in New Orleans at midnight.
That was the end of the first Freedom Ride. It was at this point that SNCC and the Nashville student movement entered the picture. A new phase of the Freedom Rides began.
Ruby Doris Smith, spending more of her sophomore year at Spelman in the SNCC office than with her books, recalls clearly the tension in Atlanta when news came of the Mother’s Day violence in Anniston and Birmingham.
I remember Diane Nash called the Department of Justice from Nashville, and Lonnie King—you know he was head of the Atlanta student movement—also called the Department. Both of them asked the federal government to give protection to the Freedom Riders on the rest of their journey. And in both cases the Justice Department said no, they couldn’t protect anyone, but if something happened, they would investigate. You know how they do.…
When the news came that the Riders could not go on by bus, that they were flying to New Orleans, an excited discussion went on over long distance between Nashville and Atlanta, the two centers where SNCC had its strongest contingents. The Ride, they decided, should continue. If it didn’t, it would prove that violence could overcome nonviolence.
The indomitable Diane Nash was quickly assembling a group of students in Nashville, determined to go to Birmingham and continue the Freedom Ride from there to Montgomery, then into Mississippi, then into New Orleans. They were joined by some members of the first Ride, including John Lewis and Henry Thomas. Ruby Doris Smith raced around Atlanta trying to raise money so that she could go along, but many Atlanta Negroes thought it was too dangerous, and tried to dissuade her from going.
Meanwhile the Nashville group had left, early in the morning of May 17, 1961. Eight Negroes and two whites were aboard a bus headed for Birmingham. Police got on the bus oh the outskirts of Birmingham, ordered two students to change their seats, and arrested them when they refused. The rest of the group was arrested (the reason given was “protective custody”) in the Birmingham terminal, after making their way through a crowd and trying in vain to get a bus driver to agree to take them on to Montgomery.
The Riders spent a night in jail. Then, early the next morning they were driven 120 miles to the Tennessee border by Birmingham police chief “Bull” Connor, and let out in the middle of nowhere. Diane and the others made their way back to Nashville and started all over, joined by more students, including three whites, so that there were now seventeen in the group. That same afternoon they were back, by bus, in the Birmingham terminal. It was May 19. Five days had passed since Mother’s Day.
Ruby Doris Smith, her money finally in hand, flew from Atlanta to Birmingham to join the Nashville group:
I was alone.… When I got to Birmingham I went to the bus terminal and joined the seventeen from Nashville. We waited all night trying to get a bus to Montgomery. Every time we got on a bus the driver said no, he wouldn’t risk his life. The terminal kept crowding up with passengers who were stranded because the buses wouldn’t go on. The Justice Department then promised Diane that the driver of the 4:00 A.M. bus would go on to Montgomery. But when he arrived he came off the bus and said to us: “I have only one life to give, and I’m not going to give it to NAACP or CORE!”
The students sat outside on the ramp for three hours, and sang Freedom Songs as dawn broke over Birmingham. Then they were startled to see the same bus driver return and, still grumbling, begin to collect tickets for the trip to Montgomery. Joined by two Birmingham Negroes and some newspapermen, but with no other white passengers aboard, the bus headed for Montgomery.
That trip to Montgomery took place on Saturday, May 20. The day before, a political drama was enacted on the longdistance wires between Washington, D.C. and Montgomery, Alabama. On Friday, President John Kennedy, concerned ever since the bus-burning and beatings of Mother’s Day, telephoned the Capitol Building at Montgomery to talk to Governor John Patterson. Patterson had said, just before the Anniston-Birmingham violence: “The people of Alabama are so enraged that I cannot guarantee protection for this bunch of rabble-rousers.” Patterson was not available to answer the phone and President Kennedy spoke to the Lieutenant-Governor.
The President said, in this conversation, that it was the federal government’s responsibility to guarantee safe passage of people in interstate travel, and that he hoped Alabama could restore this right without the need for federal action. That same evening, a representative of the President, Justice Departmentman John Siegenthaler, flew to Montgomery to confer with Governor Patterson. Then he telephoned Attorney General Robert Kennedy in Washington, relaying Patterson’s assurance that he had “the will, the force, the men, and the equipment to fully protect everyone in Alabama.” Apparently, this promise of safe conduct led the Justice Department to arrange for a bus driver to leave the Birmingham terminal with the Freedom Riders. The F.B.I. notified the Montgomery police that the students were coming, was promised that precautionary steps would be taken, and told Washington that therefore no federal action was needed.
Ruby Doris Smith tells of the students’ arrival in Montgomery:
There were police cars all around the bus, and helicopters flying overhead. But when we got inside the Montgomery city limits, it all disappeared. It was around noon when we got to the terminal and got off the bus. Paul Brooks went to call cabs for us. People were meantime gathering nearby, and a CBS cameraman was taking pictures. Suddenly a large man with a cigar hit the cameraman. He kept dragging him all over the street, beating him. The cameraman was small. There was not one policeman around.
About three hundred persons had gathered at the terminal, but apparently only about twenty-five or thirty participated in the actual violence that followed. These had clubs and sticks. Fifteen of them clubbed one newspaperman, Norman Ritter, head of the Time-Life News Bureau, when he tried to come to the help of another newsman.
One of the first of the Riders to get off the bus was James Zwerg, a young white man from Appleton, Wisconsin, tall, slender, dressed neatly in an olive-green business suit. Several women screamed, “Kill the nigger-loving son of a bitch,” and a group of white youngsters moved in, pounded at Zwerg with fists and sticks, and sent him bleeding to the pavement. Then others stomped his face into the hot tar of the roadway, while women shouted encouragement.
“Zwerg never attempted to defend himself in any way,” Ruby Doris Smith recalls. “He never put his hands up or anything. Every time they knocked him down, he got back up.” At just about that time, the cabs arrived for them.
The mob turned from Zwerg to us. Someone yelled: “They’re about to get awayl” Then they started beating everyone. I saw John Lewis beaten, blood coming out of his mouth. People were running from all over. Every one of the fellows was hit. Some of them tried to take refuge in the post office, but they were turned out…. We saw some of the fellows on the ground, John Lewis lying there, blood streaming from his head….
A few of the Riders escaped in the crowd. Others, trying to get through, were caught. Suitcases were torn from the students’ hands; clothing and mail were scattered over the street. (Later, onlookers gathered the clothing together, along with an English composition book that belonged to one of the students, and set the pile on fire.)
One of the white girls was chased by the mob. John Siegenthaler, the President’s emissary to Montgomery, was on the scene, and as he tried to get the girl into his car, someone struck him from behind and knocked him unconscious. He lay on the street while people milled around. In the meantime the police had arrived. Siegenthaler still lay unconscious on the pavement. A newspaperman asked Police Commissioner L. B. Sullivan why an ambulance wasn’t called for Zwerg and for Siegenthaler. Sullivan replied: “Every white ambulance in town reports their vehicles have broken down.” After Siegenthaler lay there twenty-five minutes, police put him in a car and took him to a downtown hospital.
Jim
