Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63

by Taylor Branch

When reporter Simeon Booker looked into the terminal a few seconds later, he saw a bloodied Walter Bergman on his hands and knees crawling desperately among the legs of the men beating him, groping for a door.

The violence at the terminal was contagious, furtive, and often blind. A Birmingham white man, who had been in the men’s room for some time, emerged with a look of innocent shock that provoked the mob. He became one of seven bystanders hurt badly enough to be hospitalized. A Negro man arriving to pick up his girlfriend was set upon, as were several reporters. A white photographer from the Birmingham Post-Herald, who had the presence of mind to remove the film from his camera after shooting the attack on Peck, was clubbed with a lead pipe and his camera smashed. Outside—where a hysterical woman passenger who had been caught on the Trailways ride from Anniston was shouting, “It started on the bus! It started on the bus!”—a handful of Klansmen came upon one Negro Freedom Rider* and knocked him repeatedly into a pile of trash boxes. Then, seeing a man talking into the car radio of a vehicle marked WAPI News, they smashed all the windows of the car, dragged news director Clancy Lake away from his live broadcast out into the street, ripped out his microphone, and fled. By the time the allotted fifteen minutes were up, and a phalanx of Birmingham policemen had trotted briskly into the Trailways terminal, the Klansmen were well dispersed and in a triumphant, surly mood. One retreating carload, a mile away from the terminal, came upon two Negro men talking on a street corner. They stopped abruptly, jumped the Negroes, and beat them.

A frightened Negro doctor refused to treat Person’s wounds, and while a woman was giving him first aid, Jim Peck, miraculously, spilled alone from a taxi with a crimson head and jagged broken teeth, and hunched over from the pain of blows to his ribs. “You need to go to a hospital,” Shuttlesworth said by way of a greeting. As they waited for the ambulance, Peck struggled over to Person and shook his hand.

a call of distress from Anniston Hospital, where Freedom Riders from the burned Greyhound bus were besieged. A large contingent of the white mob had pursued them there, and hospital personnel, intimidated by the mob, ordered the Freedom Riders to leave, saying their presence endangered other patients.

Soon eight cars of Negro churchmen, brimming with shotguns and rifles, took off down Highway 78 to pick up the enervated but immensely grateful pacifists in Anniston.

“When white men and black men are beaten up together,” he declared, “the day is coming when they will walk together.”

Diane Nash suggested that Bevel, as temporary chairman of the Nashville movement, call an emergency meeting to discuss a student response. Bevel replied that there was nothing they could do or say about distant Alabama that could not wait until they had finished their picnic, but Nash was insistent. The movement was about selflessness, she said.

“I have said for the last 20 years that these out-of-town meddlers were going to cause bloodshed if they kept meddling in the South’s business…. It happened on a Sunday, Mother’s Day, when we try to let off as many of our policemen as possible so they can spend Mother’s Day at home with their families.”

The News dismissed Connor’s explanation as lame and all but accused him of conspiring with the Klan.

In faraway Tokyo, the morning newspapers shocked no one more than Sidney Smyer, the incoming president of the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce. Smyer, leading the city’s business delegation at the International Rotary Convention, could not read the Japanese writing, but he could recognize the ugly photographs of the bus station riot. The Post-Herald photographer’s carefully preserved roll of film had survived his beating to move on the international wires. As a result, Smyer found himself the object of cold stares and perplexed questions from his Japanese hosts and the assembled international businessmen, who had suddenly lost interest in Birmingham’s climate for investment. Words failed Smyer and his Birmingham friends as they tried to explain that the incident was grossly unrepresentative of their city. They felt like zoo specimens on display. Smyer, though a stout segregationist and a Dixiecrat from 1948, told his Birmingham colleagues that something must be done about Bull Connor.

Orleans, No sooner had they made flight reservations and begun their retreat from the terminal than radio reports of the change signaled a general stampede. Elements of the mob reached the airport ahead of them, transplanting the siege.

Suddenly, the issue was not one of reinforcing the riders but replacing them, not boosting the ride’s success but preventing its failure. Diane Nash soon traced James Farmer to Washington, where he was attending his father’s funeral. She asked him whether CORE would object if Nashville students went to Birmingham and took up where the original riders left off. Her request left Farmer temporarily speechless, but he gave his consent.

The two of them met with Roy Wilkins, urging him to support their voter registration plans, and then Kennedy walked into the office of John Seigenthaler, the only Southerner on his immediate staff.

The CORE group, after two days in Alabama and eleven days in the South, found safety in the air.

“Yes, I know who she is,” said Seigenthaler. “Well, you come from that goddam town,” said Marshall. “They started another group down to Birmingham to take over by bus where those others left off…. If you can do anything to turn them around, I’d appreciate it.” When Seigenthaler responded groggily, Marshall said, “Diane Nash is at this number.”

Nash, telling them about the grim realities of Birmingham. “I came through there,” he said. “All hell is going to break loose. She’s going to get those people killed.”

We are going to come into Birmingham to continue the Freedom Ride.” “Young lady,” Shuttlesworth replied in his most authoritative voice, “do you know that the Freedom Riders were almost killed here?” “Yes,” Nash said tersely. Her patience was almost spent. “That’s exactly why the ride must not be stopped. If they stop us with violence, the movement is dead. We’re coming. We just want to know if you can meet us.”

returned to the student group for the final and most difficult decision: which of the volunteers would be chosen to make the ride. It was treated as a life-or-death matter.

Inside the bus, the Freedom Riders maintained the discipline they had learned from Jim Lawson. They kept insisting on their right to leave, pushing up from their seats to the point of physical repression by the police, and at the same time they tried to make human contact with the officers. They

asked them one by one if they were World War II veterans, and if so, what they had fought for.

They asked them if they were Christians, and if so, did they believe that Christ ...

Finally, Bull Connor himself appeared at the terminal, and as the Freedom Riders moved to board the Montgomery bus he ordered his men to arrest them. Cheers went up from the bystanders as the police officers handcuffed the ten riders and dragged them to the paddy wagons. When Connor’s nemesis, Fred Shuttlesworth, demanded to know why this was being done, he too was arrested, which drew more cheers. Connor, having satisfied the segregationists by deed, now moved to placate the image-conscious city fathers by telling reporters that he was placing the Freedom Riders under “protective custody.”

Heading north on U.S. Highway 31, John Lewis sat behind Bull Connor in one of the police cars.

From the humble refuge, John Lewis placed a call to inform Diane Nash of their collective decision. All seven packages were ready to return to Birmingham, he announced, as soon as transport could be arranged.

When Lillard’s car roared up to the agreed-upon rendezvous point, they all squeezed in—making four in the front and four in the back—and told him to keep heading south for Birmingham, over the same roads they had just traveled with Bull Connor.

The eight students speeding down the highway heard on the radio that the Freedom Riders—themselves—were not retreating to Nashville after all but were making their way back to Birmingham in a private car to renew the fight. Suddenly, instead of stealing a march, they were heading into a manhunt.

When reporters within the milling crowd saw John Lewis and other familiar faces, they realized that all the crazy reports indeed were true. Negroes, whom Bull Connor had cowed into silent submission for years, were not only defying him but outwitting him under the most searing public scrutiny. This was high drama—a third attempt to move the Freedom Ride forward from the spot of the Mother’s Day beatings.

The enraged whites smashed Life photographer Don Urbrock repeatedly in the face with his own camera. They clubbed Norman Ritter to the ground, beat a Birmingham television reporter, and chased the reporters who escaped.

Some stalked and some charged, egged on by a woman in a yellow dress who kept yelling “Get those niggers!” Fighting panic, the Freedom Riders made their way to two nearby Negro taxis and tried to send the seven females away to safety. Four of the five Negroes jumped into the backseat of the first taxi, whose driver had a little boy with him on the front seat. “Well, I can’t carry but four!” cried the driver, when he saw that he was drawing the attention of the onsurging whites. There was no time to argue. The Freedom Riders shoved the fifth female Negro into the front seat anyway. “Well, I sure can’t carry them!” shouted the driver, eyeing Susan Wilbur and Sue Harmann, the two white students.

Others chased the male Freedom Riders, some of whom were trying futilely to act on John Lewis’ shouted directions about how to zigzag to Columbus Street and climb the long hill toward the refuge of Ralph Abernathy’s church.

They, along with several Alabama reporters standing closer, saw a dozen men surround Jim Zwerg, the white Wisconsin exchange student at Fisk in Nashville. 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 with blood, a few adults on the perimeter put their children on their shoulders to view the carnage. A small girl asked what the men were doing, and her father replied, “Well, they’re really carrying on.” The Freedom Riders in the nearby taxi turned away in sickened hysteria.

“Oh, there are fists, punching!” he cried. “A bunch of men led by a guy with a bleeding face are beating them. There are no cops. It’s terrible! It’s terrible! There’s not a cop in sight. People are yelling, ‘There those niggers are! Get ’em, get ’em!’ It’s awful.”

White women were beating her from behind with pocketbooks, and a teenager was jabbing her from the front, dancing like a prizefighter. Seigenthaler decided to try to rescue her. He drove up on the curb and jumped out. As he did, a woman with an especially heavy shoulder bag knocked Wilbur across the right front fender of his car, and by the time Seigenthaler reached her lying there, the crowd of screaming, angry whites jammed in so tightly upon them that he could not push his way to the car’s back door. He grabbed Wilbur by the shoulders, managed to pull the right front door open, and, shouting “Come on, get in the car,” began to slide across to the driver’s seat. He saw in a flash that another white student—Sue Harmann, whom he had not seen before—had dived into the back. Wilbur balked. Still absorbing blows, she shouted, “Mister, this is not your fight! Get away from here! You’re gonna get killed!” Seigenthaler jumped back outside, where people were climbing over his car. “Get in the damn car!” he shrieked at Wilbur.

As she did, two men stepped between Seigenthaler and the car door, one of them shouting “Who the hell are you?” With Seigenthaler frantically telling them to get back, that he was a federal agent, the other men brought a pipe down on the side of Seigenthaler’s head. Then the crowd, crushing in to seize Sue Harmann, kicked his unconscious body halfway under the car.

Zwerg was face-down in a patch of warm, gooey repair tar on the pavement. John Lewis lay unconscious near the retaining wall, felled by a blow from a wooden Coca-Cola crate, and his seminary schoolmate, William Barbee, lay some distance away. Barbee had been overtaken and knocked to the pavement, and was still being stomped and kicked by a taunting swarm of rioters when Floyd Mann suddenly appeared among them. “Stand back!” he shouted above the din, showing his drawn revolver. “We are going to keep law and order.” He cleared the attackers from Barbee and moved on to pull others from a television cameraman. Mann, a state official within city jurisdiction, was acting alone, without support or legal authority.

They made their way to John Lewis, who was pointed out to them as a Freedom Rider, and stood over him to read Judge Jones’s injunction.

For safety, the three of them huddled near the same state officials who were serving them with an injunction that held them responsible for the riot.

Commissioner Sullivan told inquiring reporters that all the ambulances for whites were out of service with breakdowns. One reporter ventured to the taxi where Zwerg was sitting and tried to explain why it was taking so long to evacuate him. “You can’t get me out of here,” Zwerg replied vacantly. “I don’t even know where I am or how I got here.”

Some fifteen or twenty minutes later, a police lieutenant came upon the partially hidden form of Seigenthaler, who was just beginning to stir. “Looks like you got some trouble, buddy,” he said. “Yeah, I did,” said Seigenthaler, waking to pain. “What happened?” “Well, we had a riot.” “Don’t you think you better call Mr. Kennedy?” “Which Mr. Kennedy?” “The Attorney General of the United States.” The lieutenant frowned. “Who the hell are you?” he asked. “I’m his administrative assistant,” groaned Seigenthaler, in a manner that convinced the lieutenant he was talking with a bona-fide big shot. He ran for help, carrying news that reporters picked up instantly. Seigenthaler passed out again. He awoke in the X-ray room of a hospital, lying beside a doctor who was talking on the telephone with Byron White in Washington.

A handful of whites ambushed two stray Negro teenagers half a block from the bus terminal, setting one briefly on fire with kerosene and breaking the other’s leg with a stomping.

William Barbee soon made this message public with a statement to reporters at his bedside. “As soon as we’re recovered from this, we’ll start again,” he said. One floor above him, in the white section of St. Jude’s Hospital, Jim Zwerg cleared enough concussion from his head to tell reporters essentially what they had heard from Jim Peck in the Birmingham operating room six days earlier. “We will continue our journey one way or another,” said Zwerg. “We are prepared to die.”

The New York Times, which gave King and the civil rights movement generally sympathetic coverage, opposed the extension of the ride. “They are challenging not only long-held customs but passionately held feelings,” the paper declared. “Non-violence that deliberately provokes violence is a logical contradiction.”

A Gallup poll in June showed that 63 percent of all Americans disapproved of the Freedom Rides.

Dawson recognized the one in front as Billy Jack Caston; the second was another of the sheriff’s cousins, and the third was the sheriff’s son. There was very little talk. Caston asked Moses where he was going. To the registrar’s office, Moses replied. Caston said no he wasn’t and struck a quick, swiping blow to Moses’ forehead with the handle of his knife.

In a mystical discovery even more vivid than the pains shooting through his head, Moses felt himself separating from his body as he staggered on the sidewalk. He floated about ten feet up in the air so that he could watch the attack on himself comfortably. His fears became as remote as Caston’s grunts, and time slowed down so that he could hear Preacher Knox running away on the sidewalk before he saw Caston slapping and shaking him. In peaceful surrender, he saw Caston hit him again behind the right temple, saw himself sink to his knees, saw Caston drive his face to the pavement with a crushing blow to the top of the head. Through waves of concussion, he distinctly heard Curtis Dawson pleading with Caston to stop the beating.

“We’ve got to go on to the registrar,” he said, as Dawson struggled to overcome his horror at the sight of the blood flowing down from the gashes in Moses’ head. Preacher Knox returned to help him to his feet. “We can’t let something like this stop us,” said Moses. “That’s the whole point.” Dawson replied bravely that he was ready; Preacher Knox agreed. Moses was deeply moved by their decision, and most especially by Preacher Knox’s unexpected courage, but as the three of them crossed the street toward the courthouse he wondered whether Knox, with shock compounding his scrambled ways, really knew what he was doing. The county registrar reserved a practiced, well-what-have-we-got-here look for Negro customers, but it vanished in a gasp at the sight of Moses, whose bloody head and shirt combined with his serene, quiet voice to give him a presence as eerie as Banquo’s ghost. The registrar gamely sought refuge in bursts of businesslike indifference, excessive politeness, and put-upon impatience, before all his bureaucratic poses collapsed under the weight of his nerves. He said he was closing the office and asked the three Negroes to leave.

Like Doar, he drove out to Negro country churches to meet those making the registration complaints, and he was moved by the courage of those who persevered without protections. His dominant impression of Moses was that he was hauntingly peaceful.

Somehow, Moses reported, Herbert Lee was being singled out for resentment as a detective or “spy” for the Negroes. Doar took these reports seriously enough to ask Moses and Steptoe to take him out to Lee’s farm for a talk. Lee was not there, however, and Doar had to leave for Washington that night. When he walked into his office at the Justice Department the next day, Doar found a phone message that Herbert Lee had been murdered.

wounds. In a chilled voice, Anderson reported that he was at a McComb funeral home with a mysterious corpse, which had lain amid a crowd for some hours in the parking lot of a cotton gin over in Liberty. No white or Negro in Liberty would touch it. When the McComb hearse arrived from across the county line to fetch the body, summoned by a cryptic message from Amite County authorities, no one at the scene dared to disclose even the victim’s name. These circumstances led Anderson to suspect that it was someone from the voter registration classes. Moses soon identified the body as Herbert Lee. It lay on a table with a single bullet wound in the left temple.

At the funeral, the new widow Lee left her children to walk up to Moses and McDew, beating her chest in anguish and shouting, “You killed my husband! You killed my husband!” Her cries echoed in the cold misery of Moses’ reflections. He labored to reach a philosophical perspective on his guilt, acknowledging that he was a “participant” in the killing, in the sense that it probably would not have occurred without his registration classes. Still, Moses could not convince himself that he should have acted differently unless he also accepted the reality of Amite County as permanent—that Negroes could always be gunned down with impunity for showing interest in the ballot.