Parting the Waters (80 page)

Susan Wilbur and Sue Harmann, pounded upon continuously as they fled, had pushed their way inside a church and called police officers, who eventually put them on a train bound for Nashville. “I don't know why they let us go,” Wilbur told reporters. “Maybe it was because we are girls.” Meanwhile, the five Freedom Riders in the stalled taxi had barged into a Negro home in Montgomery and called Shuttlesworth in Birmingham. Other Freedom Riders, stranded in hiding places all over the city, called Diane Nash with reports on their location and condition. Under her long-distance instruction, the scattered Freedom Riders began showing up one by one at the home of Rev. S. S. Seay—a defendant in the
New York Times
libel suits and the preacher who, at a climactic early moment of the bus boycott five years earlier, had risen in a fit of courage to bid all the Negro preachers go to jail.

Now Seay hosted a euphoric rebirth of the Freedom Ride. Each newcomer who came through his door was embraced as a survivor—purged of sufferings and picked clean of tales about when he or she had last seen everyone else at the terminal. Spirits swelled with each new arrival, and there were constant bulletins from Nash about how they were shaking up the outside world. Shuttlesworth and Abernathy were on the way to help, she said. She was leaving for Montgomery herself, and so was Jim Lawson, who had been on the way to visit his sick mother in Ohio. Martin Luther King might come. President Kennedy's personal representative had been beaten at the terminal too, and the Kennedys might send in the Army. Newspapers like
The New York Times
were sending in their own correspondents, no longer content to rely on wire service reports. The Freedom Riders had broken out of Birmingham at a terrible price, but nothing could stop them now. John Lewis walked into Seay's house fresh from the hospital, with a bandaged head, and received an emotional welcome in proportion to his wounds and his determination. He announced that even the two students left in the hospital were ready to go on. William Barbee soon made this message public with a statement to reporters at his bedside. “As soon as we're recovered from this, we'll start again,” he said. One floor above him, in the white section of St. Jude's Hospital, Jim Zwerg cleared enough concussion from his head to tell reporters essentially what they had heard from Jim Peck in the Birmingham operating room six days earlier. “We will continue our journey one way or another,” said Zwerg. “We are prepared to die.”

The Attorney General, who was said to have gone from horseback riding to an FBI baseball game, had been difficult to locate. He was still wearing shirtsleeves and a baseball cap when he walked into his office late Saturday to join the emergency conclave of Byron White, Burke Marshall, and ten other Justice officials. His feelings of betrayal personalized by the brutal attack on Seigenthaler, Kennedy called Governor Patterson to demand an explanation for the absence of police protection that morning. Patterson's aides put him off, saying the governor could not be reached, and this evasion put Kennedy into such a fury that he decided it was time to send in the marshals. After notifying President Kennedy at his weekend retreat in Middleburg, Virginia, he dispersed staff lawyers to activate the makeshift army they had been preparing all week. Then he called Seigenthaler's hospital room in Montgomery. “How are you doing?” he asked.

“This is a terrible headache,” Seigenthaler replied.

“Well, we're sending the marshals there.”

“I'm sorry to hear that,” said Seigenthaler, who knew this meant trouble, and he signed off with a weak joke, advising Kennedy never to run for governor of Alabama.

Given Seigenthaler's medical condition, which was listed as serious though not life-threatening, only an extreme emergency could have induced the Attorney General to call him back the same afternoon on business. But Kennedy did precisely that only an hour or two later. By then, the implications of sending the marshals were rumbling ominously. In Alabama, where Patterson was stating publicly that the state already had restored order, Kennedy's decision to send federal marshals after the riot, uninvited, was denounced as a political insult that invited the Freedom Riders to continue or even escalate their actions under federal protection. Kennedy realized that his forces would arrive too late to stop the first Montgomery riot but in time to be blamed if a second one occurred. To compound the pressure on him, word came that Martin Luther King was about to fly into Montgomery to encourage the Freedom Riders. The Attorney General knew that King's name, like the federal intervention, would attract reporters and increase the danger of renewed attacks by white mobs. Worse, Kennedy's lawyers were telling him that since the U.S. marshals were going in on a mission to protect interstate travelers, and since King himself would be an interstate traveler, he had little choice but to have the marshals protect King too. In effect, King would be coming into Alabama to support the Freedom Ride under armed federal guard, and no one had to tell Kennedy how Governor Patterson would react. Kennedy tried by phone to convince King not to go to Alabama. So did Marshall. When they failed, Kennedy was not above trying a little manipulation; Seigenthaler's wounds might soften a firm resolve.

“I was wondering if you think it would help any if you talk to King,” he inquired awkwardly, knowing that he was asking Seigenthaler to play on King's sympathies, in a lobbying campaign to make King choose a course favored by Patterson over one pressed upon him by the Freedom Riders. Seigenthaler gamely volunteered to make the phone call, but the plan was abandoned before he could reach King. Floyd Mann, appearing later at his hospital room, broke down weeping in sympathy and frustration.

From Washington that night, James Farmer ordered his New York staff to begin recruiting an emergency team of CORE members to take up the Freedom Ride in Alabama, lest the Nashville students assume complete command of a crusade that was catapulting CORE into national recognition for the first time in its history. About midnight, John Doar drove fifty miles north of Montgomery, then puttered across the water in a little boat to Judge Frank Johnson's lakeside cottage. He carried a sheaf of affidavits supporting the Justice Department's petition for a temporary restraining order against Alabama Klan groups. Johnson declined Doar's request to include Birmingham in its scope—even though Doar's best evidence of Klan conspiracy in the riots came from Birmingham—but he agreed to sign the order as it applied to Montgomery. This being a bold and hazardous act for an Alabama judge, Johnson then accepted Doar's offer of U.S. marshals to protect his own life.

King flew into Montgomery about noon the next day, Sunday, May 21, a little more than a week after he had warned that the original Freedom Riders would never make it through Alabama. U.S. marshals—about fifty of them by the count of state agents—met King at the airport and escorted him to the familiar confines of Abernathy's house, where King had first lighted in Montgomery with Vernon Johns more than seven years earlier. While he made plans for a mass meeting that night, the marshals outside refused to tell reporters or state agents why they were there. Everyone knew they were guarding King, of course, and to Governor Patterson it was an act of sneaky, cowardly treachery on the part of Attorney General Kennedy. Patterson also realized his sudden political opportunity. Having had little to gain when pitted against the lowly, mostly Negro Freedom Riders, whose stature rose in every clash with white Alabama, Patterson seized the new underdog role in a battle against the federal government itself. He summoned Byron White to the capitol for what amounted to a public council of war.

“We don't need your marshals,” Patterson told White, as the two of them stood there before the Alabama cabinet and a host of reporters. “We don't want them, and we didn't ask for them. And still the federal government sends them here to help put down a disturbance which it helped create.”

White responded to the governor's anger with the calm argument that they shared a common mission of preserving public order. “Everything seems very peaceful this morning,” he said. “Yet yesterday's violence showed how fast it can erupt.”

Patterson told White that the Freedom Ride was inspired by Communists. With some sarcasm, he asked White if the federal marshals, in their devotion to law and order, would assist state agents in executing Judge Jones's order to have the Freedom Riders arrested for violating his injunction. (“I cannot guarantee that,” White replied. “I am not familiar with your injunction.”) Patterson bore in on the issue. “Will you make available all the information you have about the Freedom Riders who came in yesterday?” he asked.

“No,” said White.

“You know where some of these Freedom Riders are, don't you?”

“Yes,” White replied. “In the hospital.”

“Do you know where the others are?”

“No, I don't.”

“If you knew where some of these people are, would you inform us?”

“I will never know where these people are,” White replied evasively.

Patterson warned White that Alabama regarded the U.S. marshals as “interlopers” without special rights or privileges in the state. “Make especially certain,” he said gravely, “that none of your men encroach on any of our state laws, rights, or functions, because we'll arrest them like anybody else.” The governor dismissed White after forty-five tense, unpleasant minutes.

These words crackled out over the airwaves, along with news that King and his supporters would meet in Abernathy's church that night. The Freedom Riders already were hiding in the basement library of the church, hoping that police would not dare to arrest them there. Governor Patterson, who could be sneaky himself, received an intercept report that Byron White called Washington immediately after their confrontation to recommend that the marshals be pulled out of Alabama. Patterson was especially encouraged that White chose to call his old friend President Kennedy rather than his boss, the Attorney General. By going out of channels to express doubts about the wisdom of using the marshals in Alabama, White signaled a warning that the younger Kennedy might be out of his depth.

 

People began trickling into Abernathy's “Brick-a-Day” church about five o'clock, more than three hours before the mass meeting was scheduled to begin. Without a preacher, an organist, or a pianist, they sang and prayed among themselves, relying buoyantly on the familiar hymns. This early ritual was a sign of the old spirit in Montgomery, gone since the bus boycott, but this time students were involved as heroes, victims of mobs, and the governor and even the President were arguing about them in the newspapers. Those making their way into the church could see a dozen or so white men standing outside First Baptist with nightsticks and yellow armbands stenciled “U.S. Marshal,” guarding the church.

There was a small cluster of whites across the street, in a city park that had been closed under threat of an MIA integration suit, and another around the corner on the fringes of Oakwood Cemetery. A woman standing on the corner of Jefferson and Ripley recruited a third group from the passing traffic with come-on waves and shouts of “Get out of that car!” Among the Negroes, the elderly and the most devout were first to arrive, as usual, often with a bit of food in one hand and a grandchild's hand in the other, and they had little trouble steering past glares or occasional profanities. As the white crowd grew larger and bolder, however, some Negro families hesitated to run the gauntlet of jeers, and those who did often moved at a brisk trot into the sanctuary of the church. By nightfall, fifteen hundred people jammed First Baptist, with at least twice that many whites gathered outside and around the block.

Between hymns, Rev. S. S. Seay told the congregation stories about the Freedom Riders' courage—how they had appeared one by one at his home the previous night, beaten but unbowed. He introduced Diane Nash, who was sitting on the platform in a place of honor, and he revealed that the Freedom Riders themselves were right there among them. He could not introduce them, or even allow them to sit together, because he wanted to reduce their vulnerability to arrest. John Lewis and the others were scattered among the choir members in the loft, but they could not conceal themselves completely, nor did they want to. Whenever Seay pointedly introduced a bandaged young stranger to say a few words or to lead them in singing “We Shall Overcome,” the open secret sent emotional waves of tribute through the church, lifting songs and “Amens” that smothered the ominous noises from the street.

King had not yet made an entrance. Downstairs in Abernathy's office, he tinkered with the program, fretting about backstage details. Abernathy, Shuttlesworth, and Wyatt Walker slipped up and down the pastor's back stairs with late reports on the mood of the crowd. Ushers brought progressively fearful messages from latecomers to the church, who told of seeing broken car windows outside or of dodging rocks. Pockets of whites were raising “nigger chants,” daring the Negroes to come out of the church. Shuttlesworth, observing that James Farmer would not be able to make it through that crowd, volunteered to meet his flight from Washington and bring him personally from the airport. Waving aside all objections, Shuttlesworth ventured out into the mob just as Negroes outside were giving up hope of getting in.

“We've got to go out and see what's happening,” King announced sometime later. A chorus of dissent went up instantly among those around him. Fred Bennett, a young SCLC aide from Atlanta, told King that it would be suicide for him to face a mob in Montgomery, where his face was so well known. Bernard Lee, who had grown ever more devoted to King in the year since his expulsion from Alabama State, told King he was too valuable to take such risks. When King persisted, runners went upstairs to fetch Walker and Abernathy, in the hope that they could dissuade him. In whispers, the leaders debated several different theories of King's purpose. Some said he simply wanted to see for himself how bad the mob was before charting his next move. Others said he wanted to attempt the miracle of shaming the mob with his presence, demonstrating in the flesh that he and the other clergymen inside were not afraid. A still more dramatic reading had it that King wanted to give his own life to the mob in order to save the congregation. Walker and Abernathy did not have time to clarify all this when they pushed through to King at the basement door. King was in an emergency mode, tuning out all the clatter around him. “Let's go,” he told them. “Leadership must do this.”

A handful of preachers stepped outside, with Bennett and Lee circling watchfully around King, like bodyguards. They moved slowly around the square block of the property to survey a mob that now surrounded them in a continuous line, held back on the far side of the street by the fragile inhibitions of mobs—perhaps by the sight of the marshals and their radios, or the church steeple, or perhaps for lack of a spark. The jeers and the occasional thuds of thrown missiles carried clearly through the early evening air, and soon there rose above them the cry of someone who recognized King. “Nigger King!” it rang out. “Come over here!” King moved slowly toward the challenge, but rocks began to land around him. Then a metal cylinder skidded to a stop at King's feet. Fred Bennett pounced on the object and threw it toward a vacant spot on the grounds. The entourage pulled King in retreat during a frantic debate about whether the cylinder had been a bomb or a tear gas cannister, and if tear gas, where it had come from since there were no police in sight, and whether the police might be in collusion with the mob. Back in the church, King went upstairs to the pulpit. Stressing the positive, he announced that the marshals were still there and that the people outside remained behind a perimeter across the street. The mood inside rose up as though in contest with the shouts of the mob, as a baritone soloist led them all in singing “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.”

In Washington, the Attorney General's office was transformed into a weekend command post, from which Robert Kennedy—clad informally after a Sunday game of touch football—established a permanent open line with Byron White's staging area at Maxwell Air Force Base outside Montgomery. The staging area was in chaos. White had about four hundred men, including eighty off-duty guards from the maximum-security federal prison in Atlanta, but no sooner did guards arrive from Atlanta and other prisons, it seemed, than their shifts changed and the wardens began to complain about the risk of prison riots in their absence. Some of the guards were leaving already, to be replaced by Immigration and Border Patrol employees due in from Texas and the Gulf Coast. White's assistants were swearing in the arrivals as deputy U.S. marshals. William Orrick, a San Francisco lawyer serving as Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Division, had checked in with the office that morning upon reading of the assault on Seigenthaler, and only a few hours later he had been commandeered to Alabama himself. Now he was racing around Byron White's staging area trying to organize the marshals into instant platoons as he remembered them from the Army. With alarming reports coming in by radio from the marshals at First Baptist, Orrick and his colleagues improvised madly. When Army commanders refused, in the absence of orders from their superiors, to allow Army trucks to transport the marshals into an active civil conflict, the Justice team tracked down the local postmaster and demanded the use of mail trucks.