The Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, an adviser of the Freedom Riders, took to the pulpit in an attempt to calm the crowd, still coughing as tear gas drifted in. “It is a sin and a shame before God,” he said, “that these people who govern us would let things come to such a sad state. But God is not dead. The most guilty man in this state tonight is Governor John Patterson.”
After his talk with Kennedy, Patterson declared martial law in the state, ordering the state police and the Alabama National Guard to disperse the crowd. The state troopers escorted King and the other people out of the church.
Robert Kennedy now called for a cooling-off period, a chance to ease the tension that threatened to erupt anew at anytime. Later, reflecting on his talks with his brother during the crisis, he said, “I think the president was fed up with John Patterson … he was [also] fed up with the Freedom Riders who went down there after [the initial bombing], when it didn’t do any good to go down there.”
As the administration had feared, their intervention had wrought political damage in the South. “If this were a labor dispute, the President would be silent and his little brother wouldn’t be sitting at that big desk barking orders over the phone and looking like Mickey Rooney just in from a touch football game,” wrote the Montgomery Advertiser.
The Freedom Riders were determined to continue their journey. On May 24, two days after the church siege, twenty-seven Freedom Riders left Montgomery in two buses. Martin Luther King, Jr., still on probation after his arrest during the Atlanta sit-ins, decided not to join the rides. Several of the riders resented his decision not to share the danger as well as the publicity their ride had drawn.
But the immediate concern was the fate of the riders. “We got to the border between Alabama and Mississippi and saw that famous sign, ‘Welcome to the Magnolia State,’ and our hearts jumped into our mouths,” remembers CORE’s James Farmer. “There were Mississippi National Guard flanking the highways with their guns pointed toward the forest on both sides of the road … [when] we got to the suburbs of Jackson, one of the Freedom Riders broke into song … the words went something like this:
I’m taking a ride on the Greyhound bus line.
I’m riding the front seat to Jackson this time.
Hallelujah, I’m traveling;
Hallelujah, ain’t it fine?
Hallelujah, I’m traveling
Down Freedom’s main line.”
When the Freedom Riders arrived in Jackson, no mob greeted them at the terminal. As they got off the buses and entered the whites-only waiting room, they were accompanied only by the police. Recalls rider Frederick Leonard, “As we walked through, the police just said, ‘Keep moving’ and let us go through the white side. We never got stopped. They just said, ‘Keep moving,’ and they passed us right on through the white terminal into the paddy wagon and into jail. There was no violence in Mississippi.”
Robert Kennedy had made a deal with Mississippi’s United States senator James O. Eastland, a rabid segregationist. Kennedy had pledged not to use federal force to carry out United States civil rights laws guaranteeing integrated bus terminal facilities to interstate bus riders. Eastland had promised that there would be no mob violence. Kennedy, like his brother the president, wanted an end to the headlines and television pictures of mob violence.
Once they were arrested for violating state laws and placed in local jails, the Freedom Riders were beyond Robert Kennedy’s reach. The Mississippi courts would have their way with the much-loathed Freedom Riders.
On May 25, the day after they were arrested, the Freedom Riders were tried. “The prosecution got up, accused us of trespassing, took his seat,” remembers Frederick Leonard. “Our attorney, Jack Young, got up to defend us as human beings. While he was defending us the judge turned his back [and] looked at the wall. When [Young] finished, the judge turned around. Bam—sixty days in the state penitentiary, and there we were, on the road to Parchman [State Penitentiary], maximum security.”
But as that group was sent to jail, more Freedom Riders arrived in Jackson, where they were arrested for trying to integrate the bus terminal. Others followed. Throughout the summer, more than 300 Freedom Riders traveled through the Deep South in an effort to integrate according to the Supreme Court ruling. Robert Kennedy petitioned the Interstate Commerce Commission to give greater focus to the Court’s mandate against segregation in interstate bus terminals, asking for specific regulations governing all such facilities. But this ruling did not take shape until September; for now, it was jail for the Freedom Riders.
As news of the jailings spread across the nation, Robert Kennedy became frustrated. He wanted to placate blacks, but he also wanted to please the Democratic party’s southern wing. Kennedy decided to try to redirect the movement and deflect it from getting involved in violent confrontations requiring the administration’s intervention. He began to stress the need for more black voter registration. The power of the ballot box, he reasoned, would force southern politicians to be more responsive to black needs in housing, education, and public accommodations.
“If they register[ed] and participated in elections, even half of them or a third of them …” he said later. “If you get it [black voter registration] up over fifteen percent of the whole voter population, they [blacks] could have major impact.
“During the Freedom Rides,” he added, “I had a number of meetings with these various civil rights groups, and I said that it [voter registration] wasn’t going to be as dramatic. There wasn’t going to be as much publicity about it, but I thought that’s where they should go and that’s what they should do. I had some conversations with Martin Luther King along those lines. I think [King and the other civil rights leaders] rather resented it.”
The leaders of SNCC, the student organization, thought that the Kennedys were simply trying to undercut the mounting civil rights movement. The NAACP worried that its own voter-registration efforts would now become secondary, that their leadership role in that area would be forgotten.
The Kennedys urged large philanthropic foundations to contribute to what would become the Voter Education Project, headquartered in Atlanta. With the influx of money, civil rights leaders came to agree that swelling the ranks of black voters could only help to ensure that blacks would win their civil rights in America. The press responded positively to the idea of more blacks registering to vote. Such a quest for enfranchisement was in the American tradition, editorials said. There was widespread relief that the violence was over.
For several years after the Freedom Rides, civil rights workers in the deepest South, from Louisiana bayous to the Florida Keys, would be asked by local blacks, “Are you one of them Freedom Riders?” The answer might be, “No, ma’am, we’re working for voter registration,” or “No, sir, we’re doing legal research for the NAACP,” or “No, son, we’re here to teach folks how to read.” But if the workers were seen as part of the civil rights movement, the people called them Freedom Riders. The courage and tenacity of those pioneers had captured the imagination and awe of blacks throughout the Southland.
Chapter Six
Freedom in the Air
The Lessons of Albany and Birmingham
“Charlie Jones looked at me and said, ‘Bernice, sing a song.’ And I started ‘Over My Head I See Trouble in the Air.’ By the time it got to where ‘trouble’ was supposed to be, I didn’t see any trouble, so I put ‘freedom’ in there. That was the first time I had the awareness that these songs were mine and I could use them for what I needed.”
Bernice Johnson Reagon
of the Freedom Singers
A black protester arrested in Birmingham.
In the spring of 1961, there was little to indicate that the small southwest-Georgia city of Albany would become the setting for one of the next major acts in the civil rights drama. It was not a busy urban center, but a farming capital of 56,000 people, forty percent of them black. Peanuts, pecans, and corn had replaced the once-ubiquitous cotton on the farms surround
ing the city.
The black neighborhoods, with their unpaved streets, were home to people who enjoyed some opportunities that their counterparts throughout the South did not. The farms offered plenty of work, as did the nightclubs and resorts that attracted swells from Atlanta and as far away as Tallahassee, Florida’s capital. Blacks in Albany owned liquor stores, billiard parlors, taxi companies, and beauty shops, and their grown children attended Albany State College.
But Albany was no different from any other southern town in its entrenched segregationist practices. Despite the Brown decision, white schools did not admit black students. And despite the great number of blacks in Albany, few had been allowed to register to vote.
At all-black Albany State, students were beginning to resist this institutionalized bigotry. Many, such as Bernice Johnson, were members of the NAACP’s Youth Council, and earlier that year they had staged a rally to protest the harassment of women students—white men sometimes sneaked into the dormitories or threw eggs at students on campus.
After the rally, members of the student government were suspended. This made the black college students more eager than ever to get involved with the civil rights movement. They had all heard about the sit-ins and the Freedom Rides. “We didn’t belong to Albany, Georgia, as a people,” recalls Bernice Johnson. “We belonged to black people. Nationally, black people were doing something, and we would say, ‘When is it going to happen [here]?’”
In the summer of 1961, field representatives of the recently formed Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had arrived in Albany to help organize against segregation. Albany was one of their first attempts at mobilizing an entire community. But they had already encountered a fearful reception from rural blacks in surrounding counties, and had made little progress. Few blacks were willing to risk white reprisals by trying to register to vote, even if accompanied by a SNCC organizer.
SNCC differed from the more established Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in its approach to organizing a black community. Whereas the SCLC generally worked with such leaders as ministers, attorneys, teachers, and other black professionals, the student-run SNCC was a grassroots organization. SNCC representatives talked with high school and college kids, visited churches, and met with the young and the old. They looked for natural leaders, not necessarily those with credentials, and tried to help people build a solidarity that would last long after SNCC had left town.
On November 1, 1961, a ruling by the Interstate Commerce Commission went into effect that backed up the Supreme Court’s 1960 decision prohibiting segregation in interstate bus and train stations. Twenty-two-year-old Charles Sherrod and his fellow SNCC worker Cordell Reagon decided to “test” the ruling at Albany’s Trailways bus terminal. Along with a group of black students, they sat down in the whites-only waiting room and refused to leave. Within minutes the Albany police arrived, ordering them out. The students left without resistance, but they had made their point to local blacks: no one with dark skin yet had equal access to those facilities.
“We ran into all kinds of obstacles,” Cordell Reagon recalls. “The NAACP was saying we were taking their members and other people were saying we were Communists … even Negroes were saying this.”
Bernice Johnson didn’t care that the two young men were from SNCC; she cared only that “they were for freedom.” Johnson remembers that in early November she went to the NAACP district meeting in Atlanta as the secretary of the Albany NAACP Youth Council. At the meeting, she was warned that SNCC workers “‘come in and get you stirred up and leave you in jail and the NAACP has to pay the bills.’ I was real upset. I didn’t know what was happening … The NAACP might have been a different group but it should have had the same [goals] from where I stood. I said, ‘We’re working for the same things, aren’t we?’ What an answer I got. The regional NAACP came down to a meeting of our chapter—Vernon Jordan, Ruby Hurley … and blasted SNCC. These people thought it was important enough to stop SNCC that they came down to Albany to tell us how SNCC would lead us wrong.”
Charles Sherrod fanned the flames when he called a meeting of the NAACP Youth Council without the knowledge of Thomas Chatmon, the organization’s adviser, and E. D. Hamilton, the Albany branch president. Hamilton had flatly told the SNCC students to get out of town. At the meeting, Sherrod denounced whites for keeping the bus terminal segregated in defiance of federal law, and told the youths that they needed new leadership.
The squabbling among the civil rights groups threatened to tear them apart. But on November 17 several local adult groups formed the Albany Movement, an umbrella organization that would attempt to coordinate the activists. The Albany Movement included the Ministerial Alliance, the Negro Voters League, and the Criterion Club, a group of black professionals. The movement’s leader, chosen because he did almost no business with whites and was therefore less subject to economic reprisal, was Dr. William Anderson, an osteopath and drugstore owner. Slater King was elected vice president.
Dr. William Anderson, an osteopath, was elected president of the Albany Movement in November, 1961.
In the early 1960s, Charles Sherrod (far right) and Cordell Reagon (not pictured here) traveled the countryside around Albany, Georgia, encouraging black residents to register to vote.
Despite the new partnership, the Albany NAACP planned to recapture the initiative from SNCC. They hoped to have one of their members arrested in the illegally segregated bus terminal. The NAACP could then bail that person out and go to court asking that the federal government’s desegregation ruling be enforced.
But Sherrod, Reagon, and Charles Jones, another SNCC worker, had other ideas. On November 22, both NAACP and SNCC people sat in at the Albany bus terminal and were arrested. The NAACP bailed out its representatives, but the SNCC protesters, two students from Albany State, chose to remain in jail. Although the arrests violated federal law, Albany Police Chief Laurie Pritchett declared that the protesters “were not arrested on a federal charge, they were arrested on a city ordinance of failing to obey the orders of a law enforcement officer … It had nothing to do with interstate commerce.”
The arrest of the protesters galvanized Albany’s blacks. Their shared indignation at the arrogance of the city’s white officials mended the rift between SNCC and the NAACP, at least for the moment.
Three days later, the Albany Movement held its first mass meeting, in a church. The people sang “We Shall Overcome” and listened to speeches by the students who had been arrested in the bus station. On November 27 the five students went on trial, and movement members held a mass rally. Blacks kneeled on the sidewalk to pray for the students’ release. Four hundred people signed a petition asking that the students, expelled from Albany State for their arrests, be allowed to return to school.
On December 10, ten Freedom Riders, five white and five black, rode into Albany on an integrated train from Atlanta. At Albany’s Central Railway Terminal, the blacks walked into the white section and the whites entered the black section. Eight of them were arrested for trespassing.
The arrests brought the national press to town. At a crowded church rally the day after the incident, James Forman, one of the SNCC Freedom Riders, called for more protest marches. The next day 267 students from Albany’s black high school and from Albany State marched on the train station. They were arrested after they disregarded police orders to end the march. Most of them, true to the SNCC philosophy, refused to be bailed out of jail.
On Wednesday, December 13, Slater King, who had been elected vice president of the newly formed Albany Movement, led 200 protesters to city hall. At the courthouse steps they stopped to pray for the students’ release. As SNCC had hoped, people were drawing on their own strengths, notably their passionate religious commitment, to rally under the civil rights banner. By the end of the march, Slater King and his 200 marchers were on their way to jail. Police Chief Laurie Pritchett arrested them for parading without a permit. “We can’t tolerate the NAACP or the SNCC
or any other nigger organization [taking] over this town with mass demonstrations,” Pritchett said in a news conference.
By mid-December, Chief Pritchett and his officers had arrested more than 500 demonstrators. Albany’s mayor, Asa Kelley, agreed to negotiate the possible integration of the bus and train stations as well as conditions for the release of the protesters now packing city jails.
The Albany Movement had not anticipated so many arrests, especially of homemakers, cooks, maids, and laborers. Recognizing the need for outside help, movement president William Anderson decided to call an old college classmate in Atlanta—Martin Luther King, Jr. He asked the minister to come to Albany to speak at a movement rally.
That Friday night the Shiloh Baptist Church overflowed with people who had come to hear Rev. King. Loudspeakers were set up outside for those who couldn’t get in. “I woke up this morning with my mind stayed on freedom,” they sang. “Martin Luther King says freedom—Let the white man say freedom.”
“I can say nothing to you but to continue on in your determination to be free,” King told them. He urged the audience not to be swayed by those who claimed that time, not activism, would bring integration. “Maybe you can’t legislate morality,” he said, “but you can regulate behavior.” King entreated the crowd to embrace nonviolence: “They can put you in a dungeon and transform you to glory. If they try to kill you, develop a willingness to die … We will win with the power of your capacity to endure.”
King had driven in from Atlanta with Ralph Abernathy and Wyatt T. Walker, executive director of the SCLC. The three men expected to make only one appearance, at the rally. But Anderson, in an emotional benediction after King’s speech, announced a mass march on city hall the next day and then, before the tearful audience, asked King to lead it. King agreed.
Eyes on the Prize Page 20