Remarkably, Lonnie and King, despite all that was going on around them, kept their wits. Lonnie recognized Craig in an instant, realizing the KKK leader “could have done her in.” Passing Curry, they looked past her as if she were just another bystander, to her profound relief.
Once downstairs with the officers, the three students and King emerged through Rich’s glass doors and onto the crowded sidewalk and were escorted past student picketers presently enduring a barrage of racial slurs from enraged bystanders. The police cleared the way through a thicket of the students’ signs, which displayed messages like “We want to sit down like everyone else” and “A house divided cannot stand.”
Police treated Dr. King, Lonnie King, Marilyn Pryce, and Blondean Orbert differently than the other protesters that day. Captain Little placed the four in his personal patrol car. Lonnie felt that Little could barely contain his hostility, but he assumed the officer spared them handcuffs on the orders of Mayor Hartsfield. These images would be in the next day’s newspapers, and the always alert mayor wanted to avoid bad publicity. Before the car pulled away, photographers swiftly surrounded them with bursting flashbulbs, capturing King seated next to Orbert in the back seat. There would be no arrest wagon for Dr. King that day.
As Little drove them away, a photographer caught King looking out the window with a troubled expression on his face.
* * *
Other sit-in groups, locked out or ignored by other lunch counters and department stores, reassembled at Rich’s. When word got out that only at that department store were students actually being arrested, wave after wave of students hit it throughout the afternoon, most heading up to the Magnolia Room. Once arrested, groups of students enthusiastically sang together as they were packed into department store elevators by the police; one officer groused that they were nearly bursting his eardrums. Unlike King’s group, later groups were ushered out by way of back exits; the police wanted to avoid being photographed as they lined them up against the walls of back alleys and took down their names.
As arrest wagons headed to the police station, students held impromptu prayer services, singing “We Shall Overcome.” A student remembered, “The tin body of the wagon acted as a sounding box for our deeply felt singing.” As the vehicle turned right on Forsyth and Alabama, the picketing students heard the muffled singing, and the music spread among them.
En route, one student made his group crack up as he objected, “I can’t go to jail, I have exams coming up.” They projected bravery and bravado, but they knew this was no game. What was coming would be nothing like the brief jail stays they had experienced in the spring, when they were all released quickly back to their comfortable dorms. Arriving at the courthouse to wait for their appearance before the presiding judge, James Webb, the men were put into one large holding cell, and women in another. Students were thankful the leadership team had anticipated that they would each need to have a person on the outside, one friend who would be responsible for bringing them updates from their classes along with books and other materials. It was dawning on many that they could be incarcerated for weeks, not days. So they sang.
* * *
Judge James Webb was not in good spirits, faced with the increasing volume of students suddenly filling his courtroom that day. Luckily for Martin Luther King and this cascade of student protesters, their lawyer was scared of no one and quite used to facing down irritable white court officials. Over the decades, frightened Black clients wondered where their advocate got his nerve. The answer was simple: Donald Hollowell had been a buffalo soldier.
He was one of the last to serve in the legendary Black cavalry unit. During the Depression, Hollowell’s family badly needed help, and so he left school to support them, enlisting in the historic Tenth Cavalry at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Despite the reputation buffalo soldiers had as formidable fighters from their history on the western plains, when World War II came, Hollowell faced what all Black soldiers did. In his interactions with the larger army, he said, “I was treated with less dignity, less acceptance, and less common courtesy than even prisoners.”
After the war, he put himself through law school by working as a freight laborer and trucking clerk. He arrived in Atlanta only eight years before the sit-ins and, because he was determined to protect his vulnerable clients, found himself driving dangerous backwoods roads to defend those who desperately needed representation. He endured judges who turned their backs to him, prosecutors who insulted him with racial epithets in open court, and in at least one instance a bailiff who forced him to argue his case from the courtroom balcony to preserve the separation of the races. Hollowell became a local legend for getting a Black man, Willie Nash, acquitted for the rape of a white woman and the murder of a white man. Facing an all-white Georgia jury, he first got a mistrial (after the prosecutor used a racial slur) and then convinced a second jury that Nash’s confession was coerced by police intimidation. The evidence against Nash was weak, but Hollowell knew that wasn’t enough; he identified a suspicious lover of the woman and showed the court how flawed the evidence that the rape had even occurred was. Hollowell saved Nash’s life in a place and time in which facts rarely prevented a Black man from being executed.
The forty-two-year-old lawyer, still muscular from his quarterbacking days at Lane College, occupied an unusual position in the movement, revered by the old guard and young activists alike. His growing fame as Georgia’s foremost civil rights lawyer meant that on October 19, 1960, he was perfectly placed to represent King and the students. He earned this respect working sixteen-hour days, juggling multiple federal cases designed to force Georgia’s public education system to desegregate at all levels, and yet he still managed to make time to represent the students. They would say, “King is our leader; Hollowell is our lawyer; and we shall not be moved.”
To keep track of the influx of new cases, he made a chart on yellow notepad paper with each student’s name, which group they were part of, where they had been arrested. He worried about young people placing themselves in harm’s way and told them so. A later jail call from Lonnie would be greeted by Hollowell with “What kind of trouble are you in now?” He was steadfast but not coddling. After the student leader Julian Bond was arrested at a sit-in in the spring, a judge asked him how he pleaded; the student organizer paused and then stammered, not knowing how to answer. Hollowell said to the young man in a stage whisper, “‘Not guilty,’ you damn fool.”
The students declared themselves willing to spend months behind bars, but Hollowell saw his job as getting them out of jail as quickly as possible. He knew that every minute spent in jail was a risk, and despite his heavy caseload the students became his priority the moment they were arrested. Hollowell was used to working through the courts to effect change, following the moderate NAACP playbook, but he also possessed imagination enough to see how the students’ actions could be a turning point for civil rights.
Hollowell needed assistance, however, and so he hired a couple of young lawyers to work alongside him. One was a recent graduate of Howard Law School, Vernon Jordan.
Decades before Jordan would become head of the National Urban League and a Washington power player, he was Lonnie’s high school classmate. At that time, a friend told Lonnie he should run for class president against him. Lonnie said, “Man, have you lost your mind? Vernon Jordan has a suit for every day of the week.” Lonnie’s mother started crying when he mentioned the contest. “I just feel so badly,” she said, “that I only make five dollars a day and car fare, and you have to wear hand-me-down clothes … But you can beat him.” She told him she would ask the white woman she worked for if Lonnie could borrow some of the suits that her son outgrew. Lonnie campaigned as he would later organize and won. The loss still stung Jordan years later, but weightier considerations made him eager to help out his former high school rival and Dr. King.
* * *
Hollowell had not known Dr. King long when he arrived at the court that day from his cramped offi
ce at 859½ Hunter Street (now Martin Luther King Drive). The young minister would sometimes pop into a beauty salon that belonged to Hollowell’s wife, Louise, to charm her cosmeticians. The pastor and the lawyer would see each other at the Butler Street YMCA, and Hollowell had heard King give a sermon at Ebenezer.
Despite Hollowell’s request for a brief postponement, Judge Webb ruled that he must begin the proceedings, leaving no time for the lawyer to speak with the students. Nevertheless, Hollowell had gathered enough information to point out that Rich’s management never actually asked one of the student teams to leave but had left this job to the police; as a result, Judge Webb released at least that group.
Soon Dr. King and the students arrested alongside him were brought before the judge. Hollowell realized he had a big problem. Because of the new trespassing law that the Georgia legislature had passed to prevent sit-ins, King and the students conceivably faced months behind bars. Hollowell and Judge Webb knew that; some of Hollowell’s clients did not.
* * *
Of all his thousands of notes, letters, memos, telegrams, sermons, speeches, and manuscripts, few are more evocative than a handwritten statement that Martin Luther King drafted in a blue-lined notebook he borrowed from a fellow arrestee. We do not know if he read the whole statement before Judge Webb that afternoon; United Press International quoted him as stating, “I will stay in jail a year if necessary. It is our sincere hope that the acceptance of suffering on our part will serve to awaken the dozing consciousness of our community.”
King’s written statement read, “Mayby [sic] it will take this type of self-suffering on the part of numerous Negroes to finally expose the moral defenses of the our white brother who happen to be misguided and therby [sic] awaken the doazing [sic] conscience of our community.” Working under pressure, King made uncharacteristic mistakes. One of his gifts was an ability to exude calm in the midst of frenzy, a serenity that unnerved his opponents and steadied his followers, but even King was rattled by the events of the day.
And yet he maintained a lofty moral tone in his written statement, asserting, “If you find it necessary to set a bond, I cannot in good conscience have anyone go my bail.” King added, “One of the glories of living in a democracy is that citizens have the right to protest for what they believe to be right.” He continued, “I don’t feel that I did anything wrong in going to Rich’s and seeking to be served. We went peacefully, nonviolently and in a deep spirit of love.” He asserted that they had broken no laws that day. He made clear, “We were there because we love Atlanta and the South.” King laid down his terms, stating he would not offer any appeal because jail was “a way to bring the issue under the scrutiny of the conscience of the community.” At last, he was putting Gandhi’s jail principles into action and honoring James Lawson’s dictum of not posting bail.
Whatever King said did not lighten Judge Webb’s mood. Hollowell sensed that his earlier success was not likely to be repeated. Lonnie looked on; he loved watching Hollowell work. When it was his turn to speak for himself, he called segregation “a moral issue that needs to be solved,” and he warned that the protests would continue until the status quo shifted; someone would have to give. Other students also said they would not post bail.
A court staffer interrupted to let Judge Webb know that more students had been arrested at Rich’s and were on their way over. Webb considered allowing photographers into the courtroom, as was usually his custom, but then informed everyone, “This was a planned demonstration for the purpose of obtaining publicity … My courtroom is not going to be used for that purpose.” His attitude toward the students left no doubt that he was not interested in helping their cause by letting them be photographed for national newspapers.
Outside, twenty students started picketing with signs reading, “We prefer jail to life in hell.” Hearing this, Judge Webb ordered the band of protesters hauled into the courtroom so he could tell them that he found their actions to be a personal insult. The judge said, “If there is anywhere in the world that a Negro has received impartial treatment, it has been in the courts. It is clear in my mind that this act is contemptuous.”
Hollowell interjected that the students’ protest was aimed at their friends being held at the city jail, not their presence in his court. Judge Webb responded that perhaps they had not known they were in violation of his court, but they certainly did now, and if they went back outside to continue, he would punish them to the fullest extent of the law. He concluded his tongue-lashing with a warning: “If you persist in such vile acts, you will lose ground at every step.”
Only one white sit-in participant went before Judge Webb, Richard Ramsay, an organizer with the American Friends Service Committee in North Carolina. While sleeping over at A.D.’s house during the previous week’s SNCC conference, he was intrigued by the direct action being planned. “There was no question about what I was to do,” Ramsay wrote. From his site at McCrory’s five-and-dime on Whitehall Street, he and six students headed for the Magnolia Room at Rich’s, joining students coming in waves from other sites. When Ramsay’s group asked for a table, they were under arrest within seconds and steered to the elevator.
Once at the jail, when the police noticed that a white man was among the group, they pulled Ramsay out to question him as to why he was present. He stoutly maintained that he was with the others. After he was fingerprinted and photographed, an hour passed as he waited alone. Then Ramsay was taken to court with fifteen others, where all refused bond. While Ramsay’s group was fully expecting to go to jail, Hollowell cross-examined the arresting officer to reveal that store officials had asked this group to leave the dining room, not the premises. Based on the judge’s technical reading of the law, he had to dismiss the charges. When the students held a mass meeting at Morehouse later that night, they gave Ramsay a standing ovation for being arrested. He deflected the attention to instead praise all the students in jail that night and would later send a written account of the day’s events to the Georgia Council on Human Relations.
Fifty-two protesters had appeared in Judge Webb’s court by the end of the day. Lonnie was proud of the number of students arrested, with thirty-six ultimately heading to jail—nineteen women and seventeen men—and sixteen students released. Before they could be transported to the new Fulton County Jail, students were held near the courtroom downtown at Fulton Tower—the city jail known as Big Rock. It was a nineteenth-century Stone Mountain granite structure with a tall, narrow tower extending a hundred feet into the air. Beneath this were the cells, most in abysmal shape—dirt crusted so deep after decades of neglect that it could no longer be scrubbed away, not that this was any priority. This city jail was located across the street from the police department at Butler and Decatur Streets, in the shadow of Georgia’s capitol dome. Only a few decades before, gallows stood on the roof.
In the reeking holding tanks, the students were held alongside drunks, addicts, and others hauled in for various offenses. Prisoners were curious about the bookish, innocent-looking young people who seemed completely unprepared for the environment in which they would have to sleep. The cell looked to have been designed for about twenty people, but they were packed in double that number. There was a toilet situated in the middle of the room, and it was difficult to adjust to using it without privacy. Guards left them sleeping pads that were so rancid that a student wondered if they had been there since the Civil War. One other prisoner wondered why they had volunteered to do this, asking, “You got a chance to bail out, and you don’t bail out?” Their consensus about the activists, it seemed to the student Charles Person, was that “they’re crazy.”
Blondean Orbert described Fulton Tower as the “smallest, dirtiest, dankest jail.” When the students were about to be moved, Donald Hollowell and King himself were allowed to visit the women. Though they were there to comfort and support them, they also had difficult news to share: their cases might take months more to go to trial, and an eighteen-month sentence for trespassin
g was possible. They needed to prepare themselves for this eventuality. Hearing this, Orbert fainted. When she regained consciousness, her roommate Marilyn Pryce and Dr. King were leaning over her, asking if she was all right. She remembered King as a “pleasant, jovial, unassuming man; kind and gentle.” This would be borne out every time she saw him around campus in the years to come, when he would smile and ask, “How’s my little fainting buddy?”
At five in the evening, King, Lonnie, and a portion of the students arrived at the two-month-old Fulton County Jail on Jefferson Street, just north of what is today the Donald Lee Hollowell Parkway. In contrast to the grimy, cold conditions at Fulton Tower, Lonnie could not believe the “brand-spanking-new” gleam their lockup displayed. So many students were arrested at Rich’s that Fulton County needed to borrow beds from adjoining districts to prepare for the students.
King was allowed to call Coretta. He did not speak with his four-year-old daughter, Yolanda, or his two-year-old, Martin Luther King III, saying, “They’re too young; explaining would get too involved.”
* * *
The news of King’s arrest came as a shock to Wofford. He and Louis Martin did not receive any further details until later in the day, and from an unlikely source. Although seldom remembered, the Kennedy campaign’s involvement in the King case actually begins on the first day of King’s incarceration: he received a jail cell visit from the Kennedy aide Frank Reeves, a staffer who normally traveled on the campaign plane.
When Louis Martin joined the campaign, he was struck by the testy rivalry between Reeves and Marjorie Lawson, the titular heads of the CRS. Lawson was affluent and well connected, and the Kennedys could talk with her and her husband, Belford, about New England private schools and summers on the Massachusetts coast (Martha’s Vineyard for the Lawsons, Hyannis Port for the Kennedys). When the Kennedys first asked for their help, Belford Lawson said he would not give up his law practice, so despite Marjorie’s warning that she had never worked in politics, the Kennedys hired her. The Lawsons were successful Washington lawyers, but by 1960, Bobby had begun to feel that they possessed little credibility with civil rights leaders nationally. In fact, Bobby said to Wofford that the two Lawsons were making his brother “look silly.”
Nine Days Page 7