The riders on the Trailways bus escaped the Klan trap, but in Anniston eight young toughs boarded the bus, dragged them into the aisles, and began punching them. Anniston cops drove them off. Birmingham, the destination of the bus, was worse. A crowd of men carrying lengths of pipe had surrounded the Trailways terminal at Nineteenth Street and Sixth Avenue North. An informer had warned the FBI about them. Incredibly, the FBI had not relayed the information to Burke Marshall’s Civil Rights Division or to the attorney general’s office. Instead it passed the tip along to the Birmingham police, whose chief, Police Commissioner T. Eugene “Bull” Connor, pigeonholed it. Although Connor’s headquarters were only two blocks from the terminal, he sent no one over. The hoodlums there dragged the riders into the station and clouted them for thirty minutes, injuring three seriously enough to require hospitalization. The next morning the Birmingham News, which had denounced the New York Times the year before for saying that fear and hatred stalked the streets of Birmingham, now admitted that “fear and hatred did stalk Birmingham’s streets yesterday.” But Alabama officials had no apologies. Governor John Patterson said, “I cannot guarantee protection for this bunch of rabble-rousers,” and Bull Connor said, “Our people of Birmingham are a peaceful people, and we never have any trouble here unless some people come into our city looking for trouble.” Asked why there had been no policemen at the terminal, Connor said he had been shorthanded because it was Mother’s Day. It was a joke.
The Sunday beatings brought the freedom riders to the attention of the Justice Department for the first time, and Burke Marshall called Bob Kennedy at home to tell him of it. Bob thought he might be able to resolve the situation with a phone call. He knew Patterson, who had been the first southern governor to support John Kennedy for President and had stayed with him even after his delegation had gone over to Lyndon Johnson. He called the governor Monday morning and asked him to protect the buses. Passengers on them had a right to travel between the states, and local authorities had a clear responsibility to guarantee their safe passage. Patterson agreed. Then he called back and said he had changed his mind. He had been elected with Klan support, and now the Klansmen were cashing in their credit.
This was the first of several strange long distance exchanges the two Kennedy brothers were to have with southern governors on the race issue, and like the others it was exasperating. Bob tried to phone Patterson again. He was told that the governor couldn’t come to the phone. He tried again on Tuesday, on Wednesday, and on Thursday. Each time aides expressed their regrets. The most they could do, they said, was take a message, and they couldn’t guarantee that it would reach the governor. They couldn’t be sure, but they thought he was “out on the Gulf”—unreachable in any case. Meanwhile the situation in Birmingham was deteriorating. The original group of freedom riders, battered and frightened, had flown on to New Orleans, but their places had been taken by volunteers from Fisk University in Nashville, from Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and from the younger civil rights organizations, one such newcomer being a cool nineteen-year-old immigrant from Trinidad named Stokely Carmichael. In Washington, Attorney General Kennedy issued a statement asking for restraint from both the freedom riders and their opposition. He said, “In order to insure that innocent people are not injured, maimed, or even killed, I would call upon all people who have paramount interest in the future of our country to exercise restraint and judgment over their activities in the next few weeks or the next few days.” There was a sense of unreality in this. He seemed to be trying to play the role of an impartial arbiter between two equally responsible, equally strong adversaries. The riders solemnly promised not to attack Alabamans; the Alabamans said nothing. Then Kennedy issued another statement saying, “What is needed now is a cooling-off period.” A CORE spokesman tartly commented that what was needed was an end to cooling off, that black Americans had been cooling off for a hundred years. By Friday, when the new freedom riders prepared to continue the journey that the others had started, it was clear that they would be heading into fresh trouble. At his brother’s request, President Kennedy put in a call to Governor Patterson. He was told that the governor was “out of town and still unreachable.” He did get through to the lieutenant governor, who after several hours said he could arrange a meeting between the governor and a personal representative of the President.
The Kennedys chose John Seigenthaler, a handsome and brave young Tennessean and the attorney general’s best friend. Seigenthaler was on a plane within an hour. At first his mission seemed successful. After he and Patterson had conferred for two hours they phoned Bob Kennedy. While Patterson listened and nodded Seigenthaler reported that he had been assured that Alabama had, as Patterson put it, “the means, ability, and the will to keep the peace without outside help.” The governor said that he could protect everyone in the state, both Alabamans and visitors, in the cities and on the highways, and he said he would do it. Bobby then called Floyd Mann, the chief of Alabama’s highway patrol, who backed up the governor’s guarantee. With that, a biracial group of twenty-one students voted to board a Birmingham to New Orleans bus in the morning. An unexpected hitch developed when no driver could be found. Getting one required a long, abrasive phone conversation between the attorney general and George E. Cruit, the Greyhound representative in Birmingham, but in the end Cruit produced a man and the riders departed for Montgomery, which turned out to be even worse than Birmingham.
The trip there was uneventful. Mann’s Highway Department did its part; both U.S. 65 and U.S. 31 were clear. The FBI had alerted the Montgomery police to the arrival of the bus, and when it was about fourteen miles from the city Mann radioed a second warning to Montgomery’s police commissioner, Lester B. Sullivan. But Sullivan was no more ready than Connor to run interference for uppity blacks and renegade whites. He ignored the messages, and there were no policemen when the bus arrived at the Union Bus Terminal to confront a throng estimated at between a thousand and three thousand. The attorney general’s office had a blow-by-blow account of what happened next because John Doar, second in command to Burke Marshall in the Civil Rights Division, was in the U.S. Attorney’s office across the street from the terminal.1 Doar had just put through a call to Kennedy when the bus drew up at the terminal. Kennedy and his deputy attorney general, Byron White, heard him say:
“The bus is in. The people are just standing there, watching…. Now the passengers are coming off. They’re standing on a corner of the platform. Oh, there are fists, punching! 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, ‘Get ’em, get ’em.’ It’s awful…. The cops are there now.”
They were state troopers, not Montgomery policemen. (“We have no intention of standing police guard for a bunch of troublemakers coming into our city,” Sullivan told reporters.) And the troopers were too few to be effective. Mann saved one black by pulling his pistol, but the rest of the riders were beyond help. So were several bystanders who were unconnected with them, and who seem to have been attacked on general principle. One boy’s leg was broken. A group of young whites poured inflammable liquid on another boy and set him on fire. One Montgomery woman held up her child so that he could reach out and beat on a black man with his fists. Other women swore at two white girls who had been among the riders and then slapped them with their purses. The girls begged a passing motorist for help. He said, “You deserve what you get. I hope they beat you up good.” Another man in a rented car pulled over. “Come on, I’ll help you,” he called to the girls, “I’m a federal man.” Before he could do anything, however, he was dragged to the pavement and slugged. He was John Seigenthaler, the President’s personal envoy to the governor of Alabama, and he lay unconscious in his own blood on the sidewalk for twenty-five minutes before an ambulance arrived. Commissioner Sullivan later explained that no ambulance had been called for Seigenthaler because “every white amb
ulance in town reported their vehicles had broken down.”
Bob Kennedy, livid, put Byron White on the next plane to Montgomery with Jim McShane, U.S. marshal for the District of Columbia. After Little Rock, Attorney General William P. Rogers had instituted riot training for U.S. marshals and their deputies to provide a federal law enforcement force other than the Army. At Maxwell Air Force Base outside Montgomery, Byron White now assembled four hundred men who had been so trained—revenue agents, border patrolmen, and guards from federal prisons—and who could be swiftly deputized for the occasion. Meanwhile Doar appeared in U.S. District Court and obtained an injunction enjoining the Ku Klux Klan and the National States’ Rights Party, the two organizations most heavily represented in the mob, from interfering with interstate travel by bus. Governor Patterson then appeared at long last to protest that these moves were unconstitutional. Besides, he said, federal officers were unnecessary. On that he was simply proved wrong.
That Saturday afternoon the most famous civil rights activist, Martin Luther King, flew into Montgomery. At the home of the Reverend Ralph Abernathy he announced that he would speak that evening to a rally in the First Baptist Church. This presented the Ku Kluxers and their allies with a prize beyond their most vicious dreams. For a while King didn’t seem to be an insurable risk. Byron White was supervising the preparations of the marshals when he received a startling phone call: Governor Patterson had called a meeting of Alabama law enforcement officers and was instructing them to arrest any federal men who broke state laws. White went to the meeting alone. It was open to the press, which took down the tense exchange between him and the governor. Patterson asked the deputy attorney general to share the government’s information about CORE. “No,” said White. Then the governor asked for information about the freedom riders. “No,” White said again. Then:
PATTERSON: You know where some of these freedom riders are, don’t you?
WHITE: Yes, in the hospital.
PATTERSON: Do you know where the others are?
WHITE: No, I don’t.
PATTERSON: If you knew where some of these people are, would you inform us?
WHITE: I will never know where these people are.
At that moment they were in the First Baptist Church with Martin Luther King. By nightfall some fifteen hundred Birmingham Negroes had arrived for the rally. It had scarcely begun when an ugly crowd began to gather in a park across the street. Learning that the local police were again absent, White dispatched his marshals by every conveyance he could find—postal delivery trucks, private automobiles, and a prison truck. They were wearing business suits and brassards and were armed with pistols, nightsticks, and tear gas guns. About a hundred of them had formed a skirmish line outside the church when the mob charged, hurling stones and broken bottles. With that, the governor declared martial law. The marshals’ skirmish line held until crucial reinforcements arrived: Floyd Mann at the head of his troopers, and Henry Graham, a National Guard major general, with a detachment of his men. Even so, before the attack of the mob was blunted the marshals had to fire several volleys of tear gas. The gas seeped into the hot, overcrowded church. At times the blacks there were close to panic. If the church had been put to the torch, which was the mob’s intention, undoubtedly the loss of life would have been great. As it was, they were well shielded by the mixed force of state and federal law enforcement officers.
Governor Patterson phoned Attorney General Kennedy to protest that Alabama was being invaded.
“John, John,” Bob said quietly. “What do you mean, you’re being invaded? Who’s invading you, John? You know better than that.”
Patterson accused him of sending the freedom riders into the state and blamed him for the violence.
“Now John,” Bob said. “You can say that on television. You can tell that to the people of Alabama, but don’t tell me that. Don’t tell me that, John.”
***
Nevertheless Patterson did it again, repeating every word. Then he said that the National Guard would defend the church and the congregation inside, but could not guarantee the safety of King.
“I don’t believe that,” said Kennedy. “Have General Graham call me. I want to hear a general of the United States Army say he can’t protect Martin Luther King.”
By now the governor was yelling. He shouted shrilly that he was giving his opinion, not the general’s. He cried that sending federal marshals had created “a very serious political situation” and shrilled, “You’re destroying us politically!”
“John,” Kennedy said in the same quiet tone. “It’s more important that these people in the church survive physically than for us to survive politically.”
That ended the threat of violence against the freedom riders. In the north, Patterson was regarded as the heavy loser in the episode. Southerners took a different view, however. Lost causes have had a special appeal to them since Appomattox. They rallied to his side, sent him money and encouragement, and promised to join the fight against integration. That was ominous; it committed them. Keeping the vow became a matter of honor, and by June it had been taken publicly by virtually every politician in Dixie, including George Corley Wallace, who the following year was elected to succeed Patterson.
Nevertheless, as such things go, the freedom riders were counted a success. No one had been killed, and Jim Crow had been routed. Enforced segregation in interstate travel, theoretically outlawed by the Supreme Court in 1950, now ended in fact. Bob Kennedy petitioned the Interstate Commerce Commission to issue regulations requiring desegregation in all interstate terminals, including airports and train depots, and four months later, on September 22, it did. A few cities cited local laws as an excuse for not complying; the Justice Department brought suit against them. By the end of 1961 Negroes could travel coast to coast without seeing “White” or “Colored” in waiting rooms.
Countless bastions of segregation remained, of course, and the most formidable of them were in Mississippi. In 1931 H. L. Mencken and Charles Angoff ran a two-part series in the American Mercury ranking the states from good to bad, “from civilized to barbaric.” Their criteria included wealth, literacy, education, entries in Who’s Who in America, symphony orchestras, crime, voter registration, infant mortality, transportation, and availability of medical attention. In the final standing Mississippi was last, behind the rest of the Deep South, and its situation hadn’t changed in 1962; indeed, when John Bererdt repeated the Mencken-Angoff survey for the magazine Lifestyle ten years later, in November 1972, Mississippi was again on the bottom, just below Alabama.2 The average Mississippian had less than nine years’ schooling. Over a third of the people were poor, as the Department of Commerce Statistical Abstract of the United States defines poverty. One in four households lacked plumbing and 29 percent telephones; only 24 percent read a daily newspaper and only 3 percent a news magazine. “The Closed Society,” Professor James W. Silver of the University of Mississippi called the state in 1964, and it became clear as the 1960s progressed that an astonishing number of its people, white and black, were actually unaware of the civil rights movement. There were no attacks on the freedom riders there because the state police didn’t allow them the freedom of movement necessary to be mobbed. Their buses were met at the Alabama border and escorted to Jackson, and when they ignored the discriminatory signs in the terminal there, they were arrested and led to jail. Eventually federal courts overturned their convictions, but the rulings meant little to individual prisoners, who had served their time by then.
Burke Marshall, almost alone in the Justice Department, understood the inflexibility of Mississippi white supremacy. He knew that its prophets regarded the present period as a second Reconstruction. If they were just as single-minded in their resistance to it as their great-grandfathers had been, they thought, the federal challenge would fail and the problem would go away. But in 1961 most of the rest of the Justice Department (with the exception of Doar) wasn’t on Marshall’s wavelength. At the end of the year the at
torney general submitted a report to his brother, the President, on civil rights progress. It almost sang with hope, and in a Voice of America broadcast a week after the confrontation at the First Baptist Church, Bob declared that racism was ebbing in the United States. He actually predicted that a black man could be elected President before the end of the century.
A brief conversation with one Mississippi black, James Meredith, would have tempered his optimism. Meredith was a nine-year veteran of the Air Force and one of ten children of a farmer in the mid-state town of Kosciusko. Inspired by President Kennedy’s inaugural address, Meredith had written to the University of Mississippi the same evening he heard it, requesting an application for admission. He returned the completed form with an explanatory note: “I am an American-Mississippi-Negro citizen. With all of the occurring events regarding changes in our educational system taking place in our country in this new age, I feel certain that this application does not come as a surprise to you. I certainly hope that this matter will be handed in a manner that will be complimentary to the University and to the state of Mississippi.”
Ole Miss, as the university at Oxford was known throughout the South, rejected him for complex academic reasons, but Meredith wasn’t discouraged that easily, and he found a powerful ally in Medgar Evers, the state director of the NAACP. In June 1961 NAACP lawyers filed suit for Meredith in the federal district court, charging that he had been turned down solely because of his race. The litigation which followed is unique in the history of American jurisprudence. A district court judge ruled against Meredith twice. In June 1962 the court of appeals for the Fifth Circuit reversed the judge; then Judge Ben Cameron of the Fifth Circuit reversed the reversal. The appeals court vacated Cameron’s order, but he promptly issued another. This went on until, after his fourth stay, he had made it clear that he intended to continue along this line indefinitely. The NAACP appealed for sanity to Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black. In September Black, a native Alabaman, upheld the court of appeals and ordered the university to admit Meredith at once. “Never!” cried Governor Ross Barnett, and two days later he went on statewide television to declare: “We will not surrender to the evil and illegal forces of tyranny.”
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 141
