Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  Everyone knew about the Freedom Ride. John Lewis, just back from his interview in Philadelphia, was with them that day, having stopped off in Nashville on his way to rejoin the CORE group. The initial question among the Nashville students was whether the bus-burning presented another Rock Hill. Were the Freedom Riders going to jail? Should they go and join them? As grimmer and grimmer reports filtered in from Birmingham, however, the issue became death instead of jail. Would the Freedom Ride produce the first martyrs to nonviolence? If so, would it help or hurt the movement? Should the Nashville students welcome such a risk for themselves, even seek it out? A marathon debate ensued as to whether the adult supervisors of the Nashville Christian Leadership Council, who controlled the organization’s funds, would agree to support a venture that might well lead to the deaths of the young people.

  The Nashville debate lasted all night and continued into Monday, overlapping with the regathering of the Freedom Riders at Shuttles-worth’s house in Birmingham. A jolt of publicity greeted the new day. Shuttlesworth marveled to see the local papers filled with sympathetic accounts of the attacks, written by reporters he had always viewed as segregationists. The Birmingham News published a pained front-page editorial headlined “People Are Asking: ‘Where Were the Police?’” Beneath it, alongside graphic pictures of the beatings, appeared Police Commissioner Connor’s statement: “I have said for the last 20 years that these out-of-town meddlers were going to cause bloodshed if they kept meddling in the South’s business…. It happened on a Sunday, Mother’s Day, when we try to let off as many of our policemen as possible so they can spend Mother’s Day at home with their families.” The News dismissed Connor’s explanation as lame and all but accused him of conspiring with the Klan. Birmingham’s leading businessman told The Wall Street Journal that the violence gave the city “a black eye.” In New York, where the story played on the front page, the Times editors decided to run a separate article about the “eyewitness account” that Howard K. Smith had broadcast on CBS Radio. In Washington, seeing the photograph of the burning Greyhound on the front page of his morning Post, James Farmer called his CORE staff in New York and instructed them to superimpose that shot over one of the Statue of Liberty to form a new emblem for the Freedom Ride.

  In faraway Tokyo, the morning newspapers shocked no one more than Sidney Smyer, the incoming president of the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce. Smyer, leading the city’s business delegation at the International Rotary Convention, could not read the Japanese writing, but he could recognize the ugly photographs of the bus station riot. The Post-Herald photographer’s carefully preserved roll of film had survived his beating to move on the international wires. As a result, Smyer found himself the object of cold stares and perplexed questions from his Japanese hosts and the assembled international businessmen, who had suddenly lost interest in Birmingham’s climate for investment. Words failed Smyer and his Birmingham friends as they tried to explain that the incident was grossly unrepresentative of their city. They felt like zoo specimens on display. Smyer, though a stout segregationist and a Dixiecrat from 1948, told his Birmingham colleagues that something must be done about Bull Connor.

  At the Shuttlesworth home, fame struck at ten o’clock that morning with the announcement that the Attorney General of the United States was on the telephone, asking to speak with Simeon Booker. The Jet reporter told Kennedy that the Freedom Riders considered themselves “trapped” in Birmingham by hostile mobs that were reported to be forming near the bus station. Booker gave the phone to some of the group leaders and then to Shuttlesworth, who told Kennedy that their most urgent need was for police protection on the ride to Montgomery. Kennedy’s first suggestion was that they consolidate into one bus. Crisply, he promised to arrange bus security and call back. There was great rejoicing when Shuttlesworth recounted this conversation to the assembled Freedom Riders, who, with their swollen faces, surgical stitches, and lungs still burning with smoke, sagged at the prospect of facing another mob.

  In Washington, Kennedy was working under a severe handicap—his chief civil rights man, Burke Marshall, was confined to his apartment at the end of a two-week case of the mumps. Kennedy established a telephone network between his office, Marshall’s apartment, liaison people at FBI headquarters, and Shuttlesworth’s house, and was soon back on the line with the Birmingham preacher. “Okay,” he told Shuttlesworth, “Mr. Connor is going to protect you at the station and escort you to the city line.” This was a concession relayed through the FBI from Connor, under pressure from Birmingham leaders angry over the previous day’s violence.

  Shuttlesworth thought it over. “They were escorted to the city line in Anniston,” he replied, as politely as he could. “That’s where the bus burned.” He and Kennedy quickly established that they needed protection as far as the Alabama line.

  “Wait,” said Kennedy. “I’ll call you back.” This was a problem for Governor Patterson, whom Kennedy had known as a political supporter since the 1956 Democratic Convention. The Attorney General initiated a series of calls to Patterson and his aides, during which Patterson complained that the Freedom Riders were not “bona fide” interstate travelers, and that as governor he could not help people violate the Alabama segregation laws. Kennedy and Burke Marshall kept arguing that the federal government would have to protect the riders from violence if the state could not, and that since nobody wanted federal intervention, all sides should cooperate to get the Freedom Riders out of Alabama as quickly as possible.

  Surrounded by reporters, policemen, supporters, and darting carloads of hostile whites, Shuttlesworth led the eighteen Freedom Riders down to the Greyhound terminal, across the street from Bull Connor’s jail, to catch the three o’clock bus to Montgomery. They listened en route to nearly continuous radio bulletins on their exact position, on the size of the mob waiting at the station, and on the latest reports of the personal diplomacy between Governor Patterson and Attorney General Kennedy, which itself was big news. At the terminal, they made their way to the bus landing and braced themselves for the wait. Birmingham policemen dutifully kept angry whites away from them, but hate and violence were again close enough to touch, even before their arrangements began to come undone. Radio reports announced that Governor Patterson was correcting previous statements attributed to him. “I refuse to guarantee their safe passage,” he said, soon adding that “the citizens of the state are so enraged that I cannot guarantee protection for this bunch of rabble-rousers.” A spokesman for the governor said that angry whites had been spotted all along the highway from Birmingham to Montgomery.

  These reports put Shuttlesworth back on the telephone with Kennedy, and so did notice from Greyhound clerks that the bus drivers were refusing to drive. “Get a Negro to drive it,” Kennedy told Greyhound officials, and, impatient with their recital of obstacles and impossibilities, he said he might have to send an Air Force plane down for the Freedom Riders—he could have it there in two hours—if Greyhound failed to find a white bus driver brave enough to do his job. Shuttlesworth, hoping to maintain pressure on the various officials, said the Freedom Riders would sit there peacefully at the terminal until the impasse was resolved.

  The Freedom Riders felt the pressure, too, and their resolve began to fray under cumulative exposure to dread. Trapped again, public targets more than ever, the eighteen riders began to talk among themselves of diminishing returns. Already, they had called national attention to racial hatred more dramatically than they had ever hoped. Further beatings would not accomplish anything, and further delays would make it impossible for them to reach New Orleans on Wednesday, May 17, for the big rally on the seventh anniversary of the Brown decision. They notified Shuttlesworth that they had decided to jump over their opponents by taking an airplane directly to New Orleans, No sooner had they made flight reservations and begun their retreat from the terminal than radio reports of the change signaled a general stampede. Elements of the mob reached the airport ahead of them, transplanting the siege.
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br />   In Nashville, where a revolving mass of sit-in veterans had been debating the Freedom Ride almost continuously for twenty-four hours, the discussion shifted when they got word that the CORE group was abandoning the buses. Suddenly, the issue was not one of reinforcing the riders but replacing them, not boosting the ride’s success but preventing its failure. Diane Nash soon traced James Farmer to Washington, where he was attending his father’s funeral. She asked him whether CORE would object if Nashville students went to Birmingham and took up where the original riders left off. Her request left Farmer temporarily speechless, but he gave his consent.

  In Washington, Robert Kennedy returned to the Justice Department from Burke Marshall’s apartment, where he had gone for the last volleys of the Greyhound negotiations. Marshall came with him, pronouncing his mumps officially over. The two of them met with Roy Wilkins, urging him to support their voter registration plans, and then Kennedy walked into the office of John Seigenthaler, the only Southerner on his immediate staff. “Look,” he said, “they’re at the airport and they can’t get off the ground. It’s going to be about seven o’clock before we get them out of there. Do you think you can get down there and help them?”

  Seigenthaler blinked. “What sort of help do they need?” he asked.

  “I think they primarily need somebody along just to hold their hand and let them know that we care,” said Kennedy. The urgency in his voice moved Seigenthaler to leave instantly for the airport. Two hours later, on a brief layover in Atlanta, he checked in with Kennedy by telephone and learned that the Freedom Riders were still in Birmingham, delayed indefinitely by a bomb threat.

  While Seigenthaler was in transit, 350 Negroes filed into the Kingston Baptist Church for a mass meeting. Before Shuttlesworth arrived, a preacher cajoled the crowd to contribute to another special collection to replace the Shuttlesworth automobile that had been confiscated in the Sullivan libel case. A man in the audience rose to speak, acutely aware of the Birmingham movement’s new visibility. “Supposing The New York Times heard it took us six months to pay for his car?” was all he said. Shuttlesworth was their representative. Most of them swelled vicariously with every minute enlargement of his stature, and believed that he earned every bit of it with raw courage. There was hope that he could be dissuaded from his move to Cincinnati.

  Shuttlesworth made his entrance shortly after nine o’clock and delivered a speech filled with the day’s wonders as well as its trials. “I talked to Bob Kennedy six times,” he announced, to great effect, and he recounted in detail all the courtesies and solicitude he had received that day from the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, a white man. Interrupted by a whispered message, he told the audience, “Excuse me, I have a long-distance call from Bob,”* rushed off, and came back with a full report. “They got plenty of police out at the airport tonight simply because Bob talked to Bull,” he concluded. “The police didn’t bother me at the bus station…. Bob told me, ‘If you can’t get me at my office, just call me at the White House.’ That’s what he said.”

  When he stepped down, another preacher dismissed the meeting with a rhetorical cry: “Don’t we have a great president, who has courage and conviction? There is only one F. L. Shuttlesworth!”

  Across town from the mass meeting, Seigenthaler found a pathetic huddle of casualties at the Birmingham airport, suffering as much from battle fatigue as from their wounds. Held there into the night by repeated bomb threats, some of them had given way to paranoid ranting and had to be restrained by their companions. Seigenthaler talked with Simeon Booker and then identified himself to the head of the police detail. “We don’t want any trouble,” he said. “We just want to get these people out of here.”

  “We want them out just as much as you do,” replied the policeman, citing his orders from Bull Connor. He took Seigenthaler to meet the manager of the airline, who was distraught over bomb threats that were coming in like clockwork every time a flight to New Orleans was announced. The three of them concocted a scheme that included diversions in the airport, a departure without announcement, and, most critically, an order to airline personnel not to answer the telephone until the plane was off the ground. Seigenthaler soon boarded with the Freedom Riders, as the police unit sealed off the gate behind them, and the plane lifted off the ground near midnight. The CORE group, after two days in Alabama and eleven days in the South, found safety in the air.

  Four hours later, a telephone call from Burke Marshall woke Seigenthaler in his New Orleans hotel room. “You know Diane Nash in Nashville?” snapped the usually collected Marshall.

  “Yes, I know who she is,” said Seigenthaler.

  “Well, you come from that goddam town,” said Marshall. “They started another group down to Birmingham to take over by bus where those others left off…. If you can do anything to turn them around, I’d appreciate it.” When Seigenthaler responded groggily, Marshall said, “Diane Nash is at this number.”

  Seigenthaler roused himself to call the Nashville church where the crisis meeting was approaching its second consecutive dawn. The line was busy. Then, as newspaper presses rolled with morning headlines announcing the end of the Freedom Ride, and early-bird newscasters talked of President Kennedy’s departure that morning on a two-day state visit to Canada, Seigenthaler began waking up people he knew in Nashville who might conceivably bring pressure on Nash, telling them about the grim realities of Birmingham. “I came through there,” he said. “All hell is going to break loose. She’s going to get those people killed.”

  In Nashville, maddening details consumed all of Tuesday, May 16. The smallest questions of logistics—should they ride segregated from Nashville to Birmingham, or should they stick to their principles at the risk of being stopped even before they could begin to take up the Freedom Ride?—opened large questions of philosophy and personal belief, and just when one issue seemed to be settled someone would confess an old doubt or a new fear. Phone calls from Seigenthaler, and from sobbing or angry parents who had just seen gruesome news footage of Jim Peck disembarking from the plane in New Orleans, destabilized the emotions beneath a wobbly consensus. That evening, with the divided Nashville adults agreeing to donate $900 from the sit-in treasury without explicitly endorsing the student plan, Diane Nash pushed ahead with a call of final notice to Shuttlesworth. “The students,” she told him, “have decided that we can’t let violence overcome. We are going to come into Birmingham to continue the Freedom Ride.”

  “Young lady,” Shuttlesworth replied in his most authoritative voice, “do you know that the Freedom Riders were almost killed here?”

  “Yes,” Nash said tersely. Her patience was almost spent. “That’s exactly why the ride must not be stopped. If they stop us with violence, the movement is dead. We’re coming. We just want to know if you can meet us.”

  She returned to the student group for the final and most difficult decision: which of the volunteers would be chosen to make the ride. It was treated as a life-or-death matter. There was money to buy ten bus tickets and retain a marginal reserve, they decided, and they left it to their chairman, James Bevel, to select the ten. Bevel first chose John Lewis, for leadership and for continuity with the original Freedom Ride. He said that he would not appoint Diane Nash, because she was too valuable as the focal person in Nashville. In all, Bevel chose six Negro male students and two Negro females, plus a white student of each sex—all proven veterans of what Bevel called a “nonviolent standing army.” He did not appoint himself, he explained, because he had made a commitment to drive to New York to pick up furniture to help a friend set up house after his upcoming wedding. This was precisely the kind of bourgeois attachment of which Nash and others were so scornful, but their disapproval did not reach to Bevel’s other choices.

  Nash relayed the details to Shuttlesworth, who began to speak in a crudely improvised security code—of different “chickens,” some speckled and others Rhode Island Red, to be delivered to Birmingham at a specified time. FBI agents had i
nformed him that the police were tapping his telephone. It was ten o’clock when the Nashville students finally dispersed. The selected riders received emotional farewells from the others. Some of them wrote out their wills. Some notified relatives, friends, teachers, and college deans. All of them went home exhausted to pack and try to sleep.

  Selyn McCollum missed the Greyhound bus at dawn, and the lone white female overtook the group by car more than fifty miles down Highway 31, in Pulaski, Tennessee. There were no further disturbances—other than a whispered running argument over the insistence of Jim Zwerg, white, and Paul Brooks, Negro, on sitting together in violation of the generally accepted plan—until Birmingham police flagged down the bus at the city limit, nearly two hundred miles south of Nashville. Officers summarily arrested Zwerg and Brooks for their obvious violation of Alabama segregation law. Then some officers remained sternly at attention on board while others drove patrol cars in escort formation toward the terminal. More officers jumped inside on arrival. They guarded the front door, taped newspapers over all the windows, and then examined the ticket of each passenger wishing to leave. All those whose tickets originated in Nashville and called for travel to New Orleans by way of Montgomery and Jackson, Mississippi, were identified as Freedom Riders and told to stay on the bus. Those who insisted on their right to leave were treated roughly, pushed back into seats by billy clubs in the stomach. Selyn McCollum, seeing that the Freedom Riders were being isolated within the darkened bus, took advantage of the fact that her ticket read Pulaski instead of Nashville. “I’m not with this group,” she said, holding out her ticket, and when she was permitted to exit, she ran through the gathering mob to call Diane Nash back in Nashville. Nash then called Burke Marshall’s office at the Justice Department, asking why the Freedom Riders were being held against their will at the terminal.