Eyes on the Prize

by Juan Williams

  “I was beaten twice yesterday by hoodlums,” said Peck. “Once aboard the bus and once in the terminal in Birmingham.” When asked how extensive his injuries were, Peck replied, “Well, it is fifty stitches, and that’s a lot of stitches.”

  “And still and all, you are going to continue?” the reporter asked.

  “I think it is particularly important at this time when it has become national news that we continue and show that nonviolence can prevail over violence,” said Peck.

  The bus company, however, was reluctant to risk having another of its vehicles bombed, and the company drivers—all white—refused to carry the Freedom Riders. For two days the riders negotiated with the bus company, but finally gave up. They headed for the Birmingham airport, fearing for their safety. Simeon Booker, an Ebony reporter, called Robert Kennedy from the airport, and Kennedy later spoke of the “terror” he heard in Booker’s voice. The riders made it safely onto the plane and flew to New Orleans.

  But the Freedom Ride was not over. A group of students experienced from the sit-ins in Nashville, eight black and two white, decided to go to Birmingham to continue the Freedom Ride.

  “If the Freedom Riders had been stopped as a result of violence,” said Diane Nash, “I strongly felt that the future of the movement was going to be cut short. The impression would have been that whenever a movement starts, all [you have to do] is attack it with massive violence and the blacks [will] stop.”

  Nash carefully selected the students who would go to Birmingham and warned them of the violence they might encounter. “We were informed we should be willing to accept death,” said Susan Herman, then a twenty-year-old Fisk University student and one of the ten who went to Birmingham. With the arrival of the Nashville students, the activists re-approached the bus company. Would they let their buses be used by the students? Attorney General Kennedy was now intent on enforcing the Supreme Court’s decision mandating racially integrated travel between the states. He was also angered by Governor Patterson’s refusal to return the administration’s phone calls. Kennedy got on the phone with the Birmingham police and then with the Greyhound bus company.

  The second leg of the Freedom Ride, from Montgomery to New Orleans.

  Outside of Anniston, Alabama, the Freedom Riders’ bus was firebombed.

  Kennedy later said that the presence of the Nashville students in Birmingham, waiting to continue the Freedom Ride, seemed to him a “festering sore,” an incitement to bloody violence. To Southern segregationists, Kennedy seemed to be working with the Freedom Riders, thumbing his nose at the South instead of telling the activists to stay home and stop causing trouble. Mississippi attorney general Joe Patterson told Kennedy’s aides in the Justice Department, “I think they [the Freedom Riders] ought to go home and quit this darned Communist conduct.”

  The tension escalated when Birmingham police arrested the new Freedom Riders. “The commissioner of public safety, Bull Connor, told us we were being placed in protective custody for our own safety, for our well-being,” said Freedom Rider John Lewis. “We went to jail that Wednesday night, May 17, 1961 … Thursday night we went on a hunger strike, a fast. We refused to eat anything or drink any water.”

  On Friday, May 19, at 2 A.M., the students were awakened in their cells by Bull Connor, who flatly announced that he was taking them back to Nashville. The students refused to move. The officers carried them into police cars and drove them to the Tennessee state line, 120 miles from Birmingham, dumping them out beside the highway.

  The students called Diane Nash in Nashville, about 100 miles away, and cars were sent to pick them up. The students then went straight back to the Birmingham bus station. When they tried to board a bus for Montgomery, the bus driver said, “I cannot, I will not drive,” according to John Lewis. “He said, ‘I have only one life to give, and I’m not going to give it to the NAACP or CORE,’” recalls Lewis.

  That same day, Governor John Patterson finally returned the White House’s phone calls. The president was in a cabinet meeting. Robert Kennedy came out of the meeting to talk to Patterson. It was a brief and unfriendly conversation. Patterson would agree only to meet with John Seigenthaler, a Justice Department aide who had gone to Birmingham to monitor the situation for the Kennedys.

  “I went in to see Patterson and he had his whole cabinet sitting around this long table just across from his desk,” recalls Seigenthaler, a native of Tennessee. “Patterson said, ‘Glad to see you—you’re a southerner.’” The governor stood up and gestured to the men seated at the table. “‘Now all these people here, they’re with me. You go ahead, if you’ve got a tape recorder on, you go ahead and use it,’” Seigenthaler recalls Patterson saying.

  “‘Well,’ I said, ‘I don’t have a tape recorder on, Governor, but I’m sure you have one. You feel free to say anything, because anything I’m going to say, I’d feel free to say outside this room and as far as I’m concerned you do the same thing. The thing I’m here to tell you is that there is a strong feeling in the Department of Justice that these people have got to have access to interstate transportation.’”

  Patterson eyed Seigenthaler. The other men in the room kept silent. The governor and the president’s emissary remained standing.

  Alabama governor John Patterson (at head of table) meets with advisers.

  “I’m going to tell you something,” Patterson said, according to Seigenthaler. “The people of this country are so goddamned tired of the mamby-pamby that’s in Washington, it’s a disgrace. There’s nobody in the whole country that’s got the spine to stand up to the goddamned niggers except me. And I’ll tell you I’ve got more mail in the drawers of that desk over there congratulating me on the stand that I’ve taken against Martin Luther King and these rabble-rousers. I’ll tell you I believe I’m more popular in this country today than John Kennedy is. I want you to know if the schools in Alabama are integrated, blood’s going to flow in the streets and you take that message back to the president and you tell the attorney general that.”

  Patterson had one more point to make—that if the Kennedys sent in federal marshals, there would be “warfare.” Seigenthaler did not flinch; he stuck to his one and only point. “What I’m authorized to say is if you’re not going to protect them, the federal government will reluctantly but nonetheless positively move in whatever force is necessary to get these people through. They’ve got to be given protection and so do other interstate passengers.”

  Patterson scanned the faces of his cabinet. Seigenthaler remembers him saying next, “Well, let me give you my statement. The state of Alabama is willing and ready and able to protect all people—visitors, tourists, and others on the highways and elsewhere—while they’re in the state of Alabama. I’m making that statement to you and Floyd Mann, who is head of the state highway patrol and is sitting on your right.”

  Mann pulled Seigenthaler to one side and assured him that the state police would guard the bus from the time it left the city limits of Birmingham until it reached the outer limits of Montgomery, where that city’s police would take over.

  Seigenthaler was satisfied. Using the governor’s telephone, he called Robert Kennedy and told him of Alabama’s pledge to protect the Freedom Riders. Kennedy asked whether Seigenthaler believed that Patterson would honor the agreement, and the president’s aide said yes. But Kennedy wanted further assurance. Would the governor issue a press release making his promise public? Patterson said that Kennedy could ask the Justice Department to issue a statement. “I’ll have my own statement,” the governor added, according to Seigenthaler, “but it won’t run against what I’ve already said.”

  Patterson issued a statement promising protection to any traveler in Alabama. But he added an unexpected final line. It read, “We don’t tolerate rabble-rousers and outside agitators.”

  Robert Kennedy renewed his pressure on the Greyhound Bus Lines. He told George E. Cruit, superintendent of Greyhound’s Birmingham terminal, that the federal government’s considerab
le efforts to enable the Freedom Riders to journey from Birmingham to Montgomery would be rendered meaningless if there was no one to drive the bus. “I think you had better get in touch with Mr. Greyhound, or whoever Greyhound is, and somebody better give us an answer to this question,” Kennedy said.

  On Saturday, May 20, a week after the original buses were bombed and attacked, the new group of riders left Birmingham for Montgomery. The twenty-one Freedom Riders and Alabama officials agreed that the bus would run its normal route, making all stops on its way south to Montgomery. Two Greyhound officials would accompany the riders on the bus. As John Lewis recalls, state police promised “that a private plane would fly over the bus, and there would be a state patrol car every fifteen or twenty miles along the highway between Birmingham and Montgomery—about ninety miles.”

  All seemed calm as the bus left Birmingham. The Freedom Riders relaxed somewhat—several even napped. But when they reached the city limits of Montgomery, the planes flew away. The patrol cars disappeared as the bus pulled into the quiet Montgomery bus terminal.

  “And then, all of a sudden, just like magic, white people everywhere,” remembers Freedom Rider Frederick Leonard. “Sticks and bricks. [Cries of] ‘Niggers. Kill the niggers.’ We were still on the bus. But I think we were deciding—well, maybe we should go off at the back of this bus. Then maybe they wouldn’t be so bad on us. They wanted us to go off the back of the bus. And we decided—no, no—we’ll go off the front and take what’s coming to us.

  “Jim Zwerg was a white fellow from Madison, Wisconsin,” Leonard continues. “He had a lot of nerve. And I think what saved me, Bernard Lafayette and Allen Kasen [was that] Jim Zwerg walked off the bus in front of us, and it was like they were possessed—they couldn’t believe there was a white man who would help us. And they grabbed him and pulled him into the mob. I mean, it was a mob. When we came off the bus, their attention was on him. It was like they didn’t see the rest of us, for maybe thirty seconds, they didn’t see us at all.”

  Leonard and two other Freedom Riders fled but were trapped when they reached a railing overlooking a parking lot about fifteen feet below. The three men, one still clinging to a typewriter, had no choice but to jump. They ran from the parking lot and through the back door of a post office. Leonard remembers, “The people in there were carrying on business just like nothing was happening outside. But when we came through there, mail went flying everywhere.”

  Presidential aide John Seigenthaler, driving a rental car ahead of the bus, had dropped behind after he stopped to buy gas and coffee. Minutes after the bus pulled into the terminal, he drove in front of Montgomery’s federal office building, next to the bus station. He heard screams, and when he looked over saw baggage being hurled into the air. Seigenthaler charged his car through an alley and into the middle of the mob.

  “The Freedom Riders emerging from the bus were being mauled,” he remembers. “It looked like two hundred, three hundred people all over them. There were screams and shouts. As I drove along I saw two young women … being pummelled by a woman who was walking behind one of these young women. She had a purse on a strap and was beating [the young woman] over the head and a young, skinny blond teenager in a T-shirt was sort of dancing backwards in front of her [the Freedom Rider], punching her in the face. I bumped the car onto the sidewalk, blew the horn, jumped out of the car, grabbed the one who was being hit, took her back to the car. The other Freedom Rider got into the back seat.”

  James Peck, one of the Freedom Riders who were attacked in Birmingham, Alabama.

  Seigenthaler tried to usher the first young woman into his car, but she resisted, saying, “Mister, this is not your fight. I’m nonviolent. Don’t get hurt because of me.”

  “If she had gotten into the car,” says Seigenthaler, “I think I could have gotten away. But that moment of hesitation gave the mob a chance to collect their wits, and one [person] grabbed me by the arm, wheeled me around and said, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ I said, ‘Get back! I’m a federal man.’ I turned back to the Freedom Rider, and the lights went out. I [had been] hit with a pipe over one ear. I literally don’t remember anything that happened [next].”

  Floyd Mann, head of the Alabama State Police, was also in the bus station that morning. He ordered the mob to stop, but they continued to batter the Freedom Riders with fists, baseball bats, and pipes. Mann finally pulled out his gun as one of the activists took a beating right in front of him.

  “I just put my pistol to the head of one or two of those folks that was using baseball bats and told them unless they stopped immediately they was going to be hurt,” Mann said. “And it did stop the beaters.”

  Mann fired a warning shot into the air, scattering some of the ruffians. He ordered state troopers to the scene, but by the time they arrived, Jim Zwerg and Seigenthaler had been knocked unconscious and the mob had set several cars aflame. Mann telephoned the governor, who declared martial law in Montgomery.

  The next day Jim Zwerg spoke to a television reporter from his hospital bed. Zwerg said that “segregation must be stopped. It must be broken down. Those of us who are on the Freedom Rides will continue. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to, but we are going on to New Orleans no matter what happens. We are dedicated to this. We will take hitting. We’ll take beatings. We’re willing to accept death. But we are going to keep coming until we can ride [from] anywhere in the South to anyplace else in the South, as Americans, without anyone making any comment.”

  Freedom Riders John Lewis (left) and Freddie Leonard.

  News of the vicious attack quickly reached Washington. Robert Kennedy realized that Governor Patterson had broken his promise. Not only had the Freedom Riders been savagely beaten, but the president’s representative had been knocked unconscious and left lying in the street for nearly half an hour. Kennedy now believed he was justified in sending federal marshals to Alabama, even though it would mean a showdown between the state of Alabama and the federal government.

  Seigenthaler recalls that when Robert Kennedy called him in the hospital, Kennedy jokingly asked, “How’s my popularity down there?” Seigenthaler replied, “If you’re planning on running for public office, don’t do it in Alabama.”

  Kennedy sent 600 federal marshals to Maxwell Air Force Base outside Montgomery, prompting Governor Patterson to say, “We regret such federal interference. It is unwarranted, unneeded … I think the federal position has been one which has encouraged these outside agitators to come into our state and this encouragement has helped to create this problem we have here. Now the federal government comes in here and illegally interferes in a domestic situation they themselves helped to create.”

  John Lewis and Jim Zwerg, after being assaulted with other Freedom Riders in Montgomery, Alabama.

  Attorney General Robert Kennedy speaks with John Seigenthaler, a Justice Department official beaten by the mob when the Freedom Riders arrived in Montgomery.

  About 200 of the officers were sent into the city to protect the hospital and the Freedom Riders. As the crisis intensified, Martin Luther King, Jr., flew to Montgomery. The next evening, King addressed a rally in support of the Freedom Riders. Protected by a ring of federal marshals, the mass meeting was held at Ralph Abernathy’s First Baptist Church as night fell.

  With the darkness came a mob of several thousand whites, who surrounded the church. They threatened and cursed the blacks inside, who became more frightened by the minute.

  “Now we’ve got an ugly mob outside,” King told the crowd overflowing the church pews. “They have injured some of the federal marshals. They’ve burned some automobiles. But we are not giving in, … and maybe it takes something like this for the federal government to see that Alabama is not going to place any limit on itself—it must be imposed from without.”

  Since the bus boycott, racial tension had intensified in Montgomery. The city had recently closed all its public parks and its zoo rather than allow blacks to visit them. The pent-up hatred toward the civ
il rights activists was now welling up. Around 3:00 A.M., still trapped inside the church, King telephoned Robert Kennedy. The civil rights leader angrily asked the attorney general if there was law and order in the United States.

  Kennedy later related that he replied “that our people were down there, and that as long as he was in the church he might say a prayer for us. [King] didn’t think that was very humorous. He rather berated me for what was happening to him at the time. I said that I didn’t think that he’d be alive if it hadn’t been for us, that we were going to keep him alive and that the marshals would keep the church from burning down.”

  Kennedy then called Governor Patterson. Patterson lashed out at him for sending the marshals to Montgomery in the first place, and for ordering them to encircle the First Baptist Church that night without first consulting the governor. “Patterson was making a political oration against Negroes and the federal government and the Supreme Court and the system of federal law and the Civil War and everything,” says Burke Marshall, who listened as Kennedy spoke with Patterson.

  Kennedy let the governor vent his fury, but then broke in, saying, “You’re making political speeches at me, John. You don’t have to make political speeches at me over the telephone.”

  Outside the church, the federal marshals clashed with the angry crowd. The mob threw bottles, and the marshals threw tear gas, which drifted into the church, choking the people inside.

  “The first thing we must do here tonight,” King said above the sounds of rioting in the streets outside, “is to decide we are not going to become panicky. That we are going to be calm, and that we are going to continue to stand up for what we know is right … Alabama will have to face the fact that we are determined to be free. The main thing I want to say to you is fear not, we’ve come too far to turn back … We are not afraid and we shall overcome.”