Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  Dr. Anderson presided at the meeting. Slater King made a speech, as did C. B. King and several others. A. C. Searles, editor of the local Negro weekly, reported on his emergency conference that afternoon with President Dennis. To all his arguments that the student suspensions were not only wrong but improper—handed down without any notice or hearing, in advance of any conviction in the courts—Dennis had replied tersely that the students would be suspended “forever.” Dennis had been overwrought, Searles declared, and Searles himself was upset enough to call Dennis—his old friend, fellow deacon and Criterion Club member—“the blackest white man I ever saw.” Sharp words ostracized Dennis, and stirring words called for unity against segregation. Long-standing patterns were turned upside down, with age and conciliation giving way to youth and confrontational witness.

  Cordell Reagon, an extroverted performer with a clear tenor voice, had discovered in the SNCC workshops two gifted singers, Rutha Harris and Bernice Johnson, both of them preachers’ daughters studying voice in the hope of becoming opera stars. The trio had been singing freedom songs together for weeks, and that night they climbed into the Mount Zion pulpit to lead the singing. By prearrangement, no one played the piano or organ for either the freedom songs or the church hymns. The harmonies and intensities of naked voices became a trademark of the Albany Movement. All sounds, from the soaring gospel descants of the soprano soloists to the thunderous hand-clapping of the congregation, were created by human flesh. The songs harked back to the moods of the slavery spirituals. There were tragic, sweet songs like “Oh, Freedom” and rollicking ones like “This Little Light of Mine.” At first, the SNCC leaders accepted the songleader role because of their appreciation for movement singing, and the elders conceded them the role because music was of marginal importance to the normal church program. But the SNCC leaders soon developed a manipulative guile about the music. Their a capella singing took the service away from established control by either the preachers or the organist. The spirit of the songs could sweep up the crowd, and the young leaders realized that through song they could induce humble people to say and feel things that otherwise were beyond them. Into the defiant spiritual “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around,” Sherrod and Reagon called out verses of “Ain’t gonna let Chief Pritchett turn me around.” It amazed them to see people who had inched tentatively into the church take up the verse in full voice, setting themselves against feared authority.

  Between songs, Anderson invited the five arrested students to tell the congregation why they had decided to defy segregation at the bus station, and what had happened to them. One by one they spoke, with the last student in the pulpit being Bertha Gober, a diminutive young woman with the small voice of a child. She described her arrest, her jailers, the sordid details of her cell. “I felt it was necessary to show the people that human dignity must be obtained even if through suffering or maltreatment,” she said. “…I’d do it again anytime…After spending those two nights in jail for a worthy cause, I feel that I have gained a feeling of decency and self-respect, a feeling of cleanliness that even the dirtiest walls of Albany’s jail nor the actions of my institution cannot take away from me.” The trembling simplicity of her speech washed over the audience. “There was nothing left to say,” Sherrod wrote. He and everyone else were reduced to tears, including the “hard, grown men.” They all swayed to the closing song, “We Shall Overcome,” and about a third of them stayed on after the benediction to keep singing on their own. Dr. Anderson sang a solo, as did Sherrod and people rising from the audience. The singers stayed on well past midnight, not wanting to let the moment end.

  More than five hundred people gathered outside city hall the following Monday for the swift trial and conviction of the five arrested students. Previously, Sherrod had introduced the milling crowd outside to Charles Jones, his SNCC colleague and former Rock Hill cellmate, who was newly arrived from Atlanta, and during the trial Jones marched the crowd slowly back to Shiloh Baptist Church. Chief Pritchett, moving alongside them, wavered between good-natured jokes and orders to disperse—seemingly on the verge of making arrests. The next day, when Sherrod ventured onto the turbulent Albany State campus to address a student gathering, police arrested him on a trespassing warrant signed by President Dennis and two professors. Sherrod spent the night in jail before bonding out.

  Sherrod, Reagon, and Jones found themselves hanging on a ledge. Support for them as catalysts had waxed strongly in the recent public meetings, but they sensed that it was unstable. If they engineered another challenge to segregation, the new adults in the movement were likely to turn against them as provocateurs. If they did nothing, however, the movement would dissipate during its recuperation. To break through the impasse, they hit upon the idea of inviting a spark from Atlanta. This would enable them to rekindle the movement with minimal risk of backlash. Accordingly, they called James Forman, the new executive secretary of SNCC, and suggested that he organize a group of Freedom Riders to test the Albany train station.

  Forman liked the idea. He was a publicist who had come South from Chicago to write stories about the movement. Forman could be abrasive—he had been thrown out of the sharecroppers’ “tent cities” in Fayette County, Tennessee, on charges of “factionalism”—and he had brought to SNCC’s autumn meeting a taste for apocalyptic heroics that had struck Bob Moses as amusing. But Forman’s aggressive competence filled a vacuum in SNCC. He raised money to pay overdue bills. Through phone calls and press releases, he expanded SNCC’s role as a press agent just as reporters were looking for ways to keep up with the unpredictable student demonstrations across the South. Having been active in the predominantly white National Student Association, Forman helped make minor news by encouraging the students of exclusive Sarah Lawrence College in New York to send a telegram of support to Brenda Travis at her Mississippi reform school. He had helped recruit Tom Hayden, a white activist from the NSA, for a publicity trip to McComb, during which Hayden was dragged from a car and beaten.

  Inasmuch as SNCC headquarters was too poor to do much administration anyway, Forman decided that little would be lost if he cleared the place out for a Freedom Ride to Albany. He assembled a motley group that included himself, his new office manager, a student volunteer, a touring Danish writer, Nashville Freedom Rider Selyn McCollum, and three whites who had emerged from ordeals in McComb: Bob Zellner and newlyweds Tom and Casey Hayden. All they lacked was money for the train tickets, and for that Forman sounded out Bernard “Jelly” Lee. Since drifting away from SNCC during its summer infighting, Lee had modeled himself more closely than ever on Martin Luther King. Having left his wife, children, and two colleges, he had been taken into the household of Wyatt Walker more or less as a ward. Lee took Forman’s idea straight to Walker, who agreed to subsidize the cost of a few train tickets. Lee joined the ride. Forman advised Sherrod of their itinerary. Sherrod alerted the Albany Movement, and someone in turn alerted Chief Pritchett.

  The train pulled into Albany’s Union Railway Terminal on Sunday afternoon, December 10. Chief Pritchett allowed only Charles Jones and Bertha Gober to meet the train, along with Negro editor A. C. Searles, who claimed status as a media observer. Searles, fidgeting with a camera and a press ID, tried to cut the tension by making nervous jokes with Pritchett, saying, “You wouldn’t arrest a newsman like me, would you, Chief?” Forman, Lee, and the other seven Freedom Riders emerged to this dampened reception. Ahead of them was a nearly vacant station, as a squadron of police had sealed off and occupied the white areas. When Pritchett and a few officers tried to escort the integrated group hurriedly through the station, the riders veered off to sit down in the white waiting room. Pritchett tersely ordered them to leave. They complied, hustling toward the white exit as pointed out by Gober and Jones.

  At the moment the mixed group of riders stepped unharmed through the door, several hundred waiting partisans of the Albany Movement sent up a cry of relief and triumph. Chief Pritchett became instantly perturbed. With hugs, ha
ndshakes, and cheers breaking out all around his porous line of officers, he tried to shout above the noise that they should clear the sidewalks. The intertwined mass moved slowly toward the waiting cars of a small motorcade. It would be impossible to convince the gawking white bystanders and their representatives on the City Commission that this joyous spectacle did no serious damage to segregation.

  Pritchett’s temper snapped. “Officers, move out!” he shouted to his reserves, and to the celebrants he thundered, “Don’t move! You’re under arrest.” He waded into the crowd to point out the culprits he wanted: the nine Freedom Riders, plus Gober and Jones. Some of them already were inside the waiting cars, with others strewn among people suddenly frozen in surprise. The arresting officers made only one mistake: in the confusion, they seized an Albany State student and missed one Freedom Rider. Eleven prisoners quickly found themselves in a paddy wagon, headed for city hall to be booked on charges of disorderly conduct, obstructing the flow of traffic, and failure to obey an officer. The motorcade left behind was transformed into a dirge recessional to Shiloh Baptist Church.

  This time there was no need to organize a summons. More than two hundred eyewitnesses formed a ready-made mass meeting, and their relatives and friends poured into the church by the minute. As their songs swelled up with fervor, everyone knew this was big, that it would sweep the Albany Movement into unknown regions. Back at city hall, Laurie Pritchett tried to explain his action to reporters, saying, “The situation was tense and there could have been general disorder at any time.”

  On Monday morning, as the leaders of the Albany Movement huddled to frame a negotiating strategy around the crisis, Marion King, wife of Slater King, joined a small group of those who decided they could not let the day go by without doing something. They went downtown to offer a prayer for justice outside city hall, and soon found themselves in jail on the same charges as the Freedom Riders. Although by police code citations these two episodes were essentially the same, those back at Shiloh perceived a jolting difference between a demonstration by young outsiders and a prayer vigil by some of Albany’s most respectable Negroes. The very idea of jailing Marion King—a Spelman graduate, a physical therapist who helped rehabilitate people with crippling injuries—shocked more conservative Negroes into attending that night’s mass meeting, which overflowed from Shiloh across the street into Mount Zion. The Albany Movement voted to march downtown again in the morning to support the defendants.

  Sherrod ducked out of the singing that night for smaller meetings with what he called his “ace group” of young high school students, mostly girls. The police seemed to be arresting anyone who refused to disperse, he said, and that meant they had a chance to fill up the jails. It was time for them all to go. “Now, you’re not going in just to get right back out,” he added. “You’ve got to stay and make a sacrifice. You’re gonna be heroes to everybody in this town.” Privately, Sherrod told Cordell Reagon that he would go to jail himself to help shore up their resolve to stay, and Reagon should stay outside to build up the next group until either Sherrod or Charles Jones came back out. Sherrod was excited. The student movement had been working almost two years toward a chance to fill up the jails, and now in Albany they finally might do it. When Reagon doubted that even such a feat could make segregation crumble, Sherrod laughed. “My uncle always told me that enough pressure can make a monkey eat pepper,” he said.

  In spite of a steady December rain, about four hundred Negroes formed at Shiloh the next morning and, three abreast behind Sherrod, marched to city hall. As the trial of the Freedom Riders commenced inside, the long line circled the block singing “We Are Not Afraid.” They went twice around, trailed by police squad cars, while an enormous crowd of both races—at least three times the number of the marchers—accumulated on the perimeter, most of them holding umbrellas. Chief Pritchett halted the march in the third lap. Instead of picking out the leaders, as was expected, he ordered his men to fan out and then herd the entire mass of marchers into a blind alley behind the jail. One line of officers stood guard at the mouth of the alley; others took marchers a few dozen at a time to be booked and jailed. As soon as he realized that they were all being arrested, an ecstatic Charles Sherrod cried out, “We are going to stay in jail! We shall overcome!” It took more than two rain-soaked hours to clear the alley.

  Page 51 of The New York Times of Wednesday, December 13, contained an AP story headlined “Albany, Ga. Jails 267 Negro Youths.” About a hundred of the prisoners had bailed out by the time the newspaper reached the streets of Manhattan, but some 150 stayed inside with Sherrod, swamping not only the thirty-person city jail but also the county jail and the work farm. Chief Pritchett had stayed up late the previous night making rental arrangements with the sheriffs of the plantation counties, and at dawn a makeshift fleet of vehicles began to scatter the overload into rural southwest Georgia. Marion King was terrified to learn that she was in a truck with forty women headed for Sheriff Johnson’s Baker County jail. Sherrod, on his way to the Terrell County jail, tried to console himself with the ironic thought that he had finally found a place to stay in his original target county, where Negroes had been too frightened to let him spend the night.

  At Shiloh, the first panic of the morning rippled outward from the earliest rumors that the prisoners had been moved to the notorious bad-land counties. The Albany Movement strategists, eyeing the pattern of sharp reaction by the white officials, fluctuated between moves that would send conciliatory signals and hard ones. A similar chemistry was operating at city hall, where Chief Pritchett and Mayor Kelley were moving in and out of an almost continuous session of the City Commission. Pritchett argued that mass arrests might well backfire by recruiting new demonstrators for the Albany Movement, but the commissioners replied that unswerving toughness eventually would crush the rebellion. Pritchett told reporters that once he might have entertained some of the Albany Movement’s new settlement demands, such as hiring Negro policemen, but the City Commission’s anger over the marches now made it “vain and useless” even to discuss them. Still, Pritchett enjoyed the confidence of the commissioners, and when a relatively small group of seventy-five showed up that morning to kneel in prayer outside the trial of the Freedom Riders, he decided not to arrest them all. In fact, he accosted only the leader, Slater King, and took him inside to explain openly to the trial judge why they were praying outside his courtroom. Slater King’s recitation of the Albany Movement’s grievances did not favorably impress Judge Abner Israel, who sentenced him to five days for contempt of court. Defense counsel C. B. King watched the bailiff haul his brother off to jail.

  The psychology of the combatants tumbled again, like a pair of wrestlers rolling downhill. At Shiloh, news of Slater King’s fate inflamed substantial numbers of people who had preferred a mass march to a prayer vigil in the first place, and more conservative Negroes came to agree that the white people might not respond well to prayer after all. Cordell Reagon decided to activate his clandestine communications system. On his word, volunteers called their sisters and cousins among the few schoolteachers cooperating with SNCC, and the teachers quietly advised trusted groups of students to slip away at a certain hour. They reached Shiloh in great numbers just in time to reinforce the group stepping off behind Reagon to city hall. Chief Pritchett allowed them to march around once. Then, under fire from the city commissioners, who believed this march was the city’s sour reward for its leniency earlier that day, he ordered his men to herd them into the alley.

  With 202 more marchers in jail by nightfall, Pritchett and Mayor Kelley faced questions from the growing number of national reporters flying into town. Kelley announced that the City Commission saw “no area of possible agreement” with the Albany Movement on integration or prisoner release. Pritchett said Albany “could erupt into violence at any minute,” sparked either by angry Negroes or by Klansmen. He vowed to put demonstrators “in jails all over Georgia” if he had to. “We can’t tolerate the NAACP or the Student Nonv
iolent Committee or any other nigger organization to take over this town with mass demonstrations,” he said.

  In court that afternoon, Judge Israel bound over the eleven people arrested after the Sunday Freedom Ride for trial on new state charges of unlawful assembly. Forman, Bob Zellner, and six others remained in jail. Three bailed out. Tom Hayden left to make a speech to a student group in New York; Charles Jones came out to replace Cordell Reagon; and Bernard Lee was eager to report to Wyatt Walker in Atlanta. Lee told Walker he had never heard of anything like Albany. Negro maids were going to jail under false names, to conceal the arrests from their white mistresses; kids were going to jail two and three times. The people of the Albany Movement were discovering miracles in themselves every day, Lee reported, and at the peak of their fervor they invoked the name of Martin Luther King. The adulation was astonishing. Lee found that whenever he identified himself as youth field secretary for the SCLC, people almost fainted with recognition and clutched him in hopeful wonder, saying, “You’re with Martin Luther King?” He thought King should consider coming to Albany, but he warned Walker that a few of the local leaders spoke poorly of King and would probably oppose it. Walker asked crisply for their names.

  During the six-week gestation of the Albany Movement, King unwittingly approached the Albany jail on an airborne path of exhaustion. He arrived home from London just as the November 1 ICC ruling went into effect. There seemed to be a bus crisis in nearly every Southern city that day, including Atlanta. In Tennessee, state auctioneers were selling off Highlander’s land, buildings, and all confiscated property, including the books from Myles Horton’s library. King, leaving the protest telegrams to Wyatt Walker, stayed mostly in transit between airport and rostrum. He returned to Montgomery as a surprise guest speaker at a huge “Testimonial Service of Loyalty and Devotion,” marking Ralph Abernathy’s departure from the First Baptist Church there. He went to Seattle, Portland, to Mankato College in Minnesota, to Cleveland, and shortly after that into a hospital for tests and two days of rest. From there he went to California for three days and then on to address the Fourth Constitutional Convention of the AFL-CIO in Bal Harbour, Florida.