Parting the Waters (83 page)

Walker soon went back to the students, and when the issue welled up again, he cut them off. “Look,” he said sharply, “if Dr. King decides he's not going, that's it. He don't have to have no reason.” The fire in his eyes stifled all further dissent. So did his abrupt switch to the double negative of street jargon, which Walker used to signal straight talk—all Negro, no polish, no nonsense.

The students generally resented Walker's imperious manner, but they were divided on King. Among the young preachers, James Bevel supported King's decision on the grounds that he could carry the message of the Freedom Ride to tens of thousands around the country. He cautioned his fellow students against making badges of their commitment. Paul Brooks, who had been arrested outside Birmingham on the first bus of Nashville reinforcements, said he wished King had simply acknowledged his fear. “I would have respected him more,” Brooks confided. John Lewis bridled at any overt criticism of King, but even he found himself defensively repeating Lawson's teaching that in nonviolence you do not badger people or force them beyond their commitment. He was looking gently but painfully back on King, patronizing the man he revered.

These nicks and bruises were tucked out of sight when they all left Dr. Harris' house on Tuesday afternoon to face a press conference. There was still martial law in Montgomery, with a thousand helmeted Guardsmen on the streets, and a large contingent of the nation's press corps was assembled there to find out whether the Negroes would press the battle. Farmer, Abernathy, and Lewis made brief statements before King read a joint declaration that the ride would go on through the heart of Mississippi, martial law or not, protection or no protection. This was dramatic enough, but then King put the prepared text aside. “Freedom Riders must develop the quiet courage of dying for a cause,” he said, chocking back the emotions that had torn at him in the private debates. “We would not like to see anyone die…. We all love life, and there are no martyrs here—but we are well aware that we may have some casualties…. I'm sure these students are willing to face death if necessary.”

 

At about midnight during the Sunday siege in Abernathy's church, Robert Kennedy had passed along to his brother a complaint from Assistant Attorney General Orrick about the sluggish performance of FBI agents in Montgomery. President Kennedy, finally given an opportunity to do something other than sign the dreaded troop proclamation, had relayed the complaint to FBI Director Hoover that same hour, and within minutes the Montgomery SAC had appeared in front of Orrick at Maxwell Air Force Base, pledging eager cooperation and begging Orrick not to criticize the Bureau again.

On the Monday morning after he had received the presidential nudge, Hoover ordered up an instant report—on King, whom he perceived to be the proximate cause of the Montgomery crisis. The sketchy document rushed to his desk that same day was a jumble of obscure suspicions. It noted that King had thanked Ben Davis, the Communist ex-city councilman from New York, for donating blood to him when King was stabbed in 1958. It recorded correctly that King had delivered the closing speech at Highlander Folk School in 1957, but branded Highlander a “Communist Party training school.” In language, detail, obsession with communism, and pervasive enmity toward King, the FBI report strongly resembled a report produced a year earlier for Bull Connor by Detective Tom Cook, Connor's Klan-connected security chief. Scanning the FBI document, Hoover learned that the Bureau had not fully investigated King, and he scrawled a commanding “Why not?” in the margin.

Hoover's agents arrested four men that Monday morning for burning the Greyhound bus in Anniston. After Orrick's complaint, they were working diligently to secure affidavits in support of Judge Johnson's injunction. These were valuable functions, for which the FBI was indispensable, but the top officials of the Kennedy Justice Department sensed enough of Hoover's attitudes to know that he would resist any new assignment in the emergency. In particular, if the Freedom Riders continued on from Montgomery, he would dig in against having his men protect them directly, as the U.S. marshals were doing. Hoover's stated reason was that the FBI could not be objective in its investigative role if associated with the Freedom Riders. His deeper reason was that the FBI was an intelligence agency, like the CIA, and did not perform menial “guard duty” even for the President, much less Negro rabble-rousers.

That left the marshals to protect the Freedom Riders, but Robert Kennedy was reconsidering that idea even before Byron White flew back to Washington for emergency consultations. He decided they were too poorly trained and organized to be effective against determined rioters; also, their presence handed Patterson and other Southern governors a popular cry of resistance. The nightmarish experience in Montgomery left Byron White worrying about how to withdraw the marshals, not how to use them again, and Burke Marshall was saying that while the federal government could not contemplate establishing a permanent force to protect all interstate bus passengers, neither could it protect some and not others. In review, therefore, Kennedy's first move was to rule out the use of White's marshals or the Army on the journey to Mississippi. He would rely on the states. This was a most “difficult decision,” Marshall recalled. Robert Kennedy met with the President for forty-five minutes on Monday, agonizing over his decision not to defend the Freedom Riders even as King was agonizing over his decision not to join them.

Kennedy then faced the seemingly impossible task of inducing the Alabama and Mississippi authorities to perform police duties they had resolutely spurned—and to do so without being able to make credible threats of using federal marshals to fill the breach. Needing extraordinary, novel tactics, he developed during dozens of conversations with them a critical distinction between force and violence. In effect, Kennedy agreed to let state officials defend segregation by making forcible, unconstitutional arrests of the Freedom Riders so long as those officials did not let mobs accomplish the same purpose by violence. Byron White gave public support to the deal on Monday by telling reporters that the United States would stand aside if the Freedom Riders went to jail. “That would be a matter between the Freedom Riders and local officials,” he said. “I'm sure they would be represented by competent counsel.” Years later, in a confidential oral history, Kennedy remained uncomfortable about the arrangement. “So I, in fact, I suppose, concurred [in] the fact that they were going to be arrested,” he said, “though I didn't have any control over it.”

All that Tuesday night, the Alabama and Mississippi authorities worked themselves into a state of feverish cooperation with Kennedy in devising for the Freedom Riders' bus an armed escort worthy of a NATO war game. Kennedy wanted a display of power that would serve to intimidate ambushers reportedly gathered along the 258-mile highway between Montgomery and Jackson, Mississippi, the designated arrest point. The state officials, once they agreed to forestall violence, wanted to stage an extravagant show in order to advertise that interracial travelers could not survive with anything less. By midnight, Mississippi governor Ross Barnett was so enthusiastic about the cooperative arrangement that he jokingly invited Byron White to ride in the escorted bus over to Jackson and have dinner with him. “You'll have the nicest ride,” Barnett chortled over the phone to White. “You'll be just as safe as you were in your baby crib.”

The Freedom Riders themselves did not know of these plans. For them, Tuesday was a night of tension, exhortation, and occasional celebration. A carload of Nashville reinforcements arrived, as did some of the CORE recruits from New Orleans. Later that night, a group of sit-in veterans came in all the way from Washington, D.C., where the original Freedom Ride had begun nineteen days earlier. This group included Howard University students John Moody, William Mahoney, and Stokely Carmichael, along with a white divinity student named Paul Dietrich. They all piled into Dr. Harris' house, where the central topic of debate was whether they would make it out of the Montgomery bus station. Since the Saturday riot, mobs had reappeared periodically on rumors of encountering the Freedom Riders again. Some of the students wrote personal testaments and notification lists, while others deposited their valuables with those staying behind. Paul Dietrich entrusted his imperial jade ring to James Farmer, who had decided not to go.

When the Freedom Riders left the house at dawn, an Alabama National Guard jeep appeared to escort their cars. At the bus station, more than one hundred Guardsmen held small clumps of bystanders at bay some distance from the terminal building. These were the first welcome signs of protection, but they were taken for nothing more than a signal that the authorities had decided not to permit a repeat of the Saturday riot. Abernathy, Walker, King, and King's brother A.D., who had come in from Atlanta, all marched with the riders into the whites' waiting room and ordered coffee or snacks from the lunch counter. The bus station manager told reporters flocking in behind that they were the first Negroes ever to receive service. Even these small acts, though recently sanctioned by the federal courts, were illegal under the criminal statutes of Alabama. As such they made King subject to rearrest for violating the conditions of his probation in Georgia, but King was determined to share at least a small part of the day's risk. He followed the group outside to the Trailways loading platform, where they were surprised to find the seven o'clock bus to Jackson empty of other passengers. Soldiers were refusing entry to anyone except Freedom Riders and newsmen with credentials. There were sixteen reporters aboard. In the end, only twelve Freedom Riders stepped forward, nearly all from Nashville. They chose their mentor in nonviolence, James Lawson, as group leader for the trip.

Suddenly, behind the dozen Freedom Riders, came an equal number of National Guard soldiers in full battle dress, carrying bayoneted rifles, and behind them came their commander, General Graham. Addressing the Freedom Riders from the front of the bus, he seemed radically different from the stern antagonist who had marched into First Baptist Church. “This may be a hazardous journey,” Graham said softly. “We have taken every precaution to protect you. And I sincerely wish you all a safe journey.” As he stepped off the bus, several of the students thanked him emotionally for the whiff of reconciliation. Outside, just before the bus pulled out at 7:06
A.M.
, King reached up to an open window and shook the hand of Paul Dietrich to wish him good luck.

A squadron of motorcycle policemen helped the bus push its way through the congestion around the station. The policemen dropped off at the city limits to leave the bus in the midst of an extraordinary procession numbering some forty-two vehicles—mostly highway patrol cars, their sirens wailing, with several dozen more reporters bringing up the rear. Supplementing the main convoy were FBI spotter cars at strategic checkpoints, helicopter escorts, and U.S. Border Patrol airplanes in high-altitude reconnaissance—providing reports to Attorney General Kennedy's office via Byron White's staging area back in Montgomery. After the procession hurtled past the first scheduled stop, at Selma, the Guard commander on board revealed that all intermediate stops had been canceled. There would be no terminals, no snack bars, no rest rooms during the entire seven-hour trip to Jackson.

The caravan maintained speeds of nearly seventy miles per hour except for two brief delays. When fear and indigestion made a Freedom Rider violently ill, vigilant Guardsmen formed a tight circle around him while he vomited on the side of the highway. The second stop occurred at the border town of Scratch Hill, Alabama, where the crest of a hill brought into view a long line of Mississippi Guardsmen and state police units, poised to take over. The Mississippi escort was even longer than Alabama's. As the Scratch Hill transfer was being made, a distraught James Lawson jumped from the bus to hold an impromptu press conference with the milling reporters. He protested that the enormous military escort was contrary to the Freedom Riders' entire philosophy. It was unnecessary, he told the reporters, many of whom, terrified themselves by news tips of dynamite ambushes ahead in Mississippi, thought Lawson was out of his mind. “We would rather risk violence and be able to travel like ordinary passengers,” Lawson added. “…We will accept the violence and the hate, absorb it without returning it.”

By then it was late morning, and a second group of fourteen Freedom Riders had bought tickets for the 11:25 Greyhound out of Montgomery. Among them were two CORE students from New Orleans, Jerome Smith and Doris Castle, and Henry Thomas, a veteran of the Anniston bus-burning ten days earlier, who had returned for a second ride. Group leader Lucretia Collins, a Nashville student who had been with the ride since Birmingham, conducted nonviolence workshops en route.

News of this second busload came as a seismic shock to Robert Kennedy. All the cajoling and commandeering for the two-state armored caravan had been predicated on the assurance that they would have to pull it off only once. Instead, the fragile trust of the Alabama and Mississippi authorities was shattered again. Their motivation for cooperating with Kennedy, in what they regarded as a compromise of segregationist principle, was to end the crisis in a way that discouraged further bus riders. With new riders at the station even before the Alabama fleet returned to Montgomery, they felt betrayed, ridiculous. Kennedy himself, scrambling madly to keep the agreement patched together this one more time, was angry enough to issue his first formal statement. His aides in Washington told reporters that this second busload had “nothing to do with the Freedom Riders.”