4

The Rides Reach Alabama

By now, awareness of the rides was spreading and publicity was building. Support for the rides was mixed even within the civil rights community. While speaking at a race-relations conference, Thurgood Marshall said that he felt it was irresponsible and dangerous to continue the Freedom Rides into Alabama and Mississippi. Alabama Governor John Patterson declared there would be no protection for the freedom “rioters” in his state. As they crossed into Alabama, the riders were aware that they were entering a state in which the Ku Klux Klan had significant numbers, including among local leaders and police officers. As they plunged into the Heart of Dixie, signs at the outskirts of small towns greeted them with emblems of the Klan.

Arrival in Anniston

On Sunday morning, May 14—Mother’s Day—the Greyhound bus pulled into Anniston, Alabama. A crowd of about two hundred whites met the riders at the station. Local Klan leader Kenneth Adams had read of the riders’ impending arrival and had organized a hostile reception. He and Anniston’s well-established KKK members were particularly active on Sundays, when they had most of the day off. Many in the mob had come over right from church.

The waiting mob members carried knives, pipes, bricks, and chains. The bus driver pulled away when the ominous crowd began to throw stones and beat on the sides of the bus. But some in the mob had managed to slash the rear tires of the bus. The mob piled into pickup trucks and cars and followed the bus for six miles until flat tires forced the driver to stop on the side of the road.

The screaming crowd surrounded the bus and pulled at the door. Riders dropped to the ground as rocks and bricks shattered windows. A homemade molotov cocktail came flying inside the bus and quickly set it afire. The riders tried to escape the smoke and fire, but the attackers, who had been trying to get in, now held the door shut. The riders thought they might die in the fire but were equally afraid of being killed by the throng outside.

Finally E. L. Cowling, an undercover State of Alabama investigator who had been traveling with the riders, drew his pistol and pointed it at the whites who were holding the door shut. Cowling’s show of force, and the fear that the bus would explode, forced the mob back. Cowling ushered the riders off the bus.

 

 

The fire-bombed bus outside Anniston, Alabama.

 

No sooner than the riders had escaped the inferno, the fuel tank did explode. The riders staggered from the blast into the hands of the mob. One man asked a rider if he was okay, and when he said yes, then began assaulting him. Twelve riders were suffering from smoke inhalation, and most bore cuts from the shattered glass. Still, the mob attacked, hitting Henry Thomas with a baseball bat and splitting Genevieve Hughes’s lip. One young observer described the scene as “hell.”

 

 

On the day after, the front page of the Birmingham News carried dramatic stories and photos of the attacks in Anniston and Birmingham. Similar stories and wire service copies of the photos appeared worldwide.

 

Miraculously, Fred Shuttlesworth showed up from Birmingham at the head of a fifteen-car caravan carrying armed black men. They whisked the riders away and sought medical help, but all except the white Hughes were denied hospital treatment. Hank Thomas had to be flown to New Orleans for medical care. When Alabama state troopers eventually arrived at the scene of the mob attack and drew their weapons, they made no arrests.

The trailing Trailways bus entered Anniston an hour later. Its arrival has been overshadowed by the famous photos of the burning Greyhound bus, but its reception was no less horrible. No police intervened when eight young white men boarded the bus and beat the riders with clubs and soft drink bottles. The attackers threw Jim Peck, Charles Person, and Walter Bergman to the back of the bus and stomped on Bergman until he lost consciousness.

The assailants’ fury spent, they left, and somehow the bus managed to get back on the road toward Birmingham.

Arrival in Birmingham

The Birmingham police were expecting the riders. The police prepared by updating the Ku Klux Klan and agreeing to give them time alone with the riders. Once again, a KKK-led crowd greeted the beleaguered Trailways bus. Its passengers stepped off the bus to be attacked this time by a Birmingham mob.

This crowd assaulted riders and bystanders alike with whatever they could get their hands on, including key rings and chains. Someone snatched and smashed a Birmingham Post-Herald photographer’s camera before clubbing the photographer with a bat. A group kicked in CBS radio reporter Howard K. Smith’s car windows, ripped his microphone from the dashboard, and dragged him from his car into the street.

They attacked the already beaten Charles Person and Jim Peck, breaking Peck’s teeth and pummeling his face into a “bloody, red pulp” in need of 53 stitches, according to Smith. Walter Bergman, also not yet recovered from the attack in Anniston, was again knocked to the ground and repeatedly hit. Ten days later, Bergman suffered a stroke. He lived with brain damage and could not walk for the rest of his life.

After a long fifteen minutes, the police arrived and made a few arrests (although no one was ever convicted). Birmingham Public Safety Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor stated that the “trouble-makers” weren’t protected because it was Mother’s Day and all police officers had been visiting their “mommas.” He had supposedly watched the whole scene from his window.

For the second time that day, Fred Shuttlesworth came to the aid of those who couldn’t make it to the hospital. He brought the riders to his house and said, “When white men and black men are beaten up together, the day is coming when they will walk together.”

Publicity

Photographs of the Anniston bus burning spread instantly throughout the world. One of the photos superimposed onto the Statue of Liberty’s torch became the symbol for the Freedom Rides. The images disturbed African diplomats as well as other international contacts. This was President Kennedy’s first significant racial crisis, and it was not the kind of negative publicity the U.S. needed in the midst of tense negotiations with the Soviet Union over nuclear arms.

The president consulted with Attorney General Robert Kennedy and Burke Marshall, head of the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. Robert Kennedy urged the riders to give up their journey, but he sent a personal representative, John Seigenthaler of Nashville, to be with the riders in Birmingham. The attorney general gave Shuttlesworth his personal phone number and told him, “If you can’t get me at my office, just call me at the White House.”

Southern newspapers were unsympathetic to the riders. The Montgomery paper was amongst a few to condemn the police’s absence in Birmingham, mainly because they failed to protect “native white Alabamians against riot and violence.” Some letters to the editor congratulated and thanked the attackers, and Alabama congressman George Huddleston Jr. contradicted his statement, “Every decent Southerner deplores violence,” by saying that, “these trespassers—these self-appointed merchants of racial-hatred—got just what they deserved.”

Meanwhile, James Farmer came to Birmingham from his father’s funeral. The riders continued to face resistance, from taunting police officers to menacing mobs. Bus drivers refused to take them out of the city. Restaurants wouldn’t serve them food. Many riders should have been in bed recovering. They mulled over their few options. Exhausted, they chose to fly to New Orleans with Seigenthaler.

Getting out of the New Orleans airport was another ordeal. A line of white policemen verbally assaulted the riders until an irritated Siegenthaler told them that he was a Justice Department official.

The riders were disappointed that they had to cancel their journey, but they were relieved to see a band of equally grateful CORE volunteers waiting to take them home. Several riders were unable to hold back tears as they fell into their comrades’ arms.

Reinforcements

Upon returning to Nashville from his job interview, John Lewis followed the news of the attacks and the rides’ cancellation. In his mind, stopping the rides contradicted the principles of nonviolence. “Truth cannot be abandoned,” he later wrote, “even in the face of pain and injury, even in the face of death.”

Diane Nash agreed that it was more dangerous to stop than to continue and declared, “If they stop us with violence, the movement is dead.” She compared the situation to molding metal, a substance most manipulative when hot and most difficult to shape when cool.

Nash gained support from James Lawson, who wanted to join them in Nashville, and called Jim Farmer to ask for approval for the Nashville Student Movement to take over from CORE. Farmer agreed, despite predicting that continuing through Alabama would be a suicidal “massacre.”

Lewis, Nash, and other sit-in veterans paid for the trip to Birmingham with money from the sit-in treasury, but they were short on funds. In spite of worries about continuing the Freedom Rides, older members of the Nashville Christian Leadership Conference (NCLC) gave them $900.

Of the group of students chosen by acting head of NSM’s Central Committee James Bevel to revive the Freedom Rides, John Lewis was elected leader. Other riders included: William Barbee, Paul Brooks, Catherine Burks, Carl Bush, Charles Butler, Joseph Carter, Lucretia Collins, Rudolph Graham, William Harbour, Susan Hermann, Patricia Jenkins, Bernard Lafayette, Frederick Leonard, Salynn McCollum, William Mitchell, Etta Simpson, Ruby Doris Smith, Susan Wilbur, and James Zwerg.

Four were white, six were women, and the oldest was twenty-two years old. Most attended Tennessee State University or American Baptist Theological Seminary.

They were heading for Birmingham.

Diane Nash called Fred Shuttlesworth to alert him of their arrival. Because they were quite sure Shuttlesworth’s phones were tapped, they used a code which specified race, sex, and number of volunteers. She told him that a shipment of “chickens” was to leave Nashville at dawn the next day.

The reinforcement riders prepared for the worst. Lewis did not even tell his family. James Zwerg, raised in a white, middle class family in Wisconsin, phoned his parents before leaving. They begged him not to go. His mother mentioned his father’s weak heart. Zwerg said he had to go. The last thing she said before hanging up was that Zwerg had killed his father.

This second wave of freedom riders left Nashville on the day Lewis had expected to arrive in New Orleans, the anniversary of Brown v. Board. The ride to Birmingham was peaceful. Riders were unaware that adversaries knew about their journey. Greyhound employees conferred with one another, some swearing they wouldn’t chauffeur “niggers.”

Hundreds of policemen and protesters awaited them at the Birmingham Greyhound station. Officers waved them over and boarded the bus. One asked for their tickets and chuckled when he realized who they were. The officer told them that they were breaking the law. Lewis said that they had a right to see friends in the city, but the policeman pushed Lewis into his seat with a billy club, and told him to “sit down and stay there.”

The riders had been trained to break down barriers through conversation, but the police didn’t respond. They taped newspapers over the windows to prevent the crowd from seeing in, and the riders sat in dark silence for three hours as the crowd grew rowdier.

The police finally cleared a path through the crowd, allowing the riders to get off the bus and make it to the station where Fred Shuttlesworth and Salynn McCollum were waiting. (McCollum was one of the selected students, but she had missed the bus and made it to Birmingham on her own.) Because of this, the police had not identified her, and she was able to call Diane Nash with updates on the situation. Restaurants were closed, so black riders used whites-only restrooms and whites used black restrooms. The next bus for Montgomery was to leave at 5 p.m. Riders sang to pass the time.

The riders easily recognized Bull Connor when he walked in the room. He put the riders under “protective custody” and arrested Shuttlesworth when he tried to interfere. Connor threw the riders into a paddy wagon that took them to jail. McCollum was soon released to her father who took her back to Buffalo, but her role in the Civil Rights movement was hardly done. She would work in Atlanta for SNCC from 1962 to 1963.

The riders couldn’t sleep (they were given no mattresses) and fasted for the next two days. They signaled their safety to one another by singing. This expression of freedom disturbed the guards. Connor found it particularly unbearable. Guards threw Zwerg in with white prisoners and hoped to incite them by saying he was a “nigger-lover.” Zwerg ended up befriending the drunks and vagrants in his cell, who helped him communicate with other riders.

At 11:30 p.m. on May 18, Connor dropped by to collect seven riders, including Lewis. Completely ignorant of where they were about to go but unwilling to physically fight, the riders went limp and forced the police to drag them. They were placed in unmarked police station wagons.

Connor tried to chat with them. The threat of lynching hung in the air, but Catherine Burks invited him to breakfast and said, “You ought to get to know us better.” Connor replied that it would be a pleasure.

Connor put the riders out in Ardmore, on the deserted Tennessee border. The police unloaded the riders’ luggage as Connor told them to catch a train “or a bus,” he joked, to Nashville, “where they belonged.” He chuckled when Burks said, “We’ll be back in Birmingham by the end of the day.”

There were no streetlights. Riders found their way by moonlight. The area seemed too central to be a black part of town, meaning it was probably Klan territory. They walked for about a mile and crossed a set of railroad tracks before feeling safe enough to knock on someone’s door.

An elderly black man answered. Startled to see seven young men and women carrying suitcases, he apologized for not being able to help them. His wife came to the door, looked at the riders, and convinced him to change his mind. They brought them warm water, and he bought food from several different stores, so as not to raise suspicions by buying large quantities of food at one place. The riders called Diane Nash who immediately sent a Nashville student to pick them up and return them to Birmingham.

The car arrived by mid-morning. Four riders squeezed into the back and three crouched next to the driver. Despite the stifling heat, they felt safer with the windows rolled up. They were amused by a radio announcement claiming the riders were on Nashville’s campus, but soon United Press International reported that they were on their way back to Birmingham.

They arrived in Birmingham soaked in sweat but safe. Shuttlesworth provided them with lunch at his place, where they shared chicken and sandwiches with ministers from the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. Shuttlesworth drove them back to the station to meet their fellow riders including Jim Zwerg and Paul Brooks. That morning, a judge had dismissed charges against Zwerg and Brooks and told them to leave town.

Twenty-one freedom riders passed through reporters, police, and a crowd of 3,000 to reach the Greyhound bus set to leave at 3:00 in the afternoon. The bus sat there open and idling, but the driver was nowhere in sight. Someone told them the bus had been cancelled. The riders walked back to the terminal, passing by the same jeering crowd, who poured drinks on them and stepped on their feet. They sat on benches and sang “We Shall Overcome” until they were informed that the 5:00 bus had also been cancelled.

 

 

Once political allies, Alabama Governor John Patterson, left, and U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy, right, clashed repeatedly over protecting the Freedom Riders.

 

The riders were prepared to wait for days. Phones had been cut off, restaurants were closed, and sleeping was difficult. Police attempted to restrain the mob with dogs, but a crowd hurled bricks and rocks through the windows, and white-robed KKK members wandered the depot.

Behind the Scenes

Governor Patterson had been speaking with the Kennedys about the Freedom Rides. Patterson said that he couldn’t “act as nursemaids to agitators” and stopped responding to the White House’s calls.

John Seigenthaler visited Patterson upon leaving New Orleans. Patterson told Seigenthaler that since “the citizens of the state” were so enraged, there was no way to “guarantee the safety of fools.” Patterson cited states’ rights and professed to be more popular in the country than President Kennedy because he didn’t back down to “the goddamned niggers.” Seigenthaler knew that the Justice Department would have to take over if Alabama failed to protect the riders.

Seigenthaler himself felt frustrated as he tried to track down the freedom riders. When he found Nash, he told her that if they continued through Alabama all hell would break loose and people would die. She replied, “Then others will follow them.”

Federal authorities, bus companies, and local and state officials argued throughout the night. Robert Kennedy famously called the manager of Greyhound’s Birmingham terminal and told him to “get in touch with Mr. Greyhound” if he couldn’t find a driver.

Riders were told at dawn on Saturday morning that a bus was ready, but unfortunately the assigned driver said, “I have one life to give and I’m not going to give it to CORE or the NAACP,” before storming away. (Lewis was impressed that he even knew what CORE was.) Greyhound officials, leaders of local bus drivers’ unions, and Bull Connor met with the driver in a back room. They determined that the riders required a heavy escort. At 8:30 a.m., the bus driver returned, the freedom riders boarded the bus, and on that day, May 20, they headed to Montgomery, the Cradle of the Confederacy.