Harold Titus's Blog - Posts Tagged "john-f-kennedy"

When Shriver got to the hotel suite he found Kennedy surrounded by aides, all rigidly opposed to the idea. Although the senator had already expressed his concerns privately to Governor Vandiver, he worried that a public telephone call to Coretta King could be perceived as a “gimmick” to reel in black votes. His key advisor, Ken O’Donnell, saw little political upside. “I felt my job was to always focus on the political factors and implications,” O’Donnell recalled. “The moral issues would be raised by Bobby [Kennedy], Sarge [Shriver], Harris Wofford, or others.” When John Kennedy pulled O’Donnell aside to confer privately, Ken told him: “While I am sympathetic to what Mrs. King and her family must be going through, from a political point of view, all I can see is that it could backfire.” How could Kennedy, a candidate who was criticized for his lukewarm support of black issues, justify this unusual bighearted action? “There are a million ways politically it could be a mess,” he warned Kennedy.

Shriver hovered, waiting to make his case alone. Finally the aides began to disperse: Wordsmith Ted Sorensen left to work on a speech, and press secretary Pierre Salinger went out to speak with reporters. But O’Donnell stuck around—besides advising Kennedy, he was the man who controlled access to the candidate and later to the president, and he now stood between Jack and his brother-in-law. Ready to pull rank as brother in law, Shriver approached O’Donnell. “I never use my family connection or ask for a favor, but you are wrong, Kenny,” he said. “This is too important. I want time alone with him.”

In O’Donnell’s view, the issue was decided and he didn’t want it reopened. But he also knew Shriver didn’t use his family position to advantage. “Unlike others,” O’Donnell said of Shriver, “he never asked or abused that [family] relationship, and, at some level, morally I suspected he might be right, though politically I still was against it.” Out of respect, or courtesy, or simply because he was hungry, O’Donnell stepped aside, allowing Shriver a private moment with Jack.

In parting, O’Donnell said softly he hadn’t eaten, he was going to get a hamburger, and the two men shook hands.

“You know I am right,” Shriver said as O’Donnell started off.

“Maybe,” O’Donnell replied. Then reminding him of how things often went in the rough and tumble of politics, he observed: “If it works, you’ll get no credit for it; if it does not, you’ll get all the blame.”

Shriver went into Kennedy’s room and found his brother-in-law alone, folding his clothes into his suitcase. As Shriver built his case, describing King’s terrifying drive through rural Georgia and Coretta’s anguish, Kennedy didn’t seem to be listening. His mind was elsewhere. “Jack,” Shriver pressed, “you just need to convey to Mrs. King that you believe what happened to her husband was wrong and that you will do what you can to see the situation rectified and that in general you stand behind him.”

Kennedy was not paying attention. To engage him, Shriver appealed to his conscience. “Negroes don’t expect everything will change tomorrow, no matter who’s elected,” he told Jack. “But they do want to know whether you care. If you telephone Mrs. King, they will know you understand and will help. You will reach their hearts and give support to a pregnant woman who is afraid her husband will be killed.”

Although cool and detached, Kennedy was in a quiet way sympathetic to the suffering of others and had a reflexive dislike of unfairness. All at once, Shriver noticed a change of heart in his brother-in-law. As he remembered it, Jack zipped up his suitcase then turned to him and said: “That’s a pretty good idea. How do I get to her?”

When Shriver handed over Coretta’s telephone number to him, Kennedy said: “Dial it for me, will you? I’ve got to pack up my papers.” As Jack filled his briefcase, Shriver sat down on the edge of the bed and put his finger into the rotary dial.

When the phone rang that morning, Coretta listened as Sargent Shriver introduced himself and told her he was with Jack Kennedy in Chicago. Senator Kennedy “wanted to speak with her for a moment,” Shriver informed her. “Would that be okay?”

After several seconds, she heard a voice familiar to her; she had just recently watched Kennedy give a smooth performance in the televised debates. “Good morning, Mrs. King,” the voice said. “This is Senator Kennedy.” After a brief exchange of pleasantries, Kennedy offered his sympathy: “I want to express to you my concern about your husband. I know this must be very hard for you.” He mentioned that he was aware she was expecting a baby. “I just wanted you to know that I was thinking about you and Dr. King,” he said cordially. “If there is anything I can do to help, please feel free to call on me.”

Coretta thanked him, saying: “I would appreciate anything you could do to help.”

And that was it: The call lasted no more than ninety seconds.

When Shriver informed Kenny O’Donnell, the campaign’s political master groused: “You just lost us the election.”

Inevitably, word of Kennedy’s gesture trickled out to the press, and pressure now mounted from several directions for King’s release.

Just as he protected his Vandiver conversation, Jack Kennedy was in no hurry to reveal that he had chatted with Coretta. He didn’t tell his press secretary Pierre Salinger until his campaign plane lifted off that afternoon from Chicago’s O’Hare Airport on its way to Detroit. In the air, he nonchalantly mentioned it to Salinger who, recognizing a potential media firestorm, immediately relayed the news via the onboard radiophone to campaign manager Bobby Kennedy in Washington. Bobby was apoplectic when he learned that Shriver, Wofford, and Louis Martin had conspired and put Jack up to the call. Now the campaign had to prepare to control the damage.

For Sargent Shriver, it was impossible to forget Bobby’s irate phone call. “Bobby landed on me like a ton of bricks….He scorched my ass,” Shriver recalled. “Jack Kennedy was going to get defeated because of the stupid call,” Bobby fumed. He then turned his wrath on Wofford and Louis Martin, summoning the men to the campaign headquarters and berating them “with fists tight, his blue eyes cold,” as Wofford remembered it. Bobby had made the political calculations and didn’t like what it all added up to. “Do you know,” he fumed, “that three Southern governors told us that if Jack supported Jimmy Hoffa, Nikita Khrushchev, or Martin Luther King, they would throw their states to Nixon? Do you know that this election may be razor close and you have probably lost it for us?”

The next morning, Thursday, October 27, Judge Oscar Mitchell announced the release of the prisoner on a $2,000 bond, saying his action was mandatory under Georgia law. That afternoon, after about thirty hours of confinement at Reidsville, Martin Luther King Jr. walked out of his cell for his flight home to Atlanta. About two hours later he stepped off a chartered plane at Peachtree-DeKalb Airport into the arms of his relieved wife and other supporters.

Speaking to reporters at the airport, King said he was indebted to Kennedy for his role. “I understand from very reliable sources that Senator Kennedy served as a great force in making the release possible,” he said. “For him to be that courageous shows that he is really acting upon principle and not expediency.” Kennedy’s participation, he said, was “morally wise.” Leaving no doubt about his appreciation, King nonetheless stopped short of endorsing the candidate. “I hold Senator Kennedy in very high esteem,” he said. “I am convinced he will seek to exercise the power of his office to fully implement the civil rights plank of his party’s platform.”

King also took the opportunity to say that he had not heard from Vice President Richard Nixon and knew of no Republican efforts on his behalf (Levingston 11-18).

King did not endorse Kennedy, but news of the phone call spread quickly and undoubtedly energized black voters in a close election. Among those whose minds were changed was a black Southerner who (unlike most) could vote. He was Martin Luther King Sr. “I had expected to vote against Senator Kennedy because of his religion,” Daddy King said. “Now he can be my president, Catholic or whatever he is.”

Kennedy was amused. “Imagine Martin Luther King having a bigot for a father,” he said. Then: “Well, we all have our fathers, don’t we” (Goodman 2)?

According to his aide William Safire, Nixon said he had not spoken out because doing so would have been “grandstanding.” Nixon’s real motive, though, seems clear: it was a close election and he was willing to lose black support if it meant gaining a new harvest of white votes in the once-Democratic south. Eight years later, this approach became the carefully considered “Southern strategy” (Frank 3).

“Back in 1960, there was a real battle for the black vote,” wrote author Larry Sabato. “The GOP was still seen as the party of Lincoln in many parts of the country, while JFK’s Democrats had loads of segregationists in powerful posts.”

The campaign feared that these actions would hurt Kennedy with white southern voters, so they produced a pamphlet on blue paper, which became known as “the blue bomb.” Neither the candidate’s name nor the Democratic Party appeared on the pamphlet, but it still gave Kennedy credit for his sympathetic call by contrasting his actions with Republican nominee Richard Nixon’s silence on the issue.

Staffers distributed approximately two million copies in African American churches across the country just weeks before the election. … So while the pamphlet became well known in many African-American communities, it could be overlooked in other areas. … “At the same time, Kennedy’s campaign had plausible deniability for Southern whites,” Sabato said. “JFK needed plenty of electoral votes from Southern segregationist states” (Hiegel 2).

King’s release had an immediate and profound impact on the black community, unleashing a wave of support for Kennedy. In a single day, the senator beat back years of skepticism about his commitment to racial justice. Debates raged over whether his call to Coretta was a calculated political act or a true expression of compassion. Whatever the truth was, the act inspired a flood of raw emotion. The front page of the Chicago Defender featured a photo of King holding his young son and rubbing cheeks with him while his wife, Coretta, kissed him on his other cheek and his daughter stood at his elbow peering up at him. Above the photo was a large headline: REV. KING FREE ON BOND—HAIL SEN. KENNEDY’S ROLE IN CLERIC’S RELEASE. The New York Post sent a reporter into Harlem to gauge the reaction. “Many Harlemites were indignant at Nixon’s refusal even to comment on the case,” the reporter wrote. The Post published the comments of John Patterson, publisher of the Harlem paper Citizen-Call. “Mr. Nixon, in his refusal to comment or take a stand on the civil rights issue that Rev. King’s arrest symbolized, merely extends the say-nothing, do-nothing rule by golf-club philosophy of President Eisenhower regarding this moral issue.” By contrast, Senator Kennedy was praised in newspapers across the country. A widely distributed Associated Press dispatch reported a version of the comforting words Kennedy said to Coretta on the phone: “This must be pretty hard on you, and I want to let you both know that I’m thinking about you, and will do all I can to help.”

Kennedy suffered only minor fallout among Southern white voters. On the Sunday following King’s release, Claude Sitton of the New York Times reported that Kennedy appeared “to be gaining strength in Southern states once considered safe for Vice President Nixon.” In the concluding paragraphs, Sitton acknowledged that Kennedy’s role in King’s release from prison “may hurt the Democratic cause somewhat among white Southern voters” but that the repercussions “had been milder than expected.” If there was a strong reaction, it was among Southern blacks who were now more favorably disposed toward Kennedy. Despite voting restrictions that prevented Southern blacks from casting ballots in numbers that their population justified, their impact could be substantial. As Sitton reported, blacks “cast the decisive vote in close elections in some Southern states.”

On Election Day, if blacks hadn’t turned out for him in large numbers, Kennedy might have had to deliver a concession speech. In Illinois, for instance, where he topped Nixon by 9,000 votes, 250,000 blacks voted for Kennedy. In Michigan, he won the votes of another 250,000 blacks and carried the state by 67,000 votes. In South Carolina, he carried the state by 10,000 votes with 40,000 blacks casting ballots for him.

In his book The Making of the President 1960, campaign historian Theodore White assessed the impact of the call to Coretta. “One cannot identify in the narrowness of American voting of 1960 any one particular episode or decision as being more important than any other in the final tallies,” he wrote. But, he added, the “instinctive decision must be ranked among the most crucial of the last few weeks.” White observed that blacks were convinced that they had anointed Kennedy. “Some Negro political leaders claim,” White wrote, “that in no less than eleven states (Illinois, New Jersey, Michigan, South Carolina, Texas, Delaware, Maryland, Missouri, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Nevada), with 169 electoral votes, it was the Negro community that provided the Kennedy margin of victory.”

Nationwide, Kennedy got only 118,574 more votes than Nixon did out of a total 68,370,000 ballots cast. Kennedy tallied 49.7 percent of the popular vote to Nixon’s 49.6 percent. In the crucial electoral votes, Kennedy amassed 303 to Nixon’s 219, enough to catapult him into the White House. Altogether, blacks turned out for Kennedy in staggering numbers. A Gallup poll put the figure at 70 percent, and an IBM poll came up with 68 percent. (In 1956, Adlai Stevenson got 60 percent.) From the black perspective, those numbers left no doubt of the community’s role in sending Kennedy to the White House.

Nixon was embittered by his narrow loss and the surprising black turnout for Kennedy. Later explaining his “no comment” at the height of the King uproar, he admitted “this was a fatal communication gap. I had meant Herb [Klein, his press secretary] to say that I had no comment at this time.” This explanation doesn’t quite conform to reality. Nixon in fact had heard a drumbeat of voices within his campaign begging him to speak out immediately, but he remained silent.

John Kennedy never explained his reason for placing the call to Coretta King. Was the candidate driven by politics or by goodwill? Cynics see only a man of callous manipulation, and torchbearers for Kennedy see only his grace and humanity. As Martin Luther King Jr. himself recognized, both impulses inspired Kennedy’s call, and they did not necessarily contradict each other. And that ninety-second conversation laid massive expectations on the Kennedy presidency. Before he even settled into the White House, Jack Kennedy was put on notice that blacks from Harlem to Montgomery expected him to listen to their leader Martin Luther King Jr. and hear their cries for equality. (Levingston 19-22).

Martin Luther King never gave Kennedy total credit for his release from the Georgia state prison. A recording of an interview of him conducted December 21, 1960, in Chattanooga, Tennessee, by a man who intended to write a book about the civil rights movement has King saying the following.

"Well, I would say first that many forces worked together to bring about my release," King said. "I don't think any one force brought it about, but you had a plurality of forces working together. …

"Now, it is true that Sen. Kennedy did take a specific step. He was in contact with officials in Georgia during my arrest and he called my wife, made a personal call and expressed his concern and said to her that he was working and trying to do something to make my release possible.

"His brother, who at that time was his campaign manager, also made direct contact with officials and even a judge in Georgia, so the Kennedy family did have some part, at least they expressed a concern and they did have some part in the release, but I must make it clear that many other forces worked to bring it about also."

The interviewer never finished the book and the tape was lost until the man's son rediscovered it five decades later while rummaging through dilapidated boxes left there by his father (Duke 1-2).

I detect regret in King’s remarks made later about his relationship with Richard Nixon. “I always felt that Nixon lost a real opportunity to express … support of something much larger than an individual, because this expressed support of the movement for civil rights in a way. And I had known Nixon longer. He had been supposedly close to me, and he would call me frequently about things, getting, seeking my advice. And yet, when this moment came, it was like he had never heard of me, you see” (Frank 4).

Knowing what transpired during the next five years, I am gratified that Kennedy, not Nixon, made that necessary call.


Works cited:

Duke, Allan. “Rare recording of Martin Luther King Jr. talking about John F. Kennedy released.” CNN. January 20, 2014. Web. https://www.cnn.com/2014/01/20/us/mlk...

Frank, Jeffrey. “When Martin Luther King Jr. and Richard Nixon Were Friends.” Daily Beast. January 21, 2013. Web. https://www.thedailybeast.com/when-ma...

Goodman, James. “How Martin Luther King Persuaded John Kennedy to Support the Civil Rights Cause.” The New York Times. June 29, 2017. Web. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/29/bo...

Hiegel, Taylor. “Remembering Kennedy's micro-targeting in the 1960 election.” NBC News. November 2, 2015. Web. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/re...

Levingston, Steven. “John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Phone Call That Changed History.” Time. June 10, 2017. Web. http://time.com/4817240/martin-luther...

Following the momentum of student-led sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina and Nashville, Tennesssee in early 1960, an interracial group of activists, led by Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) Executive Director James Farmer, decided to continue to challenge Jim Crow segregation in the South by organizing “freedom rides” through the region. They used as their model CORE’s 1946 “Journey of Reconciliation” where an interracial group rode interstate buses to test the enforcement of the Supreme Court’s decision in Morgan v. the Commonwealth of Virginia which outlawed segregation in interstate travel. White southern segregationists resisted CORE’s efforts. When most of the demonstrators were arrested in North Carolina, the police effectively aborted the Journey of Reconciliation.

Recalling that failed effort 15 years earlier, James Farmer organized a new generation of black and white activists to travel on interstate buses to test the 1960 United States Supreme Court decision in Boynton v. Virginia which reiterated the earlier ruling prohibiting racial segregation in interstate transportation (Mack 1).

"So that everything would be open and above board, I sent letters to the

President of the United States, President Kennedy; to the Attorney General,

Robert Kennedy; the Director of the FBI, Mr. Hoover; the Chairman of the

Interstate Commerce Commission, which regulated interstate travel; to the

President of Greyhound Corporation; and the President of Trailways Corporation.

And I must say we got replies from none of those letters,” Farmer would state later (Freedom Quotes 1).

John F. Kennedy had been elected president, in large part due to widespread support among blacks who believed that Kennedy was more sympathetic to the civil rights movement than his opponent, Richard Nixon. Once in office, however, Kennedy proved less committed to the movement than he had appeared during the campaign. To test the president's commitment to civil rights, CORE would send two interracial groups on chartered buses into the deep South. The whites would sit in the back and the blacks in the front. At rest stops, the whites would go into blacks-only areas and vice versa. "This was not civil disobedience, really," explained … Farmer, "because we [were] merely doing what the Supreme Court said we had a right to do." But the Freedom Riders expected to meet resistance. "We felt we could count on the racists of the South to create a crisis so that the federal government would be compelled to enforce the law," said Farmer. "When we began the ride I think all of us were prepared for as much violence as could be thrown at us. We were prepared for the possibility of death" (Cozzens 1).

Half of the Freedom Riders would travel on a Greyhound bus and the other half on a Trailways bus. Their ultimate destination was New Orleans, Louisiana.

Prior to the 1960 decision, two students, John Lewis and Bernard Lafayette, integrated their bus ride home from college in Nashville, Tennessee, by sitting at the front of a bus and refusing to move. After this first ride, they saw CORE’s announcement recruiting volunteers to participate in a Freedom Ride, a longer bus trip through the South to test the enforcement of Boynton. Lafayette’s parents would not permit him to participate, but Lewis joined 12 other activists to form an interracial group that underwent extensive training in nonviolent direct action before launching the ride (Freedom Stanford 1).

“One of the most remarkable things about the Freedom Rides is that …there was not a single incident of breaking the discipline,” Raymond Arsenault, author of Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice, said. “It’s hard to think of anything more striking in American history than that.”

Even seemingly minor details were not overlooked. For the day of the rides, a dress code was implemented: women in dresses, skirts, and the men in sport coats. “They wanted to look like they had just come out of church or Sunday school,” Arsenault said (Colvin 1).

The Freedom Riders left Washington DC on May 4, 1961. It was scheduled to arrive in New Orleans on May 17, the seventh anniversary of the Brown v Board of Education decision.

The first significant confrontation with segregationists occurred in Charlotte, North Carolina. Joseph Perkins, twenty-seven year-old CORE Field Secretary, was arrested for trespassing for attempting to have his shoes shined at a whites-only shoe stand. Perkins refused to post bail and spent two nights (May 8 and 9) in jail. On May 10, Judge Howard B. Arbuckle found him innocent of the trespassing charge based on the precedent set in Boyton v. Virginia. Perkins would rejoin the riders May 11.

On May 10 several white men attacked a group of Freedom Riders at the Greyhound bus terminal in Rock Hill, South Carolina, as they attempted to enter the whites-only waiting room. John Lewis, Al Bigelow and Genevieve Hughes sustain injuries. Two men set upon Lewis, battered his face and kicked him in the ribs. The attack was broken up by local police.

Lewis received then a telegram inviting him to Philadelphia for an interview for a position with the Peace Corps. He decided to go, intending to rejoin the Freedom Riders in Birmingham.

The Freedom Riders arrived in Atlanta on May 13 and attended a reception hosted by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. They wanted King to join them on the buses, to become a Freedom Rider himself. King passed on a warning that the Klan had "quite a welcome" prepared for the Riders in Alabama. He urged them to reconsider traveling through the Deep South. He whispered prophetically to Jet Magazine reporter Simeon Booker, who was covering the story, “You will never make it through Alabama” (Freedom Stannford 2). Despite King’s warning, the CORE Freedom Riders left Atlanta on May 14, bound for Alabama.

Informed that his father had died unexpectedly, James Farmer needed to return to Washington, D.C. to attend his father’s funeral. James Peck replaced Farmer as leader of the perilous project. Peck phoned Fred Shuttlesworth, the pastor of Birmingham's Bethel Baptist Church and the leader of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, to give him the exact arrival times of the two Freedom Buses. Shuttlesworth told Peck that Birmingham was alive with rumors that a white mob planned to confront the Riders at the downtown bus stations. Peck calmly told his riders about Shuttlesworth’s warning. He also related a warning he had received about potential difficulties that might arise at Anniston, a rest stop on the bus route to Birmingham. To allay fears, he stated he had no reason to believe the Riders would encounter serious trouble prior to their arrival in downtown Birmingham. The four-hour ride would give them considerable time to prepare an effective nonviolent response to the waiting mob, should such an eventuality exist.

The Greyhound Bus

The two busses carrying the riders left Atlanta an hour apart. The Greyhound group, with Joe Perkins in charge, left first at 11:00 A.M. The bus was more than half empty. Fourteen passengers were on board: five regular passengers, seven Freedom Riders, and two journalists, Charlotte Devree and Moses Newson. The riders were Genevieve Hughes, white, 28, CORE field secretary; Al Bigelow, white, 55, retired naval officer; Hank Thomas, black, 19, Howard University student; Jimmy McDonald, black, 29, CORE volunteer; Mae Frances Moultrie, black, 24, Morris College student; Joe Perkins, black, 27, CORE field secretary; and Ed Blankenheim, white, 27, a carpenter. Three of the regular passengers were Roy Robinson, the manager of the Atlanta Greyhound station, and two undercover plainclothes agents of the Alabama Highway Patrol: Eli Cowling and Harry Sims. Following the orders of Floyd Mann, the director of the Alabama Highway Patrol, Cowling carried a hidden microphone to be used to eavesdrop on the Riders. Unsure of the Freedom Ride's itinerary, Mann and his boss, Governor John Patterson, wanted to know what the Riders planned.

Just south of Anniston, the driver of a northbound Greyhound motioned to the driver of the Freedom Riders' bus, O. T. Jones, to pull over to the side of the road. A white man then ran across the road and yelled to Jones through the window: "There's an angry and unruly crowd gathered at Anniston. There's a rumor that some people on this bus are going to stage a sit-in. The terminal has been closed. Be careful." With this message the Riders' worst fears seemed to be confirmed, but Joe Perkins — hoping that the warning was a bluff, or at least an exaggeration — urged the driver to keep going. A minute or two later, as the bus passed the city limits, several of the Riders couldn't help but notice that Anniston's sidewalks were lined with people, an unusual sight on a Sunday afternoon in a Deep South town. "It seemed that everyone in the town was out to greet us," White Rider Genevieve Hughes, 28-year-old CORE Field Secretary, later commented.

Nineteen-year-old Hank Thomas, who had joined the 1961 CORE Freedom Ride at the last minute after his Howard University roommate John Moody had dropped out with a bad case of the flu, remembered the strange feeling that he and the other Riders felt as the bus turned into the station parking lot. The station was locked shut. There was utter silence. Then, suddenly, a screaming mob, led by Anniston Klan leader William Chappell, surrounded the bus. Thomas thought he heard the driver, O. T. Jones say, "Well, boys, here they are. I brought you some niggers and nigger-lovers."

An eighteen-year-old Klansman and ex-convict, Roger Couch, stretched himself out in front of the bus. The others, approximately fifty in number, carrying metal pipes, clubs, and chains — milled about, many screaming: "Dirty Communists! "Sieg heil!" No policemen were present, even though the manager of the Anniston Greyhound station, had warned local officials earlier that a potentially dangerous mob had assembled.

After the driver opened the door, Cowling and Sims hurried to the front and managed to close the door. Frenzied attackers began to smash windows, dent the sides of the bus, and slash tires. Genevieve Hughes watched a man walk by the side of the bus, saw him slip a pistol from his pocket, watched him stare at her for several minutes. She heard the sound of shattering glass. She shouted, "Duck, down everyone," thinking that a bullet had struck one of the windows. It had been a rock. A second man cracked the window above her seat with brass knuckles. Joe Perkins's window was also cracked. The assault continued for almost twenty minutes.

The Anniston police finally arrived. The officers examined the broken windows and slashed tires but made no attempt to arrest anybody. Eventually, the officers cleared a path in the crowd and motioned for the bus to leave the parking lot.

A police car led the Greyhound to the city limits and then turned back, leaving the bus to the mercy of the pursuing mob. A long line of cars and pickup trucks, plus one car carrying a news reporter and a photographer, followed. Two of the cars, ahead of the bus, forced it to slow down. The thirty or forty cars and trucks were occupied mostly by Klansmen, none wearing hoods or robes. Some had just come from church, wearing coats and ties and polished shoes. Some had children with them.

Two tires now flat, six miles southwest of Anniston, in front of the Forsyth and Son grocery store, the driver pulled over to the side of the road. Roy Robinson and the driver ran into the grocery store hoping to call a local garage that might have replacement tires. Back in the bus, Eli Cowling had retrieved his revolver from the baggage compartment. A teenage boy smashed a side window with a crowbar. A group of men and boys rocked the bus trying to turn it over on its side. A second group attempted to enter through the front door. Brandishing his gun, Cowling blocked them, retreated, locked the door behind him. For the next twenty minutes Klansmen pounded on the bus demanding that the Freedom Riders come out. Two highway patrolmen arrived. Neither made an effort to disperse the crowd, Cowling, Harry Sims, and the Riders stayed inside.

One members of the mob, Cecil "Goober" Lewallyn, tossed a flaming bundle of rags through a broken window. The bundle exploded; dark gray smoke spread throughout the bus. Genevieve Hughes, seated only a few feet away from the explosion, thought first that the bomb-thrower had thrown a smoke bomb. The smoke got blacker. The flames started to engulf several of the seats. Crouching in the middle of the bus, she screamed: "Is there any air up front?" No one answered. "Oh, my God, they're going to burn us up!" she yelled. She found an open window six rows from the front, thrusted out her head, and saw the outstretched necks of Jimmy McDonald and Charlotte Devree. Seconds later the three Riders squeezed through their opened windows. Choking from the smoke and fumes, they staggered across the road. They were afraid that the other passengers were trapped inside, but then they saw that several passengers had escaped through the front door on the other side.

Members of the mob were pressing against the door screaming, "Burn them alive" and "Fry the goddamn niggers." An exploding fuel tank persuaded the mob that the whole bus would within seconds explode. The frightened mob retreated. Cowling pried open the door. The choking occupants escaped. Hank Thomas was the first Rider to exit the front of the bus. A white man rushed toward him, asked: "Are you all okay?" Before Thomas could answer, the man struck Thomas’s head with a baseball bat. Thomas fell to the ground and remained barely conscious while the rest of the gasping Riders collapsed on the grass.

Several white families had gathered in front of the grocery store. Twelve-year-old Janie Miller gave choking victims water, filling and refilling a five-gallon bucket, ignoring the Klansmen’s insults (Gross/ Arsenault 3- 7)

“It was the worst suffering I’d ever heard,” Miller would recall in the PBS /American Experience film, Freedom Riders. “I walked right out into the middle of that crowd. I picked me out one person. I washed her face. I held her, I gave her water to drink, and soon as I thought she was gonna be okay, I got up and picked out somebody else.” For daring to help the injured riders, she and her family were later ostracized by the community and could no longer live in the county (Doyle 7).

Twenty-four-year-old Morris College student Mae Frances Moultrie was the only African-American CORE female on the bus. She had joined the Ride on May 11th in Sumter, SC. Moultrie was so badly overcome by the heat and smoke, she could not remember "if I walked or crawled off the bus" (Meet 3).

Cowling's pistol, the heat of the fire, and the acrid fumes from the burning seats kept the mob away. A second fuel tank explosion drove them farther back. Two warning shots by the highway patrolmen on the scene persuaded the Klansmen to slip away. Minutes passed. Cowling, Sims, and the patrolmen stood guard over the Riders, lying and sitting yards away from the shell of the bus. No one in a position of authority had attempted to make an arrest. Nobody had recorded the license numbers of the Klansmen's cars and pickup trucks. No one attempted to call an ambulance. Finally, a white couple who lived close by permitted Genevieve Hughes to make a call. Nobody answered. The couple drove Hughes to the hospital. One of the state troopers called for an ambulance. Its driver refused to carry any of the black Riders. Already loaded, refusing to leave behind their black friends, the white Riders began to exit. Cowling spoke sternly to the driver. He relented. All who needed to be transported were driven to Anniston Memorial Hospital.

Genevieve Hughes discovered that only a nurse was at the hospital. The nurse gave her pure oxygen to breathe. It burned her throat, did not relieve her coughing. She was burning hot. Her clothes were a wet mess. After awhile Ed Blankenheim and Bert Bigelow were brought in. Laying on their beds, they continued to cough. Eventually a woman doctor arrived, having taken several minutes to reference smoke poisoning. A Negro man (not a Freedom rider) who had been in the back of the bus with Genevieve was brought in. She told the nurse and doctor to take care of him. They did not. They did nothing for Hank Thomas. Of the thirteen people brought to the hospital, only Ed Blankenheim, the Negro man and Genevieve had been admitted.

After awhile, having slept, Genevieve was questioned about the bombing by an FBI agent. She was unaware that he or another FBI agent on the scene had persuaded the medical staff to treat all of the injured passengers. Perhaps the cause of their failure to comply had not been entirely racial. A group of Klansmen made an unsuccessful attempt to block the entrance to the emergency room. The crowd outside swelled in numbers. Several Klansmen threatened to burn the building down. With nightfall approaching, recognizing that he had no police protection, the hospital superintendent ordered the Riders to leave.

Even though Hughes and several other Riders needed to stay, Joe Perkins had to comply. It took him more than an hour to arrange safe passage out of the hospital. The state troopers and the local police refused to provide the Riders transportation or escort even when they were transported. Bert Bigelow called friends in Washington hoping to receive help from the federal government. Perkins called Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth in Birmingham. Shuttlesworth mobilized a fleet of eight cars. He reminded the volunteer drivers that they had to behave non-violently. “You mustn't carry any weapons. You must trust God and have faith." Out of sight, several of the deacons pulled out shotguns from beneath their seats.

Shuttlesworth's deacons made their way across the back roads toward Anniston. The hospital superintendent insisted that the interracial group could not stay the night. At last the rescue mission pulled into the parking lot. The police holding back the jeering crowd and the deacons showing their weapons, the Riders climbed into the cars. The cars left. One rescuer remarked: “You couldn't tell the deputies from the Ku Klux."

The Riders wanted to know the fate of the Trailways group. Perkins's phone conversation with Shuttlesworth earlier in the afternoon had informed him that the other bus had also run into trouble. The deacons knew few details of the story. Even so, it was evident to all that the defenders of white supremacy in Alabama had decided to smash the Freedom Ride with violence. They would not countenance the law, the U.S. Constitution, or anything else interfering with the preservation of racial segregation in their state (Gross/ Arsenault 8-11)


Works cited:

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...

Cozzens, Lisa. “Freedom Rides.” Watson.org. Web. http://www.watson.org/~lisa/blackhist...

Doyle, Jack. ““Buses Are A’Comin’- Freedom Riders: 1961.” PopHistoryDig.com. June 24, 2014. Web. http://www.pophistorydig.com/topics/t...

“Freedom Rides: American Civil Rights Movement.” Encyclopedia Britannica. Web. https://www.britannica.com/event/Free...

“Freedom Rides Quotes.” Uen.org. Web. https://www.uen.org/freedomrides/down...

“Freedom Rides.” Stanford: The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. Web. https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/en...

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...

Mack, Dwayne. “Freedom Rides (1961).” BlackPast.org. Web. https://blackpast.org/aah/freedom-rid...

“Meet the Players: Freedom Riders.” American Experience. Web. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexper...

Ain't gonna let nobody, Lordy, turn me 'round,
turn me round, turn me 'round.
Ain't gonna let nobody, Lordy, turn me 'round.
I'm gonna keep on a-walkin', Lord,
marching up to freedom land (Mt. Zion 1).

Since the Albany Movement envisioned total desegregation, their tactics were diverse. Protestors held meetings, gave speeches, marched, held sit-ins, and organized rallies. Of all the tactics, however, there was one that became surprisingly effective, and that was singing. Singing, largely inspired by the role of music in African American Baptist churches, proved to be an extremely effective way to galvanize protestors, keep energy and morale high, and present a very non-threatening form of nonviolent protest (Muscato 1).

Rev. Prathia Hall participated in many mass meetings held at Albany's churches, and she describes her moving experience as follows:

"I was profoundly impacted by the Albany movement and the southwest Georgia project conducted by SNCC. It was my first experience of the deep South…the very first night, there was a mass meeting. The mass meeting itself was just pure power…you could hear the rhythm of the feet, and the clapping of the hands from the old prayer meeting tradition…people singing the old prayer songs…there was something about hearing those songs, and hearing that singing in Albany in the midst of a struggle for life against death, that was just the most powerful thing I'd ever experienced" (Faith 1).

Charles Sherrod described such a scene: “Tears filled the eyes of hard, grown men who had seen with their own eyes merciless atrocities committed…when we rose to sing ‘We Shall Overcome,’ nobody could imagine what kept the church on four corners” (Nelligan 19).

The a cappella singing that became the trademark and the unifying force of the civil rights movement was introduced at this church by three student "Freedom Singers"--Ruth A. Harris, Bernice Johnson, and Cordell Reagon (Mt. Zion 1).

Locally raised Rutha Harris described how she became a founding member of the Freedom Singers after discovering that she was” not free.”

My skills as a singer were discovered by the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (“SNCC”) member, Cordell Reagon. Cordell heard me sing during a mass meeting and thought I was very good. Cordell was a field secretary for SNCC, and also a very gifted singer. He was trying to form a singing group to raise money for SNCC. We were called The Freedom Singers. We sang a cappella. The original group consisted of Cordell Reagon, Bernice Johnson (later Bernice Johnson Reagon), Charles Neblett and yours truly – me!

I joined the Albany Movement through SNCC. I was 21 and I was home in Albany for the summer. SNCC was organizing people to register to vote. I went to a meeting to learn about what they were doing.

Cordell met me while I was walking down the street and asked me if I wanted to be free. I said “What do you mean, do I want to be free? I am free.” I said this because my father, Reverend I. A. Harris, sheltered us from segregation. He built the house that I am living in now in 1932. He was a strong man and a respected member of the Black community. He was also respected by white people in town. As we said back then, “he didn’t take no wooden nickels.”

Well, he controlled what we were exposed to. He was a minister, so he told us that we could not go to the movies at all because he did not like the content. That meant we never went to a segregated movie theatre. If we wanted to go out to eat, he said, “No, we have a refrigerator, stove, kitchen table and good food right here. I am not spending money on eating out when you can eat right here.” That meant that we didn’t see any segregated restaurants.

If we couldn’t use the bathroom at a gas station, he took off and refused to buy gas there. I really thought I was free until I learned about the voter registration numbers in Albany. I thought, “I know there are more than 28 Black people who want to vote in this town.” That motivated me to start working with SNCC.

When I learned from the SNCC workers that people in Albany were afraid to register to vote, for fear of death, violence or losing their jobs, I realized that things were not as I thought they were in my life in Albany either. As I got more involved in the movement I came to understand that I could not go to the white areas of places that we marched to, like segregated waiting rooms in bus stations, bathrooms, and segregated restaurants. It brought it all home and I knew I wasn’t free either.

My mother agreed to let me travel with the Freedom Singers after I promised that I’d finish college once I was done working with SNCC. I left Florida A&M for the movement. I fulfilled my promise to my mother in 1970, when I graduated from Albany College.

…

Without the songs of the Civil Rights movement, there would not have been a movement in my opinion.

Yes, we were afraid. There was fear. If you are marching for voter registration and the police say halt, and you don’t, you know you will be arrested. After you were arrested, who knew what would happen? The police might kill you or harm you. We were afraid, but we kept going and sang freedom songs.

The songs directly addressed the situation we were facing and helped us move forward. The police said halt. These songs kept us moving (Stayed 1-3).

King returned to Albany on February 27, 1962, to stand trial for his arrest in December. The trial was a quick one, and despite the predetermined outcome, Judge A.N. Durden announced that he would issue a decision within the next six months. Meanwhile, King left Albany to resume his duties with the SCLC. In Albany, boycotts and sporadic arrests continued. The Albany Movement kept trying to talk and bargain with the city council and the police department with little success. The white establishment had little reason to consider any of the Movement’s proposals, as the boycott threat had already proved surmountable, and it appeared that the community was not eager to resume mass marches any time soon. Sporadic arrests did continued, but these were largely the result of so-called “test” arrests of protestors attempting to integrate public facilities (Nelligan 32).

The two leaders of the white supremacists were the police chief Laurie Pritchett and James H. Gray, “who owned Albany’s only newspaper, the Albany Herald, its only television station, a radio station, and who was a key member of its city commission. Although historians give Pritchett the lion’s share of credit for beating King at his own game, it was Gray who called the shots in Albany, and it was his media empire that played events up or down as he saw fit.”

Pritchett was the city’s point man, and he confounded both the press and the demonstrators. According to The Race Beat: The Press, The Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibhanoff, he looked every bit the Southern bubba cop and enjoyed playing the role for cameras. Large in stature and big bellied, he often addressed demonstrators while chewing on a piece of straw, and he liked to cock a smile at them before taking them politely to jail.

But the comparison ends there. Pritchett was also smart. He knew King was committed to non-violence, and he had spent time in the library studying Gandhian philosophy and tactics. He understood that if King could not provoke a confrontation, he would gain no moral ground in Albany. Pritchett was also mean. Once he told a reporter over beer that “There are three things I like to do: drink buttermilk, put niggers in jail, and kick reporters’ asses. …”

Behind Pritchett’s power was James H. Gray. Gray grew up affluent in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where his father was a lawyer and one of his neighbors was Norman Rockwell. He graduated from elite Dartmouth College, where he befriended a Harvard University basketball rival, Joseph Kennedy. According to The Race Beat, Gray sometimes visited the Kennedys and, after Joseph Kennedy died in World War II, he became close to the next oldest son, John. After leaving Dartmouth he wrote for the Hartford (Connecticut) Courant and later the New York Herald.

By then he had set his sights on Albany because of his wealthy wife, Dorothy Ellis, who was from the small Georgia city and whose father owned the Albany Herald and a plantation. … When he returned home [after World War II] he moved to Albany, purchased its only newspaper and began to build a media empire. He was also prominent in Georgia’s arch segregationist Democratic Party, where he became chair in 1958. That year he hosted his friends, then-Senator John F. Kennedy and his wife, for a weekend in Albany.

Although only a transplanted Southerner, Gray earned a reputation for his rabid defense of racial segregation. In the late 1950s, following the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision that outlawed segregated public schools, he was one of a number of Southern editors openly hostile to any news coverage portraying the South in a negative light. Following the decision, moreover, a new organization known as the White Citizens Council (WCC) formed in Mississippi to fight segregation; chapters soon formed in every Deep South state. Unlike the Ku Klux Klan–whose members, by then, were typically working class or marginalized whites–the WCC was middle class. Its members were professional men, including bankers, lawyers, business owners, and some newspaper publishers.

…

When the Albany demonstrations began in late 1961, Gray knew what to do. He contacted the city’s mayor, Asa Carter, and Police Chief Pritchett to coordinate a strategy whose main principal was to avoid violence. Arrests yes, force no.

When King sat in jail a week before Christmas, Gray addressed the public through his own television station and announced that the movement was under the influence of a “cell of professional agitators” and Communists. He affirmed further that Albany’s racial system was one that “over the years has been peaceful and rewarding.” He called Pritchett and insisted that he negotiate King’s release, then phoned his friends in the Kennedy Administration to make sure there would be no federal intervention in Albany (King 1-3).

One of the major issues surrounding the Albany Movement’s 1961-1962 campaign was the lack of aid from the federal government. President John F. Kennedy and his administration promised that they were watching the situation in Albany closely; however, because of Pritchett’s use of arrests and avoidance of public violence, the federal government never felt enough pressure from American citizens to intervene. The lack of intervention by the Kennedy administration in this case reinforced the frustration and distrust that many civil rights demonstrators had for the federal government (Albany 2).

Dr. Anderson was definitely critical of Kennedy and the Justice Department.

Needless to say we were in constant contact with the federal government. Even from the time Dr. King initially came into Albany. Contact had been made with Attorney General Bob Kennedy, and he had sort of turned us over to Burke Marshall. And when Dr. King was coming in we requested some protection for him coming into town. Laurie Pritchett, I understand was contacted by Burke Marshall, and was requested to provide security for Dr. King, and initially Laurie Pritchett said that he couldn't do it. He couldn't guarantee the safety of Dr. King coming into town. So Burke Marshall indicated, if you can't then I'll send in enough federal marshals to do it, whereupon Laurie Pritchett decided, well maybe I can. But even we—we never at any time got any of the Justice Department officials to come in to my knowledge. Even as observers during the arrest or during the court hearings. There were FBI agents on the scene, but no one from the Justice Department that we thought would be there to protect our civil rights. We didn't have that.

I would have expected a representative from the Justice Department to be on the scene as an observer if nothing else because civil rights were being violated. For example, we were not permitted to—to demonstrate at all, even following all the guidelines that had been set forth by the city, we attempted picketing of—of selected stores in small numbers, widely spaced. Not blocking any ingress or egress, all the guidelines that were given, so that you could picket, we would do that and still got arrested. I was arrested on several occasions just walking down the street holding a piece of paper in my hand and under the pretense of passing out literature without a permit or something to that effect. I'm saying that Justice officials were not there as observers, and if they were there mind you they were not identified as such, and to my knowledge no action was taken relative to the violation of our civil right— (Interview 10).

When King and his supporters once again confronted the racists--most famously in this period in Albany, Ga., and Birmingham, Ala.--the president and his advisers responded by calling for the maintenance of "law and order" and investigating King's alleged Communist Party ties, rather than by attacking Jim Crow.

Despite their promises, the Kennedys claimed the government had no jurisdiction over the Jim Crow laws of Southern cities, and they told King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to await Congressional action.

…

King was blamed for the deal made with the city council in December that temporarily halted demonstrations, an agreement that the council did not honor. Albany Mayor Asa Kelly gloated he had forced an end to the protests with Jim Crow still intact. Even more humiliating, the Kennedy administration phoned Kelly to congratulate him on his handling of the crisis.

The administration's only words to King were warnings that two of his advisers, Jack O'Dell and Stanley Levison, were linked to the Communist Party and should be dropped. King bowed to pressure and asked O'Dell for his resignation as a paid SCLC staff member. O'Dell continued to be active in the organization as a volunteer.

King [later] criticized President Kennedy for his "lack of leadership" in civil rights issues. But King maintained his position that federal support was key to the movement's success--a position that would contribute to the final defeat at Albany (Sustar 1, 3-4).


Works cited:

“A Faith Forged in Albany.” This Far by Faith. Web. https://www.pbs.org/thisfarbyfaith/jo...

“The Albany Movement campaigns for full integration in Georgia (Fall 1961- Summer 1962).” Global Nonviolent Acyion Database. Web. https://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/con...

“Interview with Dr. William Anderson.” Eyes on the Prize Interview. November 7, 1985. Washington University Digital Gateway Texts. Web. http://digital.wustl.edu/e/eop/eopweb...

King, Pamela Sterne. “From Albany to Birmingham.” Weld: Birmingham’s Newspaper. December 19, 2012. Web. https://weldbham.com/blog/2012/12/19/...

“Mt. Zion Baptist Church.” We Shall Overcome: Historic Places of the Civil Rights Movement. Nps.gov. Web. https://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/civilri...

Muscato, Christopher. “The Albany Movement: History, Events & Significance.” Study.com. Web. https://study.com/academy/lesson/the-...

Nelligan, Brendan Kevin. “Lessons of Albany: Civil Rights Protest in Albany, Georgia 1961-62.” Providence College: DigitalCommons@Providence. Fall 2009. Web. https://digitalcommons.providence.edu...

“She’s Still ‘Stayed on Freedom’: An Interview With Civil Rights Activist and Freedom Singer, Rutha Harris.” BlackHer Movement. Web. http://blackher.us/shes-still-stayed-...

Sustar, Lee. “King, nonviolence and the Albany Movement.” SocialistWorker.org. November 9, 2012. Web. https://socialistworker.org/2012/11/0...

By 1962 the Freedom Movement fight against segregation is slowly grinding to a halt. Two years of sit-ins have managed to desegregate some public facilities in some college-towns of the Mid- and Upper-South, and after the Freedom Rides all bus terminals serving interstate commerce are now no longer segregated — in theory. But across the region most public facilities remain segregated by local law and the very few Afro-Americans who dare sit at the front of a bus still face both vigilante violence and likely arrest on trumped up charges of "disorderly conduct" or "disturbing the peace." And by 1962 most student integration campaigns in the Deep South have been crushed by intensified police repression and Klan terrorism. In Albany Georgia, for example, public facilities are still segregated despite a powerful SNCC-organized movement with deep support in the Afro-American community and mass marches led by Dr. King resulting in over 750 arrests.

It is 100 years since the Civil War (or the "War of Northern Aggression" as some southern politicians refer to it). The years 1960 to 1965 mark the centennial of that war. On the national level, Centennial programs and ceremonies are conducted with maximum deference to the sensitivities of southern whites and little mention of slavery as the conflict's defining issue. Nor is there much acknowledgement of Black suffering under ante- bellum slavery, or Reconstruction, or the realities of ongoing segregation and denial of basic human rights in the current-day South of the 1960s. And in the South itself, commemorations glorify the "lost cause," exalt the sanctity and purity of white womanhood, and praise the "southern way of life" and its defenders such as the White Citizens Councils and the Ku Klux Klan.

During the 1960 presidential campaign, John F. Kennedy assured Afro-American voters and northern liberals that he would address equality of opportunity with the "stroke of the president's pen." But once in office JFK's priority is foreign affairs and Cold War anti-communism. Unwilling to offend southern segregationists in Congress who he needs for his military and diplomatic initiatives, JFK offers little public support for the student sit-ins and minimal federal action in defense of Black voting rights.

When forced by public pressure to take action against mob violence during the Freedom Rides and the Meredith-'Ole Miss crises, Kennedy's assertion of federal authority is reluctant and tepid. Civil rights supporters and northern liberals press him to enact new civil rights legislation but he declines, arguing that there is no chance at all of doing so in the 87th Congress (1961-1962) against the united and adamant opposition of the Southern Bloc of Senators. And as a practical politician he knows that no Democrat can be elected president — or reelected — without the political support of the "Solid South" (Campaign 1).

By the fall of 1961, a year and a half of nonviolent sit-in and freedom ride campaigns by SNCC, CORE, and the NAACP have managed to desegregate some public facilities in some college-towns of the Mid- and Upper-South. But in the Deep South states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina, direct action campaigns have been brought to a standstill by legal assaults, mass arrests and police brutality — at least for the moment.

Following SNCC's decision to pursue both direct action and voter registration, in the fall of '61 Diane Nash, James Bevel (the two of them newly married), Bernard Lafayette, Paul Brooks, and other direct action proponents begin organizing a "Move On Mississippi" (MOM) campaign in Jackson. With its large Afro-American population and two Black colleges they hope to build a nonviolent student-led protest movement that can both challenge segregation and register voters as was done in Nashville.

But Mississippi is not Tennessee. Fear lays heavy over the Afro-American community and it's tough going. Half a year earlier, the Tougaloo Nine, had been immediately arrested for the "crime" of trying to read in the white-only public library. When Jackson State College students attempted to hold a support vigil and march they were brutally dispersed by club-swinging police using tear gas and attack-dogs — as were adult supporters outside the courthouse when the nine were arraigned. The arrival of the Freedom Riders in May inspired the community with hope, but after the riders were incarcerated in the notorious Parchman Prison the state's lesson regarding the price of protest was not lost on Jackson's Black community.

Nevertheless the MOM organizers dig in and begin holding workshops for Black students on nonviolent strategies and tactics. But before they have a chance to mount their first protest the Jackson police hit them with a preemptive strike. Nash, Bevel, and Lafayette are arrested on felony charges of "Contributing to the Delinquency of Minors." Though the students attending the seminars have not violated any laws the city prosecutor claims that merely teaching them about nonviolent resistance constitutes "contributing" to their future "delinquency" — a police-state legal ploy that utterly tramples underfoot the First Amendment right of freedom of speech and association

The felony charges come with high bail amounts that SNCC can ill-afford. If they or others continue teaching nonviolent resistance they'll be arrested again and have to sit in jail awaiting trial and appeal — a lengthy process. As a practical matter, the arrests stifle MOM's effort to build a direct action movement in Jackson.

In municipal court the three are quickly convicted on the "contributing" charges. In addition to $2,000 fines (equal to $16,000 each in 2016) Bernard and James are sentenced to three years in prison, Diane to two years. They remain free on bond while their convictions are appealed. But under the legal rules they first have to appeal up through the various levels of Mississippi courts — all of which will certainly ignore the unconstitutionality of their arrest and conviction. Only after the state Supreme Court rejects their appeal (as everyone knows it will) can they appeal to federal court where, after more time-consuming and costly hearings at various levels they expect that the charges will be dismissed on constitutional grounds. The Mississippi authorities know the convictions will eventually be overturned in federal court, but meanwhile they prevent SNCC workers from organizing protests in Jackson — perhaps for years if the court proceedings can be strung out long enough.

Late in April of 1962, Diane declares that her commitment to nonviolence precludes any further cooperation with the biased and corrupt Mississippi judicial system. Though she is pregnant with her and Bevel's first child, she withdraws her appeal and appears before the sentencing judge to turn herself in and begin serving her two-year prison sentence.

“To appeal further would necessitate my sitting through another trial in a Mississippi court, and I have reached the conclusion that I can no longer cooperate with the evil and unjust court system of this state. I subscribe to the philosophy of nonviolence; this is one of the basic tenets of nonviolence — that you refuse to cooperate with evil. The only condition under which I will leave jail will be if the unjust and untrue charges against me are completely dropped.

“The southern courts in which we are being tried are completely corrupt. ... The immorality of these courts involves several factors. They are completely lacking in integrity because we are being arrested and tried on charges that have nothing to do with the real issues. The real reason we are arrested is that we are opposing segregation, but the courts are not honest enough to state this frankly and charge us with this. Instead they hide behind phony charges — breach of peace in Jackson, criminal anarchy in Louisiana, conspiracy to violate trespass laws in Talledega, Alabama.

“But over and above the immorality of cooperating with this evil court system, there is an even larger reason why we must begin to stay in jail. If we do not do so, we lose our opportunity to reach the community and society with a great moral appeal and thus bring about basic change in people and in society.

“[My child] will be a black child born in Mississippi and thus wherever he is born he will be in prison. I believe that if I go to jail now it may help hasten that day when my child and all children will be free — not only on the day of their birth but for all of their lives.”

Meanwhile, Bevel and Bernard continue their appeal so as to overturn the legal fiction that teaching nonviolence to students amounts to a form of contributing to their delinquency.

The bold defiance of Diane Nash places the authorities in an uncomfortable position. The municipal court convictions and prison sentences were accomplished with little notice by the press and appeals through the state judiciary are unlikely to attract much media attention. But incarcerating a young mother-to-be in state prison on bogus "contributing" charges that are utterly without legal merit risks a national publicity backlash of exactly the kind that the Freedom Movement is proving itself adept at provoking (Diane 1-3).

“When I surrendered, I sat in the front seat of the courtroom and the bailiff told me to move back and I thought ‘I [might be here] for two years, I’m not moving anywhere,’” she says. “So they charged me with contempt of court for refusing to move to the back.”

The contempt of court sentence lasted for 10 days. While in jail, the only thing on Nash’s mind was her unborn child. She was determined to do everything she could so that her child would enter a world that was equal for all Americans, regardless of race.

After serving out her sentence for contempt, the judge declined to hear Nash’s other case. Nash believes the federal government tapped her telephone line and listened in when she told organizations in the Civil Rights Movement that she was pregnant and headed to jail for up to two years. On the heels of the horrific imagery of the bloodied and beaten Freedom Riders that had been spread far and wide, they surmised that Mississippi didn’t want to find itself, once again, at the center of a national political debate.

As a result, the government reduced Nash’s sentence for “contributing to the delinquency of minors” without formally addressing it. This left Nash in a predicament. She didn’t want the prejudiced justice system she had been fighting against to think that she was indebted to it. She was ready and willing to serve her full sentence, after all.

“When I got home, I wrote Judge Moore a certified return-receipt letter. I said, ‘In case you should change your mind and you want me, here’s where you can reach me,’” Nash recalls. And though the judge never took her up on the offer, Nash was always ready to do what was necessary to make a mark. To change the world, she says with a laugh, “sometimes you have to be bad” (Morgan 7-9).

The Bevel’s daughter Sherrilynn is born later that year while her parents continue their Freedom Movement organizing in the Deep South, her mother with SNCC and her father with SCLC — soon they will be in Birmingham leading a decisive direct action campaign against segregation. Bernard Lafayette marries NAACP youth leader Colia Lidell and together they move into Selma, Alabama, where they begin organizing what eventually becomes the Selma Voting Rights Campaign and The March to Montgomery, the capstone voting-rights campaign of the 1960s. And that fall, a few months after Diane forces Mississippi to suspend her sentence, students working with the North Jackson NAACP Youth Council pick up the direct action torch by first organizing a Black boycott of the Jackson State Fair and then a Christmas boycott of the city's white merchants (Diane 4).


Works cited:

“Diane Nash Defies the Mississippi Judicial System (April-May).” Civil Rights Movement History 1962. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis62.h...

Morgan, Thad. “How Freedom Rider Diane Nash Risked Her Life to Desegregate the South.” History. March 8, 2018. Web. https://www.history.com/news/diane-na....

“The Campaign for a Second Emancipation Proclamation.” Civil Rights Movement History 1962. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis62.h...

James Meredith was born June 25, 1933, in Kosciusko, Mississippi. He was one of ten children of Roxy Patterson Meredith and Moses Cap, a poor farmer in Kosciusko. As a young child, Meredith became aware of racism. He would refuse the nickels and dimes that a local white man regularly gave to black children, calling the gifts degrading. More painful was the realization he made as a young man on a trip to visit relatives in Detroit, where he saw blacks and whites sharing the same public facilities. He rode the train home from this brush with integration, and when he arrived in Memphis, the conductor told him to leave the whites-only car. "I cried all the way home," Meredith later recalled, "and vowed to devote myself to changing the degrading conditions of black people." He also had other ambitions and goals. Ever since a childhood visit to a white doctor's office, he had harbored a dream of attending the University of Mississippi, the physician's alma mater.

After high school, in 1951, Meredith joined the U.S. Air Force. He rose to the rank of staff sergeant, earned credits toward a college degree, and served in the KOREAN WAR. Following his discharge in 1960, he attended the all-black Jackson State College, but the courses he wanted to take were offered only at the state university. As a 28-year-old, he followed with hopefulness the speeches of President John F. Kennedy, which promised greater enjoyment of opportunity for all U.S. citizens. Change was in the air, and many African Americans were heartened by the portents in Kennedy's 1961 inaugural address. On the same day that Kennedy became president, Meredith applied for admission to the University of Mississippi.

The school turned down his application. Mississippi still practiced SEGREGATION, and that meant that no African Americans could attend the all-white university. Even seven years after BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION, southern states resisted complying with the U.S. Supreme Court's decision that compulsory segregation was unconstitutional. Knowing that he had a constitutional right that the state refused to recognize, Meredith turned to the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. This arm of the civil rights organization, accustomed to fighting segregation cases, extended help to him. Meredith and his attorneys fought some 30 court actions against the state.

At last, a federal court ruled that a qualified student could not be denied admission on the ground of race. Meredith had won, but the court order infuriated segregationists. Playing to popular sentiment, Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett promised to stop Meredith. Barnett pressured the state legislature to give him authority over university admissions, a power that usually was exercised by the state college board (James 1-2).

In a TV address to the state, Governor Ross Barnett declares: "There is no case in history where the Caucasian race has survived social integration. We will not drink from the cup of genocide. ... We must either submit to the unlawful dictates of the federal government or stand up like men and tell them never! ... No school will be integrated in Mississippi while I am your Governor!" The state legislature and local officials across the state (all of them white, of course) echo and intensify his position.

Meredith has no illusions. He later explains: "I was engaged in a war. I considered myself engaged in a war from day one. And my objective was to force the federal government — the Kennedy administration at that time — into a position where they would have to use the United States military force to enforce my rights as a citizen." (James Integrates 1).

By September of 1962, the situation had escalated to the point where President John F. Kennedy had to get involved. While not overly concerned with civil rights before 1960, JFK had won his election largely thanks to African American support and was quickly taking a greater interest in desegregation. He sent Chief U.S. Marshal J.P. McShane to escort James Meredith into the school. Three times J.P. McShane and a small group of unarmed deputies tried to enroll Meredith at Ole Miss. Three times they were blocked by armed state troopers sent by Ross Barnett (James Enrollment 1).

Cars driven by whites parade through Mississippi towns with confederate flags waving and bumper stickers proclaiming: "The South shall rise again!" Retaliatory violence against Blacks flares across the state as Black men, women, and children are attacked, beaten, and shot at. Armed students are posted at Tougaloo to defend the campus from KKK nightriders. Despite the terror, Blacks are inspired by Meredith's courage and defiance. His struggle to integrate 'Ole Miss becomes a state-wide confrontation between whites intent on maintaining the old order of racial segregation and Blacks determined to be free and equal citizens (James Integrates 2).

In a series of telephone calls in late September 1962 President Kennedy tried to convince Governor Barnett to let James Meredith enter the campus to register for classes. … If Kennedy couldn't sway Barnett with words, he would have to use federal troops, a move that could provoke violence and cost Kennedy precious votes in the South.

The stand-off had a Civil War flavor. An old-style Southern Democrat, Ross Barnett declared that Mississippi segregation laws trumped Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court. President Kennedy was also a Democrat, but a young, bred-in-the-bone Yankee from Massachusetts. Having won the presidency by a tiny margin, Kennedy needed the continued loyalty of Southern Democrats. But Barnett's repeated defiance of federal law forced JFK into a risky confrontation.

From September 15 to September 30, Bobby Kennedy and Ross Barnett had more than a dozen phone conversations.

Historian Bill Doyle, author of American Insurrection: The Battle of Oxford, Mississippi, 1962, says that Ross Barnett knew integration was inevitable, but needed a way to let James Meredith into Ole' Miss without losing face with his white, pro-segregation supporters. "Ross Barnett desperately wanted the Kennedys to flood Mississippi with combat troops because that's the only way Ross Barnett could tell his white segregationist backers, 'Hey I did everything I could, I fought them, but to prevent bloodshed in the end I made a deal,'" Doyle says.

On September 27, 1962 Bobby Kennedy and Ross Barnett agreed on an extraordinary plan: James Meredith would arrive at the Ole' Miss campus in Oxford accompanied by at least 25 armed Federal Marshals (at the time, Marshals were Justice Department agents normally used to transport prisoners, not trained for combat). Ross Barnett would make a show of blocking Meredith, but be forced to step aside when the Marshals drew their guns.

Robert F. Kennedy: I will send the Marshals that I have available up there in Memphis and there will be about 25 or 30 of them and they will come with Mr. Meredith and they will arrive at wherever the gate is and I will have the head Marshal pull a gun and I will have the rest of them have their hands on their guns and their holsters. And then as I understand it, they will go through and get in and you will make sure that law and order is preserved and that no harm will be done to Mr. McShane and Mr. Meredith.

Ross Barnett: Oh, yes.

RFK: And then I think you will see that’s accomplished?

RB: … I was under the impression that they were all going to pull their guns. This could be very embarrassing. We got a big crowd here and if one pulls his gun and we all turn it would be very embarrassing. Isn’t it possible to have them all pull their guns?

RFK: I hate to have them all draw their guns, as I think it could create harsh feelings. Isn't it sufficient if I have one man draw his gun and the others keep their hands on their holsters?

RB: They must all draw their guns. Then they should point their guns at us and then we could step aside. This could be very embarrassing down here for us. It is necessary.

By the end of the day, the Mississippi governor and the attorney general decided to scrap their plan because it was too dangerous. A mob had gotten word of Meredith's imminent arrival and had begun to descend on Oxford. Barnett and Kennedy feared the staged showdown would spark a riot.

When Bobby Kennedy could not get Governor Barnett to comply with the order of the Supreme Court, President Kennedy stepped in. On September 29 and 30, 1962, JFK had a series of conversations with Governor Barnett. He hoped to manage the crisis by telephone. Their first call took place at 2 p.m. on Friday, September 29.

President Kennedy apparently thought Barnett was a pushover. After the call, he turned to his brother and said, "You've been fighting a sofa pillow all week." But JFK was wrong. According to civil rights historian Taylor Branch, Ross Barnett had the president and attorney general wrapped around his finger.

“They're never sure whether he's making a fool of them or they're making a fool of him. But they know as the evenings go on, they feel less and less in control, so the suspicion starts to rise that maybe Barnett's making a fool of them."

While Barnett and Kennedy were secretly negotiating by phone, radio stations across the South were blaring bulletins about the situation. White racists were grabbing their guns and heading for Oxford.

Rather than send army troops to escort Meredith to Ole' Miss, President Kennedy dispatched scores of Federal Marshals to Mississippi - lightly armed men clad awkwardly in suits, ties and gas masks. At the same time, JFK wanted Ross Barnett to assure him that Mississippi patrolmen would help maintain law and order as the threat of a race riot on the university campus in Oxford grew.

Despite Governor Barnett's promise [that highway patrolmen would maintain order], he did not maintain order. Though he'd been privately negotiating with the White House, Barnett made a defiant speech at a Saturday night Ole' Miss football game. He was cheered on by some 40,000 fans.

The next day, September 30, 1962, hundreds of outraged protestors flooded Oxford to block Meredith's expected arrival. At 12:45 p.m., Bobby Kennedy made an angry call to Barnett. The attorney general warned that if Barnett didn't let Meredith register, President Kennedy would expose their secret telephone negotiations in a televised speech scheduled that evening.

The attorney general's threat worked. Barnett knew that if his segregationist supporters learned he had made a covert deal with the Kennedys, his political career would be over. So, to keep the secret, Barnett agreed to the Kennedy plan: get Meredith safely lodged on campus that evening so he could register for classes Monday morning.

On Sunday, September 30, 1962 at 6 p.m., James Meredith was escorted onto the University of Mississippi campus in Oxford by a convoy of Federal Marshals. While he got settled in one of the school dorms, more than 2,500 angry students and outside agitators swarmed around the main campus building, the Lyceum. President Kennedy was informed of Meredith's arrival and went on national television that night to announce this apparent victory and explain that it had been achieved without the use of federal soldiers. He reminded viewers that, "Americans are free, in short, to disagree with the law but not to disobey it." Kennedy continued: "For in a government of laws and not of men, no man, however prominent or powerful, and no mob, however unruly or boisterous, is entitled to defy a court of law" (John 1-6).

White students surround Meredith's dorm and the registration office. They chant: "Two-four-one-three, we hate Kennedy! Kill the nigger-loving bastards!" Determined to lynch Meredith, armed Klansmen from around the state and as far away as Selma and Birmingham Alabama swarm into Oxford. The crowd, a volatile mixture of KKK, students, and townsmen, grows to more than 2,000. The mob is led by former Army Major-General Edwin Walker, who had been forced to retire when he refused to stop distributing racist hate literature to his soldiers. They attack the Marshals guarding Meredith with bricks, bottles, guns, and fire bombs. Mississippi state troopers charged with maintaining "law and order" disappear, leaving the Marshals to face the horde alone.

The Marshals desperately try to hold back the lynch mob with tear gas. Half of them are wounded, 30 of them are shot. The crowd lashes out at journalists — they murder French reporter Paul Guihard. A second man [a local jukebox repairman] is also killed under circumstances that remain unclear to this day. With tear gas running low and the raging horde closing in, the Marshals plea for reinforcements. President Kennedy calls up Troop E of the Mississippi National Guard, but only 67 men respond. Led by Captain "Chooky" Falkner (nephew of author William Faulkner) they try to rescue the Marshals and Meredith. They are not enough.

As the battle rages, Kennedy finally — at long last — sends in the United States Army to restore order. An officer later recalled:

“As we were marching up there, they would throw rocks at us and call us nigger lovers. Wanted to know if we were there to put our nigger brother in college. There was a lot of gasoline burning, a lot of automobiles burning on campus. Every concrete bench was broken, being thrown at us. I spent time in Vietnam. I'll take that any time over 'Ole Miss.”

To appease southern whites, Attorney General Robert Kennedy secretly orders that the units assigned to 'Ole Miss be re-segregated so that armed Black GIs won't be patrolling the streets of Oxford. Some 4,000 Black soldiers are humiliated, disarmed, removed from their units, and reassigned to KP and garbage duty. Black soldiers can be sent to fight and die in Vietnam, but they are not allowed to protect Black citizens in Mississippi from mob violence (James Integrates 3-5).

Though President Kennedy and Governor Barnett talked several more times, the rioting in Oxford forced both men to do what they wanted most to avoid: Barnett had to step aside without his valiant last stand, and Kennedy had to storm Mississippi with U.S. Army troops. (John 6-7).

Being for integration meant being on the wrong side of the powerful White Citizens' Councils, the Ku Klux Klan and the State Sovereignty Commission, a spy agency.

White professors on campus who supported Meredith's admission faced intimidation. Marleah Kaufman Hobbs' husband, a political science professor, got death threats. She was a fine arts grad student at the time. Now 89 years old, she remembers when the riots broke out.

"That night the cracking of the guns, the planes flying overhead bringing in more National Guard — we didn't sleep at all that night. It was the changing of the world," she says.

Bishop Duncan Gray Jr., then an Episcopal priest in Oxford, tried to squelch a mob that had gathered atop a Confederate monument on campus.

"Of course, they grabbed me and pulled me down. I'd been hit a few times before, but that's when I took the roughest beating," says Gray, who is white.

Gray says the night forever changed the dynamics in Mississippi's struggle to preserve white supremacy.

"It was a horrible thing, and I'm sorry we had to go through that, but it certainly marked a very definite turning point. And maybe a learning experience for some people," he says. "I think even the ardent segregationists didn't want to see violence like that again" (Elliott 1-2).

The French journalist Paul Guihard, on assignment for the London Daily Sketch … was found dead behind the Lyceum building with a gunshot wound to the back. One hundred-sixty US Marshals, one-third of the group, were injured in the melee, and 40 soldiers and National Guardsmen were wounded.

On Monday morning, October 1, 1962, Meredith walked across the battered campus and registered for classes.

The US government fined Barnett $10,000 and sentenced him to jail for contempt, but the charges were later dismissed by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Many students harassed Meredith during his two semesters on campus but others accepted him.

According to first-person accounts chronicled in Nadine Cohodas’ book The Band Played Dixie (1997), students living in Meredith’s dorm bounced basketballs on the floor just above his room through all hours of the night. Other students ostracized him: when Meredith walked into the cafeteria for meals, the students eating would turn their backs. If Meredith sat at a table with other students, all of whom were white, the students would immediately get up and go to another table (Denise 1-2).

Hunter Bear wrote: Meredith had a terrible time up there. Medgar [Evers] was on the phone constantly bolstering him. I was sitting in Medgar's office while he was doing that. Meredith was befriended by a few courageous white people on the campus, — notably Jim Silver of the History Department, who later became a very good friend of ours and wrote the book Mississippi, the Closed Society. (Interview 19).

When Meredith graduated from Ole Miss in August 1963 (with a BA in political science), he wore a segregationist's "Never" button upside down on his black gown.

He later wrote: “I noticed in the hallway a black janitor and I wondered why he was standing there. And he had a mop under his arm. And as I passed him, he turned his body, twisted his body, and touched me with the mop handle. Now this delivered a message, and the message was clear: ‘We are looking after you while you are here’" (James Integrates 6).


Works cited:

Denise, Carletta. “October 1, 1962: James Meredith Enters The University Of Mississippi.” Black Then: Discovering Our History. October 1, 2018. Web. https://blackthen.com/%E2%80%8Boctobe...

Elliott, Debbie. “Integrating Ole Miss: A Transformative, Deadly Riot.” NPR. October 1, 2012. Web. https://www.npr.org/2012/10/01/161573...

“Interview: Hunter Bear (John Salter).” Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/nars/hunteri.htm

“James Howard Meredith - Further Readings.” University of Mississippi Free Legal Encyclopedia. Web. http://law.jrank.org/pages/8541/Mered...

“James Meredith Integrates 'Ole Miss (Sept-Oct).” Civil Rights Movement History 1962. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis62.h...

“James Meredith's Enrollment in Ole Miss: Riot & Reaction.” Study.com. Web. https://study.com/academy/lesson/jame...

“John F. Kennedy: The Mississippi Crisis.” American Public Media. Web. http://americanradioworks.publicradio...

Even with Bevel’s activist training, nothing could prepare the young people for their time in jail. “Jail was a totally different experience,” recalled Larry Russell. “I’d never been on the other side of the big wall before.”

Bull Connor ordered every demonstrator interrogated. Audrey Hendricks, who was 9-years-old at the time, recalled: “They were asking me a lot of questions about ‘Why did you march? Who told you to march? Did they force you to march?” By the end of the first day, one of the city jails had reached capacity. As a result of the overcrowding, other jails and the fairgrounds had to be used. Girls ages 13 to 18 were housed at the 4-H Club building, while the Jefferson County Jail and the Bessemer Jail took in the young boys.

Police held those children younger than thirteen in the same cellblocks as the older children. “We was in there about two weeks. About two weeks, and we be singin’. Oh my God we be singin’,” said Mary Hardy Lykes. “When they put us in jail, the guys was in one side and the girls in another side, and you could hear them. And they would sing songs, then the girls would sing a song to answer them back.”

When a New York Times reporter interviewed a group of black girls at the Jefferson County Detention Home and asked if they wanted to go home they all replied, “Yes!” 12-year-old Anita Woods, however, added that she would do it all again. “I’ll keep marching till I get freedom.” The reporter then asked her what is freedom and she answered, “It’s equal rights. I want to go to any school and any store downtown and sit in the movies. And sit around in a cafeteria.” Freedom for her meant enjoying the same rights and privileges afforded whites.

Not every demonstrator remembered his or her time in jail fondly.

James W. Stewart recalled being in a cell with close to three hundred boys and deplorable toilet facilities. “You went to the bathroom in front of three or four hundred people. The only ventilation was a screen that ran across the ceiling, high up over the toilets, and the ceiling was very high.”

An article written in the Chicago Daily Defender reported that it took officers over four hours to serve a breakfast to grits, applesauce, and bacon to the demonstrators. “It took from 4:30 a.m. until 9:00 a.m. to feed the 1,319 persons, which included 800 demonstrators, breakfast at [one particular] jail.” According to chief city jailer Robert Austin, one jail “ran out of food and had to provide a slim diet for breakfast.” When no more beds were available, prisoners, both male and female, slept shoulder-to-shoulder on the jailhouse floors.

Some of the children had the fortune of sleeping with a blanket, but others had only the clothes they wore, and the body heat of a nearby demonstrator to keep them warm.

When the jail cells reached maximum capacity, which meant the officers could not cram another soul into the space, they started putting children in isolation chambers. Miriam McClendon recalled being placed in a “sweat box” as a form of punishment. “The sweat box was a little small room, closet size and you had to step down into it. Just a few inches, not far and they had water at the bottom of it. It was like a steel coffin.”

McClendon was forced to stand in the “sweat-box” with a group of girls. It was so tightly packed, the warden and a guard had to use their own body weight to shut the door. She remembers feeling the heat from the other bodies and hearing the other girls cry and moan from discomfort and fear. A similar experience took place at the south side jail where officers placed male protesters into “The Pit,” a “three-story high room with a concrete floor where drunks usually dried out.”

“The ladies had a lot of stories of being mistreated – not abused necessarily, but just mistreated,” said Carolyn Maull McKinstry. “Many felt deprived, disrespected.” She recalled stories of imprisonment from a female classmate that included a young woman stationed at the state fairgrounds who shared with an officer her need for certain personal products but no one tended to her requests during the five days she spent in jail Reports of these types of conditions worried parents and others. Then again, filling up the jails strained the city’s financial and personnel resources. The jail-in put added pressure on the city to negotiate (Jeter-Bennett 155-158: 309-318).

Gloria Washington Lewis…recalled peanut butter sandwiches, and an attempted rape.

She had her own reasons for protesting. ''I wanted to know why I couldn't ride a train, why I couldn't see a duck in a park,'' she said. ''Those are wounds that don't ever heal.'' And her father, a coal miner afraid of risking his job, winked. ''He had a little look in his eyes: 'I can't go, but you can,' '' she said.

She was arrested at City Hall after sneaking through police lines and finally pulling a poster from her pants. ''Free at Last,'' it said. She had just turned 16, but gave her age as 15, hoping for more lenient treatment. She did not get it.

At the state fairgrounds where Ms. Lewis and hundreds of other girls were jailed and fed peanut butter sandwiches, she shared a bunk bed with one girl who arrived disheveled, ''a mess, her clothes torn off.''

The girl said the officer who arrested her had raped her in the back of a police wagon. That night, a man in uniform tried to attack the same girl, Ms. Lewis said. She and a few other girls fended him off, but the next day they were charged with attacking him and taken to the county jail.

She said she spent two weeks in the stifling ''sweat box,'' then waited even longer for someone to figure out where she was and get her. ''Every time somebody would get out, I'd say, 'Call my daddy,' '' she said. ''But the jail kept saying I wasn't there'” (Halbfinger 7).

The morning newspapers that landed on Kennedy’s breakfast table showed students braving the assaults on the front lines. In one shot, a uniformed officer in round shades and a narrow tie yanked on high school sophomore Walter Gadsden’s sweater while a German shepherd lunged toward the student’s stomach with mouth open, fangs bared.

Gazing at the images of water cannons and police dogs, Kennedy was disgusted. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy later noted the students’ impact: “What Bull Connor did down there, and the dogs and the hoses and the pictures with the Negroes, is what created a feeling in the United States that more needed to be done.”

It was then that the president and the attorney general began considering a path toward comprehensive civil rights legislation. Until students took to the streets, John Kennedy had failed to act; for two and a half years, he had been slow to recognize the plight of blacks in America. Throughout his brief term, he had been focused on other matters: foreign affairs, the national economy, the space program. But now his eyes had been opened (Levingston 5).

Attorney General Robert Kennedy had appointed Washington, D.C. anti-trust lawyer Burke Marshall to lead the civil rights division of the Department of Justice. Marshall’s task now was to meet with movement leaders and Birmingham city officials and business leaders to facilitate attainment of a compromise settlement that would restore order to the city. Urged by Marshall, the opposing parties began negotiations.

On Sunday, May 5th, a mass rally was held at the New Pilgrim Baptist Church (Sixth Avenue and 10th Street South). The rally culminated with a march to the Southside jail and a massive demonstration in Memorial Park across from the jail.

Black adults became more involved in the campaign. A number of them joined youth marchers on the front lines, while others continued to stand on the sideline, showing support through their presence. … From behind the fence parents tossed food, clothing, and blankets to the children. Emma Smith Young remembers her granddaughter going to jail for marching without a permit. “One of my grandchildren was jailed at Fair Park. She started calling back to her mother, saying that she wanted to get out of that place. They had her in there in the rain. They didn’t have anywhere else to put them. They put them out there in that [jailhouse] yard with the high fence. Up so high, they couldn’t get over the fence.

Several [parents] had visited the fairgrounds where the police held more than 800 children in hog pens. Separated by high barbed wired fences, parents tossed food, clothing, and blankets to the children. As they stood yelling out to their children, it began to rain. Police officers walked to their cars and sat inside to stay dry. With nothing to keep the children from being rained upon, parents grew increasingly concerned about their children’s safety and demanded that the ACMHR-SCLC leaders address the situation (Jeter-Barrett 166-167; 322).

Freeman Hrabowski, previously arrested, was held for five days. When the jails became full, he and many other children were confined at the fairgrounds. Martin Luther King, Jr. and other movement officials visited the grounds outside where they were incarcerated.

I will never forget, Dr. King came with our parents…outside of that awful place. We’re looking out at them, if you can imagine children encaged…it was, it was worse than prison. It was like being treated like little animals, it was awful, crowded, just awful. And he said, what you do this day will have an impact on children who’ve not been born and parents were crying, and we were crying, and we knew the statement was profound, but we didn’t fully understand (Birmingham 5).


Works cited:

“Birmingham and the Children’s March.” R&E: Religion & Ethics Newsweekly. April 26, 2013. Web. https://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionande...

Halbfinger, David M. “Birmingham Recalls a Time When Children Led the Fight.” The New York Times. May 2, 2003. Web. https://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/02/us...

Jeter-Bennett, Gisell. “’We’re Going Too!’ The Children of the Birmingham Civil Rights Movement.” The Ohio State University. 2016. Web. https://etd.ohiolink.edu/!etd.send_fi...

Levingston, Steven. “Children have changed America before, braving fire hoses and police dogs for civil rights.” The Washington Post. March 23, 2018. Web. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/r...

On Monday, May 6, Comedian Dick Gregory arrived in Birmingham and marched with the young demonstrators. Like hundreds before him, he was arrested. Law enforcement officials were working over time to keep up with the arrests. … Once again, Bull Connor summoned his firemen. With no place to run, no trees for protection, the demonstrators were hit with the full force of the water. By Monday night, 2,500 demonstrators had been arrested, over 2,000 of them children. All jails in the city and county were filled (No 5).

Tuesday, May 7th. Fighting broke out between blacks and whites in the downtown area. Leading a group of child marchers, Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth was hit with the full force of a fire hose and had to be hospitalized. The situation was rapidly approaching the riot proportions that James Bevel had feared.

Attorney General Robert Kennedy [had] sent Burke Marshall, his chief civil rights assistant, to facilitate negotiations between prominent black citizens and representatives of Birmingham’s Senior Citizen's Council, the city’s business leadership. The Senior Citizen’s Council sought a moratorium on street protests as an act of good faith before any final settlement was declared … Marshall encouraged campaign leaders to halt demonstrations, accept an interim compromise that would provide partial success, and negotiate the rest of their demands afterward. Some black negotiators were open to the idea … Hospitalized Shuttlesworth was not present at the negotiations … On 8 May King told the negotiators he would accept the compromise and call the demonstrations to a halt.

When Shuttlesworth learned that King intended to announce a moratorium he was furious—about both the decision to ease pressure off white business owners and the fact that he, as the acknowledged leader of the local movement, had not been consulted. Feeling betrayed, Shuttlesworth reminded King that he could not legitimately speak for the black population of Birmingham on his own: “Go ahead and call it off … When I see it on TV, that you have called it off, I will get up out of this, my sickbed, with what little ounce of strength I have, and lead them back into the street. And your name’ll be Mud” (Birmingham Campaign 7).

Despite Shuttlesworth’s strong disapproval, the decision had been made and there was no going back. Even after Burke Marshall tried to calm the ACMHR leader, he continued to rant and rave. “I’ll be damned if you’ll have it like this. You’re mister big, but you’re going to be mister S-H-I-T. I’m sorry, but I cannot compromise my principles and the principles we established.” Frustrated and disappointed, Shuttleworth went home (Jeter-Bennett 173-174; 349).

King made the announcement anyway, but indicated that demonstrations might be resumed if negotiations did not resolve the situation shortly (Birmingham Campaign 7).

Birmingham lawyer and social activist David Vann recalled: “After we reached the settlement, … to say we were going to take down the [segregationist] signs. We'd have a 60 day cooling off period and desegregate lunch counters and begin a program of employment in downtown Birmingham with at least three clerks hired. I think somebody in New York asked Reverend Shuttlesworth, did he -- Why he would settle for just three clerks in downtown Birmingham. And he said, ‘I meant three in every store.’ And the thing almost came unglued” (No 7).

The settlement [agreed upon May 10] called for desegregating lunch counters, department store dressing rooms, public restrooms and drinking fountains within the next 90 days; hiring and promoting African Americans on a nondiscriminatory basis, hiring blacks in stores and other industries by a newly appointed private fair employment committee within 60 days; releasing movement demonstrators on bond or “on their personal recognizance,” and creating an official biracial committee to convene two weeks later (Jeter-Barrett 179-180).

The next evening, May 11, the Ku Klux Klan held a rally in the nearby town of Bessemer to express its outrage at and opposition to the accords. Grand Dragon Robert Shelton criticized white negotiators for their involvement. “These stores that want the Negro trade so much, these people who are selling out the whites, they don’t need our business.”

Threatening to harass those responsible for the recent settlement, Klansmen returned to Birmingham, raiding black neighborhoods, setting off a series of riots. At 10:45 p.m. a group of vigilantes bombed the home of Dr. King’s younger brother Reverent A. D. King in an attempt to kill the SCLC leader. Luckily, all seven members of his [A. D. King’s] family made it out safely. Nearby neighbors quickly ran to the scene of the explosion to check on the King family.

As news of the bombing spread, more than one thousand people converged on the site. A number of bystanders suggested retaliating against the vigilantes as well as the police officers who were trying to disperse the crowd. Afraid a riot might break out, A.D. King addressed the bystanders about the importance of nonviolence.

Just as the reverend and other church leaders worked to disperse the crowd, a second bombing occurred at the Gaston Motel. Vigilantes targeted Room 30 in hopes Dr. King would be there, but the SCLC leader had already left town to spend the weekend in Atlanta. Moments after the explosion a crowd of black onlookers formed near the motel (Jeter-Bennett 182-183).

When law enforcement arrived, bystanders broke into frenzy. “We threw rocks at white folks’ cars,” said Washington Booker, “roamed the streets, vandalized, burned anything the white folks owned.”

Once peaceful bystanders now began throwing bricks and bottles at police officers. Chanting, “lill ‘em, kill ‘em”, they took to the streets, attacking patrol cars, fire trucks and storefronts. As fires raged, Birmingham’s evening sky glowed in hues of red and orange.

Not everyone went downtown to riot. Some came out of curiosity. The Streeter family drove downtown that night. “We got into a car and we came downtown. It was scary – a full riot,” remembered Arnetta Streeter Gary. Audrey Faye Hendricks rode downtown as well. As they neared the Gaston Motel, they saw fires and turned around. “It was a dangerous situation,” Hendricks said. James Stewart’s parents decided not to go downtown, but he was aware of the rioting and what it all meant. “The battle intensified,” he said. “We went to jail … and we won-like a soccer game… The bombing were at a different level; they were trying to kill somebody.”

After having spent days in jail, some of the youth demonstrators were shocked by the amount of violence following the agreement. At its height, nearly 2,500 people vandalized white and black owned businesses, as well as looted grocery stores, liquor stores, and other businesses.

Local law enforcement and sate patrolmen arrived downtown determined to restore order. They stormed the streets beating rioters, releasing police dogs, and threatening to shoot protestors. With so many rioters and onlookers crowding the roadways, it was impossible for firemen to extinguish burning buildings or for medics to care adequately for the injured. Bull Connor’s infamous whiter armored truck thundered across the city, with an officer blaring through its loudspeaker, “Everybody get off the streets now. We cannot get ambulances in here to help people unless you clear the streets.”

Witnessing the violence and the increasing danger, movement leaders began assisting police in their effort to restore calm. SCLC’s Wyatt Walker used a megaphone to speak to the crowd. “Please do not throw bricks anymore,” he pleaded. “Ladies and gentlemen, will you cooperate by going to your homes?” The rioters refused to comply. Some even yelled back: “They started it! They started it!”

A. D. King tried to reach the people. “We’re not mad anymore. We’re saying: ‘Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.’” He voiced his vehement opposition to the use of violence claiming it was the “tactic of the white man” and asked the people to join him in prayer and song before returning home peacefully (Jeter-Bennett 368-372).

A few hours before dawn, the demonstrators finally made their way back to their homes. The riot, the first of its kind in the 1960s, was over. The uprising, though, illustrated to citizens, black and white, that it would require more than schoolchildren and nonviolent protests to fix Birmingham (Jeter-Bennett 183-184).

Only dismantling the city’s historic white power structure and the ideology of white supremacy would provide black citizens full rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Until then, the unholy trinity of economic, social, and political oppression continued.

On May 12 President John F. Kennedy ordered 3,000 federal troops into position at military bases near Birmingham and began to make preparations to federalize the Alabama National Guard.

On May 20 the Birmingham Board of Education announced all students who participated in the demonstrations would be either suspended or expelled. The SCLC and the NAACP immediately went to the local federal district court, where the judge upheld the ruling. On May 22, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the decision (King 8).

On May 23, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled on the municipal conflict in Birmingham. The justices sided with Birmingham voters and declared Albert Boutwell and the rest of the newly elected city council the official governing body of the city. … Bull Connor’s career as a political leader was over (Jeter-Bennett 190). On the same day more than one thousand black student demonstrators were permitted to return to their classes.

Virulent supremacists were not done.


Works cited:

“Birmingham Campaign.” Stanford: The martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. Web. https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/en...

Jeter-Bennett, Gisell. “’We’re Going Too!’ The Children of the Birmingham Civil Rights Movement.” The Ohio State University. 2016. Web. https://etd.ohiolink.edu/!etd.send_fi...

“King, Children's Crusade sparked new dynamic in Civil Rights Movement.” The Philadelphia Tribune. January 8, 2016. Web. http://www.phillytrib.com/special_sec...

“No Easy Walk.” Amazon AWS. Web. http://wgbhprojects.s3.amazonaws.com/...

The bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church on September 15 was the third bombing in 11 days, after a federal court order had come down mandating the integration of Alabama’s school system.

In the aftermath of the bombing, thousands of angry black protesters gathered at the scene of the bombing. When Governor Wallace sent police and state troopers to break the protests up, violence broke out across the city; a number of protesters were arrested, and two young African American men were killed (one by police) before the National Guard was called in to restore order (Birmingham 2).

Negroes stoned cars in other sections of Birmingham and police exchanged shots with a Negro firing wild shotgun blasts two blocks from the church. It took officers two hours to disperse the screaming, surging crowd of 2,000 Negroes who ran to the church at the sound of the blast.

At least 20 persons were hurt badly enough by the blast to be treated at hospitals. Many more, cut and bruised by flying debris, were treated privately.

…

City Police Inspector W.J. Haley said as many as 15 sticks of dynamite must have been used. "We have talked to witnesses who say they saw a car drive by and then speed away just before the bomb hit," he said (Six Dead 2-3).

Two Negro youths were killed in outbreaks of shooting seven hours after the 16th Street Baptist Church was bombed, and a third was wounded.

City police shot a 16-year-old Negro [Johnny Robinson] to death when he refused to heed their commands to halt after they caught him stoning cars. … They said he fled down an alley when they caught him stoning cars. They shot him when he refused to halt (Six Dead 4).

Virgil Ware, aged 13, was shot in the cheek and chest with a revolver in a residential suburb 15 miles north of the city. A 16-year-old white youth named Larry Sims fired the gun (given to him by another youth named Michael Farley) at Ware, who was sitting on the handlebars of a bicycle ridden by his brother. Sims and Farley had been riding home from an anti-integration rally which had denounced the church bombing. When he spotted Ware and his brother, Sims fired twice, reportedly with his eyes closed. (Sims and Farley were later convicted of second-degree manslaughter, although the judge suspended their sentences and imposed two years’ probation upon each youth.) (Longman 1).

Civil rights activists blamed George Wallace, the Governor of Alabama, for the killings. Only a week before the bombing he had told the New York Times that to stop integration Alabama needed a "few first-class funerals" (The 16th Street 4).

Upon learning of the bombing at the Church, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. sent a telegram to Alabama Governor George Wallace, a staunch and vocal segregationist, stating bluntly: 'The blood of our little children is on your hands" (16th Street 5).

King also sent a telegram to President John F. Kennedy, expressing outrage. King promised “TO PLEAD WITH MY PEOPLE TO REMAIN NON VIOLENT,” according to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. But King feared unless there was quick response by the federal government, “WE SHALL SEE THE WORST RACIAL HOLOCAUST THIS NATION HAS EVER SEEN….” (Brown 3).

President Kennedy, yachting off Newport, R.I., was notified by radio-telephone and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy ordered his chief civil rights troubleshooter, Burke Marshall, to Birmingham. At least 25 FBI agents, including bomb experts from Washington, were being rushed in (Six Dead 6).

Kennedy made this statement the next day. "If these cruel and tragic events can only awaken that city and state - if they can only awaken this entire nation to a realization of the folly of racial injustice and hatred and violence, then it is not too late for all concerned to unite in steps toward peaceful progress before more lives are lost" (1963 Birmingham 2).

A witness identified Robert Chambliss, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, as the man who placed the bomb under the steps of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. He was arrested and charged with murder and possessing a box of 122 sticks of dynamite without a permit (The 16th Street 5).

Several days prior to the bombing, Chambliss, a retired auto mechanic, “foreshadowed the violence to come when he told his niece, ‘Just wait until Sunday morning and they'll beg us to let them segregate’" (16th Street 6).

On 8th October, 1963, Chambliss was found not guilty of murder and received a hundred-dollar fine and a six-month jail sentence for having the dynamite (The 16th Street 6).

In a 1965 memo to J. Edgar Hoover, FBI agents named four men as primary suspects for the bombing - Thomas Blanton, Robert Chambliss, Bobby Frank Cherry, and Herman Cash. All four men were members of Birmingham's Cahaba River Group, a splinter group of the Eastview Klavern #13 chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. Eastview Klavern #13 was considered one of the most violent groups in the South and was responsible for the 1961 attacks on the Freedom Riders at the Trailways bus station in Birmingham.

The investigation ended in 1968 with no indictments. According to the FBI, although they had identified the four suspects, witnesses were reluctant to talk and physical evidence was lacking. In addition, information from FBI surveillances was not admissible in court. Hoover chose not to approve arrests, stating, "The chance of prosecution in state or federal court is remote." Although Chambliss was convicted on an explosives charge, no charges were filed in the 1960s for the bombing of the church.

In 1971, Alabama Attorney General Bill Baxley reopened the case, requesting evidence from the FBI and building trust with witnesses who had been reluctant to testify (16th Street 7).

Baxley had received death threats from white supremacists, including an ugly letter from KKK Grand Dragon Edward R. Fields. Baxley responded with a one-sentence missive typed on official stationery: “Dear Dr. Fields, my response to your letter of February 19, 1976, is kiss my ass. Sincerely, Bill Baxley, Attorney General” (Brown 4).

Investigators discovered that, while the FBI had accumulated evidence against the bombers, under orders from Hoover they had not disclosed the evidence to county prosecutors. Robert Chambliss was convicted of murder on November 14, 1977; however, it would be decades before the other suspects were tried for their crimes. [Chambliss died in prison on October 29, 1985] In 2000, the FBI assisted Alabama state authorities in bringing charges against the remaining suspects. On May 1, 2001, Thomas Blanton was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. In 2002, Bobby Frank Cherry was convicted as well. His boasts that he was the one who planted the bomb next to the church wall helped send Cherry to prison for life. Herman Cash died in 1994 having never been prosecuted for the murders of the four girls (16th Street 8).

What of the survivors, the children who had been friends of the slain? Several have bared the souls to the media.

Dale Long drove to Birmingham to see the 2001 court proceedings, hoping to find some closure — but he still suspects that not all of the people who participated in the bombing were apprehended. He’s gone back home throughout the years to see family and revisit the church, but the trips haven’t gotten any easier. “I never moved back to Birmingham, never wanted to live in Birmingham again. I wanted to get away from those painful memories,” he says. “The biggest struggle I had going on back then [was], Why did we live there? I thought it was the most god-awful place to live.”

Barbara Cross: “If it happened to older people, it wouldn’t have made a difference,” Cross argues. “How would you feel if you went to go find your child and you couldn’t? The [home] phone would be constantly ringing with white women calling my house to tell my parents, ‘We don’t all think like that.'”

Cross says she forgives the Klansmen behind the bombing, because that’s what the Sunday School lesson taught that day said to do. Entitled “The Love That Forgives,” it was centered on Matthew 5:43-48, which contains the instruction to love one’s enemies. “I hate what they did but I can separate the hate of the doing from the hate of the person,” Cross explains. “I wasn’t taught to hate. I pray for those who don’t know any better.”

They went back to school the day after the bombing, on the thought that they had to show they were not intimidated, but what they had seen had shaken them. Long notes that he didn’t get any counseling as a student in Birmingham; these days, he works with kids who might need help as a mentor with Big Brothers Big Sisters. And it wasn’t until Cross was a college freshman at Tuskegee University in 1968 that she realized that certain health issues were a result of the trauma of that day. (Waxman 5-6).

Sarah and Janie Collins: It is no surprise that Sarah and her sister Janie have never fully shaken off the horror of that day 34 years ago. "I never smiled, and I never talked about what had happened," says Janie. "Then, back in 1985, someone told me that it was going to destroy me if I didn't start talking about it. So I did. I ended up checking into Brookwood (Medical Center, for psychotherapy) for 37 days."

Janie, like Sarah, now works as a housekeeper. Her employer, plastic surgeon Dr. Peter Bunting, had no notion of her connection to the bombing when he hired her. "I almost fell off my stool when she told me," he says, adding that while Janie holds no grudge, "I think she will always be in a state of healing - which is true of the city too." Janie lives in a spacious one-story home and is a member of a small church congregation called Fellowship West.

"She is queen," says Christopher Williams, "always so positive and outgoing that it's hard for me to imagine the timid, nervous person she says she was for so many years. She told me that she thinks she's finally crossed the bridge from the bombing, and I said, "Maybe you are the bridge."

(She now suffers from glaucoma in her left eye).

She worked as a short-order cook after high school and was married for three years to a city worker before she took a foundry job, which she held for 16 years. In 1988, she married Leroy Cox, a mechanic, and the two live together in a small, cheerful prefab house; a statue of the Virgin Mary graces its tiny front yard. Sarah's family members say she has always been the peacemaker, even as she struggled to find peace for herself. "In 1989," Sarah recalls, "a prophet called out to me at church and prayed for me to be relieved of my nervousness and fear. It has been better since then. The panic attacks in the middle of the night finally subsided."

What most concerns Sarah and Janie now is the forlorn state of Addie's grave site in a cemetery so close to the Birmingham airport that the roar of jets seem to mock the mourners below. The grass is overgrown, and a dirt road leading there is rutted, but Janie and Sarah can't afford to move their sister. "It is," says Janie, standing over the grave at dusk on a hot Alabama evening, "like an open sore to us" (Smith, Wescott, and Craig 8-9).

Carolyn McKinstry: When I went home that Sunday, I remember one or two people calling my mother, looking for their children. One of them was Mrs. Robertson, Carole’s mother. Later somebody else called and said that the girls in the bathroom never made it out. My heart jumped. I knew who they were talking about. I was shocked. I was numb. The bomb exploded on Sunday at 10:22 a.m. On Monday morning at 8 o’clock, I was sitting in my classroom. No one said anything. No one said, “Let’s have a moment of silent prayer.” No one said, “Let’s have a memorial. Let’s talk about it.” Even in my home we didn’t talk about it. My parents never said, are you OK? Do you miss your friends? Are you afraid? I think the reason we didn’t talk about it primarily was because there was nothing we could do about it.

The first thing that stands out is the pain of that day. How horrible it was and learning that my friends had died. The second thing that stands out is that no one responded. No one did anything. For the first 14 years after the bombing of the church, no one was arrested. Nothing happened. The police and FBI acted as though they didn’t have any evidence or enough evidence. But the police would later say they did not feel they could get a conviction in Birmingham. The mood of the community was such that they did not think white people were going to convict one of their own for the death of black children. But the truth was, in Birmingham, no one thought that black life was important. It didn’t matter that blacks were killed, that little girls were killed in Sunday school.

It [the bombing] gave us a reputation that we didn’t want. There is nowhere in the world that you can go that people don’t know this story. That’s how horrific it was. And how people saw what we had done. When we finally prosecuted someone 14 years later and then 32 years later, I think it was because we received pressure from the rest of the world. You know how people can shame you? You want to make amends. That one image we could never get rid of: killing babies in church all in the name of segregation. So I think when we began the prosecuting of the last two men, it was an attempt to say we have changed. We are a different nation.

It softened the heart of the oppressors. What Dr. King said to us was that unmerited suffering was always redemptive. He also said that the blood of these girls might well serve as a redemptive force not only for Birmingham, Alabama, but for the rest of the world. We may yet see something very horrible become a force for good. And I think that is what we saw to a large extent. The following year we saw the signing of the civil-rights legislation (Joiner 5-6).


Sources cited:

“16th Street Baptist Church Bombing (1963).” National Park Service. March 23, 2016. Web. https://www.nps.gov/articles/16thstre...

“1963 Birmingham Church Bombing Fast Facts.” CNN Library. September 7, 2018. Web. https://www.cnn.com/2013/06/13/us/196...

“Birmingham Church Bombing.” History. A&E Television Networks. August 28, 2018. Web. https://www.history.com/topics/1960s/...

Brown, Deneen L. “Doug Jones triumphs in an Alabama Senate race that conjured a deadly church bombing.” The Wasnington Post. December 12, 2017. Web. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/r...

Joiner, Lottie L. “50 Years Later: The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church Bombing.” Daily Beast. September 15, 2013. Web. https://www.thedailybeast.com/50-year...

Longman, Martin. “Remember the 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing.” Washington Monthly. September 15, 2017. Web. https://washingtonmonthly.com/2017/09...

“Six Dead After Church Bombing.” United Press International. September 16, 1963. Web. http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/...

“The 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing.” Modern American Poetry. Web. http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/...

Waxman, Olivia B. “16th Street Baptist Church Bombing Survivors Recall a Day That Changed the Fight for Civil Rights: 'I Will Never Stop Crying Thinking About It'.” Time. Web. http://time.com/5394093/16th-street-b...

The 1963 event was officially dubbed the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Its main aims were racial equality and full employment for blacks and whites. Unemployment was rising then, especially among minorities. And although there had been several major pushes for equal rights over the last decade, little progress had been made. By 1962, civil rights legislation (to prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, color, creed, religion or sex) was stalled in Congress, and U.S. President John F. Kennedy was unwilling to lend any help [sources: Erickson, Penrice].

Frustrated, civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph [president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and vice president of the AFL-CIO] proposed a march on Washington to demand equal rights and jobs for all. But the response from mainstream civil rights organizations was tepid [source: Penrice]. Then King signed on. Suddenly, the idea began to pick up steam. Civil rights groups that often disagreed with each other banded together -- the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the National Urban League, the Conference of Racial Equality (CORE), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).


In June 1963, a date was set: Aug. 28, 1963. The buzz was 100,000 would attend, mainly blacks. Many people became unnerved. Mainstream media wondered if the march would devolve into a riot. President Kennedy asked organizers to call off the march, but they refused. So to help ensure public safety, liquor stores and bars were shuttered that day. Stores hid or moved their valuable items. Federal employees were given the day off. And innumerable military personnel were on standby (McManus 1-2).

Rachelle Horowitz, an aide to Bayard Rustin, interviewed in 2013 declared:

A. Philip Randolph [president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters] had tried to put on a march in 1941 to protest discrimination in the armed forces and for a fair employment policy commission. He called off that march when FDR issued an executive order [prohibiting discrimination in the national defense industry]. But Randolph always believed that you had to move the civil rights struggle to Washington, to the center of power. In January 1963, Bayard Rustin sent a memo to A. Philip Randolph in essence saying the time is now to really conceive of a big march. …

John Lewis, chairman of SNCC, added:

A. Philip Randolph had this idea in the back of his mind for many years. When he had his chance to make another demand for a March on Washington, he told President Kennedy in a meeting at the White House in June 1963 that we were going to march on Washington. It was the so-called “Big Six,” Randolph, James Farmer, Whitney Young, Roy Wilkins, Martin Luther King Jr. and myself. Out of the blue Mr. Randolph spoke up. He was the dean of black leadership, the spokesperson. He said “Mr. President, the black masses are restless and we are going to march on Washington.” President Kennedy didn’t like the idea, hearing people talk about a march on Washington. He said, “If you bring all these people to Washington, won’t there be violence and chaos and disorder and we will never get a civil rights bill through the Congress?” Mr. Randolph responded, “Mr. President, this will be an orderly, peaceful, nonviolent protest.”

Harry Belafonte said; “We had to seize this opportunity and make our voices heard. Make those who are comfortable with our oppression—make them uncomfortable—Dr. King said that was the purpose of this mission.”

Joyce Ladner, SNCC activist, had a practical motive for supporting a march.

At that point, the police all over Mississippi had cracked down so hard on us that it was more and more difficult to raise bond money, to organize without harassment from the local cops and the racists. I thought a large march would demonstrate that we had support outside our small group.

Harry Belafonte would bring celebrity support.

To mobilize the cultural force behind the cause—Dr. King saw that as hugely strategic. We use celebrity to the advantage of everything. Why not to the advantage of those who need to be liberated? My job was to convince the icons in the arts that they needed to have a presence in Washington on that day. Those that wanted to sit on the platform could do that, but we should be in among the citizens—the ordinary citizens—of the day. Somebody should just turn around and there was Paul Newman. Or turn around and there was Burt Lancaster. I went first to one of my closest friends, Marlon Brando, and asked if he would be willing to chair the leading delegation from California. And he said yes. Not only enthusiastically but committed himself to really working and calling friends (Oral 4-8).

On July 2, 1963, leaders from six civil rights groups — A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King Jr., Whitney M. Young Jr., James Farmer, Roy Wilkins and John Lewis — announced plans for a March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. These men all wanted equality for black Americans, but the tactics and methods they adopted often varied.

These leaders also disagreed on who should handle march logistics. Randolph wanted to put Bayard Rustin in charge, as Rustin was a skilled organizer — during the bus boycott in Montgomery, Rustin had counseled King on nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience. But Rustin was gay (he'd been arrested in 1953 on a "morals" charge), had joined the Communist Party for a short time and had gone to prison for refusing to serve during World War II.

The solution was for Randolph to become march director and select Rustin as his deputy; Rustin then set up an office in Harlem and got to work. His tasks included getting funds for a sound system, having brochures printed, arranging for drinking water and directing volunteers to prepare boxed lunches. Plus he had to plan for how many toilets the crowd — 150,000 were hoped for — would require (Kettler 1-2)!

Volunteers prepared 80,000 50-cent boxed lunches (consisting of a cheese sandwich, a slice of poundcake and an apple). Rustin marshaled more than 2,200 chartered buses, 40 special trains, 22 first-aid stations, eight 2,500-gallon water-storage tank trucks and 21 portable water fountains (Oral 3).

Rustin did everything from coaching volunteer marshals in nonviolent crowd control techniques to creating a 12-page manual for bus captains, instructing them on issues like where to park their vehicles and locate bathrooms for passengers. He managed to divvy up the limited podium time among competing interests without angering anyone (McManus 6).

There was wariness and anger in Washington, D.C. about the march, which opposing politicians denounced as a Communist plot. President John F. Kennedy feared that any disturbance could derail his proposed civil rights legislation (though he eventually accepted the march and offered some support). Two Southern Democrats in Congress even tried to legislate the demonstration away — one wanted to halt mass protests while a civil rights bill was under consideration, the other attempted to outlaw interstate travel for "any conduct which would tend to incite to riot."

Three weeks before the march, Senator Strom Thurmond read out details of Rustin's 1953 arrest on the Senate floor. However, given Thurmond's stance as a staunch segregationist, no one broke with Rustin. Eleanor Holmes Norton, who worked in Rustin's Harlem office, later noted, "I'm sure there were some homophobes in the movement, but you knew how to behave when Strom Thurmond attacked."

Anna Arnold Hedgeman, the sole female member of the march's administrative committee, had spent years battling for civil rights and knew how much of a contribution women had made to the movement: Rosa Parks sparked the Montgomery bus boycott, Diane Nash fought to continue Freedom Rides when others wanted to quit and countless women faced danger in order to register voters.

Given all this, Hedgeman and others wanted a female speaker for the march. But Rustin cited the overloaded program as a reason not to add anyone else (he also felt other women would get jealous if just one were chosen). As the march's date approached, Hedgeman wrote a letter to the committee to demand a female speaker, noting, "It is incredible that no woman should appear as a speaker at the historic March on Washington Meeting at the Lincoln Memorial."

In the end, a "Tribute to Negro Women" was added to the program. At the march, Daisy Bates, who'd helped the Little Rock Nine as they'd integrated their school system, read a prepared statement, then several women who'd contributed to the movement were named. It was a compromise, but it didn't offer a female civil rights speaker.

With violence expected, Washington planned to have 6,000 officers — police, marshals and National Guardsman — on hand on August 28, with thousands more soldiers available at nearby bases. (Kettler 3-5).

… some of the march's most vocal dissidents were black, namely Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X. Carmichael was a civil rights activist and later the leader of SNCC. But over time he moved away from King's theory of nonviolence and toward one of self-defense; he also coined the "black power" slogan. The March on Washington, in Carmichael's view, was "only a sanitized, middle-class version of the real black movement," so he refused to attend. Black nationalist leader and Nation of Islam spokesman Malcolm X bitterly referred to the event as "The Farce on Washington" and discouraged fellow Nation of Islam members from attending. Curiously, he himself attended (McManus 9).

The potent symbolism of a demonstration at the Lincoln Memorial—timed to coincide with the centenary of the Emancipation Proclamation and following President John F. Kennedy’s announcement in June that he would submit a civil rights bill to Congress—transfixed the nation (Oral 2).

Rachelle Horowitz commented:

It was about 5:30 in the morning, it’s gray, it’s muggy, people are setting up. There’s nobody there for the march except some reporters and they start annoying Bayard and pestering him: “Where are the people, where are the people?” Bayard very elegantly took a piece of paper out of his pocket and looked at it. Took out a pocket watch that he used, looked at both and said, “It’s all coming according to schedule,” and he put it away. The reporters went away and I asked, “What were you looking at?” He said, “A blank piece of paper.” Sure enough, eventually, about 8:30 or 9, the trains were pulling in and people were coming up singing and the buses came. There’s always that moment of “We know the buses are chartered, but will they really come.”

Courtland Cox, a SNCC activist, said:

Bayard and I left together. It was real early, maybe 6 or 7 in the morning. We went out to the Mall and there was literally no one there. Nobody there. Bayard looks at me and says, “You think anybody is coming to this?” and just as he says that, a group of young people from an NAACP chapter came over the horizon. From that time, the flow was steady. We found out that we couldn’t see anyone there because so many people were in buses, in trains and, particularly, on the roads, that the roads were clogged. Once the flow started, it was just volumes of people coming.

Civil right activist Barry Rosenberg related:

I could hardly sleep the night before the march. I got there early. Maybe 10:30 in the morning, people were milling around. There were maybe 20,000 folks out there. It was August; I forgot to wear a hat. I was a little concerned about getting burned up. I went and got a Coke. When I got back, people just poured in from all directions. If you were facing the podium, I was on the right-hand side. People were greeting each other; I got chills, I got choked up. People were hugging and shaking hands and asking “Where are you from” (Oral 11-12)?

Attendance climbed to about 250,000. The huge procession headed down Constitution Avenue to the Lincoln Memorial without the march's leaders, who had to hurry to the front. John Lewis recalled:

Early that morning the ten of us [the Big Six, plus four other march leaders] boarded cars that brought us to Capitol Hill. We visited the leadership of the House and the Senate, both Democrats and Republicans. In addition, we met on the House side with the chairman of the judiciary committee, the ranking member, because that’s where the civil rights legislation will come. We did the same thing on the Senate side. We left Capitol Hill, walked down Constitution Avenue. Looking toward Union Station, we saw a sea of humanity; hundreds, thousands of people. We thought we might get 75,000 people showing up on August 28. When we saw this unbelievable crowd coming out of Union Station, we knew it was going to be more than 75,000. People were already marching. It was like “There go my people. Let me catch up with them.” We said, “What are we going to do? The people are already marching! There go my people. Let me catch up with them.” What we did, the ten of us, was grab each other’s arms, made a line across the sea of marchers. People literally pushed us, carried us all the way, until we reached the Washington Monument and then we walked on to the Lincoln Memorial.

Joyce Ladner said: “As the day passed a lot of individual people were there. Odetta and Joan Baez and Bobby Dylan. They began warming up the crowd very early, began singing. It was not tense at all, wasn’t a picnic either. Somewhere in between; people were happy to see each other, renewing acquaintances, everyone was very pleasant” (Oral 12-14).

“It’s a pleasure being here and nice being out of jail. And to be honest with you, the last time I’ve seen this many of us, Bull Connor was doing all the talking.” — Activist and comedian Dick Gregory

Juanita Abernathy remembered:

I don’t know where that march started out. It looked like we marched forever before we got to the Mall. You were used to marching; you wear comfortable shoes so your feet won’t hurt and you don’t get blisters. We got to the stage and Coretta [Scott King] and I sat on the second row. Mahalia [Jackson] sat on the first row, because she was singing. We were on the left side of the stage. I wanted to scream, we were so happy, we were ecstatic. We had no idea it would be that many people—as far as you could see there were heads. What I called a sea of people; because all you could see was people, everywhere, just a sea of heads and what jubilation. Which said to us in the civil rights movement: “Your work has not been in vain. We are with you. We are part of you” (Oral 12-17).

Several male civil rights leaders gave speeches, as did union and religious leaders. In his talk, Randolph said, "Those who deplore our militants, who exhort patience in the name of a false peace, are in fact supporting segregation and exploitation. They would have social peace at the expense of social and racial justice. They are more concerned with easing racial tension than enforcing racial democracy" (Kettler 1-4).


John Lewis, interviewed in 2013, had this to say about his speech.

I started working on my speech several days before the March on Washington. We tried to come up with a speech that would represent the young people: the foot soldiers, people on the front lines. Some people call us the “shock troops” into the delta of Mississippi, into Alabama, southwest Georgia, eastern Arkansas, the people who had been arrested, jailed and beaten. Not only our own staffers but also the people that we were working with. They needed someone to speak for them.

The night before the march, Bayard Rustin put a note under my door and said, “John, you should come downstairs. There’s some discussion about your speech, some people have a problem with your speech.”

The archbishop [of Washington, D.C.] had threatened not to give the invocation if I kept some words and phrases in the speech. In the original speech I said something like “In good conscience, we cannot support the administration’s proposed civil rights bill. It was too little, too late. It did not protect old women and young children in nonviolent protests run down by policemen on horseback and police dogs.”

Much farther down I said something like “If we do not see meaningful progress here today, the day will come when we will not confine our marching on Washington, but we may be forced to march through the South the way General Sherman did, nonviolently.” They said, “Oh no, you can’t say that; it’s too inflammatory.” I think that was the concern of the people in the Kennedy administration. We didn’t delete that portion of the speech. We did not until we arrived at the Lincoln Memorial.

It was at the back side of Mr. Lincoln that Mr. Randolph and Dr. King said to me, “John, they still have a problem with your speech. Can we change this, can we change that?” I loved Martin Luther King, I loved and admired A. Philip Randolph, and I couldn’t say no to those two men. I dropped all reference to marching through the South the way Sherman did. I said something like “If we do not see meaningful progress here today, we will march through cities, towns and hamlets and villages all across America.” I was thinking about how I was going to deliver the speech. I was 23 years old and it was a sea of humanity out there that I had to face (Oral 9-10, 18).

It was Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech that is best remembered at the event.

Courtland Cox: What’s interesting was not only the crowd all the way to the Reflecting Pool, but that people were up in trees, they were everywhere. When King started speaking, and as he was speaking, Mahalia Jackson began like a chant and response. She was like his amen corner. She kept saying “Tell ’em Rev” the whole time he was speaking. She was just talking to him.

Julian Bond: When Dr. King spoke, he commanded the attention of everybody there. His speech, with his slow, slow cadence at first and then picking up speed and going faster and faster. You saw what a magnificent speechmaker he was, and you knew something important was happening (Oral 19-20).

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of captivity.

But one hundred years later, we must face the tragic fact that the Negro is still not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. So we have come here today to dramatize an appalling condition.

…

America has given the Negro people a bad check; a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds." But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check- a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.

We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. … Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood.

… This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. Those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. …

The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone (Dream 1-3).

As the speech was winding down, Mahalia Jackson, a close friend of King's, felt it needed to go in a different direction. So she shouted to him from behind the podium, "Tell them about the dream, Martin!" And he did, improvising that well-loved section from speeches and sermons he had given in the past (McManus 10).

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self evident; that all men are created equal."

…

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today.

…

When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last" (Dream 4-6).

Joyce Ladner: Medgar Evers’ death was a subtext of the march. Everyone was aware that one of the truly great heroes in the Deep South had just been murdered. And therefore, Mr. President, your request that we go slow doesn’t make sense.

Rachelle Horowitz: The podium sort of cleared. Those of us who had worked on the march, the staff people and the SNCC staff, stood at the bottom of the memorial. We linked arms and we sang “We Shall Overcome” and we probably cried. There were some SNCC people who were cynical about Dr. King and we forced them to admit it was really a great speech.

John Lewis: After the March, President Kennedy invited us back down to the White House, he stood in the doorway of the Oval Office and he greeted each one of us, shook each of our hands like a beaming, proud father. You could see it all over him; he was so happy and so pleased that everything had gone so well.

Joyce Ladner: After the march, all the people had left and a group of SNCC people were standing there with remnants of things to clean up. This small group of people had to go back south. We were dedicated to going south, to take this giant problem on, fighting the problem we had left behind.

My sister Dorie and I walked back to the hotel. In the lobby, Malcolm X was holding forth. He was talking about the “Farce on Washington.” Reporters and others were crowded around him. His ideal would have been, you take your freedom, grab it, not ask the government to free you. I do recall very clearly wondering who was right, King and us or Malcolm?

Actor and future director Ken Howard: One thing about the march: It was a step. You have to realize the tumultuousness of the times. Just a few weeks later, four little black girls got blown up at a church in the South. After the march, you had the feeling that things will change—and then these little girls were killed. As they said about the walk on the moon, it was a “small step,” but it was a step nonetheless that people heard. The loss of those girls was sad, but it was another step, because individuals began to see there was an injustice being done.

Only in retrospect do you see just how each little piece enabled a building to be built. Who would have thought a minister from a small black church in Atlanta would have a monument on the Mall? You wouldn’t think a minister from a small black church would be a “drum major” in a movement helping a people gain their rights as citizens. It’s only from the mountaintop of time that you see that it all made a difference. Each individual thing played a role (Oral 21-25).


Works cited:

“An Oral History of the March on Washington.” Smithsonian Magazine. July 2013. Web. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/histor...

Kettler, Sara. “March on Washington: The Activists Who Took a Stand for Equality.” Biography. August 25, 2017. Web. https://www.biography.com/news/march-...

“Martin Luther King Jr., The March on Washington Address.” University of Delaware. Web. http://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson...

McManus, Melanie Radzicki. “How the March on Washington Worked.” How Stuff Works.com. August 26, 2013. Web. https://history.howstuffworks.com/his...

J. Edgar Hoover lived in Washington, D.C. all his life. In 1895 he was born in a white, Protestant, middle-class neighborhood known as Seward Square, three blocks behind the Capitol. His family had been civil servants for generations, including his father, Dickerson Naylor Hoover, who worked for the Coast Guard (Biography 1).

The eight decades of Hoover's life tell their own story. As early as his teen years, his mind was closing on issues that were to dominate his era. In the school debating society, he argued against women getting the vote and against abolition of the death penalty. He could never bear to come second in anything. When his father began to suffer from mental illness, a niece told me, Hoover "couldn't tolerate the fact. He never could tolerate anything that was imperfect." Another relative said: "I sometimes have thought that he really had a fear of becoming too personally involved with people." William Sullivan, a close FBI associate, thought his boss "didn't have affection for one single solitary human being".

Hoover joined the Bureau – at that time just the Bureau of Investigation (the word "Federal" was only added in the 1930s) – as America's first great Communist scare was getting under way, and handpicked as his assistant a man named George Ruch. … Ruch expressed astonishment that left-wingers should even "be allowed to speak and write as they like". Hoover and Ruch favoured deporting people merely for being members of radical organisations, and used the Bureau to spy on lawyers representing those arrested in the infamous Red Raids of 1920. One of them, on whom he was to keep tabs for half a century and deem "the most dangerous man in the United States", was future Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter (Summers 2).

In 1924 President Calvin Coolidge appointed him head of the Bureau of Investigation, a position Hoover had long coveted. It was in this position that he finally received the power he craved. Hoover inherited the Bureau just after it had been severely tainted with scandal from previous administrations. Upon acceptance, Hoover demanded it be completely divorced from politics and responsible only to the Attorney General. Hoover's conditions were met and he set out on a rejuvenation campaign which would build the Bureau into one of the most powerful government agencies in 20th century America.

… To make his agency respectable, Hoover assembled an elite group of men, white and college-educated, who would represent the Bureau as agents. He demanded conformity and a strict moral code from all of them, demanding them to abstain from alcohol and relations with women. He instituted a training school and effectively made his organization into the symbolic guardian of the country's laws, citizens, and its morals (Biography 2-3).

The favourable publicity Hoover enjoyed was partially deserved. He cleaned up a Bureau that had been notorious for corruption and inefficiency, replacing it with an agent corps that became a byword for integrity. …

Hoover brought modernity and co-ordination at a time of disorganisation. He built the first federal fingerprint bank, and his Identification Division would eventually offer instant access to the prints of 159 million people. His Crime Laboratory became the most advanced in the world. He created the FBI National Academy, a sort of West Point for the future elite of law enforcement (Summers 3).

In 1936 [President Franklin] Roosevelt instructed Hoover to keep him informed on fascist and Communist activities in the U.S. Hoover took the opportunity to increase his domestic surveillance efforts and to maintain a "Custodial Detention List" which included names of "questionable" individuals for possible accusations during wartime. This list included Eleanor Roosevelt, whom he personally despised for her liberal leanings, and later, Martin Luther King, Jr. and John F. Kennedy. Lyndon B. Johnson, a personal friend to Hoover, postponed the F.B.I. director's retirement indefinitely. Hoover remained with the Bureau until his death at the age of 77 in 1972 (Biography 4).

Hoover never joined a political party and claimed he was "not political". In fact, he admitted privately, he was a staunch, lifelong supporter of the Republican party. He secretly aspired to be president and considered running against Franklin D Roosevelt, whom he thought suspiciously left-wing. Hoover publicly expressed support for Senator Joe McCarthy shortly before McCarthy claimed Truman's State Department was harbouring 200 members of the Communist party. His agents slipped file material to the senator for use in his infamous inquisition, while publicly denying doing so.

…

… Hoover's Division 8, euphemistically entitled Crime Records and Communications, had a priority mission. Crime Records pumped out propaganda that fostered not only the image of the FBI as an organisation that spoke for what was right and just, but of the Director himself as a champion of justice fighting "moral deterioration" and "anarchist elements". Hoover used the department to preach the notion that the political left was responsible for all manner of perceived evils, from changing sexual standards to delinquency (Ackerman 2).

Hoover had gone easy on the mob. It is now clear that Hoover had contacts with organised criminals or their associates in circumstances that made it possible – likely even – that they learned of his sexual proclivities. More than one top mobster claimed the outfit had a hold on Hoover. Meyer Lansky, the syndicate's co-founder, was said to have "pictures of Hoover in some kind of gay situation" and an associate quoted Lansky as claiming, "I fixed that sonofabitch." Carmine Lombardozzi, who was known as "the Italian Meyer Lansky", said: "J Edgar Hoover was in our pocket" (Summers 8).

By 1960, the FBI had opened “subversive” files on some 432,000 Americans. Hoover deemed the most sensitive files as “personal and confidential” and kept them in his office, where his secretary, Helen Gandy, could watch them (Ackerman 2).

Hoover's public position on race, Southerner that he was, was that of the paternalistic white nativist. Less openly, he was racially prejudiced. He shrugged off the miseries of black Americans, preferring to claim they were outside his jurisdiction. "I'm not going to send the FBI in," a Justice Department official recalled him saying testily, "every time some nigger woman says she's been raped." FBI agents paid more attention to investigating black militants than pursuing the Ku Klux Klan.

...

A rumor has persisted that Hoover himself had black ancestry. Early photographs do show him looking somewhat negroid, with noticeably wiry hair. Gossip along those lines was rife in Washington and – true or not – Hoover must have been aware of it. Did anxiety on that front shape the way he behaved towards blacks – just as he lashed out at homosexuals while struggling with his own [presumed] homosexuality (Summers 4-7)?

The unfolding story of the civil rights protest movement and the leadership role of Martin Luther King, Jr., is a most ignoble chapter in the history of FBI spying and manipulation. As the civil rights movement grew and expanded, the FBI pinpointed every group and emergent leader for intensive investigation and most for harassment and disruption …. The NAACP was the subject of a COMINFIL investigation. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) were listed by the FBI as "Black-Hate" type organizations and selected for covert disruption of their political activities. But the most vicious FBI attack was reserved for King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. All of the arbitrary power and lawless tactics that had accumulated in the bureau over the years were marshaled to destroy King's reputation and the movement he led. The FBI relied on its vague authority to investigate "subversives" to spy on King and SCLC; its vague authority to conduct warrantless wiretapping and microphonic surveillance to tap and bug him; its secrecy to conduct covert operations against him. The campaign began with his rise to leadership and grew more vicious as he reached the height of his power; it continued even after his assassination in 1968. (Halperin 63).

In a memoranda sent to Hoover, King's “I Have a Dream” speech [culminating the March on Washington] was characterized as "demagogic," and the presence of "200" Communists among the 250,000 marchers caused the Intelligence Division to state that it had underestimated Communist efforts and influence on American Negroes and the civil rights movement. King was singled out:

“He stands head and shoulders over all other Negro leaders put together when it comes to influencing great masses of Negroes. We must mark him now . . . as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation from the standpoint of Communism, the Negro, and national security” (Halperin 77).

On October 10 and 21, Attorney General Robert Kennedy gave the FBI the authority to wiretap King. "Hoover had come to Bobby Kennedy and President Kennedy and said, 'Look, Stanley Levinson — King's adviser — is a communist. He's a secret communist, he's an underground communist, and he's using Martin Luther King as a cat's paw.' Well, when you put it that way, you weren't gainsaying Hoover if you were John or Bobby Kennedy. So they said yes" (History 4).

On October 18, 1963, the FBI distributed a … memorandum on King, not only to the Justice Department, but to officials at the White House, the Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department, the Defense Department, and Defense Department intelligence agencies. It summarized the bureau's Communist party charges against King and went much further. According to - Assistant Attorney General Burke Marshall, it was a personal diatribe . . . a personal attack without evidentiary support on the character, the moral character and person of Dr. Martin Luther King, and it was only peripherally related to anything substantive, like whether or not there was Communist infiltration or influence on the civil rights movement.... It was a personal attack on the man and went far afield from the charges [of possible Communist influence].

The attorney general was outraged and demanded that Hoover seek the return of the report. By October 28, all copies were returned. This was the first-and last-official action to deter Hoover's vendetta against King.

In November, John Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. Lyndon Johnson became president and the Justice Department was in a state of confusion with the attorney general [Robert Kennedy] preoccupied with his personal grief. King viewed the assassination as a tragedy, and hoped it would spawn a new public concern for peace and reconciliation.

While the nation mourned, the FBI held a conference at the beginning of December to plan its campaign to destroy King and the civil rights movement. At that all-day meeting FBI officials put forward proposals …. Officials of the nation's number-one law enforcement agency agreed to use "all available investigative techniques" to develop information for use "to discredit" King. Proposals discussed included using ministers, "disgruntled" acquaintances, "aggressive" newsmen, "colored" agents, Dr. King's housekeeper, and even Dr. King's wife or "placing a good looking female plant in King's office" to develop discrediting information and to take action that would lead to his disgrace.

… By January, the FBI had initiated physical and photographic surveillance of King, deploying its most experienced personnel to gather information, and had placed the first of many illegal bugs in Dr. King's room at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C.

According to Justice Department regulations at the time, microphonic surveillance, although it necessitated a physical trespass and was more intrusive than a phone tap, did not require the approval of the attorney general. Even under its own regulations, however, the FBI could only use this technique to gather "important intelligence or evidence relating to matters connected with national security." In this case the FBI planned to use "bugs" to learn about "the [private] activities of Dr. King and his associates" so that King could be "completely discredited." It was clearly illegal.

The Willard Hotel "bug" yielded "19 reels" of tape. The FBI, at least in its own opinion, had struck pay dirt. The bug apparently picked up information about King's private extramarital and perhaps "inter-racial" sexual activities. This opened up the possibility of discrediting King as a Communist who engaged in "moral improprieties."

For J. Edgar Hoover, "immoral" behavior was a crime comparable to "subversive" activity-and of equal utility. Hoover gathered such information on prominent persons to use for political and blackmail purposes. Often he would share such "official and confidential" information with presidents when his surveillance uncovered "obscene matters" on the president's opponents or aides. Sometimes he would let people know he had such information on them, and that list includes Presidents John Kennedy and Richard Nixon. In this case, however, Hoover did not plan to let King know he had the information to gain a "political" power advantage over him; he planned to use it to destroy him politically. With the Willard Hotel tapes, the FBI campaign moved into high gear.

With Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson pressing action on civil rights legislation and calling for a "War on Poverty," Martin Luther King was a man the country and the world thought worthy of honor. In December 1963, Time magazine named him "Man of the Year." … Hoover wrote across a memorandum, "They had to dig deep in the garbage to come up with this one."

In 1964, while continuing his "nonviolent" activities on behalf of civil rights in St. Augustine, Florida, and other cities, King was awarded honorary degrees by universities; he was invited by Willy Brandt, the mayor of West Berlin, to speak at a ceremony honoring the memory of President Kennedy; he had an audience with Pope Paul VI in Rome; and, in October, he was named by the Nobel Prize Committee to receive the Peace Prize in December (Halperin 77-80).

Dr. King was well aware early in 1964 of Hoover’s antipathy. Based on unsubstantiated FBI allegations, in April of 1964 conservative columnist Joseph Alsop alleges that an unnamed associate of Dr. King is a Communist. News reports quickly follow, detailing supposedly secret testimony to Congress by FBI Director Hoover charging "Communist influence" over the Civil Rights Movement."

Dr, King answered back. As a general rule, Dr. King prefers not to respond to false charges and personal slanders against himself. But when the Freedom Movement as a whole is smeared he stands to its defense. On April 23 he tells a press conference: "[It is] difficult to accept the word of the FBI on communistic infiltration of the Civil Rights Movement when it has been so completely ineffectual in protecting the Negro from brutality in the Deep South" (Hoover 1-2).

Though he considers himself entitled to defame and vilify anyone he chooses, the slightest criticism of himself or the FBI sends Hoover into a towering rage. King's retort is no exception, and Hoover's already virulent hatred intensifies. FBI agents are ordered to expand their surveillance and redouble their efforts to find damaging personal information that can be used to destroy King's reputation (Halperin 80).

In October, the world learns that Dr. King has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Hoover's obsessive malice can no longer be restrained, it finally erupts into public view on November 18 when he tells a group of journalists that in reference to King's criticism of FBI effectiveness, "I consider King to be the most notorious liar in the country. He goes on to charge that King is, "one of the lowest characters" in America, and "controlled" by Communist advisors.

King responds that he is "appalled and surprised" by Hoover's attack. He offers to meet with the FBI Director to discuss the Bureau's "seeming inability to gain convictions in even the most heinous crimes perpetrated against civil rights workers." He cites as examples the brutality in Albany, the four little girls killed in Birmingham, and the lynching of Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman.

Hoover intensifies his vendetta against King. Behind the scenes, FBI officials escalate their smear campaign by leaking more derogatory stories to the media. Meanwhile, FBI field agents meet with religious organizations, universities, and government officials to "confidentially" brief them that Dr. King is "associating with Communists" and having extramarital affairs in hotel rooms while on the road for speaking engagements and meetings.

From their illegal hotel bugs they assemble a composite audio sex-tape. They package the tape with a phony letter supposedly from an unidentified Afro-American man. The letter threatens King with public exposure unless he commits suicide before accepting the Nobel Prize. To conceal its FBI origins, they mail it from Miami on November 21. When the package arrives at the SCLC office in Atlanta, staff members are busy preparing for Dr. King's trip to Europe for the Nobel Prize. They assume it's just another recording of a King speech, so without reading the letter they toss the package into a pile of low-priority correspondence to be dealt with when someone has time. Dr. King doesn't actually hear the tape or read the letter until weeks after returning from Oslo (Hoover 3-6).

In part, the letter said: King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days in which to do [This exact number has been selected for a specific reason; it has definite practical significance]. You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy fraudulent self is bared to the nation.

It was thirty-four days before the Nobel Peace Prize ceremonies (Halperin 86).

Publicly, Hoover presses his attack. In a Chicago speech on November 24, he characterizes the Civil Rights Movement as: "pressure groups that would crush the rights of others under heel." And, "They have no compunction in carping, lying, and exaggerating with the fiercest passion, spearheaded at times by Communists and moral degenerates."

Dr. King fears that the public controversy with Hoover risks diverting the Freedom Movement from the critical work ahead. It distracts media attention from the real issues, and with first the Nobel Prize and then the Selma campaign on the horizon he is unwilling to expend precious time and energy responding to FBI slanders. As a conciliatory gesture, he arranges through intermediaries to meet face-to- face with the FBI Director on December 1st. King allows Hoover to dominate the meeting with a long rant justifying and defending the Bureau. Afterwards, King further defuses the situation by telling the press that the meeting was friendly and amicable and that, "I sincerely hope we can forget the confusions of the past and get on with the job."

Dr. King's effort partially succeeds. Hoover and the FBI cease their public attacks, but covert efforts to destroy King and thwart the Freedom Movement continue (Hoover 3-7).

… two noted specialists in psychiatry and psychology said they believed Hoover's sexual torment was very pertinent to his use and abuse of power as America's top law-enforcement officer.

Dr John Money, professor of medical psychology at Johns Hopkins University, thought Hoover "needed constantly to destroy other people in order to maintain himself. He managed to live with his conflict by making others pay the price." Dr Harold Lief, professor emeritus of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, concluded that Hoover suffered from "a personality disorder, a narcissistic disorder with mixed obsessive features… paranoid elements, undue suspiciousness and some sadism. A combination of narcissism and paranoia produces what is known as an authoritarian personality. Hoover would have made a perfect high-level Nazi" (Summers 5-6).

Hoover stands as a reminder that 48 years of power concentrated in one person is a recipe for abuse. It was mostly after his death [1972] that Hoover’s dark side became common knowledge — the covert black-bag jobs, the warrantless surveillance of civil rights leaders and Vietnam-era peace activists, the use of secret files to bully government officials, the snooping on movie stars and senators, and the rest (Ackerman 4).


Works cited:

Ackerman, Kenneth D. “Five myths about J. Edgar Hoover.” The Washington Post. November 9, 2011. Web. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinio...

“Biography: J. Edgar Hoover.” American Experience. Web. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexpe...

Halperin, Morton; Berman, Jerry; Borosage, Robert; and Marwick, Christine. “The Lawless State: The Crimes of the U. S. Intelligence Agencies.” Penguin Books, 1976. Web. http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/NSA...

“The History Of The FBI's Secret 'Enemies' List.” NPR Fresh Air. February 14, 2012. Web. https://www.npr.org/2012/02/14/146862...

“Hoover Attempts to Destroy Dr. King (Nov-Dec).” Civil Rights Movement History
1964 July-Dec. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim64c.htm...

Summers, Anthony. “The Secret life of J Edgar Hoover.” The Guardian. December 31, 2011. Web. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2012...