Lindsley admits that despite her pride in what they did, occasionally she feels “a little bit angry when I think about what could have happened … that they were willing to take that risk.” As a mother of three now, she cannot imagine doing the same.
Bonnie with Lindsley, the oldest Raines child, age eight, in 1971, the year of the burglary. The Raineses told her about the burglary when she was in college. They did not tell the other children until many years later.
She and Mark, age eight and seven at the time of the burglary, searched for clues they might have seen then. The children didn’t know where their parents and the other people went when they left the house early each evening. Nor did they know what happened late at night in the attic. Bonnie Raines remembers telling them during that period, late 1970 through March 1971, that they must never go to the attic. Despite that warning, they recall that they did go up there. They saw maps and drawings on the wall of the forbidden room where, they now realize, people they knew as their parents’ friends developed the strategy for the FBI burglary and its aftermath late at night while Keith Forsyth practiced speeding up his lock-picking skills. They thought what they saw on the wall was just part of their parents’ work.
As she tried to remember that time, Lindsley recalled something that seemed highly relevant. Her mother once told her that because the FBI might be tapping their phone it was important to be careful about what she said on the phone. Lindsley didn’t understand what the FBI was, or why it might be interested in what she said, but she remembers thinking at first that it was “kind of cool” that the FBI, whatever it was, might be interested in her conversations. But then she had a second thought: “What if I say a curse word? Am I going to get in trouble?”
She also remembered Bob Williamson, but as her troubadour, not as a burglar. She has fond memories of him playing his guitar as she sang along. He would sing her favorite songs and also make up songs just for her. Sometimes he played until she fell asleep.
After Mark learned about the burglary, he read some of the stolen documents. He was angry about what the FBI was doing, and he was very proud of his parents’ role in revealing it.
The three oldest children always knew their parents were politically engaged. Even when the children were very young, the Raineses talked to them about the civil rights movement, about the war in Vietnam. They took the children to the trials of friends and to demonstrations. They hoped such experiences would plant seeds that would make the children aware of injustice and the need to do something about it. Once the children went with Bonnie Raines to get their father out of jail when he was arrested and jailed at a military base in New Jersey in 1970 as he tried, along with other activists, to block a freight train loaded with napalm that was on its way to a port to be shipped to Vietnam. After she got a call saying he was in jail, Bonnie Raines corralled the children into the station wagon and drove to the office of Uncle Bob, then pastor of a prominent Methodist church in Philadelphia, to get the $300 in cash she needed to pay John’s fine. Mother and children then sped off to rescue him.
As the youngest child, Mary did not have such experiences. She was literally the embodiment of the confidence they had by 1975 that they probably were not going to be arrested for Media. By the time she was growing up, they seldom went to demonstrations and trials. Perhaps because Mary did not have Vietnam-era memories of her parents and their friends, it may have been even more difficult for her to imagine them burglarizing an FBI office. As she talked with Mark and Nathan months after learning about the burglary, she searched for words to describe the conundrum their secret posed for her. “You look at your parents as being, you know—”
Nathan gently suggests, “Authority figures?”
“Yes,” Mary readily agrees that’s what she means. “And here they were doing crazy things like I think happens only in movies. Mom’s telling about how she walked in and was wearing those gloves and scoping out the place. It was all like a big spy movie to me. I could not believe that my parents actually did something like that.” As she sorted it out with her brothers, Mary seemed to be proud, amazed, and confused all at once. “I don’t think I can feel what they were feeling, but I think I understand now how strongly they felt in order to put so much at risk.…Somebody needed to do it.…Maybe no one else thought of it. Once they knew it needed to be done, they had to go ahead. They had to take things into their own hands. Still, I could not believe that my parents did something like that.”
Nathan shares her sense of amazement. Learning what they did that night, he said, “made me look at them in a different light.
“I have nothing but pride about what they did,” he said years after his initial shock. “Pride and a sense of duty that I have to sort of try to carry on what my parents started.…I think we all have felt a need to continue what they’ve started.…They risked everything. But they knew that this information was important enough that the public needed to know about it.” A counselor in a very poor public middle school in North Philadelphia, Nathan says that “if there was a situation where I felt the government was overstepping its bounds, I would absolutely consider doing something similar to what they did.”
Each of the Raines children echoes the pride Nathan expresses. “I definitely was proud of them,” says Mary. “It was kind of like having a rock star parent, but in a cooler way. I don’t really idolize … except for people like Martin Luther King.” At some point, she realized that her parents, like the few people she idolized, also put a lot on the line. They “did something for the country.…They risked a lot.” As the mother of two small children now, she can’t imagine taking the same risk. But they “fueled the fire for us to … make our own individual choices based on the values that they taught us.” Mary’s most recent job was as an attorney investigating police misconduct for the Independent Police Review Authority in Chicago.
The Raineses shared their secret first with Lindsley. She knew it for several years before her siblings were told. The day they told her is etched very clearly in her mind. They had come to visit her on parents’ weekend one autumn when she was a student at Denison University in Granville, Ohio. “We went for a walk down the hill. There’s this quiet place.” As the three of them sat down in a beautiful sheltered spot, one of her parents said, “We have something to tell you.”
Lindsley, now a social worker in the trauma unit of Cooper Memorial Hospital in Camden, New Jersey, remembers thinking, “ ‘My God, they’re getting divorced.’…They told me the story. And I just remember thinking, ‘Oh my God.’ I really had no idea that this had happened.…I was amazed and awestruck.…I just remember being blown away, like … I can’t believe that they did it, first of all, and that they got away with it.…The consequences didn’t cross my mind then.…And then they said, ‘But you can’t tell anybody!’ I’m like, ‘Okay.’…I was the oldest and the first one to know, and so that was kind of a little prize, a little package for me that I could hold on to.…I was happy to know.…They were acknowledging that I was old enough and mature enough to sort of deal with it and appreciate what they had done.”
AT FAMILY GATHERINGS in the Philadelphia row house where the Raineses moved after the children were all on their own, or at the old house in Glen Lake in northern Michigan, where their children, and now grandchildren, all like to gather every summer, questions still come up occasionally about the biggest family secret, the night John and Bonnie Raines burglarized an FBI office. Many stories have been told. They laugh when they remember the story about Nathan’s best friend. When Nathan told him the big secret about his parents, the friend did not believe him. “You’re making this story up, just to look cool, to make your parents look cool,” he said. “I suppose you’ll tell me next they’re art thieves.”
“We laugh and shake our heads at the same time,” says Lindsley. Though the children have now been privy to the big secret for years, a sense of wonderment occasionally still emerges when they talk about what their parents did that night in 1971, and t
hey still can’t quite imagine how it was possible.
The stories that piece together how it was possible for Bonnie and John Raines to say yes when Davidon asked them what they thought of burglarizing an FBI office begin with John filling out a form that came across his desk in the spring of 1961 at the small Methodist church where he worked in Setauket, a community on the North Shore of Long Island. It was an invitation from the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to travel to the South that summer as a Freedom Rider. At the time, his decision to participate did not seem particularly consequential. He had no plans for the summer and thought this might be an interesting thing to do.
Little did he know. Becoming a Freedom Rider that summer introduced him to an America he did not know and transformed him into a person he had not planned to be. It led to his marriage to Bonnie Muir, to their unusual commitment to joint participation in acts of nonviolent resistance, and ultimately to their driving to Media in March 1971.
CORE planned the Freedom Rides to force open the access to transportation the U.S. Supreme Court had ordered when it ruled, in Boynton v. Virginia in December 1960, that segregation in interstate transportation facilities was illegal. After that court decision, government agencies did not move to enforce it, and the facilities remained segregated. CORE officials concluded that transportation facilities would remain segregated until people forced authorities to apply the new law, just as public schools remained segregated until brave black people enrolled in previously all-white schools, despite angry whites standing in schoolhouse doors barring their entrance. After much violence and the intervention of federal troops, local authorities were forced to abide by the 1954 Supreme Court ruling that required integration of public schools. Now CORE’s Freedom Riders would force access by black people to public transportation with a similar method: teams of black and white people would ride buses together. If attempts were made to deny black people that right, the integrated team would insist that the new law be enforced. In the end, 450 people, including John Raines, volunteered and made up sixty teams, each half black and half white, that traveled throughout the South that summer and fall. They endured arrests and beatings, the burning of some of their buses, and even attempts to burn the Riders themselves. In one town, angry white women broke through circles of white men surrounding the Freedom Riders and madly clawed their faces until they drew blood.
At the end of the suffering, the Riders achieved their goal: In November 1961, the Interstate Commerce Commission issued rules on how the law established by the U.S. Supreme Court would be enforced.
This was new territory for John Raines. He had not been very interested in the civil rights movement. He was aware of Rosa Parks’s heroic role in the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott in 1955, but he had not been either intellectually or emotionally engaged in such issues. He had never, for instance, preached a sermon on civil rights or racial issues. Shortly before the CORE invitation reached him, he had made an important decision about his future. He had notified officials at the Setauket church that he was leaving his post as pastor, a position he had held for two years, to return to Union Theological Seminary to study for a doctoral degree in Christian social ethics. He had finalized arrangements to work as an assistant at the seminary to Professor Reinhold Niebuhr, one of the most respected theologians of the twentieth century. Then twenty-seven, Raines had decided that the academic life, rather than life as a pastor, was the life he preferred. This decision was a detour from family expectations. Raines’s father was then a prominent Methodist bishop, based in Indianapolis, and his two brothers were both ordained Methodist ministers. But he was looking forward to the change. He longed for the rich intellectual life of the seminary in Morningside Heights, adjacent to Columbia University, and to preparing for a career as a professor.
He was planning to teach social ethics, not planning to apply them to the point of subjecting himself to arrest, something that would be very likely now that he had agreed to become a Freedom Rider. Before he left for the South, he knew Freedom Riders on the first buses that went south had been attacked and their buses set on fire. There also had been news reports about the threatening attack one evening at a crowded African American church in Montgomery, Alabama. As local black people held a special service to thank the Freedom Riders for their bravery and commitment, an angry white mob circled the church and threw rocks and Molotov cocktails at it. The scene was hellish—black people inside the church, including the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, singing joyously as they thanked black and white Freedom Riders for their courage, and white people outside the church puncturing the inside music with explosions that threatened to destroy the church and those in it. Federal marshals arrived to control the mob, but they were unable to do so. It was not until National Guardsmen arrived that many hours later the people who had been kept inside the church all night to protect them from the mob were freed.
What had been a relatively casual decision about how to spend his summer turned out to be much more for John Raines. Whatever he originally thought about whether CORE was overreacting by requiring every Freedom Rider to attend workshops in how to maintain nonviolent behavior no matter how badly one was treated, he soon realized such training was necessary. After he finished the training, he flew to St. Louis in early July to meet his fellow Freedom Riders for a bus ride to their first destination, Little Rock. His fellow Freedom Riders included one of the organizers of the Freedom Rides, the Reverend Benjamin Elton Cox, then twenty-nine and the African American pastor of Pilgrim Congregational Church in High Point, North Carolina, and Janet Reinitz, then twenty-three, a white artist from New York City.
As they traveled south into Arkansas, word spread in Little Rock that an integrated bus was on its way to the local bus station. When the Freedom Riders’ bus pulled into the bus terminal, an angry white mob was waiting inside. As the Riders walked into the terminal they quickly realized the game they were expected to play. In a not very subtle attempt to be technically in compliance with the new federal law that required racially integrated transportation facilities—while simultaneously maintaining segregation—the old “white” and “black” passenger areas had been renamed “integrated” and “segregated.” The “integrated” area was for black people, and the “segregated” area was for white people. Police tried to guide the Freedom Riders toward the area designated for black people. The Riders conferred briefly about how to deal with the subterfuge, and then, led by Cox, they slowly and calmly walked together into the area designated for white people.
Raines remembers the white mob screaming at them furiously at that point. The police chief, Paul Glascock, was surprised and enraged at the Freedom Riders. He had apparently thought the riders would go along with the transparent trick. He promptly arrested them under a state breach-of-the-peace statute and took four of the five to jail. The fifth, a high school student, obeyed his order to return to St. Louis.
Actually, no Freedom Rider was supposed to be arrested in Little Rock. Local and state officials were desperate to prevent the city from being in the spotlight again. In 1957, it had received international notoriety when the governor, Orval Faubus, supported white segregationists when they publicly defied efforts of African American students to integrate the city’s Central High School. Shocking scenes of violent white mobs attacking African Americans and using their bodies as barricades to keep black children from entering school were broadcast nightly on national network news and abroad.
In anticipation of the Freedom Riders coming to Little Rock, orders had gone out from officials that there should be no repeat in 1961 of those 1957 scenes. Even Governor Faubus was upset about their arrests. As the local Gazette editorialized while the riders were behind bars, “The quicker the defendants can be freed the better for the community.”
The judge assigned to their case, Judge Quinn Glover, told them he would suspend their sentences if they returned to their homes. No way. They had more bus rides to take. They refused his offer. Days later, he orde
red that they be brought to his chambers for a private meeting. “I know you have a right to do what you did. I know the mob, not you, was the threat to the peace,” John Raines recalls the judge telling them, “but if I don’t find you guilty, I won’t get reelected.” Trying to appeal to their racial justice instincts, Judge Glover said, “And the other guy is worse on niggrahs than I am.” He told them he would set them free if they agreed to get out of town. Unwilling earlier to promise to go home, they were willing now to agree to get out of town. After all, they wanted to ride to their next assignment, and it seemed as though they had made their point in Little Rock. They grabbed their new freedom, left the courthouse, and boarded a bus for Louisiana.
Story in Newsday, a Long Island newspaper, about the young local minister, John Raines, who became a Freedom Rider in the South in the summer of 1961.
Raines being booked at the Little Rock jail. Days later, a judge freed him and his fellow Freedom Riders on condition that they leave town. (Photo from Orval Eugene Faubus Collection, University of Arkansas Libraries)
As the Freedom Riders emerged from a bus in Shreveport, they looked up and saw police snipers lining the edge of the roof of the bus station, their rifles aimed at the Freedom Riders. Local police had completely sealed off the bus terminal. No tests of laws would take place there that day. Dave Dennis, a local man who had just been released from Mississippi’s Parchman State Prison where he had been imprisoned for his role as a Freedom Rider just days earlier, took them to a meeting with local black clergy who invited them to stay at their homes that night. But when it became clear that the local clergy felt threatened by the strong measures taken by local authorities, the riders feared their presence in town would add more danger to what already was a very dangerous situation for local black people. They thanked the black ministers for their offer of hospitality, but told them they would ride through the night to their next destination. The next day, the riders were turned away at the Baton Rouge terminal.
The Burglary Page 59
