Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  “Let’s all stand together,” said Lewis, as the Freedom Riders retreated backward along the enclosed loading platform. Hemmed against a railing that ran along a retaining wall, they stood helpless as the white men barreled into them. Some of Lewis’ group jumped, some were pushed, and some were literally thrown over the railing onto the roofs of cars parked in the Post Office lot below. Those who did not take their luggage with them were soon pelted with their own suitcases. Above, on the platform, reporters who objected, or who tried to take photographs of the attack, were set upon by a small mob whose full fury was now released. The enraged whites smashed Life photographer Don Urbrock repeatedly in the face with his own camera. They clubbed Norman Ritter to the ground, beat a Birmingham television reporter, and chased the reporters who escaped.

  Down below, the Freedom Riders realized that whites who had been secluded at various observation posts were closing in on them from all directions. Some stalked and some charged, egged on by a woman in a yellow dress who kept yelling “Get those niggers!” Fighting panic, the Freedom Riders made their way to two nearby Negro taxis and tried to send the seven females away to safety. Four of the five Negroes jumped into the backseat of the first taxi, whose driver had a little boy with him on the front seat. “Well, I can’t carry but four!” cried the driver, when he saw that he was drawing the attention of the onsurging whites. There was no time to argue. The Freedom Riders shoved the fifth female Negro into the front seat anyway. “Well, I sure can’t carry them!” shouted the driver, eyeing Susan Wilbur and Sue Harmann, the two white students. Doors slamming, he drove off as the two whites were pushed inside the other taxi. Before the second driver had a chance to say that it was illegal for him to transport whites, the mob yanked him and his keys outside to prevent the car from leaving, then dragged the two women from the back. Others chased the male Freedom Riders, some of whom were trying futilely to act on John Lewis’ shouted directions about how to zigzag to Columbus Street and climb the long hill toward the refuge of Ralph Abernathy’s church.

  The first taxi, filled with screams and shouts, found one of the two exits from the parking lot choked off by a stream of angry whites. Swerving around, bombarded with conflicting advice, the driver found the other exit blocked by cars. This was too much for him. He told the Freedom Riders that he was going to abandon the taxi. While some of his passengers tried desperately to calm him, others looked back in horror at the loading platform. They, along with several Alabama reporters standing closer, saw a dozen men surround Jim Zwerg, the white Wisconsin exchange student at Fisk in Nashville. One of the men grabbed Zwerg’s suitcase and smashed him in the face with it. Others slugged him to the ground, and when he was dazed beyond resistance, one man pinned Zwerg’s head between his knees so that the others could take turns hitting him. As they steadily knocked out his teeth, and his face and chest were streaming with blood, a few adults on the perimeter put their children on their shoulders to view the carnage. A small girl asked what the men were doing, and her father replied, “Well, they’re really carrying on.” The Freedom Riders in the nearby taxi turned away in sickened hysteria.

  Upstairs at a window of the Federal Building, observer John Doar, his renowned dour composure already dissolved, was describing the sudden disaster over the telephone to Burke Marshall. “Oh, there are fists, punching!” he cried. “A bunch of men led by a guy with a bleeding face are beating them. There are no cops. It’s terrible! It’s terrible! There’s not a cop in sight. People are yelling, ‘There those niggers are! Get ’em, get ’em!’ It’s awful.” One of Robert Kennedy’s secretaries was taking notes on an extension phone. Marshall, still listening to Doar, asked another one to track down the Attorney General. Less than five minutes after the bus door opened in Montgomery, official Washington knew that pipes and bare knuckles nullified all the painstaking federal-state agreements.

  Seigenthaler, driving slowly toward the scene through a mass of bystanders, first saw suitcases flying upward in the distance. He did not yet know that this was the Freedom Riders’ luggage being thrown into the air—smashed open as trophies—but he could sense the contagion of a riot. As he moved within sight of the loading platform, a swarming mass of several hundred people came into view, running in all directions, to and from scattered pockets of violence. To Seigenthaler, it looked like a close-up of a giant anthill. He caught sight of one well-dressed Negro darting ahead of his pursuers, and then, closer to his car, he saw a cluster of people moving around a young white woman. This was Susan Wilbur, struggling to escape after being pulled from the Negro taxi. White women were beating her from behind with pocketbooks, and a teenager was jabbing her from the front, dancing like a prizefighter.

  Seigenthaler decided to try to rescue her. He drove up on the curb and jumped out. As he did, a woman with an especially heavy shoulder bag knocked Wilbur across the right front fender of his car, and by the time Seigenthaler reached her lying there, the crowd of screaming, angry whites jammed in so tightly upon them that he could not push his way to the car’s back door. He grabbed Wilbur by the shoulders, managed to pull the right front door open, and, shouting “Come on, get in the car,” began to slide across to the driver’s seat. He saw in a flash that another white student—Sue Harmann, whom he had not seen before—had dived into the back.

  Wilbur balked. Still absorbing blows, she shouted, “Mister, this is not your fight! Get away from here! You’re gonna get killed!”

  Seigenthaler jumped back outside, where people were climbing over his car. “Get in the damn car!” he shrieked at Wilbur.

  Wilbur, not sure who Seigenthaler was, kept insisting during the struggle that she was nonviolent and did not want to get anybody hurt. As she did, two men stepped between Seigenthaler and the car door, one of them shouting “Who the hell are you?” With Seigenthaler frantically telling them to get back, that he was a federal agent, the other men brought a pipe down on the side of Seigenthaler’s head. Then the crowd, crushing in to seize Sue Harmann, kicked his unconscious body halfway under the car.

  His was not the only prostrate form littering the scene as the rioters kept scurrying, shouting, and celebrating. Zwerg was face-down in a patch of warm, gooey repair tar on the pavement. John Lewis lay unconscious near the retaining wall, felled by a blow from a wooden Coca-Cola crate, and his seminary schoolmate, William Barbee, lay some distance away. Barbee had been overtaken and knocked to the pavement, and was still being stomped and kicked by a taunting swarm of rioters when Floyd Mann suddenly appeared among them. “Stand back!” he shouted above the din, showing his drawn revolver. “We are going to keep law and order.” He cleared the attackers from Barbee and moved on to pull others from a television cameraman. Mann, a state official within city jurisdiction, was acting alone, without support or legal authority.

  Police Commissioner Sullivan arrived with a squadron some ten minutes after the first violence. By then the Freedom Riders were either down or gone, but the milling crowd was still growing by the hundreds, gawking or looking for new targets. Behind Sullivan came Alabama Attorney General Gallion in the company of his assistants and a deputy sheriff. They made their way to John Lewis, who was pointed out to them as a Freedom Rider, and stood over him to read Judge Jones’s injunction.

  Struggling to his feet, Lewis managed to locate and revive Barbee and Zwerg. For safety, the three of them huddled near the same state officials who were serving them with an injunction that held them responsible for the riot. All three Freedom Riders were bleeding. Zwerg in particular was a hideous sight, moving Lewis and several reporters to beg the officials to have him taken to a hospital. Police officers kept saying that Zwerg was free to leave. Lewis and Barbee placed him gingerly into the backseat of a white cab, which was promptly abandoned by the driver. The deputy sheriff read Judge Jones’s injunction to Zwerg as he sat motionless, uncomprehending. Some time later, a Negro taxi driver volunteered to take Lewis and Barbee to a hospital, but the segregation laws forced Zwerg to remain behind. Commi
ssioner Sullivan told inquiring reporters that all the ambulances for whites were out of service with breakdowns. One reporter ventured to the taxi where Zwerg was sitting and tried to explain why it was taking so long to evacuate him. “You can’t get me out of here,” Zwerg replied vacantly. “I don’t even know where I am or how I got here.”

  Some fifteen or twenty minutes later, a police lieutenant came upon the partially hidden form of Seigenthaler, who was just beginning to stir. “Looks like you got some trouble, buddy,” he said.

  “Yeah, I did,” said Seigenthaler, waking to pain. “What happened?”

  “Well, we had a riot.”

  “Don’t you think you better call Mr. Kennedy?”

  “Which Mr. Kennedy?”

  “The Attorney General of the United States.”

  The lieutenant frowned. “Who the hell are you?” he asked.

  “I’m his administrative assistant,” groaned Seigenthaler, in a manner that convinced the lieutenant he was talking with a bona-fide big shot. He ran for help, carrying news that reporters picked up instantly. Seigenthaler passed out again. He awoke in the X-ray room of a hospital, lying beside a doctor who was talking on the telephone with Byron White in Washington.

  By that time, police had allowed Zwerg to be taken by a Negro ambulance to a Catholic hospital, which agreed to receive him. At the riot scene, the crowd swelled to upwards of a thousand people, still breaking into sporadic violence. A handful of whites ambushed two stray Negro teenagers half a block from the bus terminal, setting one briefly on fire with kerosene and breaking the other’s leg with a stomping. Other rioters built an enormous bonfire from the scattered contents of the Freedom Riders’ suitcases. Police began to make arrests, eventually hauling off seven people charged with disorderly conduct and two alleged drunks. In the midst of all this, Commissioner Sullivan sat on the back of a car, fielding press questions about police preparedness and the causes of the riot. “I really don’t know what happened,” he said. “When I got here, all I saw were three men lying in the street. There was two niggers and a white man.”

  Susan Wilbur and Sue Harmann, pounded upon continuously as they fled, had pushed their way inside a church and called police officers, who eventually put them on a train bound for Nashville. “I don’t know why they let us go,” Wilbur told reporters. “Maybe it was because we are girls.” Meanwhile, the five Freedom Riders in the stalled taxi had barged into a Negro home in Montgomery and called Shuttlesworth in Birmingham. Other Freedom Riders, stranded in hiding places all over the city, called Diane Nash with reports on their location and condition. Under her long-distance instruction, the scattered Freedom Riders began showing up one by one at the home of Rev. S. S. Seay—a defendant in the New York Times libel suits and the preacher who, at a climactic early moment of the bus boycott five years earlier, had risen in a fit of courage to bid all the Negro preachers go to jail.

  Now Seay hosted a euphoric rebirth of the Freedom Ride. Each newcomer who came through his door was embraced as a survivor—purged of sufferings and picked clean of tales about when he or she had last seen everyone else at the terminal. Spirits swelled with each new arrival, and there were constant bulletins from Nash about how they were shaking up the outside world. Shuttlesworth and Abernathy were on the way to help, she said. She was leaving for Montgomery herself, and so was Jim Lawson, who had been on the way to visit his sick mother in Ohio. Martin Luther King might come. President Kennedy’s personal representative had been beaten at the terminal too, and the Kennedys might send in the Army. Newspapers like The New York Times were sending in their own correspondents, no longer content to rely on wire service reports. The Freedom Riders had broken out of Birmingham at a terrible price, but nothing could stop them now. John Lewis walked into Seay’s house fresh from the hospital, with a bandaged head, and received an emotional welcome in proportion to his wounds and his determination. He announced that even the two students left in the hospital were ready to go on. William Barbee soon made this message public with a statement to reporters at his bedside. “As soon as we’re recovered from this, we’ll start again,” he said. One floor above him, in the white section of St. Jude’s Hospital, Jim Zwerg cleared enough concussion from his head to tell reporters essentially what they had heard from Jim Peck in the Birmingham operating room six days earlier. “We will continue our journey one way or another,” said Zwerg. “We are prepared to die.”

  TWELVE

  THE SUMMER OF FREEDOM RIDES

  The Attorney General, who was said to have gone from horseback riding to an FBI baseball game, had been difficult to locate. He was still wearing shirtsleeves and a baseball cap when he walked into his office late Saturday to join the emergency conclave of Byron White, Burke Marshall, and ten other Justice officials. His feelings of betrayal personalized by the brutal attack on Seigenthaler, Kennedy called Governor Patterson to demand an explanation for the absence of police protection that morning. Patterson’s aides put him off, saying the governor could not be reached, and this evasion put Kennedy into such a fury that he decided it was time to send in the marshals. After notifying President Kennedy at his weekend retreat in Middleburg, Virginia, he dispersed staff lawyers to activate the makeshift army they had been preparing all week. Then he called Seigenthaler’s hospital room in Montgomery. “How are you doing?” he asked.

  “This is a terrible headache,” Seigenthaler replied.

  “Well, we’re sending the marshals there.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” said Seigenthaler, who knew this meant trouble, and he signed off with a weak joke, advising Kennedy never to run for governor of Alabama.

  Given Seigenthaler’s medical condition, which was listed as serious though not life-threatening, only an extreme emergency could have induced the Attorney General to call him back the same afternoon on business. But Kennedy did precisely that only an hour or two later. By then, the implications of sending the marshals were rumbling ominously. In Alabama, where Patterson was stating publicly that the state already had restored order, Kennedy’s decision to send federal marshals after the riot, uninvited, was denounced as a political insult that invited the Freedom Riders to continue or even escalate their actions under federal protection. Kennedy realized that his forces would arrive too late to stop the first Montgomery riot but in time to be blamed if a second one occurred. To compound the pressure on him, word came that Martin Luther King was about to fly into Montgomery to encourage the Freedom Riders. The Attorney General knew that King’s name, like the federal intervention, would attract reporters and increase the danger of renewed attacks by white mobs. Worse, Kennedy’s lawyers were telling him that since the U.S. marshals were going in on a mission to protect interstate travelers, and since King himself would be an interstate traveler, he had little choice but to have the marshals protect King too. In effect, King would be coming into Alabama to support the Freedom Ride under armed federal guard, and no one had to tell Kennedy how Governor Patterson would react. Kennedy tried by phone to convince King not to go to Alabama. So did Marshall. When they failed, Kennedy was not above trying a little manipulation; Seigenthaler’s wounds might soften a firm resolve.

  “I was wondering if you think it would help any if you talk to King,” he inquired awkwardly, knowing that he was asking Seigenthaler to play on King’s sympathies, in a lobbying campaign to make King choose a course favored by Patterson over one pressed upon him by the Freedom Riders. Seigenthaler gamely volunteered to make the phone call, but the plan was abandoned before he could reach King. Floyd Mann, appearing later at his hospital room, broke down weeping in sympathy and frustration.

  From Washington that night, James Farmer ordered his New York staff to begin recruiting an emergency team of CORE members to take up the Freedom Ride in Alabama, lest the Nashville students assume complete command of a crusade that was catapulting CORE into national recognition for the first time in its history. About midnight, John Doar drove fifty miles north of Montgomery, then puttered acr
oss the water in a little boat to Judge Frank Johnson’s lakeside cottage. He carried a sheaf of affidavits supporting the Justice Department’s petition for a temporary restraining order against Alabama Klan groups. Johnson declined Doar’s request to include Birmingham in its scope—even though Doar’s best evidence of Klan conspiracy in the riots came from Birmingham—but he agreed to sign the order as it applied to Montgomery. This being a bold and hazardous act for an Alabama judge, Johnson then accepted Doar’s offer of U.S. marshals to protect his own life.

  King flew into Montgomery about noon the next day, Sunday, May 21, a little more than a week after he had warned that the original Freedom Riders would never make it through Alabama. U.S. marshals—about fifty of them by the count of state agents—met King at the airport and escorted him to the familiar confines of Abernathy’s house, where King had first lighted in Montgomery with Vernon Johns more than seven years earlier. While he made plans for a mass meeting that night, the marshals outside refused to tell reporters or state agents why they were there. Everyone knew they were guarding King, of course, and to Governor Patterson it was an act of sneaky, cowardly treachery on the part of Attorney General Kennedy. Patterson also realized his sudden political opportunity. Having had little to gain when pitted against the lowly, mostly Negro Freedom Riders, whose stature rose in every clash with white Alabama, Patterson seized the new underdog role in a battle against the federal government itself. He summoned Byron White to the capitol for what amounted to a public council of war.