Parting the Waters (76 page)

In Nashville, where a revolving mass of sit-in veterans had been debating the Freedom Ride almost continuously for twenty-four hours, the discussion shifted when they got word that the CORE group was abandoning the buses. Suddenly, the issue was not one of reinforcing the riders but replacing them, not boosting the ride's success but preventing its failure. Diane Nash soon traced James Farmer to Washington, where he was attending his father's funeral. She asked him whether CORE would object if Nashville students went to Birmingham and took up where the original riders left off. Her request left Farmer temporarily speechless, but he gave his consent.

In Washington, Robert Kennedy returned to the Justice Department from Burke Marshall's apartment, where he had gone for the last volleys of the Greyhound negotiations. Marshall came with him, pronouncing his mumps officially over. The two of them met with Roy Wilkins, urging him to support their voter registration plans, and then Kennedy walked into the office of John Seigenthaler, the only Southerner on his immediate staff. “Look,” he said, “they're at the airport and they can't get off the ground. It's going to be about seven o'clock before we get them out of there. Do you think you can get down there and help them?”

Seigenthaler blinked. “What sort of help do they need?” he asked.

“I think they primarily need somebody along just to hold their hand and let them know that we care,” said Kennedy. The urgency in his voice moved Seigenthaler to leave instantly for the airport. Two hours later, on a brief layover in Atlanta, he checked in with Kennedy by telephone and learned that the Freedom Riders were still in Birmingham, delayed indefinitely by a bomb threat.

While Seigenthaler was in transit, 350 Negroes filed into the Kingston Baptist Church for a mass meeting. Before Shuttlesworth arrived, a preacher cajoled the crowd to contribute to another special collection to replace the Shuttlesworth automobile that had been confiscated in the
Sullivan
libel case. A man in the audience rose to speak, acutely aware of the Birmingham movement's new visibility. “Supposing
The New York Times
heard it took us six months to pay for his car?” was all he said. Shuttlesworth was their representative. Most of them swelled vicariously with every minute enlargement of his stature, and believed that he earned every bit of it with raw courage. There was hope that he could be dissuaded from his move to Cincinnati.

Shuttlesworth made his entrance shortly after nine o'clock and delivered a speech filled with the day's wonders as well as its trials. “I talked to Bob Kennedy six times,” he announced, to great effect, and he recounted in detail all the courtesies and solicitude he had received that day from the nation's chief law enforcement officer, a white man. Interrupted by a whispered message, he told the audience, “Excuse me, I have a long-distance call from Bob,”
*
rushed off, and came back with a full report. “They got plenty of police out at the airport tonight simply because Bob talked to Bull,” he concluded. “The police didn't bother me at the bus station…. Bob told me, ‘If you can't get me at my office, just call me at the White House.' That's what he said.”

When he stepped down, another preacher dismissed the meeting with a rhetorical cry: “Don't we have a great president, who has courage and conviction? There is only one F. L. Shuttlesworth!”

Across town from the mass meeting, Seigenthaler found a pathetic huddle of casualties at the Birmingham airport, suffering as much from battle fatigue as from their wounds. Held there into the night by repeated bomb threats, some of them had given way to paranoid ranting and had to be restrained by their companions. Seigenthaler talked with Simeon Booker and then identified himself to the head of the police detail. “We don't want any trouble,” he said. “We just want to get these people out of here.”

“We want them out just as much as you do,” replied the policeman, citing his orders from Bull Connor. He took Seigenthaler to meet the manager of the airline, who was distraught over bomb threats that were coming in like clockwork every time a flight to New Orleans was announced. The three of them concocted a scheme that included diversions in the airport, a departure without announcement, and, most critically, an order to airline personnel not to answer the telephone until the plane was off the ground. Seigenthaler soon boarded with the Freedom Riders, as the police unit sealed off the gate behind them, and the plane lifted off the ground near midnight. The CORE group, after two days in Alabama and eleven days in the South, found safety in the air.

Four hours later, a telephone call from Burke Marshall woke Seigenthaler in his New Orleans hotel room. “You know Diane Nash in Nashville?” snapped the usually collected Marshall.

“Yes, I know who she is,” said Seigenthaler.

“Well, you come from that goddam town,” said Marshall. “They started another group down to Birmingham to take over by bus where those others left off…. If you can do anything to turn them around, I'd appreciate it.” When Seigenthaler responded groggily, Marshall said, “Diane Nash is at this number.”

Seigenthaler roused himself to call the Nashville church where the crisis meeting was approaching its second consecutive dawn. The line was busy. Then, as newspaper presses rolled with morning headlines announcing the end of the Freedom Ride, and early-bird newscasters talked of President Kennedy's departure that morning on a two-day state visit to Canada, Seigenthaler began waking up people he knew in Nashville who might conceivably bring pressure on Nash, telling them about the grim realities of Birmingham. “I came through there,” he said. “All hell is going to break loose. She's going to get those people killed.”

 

In Nashville, maddening details consumed all of Tuesday, May 16. The smallest questions of logistics—should they ride segregated from Nashville to Birmingham, or should they stick to their principles at the risk of being stopped even before they could begin to take up the Freedom Ride?—opened large questions of philosophy and personal belief, and just when one issue seemed to be settled someone would confess an old doubt or a new fear. Phone calls from Seigenthaler, and from sobbing or angry parents who had just seen gruesome news footage of Jim Peck disembarking from the plane in New Orleans, destabilized the emotions beneath a wobbly consensus. That evening, with the divided Nashville adults agreeing to donate $900 from the sit-in treasury without explicitly endorsing the student plan, Diane Nash pushed ahead with a call of final notice to Shuttlesworth. “The students,” she told him, “have decided that we can't let violence overcome. We are going to come into Birmingham to continue the Freedom Ride.”

“Young lady,” Shuttlesworth replied in his most authoritative voice, “do you know that the Freedom Riders were almost killed here?”

“Yes,” Nash said tersely. Her patience was almost spent. “That's exactly why the ride must not be stopped. If they stop us with violence, the movement is dead. We're coming. We just want to know if you can meet us.”

She returned to the student group for the final and most difficult decision: which of the volunteers would be chosen to make the ride. It was treated as a life-or-death matter. There was money to buy ten bus tickets and retain a marginal reserve, they decided, and they left it to their chairman, James Bevel, to select the ten. Bevel first chose John Lewis, for leadership and for continuity with the original Freedom Ride. He said that he would not appoint Diane Nash, because she was too valuable as the focal person in Nashville. In all, Bevel chose six Negro male students and two Negro females, plus a white student of each sex—all proven veterans of what Bevel called a “nonviolent standing army.” He did not appoint himself, he explained, because he had made a commitment to drive to New York to pick up furniture to help a friend set up house after his upcoming wedding. This was precisely the kind of bourgeois attachment of which Nash and others were so scornful, but their disapproval did not reach to Bevel's other choices.

Nash relayed the details to Shuttlesworth, who began to speak in a crudely improvised security code—of different “chickens,” some speckled and others Rhode Island Red, to be delivered to Birmingham at a specified time. FBI agents had informed him that the police were tapping his telephone. It was ten o'clock when the Nashville students finally dispersed. The selected riders received emotional farewells from the others. Some of them wrote out their wills. Some notified relatives, friends, teachers, and college deans. All of them went home exhausted to pack and try to sleep.

Selyn McCollum missed the Greyhound bus at dawn, and the lone white female overtook the group by car more than fifty miles down Highway 31, in Pulaski, Tennessee. There were no further disturbances—other than a whispered running argument over the insistence of Jim Zwerg, white, and Paul Brooks, Negro, on sitting together in violation of the generally accepted plan—until Birmingham police flagged down the bus at the city limit, nearly two hundred miles south of Nashville. Officers summarily arrested Zwerg and Brooks for their obvious violation of Alabama segregation law. Then some officers remained sternly at attention on board while others drove patrol cars in escort formation toward the terminal. More officers jumped inside on arrival. They guarded the front door, taped newspapers over all the windows, and then examined the ticket of each passenger wishing to leave. All those whose tickets originated in Nashville and called for travel to New Orleans by way of Montgomery and Jackson, Mississippi, were identified as Freedom Riders and told to stay on the bus. Those who insisted on their right to leave were treated roughly, pushed back into seats by billy clubs in the stomach. Selyn McCollum, seeing that the Freedom Riders were being isolated within the darkened bus, took advantage of the fact that her ticket read Pulaski instead of Nashville. “I'm not with this group,” she said, holding out her ticket, and when she was permitted to exit, she ran through the gathering mob to call Diane Nash back in Nashville. Nash then called Burke Marshall's office at the Justice Department, asking why the Freedom Riders were being held against their will at the terminal.

Inside the bus, the Freedom Riders maintained the discipline they had learned from Jim Lawson. They kept insisting on their right to leave, pushing up from their seats to the point of physical repression by the police, and at the same time they tried to make human contact with the officers. They asked them one by one if they were World War II veterans, and if so, what they had fought for. They asked them if they were Christians, and if so, did they believe that Christ had died for all people. There were few memorable conversations, but the Freedom Riders did establish over time the limits of the police orders, which were to intimidate them but not to harm them. After an hour's stalemate convinced the police commanders that these nine riders were not going to retreat to the airport like the ones two days earlier, new orders came down that the Freedom Riders were to be allowed to leave the bus. Soon they stepped out to behold a jeering crowd gathered in the terminal parking lot. The Nashville students walked within a corridor formed by two rows of blue-helmeted policemen, billy clubs crossed like a Roman guard, through the crowd into the terminal, where Selyn McCollum and Fred Shuttlesworth were waiting for them.

Monday's siege at the Birmingham Greyhound terminal was essentially re-created on Wednesday. Police commanders, straddling the thin edge between protection and repression, between maintaining peace and preserving segregation, now emphasized to the Freedom Riders that the police, as they could see, were protecting them from a mob of angry white people. It would make their task much easier, they advised, if the Freedom Riders would not mingle interracially there in the white waiting room. To this argument, and to a host of similar blandishments, the Freedom Riders steadfastly replied that they intended to wait there in accordance with the Supreme Court's
Boynton
decision and to catch the five o'clock bus to Montgomery.

The stalemate lasted three more hours, during which time some of the crowd's hostility was redirected toward the police officers who were constantly pushing them back. Finally, Bull Connor himself appeared at the terminal, and as the Freedom Riders moved to board the Montgomery bus he ordered his men to arrest them. Cheers went up from the bystanders as the police officers handcuffed the ten riders and dragged them to the paddy wagons. When Connor's nemesis, Fred Shuttlesworth, demanded to know why this was being done, he too was arrested, which drew more cheers. Connor, having satisfied the segregationists by deed, now moved to placate the image-conscious city fathers by telling reporters that he was placing the Freedom Riders under “protective custody.” The students sang freedom songs as they were transported to the Birmingham jail. They tried to calm themselves by saying that this was no worse than another night on the Nashville picket line.

 

President Kennedy returned from Canada as the Freedom Riders went off to jail. Early the next morning, unannounced and unrecorded by the official schedule, Robert Kennedy walked into the White House and up to the President's private quarters, accompanied by Byron White and Burke Marshall. The trio from Justice caught the President in his pajamas, with his breakfast sitting in front of him. The Attorney General greeted his brother as though they were resuming an interrupted business meeting. “As you know, the situation is getting worse in Alabama,” he began. The new batch of Freedom Riders were refusing to eat in the Birmingham jail, demanding to be put back on the bus. Greyhound officials, upset about their firebombed bus, were refusing to transport any Freedom Riders without guarantees of police protection, and Governor Patterson was refusing to repeat the guarantee he had made and then half-repudiated on Monday. In fact, the governor was hedging and equivocating—almost hiding, Kennedy reported—for fear of being caught in a political trap. If Patterson declared that he would protect the Freedom Riders as interstate travelers, then Alabama voters might say that he had knuckled under to the federal government, sacrificed Alabama's segregation laws, and accepted the unmanly role of nursemaid to the hated group of interracial troublemakers. If, on the other hand, Patterson declared he could not or would not protect the Freedom Riders, he would be admitting limits to state sovereignty and all but inviting the federal government to assume police power in his state. To Patterson, either course was political suicide.