Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  Inside the bus, the Freedom Riders maintained the discipline they had learned from Jim Lawson. They kept insisting on their right to leave, pushing up from their seats to the point of physical repression by the police, and at the same time they tried to make human contact with the officers. They asked them one by one if they were World War II veterans, and if so, what they had fought for. They asked them if they were Christians, and if so, did they believe that Christ had died for all people. There were few memorable conversations, but the Freedom Riders did establish over time the limits of the police orders, which were to intimidate them but not to harm them. After an hour’s stalemate convinced the police commanders that these nine riders were not going to retreat to the airport like the ones two days earlier, new orders came down that the Freedom Riders were to be allowed to leave the bus. Soon they stepped out to behold a jeering crowd gathered in the terminal parking lot. The Nashville students walked within a corridor formed by two rows of blue-helmeted policemen, billy clubs crossed like a Roman guard, through the crowd into the terminal, where Selyn McCollum and Fred Shuttlesworth were waiting for them.

  Monday’s siege at the Birmingham Greyhound terminal was essentially re-created on Wednesday. Police commanders, straddling the thin edge between protection and repression, between maintaining peace and preserving segregation, now emphasized to the Freedom Riders that the police, as they could see, were protecting them from a mob of angry white people. It would make their task much easier, they advised, if the Freedom Riders would not mingle interracially there in the white waiting room. To this argument, and to a host of similar blandishments, the Freedom Riders steadfastly replied that they intended to wait there in accordance with the Supreme Court’s Boynton decision and to catch the five o’clock bus to Montgomery.

  The stalemate lasted three more hours, during which time some of the crowd’s hostility was redirected toward the police officers who were constantly pushing them back. Finally, Bull Connor himself appeared at the terminal, and as the Freedom Riders moved to board the Montgomery bus he ordered his men to arrest them. Cheers went up from the bystanders as the police officers handcuffed the ten riders and dragged them to the paddy wagons. When Connor’s nemesis, Fred Shuttlesworth, demanded to know why this was being done, he too was arrested, which drew more cheers. Connor, having satisfied the segregationists by deed, now moved to placate the image-conscious city fathers by telling reporters that he was placing the Freedom Riders under “protective custody.” The students sang freedom songs as they were transported to the Birmingham jail. They tried to calm themselves by saying that this was no worse than another night on the Nashville picket line.

  President Kennedy returned from Canada as the Freedom Riders went off to jail. Early the next morning, unannounced and unrecorded by the official schedule, Robert Kennedy walked into the White House and up to the President’s private quarters, accompanied by Byron White and Burke Marshall. The trio from Justice caught the President in his pajamas, with his breakfast sitting in front of him. The Attorney General greeted his brother as though they were resuming an interrupted business meeting. “As you know, the situation is getting worse in Alabama,” he began. The new batch of Freedom Riders were refusing to eat in the Birmingham jail, demanding to be put back on the bus. Greyhound officials, upset about their firebombed bus, were refusing to transport any Freedom Riders without guarantees of police protection, and Governor Patterson was refusing to repeat the guarantee he had made and then half-repudiated on Monday. In fact, the governor was hedging and equivocating—almost hiding, Kennedy reported—for fear of being caught in a political trap. If Patterson declared that he would protect the Freedom Riders as interstate travelers, then Alabama voters might say that he had knuckled under to the federal government, sacrificed Alabama’s segregation laws, and accepted the unmanly role of nursemaid to the hated group of interracial troublemakers. If, on the other hand, Patterson declared he could not or would not protect the Freedom Riders, he would be admitting limits to state sovereignty and all but inviting the federal government to assume police power in his state. To Patterson, either course was political suicide.

  The result thus far was a stalemate, which was the outcome least tolerable to the federal government. The Attorney General did not say—he did not have to—that his own highly visible role in getting the first Freedom Riders out of Birmingham had helped elevate the drama into a major national story, with reporters still waiting in Alabama for the federal government to resolve this second crisis. For Robert Kennedy, the dilemma already was a humbling demonstration of the race issue’s mystifying, unconventional powers. A handful of faceless, nameless, half-suicidal pacifists had seized his attention by the simple act of riding a bus. Less than two weeks after Kennedy’s sweeping rhetorical commitment to activist law enforcement in civil rights—“We will move”—reality contrived for him a cruel test in which the Administration’s reputation hung on whether he could empower a single bus to move out of the Birmingham station.

  They had come to the White House, said the Attorney General, to report that they had begun contingency planning for direct federal intervention in Alabama. The President himself might be required to act publicly, if things went badly. All three Justice officials were agreed that the most drastic and least desirable course was the “Little Rock method”—the use of Regular Army troops to guard the Freedom Riders’ bus. Among the many drawbacks of this option were President Kennedy’s campaign statements faulting Eisenhower for allowing the 1957 Little Rock school crisis to deteriorate to the point that federal troops had been required. Kennedy had promised a more vigorous, farsighted presidential leadership to spare the country such traumas. To falter now, so early in his Administration and so soon after the Bay of Pigs, might raise questions about the President’s elementary competence. It would certainly bring the wrath of the South down on him, and Kennedy, unlike Eisenhower, rested his thin governing margin upon solid electoral support in the South.

  Compounding these negative prospects was the most absorbing, dramatic new fact of the President’s political life: the White House had disclosed only two days earlier that President Kennedy would meet Soviet Premier Khrushchev in Vienna within the month for personal negotiations on the full range of issues dividing East and West. It was bad enough that Kennedy had to prepare for these fateful talks weakened by the Bay of Pigs. To face Khrushchev against the backdrop of racial strife within the bosom of the free world, while commanding troops against his own people, would open Kennedy to ridicule from the Soviet leader. Clearly, the Army option threatened multiple disaster and was a dreaded last resort. Calling out the National Guard, Kennedy’s next choice down the military scale, was not much better. By far the most palatable alternative was to protect the Freedom Riders’ bus with a force of U.S. marshals and other civilians within the federal service.

  Very little of this needed to be said to President Kennedy, whose mind was quickest when cutting through multi-shaded calculations. Robert Kennedy asked Byron White to review for the President his efforts to assemble a conglomerate force of civilian officers. White named the agencies he had contacted in addition to the Marshal Service, including the U.S. Border Patrol, the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (known among moonshiners as “the revenooers”), and even the Bureau of Prisons, which had agreed to lend some prison guards to the emergency detail. White reeled off the numbers of agents available from different units in different locations, along with the distances from Montgomery, the estimated time required to concentrate them for action, and plans for deploying the men along the road between Birmingham and Montgomery.

  Speaking like the makeshift general he had become overnight, White briefed the President about how he would make a unified command from so many disparate bureaucracies. The Army had agreed to help solve the staggering problems of transport and logistics, lending planes, trucks, barracks, and rations, he reported, adding frankly that such cooperation was traceable almost entirely
to the relief of the commanders on learning that their own soldiers were not slated for domestic riot duty. The overall task was impossible, White concluded wryly, but it could be done. He hoped the force would never be used. Toward that end, the preparations already undertaken were being advertised to Governor Patterson in order to reinforce the credibility of the Administration’s ultimatum: if Patterson failed to use state power to protect lawful travelers from violent mobs, the federal government would have no choice but to step in.

  When White finished, Robert Kennedy asked Burke Marshall to outline the President’s authority under the law. Marshall was nervous, having never met the President before, but Kennedy’s alert manner reassured him, recalling for Marshall the sense of putting a complex legal argument before a manifestly skilled judge. He told Kennedy that the law required the President to issue a proclamation announcing a breakdown of public order before implementing either of the two military options, the Army or the National Guard. Therefore, these alternatives bore the added disadvantage of risking the President’s own prestige by what amounted to an admission of national crisis. Happily, Marshall’s reading of the United States Code—Title 10, Sections 331, 332, and 333—convinced him that use of Byron White’s army of deputy marshals required only a written notice from the President to the Attorney General, recognizing the threat to public peace and ordering the Attorney General to use all powers at his disposal to enforce federal laws. This notice need not be released to the public, said Marshall, which meant that the Administration had the legal authority to carry out White’s plan without invoking the President’s name. In addition, Justice Department lawyers were preparing to ask a strong federal judge in Alabama, Frank Johnson, Jr., for an injunction ordering the Alabama Klan not to interfere with the right of the Freedom Riders to travel unmolested, and also ordering the Alabama police departments to provide adequate protection to the Freedom Riders in light of the public threats against them. This injunction, if obtained, would provide another leg of authority for the use of the deputy marshals.

  President Kennedy asked only a few questions, mostly about timing. For his own unstated reasons, he asked Marshall whether it was likely he could get by without making a decision until Monday. Marshall replied that the stalemate probably would not hold that long. The Freedom Riders were being held illegally, without charges, and lawyers were demanding their release. The President, switching to the preferred way out, wondered how they could move most effectively to induce Governor Patterson to take responsibility. He knew Patterson personally. Was it time for direct contact by him? If so, should it be by telephone, telegram, or letter? It was decided to place a call to Patterson’s office in Montgomery. Moments later a chagrined operator reported that the governor was said to be on a fishing boat somewhere far out in the Gulf of Mexico. Patterson was unavailable even to the White House. This egregious snubbing of the President introduced the Kennedys to a far different John Patterson from the one they had known.

  There was to be no word of the President’s involvement. The Attorney General would say only that he was meeting with his own advisers in an effort to maintain law and order in Alabama, and the three Justice Department men would push forward with the contingencies outlined that morning. With these orders understood, the President excused himself to dress for the day. Burke Marshall, looking back into the room as he made his exit, was struck by the sight of the breakfast tray on the table, still untouched.

  The three men plunged into a day of chaos at the Justice Department. They built the secret army of marshals out of nothing, aided only by a riot-training course that Attorney General Rogers had initiated after Little Rock. Lawyers walked briskly through the corridors carrying what they called “field maps” of Alabama. They discussed weaponry, tactics, and the apparel of the new civilian soldier. They fended off reporters. The top officials quibbled with commanders of the Army Quartermaster Corps.

  Shuttlesworth was convicted on obstruction charges at a boisterous evening trial in Birmingham. Justice Department telephones were still ringing after midnight when notice arrived of Bull Connor’s miracle cure. His men were dragging the limp, protesting Freedom Riders out of their cells into unmarked police cars. Connor himself assured federal officials that no harm would come to them, saying that he was taking two reporters along as witnesses. His compromise, he said, would protect the Freedom Riders in a manner consistent with Alabama law and the opinions of Alabama voters. He was going to “escort” them personally through the state, under cover of darkness, and dump them into Tennessee. His plan, relayed instantly through the Justice Department and down to Seigenthaler, was received as an unorthodox and illegal but thoroughly effective remedy for the nightmarish stalemate. The crisis in Alabama was over. Connor laughed off a cautionary question from Washington about how he would justify the forced release of the Freedom Riders from his jail. “I just couldn’t stand their singing,” he quipped.

  Heading north on U.S. Highway 31, John Lewis sat behind Bull Connor in one of the police cars. His fears of police beatings, even a prearranged lynching, gradually receded as Katherine Burke, one of the more outspoken Freedom Riders, launched into a friendly conversation with her fearsome captor, offering to cook him breakfast and smother him with Christian kindness if he would accompany her back to Tennessee State in Nashville. Connor responded with good-natured yarns about how much he would appreciate her cooking. As the miles rolled by, the two of them settled into a rather jolly conversation, much to the wonder of Lewis and the others.

  Connor halted the police caravan abruptly at the tiny border town of Ardmore, Tennessee. As his officers stacked the Freedom Riders’ luggage on the side of the road, he pointed through the darkness at the railroad track running beside them and to what he said was a station up ahead. “You all can catch a train back to Nashville from here,” he said, then roared off. The Freedom Riders huddled alone in the pre-dawn silence, a little more than a hundred miles from Birmingham and a little less than a hundred from Nashville.

  There were seven of them now, they discovered. Jailhouse segregation had prevented them from learning earlier that Selyn McCollum’s father had flown down from Buffalo, New York, to demand personal custody of his daughter, and that Jim Zwerg and Paul Brooks had been released separately. Amid tentative hugs and celebrations, it required very little conversation to establish that none of them knew anyone in or near Ardmore. Or that they were ravenously hungry, not having eaten in two days. Or that they felt more imperiled now, as seven infamous Negroes stranded by night in the middle of nowhere, than in the cells of the Birmingham jail. A party of them finally dared to venture toward the buildings, where they feared Klansmen might be waiting for them. They found no train station, nor anyone yet stirring, but they did find a pay telephone, from which they placed a collect call to the Nashville movement headquarters.

  The sleepless Diane Nash scarcely absorbed their bizarre news before she raised urgent business. “Eleven other packages have already been shipped to Birmingham by other modes of transportation,” she said. This meant that eleven other students had been recruited to take up the ride, on the assumption that the ten ahead of them might stay in jail. “What are you going to do now?” asked Nash. Awkwardly, the Freedom Rider in Ardmore promised to call back again soon, as neither he nor his companions were thinking much beyond food and rescue.

  The seven of them agreed that their first objective was to reach shelter. Clutching their luggage, they went trekking single file down the railroad track in search of a “Negro home” in the country. They found one after first morning light. The elderly couple answering a scout’s knock turned out to be simple, isolated farm people, who did not know much about the outside world. Every Negro in the South had heard of the Freedom Riders by now, however, and the sudden realization that these revolutionaries were at the door, seeking help, put fear into them no less than would a Martian invasion. The old man cried out and blocked the door. It took much pleading along with some recitation of Scripture to g
ain entry, but the jittery couple eventually warmed to the Freedom Riders, finding in themselves more protective instinct than fear, more pride than suspicion. The spirit of the adventure filled the old man with such courage, in fact, that he agreed to go out and buy food for them. Craftily, to minimize suspicion, he went to several different stores for portions of the large order. He said all the white merchants knew that he and his wife never bought two dozen eggs or two pounds of bologna at once.

  From the humble refuge, John Lewis placed a call to inform Diane Nash of their collective decision. All seven packages were ready to return to Birmingham, he announced, as soon as transport could be arranged. Nash already had found a volunteer driver, Leo Lillard, who left within minutes. Waiting for him, the seven stiffened their resolve by self-catechism in nonviolence. If they fled home to Nashville, they kept saying, they would be doing exactly what the segregationists wanted them to do: retreating out of fear. They had to return. When Lillard’s car roared up to the agreed-upon rendezvous point, they all squeezed in—making four in the front and four in the back—and told him to keep heading south for Birmingham, over the same roads they had just traveled with Bull Connor. Dazed by fatigue, yet brimming with zealous optimism, they were consumed by the belief that the hatred of mobs could not prevail, having seen, after all, sparks of humanity even in Connor, the archracist. When they heard the first bulletin in which a white Alabama radio announcer declared with relief that the “so-called Freedom Riders” were gone, sent packing to Nashville by Bull Connor, a thrill shot through them. The laughter in the car gave way to intermittent pauses of awed silence, as it was all becoming too dazzling to believe. Suddenly, they were not only in the news but ahead of it. They were stealing a march on segregation.