Eyes on the Prize

by Juan Williams

  Nationally, both presidential candidates tried to avoid addressing civil rights issues. To champion segregation openly would mean a loss of the burgeoning black vote and would jeopardize the support of moderate whites. But if a candidate spoke out for the rights of blacks, he risked losing the backing of the white segregationists who controlled southern politics. Nixon faced an additional handicap—he was a Republican. The current Republican president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, had angered Dixie by sending troops to Little Rock.

  Kennedy had said that he believed the Supreme Court’s “deliberate speed” decision, which in effect allowed southern states to use delaying tactics to avoid school desegregation, was “a satisfactory arrangement.” Kennedy was also very closely linked to Alabama governor John Patterson, who had enthusiastically backed the candidate in the primaries and during the Democratic convention. Patterson’s support prompted Roy Wilkins of the NAACP to say, “It is very difficult for thoughtful Negro voters to feel at ease about the endorsement of Senator Kennedy by Governor John Patterson … Anything with an Alabama odor does not arouse much enthusiasm among Negro citizens.” Jackie Robinson, the first black major-league baseball player, campaigned for Nixon.

  By October, a month before the election, sit-ins had taken place in 112 southern cities, and many were still going strong. On October 19, a new round of sit-ins began in Atlanta, aimed at the entrenched segregationist practices of the city’s major department stores and restaurants. One hundred students from five colleges sat in at eight stores across the city.

  Martin Luther King had moved to Atlanta in early 1960 to work more actively as head of the SCLC. He had avoided local civil rights actions because he did not want to interfere with the activities of local movement leaders. But in that city, the students and the older leaders were at odds. The traditional Negro leadership, including King’s father, objected to the sit-ins as inappropriate; they felt the battle was in the courts and the voting booths, not on the streets. But the students, whose dedication to nonviolence moved King, appealed to the young leader. He decided to join them for a one-day sit-in, not as a leader but as a participant. As the Ku Klux Klan held counter-demonstrations in the Atlanta streets, Martin Luther King, Jr., was arrested for sitting in the Magnolia Room restaurant of Rich’s Department Store.

  Vice President Richard M. Nixon campaigning in Tennessee.

  Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy, campaigning in 1960.

  On October 24, a truce was called by Atlanta’s city officials, merchants, and sit-in leaders. The sit-ins would stop, and the protesters would be released from jail.

  King, however, was not given his freedom. He had been arrested earlier for driving without a Georgia license, and the sit-in arrest was a violation of his probation. King was sent to a rural jail, Reidsville State Penitentiary, to serve a four-month sentence.

  Candidate Richard Nixon privately asked the United States Justice Department to determine if King’s constitutional rights had been violated, but he made no public statement on behalf of the jailed leader.

  The Kennedy campaign heard of the arrest from Coretta Scott King, who called Harris Wofford, an aide to the candidate. Wofford spoke with Louis Martin, the campaign’s top black adviser, who said Kennedy should at least make a gesture of concern for Rev. King. Wofford agreed, but he knew that Kennedy had privately promised the governor of Georgia that he would issue no public statement; the governor, in turn, had indicated he would try to find a way to get King released. Wofford suggested that Kennedy make the limited gesture of telephoning Mrs. King to express his sympathy.

  Even that token action was potentially controversial, but aides Wofford and Martin agreed it should be done. Wofford called Sargent Shriver, another Kennedy aide sympathetic to the movement, who was with Kennedy in a hotel near Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. Shriver waited until after the departure of other advisers who might counsel Kennedy not to get involved with a potentially explosive issue like civil rights and a controversial character like King. Shriver proposed the telephone call, and Kennedy agreed. He immediately phoned Mrs. King in Atlanta and told her he would keep an eye on her husband’s situation.

  “[Kennedy] said, ‘I’m thinking about you and your husband, and I know this must be a very difficult time for you,’” remembers Coretta Scott King. “‘If there’s anything I can do to help, I want you to please feel free to call me.’”

  Later, Kennedy said of the call, “She is a friend of mine and I was concerned about the situation.”

  Kennedy’s other aides were furious when they heard about the call. They were relieved when no major news stories about it appeared in the white press. Meanwhile, Louis Martin spoke with Robert Kennedy about King’s jailing. Later that day, the younger Kennedy called Judge Oscar Mitchell in Atlanta. That story broke in the mainstream press, as did Atlanta mayor William B. Hartsfield’s statement that Kennedy campaign aides had called him to ask if he could expedite King’s release. The day after John Kennedy’s phone call, King was set free on bail.

  “It’s time for all of us to take off our Nixon button,” said Martin Luther King, Sr., who until then had been favoring the Republicans. White Democrats had long maintained a stranglehold on southern politics, making it essentially a one-party system. That system excluded blacks. Supporting the Democratic candidate was a significant and portentous move for the civil rights movement.

  The Kennedy campaign printed two million copies of a pamphlet detailing the phone calls. Delivered to black churches and schools, the pamphlet’s headline read, “NO COMMENT NIXON vs. A CANDIDATE WITH A HEART—SEN. KENNEDY: The Case Of Martin Luther King, Jr.”

  “We showed that our candidate was trying to be helpful,” says Louis Martin. “As to the political motivation, no doubt about it—we campaigned … we were vulnerable to some limited extent in [the] sense that [blacks] regarded all those public officials in the South as Democrats, and we feared the Republicans would use that against us.”

  According to a post-election Gallup poll, Kennedy received sixty-eight percent of the black vote—seven percent more than the last Democratic candidate, Adlai Stevenson, had garnered against Eisenhower in the 1956 election. In one of the closest presidential elections in American history, Kennedy won by a margin of two-thirds of one percent in the popular vote. Civil rights leaders were quick to stress the importance of Kennedy’s support among black voters.

  It was a time of high hopes for the civil rights movement. Blacks had helped elect a president. Kennedy was only forty-one years old, and he promised a new vision for the nation. Listening to his inaugural address in January 1961, civil rights leaders and the many student activists who had brought their own energy to the movement took heart at the new president’s statement that “the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans.”

  But Kennedy introduced no new civil rights legislation. Nor did he fulfill his campaign promise to wipe out housing discrimination in federally funded housing projects “with one stroke of the pen”—that is, with an executive order. Civil rights leaders started a campaign urging people to mail Kennedy pens printed with the words “one stroke of the pen” to remind him of his promise.

  CORE and the Freedom Rides: An Interview with James Farmer

  After receiving a theology degree from Howard University, James Farmer went north to work for the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR). He proposed that the FOR establish a new organization to combat racial discrimination with the techniques that Mohandas Gandhi had used in India. Although the fellowship declined to sponsor the project directly, it authorized Farmer to establish the new organization while on the FOR payroll. In 1942, he played an instrumental role in founding the Congress of Racial Equality in Chicago.

  CORE’s first project was to desegregate a roller-skating rink called White City on the South Side of Chicago. By 1944, CORE chapters had been formed in New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Detroit. During the 1960s, CORE moved south to lead the Freedom Rides.

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bsp; The original “Freedom Riders” in 1947 on their “Journey of Reconciliation.” James Peck, who also joined the Freedom Rides of 1961, is fourth from left.

  In 1947, CORE and a sister organization, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, had a kind of Freedom Ride. It was called the “Journey of Reconciliation.” The riders, black and white, went through the upper South, not the Deep South, and tested only the seating on buses. This was in response to a Supreme Court decision in the Irene Morgan case in 1946, saying that segregated seating of interstate passengers was unconstitutional. They were unsuccessful in that ride. Some of them were arrested in North Carolina and served on a chain gang as a result.

  When I became CORE’s national director in 1961, there were letters on my desk from blacks in the Deep South who complained that when they tried to sit on the front seats of buses or to use the bus terminal facilities, they were beaten, or jailed, or thrown out, or all three. This was in spite of the fact that the Supreme Court said they had every right to sit anywhere they wanted to on a bus or to use the bus terminal facilities without segregation. But those Supreme Court decisions had become merely scraps of paper gathering dust with cobwebs over them. They were not being enforced.

  We decided … to have an interracial group ride through the South. We wrote letters in advance, following the Gandhian program of advising your adversaries or the people in power of just what you were going to do, when you were going to do it, and how you were going to do it, so that everything would be open and aboveboard. I sent letters to President Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, J. Edgar Hoover, the chairman of the Interstate Commerce Commission, the president of Greyhound Corporation, and the president of Trailways Corporation … we got replies from none of those letters.

  [After the first lap of the Ride,] Robert Kennedy called Dr. King, who had come into Montgomery to speak at a rally that we were having on behalf of the Freedom Riders. Robert Kennedy asked Dr. King to intercede, to try to get me to halt the Freedom Ride and have a cooling-off period. After consulting with Diane Nash of SNCC and other Freedom Riders … I asked Dr. King to tell Bobby Kennedy that we’d been cooling off for 350 years, and that if we cooled off any more, we’d be in a deep freeze.

  I had decided that I was not going to take that ride from Montgomery to Jackson because I was scared. I didn’t think the buses would arrive in Jackson safely. I had all kinds of excuses; my father had just died, and two deaths in the same week would have been a bit much for [my] family. Furthermore I had been away from my office for six weeks. None of the students—these were the SNCC students and the few CORE students from Nashville—ever asked me if I was going. They merely assumed I was going because, after all, it was my project. I had started it, and I had gone to Montgomery to join them.

  James Farmer leads a line of Freedom Riders arrested in Jackson, Mississippi.

  I went down to say goodbye to the students who were going to ride to Jackson. I reached my hand through an open window to shake hands with a young CORE girl from New Orleans, Doris Castle, who was seventeen years old at the time. Her eyes were wide with fear. I said, “Well, Doris, have a safe journey. After the Freedom Ride we’ll get together in New Orleans or someplace and we’ll have a big bowl of crab gumbo and we’ll talk about the next step.” She looked at me with total disbelief and said, “But Jim, you’re going with us, aren’t you?” I said, “Well, no Doris,” and went through the whole catalog of reasons. Doris said just two words. In a stage whisper, she said “Jim. Please.” Well, that was more than I could bear. I said to a CORE aide, “Get my luggage and put it on the bus. I’m going.”

  “Kennedy attributed that first promise to me and to the civil rights section [of the campaign],” remembers Harris Wofford. “So he said, ‘Send them to Wofford,’ and the pens piled up—thousands and thousands of pens—in my office.”

  In December, the month before Kennedy’s inauguration, civil rights activists had won a victory in the Supreme Court when the justices ordered integration of bus stations and terminals serving interstate travelers. That court triumph made Kennedy’s first few months in office all the more disappointing to blacks. But civil rights leaders still believed that Kennedy was a friend at heart and they knew he owed blacks a political debt. Eisenhower had been reluctant to use federal force after Little Rock. But Kennedy, civil rights leaders hoped, would not back down. Without enforcement from the executive branch, in this case in the form of a ruling from the Interstate Commerce Commission ordering compliance, the Supreme Court ruling would be meaningless. Just how far would Kennedy go to enforce the nation’s civil rights laws?

  The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) intended to find out. In 1947 CORE had organized the “Journey of Reconciliation” after the Supreme Court ruled that segregated seating on interstate buses and trains was unconstitutional. Together, black and white CORE workers had traveled by bus throughout the upper South in an attempt to test the ruling. They were harassed and finally arrested in North Carolina for violating the state’s segregation laws.

  Fourteen years later, CORE planned to confront segregation in transportation once again. James Farmer, the organization’s executive director, reasoned that the federal government was not enforcing the law because administration politicians feared losing the support of southern Democrats. “What we had to do,” Farmer said, “was to make it more dangerous politically for the federal government not to enforce federal law than it would be for them to enforce federal law … We decided the way to do it was to have an interracial group ride through the South. This was not civil disobedience really, because we would be merely doing what the Supreme Court said we had a right to do.”

  The strategy for the “Freedom Ride” was that whites in the group would sit in the back of the bus. Blacks would sit in the front and refuse to move when ordered. At every rest stop, blacks would go into the whites-only waiting rooms and try to use all the facilities. “We felt we could count on the racists of the South to create a crisis so that the federal government would be compelled to enforce the law,” Farmer explains.

  CORE recruited thirteen people with spotless reputations. The organization wanted to thwart any attempt by segregationists to smear the riders in the press. Among the thirteen were James Farmer; John Lewis, fresh from his experience with the Nashville sit-ins; and forty-six-year-old James Peck, a white CORE member and the only Freedom Rider who had also been on the 1947 Journey of Reconciliation. Their trip began on May 4, 1961, departing Washington, D.C., to travel through Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. They planned to arrive in New Orleans on May 17, the anniversary of the 1954 Brown decision.

  “We were told that the racists, the segregationists, would go to any extent to hold the line on segregation in interstate travel,” remembers James Farmer. “So when we began the ride I think all of us were prepared for as much violence as could be thrown at us. We were prepared for the possibility of death.” Several of the Freedom Riders left letters to be delivered to loved ones if they were killed.

  The ride began with only occasional scuffles as the riders attempted to use bus terminal restrooms and lunchrooms in Virginia and the Carolinas. On Mother’s Day, May 14, the thirteen riders divided into two groups to travel from Atlanta to Birmingham. The only scheduled stop on the way was Anniston, Alabama.

  Pulling into the Anniston bus depot, the Greyhound bus carrying the first group of riders was stoned. Its tires were slashed as a swarm of some 200 angry people attacked it. The bus raced away, stopping six miles out of town to fix the flat tires. Here a mob again surrounded the vehicle and someone tossed a firebomb through the rear door. The passengers fled through an emergency exit, and seconds later the bus burst into flames. The next day its burning image covered the front pages of America’s newspapers.

  Meanwhile, the Trailways bus carrying the other group arrived in Birmingham. At the station a mob of whites was waiting for the Freedom Riders. Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor later said that he posted no officers at the bus station because
of the Mother’s Day holiday. Unhindered, the mob assaulted the riders; one of them, William Barbee, was paralyzed for life. It was later learned that an informant had told the FBI in advance that the Freedom Riders would be attacked in Birmingham and that the city police planned to stay away.

  At a press conference after the attack, Alabama governor John Patterson told reporters he had no sympathy for the Freedom Riders. “When you go somewhere looking for trouble, you usually find it,” he remarked.

  In Washington, President Kennedy summoned Justice Department staff members and his brother, Robert, now attorney general, to the White House for an emergency breakfast meeting at 8:30. “The breakfast was in the sitting room outside the president’s bedroom in the mansion,” remembers Burke Marshall. “The president was still in his pajamas. It was the first time the president had had the problem of serious racial disorders … Our recommendation to the president was that he should not use troops unless it was unavoidable.” The president and attorney general decided to prepare federal marshals to go to Alabama if necessary. The violence against the Freedom Riders was being given international press coverage and the Kennedys were concerned about their image as they prepared for an upcoming summit with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev.

  The president placed a call to his former campaign supporter, Alabama governor John Patterson. But the governor would not take the president’s calls. His aides said he had gone fishing.

  Attorney General Robert Kennedy has a word with Assistant Attorney General Burke Marshall.

  In Birmingham, reporter Robert Shackne interviewed Jim Peck, whose head was heavily bandaged. “Mr. Peck, you have obviously been injured … What happened to you?” asked Shackne.