The Burglary

by Betty Medsger

  JOHN RAINES’S BASIC ASSUMPTIONS about crucial aspects of American life were challenged for the first time by what he observed as a Freedom Rider. For one thing, it was the first time he met people who looked like him—white—who wanted to kill him, all because he supported the yearnings of black people for equality. Before that experience, he had no idea that some government agencies in the United States were instruments of repression against their own people. He had no idea that countless black Americans were prevented from exercising their basic rights, such as riding on a public bus or voting. He had thought going on a Freedom Ride would be a nice way to spend his summer. It turned out to be a transforming experience.

  The day after his Freedom Ride ended, Raines traveled to visit his parents at Glen Lake. It took nearly all day to make the journey by plane and car. He was looking forward to a quiet respite with his parents by the lake. As he traveled that day, he felt a need to decompress and think about what he had just experienced. He knew his parents’ lake house would be the perfect place to do it. It had been a family gathering place since they bought it in 1951. His parents had not been active in the civil rights movement, but he grew up knowing they hated racism. While he was in the South, his father, in an interview with Robert Caro, then a reporter for Newsday, a newspaper on Long Island, said he respected his son for being a Freedom Rider.

  When he arrived at the old cottage—which the family called the “pea-green shack on the damn hill” because years ago cars often got stuck on the unpaved road that led up to the cottage—nestled in trees above Glen Lake, he was tired but also eager to talk. He had stories to tell. He was also hungry. His parents were happy to see him, but they had finished dinner much earlier. They were tired and ready to go to bed by the time he arrived. They suggested he have dinner at the Homestead. They would hear his stories in the morning.

  With that suggestion, Richard and Lucille Raines unintentionally set the stage for the next life-changing development in their son’s life that summer.

  John liked the Homestead, a stately resort hidden in the woods on the northeastern edge of Lake Michigan, just a few miles from his parents’ cottage. There weren’t many people in the Homestead dining room by the time he arrived that evening. That made it easy for Bonnie Muir, his waitress, to spend more time talking with him than she usually did with customers. As she served him dinner, she learned two things that pleased her—that he had just returned from being a Freedom Rider and that he was about to move to New York. As he answered her questions about his time in the South, he struck her right away as “a great alternative to the sort of all-American guys that I had dated before that.” They were “very nice, but not very interested in the world.” Muir was interested in the world. A news junkie, she had read about the arrests of some of the Freedom Riders a few weeks earlier. She was not an activist, but she admired people who were. She was happy to meet such a person, especially one as handsome and charming as John Raines.

  It was clear they both enjoyed their conversation that evening. Both later said they felt a meshing of values in their conversation that night that they seldom, if ever, had felt before. In the two weeks before Raines left for New York, they enjoyed what they later called “three or four intense dates.” On one of those evenings, he took her home to meet what she still calls, after fifty years of marriage, his “exuberant” family. All of them gathered after dinner, as they often did, on the front porch and sang. “They were great singers. They sang four-part harmony … some hymns, barbershop quartet songs. I thought it was wonderful.” She was starting to fall in love not only with Raines but also with his family.

  Crazy about each other by the time they parted in late August, Raines and Muir arranged to meet several weeks later in New York. They agree that, as Bonnie Raines put it years later, “It was really there, in New York, that we fell in love.” For hours, they walked the streets of Morningside Heights and Harlem, ecstatic in their new love and also in their affection for the city on those clear, beautiful autumn days. Many years later, John Raines suggests, with a grin, that Bonnie would not have married him if he hadn’t lived in New York. She laughs and counters that she might not have married him if he hadn’t been a Freedom Rider.

  Anyone observing the couple with the striking all-American good looks as they dated that summer at Glen Lake, or several weeks later in New York, might have predicted that if they married they would be likely to root themselves in a few years in one of the nation’s expanding lush suburbs. Surely no one would have predicted then that ten years later they would be driving a getaway car through the Philadelphia Main Line district after committing what J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, considered one of the worst crimes in the bureau’s history.

  ON THE SURFACE that summer at Glen Lake, Bonnie Muir seemed like a quintessential summer lodge waitress. Her long, shining black hair framed an engaging and warm face. She had a radiant smile and was a dreamy version of Hollywood’s girl next door. She had just finished her sophomore year at Michigan State University and was earning money for her education by working at the Homestead. She had grown up in Grand Rapids, the daughter of loving parents Dorothy and Andrew Muir. At the university she was a good student, a pretty cheerleader who cheered the Spartans on at every football game, and an enthusiastic Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority sister. But there was much more to her than those visible signs of the happily conforming midcentury coed. Like most middle-class American women of her generation, when she thought of her future, she had these expectations: She would graduate, she would marry, she would have children, and, if she worked outside the home, she would be an elementary school teacher. Within two years, Muir would envision a future radically different from those expectations.

  John Raines, tall and blond with radiant blue eyes and an easy, hearty laugh, had, like most men of the educated class, grown up close to the establishment and with a certainty that a variety of professions would be open to him. When he was a child, his parents were part of the liberal Minneapolis elite during the years his father, the future Indianapolis bishop, was pastor of the large Hennepin Avenue Methodist Church. Hubert Humphrey, the mayor of Minneapolis during some of those years, lived on the same street as the Raineses and was a friend who dropped by their home occasionally. Raines realized later that he had grown up accustomed to being connected to power. It was an environment, he recalls, that gave him and his brothers “an impression that all was right with the world, and that they would inherit it and run it.” Protestant clergy in top-tier appointments, such as bishops or pastors of large, prestigious congregations, were not rich by virtue of salaries. Rather, church officials made it possible for such clergy to live like the rich by buying large homes for them in the best neighborhoods and paying for them to send their children to superior schools. This was the case for the Raines family.

  One year after they met, John and Bonnie were married, on August 17, 1962, in Grand Rapids. She left Michigan State at the end of her junior year. They started life together in New York the next month, and she immediately enrolled in City College of New York as an elementary education major. Their first child, daughter Lindsley, was born on September 10, 1963. Several months later, when she was pregnant with their second child, Mark, she and John went to Washington and stood with thousands of people in a round-the-clock vigil at the Lincoln Memorial protesting the filibuster then taking place on Capitol Hill in an attempt to block passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. That was the first time Bonnie Raines participated in a protest.

  After they married, John kept going south. “Bonnie knew I would be going south again, and she wanted me to go,” John recalls. Each time he prepared to leave, “Bonnie never said, ‘I wish you wouldn’t go, but go if you have to.’ Instead, it was always, ‘Go. I wish I could go too.’ ” She stayed behind in their small student apartment in Morningside Heights, near Union Seminary, alone the first year, but later with the company of their two babies.

  John Raines was present at some of the pivotal events
of the civil rights movement, beginning with the Freedom Rides in the summer of 1961. In 1964, he was in Mississippi during Freedom Summer. In April 1965, he answered Martin Luther King’s plea for people to come to Selma, Alabama. King’s plea went out after local black people were attacked by whites, led by state and local law enforcement officials on horseback, after local black people, including schoolteachers, were denied the right to register to vote and fired from their jobs for trying to do so. In the summer of 1965, Raines went to Baker County in southwest Georgia. That turned out to be his most unforgettable trip south.

  In Mississippi in 1964, the most violent of the civil rights summers, John Raines walked the streets of Hattiesburg and drove country roads with black people as they tried to register to vote under extremely hostile conditions. Black leaders from Mississippi predicted months earlier that the situation might be explosive that summer and begged for federal protection. A new organization had been formed—the Association for the Preservation of the White Race—by white people who wanted an organization even more aggressive in its support of racism and segregation than the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens’ Councils. The new organization boldly and openly described itself as anti-Negro, anti-Catholic, and anti-Semitic. Thirty thousand members had signed up in fifteen counties across the state. In addition, the state legislature passed laws that spring designed to make it extremely difficult for civil rights workers to have a public presence. The new laws prohibited people from picketing any public buildings or demonstrating on public streets and sidewalks or on any property belonging to cities, counties, or the state. Enraged at the possibility of black people registering to vote, white people burned black homes and churches that spring with impunity. Local law enforcement officers not only didn’t investigate the crimes, they often participated in them.

  Black community leaders from Mississippi went to Washington to plead for the Johnson administration to send two hundred federal marshals to protect civil rights workers that summer. Their plea was made at the same time southern senators were conducting their filibuster against the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Historian Howard Zinn, writing about the refusal to send the marshals, said the request for two hundred marshals to protect civil rights workers and local black people as they tried to secure one of their most basic rights as Americans, the right to vote, was a pretty small request, especially when compared to the fact that by that time the government had 40,000 troops in Vietnam in a war U.S. officials said was being fought to secure basic rights for Vietnamese people.

  The fears of Mississippi black people turned out to be more than justified. The tragedy that, more than any other during those summers, came to symbolize the extreme violence southern whites used against black people and their supporters took place that year: the murder of James Chaney, a local young African American civil rights worker, and Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, two young white civil rights workers from New York.

  It was in the midst of that terrible cauldron in Mississippi in summer 1964 that John Raines started thinking seriously about the role of the FBI. Like many civil rights workers, he wondered why the FBI was not on the scene there and elsewhere in previous years when violence was threatened against civil rights workers. Records that emerged years later showed that skepticism about FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s attitudes toward the civil rights movement was well placed. When asked to investigate threats against civil rights workers, he repeatedly claimed that the FBI could not intervene—even when there was evidence that violence against civil rights workers was likely—because the bureau was an investigating agency, not a crime-fighting agency. This claim was the opposite of how the FBI had responded historically to predicted crime. Hoover and the bureau, in fact, gained their greatest fame for being crime fighters. The bureau’s dramatic crime-fighting, crime-preventing efforts in the 1930s, when the FBI stopped the violent sprees involving John Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, and other well-known crime figures of that era, had been used by Hoover to build the reputation of the FBI. Hoover proudly trumpeted the bureau’s crime-fighting image. In contrast, when civil rights workers were threatened in the 1950s and early 1960s, Hoover refused to be involved until he was forced to by President Johnson.

  A few days after the three young men disappeared and were feared murdered, the White House recognized that the situation in Mississippi was at least as grave as black people had told them it would be when they asked for protection in May. At a planning session at the White House that involved Attorney General Robert Kennedy and his aides Burke Marshall and Nicholas Katzenbach, President Johnson summed up the law enforcement problem then in Mississippi this way: “There are three sovereignties involved. There’s the United States, there’s the state of Mississippi, and there’s J. Edgar Hoover.”

  President Johnson ordered his old friend the FBI director to take action in Mississippi. With that, the FBI opened an office in Jackson, the first in the state. Agents there—led by Roy Moore, the same agent the director appointed to be in charge of the MEDBURG investigation in 1971—conducted an intensive investigation. Forty-four days after the three men disappeared, their bodies were found. They had been ambushed, shot dead, and then buried in an earthen dam near Philadelphia, Mississippi, the town where Ronald Reagan launched his 1980 presidential campaign. They were victims of a conspiracy by local law enforcement agents and the Ku Klux Klan. The FBI arrested eighteen men in October 1964.

  From 1961 through 1965, on each of Raines’s trips south, he faced the seething hatred of southern whites many times as they tried to prevent black people from registering to vote and from entering bus stations, restaurants, schools, voter registration offices, and other public places. He was in the center of angry white mobs and was arrested several times, but his most threatening experience took place in 1965, when he spent a night alone in a jail in Newton, Georgia. What happened that summer in Newton, a rural area in Baker County in southwest Georgia, was not a touchstone moment of the civil rights movement as, say, Freedom Summer in Mississippi or the Selma-to-Montgomery march in Alabama had been. It was, however, a touchstone moment for the black people in that isolated part of Georgia and for John Raines.

  He went to Newton in response to a call for help from Charles Sherrod, his former classmate at Union Seminary in New York. Sherrod had left the seminary and gone to Baker County to establish a chapter of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, then one of the most effective organizations supporting grassroots efforts by black people to claim their basic rights. By the time Sherrod asked Union Seminary for help in the summer of 1965, he had been working in Baker County for five years. It felt, he later wrote, as if there had been virtually no change. Segregation in southwest Georgia seemed to be total. Nearly every public institution was still off-limits to black people.

  As violence against African Americans increased as they tried to register to vote that summer, Sherrod realized he needed public exposure of the attacks. He called Union Seminary president John Bennett and said, “Get us a couple whites.” A familiar pattern went into play. Sherrod, Bennett, and students at the seminary, including Raines, knew that if northern whites came and were beaten along with local blacks, reporters would come. That meant the beatings might be shown on national television, and that, in turn, made it more likely that protection from the federal government might arrive.

  When Bennett put word out at Union Seminary that Sherrod needed help, Raines and a few other seminarians responded—as they had in the past to calls from the South—as they would have if a member of their own family had asked for help during a crisis. They flew to Georgia immediately. As with the seminarians’ earlier trips, travel costs were paid by the seminary.

  A few days after he arrived, Raines was arrested at a rally in Newton and incarcerated. Instead of being placed in a jail inside a courthouse, where many southern jails were located, he was placed in a building behind the Baker County Courthouse. He remembers the space was very small and very dark. Given his isolation and the fact tha
t the sheriff was someone who was known for turning a blind eye to violence against black people and their supporters, Raines realized he was in a dangerous situation, but he didn’t realize how dangerous. He was completely helpless to do anything about it.

  Without Raines knowing it, word spread in the local black community during the night that a civil rights worker was in trouble—that the local White Citizens’ Council was planning to attack him in jail. Frantic to save him, leaders in the black community convinced a local black farmer to put up his modest farm for the bail needed to get John Raines out of jail. To this day, Raines is profoundly grateful for that act of generosity that may have saved his life. In that experience, more than any other, he said he learned how important the embrace of a community of resisters can be.

  DURING HIS SUMMERS in the South, Raines gradually realized that southern black people were giving him what he came to call his “second education.” It changed him forever. This new education was, in some ways, in opposition to what he calls his “first education.” Prestigious schools—Carleton College in Minnesota and Union Theological Seminary in New York before he became a minister on Long Island—were the venues of his “first education.” The lessons taught there, he recalled, were primarily “an education in deservedness. We were all being trained to be leaders of our generation—liberal leaders who would help others become more like us.…We were taught to want to become judges, to go to Washington and become part of Foggy Bottom [the U.S. State Department].…We were taught to aspire to what privileged white males should aspire to—which was leadership of the country.”

  In his first education, Raines was taught to accept the world as it is, full of the coming together of ambiguity and tragedy. “We felt comfortable. We saw the everyday injustices of life, but we were persuaded that life had tragic moral limitations and that we were well qualified to become leaders because we did not bring impossible and disruptive expectations to the social system.”