
gomery are giving in the nonviolent campaign for racial brotherhood,” re-
ceived the endorsement of several hundred ministers, more than two hundred
of whom expressed “their own willingness to go personally to Montgomery
to supply the pulpits of any of the defending ministers who were jailed.” To
Smiley’s dismay, none of the signees lived in the state, but he refused to
abandon his efforts to awaken the Christian conscience of white Alabama.
On March 10, just prior to the mass mailing, he had convened a secret
meeting of ten white Alabama ministers, who agreed to hold a larger meeting
of sixty-five ministers on April 6. The second gathering, held at a YMCA camp
ten miles outside of Montgomery, included religious leaders from seven de-
nominations, and even though the participants did not feel comfortable enough
to publicize the meeting, Smiley was heartened by what transpired. “It was the
first meeting of this sort that has been held in Alabama since the crisis began,”
he wrote Swomley, “and the men were tremendously encouraged to learn that
there were this many standing out, and it could very easily be the start of some-
thing most exciting. Since the meeting was to be held without publicity, there
were no statements issued. . . . But they did set up another meeting in a month,
at which time they planned to make a general announcement inviting men to
attend and would issue a public statement. This is the thing that we need, for if
we could get 100 men who would issue a statement, it is inconceivable to me
that the 100 men could be fired, even in Alabama.” Although the plans for a
public mass meeting of liberal white ministers never materialized, Smiley con-
tinued to search for potential supporters in the white community. With the
help of Abernathy and Wilson Riles, a black FOR field secretary and former
head of the Arizona NAACP who spent most of April in Montgomery, he
organized a series of interracial prayer meetings, which strengthened the lines
of communication between the city’s black and white ministers. The vast ma-
jority of the white ministers remained cautious in their dealings with the MIA,
but the resolute courage of a small group of FOR converts who met periodi-
cally with the Reverend Bob Graetz, the white minister of the all-black Trinity
Lutheran Church, gave Smiley some hope for the future.
19
70 Freedom Riders
During the spring of 1956, Smiley and Riles constituted the official FOR
presence in Montgomery. However, throughout this pivotal period their ef-
forts were reinforced by Rustin’s increasingly close relationship with King.
Although operating out of New York after March 8, Rustin was in frequent
contact with the MIA president, who had come to regard him as a trusted
advisor and who seemed untroubled by his radical past or maverick ways. In
a series of meetings held in Birmingham in early March, the two men contin-
ued their ongoing philosophical discussion of nonviolence and also addressed
practical matters such as fund-raising, publicity, and coalition building. Most
important, facing a dilemma that would later bedevil the Freedom Riders,
they tackled the difficult problem of determining how movement leaders in
the North could help the MIA without exacerbating fears of meddling and
outside agitation. Since even some MIA leaders were extremely wary of out-
side interference, King and Rustin agreed that all “communications, ideas,
and programs” should be funneled through King or Nixon and that publicly
the MIA “must give the appearance of developing all of the ideas and strate-
gies used in the struggle.” Whatever the real source, the MIA was to be given
credit. In this spirit, Rustin asked Randolph and other movement leaders to
provide “ghostwriters for King, who cannot find time at present to write
articles, speeches, etc., himself.” Rustin himself soon wrote an article under
King’s byline that was published in the April 1956 issue of Liberation. En-
titled “Our Struggle,” it was King’s first published work.
20
The MIA’s growing dependence on Rustin, Smiley, and FOR repre-
sented an important turning point in the history of the boycott, and perhaps
in the history of the civil rights movement as well. Despite its haphazard
beginnings, this historic alliance established a pattern of collaboration and
interdependence that would be repeated and expanded upon in the months
and years that followed. No one can be sure what would have happened if
these nonviolent missionaries had not become actively involved in the boy-
cott during the crucial months of February and March, but it is highly un-
likely that either the movement-building process or the evolution of the
perceived meaning of Montgomery would have proceeded as rapidly, or as
creatively, without them. Thanks in large part to FOR’s influence, the lead-
ers of the MIA adopted an increasingly self-conscious identification with
Gandhian nonviolence, an identification that magnified and deepened the
national and international impact of the boycott, presaging an ideological
connection that would influence the Freedom Rides five years later.
Several factors contributed to this fortunate turn of events, but none was
more important than King’s leadership. To some degree, the MIA’s recep-
tiveness to outside help was born of necessity. During the tense days of late
February and early March, the boycotters’ resources were pressed to the limit,
and the MIA was in no position to refuse any reasonable offer of assistance.
With or without King, the MIA eventually would have forged some kind of
relationship with national civil rights organizations. However, it was by no
Beside the Weary Road 71
means inevitable that this relationship would involve anything more than a
one-way pipeline propelling funds and advice into the benighted South. For-
tunately for the future of the movement, King’s presence encouraged a true
collaboration between local and national leaders. Among the leaders of the
MIA, he alone possessed enough intellectual sophistication and charisma to
deal with Rustin and Smiley on a more or less equal plane. While he lacked
their experience, his broad educational background, especially his years at Crozer
Theological Seminary and Boston University, gave him the self-confidence
to advance his own ideas about the strategic and moral implications of non-
violence. From the outset he was able to mediate between Gandhianism and
African American evangelism—and between the protest traditions of North
and South—because, unlike most Southern Baptist ministers, he was already
familiar with the language and political culture of Northern intellectuals and
activists. Although his deliberative style and intellectual stubbornness did
not always sit well with his older and more experienced Northern allies, King’s
ability to grasp the subtleties of both movement politics and nonviolent
philosophy inspired confidence and loyalty, convincing Rustin, Smiley, and
many others that this young Alabama preacher had the potential to become
an American Gandhi. With King’s help, they were able to look beyond the
traditional stereotypes of the black South and to appreciate the largely un-
tapped intellectual resources of a people long burdened by condescension
and neglect.
Of course, even King had his limitations. Contrary to popular hagiography,
his advanced understanding of nonviolent philosophy did not spring forth
full blown; rather it emerged from months of careful nurturing and reflective
deliberation. Even his basic commitment to nonviolence came later than myth
now suggests. “Quite contrary to what many people think,” Rustin recalled
in a 1976 interview, “Dr. King was not a confirmed believer in nonviolence,
totally, at the time that the boycott began.” To prove his point, Rustin re-
lated a troubling incident during an early visit to the Dexter parsonage. When
Worthy “went to sit down in the King living room,” he encountered a loaded
gun resting on the seat of a chair. Later in the evening, Rustin pressed King
for an explanation: How could the leader of a nonviolent movement be so
casual about firearms? King explained that he and his colleagues had no in-
tention of using their weapons except in cases of self-defense, a response that
hardly assuaged Rustin’s fears. For several hours that night, and in the weeks
that followed, Rustin tried to persuade King that any association with weap-
ons negated the spirit of nonviolence. At first King rejected Rustin’s argu-
ment as impractical, but “within six weeks, he had demanded that there be no
armed guards” in the MIA.
Smiley’s recollections offer a similar picture of King’s conversion to non-
violence. “He didn’t even use the word at first. He used ‘passive resistance’
almost entirely,” Smiley recalled. During their first meeting, Smiley pre-
sented King with a pile of books on Gandhianism, hoping to engage the
72 Freedom Riders
young minister in a discussion of the finer points of nonviolent theory, but
after an awkward silence King sheepishly confessed that, although he ad-
mired Gandhi, he knew “very little about the man.” Undaunted, Smiley
pledged to do what he could to remedy the situation, an offer King gratefully
accepted and Smiley more than made good on in the weeks that followed.
“The role that I played,” he told sociologist Aldon Morris in 1978, “. . . was
one in which I literally lived with him hours and hours and hours at a time,
and he pumped me about what nonviolence was.” Blessed with a talented and
willing student, Smiley had a profound influence on King’s “pilgrimage to
nonviolence.” When King took the first integrated bus ride following the
boycott’s successful conclusion in December 1956, he fittingly gave Smiley
the honor of sitting by his side, though then and later the always gracious
Texan insisted that Rustin deserved most of the credit for nurturing the MIA
leader’s maturation as a proponent of nonviolent resistance.
21
Whatever its sources, by late spring King’s pilgrimage had progressed to
the point where Rustin and Smiley were eager to show off their protégé’s
progress. To this end, Smiley invited King and Abernathy to Atlanta to meet
with Muste, Swomley, Lawrence, and a handful of FOR activists from across
the South. In late March 1956, following a speaking engagement in New
York City, King had met briefly with an FOR-sponsored group known as the
Committee for Nonviolent Integration, but the Atlanta meeting represented
the first real opportunity for the nation’s leading pacifists to engage the MIA
president in a face-to-face dialogue. Held at Morehouse College on May
12, the daylong meeting focused on the racial crises in Alabama, South Caro-
lina, and Mississippi and on “the future of nonviolence in the South.” Spe-
cifically, FOR leaders wanted to know how other potential centers of
nonviolent resistance could “achieve the unity of Montgomery.” After lis-
tening to depressing reports on Orangeburg, South Carolina, where white
segregationists were on the offensive and where black leaders were squab-
bling among themselves, and on the situation in Mississippi, where the FOR
movement had been driven underground, the leaders looked to King for a
measure of solace. He did not disappoint them. Flanked by Abernathy and
Martin Luther King Sr., the young minister presented a moving account of
how thousands of seemingly ordinary citizens had become infused with the
extraordinary power of nonviolent direct action. As Muste and his colleagues
listened with rapt attention, King insisted that a successful nonviolent move-
ment required both personal resistance, which was “a day-by-day affair,” and
collective passive resistance, which “must be used with care in a controlled
situation.” To Smiley’s relief, the eloquence and thoughtfulness of King’s
words dispelled the gloom of the earlier reports, and at the close of the meet-
ing the participants endorsed a proposal for two subregional conferences to
be held in mid-July. Under the proposal each Southern city would send two
representatives to compare notes and exchange ideas, with the expectation
that a coordinated network of protest would emerge.
Beside the Weary Road 73
Despite its brevity and bittersweet quality, the Morehouse conference
represented a major step forward in FOR’s fledgling Southern campaign.
Muste, in particular, left the meeting with renewed hope. This was his first
encounter with the young Alabama preacher, though King had been in the
audience when Muste had given a speech at Crozer Seminary in 1949. As
Muste later told his friends in New York, King was even more impressive
than he had been led to believe, and the idea that the boycott leader could
become an American Gandhi no longer seemed far-fetched. For more than
half a century, Muste had dreamed of spreading the FOR message to the
American masses. Now it appeared he had found an ideal messenger, one
who could not only prick the conscience of white Americans but could also
demonstrate the transformative power of nonviolence. From Muste’s per-
spective, the boycotters had to do more than win the struggle in Montgom-
ery; they also had to win it in the right way, creating a model of nonviolent
resistance that others could follow. One false step, one act of violence, he
feared, could sully the MIA’s image and halt the nonviolent movement’s
newfound momentum. With this in mind, he urged Smiley and Rustin to
stay close to King and to redouble their efforts to mold the MIA president in
the Gandhian image.
22
OTHER MOVEMENT LEADERS, including Muste’s old friends Norman Thomas
and Phil Randolph, saw things somewhat differently. In late March, Thomas
warned King that “the intrusion of Northerners in Montgomery will do more
harm than good.” As a socialist who had barely survived the ravages of
McCarthyism, he was sensitive to the realities of the Cold War and did not
want the MIA to take any unnecessary chances. To him, collaborating with
individuals who might taint the Montgomery movement with the appear-
ance of left-wing infiltration or, as in the case of Rustin, with personal scan-
dal was not worth the risk. Randolph shared Thomas’s fears, but he also had
concerns of a broader nature: white infringement on an indigenous black
movement, elite manipulation of a grassroots protest, the likelihood of orga-
nizational squabbling, and an unhealthy preoccupation with ideology. In his
calculation, allowing outsiders to set unrealistic goals—to measure the boy-
cotters’ moral progress with an absolutist ideological or philosophical yard-
stick that made sense in New York or New Delhi but not necessarily in
Montgomery—would almost certainly doom the boycott to failure. Although
he had great respect for Muste, whom he had known and admired for nearly
twenty years, Randolph questioned the wisdom of subjecting local leaders to
indoctrination and extended debate on the finer points of nonviolent theory.
23
Despite his misgivings about the FOR campaign, Randolph never wa-
vered in his support of the boycott. More than any other nationally promi-
nent black leader, he welcomed the appearance of nonviolent direct action in
the Deep South. A longtime critic of the NAACP’s legalistic approach to so-
cial change, he had been one of the first African American leaders to advocate
74 Freedom Riders
direct action on a mass scale. As the organizer of the 1941 March on Wash-
ington Movement, he had been instrumental in forcing President Franklin
Roosevelt to issue an executive order creating the Fair Employment Prac-
tices Committee. Although Roosevelt’s capitulation rendered the Washing-
ton march unnecessary, Randolph continued to press for nonviolent resistance
during and after World War II. He called in 1942 for “a fusion of Gandhi’s
Satyagraha with the sit-down strike of the industrial union movement” and
later lent his support to Rustin, Farmer, and other CORE activists who staged
sit-ins in Chicago and other Northern cities. None of this activity drew much
enthusiasm from the black masses, and unsympathetic observers chided him
for presuming to be “a kind of Gandhi of the Negroes,” but Randolph never
lost his conviction that “nonviolent mass activity” was destined to be “an
important part of the future strategy and technique of the Negro.”
24
The Montgomery movement thus brought a measure of redemption to
Randolph, who was especially proud of the role his old friend E. D. Nixon
had played in the creation of the boycott. From the beginning of the protest,
Nixon’s frequent phone calls and letters kept his mentor abreast of what was
happening in Montgomery, and Randolph responded with increasing enthu-
siasm as the boycotters sustained and extended their defiance of Jim Crow.
Although he needed little prodding, the old socialist’s interest in the boycott
took on a new urgency in early February after white supremacists bombed
Nixon’s home. When the Eisenhower administration all but ignored his tele-
grams demanding federal protection for MIA leaders, an angry but deter-
mined Randolph stepped up his efforts to aid and encourage the boycotters.
This new determination led to the funding of Rustin’s pilgrimage to Mont-
gomery and to renewed cooperation with FOR, but Randolph devoted most
of his energy to the difficult task of raising money for the MIA.
25
Since early January 1956 he had been a leading supporter of In Friend-
ship, a new relief organization dedicated to “aiding those who are suffering
economic reprisals because of their fight against segregation.” Originally
conceived as a response to “race terror” in Mississippi and South Carolina,
In Friendship was the brainchild of Rustin and two remarkable behind-the-
scenes activists, Stanley Levison, a socialist gadfly and professional fund-raiser
for the liberal American Jewish Congress, and Ella Baker, a transplanted black
Virginian who had lived in New York since 1927. During the 1940s Baker
had worked as a field secretary and as national director of branches for the
NAACP, and since 1954 she had served as president of the organization’s
New York City branch. Known in movement circles as a courageous truth-
teller, this “tiny woman with a booming voice” had long been a vocal inside
critic of the NAACP’s preoccupation with legal and organizational matters.
A forceful advocate of direct action, she helped plan the 1947 Journey of
Reconciliation—even though, as we have seen, she was not allowed to par-
ticipate in the all-male campaign. Surely no one was surprised when, with
Levison’s help, she brought together a number of New York City’s most
Beside the Weary Road 75
prominent religious leaders, labor organizers, and liberal and radical activists
for In Friendship’s founding meeting on January 5, or when she later per-
suaded Randolph to serve as the organization’s first chairman.
26
In a February 17 letter inviting sympathetic leaders to In Friendship’s
first “Action Conference,” Randolph emphasized the plight of black Missis-
sippi farmers being squeezed by the White Citizens’ Councils, which had
“succeeded in choking off loans and other credits on which farmers depend.”
Following the mass indictments in Montgomery, however, he wasted no time
in redirecting In Friendship’s activities toward the struggle in Alabama. For
the remainder of the year, the organization’s primary focus was raising funds
for the MIA.
27
In early March, in an effort to depoliticize In Friendship’s image,
Randolph resigned as chairman and was replaced by three distinguished reli-
gious co-chairmen: Rabbi Edward Klein, Monsignor Cornelius Drew, and
Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick. Even after his resignation, though, Randolph
continued to serve as the organization’s principal sponsor. When In Friend-
ship held a mass rally and fund-raiser in Madison Square Garden on May 24,
Randolph’s involvement was a key element of the event’s success. In large
part, it was his stature that enabled Baker and Levison to enlist a star-studded
array of celebrities, including Eleanor Roosevelt, Tallulah Bankhead, Sammy
Davis Jr., Pearl Bailey, Cab Calloway, and Josh White, who brought down
the house with a throbbing rendition of “Free and Equal Blues.” King, Rosa
Parks, and Autherine Lucy were also on hand, but Bankhead, the daughter of
a former U.S. senator from Alabama, stole the show when she kissed Parks
and Lucy onstage. “Prejudice is so stupid,” the actress told the crowd in her
best Alabama drawl. “I’m a Bankhead and there have been generations of
Bankheads in Alabama, but I’m not proud of what’s happening there today.”
To Randolph’s delight, the rally drew sixteen thousand participants and, de-
spite Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr.’s financial shenanigans, raised
more than eight thousand dollars, half of which went to the MIA.
28
Unfortunately, the May rally proved to be the high-water mark of In
Friendship’s fund-raising activities. With Randolph’s blessing, Baker and
Levison continued to work feverishly through the summer and fall, but
their efforts were hampered by stiff competition from political fund-raisers—
particularly after the contest between Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson
took shape—and by lukewarm support from the national leadership of the
AFL-CIO and the NAACP. Even though In Friendship’s publications re-
peatedly pledged that the organization would “limit itself to programs of
economic aid and will not attempt to duplicate the legal, legislative, and other
phases of civil rights which are now being carried on by other appropriate
organizations,” AFL-CIO chief George Meany, NAACP executive direc-
tor Roy Wilkins, and others remained wary of the new organization’s inten-
tions. For this reason, In Friendship’s activities were essentially limited to
the New York area and never became national in scope. On December 5 the