Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  In Washington that Friday morning, Burke Marshall was trying to catch up with the backlog of routine work that had accumulated during his bout with the mumps. His office cleared a draft of a Robert Kennedy letter to Martin Luther King, thanking him for sending a telegram in praise of the Attorney General’s speech at the University of Georgia. “I hope you will continue to make your views known to me,” said the letter, at the bottom of which Kennedy scratched a more personal “Many thanks to you.”

  Another piece of Marshall’s work was a long letter to Montgomery’s mayor, Earl James. Marshall reviewed for James the results of three federal investigations begun during the Eisenhower Administration, all involving blatantly illegal racial persecutions by the Montgomery police force. In two of the cases, policemen had entered the homes of whites stationed at Maxwell Air Force Base, upon receiving reports that Negro Air Force officers were visiting in white neighborhoods, and had arrested all the occupants on charges of disturbing the peace. In the third case, a squad of policemen had arrested on disorderly conduct charges a white Illinois professor, his wife, and thirteen of his students, who were having lunch in a Negro café near Alabama State while on a sociology field trip through the South. “We do not wish to take any federal action, and do not wish to make any public issue of the matter,” Marshall informed Mayor James, “if it can satisfactorily be worked out.” What the federal government wanted, he added, was “some assurance…that incidents will not be repeated and that federal action in these cases and resulting adverse publicity to your city can be avoided. It is toward that end that I am writing you on this informal basis.”

  Marshall’s letter was an application of the Administration’s policy of quiet persuasion, by which the Attorney General wanted to give Southern officials some latitude along the tense line between federal and state laws on race. The policy was premised on the hope that Southerners would find it less embarrassing to abandon the excesses of segregation in private than to defend them in public. However, Marshall could not avoid signaling that the federal government was preoccupied with political comfort, too. The very reasonableness of Marshall’s letter was grounded in reluctance born of politics, which gave Mayor James a glint of hope that there was a mirror image to the federal threat: he could hope that Kennedy and Marshall would prefer to tolerate the excesses of segregation in private than to attack them in public.

  Diane Nash had remained quiet about her reinforcements at first, for tactical reasons, but it became too much for her when her own allies around the South seemed to lose heart upon learning the news of Bull Connor’s victory in Alabama. She began dropping hints along her telephone network that there was a big surprise in store for Mr. Connor. Her prediction spread so quickly that it achieved bulletin status before Leo Lillard’s car reached Birmingham. The eight students speeding down the highway heard on the radio that the Freedom Riders—themselves—were not retreating to Nashville after all but were making their way back to Birmingham in a private car to renew the fight. Suddenly, instead of stealing a march, they were heading into a manhunt. Unnerved, Lillard’s passengers stacked themselves on the floorboards in hiding. In their fear, they decided it would be safer to roll up all the windows, so they soon became piles of sweating apprehension. Lillard ducked off the main highway and angled into town by back roads, through Bessemer. Eyeing all cars with suspicion, he announced that he would try to outrun anyone who followed them.

  At last at Shuttlesworth’s house, the students had a joyous reunion with the reinforcements who had arrived ahead of them. Among these was Ruby Doris Smith of Spelman, famous to all of them as one of the four SNCC students who had answered the call to the Rock Hill jail. The sight of her made their whole quest feel much larger. Now that they were in Birmingham, any pain ahead would fulfill the purpose of the Freedom Ride, and their shrinking fears were transformed into a heady eagerness to return to the bus station. They gulped down sandwiches around Shuttlesworth’s table, and then, amid prayers and final instructions, headed downtown to catch the five o’clock Greyhound to Montgomery.

  When reporters within the milling crowd saw John Lewis and other familiar faces, they realized that all the crazy reports indeed were true. Negroes, whom Bull Connor had cowed into silent submission for years, were not only defying him but outwitting him under the most searing public scrutiny. This was high drama—a third attempt to move the Freedom Ride forward from the spot of the Mother’s Day beatings. The Freedom Riders pushed their way stoically through the crackling anger of the crowd to the bus, which was idling at the loading platform, but Greyhound officials soon canceled the trip for lack of a driver. A round of cheers went up from the crowd as the Freedom Riders filed back into the station, saying they would wait there for a bus to Montgomery, however long it took. Birmingham officials made the wait as difficult as possible by disconnecting the public telephones and closing the snack stands, while police officers arrested Shuttlesworth again, this time on Bull Connor’s complaint that he had “conspire[d] with unknown persons” to cause a mob to gather in Birmingham on Mother’s Day.

  While officers hauled Shuttlesworth away, police riot units found that their no-violence orders required increasingly stern measures against a milling white crowd they soon estimated at three thousand. At first, officers merely reprimanded stray whites who walked across the feet of the seated Freedom Riders or deliberately spilled drinks into their laps, but canine units eventually moved the whites back out of the terminal building. The Freedom Riders sang “We Shall Overcome.” John Lewis and others began to preach in tandem. One of the more devout students could not help noting with satisfaction that fear seemed to deepen the reverence of a few skeptics who had been perfunctory about earlier religious devotionals. As night fell, bystanders tossed occasional rocks over the heads of policemen through the terminal windows.

  The crisis was fully revived in Washington. Those who had been de-alerted were realerted. Robert Kennedy, stepping up pressure to get the Alabama governor off his “fishing boat,” had President Kennedy himself place another call. This time, Patterson did not bother to use the fishing excuse. He simply refused to take a phone call from the President of the United States. Word of the snub soon reached reporters, and The New York Times and other newspapers would print page-one headlines such as “President Can’t Reach Governor.” An angry Robert Kennedy told Patterson’s aides that the President would issue a public ultimatum threatening federal intervention unless the governor emerged to discuss protection for the Freedom Riders. This brought Patterson to the telephone for a long, rancorous conversation with the Attorney General. Kennedy proposed instant solutions to all Patterson’s political objections: if the governor could not afford to announce that Alabama would protect the Freedom Riders, said Kennedy, he could say he was protecting “the highways.” These facile suggestions only enraged Patterson, who, convinced that the Attorney General was paying only superficial respect to the realities of the governor’s political career in Alabama, launched into a tirade. He had sworn an oath to preserve racial segregation, he said. “You’re making political speeches at me, John,” Kennedy interjected. “You don’t have to make political speeches at me over the telephone.” Patterson feared that he was being pushed into a deal whose meaning would be twisted into an abandonment of segregation. He declared that he would discuss the matter only face to face, with a personal representative of the President.

  John Seigenthaler soon found himself tearing down the highway from Birmingham to Montgomery with a White House telegram in his pocket. On this, the fifth day of what had begun as an ad hoc goodwill trip, he was pressed into higher service as an emissary of the President. He rushed directly to the Alabama capitol. Escorted into the governor’s office, he confronted not only Patterson but the wary faces of all the Alabama cabinet members, convened around a long table for an extraordinary night session.

  “Glad to see you. You’re a Southerner,” Patterson remarked on hearing Seigenthaler’s Tennessee accent. He followed this h
earty welcome with an angry oration, which Seigenthaler decided was largely for the benefit of the assembled Alabama politicians. “There’s nobody in the whole country that’s got the spine to stand up to the goddamned niggers except me,” Patterson declared, using the word “nigger” with casual defiance. “And I’ll tell you I’ve got more mail in the drawers of that desk over there congratulating me on the stand I’ve taken against what’s going on in this country…against Martin Luther King and these rabble-rousers. I’ll tell you I believe that I’m more popular in this country today than John Kennedy is for the stand I’ve taken.” Some time later, after more rhetoric and some earnest bargaining over the best way to get the Freedom Riders out of Alabama, he invited Seigenthaler to use his personal telephone, there in sight of the Alabama witnesses, to report the results to Robert Kennedy.

  “He’s given me this statement,” Seigenthaler told Kennedy, looking at his notes: “‘The State of Alabama has the will, the force, the men, and the equipment to give full protection to everyone in Alabama, on the highways and elsewhere.’ He says he does not ‘need or expect assistance from the federal government.’”

  “Does he mean it?” Kennedy asked Seigenthaler.

  “I think he does,” Seigenthaler replied. Then he turned to Patterson. “Governor, he wants to know if you mean it.”

  “I’ve given my word as governor of Alabama,” said Patterson, and he repeated his statement so loudly that Kennedy could hear it through the receiver in Seigenthaler’s hand. After relaying further details of the assurances, Seigenthaler was soon talking on the governor’s phone with the president of the Greyhound bus company, who was as anxious about protection as Kennedy. Governor Patterson apologized profusely to the Greyhound president for the bus burned in Anniston the previous Sunday. As the agreements were being finalized, Seigenthaler developed an affinity for Alabama Public Safety Director Floyd Mann. Mann was operating under severe constraints—the governor’s insistence that Mann’s highway patrol officers not be too visible in protecting the Negroes, for example, and the jealously guarded prerogatives of the city police forces—but he impressed Seigenthaler as a sympathetic, professional officer who was determined to protect the Freedom Riders from ambush on the open road.

  Federal and state officials haggled late into the night. Governor Patterson, even while making grudging concessions to protect the Freedom Riders, was maneuvering by other channels to stop them. His own attorney general, MacDonald Gallion, obtained from Montgomery’s Judge Walter B. Jones a state injunction forbidding “the entry into and travel within the state of Alabama, and engaging in the so-called ‘Freedom Ride’ and other acts or conduct calculated to promote breaches of the peace.” The injunction was formally addressed to James Farmer and CORE, even though Farmer was still in Washington and no CORE people had been on the rides since Monday, but these imperfections were immaterial to the plan. For the state’s purposes, the injunction would serve as a legal basis for contempt-of-court arrests that would stick, at least temporarily, and would transfer the entire dispute into the labyrinth of the court system, along with the five-year-old ban on the NAACP. State lawyers hurried to perfect binding copies of the injunction for serving on the Freedom Riders.

  At 6:05 the next morning, before the injunctions reached Birmingham, Greyhound driver Joe Caverno stepped forward to address a large press contingent and the nineteen bleary-eyed Freedom Riders—two of the fourteen reinforcements had dropped out during the long night—gathered on the loading platform next to a split-level bus marked “St. Petersburg Express.” “I’m supposed to drive this bus to Dothan, Alabama, through Montgomery,” Caverno said nervously, “but I understand there is a big convoy down the road. And I don’t have but one life to give. And I don’t intend to give it to CORE or the NAACP. And that’s all I have to say.” With that, he disappeared through the “Drivers Only” door of the terminal, leaving his audience bewildered by his fearfully eloquent repudiation of the high-level arrangement that was on everyone’s lips. No other driver appeared. Confusion seeped outward from the inert bus, with Bull Connor’s policemen no less puzzled than anyone else. The Freedom Riders decided to remain on the platform, singing hymns and Negro spirituals. Jim Zwerg, the only white male among them, sang a solo in “Oh, Lord, Keep Your Eyes on the Prize.”

  The latest snarl ruined Robert Kennedy’s Saturday morning in Washington. He called the Greyhound superintendent in Birmingham to demand an explanation. “Drivers refuse to drive,” said an exasperated George Cruit.

  “Do you know how to drive a bus?” asked Kennedy, in an ominously quiet voice.

  “No.”

  “Well, surely somebody in the damn bus company can drive a bus, can’t they?” Kennedy said. “…I think you should—had better be getting in touch with Mr. Greyhound or whoever Greyhound is, and somebody better give us an answer to this question. I am—the Government is—going to be very much upset if this group does not get to continue their trip.”

  This last sentence—intercepted by eavesdroppers on the phone line in Alabama—soon appeared in newspapers all across the South in support of the argument that Robert Kennedy was working surreptitiously for the Negroes. More conspiratorial Southerners came to believe that Kennedy had been the mastermind behind the entire Freedom Ride. Far beyond any other word or deed of his tenure at Justice, the remark would erode Kennedy’s political standing in the South, making the name “Bobby” a regional epithet.* The immediate effect of Kennedy’s words was to cause blunter, more heated words to fly between the interested parties. Bull Connor arrived at the bus station to join the private negotiations. Finally, without warning, an unhappy-looking Caverno bolted through the door along with the president of the local bus drivers’ union and the chief Greyhound dispatcher. Policemen herded the startled Freedom Riders behind the three of them onto the bus, and, as reporters dashed to their cars to follow, the St. Petersburg Express raced through downtown Birmingham, escorted by police cars with sirens wailing. The highway patrol picked them up at the city line, and the entire convoy—shadowed by FBI observers, plainclothes state detectives, and a highway patrol airplane, plus the trailing reporters—headed for Montgomery at speeds nearing ninety miles per hour.

  The Freedom Ride, paralyzed since the Mother’s Day beatings, resumed at 8:30 A.M. on Saturday, May 20. In the interim, John Lewis and the other Nashville students had endured six days and nights on a roller coaster between joy and fear, exhilaration and boredom—largely uninterrupted by sleep—and several of them reacted to the moment of triumph by dozing off. Attorney General Kennedy, relieved at last, went out for a long horseback ride through the Virginia countryside.

  The Special Agent in Charge (SAC) of the Montgomery FBI office sent word to headquarters, and from there the message reached Marshall at the Justice Department, that he did not believe a word of Police Commissioner Sullivan’s promise to protect the Freedom Riders on their arrival in the capital. Back from Washington came orders to remind Sullivan of the governor’s assurances. The SAC complied, telling Sullivan that the bus was on its way from Birmingham. Floyd Mann, equally skeptical of the Montgomery police, called Sullivan to make sure there could be no disputes about proper notice. Mann told Sullivan he had just received a radio report from his highway patrol airplane that the bus was fourteen miles outside Montgomery. Highway patrol units, forbidden to work within city limits, would be dropping off soon. Sullivan replied that there were plenty of Montgomery police at the bus terminal. This was true at the time, but the policemen promptly began to vanish.

  Elsewhere in Montgomery, Seigenthaler finished breakfast with John Doar, who had been working on his voting rights a-suit in nearby Selma. Seigenthaler eagerly sought the experienced counsel of Doar, but he also knew to avoid public identification with him. Because Doar’s lawsuits already marked him as an enemy to segregationist officials in Alabama, Burke Marshall had ordered Doar to stay clear of the Freedom Ride crisis. Accordingly, the two Justice Department colleagues had avoided all pe
rsonal contact until the completion of Seigenthaler’s visit to Patterson the previous night, and even now they were wary of being seen together. They decided to split up before the arrival of the Freedom Riders. Doar wanted to work on his Selma case. Seigenthaler, wearing a set of sports clothes he had borrowed from Doar, dropped him off at the downtown Federal Building, which overlooked the Greyhound terminal, and then, driving alone, began circling the block to look for a parking place. Figuring mistakenly from the regular bus schedule, he thought he had a half hour before the arrival of the St. Petersburg Express. In fact the high-speed bus was pulling into the terminal already, just out of sight. Seigenthaler saw a motorcycle policeman leaving the area in a hurry.

  John Lewis, selected to speak for the group, stepped first off the parked bus and paused before a semicircle of reporters on the platform. As other reporters rushed up in front of him, and the Freedom Riders filled in behind, Lewis surveyed a terminal area that was familiar to him from scores of bus rides home to nearby Troy, where he had preached to the chickens. Now all the platforms and streets and parking lots were deserted. Aside from the drivers of a few taxis parked in the distance, the only people he could see beyond the reporters were a dozen or so white men hidden in a shadowy entrance to the terminal. Lewis felt an eerie foreboding. “It doesn’t look right,” he whispered to a companion.

  Facing a battery of cameras, microphones, and notepads, Lewis got halfway through an answer to the first press question before falling strangely silent, transfixed by what he saw coming up behind the reporters. Norman Ritter, the Time-Life bureau chief from Atlanta, reacted to Lewis’ face by turning to confront the dozen white men who had been standing in the door. He held out both arms to create a boundary for the interview, but the men, brandishing baseball bats, bottles, and lead pipes, pushed past him. One of them slapped Moe Levy of NBC News, and this first act triggered a seizing and smashing of cameras and equipment.