he knew he could not move that girl—ever….”
The sit-ins of 1960 were the beginning. They left not only excitement, but a taste of victory. The spring and summer of 1961 brought, for the youngsters in SNCC and for many others, an experience of a different kind: an ordeal by fire and club. These were the Freedom Rides.
Stokely Carmichael, tall, slim, brown-skinned, gives the impression he would stride cool and smiling through Hell, philosophizing all the way. Arriving in the Jackson, Mississippi, train terminal as a Freedom Rider in the spring of 1961 (he was twenty, and a student at Howard University) Stokely and a young woman Rider made their way past what seemed an endless mob of howling, cursing people who screamed and threw lighted cigarettes; then they went into the white waiting room, where they were arrested. They were part of that extraordinary group of Americans who, in the Freedom Rides of 1961, embarked on a dramatic attempt to expose and challenge segregation in interstate travel in the Deep South.
In Parchman jail, the state penitentiary, Stokely almost drove his captors crazy: when they decided to take away his mattress because he had been singing, he held tightly to it while they dragged it—and him—out of the cell, and they had to put wristbreakers on him to try to make him relinquish his grip; after six fellow Riders had been put in solitary confinement, he demanded the same treatment, and kept banging loudly on his cell door until his wish was granted. When, after 49 days, Stokely and the others left Parchman, the sheriff and his guards were somewhat relieved.
At the time of the Freedom Rides in the spring and summer of 1961, SNCC was one year old and still loosely put together; it had an office in Atlanta with two full-time workers who maintained sporadic communication with affiliated student movements all over the South. But the students who went on the Rides—most of them veterans of the sit-ins—came out of jail to become central figures in a stronger SNCC organization that would now take up forward positions in a no-man’s-land untouched since Reconstruction.
The sit-ins had begun a new phase of the Negro upsurge, in which students—matured overnight into social revolutionaries—started to play the leading role. These same students, in the brutal training ground of the Freedom Rides, became toughened, experienced. And in the course of it all, they somehow decided that the Deep, Deep South, out of which they had just barely escaped alive, was the place where they must go back to do their work.
To CORE should go most of the credit for the Freedom Rides. Formed in Chicago in 1942 to conduct nonviolent direct action against racial discrimination, CORE worked successfully in Chicago, in St. Louis, in New Jersey, to end segregation in restaurants and other public places. In 1947, CORE and the Fellowship of Reconciliation, in order to follow up a Supreme Court decision outlawing discrimination in interstate travel, sponsored a Freedom Ride which they called a “Journey of Reconciliation.” Bayard Rustin, a Negro and a fiercely eloquent pacifist, and James Peck, white (he had startled his Harvard classmates years back by bringing a Negro date to the freshman dance), also a pacifist, were among sixteen Negro and white riders. They rode two buses through the upper South, with very little violence and only a few arrests, and established that most passengers and drivers would not go out of their way to make trouble for people who chose to sit where they pleased.
Again, in 1961, fourteen years later, a Supreme Court decision—this time in the Boynton Case, extending desegregation from carriers themselves to terminal facilities—stimulated action. Early that year, Tom Gaither (mentioned previously as the CORE man in the Rock Hill sit-in) spoke to Gordon Carey, also of CORE, about a “Freedom Ride,” after which a national council meeting of CORE agreed to undertake it, and CORE’s new national director, James Farmer, issued a call on March 13. Farmer himself and James Feck were the first two volunteers, and on May 1, 1961, a group of thirteen, seven Negroes and six whites, assembled in Washington, D.C. for a briefing session on nonviolence. Part of the group riding a Greyhound bus and the others a Trailways bus, they started the long trip from Washington to New Orleans on May 4.
On the Greyhound bus was John Lewis of SNCC, who had participated in the Nashville sit-ins. They made it through Virginia and North Carolina with little trouble, but at the Greyhound bus station in Rock Hill, South Carolina (as James Peck relates the story in his gripping book, Freedom Ride) twenty toughs were waiting. John Lewis was the first to be slugged as he approached the white waiting room. Behind him was Albert Bigelow (famous as the pacifist skipper of the Golden Rule, which sailed into an atomic testing area in the Pacific to protest nuclear warfare), who was attacked by three men. Police first watched, then stopped the beatings, and the group entered the white waiting room. The two buses went on, through Augusta and Athens, Georgia, with long lay-overs en route, and on May 13 arrived in Atlanta, where they stopped for the night before heading into Alabama and Mississippi.
Sunday, May 14, when the buses left Atlanta and crossed into Alabama, was Mother’s Day. That day the Greyhound bus was stopped, its tires slashed, outside of Anniston, Alabama, and surrounded by a mob. An incendiary device hurled through a window set the bus on fire, and those on board had to make their way out, choking, through the dense smoke, while the bus burned to a charred iron skeleton. Twelve of the passengers were hospitalized briefly for smoke inhalation, but the riders assembled again and took another bus into Birmingham.
In the meantime, the Trailways bus, an hour behind the other, was arriving in Anniston, the driver insisting he would not go on unless the group sat segregated. Eight hoodlums climbed aboard the bus and began beating the Negroes in the front seats. When James Peck and retired professor Walter Bergman moved forward to try to dissuade them, Peck was knocked to the ground, bleeding, and Bergman received a crushing blow on the head. The whole group was forced to the back of the bus, which went on to Birmingham.
Peck tells of his group’s arrival in Birmingham, of the mob lined up on the sidewalk near the loading platform as they got off, with young men carrying iron bars following them as they went into the white waiting room and towards the lunch counter. Then the attack came. Peck and Charles Person, an Atlanta Negro student who had been in the sit-ins there, were dragged into an alleyway, six men working on Peck, five men on Person, with fists and pipes. Peck, battered into unconsciousness, awoke to find the alleyway empty, blood flowing down his face. His friend Bergman came along and they managed to get a cab to Rev. Fred L. Shuttleworth’s house, where they saw Person, a gash in the back of his head, his face swollen.
Peck was taken to the hospital and lay on an operating table for several hours while reporters plied him with questions and doctors sewed fifty-three stitches in his head. At 2:00 A.M. Peck was discharged from the hospital, and then a brief nightmarish episode followed. Waiting outside the hospital for Rev. Shuttlesworth to arrive in a car, he was told by police to get off the street or be arrested for vagrancy. Returning to the hospital, he was told by a guard that discharged patients were not permitted in the hospital. He went back into the street, and, fortunately, the car arrived to pick him up.
A Southern Regional Council report on the Freedom Rides, discussing the bus-burning and beatings in Anniston and Birmingham, commented that all this took place “while police were either inactive, not present, or strangely late in arrival.” Police knew in advance of the arrival of the buses in these cities, but they simply were not on hand as the violence unfolded. When Birmingham police chief Bull Connor was questioned on this, he replied that protection was not available because so many of his men were off for Mother’s Day.
The entire Freedom Ride group assembled in Birmingham the next afternoon, ready to go on to Montgomery. No bus driver would take them. They waited for an hour on the loading platform while a mob gathered, then sat down in the white waiting room. It became clear that they would not get out of Birmingham, so they decided to fly on to New Orleans to participate in a mass rally there marking the May 17, 1954, Supreme Court decision. A bomb threat cancelled their first plane, and another mob gathered at the airport.
