Harold Titus's Blog, page 28

Civil Rights Events -- Freedom Rides -- Mayhem in Montgomery

Governor Patterson agreed to meet with John Seigenthaler, a Justice Department aide and a native of Tennessee. In the meeting, Floyd Mann, head of the state highway patrol, agreed to protect the Freedom Riders in between Birmingham. Attorney General Robert Kennedy then pressured the Greyhound bus company, which finally agreed to carry the Riders. The Freedom Riders left Birmingham on Saturday, May 20. State police promised "that a private plane would fly over the bus, and there would be a state patrol car every fifteen or twenty miles along the highway between Birmingham and Montgomery -- about ninety miles," recalled Freedom Rider John Lewis. Police protection, however, disappeared as the Freedom Riders entered the Montgomery city limits (Cozzens 5).

Jim Zwerg would recall: After we had talked it out and I was one of those chosen to go, I went back to my room and spent a lot of time reading the bible and praying. Because of what had happened in Birmingham and in Aniston, because our phones were tapped... none of us honestly expected to live through this. I called my mother and I explained to her what I was going to be doing. My mother's comment was that this would kill my father - and he had a heart condition - and she basically hung up on me. That was very hard because these were the two people who taught me to love and when I was trying to live love, they didn't understand. Now that I'm a parent and a grandparent I can understand where they were coming from a bit more. I wrote them a letter to be mailed if I died. We had a little time to pack a suitcase and then we met to go down to the bus.

As we were going from Birmingham to Montgomery, we'd look out the windows and we were kind of overwhelmed with the show of force - police cars with sub-machine guns attached to the backseats, planes going overhead... We had a real entourage accompanying us. Then, as we hit the city limits, it all just disappeared. As we pulled into the bus station a squad car pulled out - a police squad car. The police later said they knew nothing about our coming, and they did not arrive until after 20 minutes of beatings had taken place. Later we discovered that the instigator of the violence was a police sergeant who took a day off and was a member of the Klan. They knew we were coming. It was a set-up.

The idea had been that cars from the community would meet us. We'd disperse into these cars, get out into the community, and avoid the possibility of violence. And the next morning we were to come back to the station and I would use the colored services and they would go to some of the white services -- the restroom, the water fountain, etc. And then you'd get on the bus and go to the next city. It was meant to be as non-violent as possible, to avoid confrontation as much as possible.

Well, before we got off the bus, we looked out and saw the crowd. You could see things in their hands -- hammers, chains, pipes... there was some conversation about it. As we got off the bus, there was some anxiety. We started looking for the cars. But the mob had surrounded the bus station so there was no way cars could get in and we realized at that moment that we were going to get it.

There was a fellow, a reporter, with an old boom mike and he was panning the crowd. And that's when this heavy-set fellow in a white T-shirt... he had a cigar as I remember... came out and grabbed the mike and jumped on it... just smashed it... basically telling the press, "Back off! You are not going to take any pictures of this. You better stay out or you're going to get it next." You could hear crowd yelling and of course a lot of them were, "Get the ******-lover!" I was the only white guy there.

Traditionally a white man got picked out for the violence first. That gave the rest of the folks a chance to get away. I was told that several tried to get into the bus terminal. I was knocked to the ground. I remember being kicked in the spine and hearing my back crack, and the pain. I fell on my back and a foot came down on my face. The next thing I remember is waking up in the back of a vehicle and John Lewis handing me a rag to wipe my face. I passed out again and when I woke up I was in another moving vehicle with some very southern-sounding whites. I figured I'm off to get lynched. I had no idea who they were. Again, I went unconscious and I woke up in the hospital. I was informed that I had been unconscious for a day and a half. One of the nurses told me that another little crowd were going to try and lynch me. They had come within a half block of the hospital. She said that she knocked me out in case they did make it, so that I would not be aware of what was happening. I mean, those pictures that appeared in the magazines, the interview... I don't remember them at all. I do remember a class of students -- I think they were high school age, coming to visit me one time (Simkin 8-12).

Yet in the midst of that savagery, Zwerg says he had the most beautiful experience in his life. "I bowed my head," he says. "I asked God to give me the strength to remain nonviolent and to forgive the people for what they might do. It was very brief, but in that instant, I felt an overwhelming presence. I don't know how else to describe it. A peace came over me. I knew that no matter what happened to me, it was going to be OK. Whether I lived or whether I died, I felt this incredible calm" (Blake 6).

Other Freedom Riders had their recollections recorded.

The bus terminal was quiet. "And then, all of a sudden, just like magic, white people everywhere," said Freedom Rider Frederick Leonard. The Riders considered leaving by the back of the bus in hopes that the mob would not be quite as vicious. But Jim Zwerg, a white rider, bravely marched off the bus first. The other riders slipped off while the mob focused on pummeling Zwerg (Cozzens 6).

By the time the rides came along, getting arrested for demonstrating was old hat to Catherine Burks of Birmingham. As a student at Tennessee State University, she had been participating in Nashville sit-ins at movie theaters and “pray-ins” at churches.

“We would go to white people’s church on Sunday,” she said, “and some would let us in and some wouldn’t.”

She joined up with the rides in Birmingham, and she remembers dozing off because the trip was so uneventful. The Kennedy administration had negotiated with Alabama’s governor to supply the riders with escorts on the ground and in the air. But law enforcement mysteriously dropped off when the bus made it to the Montgomery city limits, turning the riders over to an awaiting mob, which was ready with pipes, chains and baseball bats.

As they stepped off the bus, [Catherine] Burks Brooks said the image that remains with her to this day is that of the young white women in the crowd “with their babies in their arms, screaming: ‘Kill them niggers. Kill them niggers’” (Colvin 7).

In Freedom Riders, she vividly recalls the assault on fellow Freedom Rider Jim Zwerg. "Some men held him while white women clawed his face with their nails. And they held up their little children --children who couldn't have been more than a couple years old -- to claw his face. I had to turn my head back because I just couldn't watch it."

A native of Piedmont, AL, William Harbour was the oldest of eight children and the first member of his family to go to college. At age 19, while a student at Tennessee State University, he had already participated in civil disobedience, traveling to Rock Hill, SC to serve jail time in solidarity with the "Rock Hill Nine" — nine students imprisoned after a lunch counter sit-in.

One of the first to exit the bus when the Nashville Movement Freedom Ride arrived at the Montgomery Greyhound Bus Station, Harbour encountered a mob of 200 people wielding lead pipes and baseball bats. Harbour survived the riot but after the end of the Freedom Rides, still faced hostility in his native Alabama. He was also one of 14 Freedom Riders expelled from Tennessee State University.

"Be best for you not to come [home]," his mother warned him in 1961. With the exception of one brief visit, he stayed away from Piedmont for the next five years (Meet 4-6).

Frederick Leonard remembered: Jim Zwerg was a white fellow from Madison, Wisconsin. He had a lot of nerve. I think that is what saved me because Jim Zwerg walked off the bus in front of us. The crowd was possessed. They couldn't believe that there was a white man who would help us. They grabbed him and pulled him into the mob. Their attention was on him. It was as if they didn't see us (Simkin 7).

The passengers were attacked by a large mob. They were dragged from the bus and beaten by men with baseball bats and lead piping. Taylor Branch, the author of Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63 (1988) wrote: "One of the men grabbed Zwerg's suitcase and smashed him in the face with it. Others slugged him to the ground, and when he was dazed beyond resistance, one man pinned Zwerg's head between his knees so that the others could take turns hitting him. As they steadily knocked out his teeth, and his face and chest were streaming blood, a few adults on the perimeter put their children on their shoulders to view the carnage." James Zwerg later argued: "There was noting particularly heroic in what I did. If you want to talk about heroism, consider the black man who probably saved my life. This man in coveralls, just off of work, happened to walk by as my beating was going on and said 'Stop beating that kid. If you want to beat someone, beat me.' And they did. He was still unconscious when I left the hospital. I don't know if he lived or died."

According to Ann Bausum: "Zwerg was denied prompt medical attention at the end of the riot on the pretext that no white ambulances were available for transport. He remained unconscious in a Montgomery hospital for two-and-a-half days after the beating and stayed hospitalized for a total of five days. Only later did doctors diagnose that his injuries included a broken back."

Some of the Freedom Riders, including seven women, ran for safety. The women approached an African-American taxicab driver and asked him to take them to the First Baptist Church. However, he was unwilling to violate Jim Crow restrictions by taking any white women. He agreed to take the five African-Americans, but the two white women, Susan Wilbur and Susan Hermann, were left on the curb. They were then attacked by the white mob.

John Seigenthaler, who was driving past, stopped and got the two women in his car. According to Raymond Arsenault, the author of Freedom Riders (2006): "Suddenly, two rough-looking men dressed in overalls blocked his path to the car door, demanding to know who the hell he was. Seigenthaler replied that he was a federal agent and that they had better not challenge his authority. Before he could say any more, a third man struck him in the back of the head with a pipe. Unconscious, he fell to the pavement, where he was kicked in the ribs by other members of the mob. Pushed under the rear bumper of the car, his battered and motionless body remained there until discovered by a reporter twenty-five minutes later."

James Zwerg, who was badly beaten-up claimed from his hospital bed: "Segregation must be stopped. It must be broken down. Those of us on the Freedom Ride will continue. No matter what happens we are dedicated to this. We will take the beatings. We are willing to accept death. We are going to keep coming until we can ride anywhere in the South" (Simkin 4-6). Interviewed later, Zwerg could not recall speaking to a news crew.

Pictures of Jim Zwerg: https://www.google.com/search?q=Freed...

The most vocal opponent of the rides was Alabama governor John Patterson, who had won election on a strong segregationist platform but had also endorsed John F. Kennedy for president. When the Freedom Riders came to his state, and even within a few blocks of the governor’s mansion in Montgomery, Patterson stood by and watched the mayhem. “We can’t act as nursemaids to agitators,” he said at the time. “You just can’t guarantee the safety of a fool, and that’s what these folks are. Just fools” (Lifson 5).

Martin Luther King, Jr. had been on a speaking tour in Chicago. Upon learning of the violence, he returned to Montgomery, where he staged a rally at Ralph Abernathy’s First Baptist Church. In his speech, King blamed Governor Patterson for “aiding and abetting the forces of violence” and called for federal intervention, declaring that “the federal government must not stand idly by while bloodthirsty mobs beat nonviolent students with impunity” …. As King spoke, a threatening white mob gathered outside. From inside the church, King called Attorney General Kennedy, who assured him that the federal government would protect those inside the church (Freedom Stanford 6).

Again Governor Patterson failed to act - and at that point Attorney General Bobby Kennedy reluctantly sent in 400 U.S. marshals, a force that was later increased to 666. The marshals (mostly deputized Treasury agents) were led by Deputy Attorney General Byron ("Whizzer") White, who met with Patterson in a long and angry conference. White carefully explained that the U.S. was not sponsoring the Freedom Riders' movement, but that the Government was determined to protect the riders' legal rights. John Patterson was having no part of such explanations. Alabama, he cried, could maintain its own law and order, and the marshals were therefore unnecessary. He even threatened to arrest the marshals if they violated any local law.

Even as White and Patterson talked, Montgomery's radio stations broadcast the news that Negroes would hold a mass meeting that night at the First Baptist Church. All day long, carloads of grim-faced whites converged on Montgomery.

That night the church was packed with 1,200 Negroes. In the basement a group of young men and women clustered together and clasped hands like a football team about to take the field. They were the Freedom Riders. Everybody say "Freedom'" ordered one of the leaders. "Freedom," said the group. "Say it again," said the leader. "Freedom!" shouted the group. "Are we together?" asked the leader. "Yes, we are together," came the reply. With that, the young Negroes filed upstairs and reappeared behind the pulpit. "Ladies and gentlemen," cried the Rev. Ralph Abernathy as the crowd screamed to its feet, "the Freedom Riders."

"Give them a Grenade." Slowly, in twos and threes, the mob started to form outside the church. Men with shirts unbuttoned to the waist sauntered down North Ripley Street, soon were almost at the steep front steps of the church. "We want to integrate too," yelled a voice. Cried another: "We'll get those ******s." A barrage of bottles burst at the feet of some curious Negroes who peered out the church door. The worst racial battle in Montgomery's history was about to begin (Simkin 7-8).

Catherine Burks described the beginning of the siege of the First Baptist Church in Montgomery by an angry segregationist mob on the following day. "I heard a rock hit the window. Some of us got up to look out the window and we got hit by more rocks. That's when a little fear came" (Meet 4).

Despite the long and obvious buildup toward trouble, only a handful of Montgomery cops were present - and they looked the other way. Into the breach moved a squad of U.S. marshals - the men Patterson had said were not needed. Contrary to Justice Department statements, the hastily deputized marshals had no riot training. They moved uncertainly to their task until a mild-looking alcohol tax unit supervisor from Florida named William D. Behen took command. "If we're going to do it, let's do it!" he yelled. "What say, shall we give them a grenade?" Whereupon Behen lobbed a tear-gas grenade into the crowd (Simkin 9). Afterward, the Federal marshals were replaced by the Alabama National Guard, who at dawn escorted the trapped Riders and church members out of the church.

After the violence at the church, Robert Kennedy asked for a cooling-off period. James Farmer had flown in to rejoin the Riders. The Freedom Riders, however, were intent on continuing. Farmer explained, "[W]e'd been cooling off for 350 years, and . . . if we cooled off any more, we'd be in a deep freeze" (Cozzens 7).

As the violence and federal intervention propelled the freedom riders to national prominence, King became one of the major spokesmen for the rides. Some activists, however, began to criticize King for his willingness to offer only moral and financial support but not his physical presence on the rides. … In response to [Diane] Nash’s direct request that King join the rides, King replied that he was on probation and could not afford another arrest, a response many of the students found unacceptable (Freedom Stanford 7).

Years later Jim Zwerg attended a reunion at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute and Museum in Alabama. During a ceremony, Zwerg was walking with a crowd of Freedom Rider colleagues when he saw the famous pictures of his battered face in a video and displayed on the museum wall.

"I looked at it, and what it brings back to me more than anything else is that I got so much notoriety because I was white," he says. "I looked at that picture and I thought of all the people that never get their names in a book, never get interviewed but literally had given their lives. Who the hell am I to have my picture up there?"

He was suddenly flooded with guilt. He started bawling during the ceremony as startled people looked on. Then another Freedom Rider veteran, a strapping black man named Jim Davis, walked over to Zwerg.

Zwerg's voice trembles with emotion as he recalls what Davis said. "He said, 'Jim, you don't realize that it was your words from that hospital bed that were the call to arms for the rest of us.' "

And then, as Davis wrapped his big arms around Zwerg in front of the startled crowd, the two men cried together (Blake 7).


Works cited:

Blake, John. “Shocking photo created a hero, but not to his family.” CNN. Web. http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/05/16/Zwer...

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...

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

Lifson, Amy. “Freedom Riders.” Humanities: The Magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities. May/June 2011. Web. https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2011/m...

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

Simkin, John. “Freedom Riders.” Spartacus Educational. August 2014. Web. https://spartacus-educational.com/USA...

Civil Rights Events -- Freedom Rides -- SNCC to the Rescue

The survivors of the two Freedom Rides that began in Washington, D. C. were scattered about Birmingham. James Farmer had arrived from the nation’s capitol. The Riders wanted to continue their journey. Farmer was apprehensive. The Greyhound bus company “did not want to risk losing another bus to a bombing, and its drivers, who were all white, did not want to risk their lives” (Cozzens 4). U. S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy sent Justice Department aide and native Tennesseean John Seigenthaler to Birmingham to negotiate air transportation of the Riders to New Orleans, the final destination of their journey. Kennedy wanted the Freedom Rides ended. Farmer declared the CORE project terminated.

On the evening of May 15, the CORE Freedom Riders finally arrive in New Orleans aboard an airplane arranged for by John Seigenthaler ….On the airport tarmac, they are met by a crowd of white police officers in riot gear who shout racial epithets at the Riders as they make their way to the terminal and a small, welcoming group of CORE volunteers (Journey 1).

The decision to end the ride frustrated student activists, such as Diane Nash, who argued in a phone conversation with Farmer: “We can’t let them stop us with violence. If we do, the movement is dead.” Under the auspices and organizational support of SNCC, the Freedom Rides would resume out of Nashville. SNCC mentors were wary of this decision, including King, who had declined to join the rides when asked by Nash and Rodney Powell. Farmer continued to express his reservations, questioning whether continuing the trip was “suicide” ((Freedom Stanford 4).

Diane Nash recognized “that if the Freedom Ride was ended right then after all that violence, southern white racists would think that they could stop a project by inflicting enough violence on it … and we wouldn’t have been able to have any kind of movement for voting rights, for buses, public accommodations or anything after that, without getting a lot of people killed first.” Robert Kennedy instructed Seigenthaler to speak directly with Nash to get her to change her mind (Morgan 2).

Seigenthaler recalled their telephone conversation.

I felt my voice go up another decibel and another and soon I was shouting, ‘Young woman, do you understand what you are doing? You’re gonna get somebody . . . Do you understand you’re gonna get somebody killed?’ And there’s a pause, and she said, ‘Sir, you should know, we all signed our last wills and testaments last night. . . . We know someone will be killed. But we cannot let violence overcome non-violence.’ That’s virtually a direct quote of the words that came out of that child’s mouth. Here I am an official of the United States government, representing the president and the attorney general, talking to a student at Fisk University. And she in a very quiet but strong way gave me a lecture (Lifson 4).

Jim Zwerg, whose subsequent Freedom Ride participation would make him famous, recalled the following.

Well, we got word on the CORE Freedom Ride, and we knew that John Lewis, a member of our organization, was going to be involved in it. We got word of the burning in Aniston... we had a meeting long into the night as soon as we heard about it. The feeling was that if we let those perpetrators of violence believe that people would stop if they were violent enough, then we would take serious steps backwards. Right away the feeling was that we needed to ride. We called Dr. King, we called James Farmer. There was an awareness that our phones were being tapped, so the feeling was that they knew what we were about to do. Our plan was different from CORE's. Whereas they chartered their buses, we were just going to get tickets and get on the bus. We felt that was even more important -- to buy a ticket just like any other traveler. We weren't getting a special bus, we were just going to get on the bus.

It was decided that we would send twelve people. I was one of 18 that volunteered to go. I've been asked why I volunteered to go... I would have to say, at that moment, it wasn't even a question. It was the right thing for me to do. I never second-guessed it (Simkin 3-4).

Zwerg was drawn to the Freedom Rides after he was assigned a black roommate while attending Beloit College in Wisconsin. He grew to admire his roommate and was shocked to see how the young man was treated by whites when they went out in public together. So he volunteered to be an exchange student at Fisk University in Nashville, an all-black college, for one semester. He wanted to know how it felt to be a minority.

Zwerg had gone to a city that had become a launching pad for the civil rights movement. He was swept up in the group of Nashville college students who were initiating sit-ins and Freedom Rides. He was awed by their commitment (Blake 5).

It was the dance craze “The Twist” that ushered Jim Zwerg of Gallup, N.M., into the civil rights movement. At a party while attending Fisk University I was showing them what a poor twist dancer I was,” he said. “We were having such a good time and I said, ‘Hey, we’ve got time, why don’t we take in a movie this afternoon?’ ” That was when he learned that blacks and whites could not attend a movie together in Nashville. His involvement in efforts to desegregate local movie theaters led to his participation in the ride (Colvin 9).

Ten volunteers left Nashville for Birmingham May 17 on the 5:15 a.m. Greyhound bus; thirteen more got on a second bus the next day. Interviewed in 1995, Zwerg described the ride from Nashville to Birmingham and his subsequent incarceration.

We just got the tickets and got on the bus. I was going to sit in the front of the bus with Paul Brooks. [22, from East St. Louis, student at American Baptist Theological Seminary, would-be editor of Mississippi Free Press in Jackson, Mississippi, 1962–1963] Paul sat by the window; I sat by the aisle. The rest of the blacks and one white girl, Celine McMullen, were going to sit in the back.

It was an uneventful ride until we got to the Birmingham city limits. We were pulled over by the police... They came on the bus and said, "This is a Freedom Rider bus, who's on here from Nashville? And the bus driver pointed to Paul and myself. They came up and really started badgering Paul, you know, "Get up... why aren't you in the back of the bus?" And he said he was very comfortable where he was. So they placed him under arrest. And they asked me to move so they could get to him... and I said, "I'm very comfortable where I am too."

We were both placed under arrest, taken off the bus, seated in the squad car for I don' t know how long. Finally they took us to Birmingham Jail and fingerprinted us. They put me in solitary for a little while. Then they put me in with a fellow who was a felon. I mean, I'm in my suit and tie and I've got my pocket bible with me. I think he thought I was some clergyman making calls. Ultimately they threw me in a drunk tank, with about twenty guys in various states of inebriation, and announced in no uncertain terms that I was a ******-lover for the Freedom Riders. Here he is, boys, have at him! I didn't know what was going to happen and I kind of said, "How do you guys feel about this? Do you know what they're talking about?" And they started asking me some questions.

One of the things we agreed on is that if you were jailed, number one, you go on a hunger strike, because in our minds we were jailed illegally. You don't cop a plea, you don't pay the bail and jump. You stay. But here I was. One single white guy. And I didn't know what had happened to Paul. I didn't know what had happened to the rest of the people on the bus. I began to see the state that some of drunks were in, and I tried to get some towels and clean up the guys who were sick. I just got talking to some of them and none of them ever laid a hand on me. Basically, we talked about what I believed and what they believed.

I discovered that since the South was predominately Baptist, Catholics were kind of looked down on at the time. Surprisingly, 19 of the 20 guys in the drunk tank were Catholics! So we kind of had something more in common than they realized. (Simkin
6-8).

The other Riders were placed under “protective custody.” “Music was the way we communicated in jail. … ‘Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on.’ I sang it for my cellmates and they liked it. So I got probably ten of these guys singing with me. They had taken all the rest of the people on the bus into protective custody, and I had heard them singing. Now they could hear this group singing, and know I was okay.”

We still had to go to mess even though you didn't eat. One day a fellow came in who was quite sick and I smuggled a sandwich back to the cell for him. I didn't know that act was punishable by three months in jail. But by giving him a sandwich -- suddenly I was a good guy and nobody was going to lay a hand on me. So the two and a half days that we were in jail were fine. We got to know each other. We talked. When I was in court I was really pleased that a number of these guys came over to me and said, "Jim, we really don't agree with you, but we wish you all the best" (Simkin 6-10).

Seven Freedom Riders who had been arrested the previous day were transported from the Birmingham jail north to the Tennessee border. Early in the morning of May 18, Bull Connor and other police officers drove the Riders under cover of darkness to Ardmore, Alabama., near the Alabama/Tennessee border.

Birmingham, AL native, 21-year-old Catherine Burks was a student at Tennessee State University when she volunteered for the Nashville Movement Freedom Ride. On May 18, she bantered with the ultra-segregationist Birmingham Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor as he drove the Nashville riders from jail back to the Tennessee state line.

In Freedom Riders, Burks says she borrowed a line from the Westerns of the day, telling Connor, "We'll see you back in Birmingham by high noon” (Meet 2).

Left on the side of the road, the Riders were told to make their way back to Nashville. The Riders found refuge in the home of an elderly black couple. From Nashville, Diane Nash made arrangements for a car to transport the Riders back to Birmingham the following day.

Federal intervention began to take place behind the scenes as Attorney General Robert Kennedy called the Greyhound Company and demanded that it find a driver. Seeking to diffuse the dangerous situation, John Seigenthaler, a Department of Justice representative accompanying the freedom riders, met with a reluctant Alabama Governor John Patterson. Seigenthaler’s maneuver resulted in the bus’s departure for Montgomery with a full police escort the next morning (Freedom Stanford 7).


Works cited:

Blake, John. “Shocking photo created a hero, but not to his family.” CNN. Web. http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/05/16/Zwer...

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...

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

“The Journey to Freedom.” Oprah.com. Web. http://www.oprah.com/oprahshow/journe...

Lifson, Amy. “Freedom Riders.” Humanities: The Magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities. May/June 2011. Web. https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2011/m...

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

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....

Simkin, John. “Freedom Riders.” Spartacus Educational. August 2014. Web. https://spartacus-educational.com/USA...

Civil Rights Events -- Freedom Rides -- Trailways Bus to Birmingham

James Farmer grew up in Marshall, Texas, where his father, James L. Farmer, Sr. was a professor at the historically black Wiley College. Farmer devoted his career to civil rights and social justice causes, working for the NAACP and the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), CORE's parent organization, prior to his February 1961 election as director of CORE.

In early 1961 CORE was less well known than the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Dr. Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Coalition (SCLC) or the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Farmer envisioned the ride as a way to vault CORE and its philosophy of nonviolent direct action to prominence on the national stage, with attendant opportunities for policy-making and fundraising.

Returning to Washington, D.C. from Atlanta, GA on the morning of May 14 to attend his father's funeral, Farmer was haunted by guilt. Later, he would relate his emotions. "There was, of course, the incomparable sorrow and pain," he said. "But frankly, there was also a sense of reprieve, for which I hated myself. Like everyone else, I was afraid of what lay in store for us in Alabama, and now that I was to be spared participation in it, I was relieved, which embarrassed me to tears" (Meet) 5).

The man who replaced Farmer in Atlanta was James Peck, the only activist among the Freedom Riders to have participated in the 1947 Journey of Reconciliation. Born into the family of a wealthy clothing wholesaler in 1914, Peck was a social outsider at Choate, an elite Connecticut prep school, in part because his family had only recently converted from Judaism to Episcopalianism. At Harvard he quickly gained a reputation as a campus radical, shocking his classmates by bringing a black date to the freshman dance. Peck dropped out after the end of his freshman year, spending several years as an expatriate in Europe and working as a merchant seaman. Returning to the United States in 1940, Peck devoted himself to organizing work and journalism on behalf of pacifist and social justice causes. He spent almost three years in federal prison during World War II as a conscientious objector.

After his release from prison in 1945, he rededicated himself to pacifism and militant trade unionism. In the late 1940s, Peck became increasingly involved in issues of racial justice, joining the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) as a volunteer (Meet 7).

Waiting in line at the Trailways bus station in Atlanta to purchase their tickets, Peck and the other Riders noticed that several of the regular passengers that had also been standing in the line left after they had been spoken to by a group of white men. Afterward, these rough-looking white men – mostly in their twenties and thirties – boarded the bus. The Riders followed, scattered themselves throughout the seats. They were Walter and Frances Bergman, white, 61 and 58 respectively; Jim Peck, white, 46; Charles Person, black, 18, student at Morehouse College; Herman Harris, black, 21, student at Morris College; Ivor Moore, black, 19, student at Morris College; and Ike Reynolds, black, 27, a CORE field secretary. Simeon Booker, Washington bureau chief of Jet Magazine, and Ted Gaffney, Jet Magazine photographer, were seated in the rear of the bus.

Soon after the bus had left the Atlanta terminal, the rough-looking white men – Klansmen – began harassing the black Riders. "You niggers will be taken care of once you get in Alabama," one of the Klansmen threatened. The comments intensified, once the bus passed into Alabama (Gross/Arsenault 12-13).

“Kids knew something was going to happen to them, in most cases it was not going to be good,” Charles Person would remark 56 years later (Colvin 3).

The bus arrived at the Anniston Trailways station approximately an hour after the other Freedom Riders bus had pulled into the Greyhound station. The waiting room was eerily quiet. Several whites looked away as the Riders, white and black, approached the lunch counter. They purchased sandwiches, then returned to the bus. Waiting for the bus to leave, they heard an ambulance siren. The bus driver, John Olan Patterson, after talking to several Anniston police officers, leaped up the steps. To the occupants of the bus he announced: "We have received word that a bus has been burned to the ground and passengers are being carried to the hospital by the carloads. A mob is waiting for our bus and will do the same to us unless we get these niggers off the front seats."

One of the Riders told Patterson that they were interstate passengers, that they had the right to sit wherever they wanted. Patterson exited the bus without uttering a word. One of eight tough, beefy men that had entered the bus behind Patterson answered. "Niggers get back. You ain't up north. You're in Alabama, and niggers ain't nothing here." He then lunged toward Person, punched him in the face. A second Klansman then punched Harris, who was sitting next to Person in the front section of the bus. Both non-violent black Riders refused to fight back. They were dragged into the aisle, struck with fists, and repeatedly kicked. Peck and Walter Bergman rushed forward from the back of the bus. “Can we talk about this?” Peck said. One of the Klansmen struck Peck, sent him reeling across two rows of seats. Bergman was then struck and fell to the floor. Blood spurted from their faces. The enraged Klansmen continued their assaults. A pair of Klansmen lifted Peck's head, others punched him senseless. Even though Bergman was unconscious, one Klansman kept stomping on his chest (Gross/Arsenault 14).

Behind them, Bergman's wife, Frances, 58, heard the sound of human flesh being brutally beaten for the first time in her life. Frances pleaded with the men to stop. She said later, "I had never before experienced the feeling of people all around hating me so... I kept thinking,‘How could these things be happening in 1961?'"

A reporter on the scene wrote: "Bergman was battered into semi-consciousness and as he lay in the aisle, one of the whites jumped up and down on his chest.... Peck's face and head bled profusely, making the aisle a slippery, bloody path" (Bergman 1).

The Klansman ignored her plea, called her a "nigger lover." However, another Klansman, seeing that Bergman was about to be killed, interceded. "Don't kill him," he said authoritatively (Gross/Arsenault 15).

Interviewed by Eyes on the Prize years later, Peck recalled the following:

Walter Bergman and I were sitting the back seat so we decided to go up front and intercept, with our bodies. We got clobbered on the head. I didn't get it so bad. But Bergman got it so bad that he later had a stroke and has been paralyzed ever since. As, he has been in a wheelchair ever since. And so, Walter and I are both suing the F.B.I., Bergman for a million dollars and me for a half a million dollars (Interview 3).

Several Klansmen dragged Person and Harris, both semi-conscious, to the back of the bus. They draped the two black men over the passengers sitting in the backseat. They did the same with Peck and Bergman. Content with what they had accomplished, the Klansmen sat in the middle of the bus. A black woman who was not a Freedom Rider begged to be allowed to exit the bus. "Shut up, you black bitch," one of Klansmen answered. "Ain't nobody but whites sitting up here. And them nigger lovers . . . can just sit back there with their nigger friends."

The bus driver, Patterson, returned with a police officer. Satisfied with what he saw, the officer addressed the Klansmen. "Don't worry about no lawsuits. I ain't seen a thing." He left the bus. Knowing that a mob was waiting on the main road to Birmingham, the driver used back roads heading west. The Klansmen did not object. The Freedom Riders were puzzled. They didn’t know that the Klansmen were protecting them for a welcoming party that was gathering in downtown Birmingham (Gross/Arsenault 15-16).

They also did not know that Birmingham Police Chief Eugene “Bull” Conner had agreed to keep his police away from the Trailways station for 15 minutes to give local whites and members of the Klan time to beat up the arriving Freedom Riders. Connor had reportedly cut a deal with the KKK giving them 15 minutes to “burn, bomb, kill, maim, I don’t give a god-damn what you do” (Doyle 6).

During the next two hours the Klansmen continued their intimidation. One man brandished a pistol, a second man displayed his steel pipe, three others blocked access to the middle and front sections of the bus. Jet Magazine journalist Simeon Booker recalled that one of the sentries was "a pop-eyed fellow who kept taunting: 'Just tell Bobby [Kennedy] and we'll do him in, too.'" One of the Klansmen approached Booker ominously. Booker gave the man a copy of Jet featuring an advance story on CORE's sponsorship of the Freedom Ride. The article was passed from Klansman to Klansman. "I'd like to choke all of them," one of the thugs said. Several others reiterated that the Riders were going to get what was coming to them when they reached Birmingham. Reaching the outskirts of the city, Peck and the other injured Riders had regained consciousness; but since the Klansmen were not allowing any of them to leave their seats or communicate, Peck could not attempt to prepare them for the horror of what most assuredly waited.

Peck and the other Trailways Riders had no detailed knowledge of what had happened to the Greyhound Riders in Anniston. They thought they were prepared for the worst, but were not. They had no knowledge of how far Birmingham's extreme segregationists would go to preserve their way of life. In Birmingham, collaboration between the Ku Klux Klan and law enforcement officials was absolute. The special agents in the Birmingham FBI field office, and their superiors in Washington, knew what was going to happen. They could have warned the Freedom Riders but did not.

Worse, FBI informant Gary Thomas Rowe actively ensured in Birmingham that the Trailways Riders would be pummeled. The plan agreed to between Klansmen and law enforcement had been to attack first the occupants of the Greyhound bus when it arrived at the Greyhound station. News of the Anniston bombing did not reach Birmingham until midafternoon, minutes before the arrival of the Trailways bus. Apprised by police headquarters, Rowe alerted the Klansmen waiting near the Greyhound station that the second bus of Freedom Riders was about to arrive at the Trailways station, three blocks away. Years later Rowe recounted the frantic dash across downtown Birmingham: "We made an astounding sight . . . men running and walking down the streets of Birmingham on Sunday afternoon carrying chains, sticks, and clubs. Everything was deserted; no police officers were to be seen except one on a street corner. He stepped off and let us go by, and we barged into the bus station and took it over like an army of occupation. There were Klansmen in the waiting room, in the rest rooms, in the parking area."

Police dispatchers had cleared the area. For the next fifteen minutes there would be no police presence at the Trailways station, except for two plainclothes detectives in the crowd there to monitor what occurred and make sure that the Klansmen left the station before the police was subsequently dispatched (Gross/ Arsenault 16-18).

Interviewed by Eyes on the Prize, James Peck recalled: When we arrived in… Birmingham, … we saw along the sidewalk … about… twenty men with pipes. We saw no cop in sight. And now I'll tell you what, how I remember the date. The next day, Bull Connor, the notorious police chief was asked why there were no police on hand. He said, he replied, it was Mother's Day and they were all visiting their mothers. Uh, well we got out of the bus and Charles Person, the black student from Atlanta and I, had been designated to try to enter the lunch counter. So we… of course we didn't [get] there (Interview 5).

Why had Charles Person, the eighteen-year-old black Morehouse College student from Georgia, chosen to be there?

The Russians had launched Sputnik, demonstrating a technological and scientific supremacy over the United States, and Person, of Atlanta, was ready to answer the call for more American students to become scientists. Accepted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he thought he would also apply to nearby Georgia Tech, which was cheaper. But he couldn’t get in there; the university was not integrated. And that’s what galvanized him.

“When you do all the things your parents ask you to do, you’re a pretty good student and you’re denied, it’s hard for a child or a teenager to understand,” he said. He joined sit-ins in Atlanta and later was chosen for the rides.

“Change always begins with the young. As you get older you can rationalize things and can kind of live with them,” Person said. “But as a child or young person, you don’t have that rationalization, and you just want to see things change” (Colvin 5).

When the bus pulled into the Trailways terminal, the Klansmen on board rushed down the aisle to be near the front door. One man shouted: "You damn Communists, why don't you go back to Russia? You're a shame to the white race!" They exited down the steps and quickly disappeared into the crowd. Peck and the other Freedom Riders, peering at the crowd, saw no weapons. They filed off the bus onto the unloading platform to retrieve their luggage. Several rough-looking men were standing a few feet away giving no indication of impending violence. Peck and Person walked toward the white waiting room. In his 1962 memoir, Peck recalled: “I did not want to put Person in a position of being forced to proceed if he thought the situation was too dangerous," but "when I looked at him, he responded by saying simply, 'Let's go.'" Person knew the Deep South; he had been jailed for sixteen days for participating in the Atlanta sit-ins; hours earlier he had been beaten up. Despite his and Peck’s past experiences, neither man was sufficiently prepared to anticipate what was about to occur.

A Klansmen pointed to the cuts on Peck's face and the caked blood on his shirt and shouted that Person, walking in front of Peck, had attacked a white man. Peck responded, tried to explain that Person had not attacked him, added: "You'll have to kill me before you hurt him." This blatant breach of racial solidarity only served to incite the crowd of Klansmen blocking their path. An enraged Klansman pushed Person toward the colored waiting room. Person recovered, proceeded toward the white lunch counter, was stopped by a second Klansman who shoved him up against a concrete wall. Another segregationist, National States Rights Party (NSRP) leader Edward Fields pointed at Peck, yelled: "Get that son of a bitch." Several burly Klansmen pummeled Person with their fists, bloodied his face and mouth, dropped him to his knees. Peck rushed to help Person to his feet. Several Klansmen pushed both men into a dimly lit corridor that led to a loading platform. A dozen whites, armed with pipes or oversized key rings, pounced. Person escaped into the street. Boarding a city bus, he made his way to Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth's parsonage (Gross/Arsenault 18-19).

Person says he knows of only one photograph that survived that melee: “It’s a picture of me. You’ll see a guy in a blazer with a pipe. We figure he’s the one that gave the most damaging blow,” he said. “He’s the only one who had a weapon that could make my skull pop open the way it did.”

In late 2016, in the middle of a conversation with a relative, Person suddenly passed out -- Collateral damage, almost 56 years later. There’s that lingering damage — a CT scan found that there’s still damage to his skull, “which was kind of disturbing to me because I thought that was past me,” he said — but there is also lingering hope. He would like to have a cup of coffee with the person who attacked him in Birmingham. No one was charged.

“There’s no resentment,” Person said. He simply wants to know why. “I don’t have time to be hating anyone because I’ve adopted nonviolence as a way of life, not just a tactic” (Colvin 6).

Meanwhile, Peck took the worse of the attack. I was unconscious, I'd say, within a minute. Uh… I woke up, I came to in an alley way. Nobody was there. A big pool of blood. I looked at that pool of blood, I said, I wonder whether I'm going to live or die. But I was too tired to care. I lay down again. Finally I came too again, and I looked and a white G.I. who had come up and said, you look in a bad way. Do you need help? And I looked the other way and [Walter] Bergman was coming so I said, no my friend is coming, he'll help me out. So, uh, Bergman took me in a cab to Shuttesworth's home, and when Shuttlesworth saw me, he said, man you need to go to a hospital. And so he called the ambulance and they took me to the hospital and … they took me to the hospital and put fifty-three stitches into my head (Interview 6).

Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth … would later say, “His head was split down to the skull. Somebody had cracked him with a lead pipe. Peck was a bloody mess. . . .” It took more than an hour for Shuttlesworth to find an ambulance willing to take Peck to the all-white Carraway Methodist Hospital. Once there, staff refused to treat him. Only at Jefferson Hillman Hospital did Peck finally receive treatment, including some 53 stitches for his head wounds (Doyle 7).

The attacks had been moved to the back corridor to avoid reporters and news photographers stationed at the white waiting room. However, several newsmen, including national CBS News correspondent Howard K. Smith, witnessed at least part of the attack.

Smith had been working on a television documentary investigating allegations of lawlessness and racial intimidation in the Southern city. Smith, a Southerner himself from Louisiana, was trying to determine if the claims he and his network were hearing about were exaggerated or true.

On the night of May 13, Smith [had] received a phone call tipping him off that the downtown bus station was the place to be the next day “if he wanted to see some real action.” Smith thus witnessed the May 14 “Mother’s Day” riot at the Birmingham Trailways Bus Station, as a vicious mob of Klansmen attacked the Freedom Riders and innocent bystanders alike with pipes and baseball bats. After the riot, Smith helped badly injured Riders Jim Peck and Walter Bergman to hail a cab. He also found three other injured black men after the melee, one of whom was Ike Reynolds. These men had agreed to do on camera interviews which Smith conducted with the men and was hopeful of airing that evening on CBS-TV. But “signal difficulties” from the local TV station – WAPI – prevented that from happening, though Smith suspected that the local owner there had vetoed such a broadcast.

Smith did deliver news accounts of the bus station melee over the CBS radio network that went out nationally. He would make a series of live radio updates from his hotel room that day. “The riots have not been spontaneous outbursts of anger,” he reported in one broadcast, “but carefully planned and susceptible to having been easily prevented or stopped had there been a wish to do so.” In another he explained: “One passenger was knocked down at my feet by 12 of the hoodlums, and his face was beaten and kicked until it was a bloody pulp.”[i.e., the Jim Peck beating]. Smith reported the facts of the incident for CBS. “When the bus arrived,” he explained in one report, “the toughs grabbed the passengers into alleys and corridors, pounding them with pipes, with key rings, and with fists,” But he was outraged by what he had witnessed, and stated at one point that the “laws of the land and purposes of the nation badly need a basic restatement.” Smith at the time also did a Sunday radio commentary, during which he was more direct, “The script almost wrote itself,” he would later recall. “I had the strange, disembodied sense of being forced by conscience to write what I knew would be unacceptable.” In his commentary, Smith laid the blame squarely on Police Chief Eugene “Bull” Connor, whose officers had looked the other way during the attack. During that commentary Smith also stated that the “rule of barbarism in Alabama” must bow to the “rule of law and order – and Justice – in America” (Doyle 8-9).

The other Riders had sought refuge. Ivor Moore, 19, and Herman Harris, 21, both of them black, somehow lost themselves in the crowd before the assaults started. Ordered to by her husband, Frances Bergman boarded a city bus just after their arrival. Walter, woozy, blood dried on his clothing, followed Peck and Person into the white waiting room.

Having witnessed Peck and Person’s beatings, he turned about hoping to find a policeman. He, too, was knocked to the floor by a raging Klansman. Jet Magazine journalist Simeon Booker came upon him crawling on his hands and knees. Booker withdrew to the street, where he found a black cabdriver who was willing to transport him and photographer Ted Gaffney to safety.

Several white men kicked and stomped Ike Reynolds, 27, before dumping his semiconscious body into a curbside trash bin.

The mob also attacked bystanders that it misidentified as Freedom Riders. A Klansman named L. B. Earle had come out of the men's room at the wrong time. Earle suffered several deep head gashes and was taken to a hospital. A second victim was twenty-nine-year-old black laborer George Webb, who was attacked when he entered the baggage room with his fiancée, Mary Spicer, who had been on a Trailways bus that had arrived from Atlanta. Spicer had been unaware of the melee inside the station until she and Webb were set upon by pipe-wielding Klansmen. Undercover FBI informant Gary Thomas Rowe, told Spicer: "Get the hell out of here," whereupon she fled into the street. Rowe and three others, including an NSRP member, pummeled Webb, who fought back but succumbed after several other thugs surrounded him. Dozens of bystanders watched, some yelling, "Kill the nigger." One of the plainclothes detectives on the scene, Red Self, told Rowe: "Get the boys out of here. I'm ready to give the signal for the police to move in." When the police did arrive, most of the rioters had left.

Several thugs, however, continued their attack on Web. A news photographer from the Birmingham Post-Herald, Tommy Langston, snapped a picture of Rowe and the other Klansmen. The attackers, abandoning Webb, chased after Langston. One man smashed the camera to the ground. Rowe and others kicked and punched, threatened to beat him with the pipes and baseball bats they had used on Webb. Meanwhile, Webb ran into the loading area, and was captured by different Klansmen. With the police arriving Webb and Langston receiving several parting licks. Bleeding profusely, Webb managed to find the car in which his fiancée and his aunt were waiting. Langston staggered down the street to the Post-Herald building, and collapsed into the arms of a fellow employee. Later, another Post-Herald photographer returned to the terminal and recovered Langston's broken camera. The roll of film inside it was undamaged.

A grisly picture of the Webb beating appeared on the front page of the Post-Herald the next morning. It was one of the few pieces of documentary evidence that survived the riot. By Monday, May 15th, photographs of the burning “Freedom Bus” in Anniston as well as images of the Birmingham mob scene were reprinted in newspapers across the country (Gross/Arsenault 19-22).

According to historian Raymond Arsenault, author of the 2006 book, Freedom Riders, “[Howard] Smith’s remarkable broadcast opened the floodgates of public reaction. By early Sunday evening, hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, of Americans were aware of the violence that had descended upon Alabama only a few hours before.” At that point, few people had heard of CORE, and fewer still knew what the term ‘Freedom Rider’ meant. But with reports like the one Smith made [and newspaper photographs and articles reprinted in local newspapers], more and more of the general population would soon understand what was taking place in the southern part of their country (Doyle 10).


Works cited:

Bergman, Gerald. “Walter Gerald Bergman's Freedom Ride and Brutal Government Violence.” Investigator 143. March 2012. Web. http://ed5015.tripod.com/ReligBergman...

Colvin, Rhonda. “As Trump attacks John Lewis, here’s how freedom riders broke the chains of segregation.” The Washington Post. January 15, 2017. Web. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation...

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

Gross, Terry. “Get On the Bus: The Freedom Riders of 1961,” containing excerpts from Raymond Arsenault’s Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice. NPR. Web. https://www.npr.org/2006/01/12/514966...

“Interview with James Peck.” Eyes on the Prize. Washington University Digital Gateway Texts. Web. http://digital.wustl.edu/e/eop/eopweb...

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

Civil Rights Events -- Freedom Rides -- Greyhound Bus -- Anniston

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...

Civil Rights -- Martin Luther King, Jr. and the 1960 Presidential Election -- Part Two

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...

Civil Rights -- Martin Luther King, Jr. and the 1960 Presidential Election -- Part One

Before dawn, on Wednesday, October 26, 1960, Martin Luther King Jr. was sleeping in a prison cell in DeKalb County, Georgia, when sheriff deputies aimed their flashlight beams into his face and barked at him to get up. They handcuffed him, shackled his legs, and hustled him out of the cell. It was 4 a.m. Hurried along, he asked repeatedly for an explanation, but the men said nothing. With a terrible foreboding, King soon found himself seated in the back of a police car rolling into the night; the only light came from the headlamps piercing the darkness.

Like all black men, King feared the chilling portent of a late-night drive into the countryside; it had happened to others, the stories he’d heard were horrific.

At home in Atlanta, Coretta King knew nothing of her husband’s ominous ride. She was six months pregnant with their third child, and she had already had an emotional week.

King hadn’t wanted to join the student-led sit-in. But the band of youths, members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, insisted. The SNCC was well-organized and impatient. Its target was one of Atlanta’s venerable institutions, Rich’s department store; its goal: to desegregate the store’s snack bars and restaurants. The young activists urged King to come along—and go to jail with them—to draw attention to their campaign. King advised the students to hold off until after the presidential election now just weeks away; but the students saw an opportunity to force the candidates to address the issue of segregation. If King were arrested with dozens of young protesters, then both contenders would have no choice but to speak out. “We thought that with Dr. King being involved in it,” said student leader Lonnie C. King, “we would really see where these guys stand.” The students’ passion—and conscience—were impossible for Martin Luther King Jr. to ignore (Levingston 1-2).

King and the SNCC demonstrators had been arrested at an Atlanta department store lunch counter, “and then, after all those arrested with him were released, held for violating the terms of his ‘probation’ for an earlier traffic violation: driving (while black) with an expired license. The judge sentenced the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to six months’ hard labor” (Goodman 1).

On that early Wednesday morning, Martin Luther King Jr. had no idea where the two deputies were taking him. An hour passed, and he realized he was deep into “cracker” country where no one protested a lynching. By dawn, King discovered he had been granted a less evil fate as the squad car turned into the maximum security state prison in Reidsville.

But his danger was far from over. If he were put to hard labor, as the judge had ordered, he would work side by side in a road gang with ruthless white criminals, many of them killers who had nothing to lose and everything to gain—national notoriety and prison respect—by murdering a black celebrity.

On that same Wednesday morning, Senator John Kennedy phoned the governor of Georgia, Ernest Vandiver. Some quiet, back-channel way had to be found to free the civil rights leader. Kennedy was motivated by his outrage, by his sympathy for the King family, and by bald political calculation. In a meeting with Kennedy just weeks earlier, King had urged the senator to take some dramatic action to prove to blacks that his commitment to their cause was genuine. His moment had arrived. If Kennedy were able to play a decisive role in King’s release, the black community was likely to reward him with an outpouring of support. But if he acted on King’s behalf, he risked a vicious backlash from Southern whites. The senator had to walk a fine line: show decency to a black man without alienating the white community.

During the presidential campaign, Kennedy raised suspicions in the black community by his blatant courtship of Southern white support. After the Democratic National Convention in July, he began shoring up his reputation among Southern leaders, meeting privately with them to allay fears that he would be an aggressive civil rights president. Kennedy promised Governor Vandiver that as president he would never use federal troops to force Georgia to desegregate its schools. In return, Vandiver declared his preference for the senator and vowed to lead Georgia into the Kennedy column on Election Day.

Now, some three months later, early in the morning at the governor’s mansion in Atlanta, the telephone jangled on the bedside table, waking Vandiver and his wife. On the line was Senator John Kennedy speaking in his New England accent. “Governor,” he said, according to Vandiver’s recollection of the conversation, “is there any way that you think you could get Martin Luther King out of jail? It would be of tremendous benefit to me.”

“Senator, I don’t know whether we can get him released or not,” Vandiver replied.

“Would you try and see what you can do and call me back?” Kennedy said.

Working in secrecy, Vandiver swung into action for the senator.

As news of King’s jailing spread, both presidential candidates received a petition from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and nearly twenty other civil rights organizations demanding that they “speak out against the imprisonment” (Levingston 3-7).

King had developed a better relationship with Richard Nixon than he had developed with the Kennedys.

King, when he was 28 and famous for his role in the Montgomery bus boycott, met Nixon in March 1957, in Africa, when Ghana celebrated its independence. They agreed to stay in touch and met three months later in Nixon’s office at the Capitol to discuss among other topics the 1957 Civil Rights Bill. That summer Nixon worked to strengthen the bill, taking on such powerful Southern Democrats as Richard Russell, who opposed it, and the Senate Majority Leader, Lyndon Johnson, who had been pushing for a weaker version of the voting-rights section.

“I will long remember the rich fellowship which we shared together and the fruitful discussion that we had,” Dr. King later wrote to the vice president, telling him “how deeply grateful all people of goodwill are to you for your assiduous labor and dauntless courage in seeking to make the Civil Rights Bill a reality… This is certainly an expression of your devotion to the highest mandates of the moral law.” Nixon replied in much the same spirit: “I am sure you know how much I appreciate your generous comments. My only regret is that I have been unable to do more than I have. Progress is understandably slow in this field, but we at least can be sure that we are moving steadily and surely ahead.” They talked frequently after that, and in September 1958, after a deranged black woman in Harlem stabbed Dr. King almost fatally, Nixon was among the first to write to him. He praised King’s “Christian spirit of tolerance,” which he said would ultimately win over “the great majority of American for the cause of equality and human dignity to which we are committed” (Frank 1).

In his book “The Promise and the Dream: The Untold Story of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy,” David Margolick opines that King and Bobby were never close. They were intermittent allies but never friends. They spoke infrequently. Almost never socialized together. Seldom did they candidly share their thinking with one another. According to Margolick: “Theirs was an uneven relationship, and for King, a slightly degrading one: he was the black man invariably asking for things, and Kennedy the white man doling them out. . . . King was the one to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ ” (Kennedy 1).

John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Martin Luther King shared an era and a cause, but they were not close allies …. They admired each other’s best qualities but were suspicious of the other’s flaws. On civil rights, they marched to different cadences (Grier 2).

In the Nixon camp, strategists calculated the political consequences and concluded the best course of action was silence. Nixon held fast to his decision even after a visit from his staunch supporter baseball hero and civil rights activist Jackie Robinson. As William Safire, then Nixon campaign aide and future New York Times columnist, told the story, Robinson came out of his ten-minute meeting with “tears of frustration in his eyes.” Complaining bitterly, he told Safire: “He thinks calling Martin would be ‘grandstanding.’” Robinson was so distraught he declared: “Nixon doesn’t deserve to win.” Yet, the baseball star continued to support the Republican and later said the outcome of the election had left him “terribly disappointed.”

In the Kennedy camp, the imprisoned preacher had two passionate proponents: White House aide Harris Wofford, a longtime friend of the Kings, and Sargent Shriver, the senator’s brother-in-law and head of the campaign’s Civil Rights Section. Because of their fervor for black rights, Wofford and Shriver were regarded as overly sentimental activists with impaired political judgment and were relegated to the periphery of the campaign. But the two men exerted a subtle yet powerful influence on the campaign: They forced a sense of conscience upon the political realists.

Wofford phoned Louis Martin, a successful black businessman and newspaper publisher who had deep political roots and was helping the campaign reach out to the black community. Martin was concerned about King, and after commiserating, the two men batted around some ideas. “What Kennedy ought to do is something direct and personal,” Wofford told Martin, “like picking up the telephone and calling Coretta.” It would be enough, Wofford observed, for the candidate to show his sympathy for her.

“That’s it, that’s it!” Louis agreed. “That would be perfect.”

Now came the hard part: getting this idea to Kennedy, who was campaigning in Chicago, and persuading him to act on it. After his private call to Governor Vandiver in the morning, the candidate had attended a breakfast with fifty businessmen. Now he was in a hotel suite at O’Hare Airport waiting to leave town.

After several tries Wofford finally tracked down Sargent Shriver, who was also in Chicago but not with the Kennedy entourage out at the airport. Understanding the urgency, Shriver listened to Wofford then said, “I’ll go right straight out to the airport. I’ll put it to Jack right now. It’s not too late” (Levingston 8-10).


Works cited:

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...

Grier, Peter. “Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy: civil rights' wary allies.” The Christian Science Monitor. January 20, 2014. Web. https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politic...

Kennedy, Randall. “Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy: a fraught relationship.” The Washington Post. April 27, 2018. Web. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outloo...

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...

Civil Rights -- Sit-Ins -- Nashville -- Accommodation

There were other arrests, other acts of violence, notably during the months of March and April

The events of February 27 did not put-off student demonstrators – if anything, it spurred them on. They also received more support from [previously neutral] students who were appalled by their treatment. Such events attracted even more media attention and by April 1960, the leadership of the sit-ins decided to expand their movement so that they boycotted all downtown businesses in Nashville associated with segregation. The action was so successful that it is calculated that 98% of the African American population in Nashville took part in the boycott (Trueman 4).

On March 3 Mayor Ben West appointed a seven-member biracial committee to investigate segregation in the city. Despite the committee’s numerous attempts at a compromise, the students declared that they would accept nothing less than the acknowledgement of their rights to sit at the store lunch counters along with white customers. On April 5, the committee suggested that the counters be divided into black and white sections. [Whites would occupy counter stool from one end of the row while Blacks occupied stools beginning at the opposite end of the row] The Nashville Christian Leadership Conference (NCLC), which worked with the Nashville Student Movement, rejected the proposal, arguing that segregation of the counters was no better than black exclusion from them (Momodu 2-3).

One of the important phases of the movement in Nashville [Diane Nash years later declared] was the economic withdrawal, where the oppressed people really withdraw their participation from their own oppression. So there was a withdrawal of shopping, by the blacks, and by whites who agreed with us, and who would participate, from the downtown area, that while blacks couldn't be served at the lunch counters or in the restaurants of the department stores, we didn't shop downtown at all. That was the height of the Easter shopping season, which used to be even important to, to retail merchants than they are now. Everybody used to get brand new Easter outfits, that … could possibly afford to. And that boycott was, I think, about 98% effective, or more, among blacks in Nashville. So that the next time — when we began negotiating with the merchants again, they were much more interested in talking to us than they had been the first time (Interview Nash 10).

On April 19, a bomb destroyed the home of Z. Alexander Looby, the defense attorney representing many of the protesters. The bombing triggered a mass march. John Lewis remembered: One of the attorneys that had been defending us, I think it was April 19, 1960, about six o'clock in the morning, the home of Z. Alexander Looby, he was one of the attorneys for the Legal Defense Fund, who taught part-time at Fisk, his home was bombed. He lived across the street from Meharry Medical College and the bomb impact broke the windows of the school. About seven o'clock we had a meeting with this group of students called the Central Committee of the Nashville Student Movement, which represented students from Fisk, American Baptist, Tennessee State, Peabody, Vanderbilt. We all met and decided that we would have a mass march on City Hall in response to the bombing of Attorney Looby's home. We sent the mayor a telegram saying to him to meet us on the steps of the City Hall by noon. By noon, we had more than five thousand students and community people marching on City Hall and the mayor came and spoke (Interview Lewis 9).

Diane Nash related: Attorney Looby was a very, very respected man in the community. He had a reputation of defending people who didn't have enough money to adequately pay him, and of being a really decent human being. And quite by accident, the student central committee had a meeting scheduled for six a.m. that morning. And I remember I was up, getting dressed to go to the meeting, when I heard the explosion.

…

The students met on Tennessee A&I's campus, and we marched, I think, three abreast. We were very organized. One of the things that we made it a point of was that whenever there was a demonstration, we were to be overly dressed. The men generally wore suits and ties, and the women — we looked like we were dressing up for Sunday. And anyway, we marched quietly — we were met later by students at Fisk. We passed Fisk campus. And other students, other schools had points where they joined in to the march. There were many thousands of people that marched that day. We marched silently, really. And the — the long line of students must have continued for many, many blocks. Miles, maybe. And we marched to the mayor's office. … We had sent telegrams ahead of time, telling him that as a result of the bombing, turning the Looby home into a state of violence, tension, violence in the city of Nashville, we felt like we needed to talk …. So we met him on the steps of City Hall. And confronted him with what his feelings as a man, were. As a person. I was particularly interested in that, as opposed to just his being a mayor (Interview Nash 12, 14, 15).

Nash asked Mayor West if it was wrong for a citizen of Nashville to discriminate against his fellow citizens because of his race or skin color. The mayor admitted that it was wrong, giving the students an important symbolic victory in their campaign. Nash then asked the mayor if the lunch counters in Nashville should be desegregated. The mayor said they should (Momodu 5).

I have a lot of respect for the way he responded. He didn't have to respond the way he did. He said, that he felt like it was wrong, for citizens of Nashville to be discriminated against at the lunch counters, solely on the basis of the color of their skin. … I think that was the turning point. The Nashville newspaper reported that, in the headlines, the next day … (Interview Nash 15).

Weeks of secret negotiations resulted. Diane Nash and the other student committee members tried to understand the merchants’ reservations, one important reservation being that there might be a boycott by whites at the lunch counters, if they began to serve blacks. And we started really strategizing how we could avoid that. So, some of the whites in Nashville … who recognized that it was important to desegregate the city, figured into …the strategy, because they made it a point to sit next to the blacks, who were being served, so that there could not be a white boycott. So, those kinds of experiences made me really look at the fact that bringing about social change through violence is probably not … as realistic. Because, who do you kill? Do you kill all whites? That doesn't make sense, because we had whites who were our opposition the first year, who the second year… took an attitude … it's not that bad, in fact, it really makes sense. … they were helpful to us the second year, in bringing about desegregation (Interview Nash 16).

On May 10, six downtown stores opened their lunch counters to black customers for the first time; the customers arrived in groups of two or three during the afternoon and were served without incident. With that agreement, Nashville became the first major southern city to begin desegregating public facilities (Momodu 6).

Whereas the bus boycott in Montgomery had been successful because of its economic clout, there had been no overt comment by anyone within the city’s authority about the immorality of segregation. For a mayor to do this, combined with the impact on a city’s local economy, was a major achievement for a state such as Tennessee.

The story of the Nashville sit-ins did not end with the desegregation of lunch counters. Towards the end of 1960, a number of the leaders of the movement helped to found the Student Non-violent Co-ordinating Committee (SNCC). Diane Nash became a full-time SNCC field worker while John Lewis was elected the leader of SNCC in 1962. …

Several of the SNCC leaders, who had honed their leadership skills during the sit-ins, became involved in the Freedom Rides. The sit-in leaders were also involved in helping to organize the Selma to Montgomery march.

Most of those who led the sit-ins became major figures in the civil rights campaign. Diane Nash was appointed to a national committee by J F Kennedy that promoted the 1964 Civil Rights Act. John Lewis was elected to Congress in 1986 after two decades of being recognized as one of the civil rights movement’s major figures.

The Rev James Lawson – who taught about the importance of a non-violent campaign – was expelled from Vanderbilt University Divinity School for his part in the sit-ins – but has since been honoured by the university (Trueman 5-6).


Works cited:

“Interview with Diane Nash.” Eyes on the Prize Interview. Washington University Digital Gateway Texts. November 12, 1985. Web. http://digital.wustl.edu/e/eop/eopweb...

“Interview with John Lewis.” Southern Oral History Program Collection. Documenting the American South. November 20, 1973. Web. https://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/A-0073/...

Momodu, Samuel. “Nashville Sit-Ins (1960).” BlackPast.org. Web. http://www.blackpast.org/aah/nashvill....

Trueman, C. N. “Nashville Sit Ins.” historylearningsite.co.uk. March 27, 2015. Web. https://www.historylearningsite.co.uk....

Civil Rights -- Sit-Ins -- Nashville -- Opposing Values Collide

Just shy of 22 years old, Diane Nash became one of the leaders in the Nashville Student Central Committee, which would organize the actual sit-ins at discriminatory restaurants throughout the city. Leading up to her first sit-in, in February 1960, Nash worried about being arrested. She’d voiced her concern in the workshops, saying that she’d help with phone calls and organizing but in the end, she would not go to jail. “But when the time came, I went,” she says, of the dozens of arrests she’d face in the not too distant future (Morgan 1).

We felt we were right. We felt we were right, and rational. When we took a position that segregation was, was wrong, and we really tried to be open and honest and loving with our opposition. A person who is being truthful and honest, actually is, is standing in a much more powerful position than a person who's lying, or trying to maintain his preference, even though on some level he knows he's wrong. I think, on some level, most people really deep-down know that segregation was wrong, just based on race, and disregarding everything else about the person (Interview Nash 5).

Well, the first time [February 13] we took a seat at a lunch counter [John Lewis recalled] and we were denied service, they said, "We don't serve you; you can't be served." It was a great feeling; it was my first real act of protesting against this system of segregation. I sort of had this feeeling for some time that you just wanted to strike a blow for freedom and this was a great sense of pride to be able to sit down and at the same time become part of an organized effort (Interview Lewis 4).

Diane Nash recalled her feelings of anticipation before sitting down in protest. People used to tickle me, talking about how brave I was, sitting in, and marching, and what have you, because I was so scared. All the time. It was like wall-to-wall terrified. I can remember sitting in class, many times, before demonstrations, and I knew, like, we were going to have a demonstration that afternoon. And the palms of hands would be so sweaty, and I would be so tense and tight inside. I was really afraid. The movement had a way of reaching inside me and bringing out things that I never knew were there. Like courage, and love for people. It was a real experience, to be among a group of people who would put their bodies between you and danger. And to love people that you work with enough, that you would put yours between them and danger.

…

… the first sit-in we had, was really funny, because the waitresses were nervous. And they must have dropped $2,000 worth of dishes that day .... I mean, literally, it was almost a cartoon. Because I can remember one in particular, she, she was so nervous, she picked up dishes and she dropped one and, and she'd pick up another one, and she'd drop it and another. It was really funny, and we were sitting there trying not to laugh, because we thought that, that laughing would be insulting and you know, we didn't want to create that kind of atmosphere. At the same time, we were scared to death (Interview Nash 5-6).

The students continued their sit-in efforts. Interviewed years later, John Lewis revealed that they occupied lunch counter stools on Tuesdays and Thursdays. “We didn't have any classes on those days and we continued to go down to the lunch counters and restaurants to sit in.”

We would continue to sit and some days we would stay all day and take turns. A shift of students would stay there until they were forced to close the lunch counters completely. Or we would occupy all of the seats. In some instances, stores like Woolworth's and Kress's, McClelland's, would just close the stores. And that continued for a period of time (Interview Lewis 5).

The protest soon attracted the support of other students (black and white) and the numbers soon went into the hundreds. The organisers of the sit-in were concerned that not all those involved in the protest had been schooled in non-violent techniques (Trueman 1).

There were people who couldn't take it [John Lewis later stated], couldn't take the discipline. But they did other things, like picking people up and taking them to the meeting places, or passing out leaflets, or making signs. But they couldn't handle putting themselves in positions where they could be attacked or arrested. And it was good that they knew that (Nance 1).

Therefore, two students, Bernard Lafayette and John Lewis, produced a handout for all those involved with their ’10 Rules of Conduct’. These were the required standards for all those who were supporting the protest. The rules stated:

Do Not:

Strike back nor curse if abused … Hold conversations with a floor walker. Leave your seat until your leader has given you permission to do so. Block entrances to stores outside nor the aisles inside.

Do:

Show yourself friendly and courteous at all times Sit straight: always face the counter. Report all serious incidents to your leader. Refer information seekers to your leader in a polite manner. Remember the teachings of Jesus Christ, Mahatma Ghandi and Martin Luther King. Love and non-violence is the way.

Towards the end of February, the mood of the store managers had become more ugly and supporters of segregation gathered at the stores concerned, along with the demonstrators (Trueman 1-2).

The first violent response to the protests came on February 27 …. The protesters were attacked by a white group opposed to desegregation. The police arrested eighty-one protesters; none of the attackers was arrested. Those arrested were found guilty of disorderly conduct. They all decided to serve time in jail rather than pay fines.

This was a day [John Lewis divulged] when we had been warned by a local white minister, Will Campbell, who had told us he had word from a reliable source that we would be arrested and that there would be some form of violence. A small group of us, on that day—it was a cold day in Nashville, we even had snow—on that particular day, went down and started sitting in at Woolworth's and later during the day there was some violence on the part of a young white teenager who pulled students off the seats or put lighted cigarettes down their backs, that type of thing. We continued to sit (Interview Lewis 5-6).

Lewis had been hit. He escaped having a lighted cigarette put down his back.

Diane Nash found something amusing in her day’s experience. The day that the police first arrested us was interesting too, because their attitude, they had made a decision they were going to arrest us if we sat-in that day, and so, they announced to us "O.K., all you nigras, get up from the lunch counter or we're going to arrest you". And their attitude was like, well, we warned you. So they repeated it a couple of times, and nobody moved. And of course, we were prepared for this. So they said, "Well, we warned you, you won't move, O.K. Everybody's under arrest." So we all get up and marched to the wagon. But everybody who was at the lunch counter was arrested. So then the police had the attitude like, O.K., we warned them, they didn't listen. And then they turned and they looked around the lunch counter again, and the second wave of students had all taken seats. And they were confounded, kind of looked at each other like, "now what do we do", you know? They said well, O.K., we'll arrest those too, and they did it. Then the third wave. No matter what they did and how many they arrested, there was still a lunch counter full of students, there (Interview Nash 7).

“We refused to strike back,” John Lewis recalled. I think studying and attending the nonviolence workshops we had been disciplined to understand, to be willing to adjust to the violence, the pain and the hurt. At the same time we didn't concentrate on what happened to us. But we were there for a purpose and the arrest. It just sort of inspired us. I didn't have any bad feelings about it. I didn't necessarily want to go to jail. But we knew, in a sense, using that particular method really as a tactic at that point that it would help solidify the student community and the black community as a whole. The student community did rally. The people heard that we had been arrested and before the end of the day, five hundred students made it into the downtown area to occupy other stores and restaurants. At the end of the day ninety-eight of us were in jail. There were mass meetings all over the city that Sunday. We refused to come out of jail. We didn't want anyone to go our bond. But early Sunday morning, the colleges and universities there had put up the necessary bail money and we were let go (Interview Lewis 7).


Works cited:

“Interview with Diane Nash.” Eyes on the Prize Interview. Washington University Digital Gateway Texts. November 12, 1985. Web. http://digital.wustl.edu/e/eop/eopweb...

“Interview with John Lewis.” Southern Oral History Program Collection. Documenting the American South. November 20, 1973. Web. https://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/A-0073/...

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....

Nance, Kevin. “John Lewis on 'March: Book One. “ Chicago Tribune. August 23, 2013. Web. http://www.chicagotribune.com/enterta...

Trueman, C. N. “Nashville Sit Ins.” historylearningsite.co.uk. March 27, 2015. Web. https://www.historylearningsite.co.uk....

Sit-Ins -- Nashville -- Gearing Up

The Nashville Sit-Ins, which lasted from February 13 to May 10, 1960, were among the earliest non-violent direct action campaigns in the 1960s to end racial segregation in the South. They were the first campaigns to desegregate lunch counters in Nashville, Tennessee. The sit-in campaign was coordinated by the Nashville Student Movement and Nashville Christian Leadership Council, which was made up primarily of students from Fisk University, American Baptist Theological Seminary, and Tennessee State University. Diane Nash and John Lewis, who were both students at Fisk University, emerged as the major leaders of the local movement (Momodu 1).

Diane Nash would say in an interview: You know, I heard about the Little Rock story, on the radio. … I remember the Emmett Till situation really keenly, in fact, even now I can, I have a good image of that picture that appeared in Jet magazine, of him. And they made an impression. However, I had never traveled to the south at that time. And I didn't have an emotional relationship to segregation. I had – I understood the facts, and the stories, but there was not an emotional relationship. When I actually went south, and actually saw signs that said "white" and "colored" and I actually could not drink out of that water fountain, or go to that ladies' room, I had a real emotional reaction. I remember the first time it happened, was at the Tennessee State Fair. And I had a date with this, this young man. And I started to go the ladies' room. And it said, "white and colored" and I really resented that. I was outraged. So, it, it had a really emotional effect (Interview Nash 1-2).

Diane Nash was born in 1938 and raised in Chicago, away from the strong racial divisions that saw African Americans treated as second-class citizens under Jim Crow laws in the South. It wasn’t until she enrolled at the historically black Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1959 that she came face-to-face with overt discrimination.

“There were signs that said white, white-only, colored. [The] library was segregated, the public library. Parks, swimming pools, hotels, motels,” she recalls. “I was at a period where I was interested in expanding: going new places, seeing new things, meeting new people. So that felt very confined and uncomfortable.”

Among the many facilities that weren’t available to Nash and her peers were restaurants that served black customers only on a “takeout basis,” which meant they weren’t allowed to sit and eat inside. Instead, black patrons were forced to eat along the curbs and alleys of Nashville during the lunch hour (Morgan 1).

John Lewis grew up in rural Alabama on a farm in Pike County about forty or fifty miles from Montgomery in a strictly segregated world. You had the white world and the black world. Segregated school bus [unclear]. In '57, I went to Nashville to attend the American Baptist Theological Seminary to study, with my great desire to come to Atlanta to study at Morehouse but my parents couldn't afford it. I could go to the Seminary and work and so I enrolled in it (Interview Lewis 1).

I grew up about 50 miles from Montgomery. Growing up there as a young child, I tasted the bitter fruits of racism. I saw the signs that said white men, colored men; white women, colored women; white waiting, colored waiting. And I would ask my mother, my father, my grandparents, and my great-grandparents why. They would say, “That’s the way it is. Don’t go getting in trouble.”

But in 1955, at 15 years old, I heard of Dr. King, and I heard of Rosa Parks. They inspired me to get in trouble. I remember meeting Rosa Parks as a student. In 1957, I wrote Dr. King a letter and told him that I wanted to attend a little [whites-only] college 10 miles from my home—Troy State College, known today as Troy University. I submitted my application and my high-school transcript. I never heard a word from the school, so that gave me the idea that I should write Dr. King.

In the meantime, I had been accepted to a little college in Nashville, Tennessee, so I went off to school there. King heard that I was there and got in touch with me. He told me that when I was back home for spring break, to go and see him in Montgomery.

…

A young lawyer met me at the Greyhound bus station and drove me to the First Baptist Church—pastored by Ralph Abernathy—and ushered me into the office. I saw Dr. King and Reverend Abernathy standing behind a desk and was so scared that I didn’t know what to do. Dr. King said, “Are you the boy from Troy? Are you John Lewis?” And I said, “I am John Robert Lewis”—I gave my whole name. And he still called me “the boy from Troy”! He told me to go back and have a discussion with my mother and my father. He said they could lose their land; their home could be burned or bombed. But if I got the okay from them, we would file a suit against Troy State and against the state of Alabama, and I would get admitted to the school. I had a discussion with my mother and my father, and they were terribly afraid, so I continued to study in Nashville (Newkirk II 1-2).

During the school year of '58 and '59, Lewis started attending nonviolent workshops conducted by James Lawson, a student at Vanderbilt Divinity School.

Jim Lawson [Diane Nash recalled] was a very interesting person. He had been to India, and he had studied the movement, Mohandas Gandhi, in India. He also had been a conscientious objector, and had refused to fight in the Korean War. And he really is the person that brought Gandhi's philosophy and strategies of non-violence to this country. And he conducted weekly workshops, where students in Nashville, as well as some of the people who lived in the Nashville community, were really trained and educated in these philosophies, and strategies. I remember we used to role-play, and we would do things like actually sit-in, pretending we were sitting at lunch counters, in order to prepare ourselves to do that. And we would practice things such as how to protect your head from a beating, how to protect each other, if one person was taking a severe beating, we would practice other people putting their bodies in between that person and the violence. So that the violence could be more distributed and hopefully no one would get seriously injured. We would practice not striking back, if someone struck us. There were many things that I learned in those workshops, that I not only was able to put into practice at the time that we were demonstrating and so forth, but that I have used for the rest of my life (Interview Nash 3).

Lawson’s students actually ventured out to segregated stores and restaurants to do nothing more than speak with the manager when they were refused service. “Lawson graded their interactions in each simulation and sit-in, reminding them to have love and compassion for their harassers” (Diane 2).

You know, we had, after — during the workshops, we had begun what we called testing the lunch counters. We had actually sent teams of people into department store restaurants, to attempt to be served, and we had anticipated that we'd be refused, and we were. And we established the fact that we were not able to be served, and we asked to speak to the manager, and engaged him in a conversation about, why not, the fact that it really was immoral to discriminate against people because of their skin color.

…

The first time we talked to the merchants, their attitude, well, you wanted a meeting, here, we're having it. They listened to what we had to say, they very quickly said no, we can't do it, and then their attitude was like, we're busy men, we're ready for the meeting to be over. That's it, no, we can't have desegregation.

And then Christmas break had happened. And we had intended to start the demonstrations afterwards, and we hadn't really started up again. So when the students in Greensboro sat-in on February 1, we simply made plans to join their effort by sitting-in at the same chains that — that they sat-in at (Interview Nash 3-4).

We came back after the Christmas holidays and continued to have the workshops. Right after February first, second, or third we received a telephone call from students in North Carolina saying, "What can you do to support the students in Greensboro (Interview Lewis 3).

On February 13, 1960, twelve days after the Greensboro sit-ins occurred, local college students entered S.H. Kress, Woolworth’s, and McClellan stores at 12:40 p.m. in downtown Nashville. After making their purchases at the stores, the students sat-in at the lunch counters. Store owners initially refused to serve the students and closed the counters, claiming it was their “moral right” to determine whom they would or would not serve. The students continued the sit-ins over the next three months, expanding their targets to include lunch counters at the Greyhound and Trailways bus terminals, Grant’s Variety Store, Walgreens, and major Nashville department stores, Cain-Sloan and Harvey (Momodu 6).


Works cited:

“Diane Nash.” AJC. Web. https://www.ajc.com/news/national/dia....

“Interview with Diane Nash.” Eyes on the Prize Interview. Washington University Digital Gateway Texts. November 12, 1985. Web. http://digital.wustl.edu/e/eop/eopweb...

“Interview with John Lewis.” Southern Oral History Program Collection. Documenting the American South. November 20, 1973. Web. https://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/A-0073/...

Momodu, Samuel. “Nashville Sit-Ins (1960).” BlackPast.org. Web. http://www.blackpast.org/aah/nashvill....

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....

Newkirk II, Vann R. “How Martin Luther King Jr. Recruited John Lewis.” The Atlantic. King Issue. Web. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/...

Civil Rights -- Sit-Ins -- Greensboro

The Greensboro Sit-Ins occurred in Greensboro, North Carolina, lasting from February 1, 1960 to July 25, 1960. Ezell Blair Jr., David Richmond, Franklin McCain and Joseph McNeil, the original protestors, became known as the Greensboro Four. All were students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College. They had read about nonviolent protest, and one of them, Ezell Blair, had seen a documentary on the life of Mohandas Gandhi. Another of the four, Joseph McNeil, worked part-time in the university library with Eula Hudgens, an alumna of the school who had participated in freedom rides; McNeil and Hudgens regularly discussed nonviolent protest. All four of the students befriended white businessman, philanthropist, and social activist Ralph Johns, a benefactor of both the NAACP and North Carolina Agricultural and Technical (Murray 1).

Joseph McNeil had grown up in New York. What he had experienced returning to college after the holidays had inspired him to take action against local, blatant racial discrimination.

My parents lived in New York City at the time, and I was home on winter break. And I was coming back to North Carolina, and I was riding a Greyhound bus. And something strange started to happen to me after I left New York. I mean, I was the same person when I got to Philadelphia that I was on 125th Street, but it seemed that the further south I went, the more differently people started to view me. I had changed, boy, but they were changing. So by the time I got to Richmond, Virginia, and I was hungry, I went to a restaurant in the terminal and asked to be served. And they said 'We can't serve you here- you have to go around the corner there.' And for me, that was the final blow of humiliation. And I had had enough. And I made up my mind that I had to do something.

Ezell Blair (Jibreel Khazan) was the first to hear about McNeil's experience:

'All right Junior Blair, wake up!'

'Joe, what’s going on man?'

'You know what happened to me?'

'No what happened to you?'

'I came from Richmond Virginia, man, by the time I got to Richmond I felt like I was a slave, man.'

(He walked all the way about a mile from the bus station at 11:30 and I was the guy who got the brunt of it. So I know exactly what he’s saying is true.)

I said, 'Well, Joe man, what can we do?'

He said, 'We got to do something man I’m so sick and tired of race discrimination.' He said, 'We have got to act man.'

So about a week or so (later), Frank, David, and Joseph and myself in the room, we said, 'We have got to make some plans. What are we going to do? Time to act.'

Franklin McCain said before the sit-in, no one on campus would have pegged them as leaders (Jones 1).

The first sit-in was meticulously planned and executed. While all four students had considered different means of nonviolent protest, McNeil suggested the tactic of the sit-in to the other three. To him, discipline in executing the protest was paramount. Months before the sit-in, he attended a concert at which other African-American students behaved tactlessly, leaving him determined not to repeat their error. The plan for the protest was simple. The students would first stop at Ralph Johns’ store so that Johns could contact a newspaper reporter. They would then go to the Woolworth’s five-and-dime store to purchase items, saving their receipts. After finishing their shopping, they would sit down at the lunch counter and courteously request service, and they would wait until service was provided (Murray 2).

Everyone knew there were risks involved. In an interview years later, Ezell Blair said:

I was the one that didn’t want to go down on Sunday night January 31st, because I was worried about getting hurt. I went home and said:

Mom, Dad, (I knew they were going to save me), no boy your grades are failing, no, boy, you better stay out of that.' But they went along with Frank and Joe!

[They said], 'You go down tomorrow, we’ll say our blessings for you. Oh by the way, I want you to dress like you’re going to church.'

[I said] 'I want to wear overalls.

[She said] 'Who’s your mother?'

[I said] 'You are.'

[She said] 'You do what I tell you.'

[I said:] 'Yes Ma. Okay. But suppose I get killed?'

She said: 'You’ll be dressed to kill! Mothers are always right (Jones 2-4).

The protest occurred on Monday, February 1, 1960. The students were refused service.

An older white woman sat at the lunch counter a few stools down from McCain and his friends.

"And if you think Greensboro, N.C., 1960, a little old white lady who eyes you with that suspicious look ... she's not having very good thoughts about you nor what you're doing," McCain says.

Eventually, she finished her doughnut and coffee. And she walked behind McNeil and McCain — and put her hands on their shoulders.

"She said in a very calm voice, 'Boys, I am so proud of you. I only regret that you didn't do this 10 years ago.'" McCain recalls.

"What I learned from that little incident was ... don't you ever, ever stereotype anybody in this life until you at least experience them and have the opportunity to talk to them. I'm even more cognizant of that today — situations like that — and I'm always open to people who speak differently, who look differently, and who come from different places," he says (Norris 1).

The manager of the Woolworth’s store requested that they leave the premises. After they had left the store, the four students told campus leaders at Agricultural and Technical what had happened. The next morning twenty-nine neatly dressed male and female North Carolina Agricultural and Technical students sat at the Woolworth’s lunch counter. The protest grew the following day, and on Thursday, white students from a nearby women’s college took part in the protests, which expanded to other stores. Soon crowds of students were mobbing local lunch counters. As the protests grew, opposition grew vociferous. Crowds of white men began appearing at lunch counters to harass the protesters, often by spitting, uttering abusive language, and throwing eggs. In one case, a protester’s coat was set on fire, and the assailant was arrested.

The protests continued each day that week. On Saturday, fourteen hundred students arrived at the Greensboro Woolworth’s store. Those who could not sit at the lunch counter formed picket lines outside the store. A phoned-in bomb threat cut the protest short, but the following week sit-ins began at Woolworth’s stores in Charlotte, Winston-Salem, and Durham. Soon other five-and-dime and department stores with segregated lunch counters became targets of these protests.

The reaction of police departments in the region was, by and large, muted. In the case of the Greensboro Woolworth’s sit-ins, protesters were left alone by the police department while those reactionaries who became violent were prosecuted. Statewide no protesters were arrested until forty-one black students in a picket line at the Cameron Village Woolworth’s in Raleigh were charged with trespassing (Murray 3-4).

The sit-in movement spread to Nashville, Tennessee; Atlanta, Georgia; and Richmond, Virginia, by early March. … The Greensboro Woolworth’s finally served blacks at its lunch counter on July 25, 1960, when manager Clarence Harris asked four black Woolworth’s employees—Geneva Tisdale, Susie Morrison, Anetha Jones, and Charles Best—to change out of their uniforms and into street clothes. The employees then ordered a meal at the lunch counter, becoming the first African Americans to be served at Woolworth’s. Most lunch counters around Greensboro would be desegregated over the next few weeks (Momodu 3-4).

Interviewed years later, Joseph McNeil reflected.

When we had these sit-ins and we faced the prospect of being arrested and going to jail, we didn’t know for how long it was going to be, or whether we were going to jail for one day or one week or six months or one year. We were students! But we were very serious students.

We cared about life and our future. But we knew that we had to do this one stand. We had to take on this one thing.

Franklin McCain recalled facing plenty of doubts when the foursome first shared their ambitions with fellow students.

"Never request permission to start a revolution," he said. "We had talked to several students about this fractured and unequal democracy and what we wanted to do about it and, quite honestly, most people thought we were crazy."

In particular, McCain says, he was stirred into defiance by "the big lie" his parents had passed on to him about how to succeed as an African-American. As a youngster, McCain embraced the Ten Commandments, sought a good education and did good deeds with no expectation of reward, just as his parents had imparted.

"When I turned 13 or 14, I saw that I'd been screwed. I was still denied the rights and privileges that were to be afforded citizens of this country," he said. "I was angry as hell at a system that I felt had betrayed me."

McNeil said he and his fellow protesters were not daunted by attempts to intimidate them -- not even those of the Ku Klux Klan.

"For the most part, we were too angry to be too fearful," he said. "The heckling and all those things were a concern, but I think it made us stronger for the process.

"The fact that you could get people to go back into harm's way day after day and take physical abuse and verbal abuse is a testament to the fact that we were responding on solid principles and morals" (Cherry and Grinberg 1-3).

McNeil believed their actions had been about choice. “It was about having the ability to say I choose to sit down. Or I choose to drink from that water fountain.

I don’t choose black water or white water or colored water. I want water.”

He said that living under Jim Crow was “so intolerable that he felt he had no other option but to seek an end to segregation.”

I was not angry at people in particular. I was angry at a system that I thought betrayed me. It was a farce. And I credit my three colleagues- probably- with saving my life. Because deep in my heart, I felt as though if that was what life had to offer, then I'm not sure it's worth living (Jones 2-3).

The goal of the Greensboro Four accomplished, McNeil was elated. Interviewed years later, McNeil said he felt obligated to visit Woolworth's one last time for "ceremonial" reasons when he returned to school in September 1960.

"I ordered coffee and pie," he said. "I never did that again. The pie wasn't very good" (Cherry and Grinberg 4).


Works cited:

Cherry, Matt and Grinberg, Emanuella. “Sit-in vet: 'Never request permission to start a revolution'.” CNN. February 1, 2010. Web. http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/02/01/gree...

Jones, Jessica. “Three of the Four Greensboro Four: In Their Own Words.” WUNC. North Carolina Public Radio. January 10, 2014. Web. https://www.wunc.org/post/three-green...

Momodu, Samuel. “Greensboro Sit-Ins (1960).” BlackPast.Org. Web. https://blackpast.org/aah/greensboro-...

Murray, Jonathan. “Greensboro Sit-In.” North Carolina History Project. Web. http://northcarolinahistory.org/encyc...

Norris, Michele. “The Woolworth Sit-In That Launched a Movement.” NPR. February 1, 2008. Web. https://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...