by Bob Zellner
That night the Huntingdon Five and a few others close to us discussed “the problem” late into the night. Joe Thomas, ministerial student, again raised the question of how we knew we were right on the subject of race. Townsend and I had recently dropped out of the ministerial program due to its terminal hypocrisy. Joe Thomas, trying to remain in the ministry, questioned, “Say there are three million people in Alabama, and, you know yourself, there are only a tiny number of us. On campus here, for instance, only five people have sufficient balls—excuse the expression—to go to a nonviolent workshop. Twenty are willing to contribute secretly to the Montgomery Improvement Association when the state is taking homes and the cars of black ministers. You know a preacher can’t do without a car, no matter what color he is. What makes us right and the rest of the world wrong? Maybe we are wrong and they’re right. In fact, I don’t see how we can be right and everybody else wrong—it’s not natural. What makes us so conceited to think we are correct?”
We chewed on that, then we went over everything again. The first amendment gives us the right to attend meetings. The concept of academic freedom guarantees the right to investigate any question, including integration versus segregation. We not only have the right to disagree with the majority, but the teachings of the church and the great martyrs of history tell us we have a duty to disagree when we think we are right. The discipline of the Methodist church, and Huntingdon is a Methodist school, obligates us to work for racial harmony in an imperfect society. Then the clincher—we’re assigned to study the racial problem and that’s what we’ve been doing. Invariably we came to the conclusion, amazing as it seems, that we were right, and the overwhelming majority of the (white) people are simply wrong. We believed most people would someday agree with us.
I unveiled a theory I had concocted. “The main reason for not resigning college is that ninety-nine percent of threats from authorities are not carried out. Mostly authority is not challenged. They seldom intend to carry out their threats, especially when their authority is shaky, as in our case. Therefore, when you resist illegitimate authority, you achieve a degree of freedom for the small price of being willing to resist. If, on the other hand, you obey, they get you to give up your freedom voluntarily. In other words, they oppress you for free. If you resist, freedom is expanded. If you surrender, freedom is curtailed with no cost to the authority.” Nobody said anything.
“Of course,” I added as an afterthought, “You should be prepared in case they carry out the threat.” I ended with a grand flourish, “After all, men, aren’t we sociologists and historians? What’s the use of a good education if we can’t develop theories while testing them in the great laboratory of society?”
“You test them,” John Hill exclaimed. “Me, I’m heading home.”
When graduation day arrived, I was the only one of the Huntingdon Five to graduate. Townsend transferred to the University in Tuscaloosa and finished two years later. Joe Thomas returned to graduate later. Hill was readmitted the next year and was present when I was arrested on one of my visits back to the campus. Sam Shirah was also there during that visit. Sam, who later became a SNCC worker, had been expelled from Birmingham-Southern, our sister Methodist college in the North Alabama Conference. I was taking Hill’s admonition to test my “authority theory” seriously and to set about challenging Huntingdon’s restrictions as soon as I could.
6
Freedom Riders in Montgomery
In the meantime, on May 21, 1961, the Freedom Riders came to town. By the time they arrived in Montgomery they were world famous. People and governments around the globe followed their every move, trumpeting their successes and failures. The rides had begun on May 4 in Washington, D.C., when the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) organized an integrated group of activists to ride Greyhound and Trailways buses into the South; New Orleans was the final destination. Although the federal Interstate Commerce Commission had stated the illegality of segregated facilities at bus and train stations, the Southern states had maintained “White” and “Colored” waiting rooms and bathrooms.
The riders had proceeded with only minor problems until they arrived in Anniston, Alabama, on Sunday, May 14—Mother’s Day. One bus went to the Anniston Trailways station where a waiting mob, especially targeting the white riders, entered the bus and beat and stomped the riders and threw them to the back of the bus. The other bus found a KKK-led white mob waiting at the Greyhound station. The driver managed to pull away, but carloads of thugs pursued and a few miles outside of town gunshots flattened the bus’s tires and the driver was forced to pull over on the roadside. Then the attackers knocked out windows and threw home-made “Molotov cocktails” into the bus, setting it on fire. The riders were beaten as they left the bus and some might have been killed but for a plainclothes policeman who was on board.
Meanwhile the Trailways bus proceeded on to Birmingham. By this time, the police certainly knew that attacks had occurred in Anniston and that another mob was waiting in Birmingham. But when the bus pulled into the Trailways station, there was not a police officer in sight, and the white mob—again KKK-led—had a free hand in beating the riders. When news reporters later asked Birmingham Police Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor where the police were, he managed to keep a straight face when he answered, “Well, unfortunately for these trouble makers, they arrived heah in Birmin’ham on Mutha’s Day and all my police were home visiting their mommas.”
Pictures of the bus being burned in Anniston and riders being beaten by jeering white mobs in Birmingham appeared in newspapers around the world the next day—on Russian and Chinese breakfast tables—while our people at the United Nations lamely explained to African diplomats that events in Alabama did not represent the United States, just the South.
Part of CORE’s objective for the Freedom Rides had been to test the resolve of new President John F. Kennedy and his brother, new Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, to enforce civil rights legislation and regulations. After Anniston and Birmingham, the Kennedys tried to get CORE to suspend the rides. But students in Nashville, veterans already of the early sit-in movement, were determined that the rides continue. A group of these young people made their way to Birmingham to replace the riders who had been injured. When it became clear that the rides would go on, the Kennedys reluctantly got involved and it looked like the riders would receive a modicum of protection when they left Birmingham headed for Montgomery.
Between classes, my little group of students at Huntingdon were glued to radio and TV watching the struggle and the violence as the riders got closer and closer to us in Montgomery. Gallows humor spawned jokes and bets on whether the riders would get that far.
A prominent news story showed pictures of Bobby Kennedy on the phone from the White House calling to find out who was in charge of the Greyhound and Trailways bus companies, trying to find a bus driver willing to get behind the wheel on the leg to Montgomery. Finally in frustration Bobby ordered that Mr. Greyhound be brought to the phone, “Maybe he can drive his bus from Birmingham to Montgomery.” Above the burble of conversation in the TV room we all heard Townsend say, “Yeah, but Mrs. Greyhound ain’t gonna let Mr. Greyhound get nowhere near that particular bus!”
I stayed busy going from friend to friend to see who was willing to go down to the Montgomery bus station to serve as “observers” when the Freedom Riders arrived. After determining that it was mostly the five of us, I arranged a Saturday morning meeting in the dorm room that Townsend and I shared. Speaking quietly behind our closed door, we talked about what we might do if riders were being brutalized in front of us—would we just take mental notes, or, even though we were untrained in nonviolence, would we try to intervene to protect the protesters in some way?
I thought each of us should act as individuals since we would probably not all agree on a collective course of action. Townsend agreed, pointing out that someone needed to remain above the fray to report back, or get people o
ut of jail, etc. “Report to who?” Joe Thomas asked no one in particular. “Whom,” Bill Head corrected. “Who, whom, what the hell difference does it make? Townsend grumbled. “Fact is, we ain’t got nobody to report to.”
“Mrs. Durr said they’d be at Mr. Durr’s law office. It’s just across the street from the bus station,” I said helpfully. Just then the door flew open. It was George Waldron in tears shouting, “They’re already at the station and the mob is killing them, it’s terrible, you can hear them screaming over the radio.” We all broke and ran for my car, careening down four stories of winding stairs.
We had missed the riders’ arrival because the normal two hours to travel from Birmingham to Montgomery was cut in half. All traffic was removed from the road and the bus sped to Montgomery under state trooper escort, up to ninety miles an hour. But at the city limits, the state trooper cars and the state plane overhead peeled away, with the understanding that Montgomery police would pick up the protection. However, the local police did not materialize.
There was no protection at the bus station and forty years later the buck is still passing; each level of government, from the national to the local, continues to blame the other. You’d think, after burned buses and Mother’s Day massacres, that federal officials would have had several layers of redundancy in place so that protection would be guaranteed! What actually happened is like Hitler telling the Brown Shirts to protect the Jews. President Kennedy turned it over to Bobby who turned it over to the two Johns, Seigenthaler and Doar. They relied on a dedicated segregationist, Governor John Patterson, who in turn asked his very decent but too trusting Public Safety Director Floyd Mann to take over. Mann, head of the Alabama state troopers, inexplicably took the word of Montgomery Public Safety Commissioner L. B. Sullivan that local police would protect the brave young people. Sullivan, the same hard-eyed racist who sued Shuttlesworth and the New York Times, turned the Freedom Riders’ safety over to the tender mercies of a local Klan thug, Claude Henley, and fifteen or twenty others from the mob in Birmingham. All of this was dutifully reported back to the Kennedys by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, completing the circle of neglect and incompetence. Once again, repeating the Birmingham experience, the nonviolent demonstrators were left to a KKK-led mob.
Speeding down Court Street we found streets empty of people and cars. Smoke rose slowly from the direction of the bus station and the Federal Building. There were no Freedom Riders in sight, but as we leaped from our old car we saw a crowd of whites circling the bus station and parking lot with their backs to us. Working my way to the front I saw otherwise normal people dancing crazily around a fire in the middle of the street just outside the station parking lot. Shards of broken glass and pieces of cameras littered the street, which looked like it was covered with isolated puddles of glistening red jelly.
As incongruous as the fire was, I remember being shocked when I saw that the burning pile consisted of the Freedom Riders’ busted suitcases, books, note books, and the odd toothbrush or deodorant. “That’s Samsonite,” I said to myself, “You can’t break Samsonite.”
Backing slowly out of the crowd, I wheeled and headed for Mr. Durr’s law office. Near the entrance to the building I saw a four by eight sheet of plywood with a brick sticking half way through it. The area looked like it had been hit by a sudden and unexpected Category 5 storm.
Hurtling the stairs I found Clifford on the phone peering down at the bus station. Virginia grabbed both my arms, softly screaming that I had to “find Decca—she’s down there, no telling what has happened by now . . .”
“Who’s that,” I blurted.
“Decca—Jessica, Jessica Mitford, remember I told you she’s staying with us while doing a story for Esquire . . . ”
“Yes, I remember . . . what’s she look like? How can I find her?”
“She said she’d stay in sight of the office, over there on the corner . . . I can’t see her now. Bob, you’ve got to save her—if they find out she’s a Yankee reporter, they will kill her—she’s wearing a pink sweater.”
I dashed out to look for “Decca,” asking myself somewhat irrelevantly if it was a good idea for her to be wearing pink. Then, there she was, cool as a cucumber, taking notes on the corner right outside the office. I was relieved but it turned out she wasn’t as calm as she looked. When I clumsily approached her asking, “Are you Jessica Mitford?” a look of pure terror came over her.
“Why do you want to know? Who told you that?” she asked, backing away from me. I finally stammered that Virginia had sent me to get her, frantically pointing over my shoulder in the general direction of the law office. With a great deal of relief, regaining the British jut of her aristocratic chin, she replied, “Well, carry on, we’ll go see Virginia and see what we can get into next. You must be Bob.”
At that early stage of my involvement, I had little idea how important the Durrs were to the freedom movement in Montgomery and in the country. Since returning to Montgomery from Washington, where Clifford had served in Roosevelt’s New Deal and later as a member of the Federal Communications Commission, the Durrs had organized themselves and a few comrades-in-arms into a reliable rear guard for the front-line civil rights workers. I knew, of course, that Clifford and Virginia had gone down to the jail with E. D. Nixon to bail out Rosa Parks, and I knew they were close to Aubrey Williams and his wife. The State Attorney General had told us that much. Virginia’s little circle also included Dr. Swenson, a local dentist originally from Minnesota; the Reverend Bob Graetz, a white minister who served a local black Lutheran congregation, and his wife, Jeannie; and Mrs. Francis McLeod, the grand dame of Alabama Methodism. Rosa Parks served as the group’s unofficial mentor and contact with the local and national civil rights troops. Aubrey Williams, possibly the most radical of the group, had convinced a young Antioch student, Peter Ackerburg, to come South on his work-study break to help with the Southern Farmer magazine which Williams published each month. Peter had adopted our little group at Huntingdon. I was not surprised, then, to find him in the Durrs’ tiny office when I returned with Mrs. Mitford. Virginia gave Decca a rare hug and thanked me for “saving her.” It wasn’t hard, I told her because Mrs. Mitford was right where she said she’d be.
“But what happened to the Freedom Riders?” I asked. “Did any of them survive?”
Joe Thomas and Townsend Ellis had slipped in quietly. Clifford, cupping his hand over the phone, told us that some of the Freedom Riders had been taken to St. Jude’s Hospital and asked if we and Peter could go over there and then come back with a report.
Back through the milling crowd and the debris of an uneven battle, we made our way as inconspicuously as possible to the car and headed for the hospital (St. Jude’s was a Catholic charity hospital in black west Montgomery, serving mostly the black community). Nobody wanted to talk about what we had witnessed.
Joe and Townsend had not spent as much time with Peter as I had so they made small talk about how a “Yankee” feels living for a while in a Southern town like Montgomery. Ackerburg, however, would have nothing to do with genteel conversation. He asked how we felt about living in a part of the country which was trying to secede from the union a second time. Listening intently, I tried to pay attention to the driving. Joe and Townsend replied a little defensively that while they obviously didn’t feel like the white mob outside the bus station, the situation in the South was more complex than Peter might think.
At the hospital visitors’ desk we asked about the Freedom Riders, not knowing any of their names. The nuns made sure we were students from Huntingdon before taking us down a hall. Near the end of the passage we could see several doors opened to the hall. Inside the first room was a bed occupied by a young man in a flimsy gown. Sunlight and breeze on white curtains created a flickering glow behind the bed near the window. The form in the bed, its head and face covered in gauze, was indistinct—so much so, I could not determine race or gender. That bruised body in f
ront of us was the white participant, Jim Zwerg.
Zwerg, along with John Lewis, ended up on the first page of newspapers all over the world. There was a familiar picture of Jim feeling inside his bloody mouth for a missing tooth while blood still dripped onto his white shirt and suit, standing next to John Lewis looking dazed but determined.
The black cab drivers at the bus station had been afraid to carry white passengers so a cab had departed with Lewis and William Barbee, leaving Zwerg behind. Later, a black cab driver risked his life and drove Zwerg to St. Jude. The only thing I could think of to say to Zwerg was, “We are so proud of you—you have fought the good fight, but now your freedom ride is over.”
Jim managed to lift himself half up. Looking like Lazarus must have, he croaked, “Oh no, as soon as we are able we will be back on the bus.” He explained in abbreviated form what he, John Lewis, Diane Nash, and others would repeat many times in the next days and weeks: If the mobs and the Klan and their masters, the Southern politicians, are allowed to stop the movement with violence and murder, then nobody will ever be safe in the South when they exercise their constitutional rights. He said this is a life-and-death struggle and we are committed to see it through. He said the riders were well trained in nonviolence and they had all written their wills. “Win or lose, we are in it to the end.”
I could tell Peter Ackerburg was shocked and deeply moved, especially by his fellow northerner, Jim Zwerg. Almost pleading, Peter said, “But this is way past rhetoric. You are almost certainly going to be killed when you get to Mississippi.”
Townsend reminded Zwerg that Jim Peck and his bus load of Freedom Riders were almost killed in Anniston when their bus was burned and the riders on the other bus were brutalized when they reached Birmingham. We didn’t have to remind him of what had happened here in Montgomery just hours before.