SNCC- The New Abolitionists

by Howard Zinn

  President John F. Kennedy issued a statement in which he called the situation “a source of the deepest concern,” asked Alabama to prevent further violence, expressed the wish that citizens would refrain “from any action which would in any way tend to provoke further outbreaks,” and said that he hoped local officials would meet their responsibilities, that the United States “intends to meet its.”

  Their heads bandaged, their wounds treated, the Freedom Riders stayed overnight in Montgomery, in the homes of local Negroes. The next day was Sunday, May 21, and they all appeared at Ralph Abernathy’s First Baptist Church in Montgomery for a mass meeting to be held that evening. Martin Luther King, Jr., flew in from Chicago to speak at the meeting. Over 1200 Negroes and a few whites were there. In the church basement, the Freedom Riders gathered and clasped hands. Someone called out: “Everybody say Freedom!” The group responded. “Say it again!” someone shouted, and the cry “Freedom!” went up once more in the church basement. Then they all went upstairs and sat on the platform as the meeting began.

  A crowd of whites, gathering outside the church, began throwing bottles and rocks at the church door. National Guardsmen stood by, for the Governor had that day declared martial law, and some local police were on duty. A group of U.S. marshals faced the crowd. After a while the marshals lobbed a few tear gas bombs into the crowd and it thinned out. But it was still too dangerous to let people come out of the church.

  While all this was going on, two Atlanta students, who had heard about the violence that noon and had immediately taken a Greyhound bus for Montgomery, made their way through the National Guardsmen into the church. One of them was Frank Holloway, a SNCC worker, who later described that night in Abernathy’s First Baptist Church:

  Inside were three or four times as many people as the church was supposed to hold, and it was very hot and uncomfortable. Some people were trying to sleep, but there was hardly room for anybody to turn around. Dr. King, other leaders, and the Freedom Riders were circulating through the church talking to people and trying to keep their spirits up. But it was a relief and like a haven to be among friends.…

  Everyone stayed in the church until six the next morning and then left.

  The students planned now to continue the Ride into Mississippi and then on to New Orleans. While they waited in Montgomery for several days, staying at the homes of Negro families there, more students arrived to join them—from Nashville, Atlanta, Washington. Five CORE people came into Montgomery from New Orleans. Twenty-seven Riders were now ready to go on to Jackson, Mississippi, where Governor Ross Barnett had said: “The Negro is different because God made him different to punish him.”

  At seven-thirty in the morning on Wednesday, May 24, with National Guardsmen lining both sides of the street near the bus terminal, twelve Freedom Riders (eleven Negro, one white), accompanied by six Guardsmen and sixteen newspapermen, left Montgomery for Jackson. Before leaving, they tasted victory by eating in the “white” cafeteria at the Trailways terminal. On the road, a convoy of three airplanes, two helicopters, and seven patrol cars accompanied the bus while, inside, James Lawson held a workshop on nonviolence. On arrival in Jackson, escorted into the city by National Guardsmen, the group was arrested trying to use white rest rooms and waiting rooms. The charges were the customary ones for civil rights demonstrators: breach of peace, refusal to obey an officer.

  Several hours after the arrest of the first contingent of Riders in the Jackson terminal, the rest of the group, including James Farmer, arrived from Montgomery, also with National Guard escort, and entered the Jackson bus terminal. Frank Holloway wrote later in New South about this experience:

  Behind all these escorts, I felt like the President of the United States touring Russia or something. … At the door of the waiting room a policeman stood there like the doorman of the Waldorf Astoria and opened the door for us. … I guess the crooks in the city had a field day because all the Jackson police were at the bus station… opening doors for us….

  Standing in line at the terminal cafeteria, the Riders in this second group were arrested too, and joined their friends in the city jail. All twenty-seven were found guilty, given two-month suspended sentences, and fined $200. They decided to go to prison rather than pay, and were taken to the Hinds County jail across the street. “When we went in,” Holloway recalls, we were met by some of the meanest looking, tobacco-chewing lawmen I have ever seen. They ordered us around like a bunch of dogs and I really began to feel like I was in a Mississippi jail.” Then they were transferred to the penal farm out in the country:

  When we got there we met several men in ten-gallon hats, looking like something out of an old Western, with rifles in their hands, staring at us.… Soon they took us out to a room, boys on one side and girls on the other. One by one they took us into another room for questioning.… There were about eight guards with sticks in their hands in the second room, and the Freedom Rider being questioned was surrounded by these men. Outside we could hear the questions, and the thumps and whacks, and sometimes a quick groan or a cry.… They beat several Riders who didn’t say “Yes, sir….” Rev. C. T. Vivian of Chattanooga was beaten pretty bad. When he came out he had blood streaming from his head…. We could hear somebody slap a girl Freedom Rider, and her quick little scream. … She was about five feet tall and wore glasses….

  In the meantime, the newspapers were full of excited talk about the Freedom Rides. Attorney General Robert Kennedy, while seeking an injunction in federal court to prohibit Bull Connor and other policemen from interfering with interstate travel, issued a call for a “cooling-off period.” The reaction of moderate opinion in the country (for instance, the New York Times and the Charlotte Observer) was to support this. On the other hand, the very next day saw the arrival in Montgomery of Negro and white ministers headed by William Coffin, Yale University chaplain, all of whom were arrested trying to use the facilities of the bus terminal. Wyatt Walker of SCLC, the Rev. Ralph Abernathy from Montgomery, and the Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth from Birmingham—were all arrested that day in Montgomery.

  Charges flew back and forth. Governor Patterson of Alabama denounced the Riders and the Federal Government. Twenty-six white students from Auburn University, a state-supported college in Alabama, wrote in a letter to the Montgomery Advertiser: “Governor Patterson referred to the freedom riders as rabble rousers.’ He is entitled to his opinion, but is Alabama to glory in the fact that it furnishes sufficient rabble to be roused?”

  In the Atlanta Constitution, editor Eugene Patterson, although criticizing the “theatrical approach” of the Freedom Riders, said:

  But that is not the point of what happened in Alabama. Any man in this free country has the right to demonstrate and assemble and make a fool of himself if he pleases without getting hurt. If the police, representing the people, refuse to intervene when a man—any man—is being beaten to the pavement of an American city, then this is not a noble land at all. It is a jungle. But this is a noble land. And it is time for the decent people in it to muzzle the jackals.

  Meeting in Atlanta, the executive committee of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference turned down the Attorney General’s plea for a “cooling-off period,” but said there would be a “temporary lull” in the Freedom Rides. It was very temporary, because students kept arriving in Jackson, by train and by bus. Through June, July, and August, the pilgrimage continued, with students, ministers, and many others, white and Negro, coming into Jackson, where police, with monotonous regularity, arrested all comers as they tried to desegregate the terminal facilities. Forty-one Negroes from Jackson joined the Riders. By the end of the summer, the number of arrested persons reached over three hundred.

  In early June, Ruby Doris Smith started her two-month sentence in Hinds County jail, sharing a four-bunk cell first with thirteen others, then with seventeen others, then with twenty-three others. She told me later, smiling, speaking softly as she always does:

  It was a
nice set-up. When the windows were open we could talk to the fellows. We sang. We wrote Freedom Songs. A Negro minister from Chicago sang: “Woke Up In The Mornin’ With My Mind Set On Freedom” so everyone began singing it. It started there…. Other songs were composed—“I Know We’ll Meet Again” was written by a fellow I knew from Nashville and Rock Hill. We would do ballet lessons in the morning to keep ourselves fit. There were different people from different areas. Somebody was giving Spanish lessons. But then, after about two weeks, we were awakened at 4:00 A.M. to find out that we were all going to Parchman State Penitentiary. … It was a long ride in the night. We sang Freedom Songs.…

  Parchman was tougher. The prisoners had all their belongings taken from them; they were stripped down and searched, not left with a comb or cigarettes. Even their shoes were taken from them. The women were issued skirts with stripes, then put in the maximum security unit of the penitentiary, reserved for the most dangerous criminals, with whites and Negroes in alternate cells. Each was given a towel, a bar of soap, a toothbrush, sheets, and pillow cases. The cells, Ruby Doris says, were filthy, full of bugs.

  The prisoners were only allowed to speak softly, and when they began to sing the guards threatened to take their mattresses away. Elizabeth Wyckoff, a white woman from the North, was quietly telling some of the Greek myths, and a guard said she was disturbing people and began to take their mattresses away. They started to sing The Star-Spangled Banner, and then their sheets were taken away. They kept singing, and their towels and toothbrushes were confiscated. The singing kept getting louder all the time. They slept on steel for three nights, without coverings, with cold air deliberately blown into their cells all night long.

  One time, Ruby Doris recalls, she and nine other Negro girls were taken to live in the prison infirmary, where conditions were better. Through their windows they could see the men prisoners going out to work in the fields every morning. “There were fifty, sixty Negro men in striped uniforms, guarded by a white man on a white horse. It reminded you of slavery.”

  In jail with Ruby Doris, on the men’s side, were Stokely Carmichael and Bill Mahoney of Howard University. Bill Mahoney had been one of the driving forces behind the decision of students at Howard to continue the Freedom Ride after the CORE group flew to New Orleans. “By that time,” Stokely recalls, “Bill Mahoney decided we should all go South. Bevel said, ‘What do you think?’ and I said, ‘Let’s go on through.’ Here we were, discussing what we were going through and then the call came in that they had sent the first bus off.…”

  Stokely Carmichael was brought up in New York, where his parents had moved from the West Indies.

  My father really worked hard, day and night. There were times when I didn’t see him for a week. He’d get up in the morning and leave for his regular job—he was a carpenter—then he’d have an odd job on the side, so he’d probably eat at my aunt’s house downtown and go to his odd job, and after that he’d drive a taxi, and then he’d come back and go to sleep. By that time, I’d be in bed…. He died in early 1962. He was a man in his late forties. It was a heart attack. We think he died of hard work….

  A very bright student, Stokely was admitted to the Bronx High School of Science, which was reserved for the top students in New York. “I was an avid reader, but had no discipline. All the other kids I went to school with, their fathers were professors, doctors, they were the smartest kids in the world. Their fathers had libraries.… We had Huckleberry Finn. That was our highest book.” In his later high school years, Stokely read Marx; pondered and debated radical ideas.

  He was a senior in high school when the Greensboro sit-ins occurred. Soon after, he joined some of his classmates who went to Washington, D.C., to picket the House Un-American Activities Committee. “I was shocked to see Negroes at a H.U.A.C. demonstration. It turned out they had been involved in the sit-in demonstrations I was reading about in Virginia. I was very happy and decided, well, I can try it.”

  At Howard University in Washington, Stokely joined an affiliate of the newly-formed SNCC. It was called NAG, the Nonviolent Action Group, and in it were Bill Mahoney (to whom the others looked for leadership), Courtland Cox (tall, handsome, bearded, dark), Joan Trumpauer (tiny, blonde, and soon a Freedom Rider), and Dion Diamond (who later, as a SNCC field secretary, would be locked up for a long time in a Baton Rouge jail). The NAG conducted sit-ins and demonstrations to desegregate public places all around the Washington area. Then came the Freedom Rides.

  Bill Mahoney, writing later in Liberation, described their arrival at Parchman penitentiary in mid-June, shortly after Ruby Doris had gotten there. As they got off the trucks, they were surrounded by men who brandished guns and spat at them and cursed. Two white men, Terry Sullivan and Felix Singer, refusing to cooperate, kept going limp as guards tried to move them along. They were thrown from the truck onto the wet sand-and-gravel drive, dragged through wet grass and mud puddles across a rough cement walk, into a building. Then a guard in a Stetson hat approached them carrying a long black rubber-handled tube. It was a cow-prodder, battery operated, which sears the flesh with an electric charge. When the two men refused to undress, the prodder was applied to their bodies. They squirmed in pain but would not give in. Their clothes were ripped from them and they were thrown into a cell.

  Stokely talks of their time in Parchman:

  I’ll never forget this Sheriff Tyson—he used to wear those big boots. He’d say, “You goddam smart nigger, why you always trying to be so uppity for? I’m going to see to it that you don’t ever get out of this place.” They decided to take our mattresses because we were singing…. So they dragged Hank Thomas out and he hung on to his mattress and they took him and it and dropped him with a loud klunk on his back…. And then they put the wristbreakers on Freddy Leonard, which makes you twist around and around in a snake-like motion, and Tyson said, “Oh you want to hit me, don’t you,” and Freddy just looked up at him meekly and said, “No, I just want you to break my arm.” And Sheriff Tyson was shaken visibly, and he told the trusty, “Put him back.” I hung on to the mattress and said, “I think we have a right to them and I think you’re unjust,” and he said, “I don’t want to hear all that shit nigger,” and started to put on the wristbreakers. I wouldn’t move and I started to sing “I’m Gonna Tell God How You Treat Me,” and everybody started to sing it and by this time Tyson was really to pieces. He called to the trusties, “Get him in there!” and he went out the door and slammed it, and left everybody else with their mattresses….

  James Farmer said later: “Jails are not a new experience for the Riders, but the Freedom Riders were definitely a new experience for Mississippi jails.”

  The students from Nashville, Atlanta, Washington, and other places who came out of jail as Freedom Riders in July and August of 1961 sought one another out, wondering what they would do next. There was the SNCC office in Atlanta which had linked them all loosely, uncertainly. A volunteer SNCC worker named Bob Moses, just down from the North, was setting up voter registration schools around McComb, Mississippi. Two other SNCC people, Reggie Robinson from Baltimore and John Hardy from Nashville, had joined him.

  Through the summer of 1961, fifteen or twenty people on the Coordinating Committee were meeting every month: at Louisville in June, at Baltimore in July, at the Highlander Folk School, Tennessee, in August. Tim Jenkins, a slim, energetic, bright young Negro who was vice-president of the National Student Association, came to the June meeting with a proposal that SNCC make the registration of Negro voters in the South its main activity. That started a controversy which simmered, unsettled, throughout the summer. It came to a boil at the Highlander meeting in August, where the issue was posed sharply: would SNCC concentrate on a methodical, grinding campaign to register Negro voters in the Black Belt? Or would it conduct more sensational direct-action campaigns—sit-ins, kneel-ins, wade-ins, picket lines, boycotts, etc.—to desegregate public facilities?

  Even before the Freedom Rides began, Jenkins had been atte
nding a series of meetings in which representatives of several foundations, including the Taconic and the Field Foundations, discussed the raising of substantial funds to support a large-scale voter registration effort in the South. Present at these meetings were Burke Marshall, Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Civil Rights Division, and Harris Wofford, special assistant to President Kennedy on civil rights. Jenkins was asked by the Foundation people to broach the idea to his friends in SNCC.

  The Negro students who had gone through the sit-ins and Freedom Rides were somewhat distrustful of white liberals with money and of the national government. The fact that both these elements were behind the idea of concentrating on voter registration, on top of Robert Kennedy’s call for a “cooling-off” period during the Freedom Rides, reinforced the suspicion that an attempt was being made to cool the militancy of the student movement and divert the youngsters to slower, safer activity. Led by Diane Nash and Marion Barry, many of the SNCC people at the Highlander meeting held to the idea that “direct action” should continue to be the primary policy.

  Tim Jenkins was also aware of the interest of the Justice Department in moderating the temper of the student movement. He knew that the Department’s conservative interpretation of civil rights law led it to argue that only in connection with voter registration activities could it go into federal court for injunctive relief against local and state governments in the South which tried to suppress the civil rights movement. But he felt that voter registration was the crucial lever which could set progress in motion in the South, and if white liberals and the government were willing to help, why not take advantage of this? Over the summer, he convinced a number of people in SNCC that he was right.