ELEVEN 

THE STUDENT NONVIOLENT COORDINATING COMMITTEE

ELLA BAKER, like almost all other adults, was caught off guard by the sit-ins and their rapid spread. She knew, however, that few of the students thrust into leadership had any preparation or background for their new roles. With eight hundred dollars borrowed from SCLC, she secured space at her alma mater, Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, for a conference of sit-in students to be held April 16–18, 1960. Highlander Folk School had hosted a conference of one hundred sit-in leaders from nineteen states during the first weekend in April; many of these students would attend the conference organized by Ella Baker two weeks later. An invitation, signed by Baker and Martin Luther King Jr., was sent to protest groups, asking them to send representatives to the Raleigh meeting.

The invitation, written by Baker, insured the students that they—and not adults—would be in charge. The conference, she wrote, would be “youth centered.” She was a remarkable woman—and one of our adult advisors. We didn’t trust older people. Miss Baker was in her late fifties and very much the distinguished lady. But we trusted her and always called her “Miss Baker.” I know some of the women called her Ella, but I could never call her Ella. She was always “Miss Baker” to me.

The meeting was a success. More than 120 students from fifty-six colleges and high schools in twelve Southern states and the District of Columbia attended, as well as observers from a dozen liberal and student organizations and Northern colleges.¹ Helped by Ella Baker, the students resisted attempts to subsume their energies into existing, older organizations. They set up a Temporary Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), adopted a statement of purpose that stressed nonviolent theory over a program for action, and elected a Fisk University student, Marion Barry, as SNCC’s first chair.

SOME OF THE PEOPLE WHO MADE SNCC

Marion Barry

Marion Barry was a member of one of the largest delegations to Raleigh—the Nashville group. Most Nashville students had been attending James Lawson’s workshops in nonviolence for over a year and had staged “hit-and-run” sit-in demonstrations in downtown Nashville in the fall of 1959. Barry, born to sharecropper parents in Itta Bena, Mississippi, had moved to Memphis when he was seven. He earned a BA degree from LeMoyne College in Memphis, where he was active in the campus NAACP. In Nashville he was working for an MA degree in chemistry and said of himself before his participation in the sit-ins: “I was not a free man. I was not a man at all. I was only part of a man, and I felt in order to be a whole man I must be an American citizen as anybody else.”²

Diane Nash

Diane Nash was born in Chicago and was a runner-up in Chicago’s Miss America pageant. She spent a year at Howard University and then transferred to Fisk. Nashville’s segregated life depressed her after the freedoms she had experienced in Chicago; she could not understand why her fellow students had surrendered to it. Raised as a Catholic, she saw her protest activities as “applied religion.”³

John Robert Lewis

John Lewis was born in March 1940, in rural Alabama near Troy, one of ten children in a family of tenant farmers. Deciding early to become a minister, he used to baptize chickens in his front yard and was the first member of his family to finish high school. He had heard King speak on the radio in 1955 and became enthralled with the notion of the social gospel. He enrolled in American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville in 1957, supporting himself by washing dishes, and traveled to Montgomery in 1959 to meet with King, Abernathy, and Gray to seek their support for a lawsuit to integrate Troy State College near his home. They persuaded him it was too dangerous, and Lewis returned to Nashville and Lawson’s workshops.

His fellow students at ABT were Bernard Lafayette, James Bevel, and Paul Brooks. Bevel, like Barry, was from Itta Bena. He described himself as the perfect example of the “chicken-eating, liquor-drinking, woman-chasing, Baptist preacher.”⁴

James Lawson

Most influential in the Nashville group was Lawson, a theology student at Vanderbilt University. A minister’s son like Martin King, he attended Baldwin-Wallace College in Ohio. A conscientious objector, he went to prison in 1951 rather than enter the army; Bayard Rustin and Glen Smiley were his counselors in draft resistance. He was paroled to the Methodist Board of Missions and spent three years as a teacher and missionary in India, returning to the United States after spending a month in Africa, where he met leaders of independence movements. He met King at Oberlin College in 1957. In 1958, Lawson became a field secretary for the Fellowship of Reconciliation and began workshops in nonviolence for the Nashville Christian Leadership Conference. These workshops attracted Lewis, Barry, Nash, Lafayette, Bevel, and others, and now the Nashville students had the deepest grounding in nonviolence of any student protest group. On the third day of the Greensboro sit-ins, Douglas Moore, a Durham minister, called Lawson in Nashville to get him to step up his plans for sit-ins.

Lawson wrote SNCC’s statement of purpose, which “expressed the religious underpinnings of nonviolent direct action.” But his greater influence was in the students he trained and in the speech he gave at the Raleigh conference. Lawson described a role for the student sit-in leaders that set them apart from the rest of American society and the established views of civil rights. The issues they faced, he argued, were not legal or economic but spiritual and moral. They succeeded in stripping the white South of its greatest weapon: “the manipulation of law enforcement to keep the Negro in his place.” The sit-ins, he said, were “a judgment upon middle-class, conventional, half-way efforts to deal with radical social evil.” He named the NAACP as an example of this “half-way” thinking; it had failed, he said, to develop “our greatest resource, a people no longer the victims of racial evil who can act in a disciplined manner to implement the constitution.” “All of Africa will be free,” he lamented, “before the American Negro attains first class citizenship.”⁵ And he warned the students that the struggle they had entered would not be over soon. “Most of us will be grandparents before we can live normal lives.”⁶

Next to Lawson, King’s speech seemed ordinary, but he too said the sit-ins represented a revolt “against the apathy and complacency of adults in the Negro community, against Negroes in the middle class who indulge in buying cars and homes instead of taking on the great cause that will really solve their problems, against those who have become so afraid they have yielded to the system.”⁷

Ella Baker’s speech “More Than a Hamburger” was in the same vein. She said, “The younger generation is challenging you and me. They are asking us to forget our laziness and doubt and fear, and follow our dedication to truth to the bitter end.” Keep the movement youthful and independent, she instructed. Change the whole society, she insisted, not just lunch counters.⁸

The students who formed SNCC clearly had the whole society—and even the world—in their sights. One of its workshops reported, “We identify ourselves with the African struggle as a concern for all mankind.” SNCC Executive Committee member Charles Jones of Charlotte declared, “This movement will affect other areas beyond [lunch counter] services such as politics and economics.”⁹ At the conference’s closing press conference, Chairman Barry attacked President Eisenhower’s planned trip to Africa and linked American prestige overseas with racial unrest at home. Before going to Africa, Barry said, “the President should lend the prestige of his office to the solution of the racial problems in this country and thus he shall be even better prepared for his visit to Africa.”¹⁰

Baker offered SNCC a corner in the Atlanta SCLC office and hired Jane Stembridge, a white Virginian, daughter of a Presbyterian minister and student at Union Theological Seminary, to run the office until a permanent executive secretary could be hired. Stembridge and volunteers printed the first issue of SNCC’s paper, the Student Voice, in June 1960. The corner in the SCLC office provided little more than a desk. Connie Curry, director of the National Student Association Southern Regional Office, offered the use of her mimeograph machine and her contacts on campuses across the South.

SNCC’s name said it was a coordinating committee, but Baker and Stembridge had much more in mind than just that. In July, a New York schoolteacher named Robert Moses, who’d come South to do volunteer voter registration work for SCLC, discovered that no one at King’s organization had prepared for his arrival. He gravitated to SNCC’s corner desk.

Robert Parris Moses

Born in Harlem in 1935, Robert Moses graduated from Stuyvesant High School and Hamilton College. The summer after his junior year he worked in a European camp sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee; in the summer after his senior year he did similar work in Japan. In 1956, he entered Harvard University to begin work on a PhD in philosophy and received an MA degree in 1957. But his mother’s death in 1958 interrupted his education, and he became a math teacher at Horace Mann High School in New York. Moses traveled with the doo-wop group Frankie Lymon & the Teenagers by bus to several cities as Lymon’s private tutor. It was the first time, he said, despite growing up in Harlem that he realized there was an urban Black nation within the United States. He helped Rustin organize the second Youth March on Integrated Schools.

He was visiting an uncle in Newport News, Virginia, in 1960 when he joined a sit-in. That demonstration, he said later, gave him “a feeling of release.” Before then, like so many others, he had accommodated himself to racial slights. “My whole reaction through life to such humiliation,” he said, “was to avoid it, keep it down, hold it in, play it cool.” He had volunteered in 1960 at the New York Office to Defend Martin Luther King, run by Bayard Rustin to raise money and political support for King’s defense on Alabama charges of income tax evasion.

Rustin and Ella Baker recommended he go South to work for SCLC. He discovered that he and Jane Stembridge had a mutual interest in philosophy. She asked him to take a tour of Mississippi for SNCC to recruit students for a planned October 1960 conference in Atlanta; few students from the Deep South had attended the Raleigh conference. One of the people Moses met was Amzie Moore, the president of the NAACP branch in Cleveland, Mississippi.¹¹

Amzie Moore

Moore was a veteran, like Medgar Evers, who had returned to Mississippi determined to fight at home for the freedoms for which he’d risked his life overseas. Born in Grenada, Mississippi, in 1912, he had been drafted in 1942. He served in Burma and India in the segregated army. When he returned to Mississippi in 1946, he helped to organize the Regional Council of Negro Leadership. Under their auspices, thirteen thousand Blacks had come to all-Black Mound Bayou, Mississippi, to hear Chicago congressman William Dawson (D-IL). The council brought NAACP chief counsel Thurgood Marshall to speak in Mound Bayou in 1952. In 1956, Moore began voter registration work. His job as a mailman gave him some protection from hostile local whites.

Moore agreed to come to the October 1960 SNCC meeting in Atlanta but made it clear to Moses that his main interest was voter registration, not sit-in demonstrations. He suggested SNCC send students to Mississippi to do registration work. Although not yet an official SNCC staff member, Moses had planted the seed of an idea that would shift the Southern movement—and the efforts of Black youth—away from integration and toward a direct challenge to Southern white power: voter registration in the most resistant state in the South.

IN JULY 1960, SNCC chair Marion Barry and other SNCC representatives appeared briefly before the platform committees of the Democratic and Republican Conventions. He told the platform writers to “stop playing political football with the civil rights of eighteen million Negro Americans” and to take immediate action to integrate public schools, expand job opportunities for Blacks in the federal government, and give home rule to Washington, DC.¹² In August 1960, Barry wrote members of Congress to explain what motivated Southern students. “We want all the rights, opportunities and responsibilities enjoyed by any other American, no more, no less, and we want these things now. . . . We call upon Congress to work to strengthen and implement the 1957 and 1960 voting legislation and to work toward a Constitutional Amendment that will encourage, rather than discourage, every qualified citizen to register and vote.”¹³

Barry’s letter to Congress and his testimony before the party platform committees demonstrated that the students were interested in more than lunch counter sit-ins. They saw themselves as the equal to other civil rights groups, capable of competing with them for the allegiance of the Black public, concerned about issues beyond those traditionally identified as “civil rights.”

Also in August, Jane Stembridge spoke to the annual congress of the National Student Association. She told her audience that discrimination existed everywhere in America, not just in the South. SNCC, she said, would create “an unbroken chain” among students nationally that would “branch out with full force into broader areas, especially . . . into the political arena.”¹⁴ But the new organization had actually done very little to branch out, beyond Moses’s trip to Mississippi and Barry’s convention pronouncements. SNCC’s organizers knew Southern Black college students had set free energies that would not be stilled; SNCC’s job was to encourage a continuation of the spontaneity of the sit-ins and to direct it into fighting discrimination everywhere.

SNCC’S FALL CONFERENCE, OCTOBER 1960

SNCC had planned a fall conference for Atlanta from October 14 to 16. Its aims were to consolidate the still scattered and uncoordinated student protest movement and to define its goals and principles. The invitation sent to student groups said the meeting would be “action oriented” and declared,

Truth comes from being involved and not from observation and speculation. We are further convinced that only mass action is strong enough to force all of America to assume responsibility and that nonviolent direct action alone is strong enough to enable all of America to understand the responsibility she must assume.

The student movement they had begun had national and international implications: “Students must look beyond the South, into the Pentagon, into Europe, and into Russia.”¹⁵

The 1960 Democratic and Republican nominees for president, Massachusetts senator John F. Kennedy and Vice President Richard Nixon, were invited to attend. One hundred forty delegates and eighty observers from sympathetic groups—including the Socialist Party, the Young People’s Socialist League, the Southern Conference Education Fund, the Highlander Folk School, and a newly formed group, Students for a Democratic Society—and Northern campuses attended the conference. They participated in workshops led by students who had initiated sit-ins in their college communities.

Again, Martin Luther King spoke; again, James Lawson attracted the most attention. He scolded the students for losing their “finest hour” when they left jail on bail. Instead of having adults waste time looking for bail money, they should have spent their time changing the system that had put their children in jail. The protests, Lawson said, were the start of a “nonviolent revolution” to “destroy segregation, slavery, serfdom, paternalism [and] industrialization which preserves cheap labor and racial discrimination.”¹⁶ Ella Baker—in a speech called “After the Sit-ins, What?”—challenged the students to move beyond integrating lunch counters.

The meeting further solidified the feeling among many of the sit-in students that the protests they had begun barely six months before must not only continue but must enlarge their scope. They felt themselves moving toward even greater confrontation with the system of segregation, indeed with the United States itself. They saw themselves as part of a worldwide movement—against colonialism in Africa and racism and other forms of oppression at home.

Recommendations adopted by the conference demonstrate how rapidly and widely students’ vision of their role had grown since the first sit-ins in February 1960. Embracing much more than integration of restaurants and movie theaters, they felt competent to issue opinions on the 1960 presidential election and the weaknesses of American democracy.

What had been the “Temporary Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee” became more permanent at the Atlanta conference. The delegates approved a Coordinating Committee composed of one representative from each Southern state and the District of Columbia. Local groups—like the Atlanta Committee on Appeal for Human Rights (COAHR) and the Washington Nonviolent Action Group (NAG)—remained independent and autonomous. SNCC’s only call to action was an appeal to its constituent groups to engage in Election Day protests demanding Nixon and Kennedy take positive steps on civil rights and to call attention to Southern violations of voting rights.

After King made his conference speech, leaders of the Atlanta sit-in group COAHR asked him to join them at a sit-in at Rich’s Department Store. Atlanta was his home, they argued, and Rich’s the most important store. King could not make up his mind. The co-chairman of the Atlanta student sit-in group thought that if Martin Luther King could get arrested in Georgia this close to Election Day, the comments the candidates made—or refused to make—would demonstrate their commitment, or lack of it, to civil rights.

ATLANTA SIT-INS

The Atlanta sit-ins had begun much as they did in other Southern locales and reflected the character of the student leadership and the white opposition as much as they did the older, established patterns of race relations against which the sit-ins revolted. Atlanta had a history as a centerpiece of Black higher education. Its reputation rested more heavily, however, on its history as a center of Black capitalism, of Booker T. Washington’s dream writ large. Spelman College students, largely at the urging of Professor Howard Zinn, had staged tentative sit-ins at the city auditorium using tickets for seats reserved for whites purchased in advance. The manager then designated their seats a “Negro section.”

ON F EBRUARY 5, 1960, I was sitting in Yates and Milton’s drugstore, an off-campus hangout for students at the Atlanta University Center schools. I was a Morehouse College junior, majoring in English, with only the vaguest career plans. An older student, Lonnie C. King Jr., whom I knew as a football player, approached me with that day’s copy of Atlanta’s Black daily newspaper, the Atlanta Daily World. King was a veteran who had been in Oklahoma in 1958 when NAACP youth chapters staged sit-ins there. He thought the Greensboro sit-in would soon become “another isolated incident in black history if others didn’t join in to make it become something the kids ought to be doing.”¹⁷ A headline in the World read “Greensboro Students Sit-In for Third Day.”

“Have you read this?” he asked.

“Yes,” I replied. “I read the paper.”

“What do you think about it?” he wanted to know.

“I think it’s great,” I replied.

“Don’t you think it ought to happen here?” he asked.

“I’m sure it will,” I replied. “Someone will make it happen here.”

“Why don’t we make it happen here,” he insisted.

Before I could ask “What do you mean we?” he said, “You take this side of the drugstore, and I’ll take the other, and we’ll organize a meeting.”

Within a few hours, we had organized twenty students. Over the next few days, with conscious attention to attracting representation from each school, the group grew larger. Atlanta University president Rufus Clement heard though the campus grapevine of our organizing efforts; he invited us to meet with him. We told Dr. Clement we intended to stage sit-in demonstrations; he convinced us to write a statement of grievances to tell the Atlanta community what we were protesting against.

Borrowing liberally from a pamphlet, Atlanta: A Second Look, published by a group of Black professionals called the Atlanta Council for Cooperative Action and written by Clark College professor M. Carl Holman and Atlanta University School of Social Work dean Whitney Young, another student, Roslyn Walker, and I wrote An Appeal for Human Rights. It began:

We, the students from the six affiliated institutions forming the Atlanta University Center—Clark, Morehouse, Morris Brown and Spelman Colleges, Atlanta University and the Interdenominational Theological Center . . . pledge our unqualified support to those students in this nation who have recently been engaged in the significant movement to secure certain long-awaited rights and privileges. This protest, like the bus boycott in Montgomery, has shocked many people throughout the world. Why? Because they had not quite realized the unanimity of spirit and purpose which motivates the thinking and action of the great majority of the Negro people. The students who instigate and participate in these sit-down protests are dissatisfied, not only with the existing conditions, but with the snail-like speed at which they are being ameliorated. . . . We do not intend to wait placidly for those rights which are already legally and morally ours to be meted out to us one at a time. . . . We want to state clearly and unequivocally that we cannot tolerate, in a nation professing democracy and among a people professing Christianity, the discriminatory conditions under which the Negro is living today in Atlanta, Georgia—supposedly one of the most progressive cities in the South.”

The Appeal listed seven areas of grievances: education, jobs, housing, voting, hospitals, law enforcement, and movies, concerts, and restaurants. It closed with a warning: “We must say in all candor that we plan to use every legal and non-violent means at our disposal to secure full citizenship rights as members of this great democracy of ours.”¹⁸

Signed by representatives of the student governments at all six schools, and paid for with money solicited from novelist Lillian Smith by Dr. Clement, the Appeal was printed as a full-page ad in each of Atlanta’s daily newspapers on March 9, 1960. The reaction was immediate. Georgia governor Ernest Vandiver said the Appeal sounded “as if it had been written in Moscow, if not Peking.”

“Obviously, it was not written by students,” Vandiver continued, adding, it was a “left-wing statement calculated to breed dissatisfaction, discontent, discord, and evil.” But Atlanta mayor William B. Hartsfield said it represented “the legitimate aspirations of young people throughout the nation and the entire world.”¹⁹

Six days later, in actions coordinated with split-second accuracy, two hundred students sat in at downtown restaurants and cafeterias—the Greyhound and Trailways bus stations, the train station, the city hall, county courthouse, and Georgia State Capitol cafeterias, and a cafeteria in a federal office building. Seventy-seven students were arrested under a new trespass law the legislature had passed on February 16 in anticipation of sit-ins in Georgia.

I led the group to the city hall. A large sign on the lawn outside announced “City Hall Cafeteria—the Public Is Welcome.” When my group approached the cashier at the end of a steam-table buffet line, we were told the cafeteria was open to city hall employees only, despite the sign’s invitation. “But,” I protested, “you have a large sign outside that says ‘City Hall Cafeteria—the Public Is Welcome.’“

“We don’t mean it,” she said and called the police who came and locked us up.

I was summoned to an arraignment hearing, representing the group arrested with me. My lawyers were Donald L. Hollowell and Austin T. Walden. Walden, the dean of Georgia’s Black lawyers, was elderly; when the judge asked me how I pled to the charges, I turned to Walden—he was, it appeared, asleep on his feet. I turned frantically to Hollowell who whispered loudly, “Not guilty, you fool!”

I had the presence of mind to drop those last words. I said, “Not guilty.” I was bound over to a grand jury and, with the others, released from jail about seven that night. We celebrated at Paschal’s Restaurant with a chicken dinner—heroes on our campuses, proud to have joined the South-wide student revolt.

The first Atlanta sit-ins brought an immediate response, but no action, and proof of serious divisions over tactics and strategy among adult Black Atlantans. Most argued that the one-day sit-in had been enough and that the legal cases raised by the arrests would eventually result in integrating the public lunch counters where sit-ins had occurred. On the advice of sympathetic adults, the committee of Atlanta students decided to focus on winning improved employment for Blacks at stores with heavy Black patronage—two A&P grocery stores in Black neighborhoods were chosen. After fruitless negotiations, picketing began on April 22.

But student leaders were mindful that their colleagues across the South had done more than stage one sit-in for one day. They wanted an opportunity to further demonstrate their impatience and rally student support. It came when Lonnie King announced that students would march on the state capitol on May 17, the sixth anniversary of the 1954 Supreme Court Brown decision.

Governor Vandiver ordered state highway patrolmen, armed with sticks, fire hoses, and tear gas, to surround the capitol. If a demonstrator stepped on the capitol grounds, he warned, “appropriate action” would be taken. Mayor Hartsfield said, in contrast, “It is none of my business, probably, but if I were governor, I would invite them inside [the capitol] to see that wonderful museum.” Two thousand students marched. A block from the capitol, they were turned away by Atlanta police chief Herbert Jenkins.

When the school term ended, most students left. The leadership of the committee, however, was Atlanta-based. They determined to continue their activity to win jobs for Blacks and to spend the summer soliciting support from an obviously divided Black community. We began printing a mimeographed leaflet for weekly Sunday distribution in churches; we convinced two radio stations serving Black Atlanta to donate time for weekly shows on the student movement. We created a presentation called “The Student Movement and You” and appeared before church, civic, and social clubs in Black Atlanta. We carried on a summer-long campaign against job discrimination at the two A&P stores; a frequent picketer was Robert Moses.

We decided to resume sit-in demonstrations, this time aimed not at safe targets like city hall or the bus and train stations. This time the target would be Rich’s, the largest department store in the South. Black adults warned against choosing Rich’s. It enjoyed a near-perfect relationship with its customers, white and Black. Its unofficial slogan was “the only thing you can’t return to Rich’s is your husband.” It was the first Atlanta retail store to tell its clerks to call Black customers “Mr.” and “Mrs.,” the first to extend credit to Blacks, and the first to remove segregated drinking fountains. Large numbers of Blacks worked at Rich’s—but none in sales, managerial, or other white-collar jobs.

The summer sit-ins at Rich’s were hit-and-run, as students avoided being arrested. But on June 24, Lonnie King and sit-inners were picked up by police. Waiting for them at the police station was Richard Rich, the company’s president. He told the students his Jewish origins made him sympathetic to their aspirations and also a special target for the wrath of local racists. If sit-ins in his store were stopped, he said, he would call together all the city’s merchants to begin negotiations for an end to segregation at all the city’s lunch counters and restaurants. The students refused. If Rich’s integrated, the other stores would follow. As he left in anger, Rich said he didn’t care if Blacks ever patronized his store.

When students returned in the fall, the “fall campaign” began, prompted at least in part by the knowledge that over one hundred cities had integrated lunch counters since the Greensboro protests began seven months before. On Wednesday, October 19, at exactly 11:00 a.m., there were large-scale demonstrations at Rich’s and seven other downtown stores, demanding integration of everything—lunch counters, restrooms, restaurants, and changing rooms. Pickets surrounded Rich’s, and students issued a plea for a boycott of the entire downtown area. The stores refused to negotiate— the students responded with harassment sit-ins, making the city call out hundreds of extra policemen and detectives. One of the people who would be arrested was Martin Luther King. His arrest would literally change history—by affecting the outcome of the 1960 presidential election.

KENNEDYS AND KINGS: THE BLUE BOMB

Two days after the Atlanta SNCC conference ended, on October 18, Lonnie King called his pastor, Martin Luther King, to ask him again to join the Atlanta students. “You are the spiritual leader of the movement, and you were born in Atlanta, Georgia,” Lonnie King told him. “I think it might add tremendous impetus if you would go.”²⁰

“Where are you going tomorrow, L.C.?” Dr. King asked.

“I’m going to be on the bridge at Rich’s,” Lonnie answered.

“Well, I’ll meet you on the bridge tomorrow at ten o’clock!” King said.²¹

Lonnie King, Martin Luther King, and thirty-three students sought service at a cafeteria on a pedestrian bridge separating two sides of Rich’s. Failing to be arrested there, they took an elevator to the Magnolia Room, the store’s best restaurant. There, on orders of the chairman of Rich’s board, police arrested them under the newly passed anti-trespassing law.

At an arraignment hearing, Dr. King refused to post bond. “I cannot accept bond,” he said. “I will stay in jail one year or ten years.” All thirty-five were taken away for what would be Martin Luther King’s first night in jail.²² Once in jail, the students and King heard bulletins about how their arrest, especially King’s, was shaking the city and the country.

On Thursday, October 20, over two thousand students picketed in downtown Atlanta; twenty-five more were arrested. Within two days, telegrams supporting and opposing were arriving at city hall by the bagful. Atlanta police were reporting increasing tension between Black picketers and white thugs in downtown Atlanta.

On Saturday, October 22, Harris Wofford, now a civil rights advisor in John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign, decided to do what he could, on his own, to get King released from jail. He began calling Atlantans he knew; one of them, attorney Morris Abram, agreed to call Mayor Harts-field. Hartsfield was at that moment in negotiation with some members of the adult Black leadership and proposed an end to demonstrations and a beginning of negotiations. But King and the jailed students refused to be released on bail; they wanted all charges against them dropped. But Harts-field didn’t have the power to drop King’s charge. King’s charge could be dropped only by the state prosecutor or the complainant, Rich’s Department Store. Richard Rich was in turmoil. He had cried when he learned his board chairman had caused Martin Luther King to be removed from his store in handcuffs. But he was afraid to drop the charges; if he did, Blacks would insist he integrate everything in the store, and angry white customers would go elsewhere.

But when Abram told Hartsfield he’d received a call from Wofford, Hartsfield decided he would announce that a truce had been reached, although none had, and that candidate Kennedy himself had called to inquire about freeing King. This announcement would not only associate Hartsfield’s imaginary truce with Kennedy, making it appear more solid, but also help Kennedy in Northern states with large numbers of Black votes.

Wofford panicked, reminding Hartsfield he had acted alone, not for the candidate, and begged him to do nothing until Wofford had cleared it with Kennedy himself. Wofford could not reach him; neither could Hartsfield. Finally, the mayor announced to the Black delegation that Kennedy was supporting efforts to solve Atlanta’s sit-in crisis and to free Martin Luther King. A reporter in the room sent the story of Kennedy’s involvement out on the national wire. When Hartsfield told Wofford what he had done, Wofford panicked again; campaign officials angrily issued a statement that Kennedy had asked only that “an inquiry be made.”

Hartsfield spent the rest of the day in negotiations; King and the jailed students continued to demand that charges against them be dropped before they agreed to leave jail. Finally, Hartsfield reached an agreement; he ordered that students held in the city jail be released unconditionally and promised that King and those held in the county jail would be out on Monday. There would be no demonstrations on Monday, the Black delegation agreed. Hartsfield intended to visit Richard Rich and the state prosecutor separately and tell each one that the other had agreed to drop the charges.²³

But when a crowd gathered outside the county jail on Monday, October 24, to embrace the soon-to-be released prisoners, they met a shocking development instead. The past May, while Martin and Coretta had been driving author Lillian Smith from their home to Emory Hospital, he had been stopped by a policeman who charged King—for three months then a Georgia resident—with driving without a proper Georgia license. A DeKalb County judge had sentenced King to twelve months in jail, suspended, and fined him twenty-five dollars. Now the judge was asking Fulton County to hold King until a hearing was held on whether his arrest at Rich’s violated the terms of his suspended sentence.

While another vigil waited outside the jail on Tuesday, King was taken to DeKalb County in leg irons and arm shackles. Nearly two hundred supporters crowded into the courtroom, including Roy Wilkins and four presidents from the Atlanta University schools. King’s suspension was revoked. Ordered to spend four months at hard labor on a state road gang, his appeal bond was denied, and he was immediately taken away. Wyatt T. Walker began to work the phones, sure that once inside a Georgia prison, where men were killed for a pack of cigarettes, King’s life was worthless.

In Washington, Harris Wofford drafted a protest statement for Kennedy to issue; the campaign talked to Governor Vandiver who agreed to release King only if Kennedy made no statement. So, when Mrs. King called Wofford for help, he could not tell her of the agreement with the Georgia governor. If it became public, Governor Vandiver would keep her husband in jail.²⁴ Over a beer after work, Wofford talked it over with campaign aide Louis Martin, a Black newspaper publisher from Chicago. If only someone important would call Mrs. King, they could privately put out the word in Black America. They considered Adlai Stevenson, but Stevenson refused to talk to her.

Later that night, King was rousted from his cell in the DeKalb County jail, handcuffed and shackled again, placed in a police car, and driven off into the night. When King’s lawyer called the jail Friday evening bearing a writ of habeas corpus, he was told his client was gone, transferred in the night to Reidsville, Georgia’s maximum-security prison. Wofford and Louis Martin conferred again, and Wofford called Sargent Shriver, Kennedy’s brother-in-law and political advisor, and asked him to get Kennedy to call Mrs. King. “If the Senator would only call Mrs. King and wish her well,” Wofford said, “it would reverberate through the Negro community in the United States. All he’s got to do is say he’s thinking about her and he hopes everything will be all right. . . . He can even say he doesn’t have all the facts in the case.”²⁵

Shriver took Mrs. King’s number and, when Kennedy’s aides left the candidate alone, told him he ought to make the call. “What the hell,” Kennedy said. “That’s a decent thing to do. Why not? Get her on the phone.” Shriver did, and when Mrs. King answered the phone, he said, “Just a minute, Mrs. King, for Senator Kennedy.”

Kennedy said, “I know this must be very hard for you. I understand that you are expecting a baby, and I just wanted you to know that I was thinking about you and Dr. King. If there is anything I can do to help, please feel free to call on me.”²⁶

At Reidsville, King was held in solitary confinement, standard procedure for a new prisoner undergoing processing. Black prisoners sent him messages that they were going to stage a hunger strike in his support. He discouraged it.

When Robert Kennedy discovered reporters were inquiring about his brother’s phone call, he cursed Louis Martin and Wofford and accused them of losing the campaign. He ordered them to do nothing—no literature, no press conferences, nothing that would attract attention. When Senator Kennedy landed in New York that night, a reporter asked him about the call. “She is a friend of mine,” he said of Mrs. King, whom he had never met and never would meet, “and I was concerned about the situation.”²⁷ The election was nine days away.

In Atlanta that morning, King’s lawyer Albert Hollowell had convinced the judge to change his mind and release King on a two-thousand-dollar bond. Hollowell didn’t know Robert Kennedy had called the judge too. A band of supporters flew to Reidsville in four private planes. After eight days, in three different jails, King was free.

One hundred well-wishers met King’s car caravan on the highway leading from the Fulton County airport where he landed; they tumbled out of their cars into the road and sang “We Shall Overcome.” At a welcome-home celebration at Ebenezer Baptist Church, King’s father delivered the words he had promised to Wofford.

“I had expected to vote against Senator Kennedy because of his religion,” he said to a standing-room-only crowd. “But now he can be my president, Catholic or whatever he is. It took courage to call my daughter-in-law at a time like this. He has the moral courage to stand up for what he knows is right. I’ve got all my votes and I’ve got a suitcase, and I’m going to take them up there and dump them in his lap.” Abernathy told the crowd it was time “to take off [their] Nixon buttons.”²⁸

When Wofford was asked about reports that “a brother” of Senator Kennedy had called the judge to secure King’s release, Wofford angrily denied the story. Robert Kennedy’s assistant John Seigenthaler did too. That night Seigenthaler told Robert Kennedy about the rumor and denial. Kennedy said, “You’d better retract it.”²⁹ It turns out Robert Kennedy had called the judge from a New York telephone booth to say any decent American judge would free King by sundown.

The New York Times carried a two-inch story on page 22 saying Kennedy had called Mrs. King; Nixon had no response to King’s jailing. Wofford and Louis Martin had what they wanted: a news item reflecting favorably on their candidate that had passed by white America almost unnoticed.

The next day Martin and Wofford told Shriver that the news—forgotten in the white press—was causing a major shift in Black voter sentiment. Martin and Wofford would have to trumpet the two Kennedy telephone calls to Black America without letting white America know—or reminding those few who did know. Black newspapers—all but two of them weeklies—could not reach the voters in time. They set up a phony committee of Black clergymen, the Freedom Crusade Committee, to avoid any linkage to the Kennedy campaign, as sponsors of a pamphlet, printed in blue, which read “‘No Comment Nixon’ Versus a Candidate with a Heart, Senator Kennedy” and highlighting Kennedy’s call to Mrs. King. Martin Luther King Jr. had not endorsed Kennedy, only saying that he was “deeply indebted to Senator Kennedy, who served as a great force in making my release possible.” By Sunday, October 30, over fifty thousand copies of the “blue bomb” were already printed.³⁰

Louis Martin began calling Black newspapers. The front page of the Washington Afro-American newspaper read: “King Freed After Kennedy Intervention.” On Tuesday, November 1, Shriver ordered 250,000 more pamphlets printed and then 250,000 more printed for distribution in Illinois alone. At dawn on Sunday, November 6, another large shipment was sent by Greyhound bus to Virginia and North and South Carolina for distribution in Black churches.

JOHN F. KENNEDY WINS

When Eisenhower had been reelected president in 1956, about 40 percent of Black voters supported the Republican ticket. Four years later, in a thirty-point shift, Black votes went Democratic roughly 70–30, a percentage greater than Kennedy’s margin in Michigan, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and North and South Carolina. In the Memphis bellwether Black Ward Five, the Democratic vote rose from 36 to 67 percent; in eight Atlanta Black precincts, it rose from 14 to 29 percent. Nixon won only 10 to 12 percent of the Black vote, compared to the 39 percent Eisenhower had won four years earlier.

Kennedy had employed an “association” strategy—creating the impression that he was a committed civil rights activist. His narrow victory taught him that this minimalist civil rights strategy, bolstered by high-profile appointments to his campaign staff, was endorsement of a prescription for presidential moderation on civil rights. He liked to quote Thomas Jefferson: “Great innovation should never be imposed on slender majorities.”³¹ On the day after the election, the Republican Party chair said the GOP had taken Black votes for granted. President Eisenhower later remarked that “a couple of phone calls” had lost Nixon the election; Nixon blamed the Eisenhower White House for not releasing a statement on King’s arrest and jailing.

The final outcome was the supreme irony. Nixon had entered the race against Kennedy as the civil rights favorite; Kennedy was the Democrat civil rights supporters least wanted to win the nomination. He had voted for the jury trial amendment to the 1957 Civil Rights Law, weakening the possibility of winning convictions of racists who blocked the right to vote, and had named Lyndon Johnson his vice presidential running mate, frightening many civil rights supporters who saw Johnson as a Southerner, not the Westerner he eventually transformed himself into. Nixon had a credible civil rights record. As vice president, he used his chairmanship of the President’s Committee on Government Contract Compliance to win jobs for Blacks in the nation’s capital, and he had fought for passage of a stronger 1957 Civil Rights Act. Unlike Kennedy, Nixon had a personal relationship with Martin Luther King; they had met together in the White House. Nixon expressed regret over Eisenhower’s failure to issue a statement; Kennedy, on the other hand, was worried that confirmation of his dependence on Black votes for his victory might alienate racist whites, making governing more difficult. As a result, he let it be known that the Kennedy administration didn’t anticipate any changes in the filibuster rule or introducing any new civil rights legislation.

Two telephone calls had shifted an election and elected a president. That the two calls originated in a Southern anti-segregation protest and that the most prominent protest leader was the subject of the call showed the power the protest movement had, even at this early stage. That two telephone calls could achieve this, demonstrated that Black America was an identifiably separate political culture that marched to a different rhythm, spoke its own language, and—at least on November 8, 1960—saw its fate tied to the fortunes of the Southern civil rights movement personified by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

And the movement in Atlanta continued on.

ATLANTA SIT-INS CONCLUDE

Atlanta lunch counters integrated on September 28, 1961, eighteen months after the sit-ins there began. As elsewhere, the Atlanta sit-ins were a mild challenge to the established racial order. An Appeal for Human Rights, published in the daily papers on March 9, defied Atlanta to live up to its reputation, to dare to join the modern world whose Southern capital it aspired to be. By announcing “unqualified support” for the new sit-in movement sweeping the Upper South, the Appeal instantly differentiated the students from the strategy of legal action and polite cross-racial negotiations employed by Black and white elites. It placed racial issues in a moral context—asserting that segregation was intolerable “in a nation professing democracy and among a people professing Christianity.”

Black objection to Atlanta’s apartheid was nothing new. What was new was the strength of the language used. The Appeal placed the struggle in an international context, charging, “America is fast losing the respect of other nations by the poor example which she sets in the area of race relations.” It issued a call to action: “We must say in all candor that we plan to use every legal and non-violent means at our disposal.”

We knew this was going to be a longer struggle. The world out there was segregated, and we could use what we’d done in this instance to attack it in those instances too. In employing these broad terms, and promising to adopt new means, the Atlanta students were joining, perhaps unknowingly, a larger and older Black tradition of issuing petitions of appeal dating back to David Walker’s “Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World” in 1829 and to the 1952 petition by W. E. B. Du Bois, William Patterson, and Paul Robeson called “We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government against the Negro People.”

The Atlanta students’ Appeal did not match these earlier efforts in stridency or scope, but it did place the discussion of civil rights under a broader rubric of “human rights.” “We felt that ‘civil rights’ was too limited,” Lonnie King said. “When you talk about ‘human rights’ you’re talking about not just the right to go to a lunch counter. You’re talking about other kinds of things. In fact, you’re bordering on natural rights that should be granted to you just by virtue of your having been created and in this world.”³²

THE ATLANTA SIT-IN MOVEMENT ended with more of a whimper than a bang. As was true of other sit-in locales, students whose sit-ins had predicted a departure from the standard behind-the-scenes negotiations between Black leaders and powerful whites soon found that when their action precipitated negotiations, the Black seats on the negotiating table that followed were filled by the very figures their actions had seemingly replaced.

Black adults and white leaders agreed on March 7, 1961—almost a year to the date from the sit-in’s initiation—that the sit-in protests would stop, but lunch counters wouldn’t integrate until several months later.

On Monday night, March 10, 1961, a tumultuous mass meeting was held at a local church as leaders who had agreed to the delayed schedule for integrating lunch counters tried to placate a community angry that their year-long sacrifices would not be rewarded for nearly half a year more. “The sit-in revealed their limitations as an ongoing strategy,” historian William Chafe wrote. “Once the demonstrations ended, control over negotiations reverted to those who exercised power in the first place. They set the rules. They determined the framework for discussion.”³³ On September 28, 1961, seventy-five Atlanta stores integrated their lunch counters. Atlanta became the 104th city to integrate lunch counters since the sit-ins began in Greensboro on February 1, 1960.

NEW PERSONALITIES JOIN THE MOVEMENT

Some new personalities, meanwhile, were joining the movement. On August 1, 1960, the Reverend Wyatt Tee Walker replaced Ella Baker as executive secretary of SCLC. As a New Jersey high school student in the 1940s, he had joined the Young Communist League. He became the pastor of a church in Petersburg, Virginia, in 1952 and led the successful Prayer Pilgrimage in Richmond in 1959. Walker commanded respect from the ministers who ran SCLC that Ella Baker could not. He was one of them; he was a minister—and he was a man. Baker had been critical—publicly and privately—of King’s leadership, arguing that deifying King stunted the growth of grassroots leadership. Walker rejected any criticism of King and referred to him as “leader.”³⁴

In November 1960, Marion Barry resigned as SNCC chairman to return to school. Elected in his place was a student from South Carolina State College, Charles McDew. Born in Massillon, Ohio, McDew was one of the few sit-in leaders not native to the South. After Black students were refused admission to various Christian churches during a “church-in” in Orangeburg, South Carolina, and then were admitted to a synagogue, McDew converted to Judaism. His election was the result of internal tensions within SNCC in which various factions were pitted against each other. The divisions were generally these: The Atlantans, led by Lonnie King, believed segregation could be nickel-and-dimed to death; economic boycotts would force white racists to do what they did not want to. They had won the fight to have the SNCC office located in Atlanta. The Nashville students, heavily influenced by the radical pacifism and nonviolence of James Lawson, believed Christian love and redemptive suffering would conquer evil. They had won the fight to choose the chairman. McDew won and served as chair until 1963.

ROCK HILL, SOUTH CAROLINA, STUDENTS

Students from Friendship Junior College in Rock Hill, South Carolina, had joined the sit-in movement eleven days after the first Greensboro sit-in. Within a month, seventy students had been arrested. A boycott of segregated establishments followed and continued through the summer and the fall. Most of the students were members of the local CORE or NAACP chapter. While attending a CORE workshop in December 1960 they adopted the idea of staying in jail without posting bond—the “jail, no bail” plan that Lawson had suggested at the first SNCC conference. But so far, only a few students from Florida A&M, and the Atlanta students who had vowed to stay in jail until Mayor Hartsfield’s machinations released them, had followed this strategy.

On January 31, 1961, the eve of the anniversary of the Greensboro sit-in, nine students and CORE field secretary Tom Gaither sat in at a segregated lunch counter. Found guilty the next day, they were sentenced to thirty days in jail or a $100 fine. Gaither and eight students refused to pay. CORE sent out an appeal for help. At a SNCC meeting in early February, the fifteen students present voted unanimously to support the Rock Hill students. Mary Ann Smith, a student at Morris Brown College in Atlanta, suggested they send students to join them and volunteered to be one of the four who would go, but she was talked out of going by her younger sister, Ruby Doris.

Ruby Doris Smith Robinson

Ruby Doris Smith was born in Atlanta on April 25, 1942, the second oldest in a family of seven children. Her family home was attached to a beauty shop—run by her mother—and a store, run by her father. When Ruby Doris was in high school her father became a Baptist minister. She was a debutante in 1958 and a majorette with the Price High School marching band. In 1959, she entered Spelman College; the Greensboro sit-ins began in the second semester of her freshman year. Her older sister, Mary Ann, was an early member of the Committee on Appeal for Human Rights; she signed the Appeal, published in the Atlanta newspapers, as secretary of the Morris Brown Student Government Association. Ruby Doris later told Howard Zinn:

I began to think right away about it happening in Atlanta, but I wasn’t ready to act on my own. . . . I told my older sister, who was on the Student Council at Morris Brown College, to put me on the list. And when two hundred students were selected for the first demonstration [March 15], I was among them. I went through the food line in the restaurant at the State Capitol with six other students, but when we got to the cashier, she wouldn’t take our money. She ran upstairs to get the Governor. The Lieutenant-Governor came down and told us to leave. We didn’t, and went to the county jail.³⁵

BY THE FALL, Ruby Doris had become an important leader in the Atlanta student movement and the newly developing SNCC. She was joined on the trip to Rock Hill by Diane Nash, Charles Jones of Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, and Charles Sherrod of Virginia Union. They were arrested and spent the next thirty days in jail.

SNCC’s first experience with “jail-no-bail” was a failure; no students joined them. But the jail experience itself served to give them a chance to reinforce their commitment to the movement and make plans for the future. They had all made a break with their lives as students; free to devote full time to the movement, they spent their jail time discussing what that movement would be. “You get ideas in jail,” Charles Sherrod said. “You talk with other young people you’ve never seen. Right away we recognize each other. . . . We’re up all night, sharing creativity, planning action. You learn the truth in prison, you learn wholeness. You find out the difference between being dead and alive.”³⁶