Harold Titus's Blog - Posts Tagged "eugene-bull-conner"
Civil Rights Events -- Freedom Rides -- Trailways Bus to Birmingham
James Farmer grew up in Marshall, Texas, where his father, James L. Farmer, Sr. was a professor at the historically black Wiley College. Farmer devoted his career to civil rights and social justice causes, working for the NAACP and the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), CORE's parent organization, prior to his February 1961 election as director of CORE.
In early 1961 CORE was less well known than the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Dr. Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Coalition (SCLC) or the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Farmer envisioned the ride as a way to vault CORE and its philosophy of nonviolent direct action to prominence on the national stage, with attendant opportunities for policy-making and fundraising.
Returning to Washington, D.C. from Atlanta, GA on the morning of May 14 to attend his father's funeral, Farmer was haunted by guilt. Later, he would relate his emotions. "There was, of course, the incomparable sorrow and pain," he said. "But frankly, there was also a sense of reprieve, for which I hated myself. Like everyone else, I was afraid of what lay in store for us in Alabama, and now that I was to be spared participation in it, I was relieved, which embarrassed me to tears" (Meet) 5).
The man who replaced Farmer in Atlanta was James Peck, the only activist among the Freedom Riders to have participated in the 1947 Journey of Reconciliation. Born into the family of a wealthy clothing wholesaler in 1914, Peck was a social outsider at Choate, an elite Connecticut prep school, in part because his family had only recently converted from Judaism to Episcopalianism. At Harvard he quickly gained a reputation as a campus radical, shocking his classmates by bringing a black date to the freshman dance. Peck dropped out after the end of his freshman year, spending several years as an expatriate in Europe and working as a merchant seaman. Returning to the United States in 1940, Peck devoted himself to organizing work and journalism on behalf of pacifist and social justice causes. He spent almost three years in federal prison during World War II as a conscientious objector.
After his release from prison in 1945, he rededicated himself to pacifism and militant trade unionism. In the late 1940s, Peck became increasingly involved in issues of racial justice, joining the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) as a volunteer (Meet 7).
Waiting in line at the Trailways bus station in Atlanta to purchase their tickets, Peck and the other Riders noticed that several of the regular passengers that had also been standing in the line left after they had been spoken to by a group of white men. Afterward, these rough-looking white men – mostly in their twenties and thirties – boarded the bus. The Riders followed, scattered themselves throughout the seats. They were Walter and Frances Bergman, white, 61 and 58 respectively; Jim Peck, white, 46; Charles Person, black, 18, student at Morehouse College; Herman Harris, black, 21, student at Morris College; Ivor Moore, black, 19, student at Morris College; and Ike Reynolds, black, 27, a CORE field secretary. Simeon Booker, Washington bureau chief of Jet Magazine, and Ted Gaffney, Jet Magazine photographer, were seated in the rear of the bus.
Soon after the bus had left the Atlanta terminal, the rough-looking white men – Klansmen – began harassing the black Riders. "You niggers will be taken care of once you get in Alabama," one of the Klansmen threatened. The comments intensified, once the bus passed into Alabama (Gross/Arsenault 12-13).
“Kids knew something was going to happen to them, in most cases it was not going to be good,” Charles Person would remark 56 years later (Colvin 3).
The bus arrived at the Anniston Trailways station approximately an hour after the other Freedom Riders bus had pulled into the Greyhound station. The waiting room was eerily quiet. Several whites looked away as the Riders, white and black, approached the lunch counter. They purchased sandwiches, then returned to the bus. Waiting for the bus to leave, they heard an ambulance siren. The bus driver, John Olan Patterson, after talking to several Anniston police officers, leaped up the steps. To the occupants of the bus he announced: "We have received word that a bus has been burned to the ground and passengers are being carried to the hospital by the carloads. A mob is waiting for our bus and will do the same to us unless we get these niggers off the front seats."
One of the Riders told Patterson that they were interstate passengers, that they had the right to sit wherever they wanted. Patterson exited the bus without uttering a word. One of eight tough, beefy men that had entered the bus behind Patterson answered. "Niggers get back. You ain't up north. You're in Alabama, and niggers ain't nothing here." He then lunged toward Person, punched him in the face. A second Klansman then punched Harris, who was sitting next to Person in the front section of the bus. Both non-violent black Riders refused to fight back. They were dragged into the aisle, struck with fists, and repeatedly kicked. Peck and Walter Bergman rushed forward from the back of the bus. “Can we talk about this?” Peck said. One of the Klansmen struck Peck, sent him reeling across two rows of seats. Bergman was then struck and fell to the floor. Blood spurted from their faces. The enraged Klansmen continued their assaults. A pair of Klansmen lifted Peck's head, others punched him senseless. Even though Bergman was unconscious, one Klansman kept stomping on his chest (Gross/Arsenault 14).
Behind them, Bergman's wife, Frances, 58, heard the sound of human flesh being brutally beaten for the first time in her life. Frances pleaded with the men to stop. She said later, "I had never before experienced the feeling of people all around hating me so... I kept thinking,‘How could these things be happening in 1961?'"
A reporter on the scene wrote: "Bergman was battered into semi-consciousness and as he lay in the aisle, one of the whites jumped up and down on his chest.... Peck's face and head bled profusely, making the aisle a slippery, bloody path" (Bergman 1).
The Klansman ignored her plea, called her a "nigger lover." However, another Klansman, seeing that Bergman was about to be killed, interceded. "Don't kill him," he said authoritatively (Gross/Arsenault 15).
Interviewed by Eyes on the Prize years later, Peck recalled the following:
Walter Bergman and I were sitting the back seat so we decided to go up front and intercept, with our bodies. We got clobbered on the head. I didn't get it so bad. But Bergman got it so bad that he later had a stroke and has been paralyzed ever since. As, he has been in a wheelchair ever since. And so, Walter and I are both suing the F.B.I., Bergman for a million dollars and me for a half a million dollars (Interview 3).
Several Klansmen dragged Person and Harris, both semi-conscious, to the back of the bus. They draped the two black men over the passengers sitting in the backseat. They did the same with Peck and Bergman. Content with what they had accomplished, the Klansmen sat in the middle of the bus. A black woman who was not a Freedom Rider begged to be allowed to exit the bus. "Shut up, you black bitch," one of Klansmen answered. "Ain't nobody but whites sitting up here. And them nigger lovers . . . can just sit back there with their nigger friends."
The bus driver, Patterson, returned with a police officer. Satisfied with what he saw, the officer addressed the Klansmen. "Don't worry about no lawsuits. I ain't seen a thing." He left the bus. Knowing that a mob was waiting on the main road to Birmingham, the driver used back roads heading west. The Klansmen did not object. The Freedom Riders were puzzled. They didn’t know that the Klansmen were protecting them for a welcoming party that was gathering in downtown Birmingham (Gross/Arsenault 15-16).
They also did not know that Birmingham Police Chief Eugene “Bull” Conner had agreed to keep his police away from the Trailways station for 15 minutes to give local whites and members of the Klan time to beat up the arriving Freedom Riders. Connor had reportedly cut a deal with the KKK giving them 15 minutes to “burn, bomb, kill, maim, I don’t give a god-damn what you do” (Doyle 6).
During the next two hours the Klansmen continued their intimidation. One man brandished a pistol, a second man displayed his steel pipe, three others blocked access to the middle and front sections of the bus. Jet Magazine journalist Simeon Booker recalled that one of the sentries was "a pop-eyed fellow who kept taunting: 'Just tell Bobby [Kennedy] and we'll do him in, too.'" One of the Klansmen approached Booker ominously. Booker gave the man a copy of Jet featuring an advance story on CORE's sponsorship of the Freedom Ride. The article was passed from Klansman to Klansman. "I'd like to choke all of them," one of the thugs said. Several others reiterated that the Riders were going to get what was coming to them when they reached Birmingham. Reaching the outskirts of the city, Peck and the other injured Riders had regained consciousness; but since the Klansmen were not allowing any of them to leave their seats or communicate, Peck could not attempt to prepare them for the horror of what most assuredly waited.
Peck and the other Trailways Riders had no detailed knowledge of what had happened to the Greyhound Riders in Anniston. They thought they were prepared for the worst, but were not. They had no knowledge of how far Birmingham's extreme segregationists would go to preserve their way of life. In Birmingham, collaboration between the Ku Klux Klan and law enforcement officials was absolute. The special agents in the Birmingham FBI field office, and their superiors in Washington, knew what was going to happen. They could have warned the Freedom Riders but did not.
Worse, FBI informant Gary Thomas Rowe actively ensured in Birmingham that the Trailways Riders would be pummeled. The plan agreed to between Klansmen and law enforcement had been to attack first the occupants of the Greyhound bus when it arrived at the Greyhound station. News of the Anniston bombing did not reach Birmingham until midafternoon, minutes before the arrival of the Trailways bus. Apprised by police headquarters, Rowe alerted the Klansmen waiting near the Greyhound station that the second bus of Freedom Riders was about to arrive at the Trailways station, three blocks away. Years later Rowe recounted the frantic dash across downtown Birmingham: "We made an astounding sight . . . men running and walking down the streets of Birmingham on Sunday afternoon carrying chains, sticks, and clubs. Everything was deserted; no police officers were to be seen except one on a street corner. He stepped off and let us go by, and we barged into the bus station and took it over like an army of occupation. There were Klansmen in the waiting room, in the rest rooms, in the parking area."
Police dispatchers had cleared the area. For the next fifteen minutes there would be no police presence at the Trailways station, except for two plainclothes detectives in the crowd there to monitor what occurred and make sure that the Klansmen left the station before the police was subsequently dispatched (Gross/ Arsenault 16-18).
Interviewed by Eyes on the Prize, James Peck recalled: When we arrived in… Birmingham, … we saw along the sidewalk … about… twenty men with pipes. We saw no cop in sight. And now I'll tell you what, how I remember the date. The next day, Bull Connor, the notorious police chief was asked why there were no police on hand. He said, he replied, it was Mother's Day and they were all visiting their mothers. Uh, well we got out of the bus and Charles Person, the black student from Atlanta and I, had been designated to try to enter the lunch counter. So we… of course we didn't [get] there (Interview 5).
Why had Charles Person, the eighteen-year-old black Morehouse College student from Georgia, chosen to be there?
The Russians had launched Sputnik, demonstrating a technological and scientific supremacy over the United States, and Person, of Atlanta, was ready to answer the call for more American students to become scientists. Accepted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he thought he would also apply to nearby Georgia Tech, which was cheaper. But he couldn’t get in there; the university was not integrated. And that’s what galvanized him.
“When you do all the things your parents ask you to do, you’re a pretty good student and you’re denied, it’s hard for a child or a teenager to understand,” he said. He joined sit-ins in Atlanta and later was chosen for the rides.
“Change always begins with the young. As you get older you can rationalize things and can kind of live with them,” Person said. “But as a child or young person, you don’t have that rationalization, and you just want to see things change” (Colvin 5).
When the bus pulled into the Trailways terminal, the Klansmen on board rushed down the aisle to be near the front door. One man shouted: "You damn Communists, why don't you go back to Russia? You're a shame to the white race!" They exited down the steps and quickly disappeared into the crowd. Peck and the other Freedom Riders, peering at the crowd, saw no weapons. They filed off the bus onto the unloading platform to retrieve their luggage. Several rough-looking men were standing a few feet away giving no indication of impending violence. Peck and Person walked toward the white waiting room. In his 1962 memoir, Peck recalled: “I did not want to put Person in a position of being forced to proceed if he thought the situation was too dangerous," but "when I looked at him, he responded by saying simply, 'Let's go.'" Person knew the Deep South; he had been jailed for sixteen days for participating in the Atlanta sit-ins; hours earlier he had been beaten up. Despite his and Peck’s past experiences, neither man was sufficiently prepared to anticipate what was about to occur.
A Klansmen pointed to the cuts on Peck's face and the caked blood on his shirt and shouted that Person, walking in front of Peck, had attacked a white man. Peck responded, tried to explain that Person had not attacked him, added: "You'll have to kill me before you hurt him." This blatant breach of racial solidarity only served to incite the crowd of Klansmen blocking their path. An enraged Klansman pushed Person toward the colored waiting room. Person recovered, proceeded toward the white lunch counter, was stopped by a second Klansman who shoved him up against a concrete wall. Another segregationist, National States Rights Party (NSRP) leader Edward Fields pointed at Peck, yelled: "Get that son of a bitch." Several burly Klansmen pummeled Person with their fists, bloodied his face and mouth, dropped him to his knees. Peck rushed to help Person to his feet. Several Klansmen pushed both men into a dimly lit corridor that led to a loading platform. A dozen whites, armed with pipes or oversized key rings, pounced. Person escaped into the street. Boarding a city bus, he made his way to Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth's parsonage (Gross/Arsenault 18-19).
Person says he knows of only one photograph that survived that melee: “It’s a picture of me. You’ll see a guy in a blazer with a pipe. We figure he’s the one that gave the most damaging blow,” he said. “He’s the only one who had a weapon that could make my skull pop open the way it did.”
In late 2016, in the middle of a conversation with a relative, Person suddenly passed out -- Collateral damage, almost 56 years later. There’s that lingering damage — a CT scan found that there’s still damage to his skull, “which was kind of disturbing to me because I thought that was past me,” he said — but there is also lingering hope. He would like to have a cup of coffee with the person who attacked him in Birmingham. No one was charged.
“There’s no resentment,” Person said. He simply wants to know why. “I don’t have time to be hating anyone because I’ve adopted nonviolence as a way of life, not just a tactic” (Colvin 6).
Meanwhile, Peck took the worse of the attack. I was unconscious, I'd say, within a minute. Uh… I woke up, I came to in an alley way. Nobody was there. A big pool of blood. I looked at that pool of blood, I said, I wonder whether I'm going to live or die. But I was too tired to care. I lay down again. Finally I came too again, and I looked and a white G.I. who had come up and said, you look in a bad way. Do you need help? And I looked the other way and [Walter] Bergman was coming so I said, no my friend is coming, he'll help me out. So, uh, Bergman took me in a cab to Shuttesworth's home, and when Shuttlesworth saw me, he said, man you need to go to a hospital. And so he called the ambulance and they took me to the hospital and … they took me to the hospital and put fifty-three stitches into my head (Interview 6).
Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth … would later say, “His head was split down to the skull. Somebody had cracked him with a lead pipe. Peck was a bloody mess. . . .” It took more than an hour for Shuttlesworth to find an ambulance willing to take Peck to the all-white Carraway Methodist Hospital. Once there, staff refused to treat him. Only at Jefferson Hillman Hospital did Peck finally receive treatment, including some 53 stitches for his head wounds (Doyle 7).
The attacks had been moved to the back corridor to avoid reporters and news photographers stationed at the white waiting room. However, several newsmen, including national CBS News correspondent Howard K. Smith, witnessed at least part of the attack.
Smith had been working on a television documentary investigating allegations of lawlessness and racial intimidation in the Southern city. Smith, a Southerner himself from Louisiana, was trying to determine if the claims he and his network were hearing about were exaggerated or true.
On the night of May 13, Smith [had] received a phone call tipping him off that the downtown bus station was the place to be the next day “if he wanted to see some real action.” Smith thus witnessed the May 14 “Mother’s Day” riot at the Birmingham Trailways Bus Station, as a vicious mob of Klansmen attacked the Freedom Riders and innocent bystanders alike with pipes and baseball bats. After the riot, Smith helped badly injured Riders Jim Peck and Walter Bergman to hail a cab. He also found three other injured black men after the melee, one of whom was Ike Reynolds. These men had agreed to do on camera interviews which Smith conducted with the men and was hopeful of airing that evening on CBS-TV. But “signal difficulties” from the local TV station – WAPI – prevented that from happening, though Smith suspected that the local owner there had vetoed such a broadcast.
Smith did deliver news accounts of the bus station melee over the CBS radio network that went out nationally. He would make a series of live radio updates from his hotel room that day. “The riots have not been spontaneous outbursts of anger,” he reported in one broadcast, “but carefully planned and susceptible to having been easily prevented or stopped had there been a wish to do so.” In another he explained: “One passenger was knocked down at my feet by 12 of the hoodlums, and his face was beaten and kicked until it was a bloody pulp.”[i.e., the Jim Peck beating]. Smith reported the facts of the incident for CBS. “When the bus arrived,” he explained in one report, “the toughs grabbed the passengers into alleys and corridors, pounding them with pipes, with key rings, and with fists,” But he was outraged by what he had witnessed, and stated at one point that the “laws of the land and purposes of the nation badly need a basic restatement.” Smith at the time also did a Sunday radio commentary, during which he was more direct, “The script almost wrote itself,” he would later recall. “I had the strange, disembodied sense of being forced by conscience to write what I knew would be unacceptable.” In his commentary, Smith laid the blame squarely on Police Chief Eugene “Bull” Connor, whose officers had looked the other way during the attack. During that commentary Smith also stated that the “rule of barbarism in Alabama” must bow to the “rule of law and order – and Justice – in America” (Doyle 8-9).
The other Riders had sought refuge. Ivor Moore, 19, and Herman Harris, 21, both of them black, somehow lost themselves in the crowd before the assaults started. Ordered to by her husband, Frances Bergman boarded a city bus just after their arrival. Walter, woozy, blood dried on his clothing, followed Peck and Person into the white waiting room.
Having witnessed Peck and Person’s beatings, he turned about hoping to find a policeman. He, too, was knocked to the floor by a raging Klansman. Jet Magazine journalist Simeon Booker came upon him crawling on his hands and knees. Booker withdrew to the street, where he found a black cabdriver who was willing to transport him and photographer Ted Gaffney to safety.
Several white men kicked and stomped Ike Reynolds, 27, before dumping his semiconscious body into a curbside trash bin.
The mob also attacked bystanders that it misidentified as Freedom Riders. A Klansman named L. B. Earle had come out of the men's room at the wrong time. Earle suffered several deep head gashes and was taken to a hospital. A second victim was twenty-nine-year-old black laborer George Webb, who was attacked when he entered the baggage room with his fiancée, Mary Spicer, who had been on a Trailways bus that had arrived from Atlanta. Spicer had been unaware of the melee inside the station until she and Webb were set upon by pipe-wielding Klansmen. Undercover FBI informant Gary Thomas Rowe, told Spicer: "Get the hell out of here," whereupon she fled into the street. Rowe and three others, including an NSRP member, pummeled Webb, who fought back but succumbed after several other thugs surrounded him. Dozens of bystanders watched, some yelling, "Kill the nigger." One of the plainclothes detectives on the scene, Red Self, told Rowe: "Get the boys out of here. I'm ready to give the signal for the police to move in." When the police did arrive, most of the rioters had left.
Several thugs, however, continued their attack on Web. A news photographer from the Birmingham Post-Herald, Tommy Langston, snapped a picture of Rowe and the other Klansmen. The attackers, abandoning Webb, chased after Langston. One man smashed the camera to the ground. Rowe and others kicked and punched, threatened to beat him with the pipes and baseball bats they had used on Webb. Meanwhile, Webb ran into the loading area, and was captured by different Klansmen. With the police arriving Webb and Langston receiving several parting licks. Bleeding profusely, Webb managed to find the car in which his fiancée and his aunt were waiting. Langston staggered down the street to the Post-Herald building, and collapsed into the arms of a fellow employee. Later, another Post-Herald photographer returned to the terminal and recovered Langston's broken camera. The roll of film inside it was undamaged.
A grisly picture of the Webb beating appeared on the front page of the Post-Herald the next morning. It was one of the few pieces of documentary evidence that survived the riot. By Monday, May 15th, photographs of the burning “Freedom Bus” in Anniston as well as images of the Birmingham mob scene were reprinted in newspapers across the country (Gross/Arsenault 19-22).
According to historian Raymond Arsenault, author of the 2006 book, Freedom Riders, “[Howard] Smith’s remarkable broadcast opened the floodgates of public reaction. By early Sunday evening, hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, of Americans were aware of the violence that had descended upon Alabama only a few hours before.” At that point, few people had heard of CORE, and fewer still knew what the term ‘Freedom Rider’ meant. But with reports like the one Smith made [and newspaper photographs and articles reprinted in local newspapers], more and more of the general population would soon understand what was taking place in the southern part of their country (Doyle 10).
Works cited:
Bergman, Gerald. “Walter Gerald Bergman's Freedom Ride and Brutal Government Violence.” Investigator 143. March 2012. Web. http://ed5015.tripod.com/ReligBergman...
Colvin, Rhonda. “As Trump attacks John Lewis, here’s how freedom riders broke the chains of segregation.” The Washington Post. January 15, 2017. Web. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation...
Doyle, Jack. ““Buses Are A’Comin’- Freedom Riders: 1961.” PopHistoryDig.com. June 24, 2014. Web. http://www.pophistorydig.com/topics/t...
Gross, Terry. “Get On the Bus: The Freedom Riders of 1961,” containing excerpts from Raymond Arsenault’s Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice. NPR. Web. https://www.npr.org/2006/01/12/514966...
“Interview with James Peck.” Eyes on the Prize. Washington University Digital Gateway Texts. Web. http://digital.wustl.edu/e/eop/eopweb...
“Meet the Players: Freedom Riders.” American Experience. Web. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexper...
In early 1961 CORE was less well known than the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Dr. Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Coalition (SCLC) or the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Farmer envisioned the ride as a way to vault CORE and its philosophy of nonviolent direct action to prominence on the national stage, with attendant opportunities for policy-making and fundraising.
Returning to Washington, D.C. from Atlanta, GA on the morning of May 14 to attend his father's funeral, Farmer was haunted by guilt. Later, he would relate his emotions. "There was, of course, the incomparable sorrow and pain," he said. "But frankly, there was also a sense of reprieve, for which I hated myself. Like everyone else, I was afraid of what lay in store for us in Alabama, and now that I was to be spared participation in it, I was relieved, which embarrassed me to tears" (Meet) 5).
The man who replaced Farmer in Atlanta was James Peck, the only activist among the Freedom Riders to have participated in the 1947 Journey of Reconciliation. Born into the family of a wealthy clothing wholesaler in 1914, Peck was a social outsider at Choate, an elite Connecticut prep school, in part because his family had only recently converted from Judaism to Episcopalianism. At Harvard he quickly gained a reputation as a campus radical, shocking his classmates by bringing a black date to the freshman dance. Peck dropped out after the end of his freshman year, spending several years as an expatriate in Europe and working as a merchant seaman. Returning to the United States in 1940, Peck devoted himself to organizing work and journalism on behalf of pacifist and social justice causes. He spent almost three years in federal prison during World War II as a conscientious objector.
After his release from prison in 1945, he rededicated himself to pacifism and militant trade unionism. In the late 1940s, Peck became increasingly involved in issues of racial justice, joining the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) as a volunteer (Meet 7).
Waiting in line at the Trailways bus station in Atlanta to purchase their tickets, Peck and the other Riders noticed that several of the regular passengers that had also been standing in the line left after they had been spoken to by a group of white men. Afterward, these rough-looking white men – mostly in their twenties and thirties – boarded the bus. The Riders followed, scattered themselves throughout the seats. They were Walter and Frances Bergman, white, 61 and 58 respectively; Jim Peck, white, 46; Charles Person, black, 18, student at Morehouse College; Herman Harris, black, 21, student at Morris College; Ivor Moore, black, 19, student at Morris College; and Ike Reynolds, black, 27, a CORE field secretary. Simeon Booker, Washington bureau chief of Jet Magazine, and Ted Gaffney, Jet Magazine photographer, were seated in the rear of the bus.
Soon after the bus had left the Atlanta terminal, the rough-looking white men – Klansmen – began harassing the black Riders. "You niggers will be taken care of once you get in Alabama," one of the Klansmen threatened. The comments intensified, once the bus passed into Alabama (Gross/Arsenault 12-13).
“Kids knew something was going to happen to them, in most cases it was not going to be good,” Charles Person would remark 56 years later (Colvin 3).
The bus arrived at the Anniston Trailways station approximately an hour after the other Freedom Riders bus had pulled into the Greyhound station. The waiting room was eerily quiet. Several whites looked away as the Riders, white and black, approached the lunch counter. They purchased sandwiches, then returned to the bus. Waiting for the bus to leave, they heard an ambulance siren. The bus driver, John Olan Patterson, after talking to several Anniston police officers, leaped up the steps. To the occupants of the bus he announced: "We have received word that a bus has been burned to the ground and passengers are being carried to the hospital by the carloads. A mob is waiting for our bus and will do the same to us unless we get these niggers off the front seats."
One of the Riders told Patterson that they were interstate passengers, that they had the right to sit wherever they wanted. Patterson exited the bus without uttering a word. One of eight tough, beefy men that had entered the bus behind Patterson answered. "Niggers get back. You ain't up north. You're in Alabama, and niggers ain't nothing here." He then lunged toward Person, punched him in the face. A second Klansman then punched Harris, who was sitting next to Person in the front section of the bus. Both non-violent black Riders refused to fight back. They were dragged into the aisle, struck with fists, and repeatedly kicked. Peck and Walter Bergman rushed forward from the back of the bus. “Can we talk about this?” Peck said. One of the Klansmen struck Peck, sent him reeling across two rows of seats. Bergman was then struck and fell to the floor. Blood spurted from their faces. The enraged Klansmen continued their assaults. A pair of Klansmen lifted Peck's head, others punched him senseless. Even though Bergman was unconscious, one Klansman kept stomping on his chest (Gross/Arsenault 14).
Behind them, Bergman's wife, Frances, 58, heard the sound of human flesh being brutally beaten for the first time in her life. Frances pleaded with the men to stop. She said later, "I had never before experienced the feeling of people all around hating me so... I kept thinking,‘How could these things be happening in 1961?'"
A reporter on the scene wrote: "Bergman was battered into semi-consciousness and as he lay in the aisle, one of the whites jumped up and down on his chest.... Peck's face and head bled profusely, making the aisle a slippery, bloody path" (Bergman 1).
The Klansman ignored her plea, called her a "nigger lover." However, another Klansman, seeing that Bergman was about to be killed, interceded. "Don't kill him," he said authoritatively (Gross/Arsenault 15).
Interviewed by Eyes on the Prize years later, Peck recalled the following:
Walter Bergman and I were sitting the back seat so we decided to go up front and intercept, with our bodies. We got clobbered on the head. I didn't get it so bad. But Bergman got it so bad that he later had a stroke and has been paralyzed ever since. As, he has been in a wheelchair ever since. And so, Walter and I are both suing the F.B.I., Bergman for a million dollars and me for a half a million dollars (Interview 3).
Several Klansmen dragged Person and Harris, both semi-conscious, to the back of the bus. They draped the two black men over the passengers sitting in the backseat. They did the same with Peck and Bergman. Content with what they had accomplished, the Klansmen sat in the middle of the bus. A black woman who was not a Freedom Rider begged to be allowed to exit the bus. "Shut up, you black bitch," one of Klansmen answered. "Ain't nobody but whites sitting up here. And them nigger lovers . . . can just sit back there with their nigger friends."
The bus driver, Patterson, returned with a police officer. Satisfied with what he saw, the officer addressed the Klansmen. "Don't worry about no lawsuits. I ain't seen a thing." He left the bus. Knowing that a mob was waiting on the main road to Birmingham, the driver used back roads heading west. The Klansmen did not object. The Freedom Riders were puzzled. They didn’t know that the Klansmen were protecting them for a welcoming party that was gathering in downtown Birmingham (Gross/Arsenault 15-16).
They also did not know that Birmingham Police Chief Eugene “Bull” Conner had agreed to keep his police away from the Trailways station for 15 minutes to give local whites and members of the Klan time to beat up the arriving Freedom Riders. Connor had reportedly cut a deal with the KKK giving them 15 minutes to “burn, bomb, kill, maim, I don’t give a god-damn what you do” (Doyle 6).
During the next two hours the Klansmen continued their intimidation. One man brandished a pistol, a second man displayed his steel pipe, three others blocked access to the middle and front sections of the bus. Jet Magazine journalist Simeon Booker recalled that one of the sentries was "a pop-eyed fellow who kept taunting: 'Just tell Bobby [Kennedy] and we'll do him in, too.'" One of the Klansmen approached Booker ominously. Booker gave the man a copy of Jet featuring an advance story on CORE's sponsorship of the Freedom Ride. The article was passed from Klansman to Klansman. "I'd like to choke all of them," one of the thugs said. Several others reiterated that the Riders were going to get what was coming to them when they reached Birmingham. Reaching the outskirts of the city, Peck and the other injured Riders had regained consciousness; but since the Klansmen were not allowing any of them to leave their seats or communicate, Peck could not attempt to prepare them for the horror of what most assuredly waited.
Peck and the other Trailways Riders had no detailed knowledge of what had happened to the Greyhound Riders in Anniston. They thought they were prepared for the worst, but were not. They had no knowledge of how far Birmingham's extreme segregationists would go to preserve their way of life. In Birmingham, collaboration between the Ku Klux Klan and law enforcement officials was absolute. The special agents in the Birmingham FBI field office, and their superiors in Washington, knew what was going to happen. They could have warned the Freedom Riders but did not.
Worse, FBI informant Gary Thomas Rowe actively ensured in Birmingham that the Trailways Riders would be pummeled. The plan agreed to between Klansmen and law enforcement had been to attack first the occupants of the Greyhound bus when it arrived at the Greyhound station. News of the Anniston bombing did not reach Birmingham until midafternoon, minutes before the arrival of the Trailways bus. Apprised by police headquarters, Rowe alerted the Klansmen waiting near the Greyhound station that the second bus of Freedom Riders was about to arrive at the Trailways station, three blocks away. Years later Rowe recounted the frantic dash across downtown Birmingham: "We made an astounding sight . . . men running and walking down the streets of Birmingham on Sunday afternoon carrying chains, sticks, and clubs. Everything was deserted; no police officers were to be seen except one on a street corner. He stepped off and let us go by, and we barged into the bus station and took it over like an army of occupation. There were Klansmen in the waiting room, in the rest rooms, in the parking area."
Police dispatchers had cleared the area. For the next fifteen minutes there would be no police presence at the Trailways station, except for two plainclothes detectives in the crowd there to monitor what occurred and make sure that the Klansmen left the station before the police was subsequently dispatched (Gross/ Arsenault 16-18).
Interviewed by Eyes on the Prize, James Peck recalled: When we arrived in… Birmingham, … we saw along the sidewalk … about… twenty men with pipes. We saw no cop in sight. And now I'll tell you what, how I remember the date. The next day, Bull Connor, the notorious police chief was asked why there were no police on hand. He said, he replied, it was Mother's Day and they were all visiting their mothers. Uh, well we got out of the bus and Charles Person, the black student from Atlanta and I, had been designated to try to enter the lunch counter. So we… of course we didn't [get] there (Interview 5).
Why had Charles Person, the eighteen-year-old black Morehouse College student from Georgia, chosen to be there?
The Russians had launched Sputnik, demonstrating a technological and scientific supremacy over the United States, and Person, of Atlanta, was ready to answer the call for more American students to become scientists. Accepted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he thought he would also apply to nearby Georgia Tech, which was cheaper. But he couldn’t get in there; the university was not integrated. And that’s what galvanized him.
“When you do all the things your parents ask you to do, you’re a pretty good student and you’re denied, it’s hard for a child or a teenager to understand,” he said. He joined sit-ins in Atlanta and later was chosen for the rides.
“Change always begins with the young. As you get older you can rationalize things and can kind of live with them,” Person said. “But as a child or young person, you don’t have that rationalization, and you just want to see things change” (Colvin 5).
When the bus pulled into the Trailways terminal, the Klansmen on board rushed down the aisle to be near the front door. One man shouted: "You damn Communists, why don't you go back to Russia? You're a shame to the white race!" They exited down the steps and quickly disappeared into the crowd. Peck and the other Freedom Riders, peering at the crowd, saw no weapons. They filed off the bus onto the unloading platform to retrieve their luggage. Several rough-looking men were standing a few feet away giving no indication of impending violence. Peck and Person walked toward the white waiting room. In his 1962 memoir, Peck recalled: “I did not want to put Person in a position of being forced to proceed if he thought the situation was too dangerous," but "when I looked at him, he responded by saying simply, 'Let's go.'" Person knew the Deep South; he had been jailed for sixteen days for participating in the Atlanta sit-ins; hours earlier he had been beaten up. Despite his and Peck’s past experiences, neither man was sufficiently prepared to anticipate what was about to occur.
A Klansmen pointed to the cuts on Peck's face and the caked blood on his shirt and shouted that Person, walking in front of Peck, had attacked a white man. Peck responded, tried to explain that Person had not attacked him, added: "You'll have to kill me before you hurt him." This blatant breach of racial solidarity only served to incite the crowd of Klansmen blocking their path. An enraged Klansman pushed Person toward the colored waiting room. Person recovered, proceeded toward the white lunch counter, was stopped by a second Klansman who shoved him up against a concrete wall. Another segregationist, National States Rights Party (NSRP) leader Edward Fields pointed at Peck, yelled: "Get that son of a bitch." Several burly Klansmen pummeled Person with their fists, bloodied his face and mouth, dropped him to his knees. Peck rushed to help Person to his feet. Several Klansmen pushed both men into a dimly lit corridor that led to a loading platform. A dozen whites, armed with pipes or oversized key rings, pounced. Person escaped into the street. Boarding a city bus, he made his way to Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth's parsonage (Gross/Arsenault 18-19).
Person says he knows of only one photograph that survived that melee: “It’s a picture of me. You’ll see a guy in a blazer with a pipe. We figure he’s the one that gave the most damaging blow,” he said. “He’s the only one who had a weapon that could make my skull pop open the way it did.”
In late 2016, in the middle of a conversation with a relative, Person suddenly passed out -- Collateral damage, almost 56 years later. There’s that lingering damage — a CT scan found that there’s still damage to his skull, “which was kind of disturbing to me because I thought that was past me,” he said — but there is also lingering hope. He would like to have a cup of coffee with the person who attacked him in Birmingham. No one was charged.
“There’s no resentment,” Person said. He simply wants to know why. “I don’t have time to be hating anyone because I’ve adopted nonviolence as a way of life, not just a tactic” (Colvin 6).
Meanwhile, Peck took the worse of the attack. I was unconscious, I'd say, within a minute. Uh… I woke up, I came to in an alley way. Nobody was there. A big pool of blood. I looked at that pool of blood, I said, I wonder whether I'm going to live or die. But I was too tired to care. I lay down again. Finally I came too again, and I looked and a white G.I. who had come up and said, you look in a bad way. Do you need help? And I looked the other way and [Walter] Bergman was coming so I said, no my friend is coming, he'll help me out. So, uh, Bergman took me in a cab to Shuttesworth's home, and when Shuttlesworth saw me, he said, man you need to go to a hospital. And so he called the ambulance and they took me to the hospital and … they took me to the hospital and put fifty-three stitches into my head (Interview 6).
Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth … would later say, “His head was split down to the skull. Somebody had cracked him with a lead pipe. Peck was a bloody mess. . . .” It took more than an hour for Shuttlesworth to find an ambulance willing to take Peck to the all-white Carraway Methodist Hospital. Once there, staff refused to treat him. Only at Jefferson Hillman Hospital did Peck finally receive treatment, including some 53 stitches for his head wounds (Doyle 7).
The attacks had been moved to the back corridor to avoid reporters and news photographers stationed at the white waiting room. However, several newsmen, including national CBS News correspondent Howard K. Smith, witnessed at least part of the attack.
Smith had been working on a television documentary investigating allegations of lawlessness and racial intimidation in the Southern city. Smith, a Southerner himself from Louisiana, was trying to determine if the claims he and his network were hearing about were exaggerated or true.
On the night of May 13, Smith [had] received a phone call tipping him off that the downtown bus station was the place to be the next day “if he wanted to see some real action.” Smith thus witnessed the May 14 “Mother’s Day” riot at the Birmingham Trailways Bus Station, as a vicious mob of Klansmen attacked the Freedom Riders and innocent bystanders alike with pipes and baseball bats. After the riot, Smith helped badly injured Riders Jim Peck and Walter Bergman to hail a cab. He also found three other injured black men after the melee, one of whom was Ike Reynolds. These men had agreed to do on camera interviews which Smith conducted with the men and was hopeful of airing that evening on CBS-TV. But “signal difficulties” from the local TV station – WAPI – prevented that from happening, though Smith suspected that the local owner there had vetoed such a broadcast.
Smith did deliver news accounts of the bus station melee over the CBS radio network that went out nationally. He would make a series of live radio updates from his hotel room that day. “The riots have not been spontaneous outbursts of anger,” he reported in one broadcast, “but carefully planned and susceptible to having been easily prevented or stopped had there been a wish to do so.” In another he explained: “One passenger was knocked down at my feet by 12 of the hoodlums, and his face was beaten and kicked until it was a bloody pulp.”[i.e., the Jim Peck beating]. Smith reported the facts of the incident for CBS. “When the bus arrived,” he explained in one report, “the toughs grabbed the passengers into alleys and corridors, pounding them with pipes, with key rings, and with fists,” But he was outraged by what he had witnessed, and stated at one point that the “laws of the land and purposes of the nation badly need a basic restatement.” Smith at the time also did a Sunday radio commentary, during which he was more direct, “The script almost wrote itself,” he would later recall. “I had the strange, disembodied sense of being forced by conscience to write what I knew would be unacceptable.” In his commentary, Smith laid the blame squarely on Police Chief Eugene “Bull” Connor, whose officers had looked the other way during the attack. During that commentary Smith also stated that the “rule of barbarism in Alabama” must bow to the “rule of law and order – and Justice – in America” (Doyle 8-9).
The other Riders had sought refuge. Ivor Moore, 19, and Herman Harris, 21, both of them black, somehow lost themselves in the crowd before the assaults started. Ordered to by her husband, Frances Bergman boarded a city bus just after their arrival. Walter, woozy, blood dried on his clothing, followed Peck and Person into the white waiting room.
Having witnessed Peck and Person’s beatings, he turned about hoping to find a policeman. He, too, was knocked to the floor by a raging Klansman. Jet Magazine journalist Simeon Booker came upon him crawling on his hands and knees. Booker withdrew to the street, where he found a black cabdriver who was willing to transport him and photographer Ted Gaffney to safety.
Several white men kicked and stomped Ike Reynolds, 27, before dumping his semiconscious body into a curbside trash bin.
The mob also attacked bystanders that it misidentified as Freedom Riders. A Klansman named L. B. Earle had come out of the men's room at the wrong time. Earle suffered several deep head gashes and was taken to a hospital. A second victim was twenty-nine-year-old black laborer George Webb, who was attacked when he entered the baggage room with his fiancée, Mary Spicer, who had been on a Trailways bus that had arrived from Atlanta. Spicer had been unaware of the melee inside the station until she and Webb were set upon by pipe-wielding Klansmen. Undercover FBI informant Gary Thomas Rowe, told Spicer: "Get the hell out of here," whereupon she fled into the street. Rowe and three others, including an NSRP member, pummeled Webb, who fought back but succumbed after several other thugs surrounded him. Dozens of bystanders watched, some yelling, "Kill the nigger." One of the plainclothes detectives on the scene, Red Self, told Rowe: "Get the boys out of here. I'm ready to give the signal for the police to move in." When the police did arrive, most of the rioters had left.
Several thugs, however, continued their attack on Web. A news photographer from the Birmingham Post-Herald, Tommy Langston, snapped a picture of Rowe and the other Klansmen. The attackers, abandoning Webb, chased after Langston. One man smashed the camera to the ground. Rowe and others kicked and punched, threatened to beat him with the pipes and baseball bats they had used on Webb. Meanwhile, Webb ran into the loading area, and was captured by different Klansmen. With the police arriving Webb and Langston receiving several parting licks. Bleeding profusely, Webb managed to find the car in which his fiancée and his aunt were waiting. Langston staggered down the street to the Post-Herald building, and collapsed into the arms of a fellow employee. Later, another Post-Herald photographer returned to the terminal and recovered Langston's broken camera. The roll of film inside it was undamaged.
A grisly picture of the Webb beating appeared on the front page of the Post-Herald the next morning. It was one of the few pieces of documentary evidence that survived the riot. By Monday, May 15th, photographs of the burning “Freedom Bus” in Anniston as well as images of the Birmingham mob scene were reprinted in newspapers across the country (Gross/Arsenault 19-22).
According to historian Raymond Arsenault, author of the 2006 book, Freedom Riders, “[Howard] Smith’s remarkable broadcast opened the floodgates of public reaction. By early Sunday evening, hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, of Americans were aware of the violence that had descended upon Alabama only a few hours before.” At that point, few people had heard of CORE, and fewer still knew what the term ‘Freedom Rider’ meant. But with reports like the one Smith made [and newspaper photographs and articles reprinted in local newspapers], more and more of the general population would soon understand what was taking place in the southern part of their country (Doyle 10).
Works cited:
Bergman, Gerald. “Walter Gerald Bergman's Freedom Ride and Brutal Government Violence.” Investigator 143. March 2012. Web. http://ed5015.tripod.com/ReligBergman...
Colvin, Rhonda. “As Trump attacks John Lewis, here’s how freedom riders broke the chains of segregation.” The Washington Post. January 15, 2017. Web. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation...
Doyle, Jack. ““Buses Are A’Comin’- Freedom Riders: 1961.” PopHistoryDig.com. June 24, 2014. Web. http://www.pophistorydig.com/topics/t...
Gross, Terry. “Get On the Bus: The Freedom Riders of 1961,” containing excerpts from Raymond Arsenault’s Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice. NPR. Web. https://www.npr.org/2006/01/12/514966...
“Interview with James Peck.” Eyes on the Prize. Washington University Digital Gateway Texts. Web. http://digital.wustl.edu/e/eop/eopweb...
“Meet the Players: Freedom Riders.” American Experience. Web. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexper...
Civil Rights Events -- Birmingham 1963 -- SCLC Comes to Town
Birmingham, Alabama, was a major industrial hub of the South due to the wartime industries of previous world wars. Birmingham was very attractive to all races, as many of the factories and shipyards that supplied the war effort employed thousands.
President F. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 in 1941 and integrated industries that supplied the WWII effort. For the first time, African Americans were able to work alongside their White counterparts, and were eligible for promotions to supervisory positions. However, this also made Birmingham a battle ground where the antebellum past and the Civil Rights Movement collided in violence and protest.
The more African Americans moved into the middle class, and in turn began to live middle class lifestyles, the City of Birmingham dug their heels in to prevent their progress. The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) had a long standing hold on the city, and it was their job to reinforce the social mores that governed everyone. African Americans needed to remember their place, and in times when they asserted their rights and ventured outside of the social caste system created for them, there was violence (Harris 1).
Martin Luther King described Birmingham as “America’s worst city for racism. … the KKK had castrated an African American; [had actually] pressured the city to ban a book from book stores as it contained pictures of black and white rabbits and wanted black music banned on radio stations” (Trueman 1).
For decades Birmingham had represented the citadel of white supremacy. No black resident was ever secure from the wide sweep of racist terrorism, both institutionalized and vigilante. Conditions in the state had become even worse with the election of Governor George Wallace in 1962, who stated upon taking his oath of office, "I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever." Wallace vowed that the federal government would not dictate racial policies in his state. For years, civil rights activists had conceived of plans to attack Birmingham's Jim Crow laws; now it seemed the utmost priority (Birmingham Desegregation 1).
Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth had fought the segregated system for more than a decade.
Having witnessed the organization of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Shuttlesworth organized his own group, the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR), in June 1956 after the state outlawed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In December 1956, when the federal courts ordered the desegregation of Montgomery's buses, Shuttlesworth asked the officials of Birmingham's transit system to end segregated seating, setting a December 26 deadline. He intended to challenge the laws on a bus on that day, but on the night of December 25, Klansmen bombed Bethel Baptist Church and parsonage, nearly assassinating Shuttlesworth (Eskew 1).
They blew the floor out from under my bed, spaces I guess 15 feet. The springs I was lying on, we never found. I walked out from this and instead of running away from the blast, running away from the Klansmen, I said to the Klansmen police that came, he said, "Reverend, if I were you, I'd get out of town as fast as I could." I said, "Officer, you're not me. You go back and tell your Klan brethren that if God could keep me through this, then I'm here for the duration." I think that's what gave people the feeling that I wouldn't run, I didn't run, and that God had to be there (Walk 1).
Shuttlesworth emerged out of the rubble of his dynamited house and led a protest the next morning that resulted in a legal case against the city's segregation ordinance.
Coinciding with school desegregation in Little Rock, Arkansas, Shuttlesworth arranged a challenge to Birmingham's all-white Phillips High School in September 1957, nearly suffering death at the hands of an angry mob. Segregationist vigilantes again greeted Shuttlesworth when he desegregated the train station. In 1958, Shuttlesworth organized a boycott of Birmingham's buses in support of the ACMHR legal case against segregated seating. Shuttlesworth's aggressive strategy of direct action alienated him from Birmingham's established black leadership. Many people in the black middle class found as too extreme the intense religious belief held by ACMHR members that God was going to end segregation.
Prompted by the national sit-in movement begun by four black college men in Greensboro, North Carolina, in February 1960, a group of black students in Birmingham from Miles College and Daniel Payne College held a prayer vigil. Shuttlesworth and the ACMHR supported their efforts. When a national group of black and white demonstrators undertook the Freedom Rides in May 1961, Shuttlesworth and the ACMHR provided assistance, rescuing the stranded protesters outside Anniston as well as those who suffered a Klan attack at the Birmingham Trailways Station. In spring 1962, Birmingham's black college students initiated the Selective Buying Campaign and, with support from Shuttlesworth and ACMHR, it became the catalyst for the spring 1963 demonstrations.
Chosen as secretary of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) when it organized in 1957, Shutttlesworth had been an active member of the region's leading civil rights group. But he was frustrated because he believed that the SCLC lacked clear direction under King's leadership. Shuttlesworth watched the SCLC intervene in Albany, Georgia, in 1961 and fail to successfully challenge segregation in a manner that forced reforms in local race relations. Aware that King's reputation had suffered from this defeat, Shuttlesworth invited the SCLC to assist him and the ACMHR in Birmingham. Believing that a success would restore his reputation as a national civil rights leader, King agreed. Shuttlesworth hoped King's prestige would attract the black masses and thus mobilize Birmingham's black community behind the joint ACMHR-SCLC campaign (Eskew 2-3).
In April 1963 King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) joined with Birmingham, Alabama’s existing local movement, the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR), in a massive direct action campaign to attack the city’s segregation system by putting pressure on Birmingham’s merchants during the Easter season, the second biggest shopping season of the year. As ACMHR founder Fred Shuttlesworth stated in the group’s “Birmingham Manifesto,” the campaign was “a moral witness to give our community a chance to survive” (Birmingham Campaign 1).
As 1963 began, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the SCLC were coming off a campaign in Albany, Georgia, which the New York Herald Tribune called "one of the most stunning defeats of King's career." SCLC had spent over a year in Albany attempting to integrate the city's public facilities. Although the president of the Albany Movement, Dr. William Anderson, said that the campaign was "an overwhelming success, in that there was a change in the attitude of the people involved," King felt that, "we got nothing." The schools remained segregated; the city parks were closed to avoid integration; the libraries were integrated, but only after all the chairs were removed. SCLC official Andrew Young remembered King as being "very depressed." He was looking to start another campaign, and he badly needed a victory (Cozzens 1).
Birmingham had had an election. The city’s three-member commission system was to be replaced by a mayor and city council system. Commissioner of Public Safety, Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Conner, recognizing that his position was about to be axed, had run for mayor and been defeated by Albert Boutwell April 2. When the newly elected officials were to be sworn into office, the three commissioners, including Conner, refused to step down. Suddenly there were two systems of government exercising power. Connor continued to exercise his power as Public Safety Commissioner.
Leaders from the ACMHR met with SCLC officials to plan strategy. Having learned from prior mistakes, King's lieutenant, the Reverend Wyatt Tee Walker, proposed a limited campaign of sit-ins and pickets designed to pressure merchants and local business leaders into demanding the city commission repeal the municipal segregation ordinances (Eskew 4).
Interviewed by Eyes on the Prize years later, Walker revealed his detailed planning. : Learning by the Albany circumstance, I targeted three stores. … And since the 16th Street Baptist Church was going to be our headquarters, I had it timed as to how long it took a youngster to walk down there, how long it would take an older person to walk down there, how long it would take a middle aged person to walk down there. And I picked out what would be the best routes. Under some subterfuge, I visited all three of these stores and counted the stools, the tables, the chairs, etc., and what the best method of ingress and egress was (Walk 2).
Twenty-one demonstrators were arrested on April 2, the first day of protest. Until the courts decided which city government was the legal one, Bull Connor remained in charge of the police and fire departments. Connor adopted Albany sheriff Laurie Pritchett’s restraint in making arrests. Actions expanded to kneel-ins at churches, sit-ins at the library, and a march on the county building to register voters. Hundreds were arrested.
{Yet], from the outset, the campaign confronted an apathetic black community, an openly hostile established black leadership, and Bull Connor's "nonviolent resistance" in the form of polite arrests of the offenders of the city's segregation ordinances. With no sensational news, the national media found nothing to report, and the campaign floundered.
…
Shuttlesworth led the first of many protest marches on City Hall to emphasize the refusal of the city commission to issue parade permits to the protestors. As the number of demonstrations increased, police arrested more ACMHR members, consequently draining the financial resources of the campaign. Black bystanders gave the campaign the appearance of mass support, but the vast majority of Birmingham's black residents remained uninvolved. A more serious threat came from established black leaders who opposed the civil rights campaign and actively worked to undermine Shuttlesworth by negotiating with the white power structure (Eskew 4-5).
Moderate White lawyer David Vann told his Eyes on the Prize interviewer: “I was upset with Dr. King because he wouldn't give us a chance to prove what we could do through the political processes. And a year and a day after Connor had been elected with the largest vote in history, a majority of the people of this city voted to terminate his office. And when he ran for mayor, they rejected him” (Walk 3)
The Kennedy administration also thought that the demonstrations were ill-timed.
On April 10th, Birmingham obtained a state court injunction, ordering an end to the demonstrations. Discouraged, Dr. King worried that the campaign, as in Albany, would stall. Interviewed by Eyes of the Prize, Andrew Young revealed the movement’s situation.
We had about five or six hundred people in jail, but all the money was gone and we couldn't get people out of jail. And the business community, black business community and some of the white clergy, were pressuring us to call off the demonstrations and just get out of town. And we didn't know what to do. And he sat there in room 30 in the Gaston Motel and Martin didn't say anything. And then finally, he got up and he went in the bedroom and he came back with his blue jeans on and his jacket and he said, "Look," he said, "I don't know what to do. I just know that something has got to change in Birmingham. I don't know whether I can raise money to get people out of jail. I do know that I can go into jail with them." And not knowing how it's going to work out, he walked out of the room and led his demonstration and went to jail.
Local white clergy were criticizing King and the campaign. Young reported: The ministers published in the newspapers a diatribe against Martin calling him a troublemaker and saying that he was there stirring up trouble to get publicity. And he sat down and took that newspaper and he had no paper, and he was in solitary confinement. And he started writing an answer to that one page ad around the margins of the New York Times (Walk 4-5). His rebuttal, titled “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” was subsequently printed in newspapers across the country.
King made salient points.
I am in Birmingham because injustice is here.
…
Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.
…
There can be no gainsaying the fact that racial injustice engulfs this community. Birmingham is probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States. Its ugly record of brutality is widely known. Negroes have experienced grossly unjust treatment in the courts. There have been more unsolved bombings of Negro homes and churches in Birmingham than in any other city in the nation. These are the hard, brutal facts of the case. On the basis of these conditions, Negro leaders sought to negotiate with the city fathers. But the latter consistently refused to engage in good faith negotiation.
…
Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. … The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.
We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was "well timed" in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never." We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied."
We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"--then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.
…
One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.
…
The Negro has many pent up resentments and latent frustrations, and he must release them. So let him march; let him make prayer pilgrimages to the city hall; let him go on freedom rides -and try to understand why he must do so. If his repressed emotions are not released in nonviolent ways, they will seek expression through violence; this is not a threat but a fact of history (Letter 1-3)
King’s request to call his wife, Coretta Scott King, who was at home in Atlanta recovering from the birth of their fourth child, was denied. After she communicated her concern to the Kennedy administration, Birmingham officials permitted King to call home. Bail money was made available, and he was released on 20 April 1963 (Birmingham Campaign 3).
Although King's decision to seek arrest marked a turning point in his life as a leader, it did little to increase support for the faltering ACMHR-SCLC campaign. …after a month of exhaustive demonstrations, the stalemate with white authorities suggested another Albany and the looming defeat of the Birmingham Campaign (Eskew 5).
Works cited:
“Birmingham Campaign.” Stanford: The martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. Web. https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/en...
“The Birmingham Desegregation Campaign.” Armistad Digital Resource. Web. http://www.amistadresource.org/civil_...
Cozzens, Lisa. “Birmingham.” Watson.org. Web. http://www.watson.org/~lisa/blackhist...
Eskew, Glenn T. “Birmingham Campaign of 1963.” Encyclopedia of Alabama. Web. http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/...
Harris, Joanna. “The 1963 Birmingham Campaign: Events & Impact.” Study.com. Web. https://study.com/academy/lesson/the-...
"Letter from a Birmingham Jail [King, Jr.]" African Studies Center – University of Pennsylvania. Web. https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles...
“No Easy Walk.” Amazon AWS. Web. http://wgbhprojects.s3.amazonaws.com/...
Trueman, C. N. “Birmingham 1963.” The History Learning Site. Web. https://www.historylearningsite.co.uk...
President F. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 in 1941 and integrated industries that supplied the WWII effort. For the first time, African Americans were able to work alongside their White counterparts, and were eligible for promotions to supervisory positions. However, this also made Birmingham a battle ground where the antebellum past and the Civil Rights Movement collided in violence and protest.
The more African Americans moved into the middle class, and in turn began to live middle class lifestyles, the City of Birmingham dug their heels in to prevent their progress. The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) had a long standing hold on the city, and it was their job to reinforce the social mores that governed everyone. African Americans needed to remember their place, and in times when they asserted their rights and ventured outside of the social caste system created for them, there was violence (Harris 1).
Martin Luther King described Birmingham as “America’s worst city for racism. … the KKK had castrated an African American; [had actually] pressured the city to ban a book from book stores as it contained pictures of black and white rabbits and wanted black music banned on radio stations” (Trueman 1).
For decades Birmingham had represented the citadel of white supremacy. No black resident was ever secure from the wide sweep of racist terrorism, both institutionalized and vigilante. Conditions in the state had become even worse with the election of Governor George Wallace in 1962, who stated upon taking his oath of office, "I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever." Wallace vowed that the federal government would not dictate racial policies in his state. For years, civil rights activists had conceived of plans to attack Birmingham's Jim Crow laws; now it seemed the utmost priority (Birmingham Desegregation 1).
Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth had fought the segregated system for more than a decade.
Having witnessed the organization of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Shuttlesworth organized his own group, the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR), in June 1956 after the state outlawed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In December 1956, when the federal courts ordered the desegregation of Montgomery's buses, Shuttlesworth asked the officials of Birmingham's transit system to end segregated seating, setting a December 26 deadline. He intended to challenge the laws on a bus on that day, but on the night of December 25, Klansmen bombed Bethel Baptist Church and parsonage, nearly assassinating Shuttlesworth (Eskew 1).
They blew the floor out from under my bed, spaces I guess 15 feet. The springs I was lying on, we never found. I walked out from this and instead of running away from the blast, running away from the Klansmen, I said to the Klansmen police that came, he said, "Reverend, if I were you, I'd get out of town as fast as I could." I said, "Officer, you're not me. You go back and tell your Klan brethren that if God could keep me through this, then I'm here for the duration." I think that's what gave people the feeling that I wouldn't run, I didn't run, and that God had to be there (Walk 1).
Shuttlesworth emerged out of the rubble of his dynamited house and led a protest the next morning that resulted in a legal case against the city's segregation ordinance.
Coinciding with school desegregation in Little Rock, Arkansas, Shuttlesworth arranged a challenge to Birmingham's all-white Phillips High School in September 1957, nearly suffering death at the hands of an angry mob. Segregationist vigilantes again greeted Shuttlesworth when he desegregated the train station. In 1958, Shuttlesworth organized a boycott of Birmingham's buses in support of the ACMHR legal case against segregated seating. Shuttlesworth's aggressive strategy of direct action alienated him from Birmingham's established black leadership. Many people in the black middle class found as too extreme the intense religious belief held by ACMHR members that God was going to end segregation.
Prompted by the national sit-in movement begun by four black college men in Greensboro, North Carolina, in February 1960, a group of black students in Birmingham from Miles College and Daniel Payne College held a prayer vigil. Shuttlesworth and the ACMHR supported their efforts. When a national group of black and white demonstrators undertook the Freedom Rides in May 1961, Shuttlesworth and the ACMHR provided assistance, rescuing the stranded protesters outside Anniston as well as those who suffered a Klan attack at the Birmingham Trailways Station. In spring 1962, Birmingham's black college students initiated the Selective Buying Campaign and, with support from Shuttlesworth and ACMHR, it became the catalyst for the spring 1963 demonstrations.
Chosen as secretary of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) when it organized in 1957, Shutttlesworth had been an active member of the region's leading civil rights group. But he was frustrated because he believed that the SCLC lacked clear direction under King's leadership. Shuttlesworth watched the SCLC intervene in Albany, Georgia, in 1961 and fail to successfully challenge segregation in a manner that forced reforms in local race relations. Aware that King's reputation had suffered from this defeat, Shuttlesworth invited the SCLC to assist him and the ACMHR in Birmingham. Believing that a success would restore his reputation as a national civil rights leader, King agreed. Shuttlesworth hoped King's prestige would attract the black masses and thus mobilize Birmingham's black community behind the joint ACMHR-SCLC campaign (Eskew 2-3).
In April 1963 King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) joined with Birmingham, Alabama’s existing local movement, the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR), in a massive direct action campaign to attack the city’s segregation system by putting pressure on Birmingham’s merchants during the Easter season, the second biggest shopping season of the year. As ACMHR founder Fred Shuttlesworth stated in the group’s “Birmingham Manifesto,” the campaign was “a moral witness to give our community a chance to survive” (Birmingham Campaign 1).
As 1963 began, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the SCLC were coming off a campaign in Albany, Georgia, which the New York Herald Tribune called "one of the most stunning defeats of King's career." SCLC had spent over a year in Albany attempting to integrate the city's public facilities. Although the president of the Albany Movement, Dr. William Anderson, said that the campaign was "an overwhelming success, in that there was a change in the attitude of the people involved," King felt that, "we got nothing." The schools remained segregated; the city parks were closed to avoid integration; the libraries were integrated, but only after all the chairs were removed. SCLC official Andrew Young remembered King as being "very depressed." He was looking to start another campaign, and he badly needed a victory (Cozzens 1).
Birmingham had had an election. The city’s three-member commission system was to be replaced by a mayor and city council system. Commissioner of Public Safety, Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Conner, recognizing that his position was about to be axed, had run for mayor and been defeated by Albert Boutwell April 2. When the newly elected officials were to be sworn into office, the three commissioners, including Conner, refused to step down. Suddenly there were two systems of government exercising power. Connor continued to exercise his power as Public Safety Commissioner.
Leaders from the ACMHR met with SCLC officials to plan strategy. Having learned from prior mistakes, King's lieutenant, the Reverend Wyatt Tee Walker, proposed a limited campaign of sit-ins and pickets designed to pressure merchants and local business leaders into demanding the city commission repeal the municipal segregation ordinances (Eskew 4).
Interviewed by Eyes on the Prize years later, Walker revealed his detailed planning. : Learning by the Albany circumstance, I targeted three stores. … And since the 16th Street Baptist Church was going to be our headquarters, I had it timed as to how long it took a youngster to walk down there, how long it would take an older person to walk down there, how long it would take a middle aged person to walk down there. And I picked out what would be the best routes. Under some subterfuge, I visited all three of these stores and counted the stools, the tables, the chairs, etc., and what the best method of ingress and egress was (Walk 2).
Twenty-one demonstrators were arrested on April 2, the first day of protest. Until the courts decided which city government was the legal one, Bull Connor remained in charge of the police and fire departments. Connor adopted Albany sheriff Laurie Pritchett’s restraint in making arrests. Actions expanded to kneel-ins at churches, sit-ins at the library, and a march on the county building to register voters. Hundreds were arrested.
{Yet], from the outset, the campaign confronted an apathetic black community, an openly hostile established black leadership, and Bull Connor's "nonviolent resistance" in the form of polite arrests of the offenders of the city's segregation ordinances. With no sensational news, the national media found nothing to report, and the campaign floundered.
…
Shuttlesworth led the first of many protest marches on City Hall to emphasize the refusal of the city commission to issue parade permits to the protestors. As the number of demonstrations increased, police arrested more ACMHR members, consequently draining the financial resources of the campaign. Black bystanders gave the campaign the appearance of mass support, but the vast majority of Birmingham's black residents remained uninvolved. A more serious threat came from established black leaders who opposed the civil rights campaign and actively worked to undermine Shuttlesworth by negotiating with the white power structure (Eskew 4-5).
Moderate White lawyer David Vann told his Eyes on the Prize interviewer: “I was upset with Dr. King because he wouldn't give us a chance to prove what we could do through the political processes. And a year and a day after Connor had been elected with the largest vote in history, a majority of the people of this city voted to terminate his office. And when he ran for mayor, they rejected him” (Walk 3)
The Kennedy administration also thought that the demonstrations were ill-timed.
On April 10th, Birmingham obtained a state court injunction, ordering an end to the demonstrations. Discouraged, Dr. King worried that the campaign, as in Albany, would stall. Interviewed by Eyes of the Prize, Andrew Young revealed the movement’s situation.
We had about five or six hundred people in jail, but all the money was gone and we couldn't get people out of jail. And the business community, black business community and some of the white clergy, were pressuring us to call off the demonstrations and just get out of town. And we didn't know what to do. And he sat there in room 30 in the Gaston Motel and Martin didn't say anything. And then finally, he got up and he went in the bedroom and he came back with his blue jeans on and his jacket and he said, "Look," he said, "I don't know what to do. I just know that something has got to change in Birmingham. I don't know whether I can raise money to get people out of jail. I do know that I can go into jail with them." And not knowing how it's going to work out, he walked out of the room and led his demonstration and went to jail.
Local white clergy were criticizing King and the campaign. Young reported: The ministers published in the newspapers a diatribe against Martin calling him a troublemaker and saying that he was there stirring up trouble to get publicity. And he sat down and took that newspaper and he had no paper, and he was in solitary confinement. And he started writing an answer to that one page ad around the margins of the New York Times (Walk 4-5). His rebuttal, titled “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” was subsequently printed in newspapers across the country.
King made salient points.
I am in Birmingham because injustice is here.
…
Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.
…
There can be no gainsaying the fact that racial injustice engulfs this community. Birmingham is probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States. Its ugly record of brutality is widely known. Negroes have experienced grossly unjust treatment in the courts. There have been more unsolved bombings of Negro homes and churches in Birmingham than in any other city in the nation. These are the hard, brutal facts of the case. On the basis of these conditions, Negro leaders sought to negotiate with the city fathers. But the latter consistently refused to engage in good faith negotiation.
…
Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. … The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.
We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was "well timed" in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never." We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied."
We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"--then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.
…
One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.
…
The Negro has many pent up resentments and latent frustrations, and he must release them. So let him march; let him make prayer pilgrimages to the city hall; let him go on freedom rides -and try to understand why he must do so. If his repressed emotions are not released in nonviolent ways, they will seek expression through violence; this is not a threat but a fact of history (Letter 1-3)
King’s request to call his wife, Coretta Scott King, who was at home in Atlanta recovering from the birth of their fourth child, was denied. After she communicated her concern to the Kennedy administration, Birmingham officials permitted King to call home. Bail money was made available, and he was released on 20 April 1963 (Birmingham Campaign 3).
Although King's decision to seek arrest marked a turning point in his life as a leader, it did little to increase support for the faltering ACMHR-SCLC campaign. …after a month of exhaustive demonstrations, the stalemate with white authorities suggested another Albany and the looming defeat of the Birmingham Campaign (Eskew 5).
Works cited:
“Birmingham Campaign.” Stanford: The martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. Web. https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/en...
“The Birmingham Desegregation Campaign.” Armistad Digital Resource. Web. http://www.amistadresource.org/civil_...
Cozzens, Lisa. “Birmingham.” Watson.org. Web. http://www.watson.org/~lisa/blackhist...
Eskew, Glenn T. “Birmingham Campaign of 1963.” Encyclopedia of Alabama. Web. http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/...
Harris, Joanna. “The 1963 Birmingham Campaign: Events & Impact.” Study.com. Web. https://study.com/academy/lesson/the-...
"Letter from a Birmingham Jail [King, Jr.]" African Studies Center – University of Pennsylvania. Web. https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles...
“No Easy Walk.” Amazon AWS. Web. http://wgbhprojects.s3.amazonaws.com/...
Trueman, C. N. “Birmingham 1963.” The History Learning Site. Web. https://www.historylearningsite.co.uk...
