Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  Farmer’s group was heading into Jackson, Mississippi, behind Lawson’s, which had been hauled out of the whites-only rest rooms of the Jackson bus terminal and off to the city jail. The Coffin group was meeting with King at Abernathy’s house in Montgomery, deciding whether to press on toward Jackson, too, and Burke Marshall was receiving alarming intelligence of new student groups forming all over the South to go in behind them. To Kennedy, the Coffin group represented a distressing change in the composition of the protesters. No longer confined to Quakers, kooks, students, pacifists, or even Negro Gandhians, the ranks of the Freedom Riders suddenly included prominent Ivy League professors. With the crisis stretching endlessly ahead, an angry Robert Kennedy released his second press statement of the day, which was designed to head off the favorable publicity such people might attract. “Besides the groups of Freedom Riders traveling through these states, there are curiosity seekers, publicity seekers and others who are seeking to serve their own causes,” Kennedy declared. “A cooling-off period is needed,” he added, warning riders to “delay their trips.” Governor Patterson praised the statement as “the first time the federal government has displayed any common sense in some days.”

  Kennedy grew even angrier over the next few hours. As Farmer’s group was joining Lawson’s in the Jackson city jail, he learned that all twenty-seven of the Freedom Riders were refusing bail and were planning to stay in jail after conviction rather than pay fines or secure appeal bonds. When Burke Marshall and Byron White failed to obtain satisfactory explanations, Kennedy called King that night, demanding to know why the Freedom Riders would not accept bail.

  “It’s a matter of conscience and morality,” said King, more formal under attack. “They must use their lives and their bodies to right a wrong. Our conscience tells us that the law is wrong and we must resist, but we have a moral obligation to accept the penalty.”

  “That is not going to have the slightest effect on what the government is doing in this field or any other,” Kennedy snapped. “The fact that they stay in jail is not going to have the slightest effect on me.”

  “Perhaps it would help if students came down here by the hundreds—by the hundreds of thousands,” said King.

  “The country belongs to you as much as to me,” said Kennedy. “You can determine what’s best just as well as I can, but don’t make statements that sound like a threat. That’s not the way to deal with us.”

  King pulled back instinctively, fearing that his leverage on Kennedy was backfiring. “I’m deeply appreciative of what the Administration is doing,” he said. Then, despairing of argument, he collapsed into a preacher’s cry: “I see a ray of hope, but I am different than my father. I feel the need of being free now!”

  Kennedy let it pass. “Well, it all depends on what you and the people in jail decide,” he said wearily. “If they want to get out, we can get them out.”

  “They’ll stay,” said King, and there was nothing more to say.

  Kennedy called Harris Wofford to vent his anger against the Freedom Riders in jail. “This is too much,” he said. “I wonder whether they have the best interest of their country at heart. Do you know that one of them is against the atom bomb?” Wofford mumbled a soothing reply. His known sympathies for civil disobedience had all but excluded him from the phone loop during the Administration’s first crisis in his field of duty.

  In Montgomery, King returned to Abernathy’s living room after his jolting conversation with Kennedy. “You know,” he said, “they don’t understand the social revolution going on in the world, and therefore they don’t understand what we’re doing.” His report did nothing to dispel the gloom hanging over William Sloane Coffin and six other new Freedom Riders. Aside from fear, some of them were upset by Robert Kennedy’s suggestion that their mission was unpatriotic, that it would weaken the President at the very moment he was trying to negotiate world peace with the Soviet Union. These were sobering, intimidating thoughts for people who were accustomed to life on the campus. “We’re really just faced with a simple issue,” said King. “Do you want to go on?” He led them all in a prayer for guidance. Some wept openly under the crush of fear and conflicting loyalties, and in the end they passed out slips of paper to vote by secret ballot. When the tally came up unanimous in favor of going on—rejecting the Attorney General’s advice—there was much hugging and rejoicing as they steeled themselves for the trip to the bus station.

  Abernathy, Walker, Shuttlesworth, and Bernard Lee accompanied them for what turned out to be a short journey. While they were sitting at the lunch counter, surrounded by Guardsmen during their pre-trip integrated meal, Sheriff Mack Sim Butler walked behind their stools and counted off all eleven of them for arrest. The sheriff later stated that he had exhausted his forbearance protecting the original Freedom Riders. “I was so furious,” he said, “because I thought if I finally got that first bunch of roughnecks out, it would be all over!”

  Attorney General Kennedy pulled five hundred of the six hundred federal marshals out of Montgomery that afternoon. To trusted reporters, he made public some of the complaints he had been making privately to King—attacking the wisdom, the motivation, and even the physical courage of the new Freedom Riders. “It took a lot of guts for the first group to go,” he told The Washington Post, “but not much for the others.” Lashing out, he called the Freedom Riders “the safest people in America” and derided their decision to remain in jail as “good propaganda for America’s enemies.” The Attorney General, summarized the Post, “does not feel that the Department of Justice can, at these times, side with one group or the other in disputes over constitutional rights.” Gone, only eighteen days after his speech at the University of Georgia, were the grand words about how the department would move swiftly to enforce federal court decisions guaranteeing the constitutional rights of Negroes.

  Kennedy’s anger failed to dampen enthusiasm at CORE headquarters in New York. On the day after Farmer’s arrest in Jackson, a CORE spokesman announced that contributions were pouring in through the mail and that more than a hundred people had volunteered to take up the ride. “We believe we can end segregation by the end of this year,” he told reporters.

  In the education building at Ebenezer, King presided over the founding meeting of the Freedom Ride Coordinating Committee. Gordon Carey of CORE represented Farmer, who remained in the Jackson jail. Two Nashville preachers represented Bevel and Lawson, who were with Farmer, and an SCLC assistant sat in for Wyatt Walker, who was in the Montgomery jail. With a SNCC representative and an officer of the National Student Association, these six people pledged to “intensify” the Freedom Ride until bus segregation crumbled across the South. They planned to open recruiting offices in four Southern cities. They would raise money to pay for bus tickets and lawyers. They would request an audience with President Kennedy. They would seek a “strong ruling from the Attorney General in clearly establishing the rights of interstate travelers (possibly) through an order to the Interstate Commerce Commission.” They would “fill jails in Montgomery and Jackson in order to keep a sharp image of the issues before the public.”

  That was on Friday, May 26, three weeks after the original CORE Freedom Riders had left Washington in utter obscurity. After an odyssey that had changed many lives and come to the attention of millions, they were allied formally with the heirs of the Montgomery bus boycott and the student sit-ins, maneuvering along a collision course with the federal government as well as the Southern states.

  Then the Freedom Rides dropped precipitously and permanently from the headlines. The idea seemed to spread by osmosis that the South’s best course, under the truce with the Justice Department, was to defend segregation quietly, under the color of law. Accordingly, the new Freedom Riders came to be funneled efficiently, almost protectively, into the Mississippi prison system. Their fate receded as an old story.

  As the second wave of riders reached Mississippi, President Kennedy delivered an extraordinary second 1961 State of th
e Union address to a joint session of Congress. “I am here to promote the freedom doctrine,” he declared on May 25. “The great battleground for the defense and expansion of freedom today is the whole southern half of the globe—Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East, the lands of the rising peoples. Their revolution is the greatest in human history. They seek an end to injustice, tyranny, and exploitation.” But the President’s address never mentioned racial injustice at home, let alone the Freedom Rides. He asked Congress for nearly $2 billion to “almost double the combat power of the Army” and to begin the race to the moon. Just after a contentious summit meeting with Khrushchev in Vienna, Kennedy had tripled draft calls and sought from Congress another $3.2 billion for weapons and fallout shelters. In short, he had moved the country toward a war footing over the disputed territory of Berlin, and in such a mood he was less inclined than ever to recognize the distracting problem of the Freedom Riders. At his press conference late in June, when the number of jailed Freedom Riders was approaching two hundred, the President volunteered nothing on the subject. Nor was he questioned about it.

  Public opinion leaders seemed only too eager to oblige the President by disengaging from the strife down in Mississippi. 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 news story that same day, headlined “Dr. King Refuses to End Bus Test,” cast the issue in a most negative light. “Some liberal Southerners of both races joined moderates and others today in asserting that the Freedom Riders should be halted,” it began, consigning the renewed campaign to the far fringes of public support. This was the last page-one story on the Freedom Rides to appear in the Times. A Gallup poll in June showed that 63 percent of all Americans disapproved of the Freedom Rides.

  Robert Kennedy, having denounced both King and the Freedom Rides in the most scathing terms on Thursday and Friday, arrived at the Justice Department on Monday morning, May 29, in an entirely different mood. He announced to his staff that King’s suggestion of seeking a ruling from the Interstate Commerce Commission might not be so naïve after all, in spite of that agency’s notoriously encrusted bureaucracy. In fact, the idea seemed so good upon reconsideration that Kennedy sent Justice Department lawyers scrambling into unfamiliar territory. They came up with the novel idea of a “petition” by the Attorney General to the nominally independent ICC. They researched, drafted, and cleared the document for Kennedy’s signature—all on that same day. Justice teams gave ICC commissioners and assorted bureaucrats no peace until they issued the ruling Kennedy wanted, handed down that September. In so doing, they had telescoped a process that normally took years—even if the commissioners liked the proposal, which in this case they did not—into less than four months. Experts considered the lobbying feat a bureaucratic miracle.

  The difference, after the early Freedom Rides, was that Justice Department officials pursued the private strategy with a vengeance. They immediately stepped up efforts to create a well-financed, tax-exempt organization to register Negro voters in the South. On the tax side, the clandestine pursuit resembled the campaign to secure tax benefits for those who helped ransom the Bay of Pigs prisoners. Kennedy himself intervened with IRS Commissioner Mortimer Caplan to help secure a tax exemption for the new Voter Education Project, housed in Atlanta’s Southern Regional Council. When that organization’s director, Leslie Dunbar, went to the IRS to negotiate for his exemption, Burke Marshall and other Kennedy officials went with him.

  Marshall, Harris Wofford, and foundation executive Stephen Currier worked simultaneously to bring the various civil rights groups under uniform rules and a central budget. This task had been delicate enough earlier in the spring, given the touchy history between Roy Wilkins and King, but now the complications rose geometrically with the addition of CORE and the SNCC students. Logically, neither organization seemed promising for registration work. CORE had few members in the South; SNCC was not really an organization, having only one full-time staff member. Both organizations were deeply engrossed in the Freedom Rides. None of these objections mattered to the Justice Department, however. CORE and SNCC must be recruited, whatever it took, because one of Kennedy’s goals was to coax them out of precisely the kind of confrontational actions around which they were shaping their identities.

  In early June, Marshall attended a small conference that included several of the SNCC and CORE leaders not in Mississippi jails. At the Capahosic, Virginia, plantation once owned by Booker T. Washington’s successor, R. R. Moton, Marshall sat under a live oak tree on the banks of the York River and made the case for voter registration. His most receptive listener among the students was Timothy Jenkins, who was bound for Yale Law School in the fall. Jenkins was deeply critical of what he called the “pain and suffering school” within SNCC. He did not share their religious zeal, and he thought direct action was a dead end. Whenever the zeal died out, he predicted, the movement would be left with no political protection, and to Jenkins all such protections were grounded in the vote. He believed this so strongly that he had already set out to win over three people he thought could swing the balance of power within SNCC. The “three Charlies,” he called them: Sherrod, Jones, and McDew. There were not three more dissimilar people in the SNCC leadership—Sherrod the country mystic, deeply religious with a stubborn streak; Jones the sophisticated dandy, son of a prominent Southern preacher, with his fancy clothes and a modulated baritone, a junior version of King; and McDew the Northern athlete, daring and “cool,” with a subtle appreciation of both labor history and Jewish prophets. To Jenkins, it was immensely hopeful that the same movement could attract three such people, and it was even more hopeful that they came to see the merits of voter registration after many all-night discussions.

  On June 16, Attorney General Kennedy received in his office a delegation from the Freedom Ride Coordinating Committee. It included the “three Charlies,” plus Wyatt Walker, who had bailed out of the Montgomery jail, and Diane Nash, whom Jenkins had written off as “addled by piety” and “hopelessly committed” to nonviolence. They all hoped to secure some additional federal help for the Freedom Rides, but what they received instead was a counterpoint from the Attorney General. The Freedom Rides were no longer productive, he said. The committee members could accomplish more for civil rights by registering Negro voters, and if they would agree to move in that direction he would do everything he could to make sure they were fully supported and protected. He mentioned the confidential work already under way to secure a tax exemption and large foundation grants.

  This was too blunt for Charles Sherrod, who was on his feet, nervous but angry, sputtering indignantly against what he regarded as a bribe to lure him from righteous work. “You are a public official, sir,” he said. “It’s not your responsibility before God or under the law to tell us how to honor our constitutional rights. It’s your job to protect us when we do.” Sherrod moved toward the Attorney General as he began preaching, and Wyatt Walker, fearing that he might attack Kennedy in the frenzy of his sermon, pulled him back toward his seat by the pocket of his pants. When the tension passed, Kennedy resumed his argument, pacing stocking-footed. By educating and registering Negro voters, he said, they might not make immediate headlines but they could alter the politics of the South.

  Kennedy and his aides pressed their points then and later. They went so far as to extend confidential promises that the Administration would arrange draft exemptions for the students—so long as they confined themselves to quiet political work. Harris Wofford put the choice to them most graphically: they could have jails filled with Freedom Riders, or jails filled with white Southern officials who tried to obstruct federally protected voting rights. They could be persecuted or protected. To those who expressed interest in voter registration went phone numbers for Burk
e Marshall or John Doar, along with assurances that they could call the Justice Department collect anytime they got in trouble down South.

  These arguments proved to be telling. They were made at a time when Robert Kennedy was being credited by Negro leaders for forceful intervention in the early Freedom Ride, when Shuttlesworth was telling Negro church crowds about the progress made already under the Kennedy Administration, shouting “We thank Jack, Bob, and God!” And even to those aware of Kennedy’s abrasive criticisms, or those suspicious of his political motives, the Attorney General was appreciated for his combative involvement. He did not stand aloof, and he seemed to feel that if he shortchanged the civil rights groups in one way, he needed to compensate them in another.