SNCC- The New Abolitionists

by Howard Zinn

  The sit-ins of 1960 were the beginning. They left not only excitement, but a taste of victory. The spring and summer of 1961 brought, for the youngsters in SNCC and for many others, an experience of a different kind: an ordeal by fire and club. These were the Freedom Rides.

  3. The Freedom Rides

  Stokely Carmichael, tall, slim, brown-skinned, gives the impression he would stride cool and smiling through Hell, philosophizing all the way. Arriving in the Jackson, Mississippi, train terminal as a Freedom Rider in the spring of 1961 (he was twenty, and a student at Howard University) Stokely and a young woman Rider made their way past what seemed an endless mob of howling, cursing people who screamed and threw lighted cigarettes; then they went into the white waiting room, where they were arrested. They were part of that extraordinary group of Americans who, in the Freedom Rides of 1961, embarked on a dramatic attempt to expose and challenge segregation in interstate travel in the Deep South.

  In Parchman jail, the state penitentiary, Stokely almost drove his captors crazy: when they decided to take away his mattress because he had been singing, he held tightly to it while they dragged it—and him—out of the cell, and they had to put wristbreakers on him to try to make him relinquish his grip; after six fellow Riders had been put in solitary confinement, he demanded the same treatment, and kept banging loudly on his cell door until his wish was granted. When, after 49 days, Stokely and the others left Parchman, the sheriff and his guards were somewhat relieved.

  At the time of the Freedom Rides in the spring and summer of 1961, SNCC was one year old and still loosely put together; it had an office in Atlanta with two full-time workers who maintained sporadic communication with affiliated student movements all over the South. But the students who went on the Rides—most of them veterans of the sit-ins—came out of jail to become central figures in a stronger SNCC organization that would now take up forward positions in a no-man’s-land untouched since Reconstruction.

  The sit-ins had begun a new phase of the Negro upsurge, in which students—matured overnight into social revolutionaries—started to play the leading role. These same students, in the brutal training ground of the Freedom Rides, became toughened, experienced. And in the course of it all, they somehow decided that the Deep, Deep South, out of which they had just barely escaped alive, was the place where they must go back to do their work.

  To CORE should go most of the credit for the Freedom Rides. Formed in Chicago in 1942 to conduct nonviolent direct action against racial discrimination, CORE worked successfully in Chicago, in St. Louis, in New Jersey, to end segregation in restaurants and other public places. In 1947, CORE and the Fellowship of Reconciliation, in order to follow up a Supreme Court decision outlawing discrimination in interstate travel, sponsored a Freedom Ride which they called a “Journey of Reconciliation.” Bayard Rustin, a Negro and a fiercely eloquent pacifist, and James Peck, white (he had startled his Harvard classmates years back by bringing a Negro date to the freshman dance), also a pacifist, were among sixteen Negro and white riders. They rode two buses through the upper South, with very little violence and only a few arrests, and established that most passengers and drivers would not go out of their way to make trouble for people who chose to sit where they pleased.

  Again, in 1961, fourteen years later, a Supreme Court decision—this time in the Boynton Case, extending desegregation from carriers themselves to terminal facilities—stimulated action. Early that year, Tom Gaither (mentioned previously as the CORE man in the Rock Hill sit-in) spoke to Gordon Carey, also of CORE, about a “Freedom Ride,” after which a national council meeting of CORE agreed to undertake it, and CORE’s new national director, James Farmer, issued a call on March 13. Farmer himself and James Feck were the first two volunteers, and on May 1, 1961, a group of thirteen, seven Negroes and six whites, assembled in Washington, D.C. for a briefing session on nonviolence. Part of the group riding a Greyhound bus and the others a Trailways bus, they started the long trip from Washington to New Orleans on May 4.

  On the Greyhound bus was John Lewis of SNCC, who had participated in the Nashville sit-ins. They made it through Virginia and North Carolina with little trouble, but at the Greyhound bus station in Rock Hill, South Carolina (as James Peck relates the story in his gripping book, Freedom Ride) twenty toughs were waiting. John Lewis was the first to be slugged as he approached the white waiting room. Behind him was Albert Bigelow (famous as the pacifist skipper of the Golden Rule, which sailed into an atomic testing area in the Pacific to protest nuclear warfare), who was attacked by three men. Police first watched, then stopped the beatings, and the group entered the white waiting room. The two buses went on, through Augusta and Athens, Georgia, with long lay-overs en route, and on May 13 arrived in Atlanta, where they stopped for the night before heading into Alabama and Mississippi.

  Sunday, May 14, when the buses left Atlanta and crossed into Alabama, was Mother’s Day. That day the Greyhound bus was stopped, its tires slashed, outside of Anniston, Alabama, and surrounded by a mob. An incendiary device hurled through a window set the bus on fire, and those on board had to make their way out, choking, through the dense smoke, while the bus burned to a charred iron skeleton. Twelve of the passengers were hospitalized briefly for smoke inhalation, but the riders assembled again and took another bus into Birmingham.

  In the meantime, the Trailways bus, an hour behind the other, was arriving in Anniston, the driver insisting he would not go on unless the group sat segregated. Eight hoodlums climbed aboard the bus and began beating the Negroes in the front seats. When James Peck and retired professor Walter Bergman moved forward to try to dissuade them, Peck was knocked to the ground, bleeding, and Bergman received a crushing blow on the head. The whole group was forced to the back of the bus, which went on to Birmingham.

  Peck tells of his group’s arrival in Birmingham, of the mob lined up on the sidewalk near the loading platform as they got off, with young men carrying iron bars following them as they went into the white waiting room and towards the lunch counter. Then the attack came. Peck and Charles Person, an Atlanta Negro student who had been in the sit-ins there, were dragged into an alleyway, six men working on Peck, five men on Person, with fists and pipes. Peck, battered into unconsciousness, awoke to find the alleyway empty, blood flowing down his face. His friend Bergman came along and they managed to get a cab to Rev. Fred L. Shuttleworth’s house, where they saw Person, a gash in the back of his head, his face swollen.

  Peck was taken to the hospital and lay on an operating table for several hours while reporters plied him with questions and doctors sewed fifty-three stitches in his head. At 2:00 A.M. Peck was discharged from the hospital, and then a brief nightmarish episode followed. Waiting outside the hospital for Rev. Shuttlesworth to arrive in a car, he was told by police to get off the street or be arrested for vagrancy. Returning to the hospital, he was told by a guard that discharged patients were not permitted in the hospital. He went back into the street, and, fortunately, the car arrived to pick him up.

  A Southern Regional Council report on the Freedom Rides, discussing the bus-burning and beatings in Anniston and Birmingham, commented that all this took place “while police were either inactive, not present, or strangely late in arrival.” Police knew in advance of the arrival of the buses in these cities, but they simply were not on hand as the violence unfolded. When Birmingham police chief Bull Connor was questioned on this, he replied that protection was not available because so many of his men were off for Mother’s Day.

  The entire Freedom Ride group assembled in Birmingham the next afternoon, ready to go on to Montgomery. No bus driver would take them. They waited for an hour on the loading platform while a mob gathered, then sat down in the white waiting room. It became clear that they would not get out of Birmingham, so they decided to fly on to New Orleans to participate in a mass rally there marking the May 17, 1954, Supreme Court decision. A bomb threat cancelled their first plane, and another mob gathered at the airport. After six diff
icult hours, they finally left Birmingham at 11:00 P.M. and arrived in New Orleans at midnight.

  That was the end of the first Freedom Ride. It was at this point that SNCC and the Nashville student movement entered the picture. A new phase of the Freedom Rides began.

  Ruby Doris Smith, spending more of her sophomore year at Spelman in the SNCC office than with her books, recalls clearly the tension in Atlanta when news came of the Mother’s Day violence in Anniston and Birmingham.

  I remember Diane Nash called the Department of Justice from Nashville, and Lonnie King—you know he was head of the Atlanta student movement—also called the Department. Both of them asked the federal government to give protection to the Freedom Riders on the rest of their journey. And in both cases the Justice Department said no, they couldn’t protect anyone, but if something happened, they would investigate. You know how they do.…

  When the news came that the Riders could not go on by bus, that they were flying to New Orleans, an excited discussion went on over long distance between Nashville and Atlanta, the two centers where SNCC had its strongest contingents. The Ride, they decided, should continue. If it didn’t, it would prove that violence could overcome nonviolence.

  The indomitable Diane Nash was quickly assembling a group of students in Nashville, determined to go to Birmingham and continue the Freedom Ride from there to Montgomery, then into Mississippi, then into New Orleans. They were joined by some members of the first Ride, including John Lewis and Henry Thomas. Ruby Doris Smith raced around Atlanta trying to raise money so that she could go along, but many Atlanta Negroes thought it was too dangerous, and tried to dissuade her from going.

  Meanwhile the Nashville group had left, early in the morning of May 17, 1961. Eight Negroes and two whites were aboard a bus headed for Birmingham. Police got on the bus oh the outskirts of Birmingham, ordered two students to change their seats, and arrested them when they refused. The rest of the group was arrested (the reason given was “protective custody”) in the Birmingham terminal, after making their way through a crowd and trying in vain to get a bus driver to agree to take them on to Montgomery.

  The Riders spent a night in jail. Then, early the next morning they were driven 120 miles to the Tennessee border by Birmingham police chief “Bull” Connor, and let out in the middle of nowhere. Diane and the others made their way back to Nashville and started all over, joined by more students, including three whites, so that there were now seventeen in the group. That same afternoon they were back, by bus, in the Birmingham terminal. It was May 19. Five days had passed since Mother’s Day.

  Ruby Doris Smith, her money finally in hand, flew from Atlanta to Birmingham to join the Nashville group:

  I was alone.… When I got to Birmingham I went to the bus terminal and joined the seventeen from Nashville. We waited all night trying to get a bus to Montgomery. Every time we got on a bus the driver said no, he wouldn’t risk his life. The terminal kept crowding up with passengers who were stranded because the buses wouldn’t go on. The Justice Department then promised Diane that the driver of the 4:00 A.M. bus would go on to Montgomery. But when he arrived he came off the bus and said to us: “I have only one life to give, and I’m not going to give it to NAACP or CORE!”

  The students sat outside on the ramp for three hours, and sang Freedom Songs as dawn broke over Birmingham. Then they were startled to see the same bus driver return and, still grumbling, begin to collect tickets for the trip to Montgomery. Joined by two Birmingham Negroes and some newspapermen, but with no other white passengers aboard, the bus headed for Montgomery.

  That trip to Montgomery took place on Saturday, May 20. The day before, a political drama was enacted on the longdistance wires between Washington, D.C. and Montgomery, Alabama. On Friday, President John Kennedy, concerned ever since the bus-burning and beatings of Mother’s Day, telephoned the Capitol Building at Montgomery to talk to Governor John Patterson. Patterson had said, just before the Anniston-Birmingham violence: “The people of Alabama are so enraged that I cannot guarantee protection for this bunch of rabble-rousers.” Patterson was not available to answer the phone and President Kennedy spoke to the Lieutenant-Governor.

  The President said, in this conversation, that it was the federal government’s responsibility to guarantee safe passage of people in interstate travel, and that he hoped Alabama could restore this right without the need for federal action. That same evening, a representative of the President, Justice Departmentman John Siegenthaler, flew to Montgomery to confer with Governor Patterson. Then he telephoned Attorney General Robert Kennedy in Washington, relaying Patterson’s assurance that he had “the will, the force, the men, and the equipment to fully protect everyone in Alabama.” Apparently, this promise of safe conduct led the Justice Department to arrange for a bus driver to leave the Birmingham terminal with the Freedom Riders. The F.B.I. notified the Montgomery police that the students were coming, was promised that precautionary steps would be taken, and told Washington that therefore no federal action was needed.

  Ruby Doris Smith tells of the students’ arrival in Montgomery:

  There were police cars all around the bus, and helicopters flying overhead. But when we got inside the Montgomery city limits, it all disappeared. It was around noon when we got to the terminal and got off the bus. Paul Brooks went to call cabs for us. People were meantime gathering nearby, and a CBS cameraman was taking pictures. Suddenly a large man with a cigar hit the cameraman. He kept dragging him all over the street, beating him. The cameraman was small. There was not one policeman around.

  About three hundred persons had gathered at the terminal, but apparently only about twenty-five or thirty participated in the actual violence that followed. These had clubs and sticks. Fifteen of them clubbed one newspaperman, Norman Ritter, head of the Time-Life News Bureau, when he tried to come to the help of another newsman.

  One of the first of the Riders to get off the bus was James Zwerg, a young white man from Appleton, Wisconsin, tall, slender, dressed neatly in an olive-green business suit. Several women screamed, “Kill the nigger-loving son of a bitch,” and a group of white youngsters moved in, pounded at Zwerg with fists and sticks, and sent him bleeding to the pavement. Then others stomped his face into the hot tar of the roadway, while women shouted encouragement.

  “Zwerg never attempted to defend himself in any way,” Ruby Doris Smith recalls. “He never put his hands up or anything. Every time they knocked him down, he got back up.” At just about that time, the cabs arrived for them.

  The mob turned from Zwerg to us. Someone yelled: “They’re about to get awayl” Then they started beating everyone. I saw John Lewis beaten, blood coming out of his mouth. People were running from all over. Every one of the fellows was hit. Some of them tried to take refuge in the post office, but they were turned out…. We saw some of the fellows on the ground, John Lewis lying there, blood streaming from his head….

  A few of the Riders escaped in the crowd. Others, trying to get through, were caught. Suitcases were torn from the students’ hands; clothing and mail were scattered over the street. (Later, onlookers gathered the clothing together, along with an English composition book that belonged to one of the students, and set the pile on fire.)

  One of the white girls was chased by the mob. John Siegenthaler, the President’s emissary to Montgomery, was on the scene, and as he tried to get the girl into his car, someone struck him from behind and knocked him unconscious. He lay on the street while people milled around. In the meantime the police had arrived. Siegenthaler still lay unconscious on the pavement. A newspaperman asked Police Commissioner L. B. Sullivan why an ambulance wasn’t called for Zwerg and for Siegenthaler. Sullivan replied: “Every white ambulance in town reports their vehicles have broken down.” After Siegenthaler lay there twenty-five minutes, police put him in a car and took him to a downtown hospital.

  Jim Zwerg got no medical attention for more than two hours. A Negro woman who saw him lying on the street called an a
mbulance, but none would come. For a long time he sat in a parked car in a state of semi-shock, the blood streaming from his mouth and nose. A reporter again suggested to Police Commissioner Sullivan that Zwerg get medical attention. Sullivan retorted: “He hasn’t requested it.”

  One Negro student, William Barbee, from the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, was knocked unconscious by a group using baseball bats. He lay on the loading platform of the bus terminal for twenty minutes before a Negro ambulance came. He would spend several weeks in the hospital.

  Accounts vary about how long it took the police to arrive after the violence began. The Associated Press reported that it took them twenty minutes. Even after their arrival the violence continued; the police then used three or four tear gas bombs to disperse the mob, which had grown to over a thousand. Governor Patterson issued a statement in which he said that “state highway patrolmen responded in force seconds after they were called. Within five minutes, we had sixty-five state patrolmen on the scene. Officers restored order quickly…”

  As the news came to Washington, Robert Kennedy telephoned Governor Patterson, but was told by a secretary that the governor was out of town, that no one knew where he was or when he would return. The Attorney General now took several moves: he had Justice Department attorneys go into federal district court in Montgomery to enjoin the KKK, the National States Rights Party, and anyone supporting them from interfering with peaceful interstate travel; he had the F.B.I. send in an extra team to intensify its investigation of the violence connected with the Freedom Ride; he sent a contingent of U.S. marshals to Montgomery under Deputy Attorney General Byron White.