Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  In early April, Doar and a colleague named Bob Owen flew into Jackson, Mississippi, incognito. They wore khaki pants, work shirts, and old boots. They would prefer that the FBI not know they were there, lest the Bureau get huffy about trespass on its investigative territory, but the disguises were mostly to fool the local whites. To minimize the chances of provoking curiosity, they drove out into the remote countryside and checked into a flophouse motel. Before dawn the next morning they introduced themselves to Medgar Evers. Sitting at his kitchen table, Doar explained their purpose, and soon Evers, who knew almost every Negro on their list of those who had complained about voting discrimination over the years, was marking spots on their special-issue large-scale maps. Doar and Owen used the marks as guides to a dirt-road farm in one county and a back-alley house in the next. They drove down to Natchez, over to Hattiesburg, then up to Clark County—knocking on doors, poking their way out into cornfields, interviewing rejected Negro voters, asking each one for the names of others. They would send the new names to the FBI for interview.

  The scouting trip through Mississippi was the first of many that helped them refine an assembly line for a-suits. They did not need to interview white voters; Bob Owen could scan the handwriting on approval forms, subpoena twenty or so with the poorest literacy, select witnesses on the basis of one-minute interviews outside the courtroom, and send the best ones to the stand for questioning by Doar. They learned quickly that they needed predominantly rural counties, with lots of farmers, because teachers and other middle-class urban Negroes felt too much economic pressure to testify. Large counties offered a higher pool of potential witnesses than small ones, and the degree of discrimination tended to vary directly with the proportion of Negroes in the county.

  Using these and other makeshift guidelines, Doar and Owen surveyed a county map of the South with a view toward initiating an a-suit in each federal court district. In Alabama, the maps led them to stick a pin in Dallas County. By this selection method, the Justice Department went to work in Selma, the local county seat, long before SNCC or Martin Luther King. From testimony before the Civil Rights Commission, Doar and Owen had the name of Amelia Boynton of the Dallas County Voters League, and on their next trip they went promptly to see her. Boynton ran a small insurance office. On her wall, the lawyers found a plaque with stars next to the names of Dallas County Negroes who had tried to register. Boynton’s honor roll was a bounty of witnesses, which enabled the Civil Rights Division to move swiftly. Doar filed an a-suit before the end of April.

  These were the days, Robert Kennedy later said wistfully, “when we thought we were succeeding because of all the stories on how hard everybody was working.” In early May, Dallas County registrar J. P. Majors resigned to avoid turning over his registration records to the federal prosecutors, forcing Doar to return to Selma to modify his pleading so as to keep the a-suit alive. Doar did not see the avalanche ahead that was to sweep him into nearby Montgomery. Nor did King, who flew off to address the annual convention of the United Automobile Workers in Detroit, on the invitation of union president Walter Reuther. Nor did Robert Kennedy, who, while trying to figure out what had gone wrong at the Bay of Pigs, decided to give a major civil rights speech at the University of Georgia. John Lewis had by far the clearest premonition of the upheaval that would bring them all to Montgomery, and he thought he was going to New Orleans.

  ELEVEN

  BAPTISM ON WHEELS

  When John Lewis missed his bus in Nashville, his seminary friends James Bevel and Bernard Lafayette drove him at high speeds to overtake the bus in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. From there, Lewis rode alone to Washington to begin Freedom Ride training on May 1, joining James Farmer and eleven recruits. It was a motley collection—three white females, three white males, and seven Negro males, ranging in age from twenty-one to sixty. There were two students and a folk singer, several CORE staff members, a retired Michigan professor and his wife, a preacher, and a free-lance writer. There was James Peck, an heir to the Peck & Peck clothier fortune, who, since silencing the Harvard Freshman Dance of 1933 by arriving with a Negro date, had spent more than three years in prison, and endured numerous arrests, for ignoring laws and social conventions that conflicted with his idealism. There was also strapping, square-jawed Albert Bigelow, a Harvard-trained architect and former Navy captain, whose World War II experience had converted him into so ardent a pacifist that he had skippered his protest craft Golden Rule into atomic test zones out in the Pacific. Lewis was the youngest rider and one of two SNCC students in the group. The other was Henry Thomas of Howard University in Washington.

  Official Washington took no notice of them. The CORE press office had interested only three reporters, all Negroes, in covering the Freedom Ride. Simeon Booker of Jet magazine tried to ease his qualms by notifying the FBI of CORE’s hazardous project. Then Booker slipped into the Justice Department for one of those thirty-second, bob-in conversations, telling the Attorney General and his aide John Seigenthaler that there would probably be trouble. “Okay, call me if there is,” Kennedy replied briskly, adding, “I wish I could go with you.” It reassured Booker to know that the Attorney General of the United States knew in advance of his trip with this quixotic band of Freedom Riders, but the glib tone of Kennedy’s remark made Booker wonder whether his apprehensions had registered fully. Kennedy promptly forgot all about the Freedom Ride.

  The thirteen riders embarked on the morning of May 4 in two groups, one on Greyhound and the other on Trailways. According to plan, they scattered throughout each bus in various combinations—some whites in the back and Negroes in the front, with at least one interracial pair of seatmates and a few riders observing less conspicuously from traditional seats. Fifty-two miles south of Washington, the buses pulled into the first rest stops at Fredericksburg, Virginia. “White” and “Colored” signs still guarded the waiting rooms and restaurants, but the riders endured nothing more illegal than icy looks. Reboarding, they pressed on with similar results to Richmond and then to Petersburg, where they were applauded at a mass meeting in Wyatt Walker’s former church before spending the night in guest homes. Thirteen days, fifteen hundred miles, and scores of bus stations stretched between them and their destination in New Orleans. Most of the bus stations were located in parts of town where the Supreme Court and Gandhi were seldom discussed.

  On the second day they passed through Farmville in Prince Edward County—home of the Vernon Johns family and the Virginia portion of the Brown case. To avoid compliance with the integration ruling, the county government had transferred most of its school property to hastily organized private schools for white children. Nearly all the Negro children had gone without schooling for two years. The impasse in Prince Edward had attracted national publicity, with issues drawn so starkly that the Kennedy Justice Department recently had filed its first school desegregation case there, in an attempt to force a reopening of the public schools. When the Greyhound and Trailways buses pulled into Farmville, the Freedom Riders found that the local “Colored” signs had been freshly painted over at the stations. All thirteen riders obtained service without incident, as the powers of Prince Edward County declined to extend their “massive resistance” to interstate transportation. By nightfall, the riders had passed through Lynchburg to Danville, where, for the first time, bus station officials turned them away. There were no arrests, however, and no violence.

  High above, Alan Shepard and Robert Kennedy were in transit, too, pioneers as visible to the world as the Freedom Riders were unknown—Shepard on the first American manned space flight, Kennedy on his way to give his maiden civil rights speech at the University of Georgia. “Western Nations Rejoice,” beamed one of the half-dozen Shepard headlines in the next day’s New York Times, celebrating the fifteen-minute space flight as a tonic against Bay of Pigs and Sputnik blues. President Kennedy held a spirited news conference as soon as Shepard was safely down.

  Robert Kennedy’s ordeal was similarly packed with tension. He and
his aides had been working on his speech for five weeks, since Kennedy had decided that it would be hypocritical of him not to set forth his civil rights policies where they would be most applied and least welcome. With his hands trembling slightly, as was his fate at public events, Kennedy thanked Georgia for giving his brother “the biggest percentage majority of any state in the Union,” and then he introduced civil rights as a part of the battle against communism abroad. At home, he told the Georgians, “We, the American people must avoid another Little Rock or another New Orleans. We cannot afford them…. Such incidents hurt our country in the eyes of the world.” On this point, he declared that the graduation of the two Negro students just admitted to their university on pain of riot “will without question aid and assist the fight against Communist political infiltration and guerilla warfare.”

  Kennedy maintained this hard line on the civil rights issue itself. “Southerners have a special respect for candor and plain talk,” he said. “…You may ask: will we enforce the civil rights statutes? The answer is: yes, we will.” He volunteered as a matter of personal belief that he agreed with the Brown decision, and he pledged to desegregate his own Department of Justice at least as rapidly as he pressed for desegregation anywhere else. Of the department’s Prince Edward County suit, much criticized in the South, Kennedy told the Georgians that the larger interests of the nation would require any of them to take the same action if holding his position. “For I cannot believe,” he said, “that anyone can support a principle which prevents more than a thousand of our children in one county from attending public school—especially when this step was taken to circumvent the orders of a court.” Promising action tempered by fairness, he offered a deliberate contrast with the Eisenhower image. “We will not stand by and be aloof,” he said. “We will move.”

  The sixteen hundred Georgians in the audience remained quiet as Kennedy shyly took his seat at the end, and then they broke into applause for a full thirty seconds, as measured by one reporter, in tribute to his persuasiveness or his courage, or both. This reception was noted, along with the absence of ranking Georgia politicians, in news accounts praising Kennedy’s “resolute speech” on civil rights. It appeared, at least for the remainder of that weekend, that the Attorney General had worked a miracle by articulating a truly national policy. On Tuesday, however, White House press secretary Pierre Salinger announced that the President was disowning two legislative versions of the Democratic platform he had promised to support during the campaign, and almost simultaneously Georgia’s Governor Vandiver was announcing that John Kennedy had given him a campaign pledge never to use federal force to support desegregation laws in Georgia. Rancorous debate over political deals sprang up on the back pages, where Roy Wilkins likened Kennedy’s disowning of the civil rights bills to “an offering of a cactus bouquet.”

  The first Freedom Rider bus pulled into the Greyhound terminal at Rock Hill, South Carolina, on the morning of Salinger’s announcement. This being the site of the “jail-in” that was already legendary among SNCC students, John Lewis made an effort to rotate into the position of first tester. As he made his way from the bus toward the whites’ waiting room, the usual tensions seemed to coil rather than abate. The Rock Hill terminal was more of a “hangout” than most, filled with pinball machines played by white youths of a type that had become the scourge of the sit-in movement. One of them was leaning on either side of the door, with about twenty more behind.

  The first two stepped in front of Lewis to block the entrance. One of them said, “Other side,” jerking his thumb toward the Colored entrance.

  Lewis drew himself up for the standard speech. “I have a right to go in here on grounds of the Supreme Court decision in the Boynton case,” he said.

  There was a pause, followed by a reply of “Shit on that” and a shoving of Lewis back and forth in the doorway. One of the attackers threw a punch that caught Lewis in the mouth, making the first loud pop of fist against flesh on the Freedom Ride. Lewis sank to the ground. More whites surged toward the primitive sounds of violence. Albert Bigelow, next in line behind Lewis, stepped forward to put his body between Lewis and those kicking him. Bigelow’s erect posture and determined passivity—such an alien sight in a fistfight—did not keep the attackers from darting in to strike him on the head and body. Three or four thudding blows dropped Bigelow to one knee, and as one of the attackers lunged toward Bigelow he knocked Genevieve Hughes, the third Freedom Rider in line, sprawling to the floor.

  Several Rock Hill policemen shouted the fracas down to a sullen lull, and the police captain waded in to extricate Lewis and Bigelow, who were bruised and bleeding but fully conscious. Pointing around disgustedly at the attackers, as though knowing them well from previous juvenile cases, the captain asked Lewis and Bigelow whether they wanted to press assault charges. Both said no—this was not in the spirit of nonviolent resistance. Their refusal displeased the captain, who seemed upset that his politically risky offer to arrest local white boys was going to waste. He waved all the suspects away, and the Freedom Riders filed into the waiting room to place their food orders unmolested.

  The Trailways bus arrived two hours later to find the terminal closed, locked up tight. Local contacts informed the second group of the attack as they drove them to an evening mass meeting at Friendship Junior College, where the students of the Rock Hill jail-in were enrolled. The Freedom Riders were saluted that night for maintaining their composure and goodwill through their first crisis. John Lewis, the first casualty, received that very night an urgent message from Nashville: the American Friends Service Committee had declared him a finalist in competition for a two-year grant to live and work among Gandhians in India, on the same scholarship James Lawson had won in 1954. The catch was that Lewis had to drop out of the Freedom Ride and fly immediately to Philadelphia for a personal interview; the Friends had wired money for a plane ticket. It was a bittersweet dilemma for a person of Lewis’ convictions, but the next morning, after soldierly farewells, he headed north alone while the other dozen riders rolled south toward Columbia and Augusta.

  King was in Montgomery for an SCLC board meeting. The occasion marked the first time he had returned to the city since his income tax trial a year earlier. In an effort to show that the steady bombardment of official persecution—the libel suits, criminal prosecutions, and firings at Alabama State—had failed to deter his movement, King presided over two days of meetings in Governor Patterson’s capital city. He sent a telegram to Attorney General Kennedy in praise of his speech at the University of Georgia, and he announced the formation of an eighteen-member National Council of Attorneys to help defend the four SCLC preachers in their libel cases. Privately, he talked with the Alabama defendants—Abernathy, Shuttlesworth, Lowery, and Seay—about whether they should endure the continued seizure of their personal assets or leave the state. Shuttlesworth had just accepted a new pulpit in Cincinnati. Abernathy had all but decided to move to West Hunter Street Baptist in Atlanta, but he could not yet bring himself to tell his congregation in Montgomery.

  King and Wyatt Walker returned to Atlanta in time to have dinner on Saturday night, May 13, with the Freedom Riders. They celebrated a successful journey through nearly seven hundred miles of upper Dixie, and King spoke glowingly of their example and their willingness to continue on through the fiercest segregationist states of the Deep South. After giving them what inspiration he could, however, King took the reporter, Simeon Booker, aside and told him that he had just come from Alabama, where the public mood was ugly and where just enough publicity had appeared to make people aware that the Freedom Riders were coming. “You will never make it through Alabama,” King whispered emotionally, and Booker, not knowing what to say, tried to make light of it by telling King that he was keeping close to the hulking Farmer. “He’s the only one I can outrun,” quipped Booker, adding that they planned to leave Farmer behind to occupy any white hoodlums who might chase them.

  Farmer had scarcely fallen asleep t
hat night when he received an emergency phone call from his mother. His father, the professor he remembered sitting under a tree reading books in Greek back during the Coolidge era, had asked to see “Junior’s itinerary” that night in his Washington hospital bed and, noting that Junior would cross into Alabama the next day, had promptly fallen into a coma and died. Mrs. Farmer would always insist that the old man had willed his own death in order to save his son’s life by forcing him to come home for the funeral. Farmer, hating himself for feeling relieved to be spared what lay ahead, took leave of his colleagues, who chose unanimously to keep to the schedule. A handful of student reinforcements joined them in Atlanta. In Farmer’s absence, Michigan student Joseph Perkins became group captain on the Grey-hound bus, with James Peck in charge on Trailways. Both buses headed west on U.S. 78. Alabama plainclothes investigators mingled unannounced among the passengers.

  After the Tallapoosa and Heflin stops, the Greyhound driver confided to group leader Perkins that drivers from buses heading east were warning of a mob up ahead in Anniston, where CORE scout Tom Gaither had predicted certain trouble. These were not idle rumors. When the bus eased into its berth at Anniston, new terminal signs reading “White Intrastate Passengers” and “Negro Intrastate Passengers” gave evidence that subtle legal minds had prepared to meet the constitutional challenge of the Freedom Rides. (The Supreme Court had banned segregation at facilities serving passengers traveling across state lines.) Still, the signs offered slight deterrence compared with the large crowd of men bearing clubs, bricks, iron pipes, and knives. The nine Freedom Riders and five regular passengers sat frozen to their seats as the mob shouted for the Freedom Riders to come out. Some tried to force open the door. This brought the two Alabama state investigators out from under cover—they ran to the front of the bus and braced themselves against the pull lever, holding the door shut. Enraged, the mob began pounding on the bus with pipes and slashing the tires. Those inside shouted that the driver should leave before the bus was disabled. The driver did not argue. He revved the engine and backed up. The numb, terror-stricken passengers watched Anniston policemen move in from positions on the fringe of the crowd to direct the bus out of town, as though they had suddenly awakened to a traffic problem.