Parting the Waters (84 page)

Kennedy's statement moved toward the position of the Alabama and Mississippi authorities. He complimented them for maintaining order so far and then made public to integrationists everywhere his warning that there would be no federal protection. “The leaders of the student groups testing segregation laws,” he announced, “…today were informed that no Federal marshals would accompany them.” The focal point of Kennedy's appeal for normalcy was his brother's imminent trip to Europe for talks with Charles de Gaulle and Nikita Khrushchev. President Kennedy was about to ask Congress to put an American on the moon and to boost U.S. spending on nuclear weapons—partly to bolster his strength for the summit meeting—and in this charged context, continuing international publicity about ugly race riots in the South would send the leader of the free world into European palaces with mud on his shoes. “I think we should all keep in mind that the President is about to embark on a mission of great importance,” the Attorney General concluded. “Whatever we do in the United States at this time which brings or causes discredit on our country can be harmful to his mission.”

From his office, Kennedy monitored the progress of the first bus into Mississippi. Byron White, James McShane, Kennedy aide Joe Dolan, Burke Marshall, and FBI assistant director Al Rosen reported almost continuously from scattered posts. They exchanged rumors—Martin Luther King reported leaving Montgomery for Atlanta on Eastern Airlines at 2:25
P.M.
, then reported to have postponed until the next day, twenty-five cars waiting in apparent ambush, a man with a homemade bomb in Jackson—and reports on the size of the waiting crowds at various bus stations. The crowd at Meridian was so angry-looking and the police so uncooperative that Kennedy ordered the convoy to bypass the city altogether.

In Montgomery, James Farmer picked at an early lunch in the bus terminal, with the fourteen Freedom Riders sitting near him and fully armed Alabama soldiers standing guard just behind. The Attorney General's public warning that there would be no federal marshals registered fully upon them, as did the noise outside from a hostile crowd that had swelled to upwards of two thousand people. Battalions of National Guardsmen were holding them back, but portents of the journey ahead further weakened the knees of the Freedom Riders as Farmer escorted them to the Greyhound. When they boarded, Farmer walked down the length of the bus on the outside, shaking hands through the windows as King had done earlier. Doris Castle of New Orleans, a college student of nineteen who looked much younger, took Farmer's hand with a look of puzzlement on her face.

“My prayers are with you, Doris,” said Farmer.

She stifled her alarm enough to cry out in a whisper, “You're coming with us, aren't you, Jim?”

Farmer told her all the things he had been telling himself—about how he had been away from the office for four weeks, and the mail was stacked high, and how somebody had to go out and find the money to keep the buses rolling—but even as he did so he sensed that his own booming voice was vacant of heart, and it seemed to him that Castle's eyes dilated into enormous globes of doelike terror. Farmer broke away from her look in a rage. “Get my luggage!” he shouted at a newly arrived CORE retainer standing by his car. “Put it on the bus! I'm going.” Somehow he remembered to give Paul Dietrich's ring to Wyatt Walker before he jumped on the bus. With soldiers ordered aboard and reporters joining them, and with reserve helicopters moving into formation at the last minute, the second caravan took off down the highway some four hours after the first.

The departure did not end the day's dramatics at the bus station, however, nor its rude surprises for Robert Kennedy. Before the Montgomery crowd could disperse, rumors ran through it that a bus was approaching the city from the east with an interracial team of riders who had been testing facilities at all the little towns on the way in from Atlanta. Not far behind the rumors came another Greyhound, and from it stepped a group of men in the telltale manner—wearing expressions of worn nerves, huddling together, looking rather lost. There were two professors of Religion from Wesleyan University in Connecticut, two clergymen from Yale (including university chaplain William Sloane Coffin, Jr.), and three Negro students, including Charles Jones of SNCC. Wyatt Walker and Fred Shuttlesworth greeted them, and the sight of the nine men trapped there seemed to destroy the tolerance of the crowd, who for twenty minutes lobbed rocks and other missiles over the restraining lines of soldiers. Finally, two cars pushed their way into a space cleared by the National Guard units. Abernathy jumped from one of them and shepherded the men inside. One of the reporters who converged upon the cars shouted questions to them about the Attorney General's statement, which was being read on the radio, that the Freedom Ride should be stopped because it was embarrassing the United States before the Khrushchev summit meeting. Abernathy, leaning out his car window, replied, “Well, doesn't the Attorney General know we've been embarrassed all our lives?” Bystanders shook their heads in disbelief at the sight of Alabama troopers escorting yet another mixed group, this time right into town. “That's a damn shame,” one of them declared.

Farmer's group was heading into Jackson, Mississippi, behind Lawson's, which had been hauled out of the whites-only rest rooms of the Jackson bus terminal and off to the city jail. The Coffin group was meeting with King at Abernathy's house in Montgomery, deciding whether to press on toward Jackson, too, and Burke Marshall was receiving alarming intelligence of new student groups forming all over the South to go in behind them. To Kennedy, the Coffin group represented a distressing change in the composition of the protesters. No longer confined to Quakers, kooks, students, pacifists, or even Negro Gandhians, the ranks of the Freedom Riders suddenly included prominent Ivy League professors. With the crisis stretching endlessly ahead, an angry Robert Kennedy released his second press statement of the day, which was designed to head off the favorable publicity such people might attract. “Besides the groups of Freedom Riders traveling through these states, there are curiosity seekers, publicity seekers and others who are seeking to serve their own causes,” Kennedy declared. “A cooling-off period is needed,” he added, warning riders to “delay their trips.” Governor Patterson praised the statement as “the first time the federal government has displayed any common sense in some days.”

Kennedy grew even angrier over the next few hours. As Farmer's group was joining Lawson's in the Jackson city jail, he learned that all twenty-seven of the Freedom Riders were refusing bail and were planning to stay in jail after conviction rather than pay fines or secure appeal bonds. When Burke Marshall and Byron White failed to obtain satisfactory explanations, Kennedy called King that night, demanding to know why the Freedom Riders would not accept bail.

“It's a matter of conscience and morality,” said King, more formal under attack. “They must use their lives and their bodies to right a wrong. Our conscience tells us that the law is wrong and we must resist, but we have a moral obligation to accept the penalty.”

“That is not going to have the slightest effect on what the government is doing in this field or any other,” Kennedy snapped. “The fact that they stay in jail is not going to have the slightest effect on me.”

“Perhaps it would help if students came down here by the hundreds—by the hundreds of thousands,” said King.

“The country belongs to you as much as to me,” said Kennedy. “You can determine what's best just as well as I can, but don't make statements that sound like a threat. That's not the way to deal with us.”

King pulled back instinctively, fearing that his leverage on Kennedy was backfiring. “I'm deeply appreciative of what the Administration is doing,” he said. Then, despairing of argument, he collapsed into a preacher's cry: “I see a ray of hope, but I am different than my father. I feel the need of being free now!”

Kennedy let it pass. “Well, it all depends on what you and the people in jail decide,” he said wearily. “If they want to get out, we can get them out.”

“They'll stay,” said King, and there was nothing more to say.

Kennedy called Harris Wofford to vent his anger against the Freedom Riders in jail. “This is too much,” he said. “I wonder whether they have the best interest of their country at heart. Do you know that one of them is against the atom bomb?” Wofford mumbled a soothing reply. His known sympathies for civil disobedience had all but excluded him from the phone loop during the Administration's first crisis in his field of duty.

In Montgomery, King returned to Abernathy's living room after his jolting conversation with Kennedy. “You know,” he said, “they don't understand the social revolution going on in the world, and therefore they don't understand what we're doing.” His report did nothing to dispel the gloom hanging over William Sloane Coffin and six other new Freedom Riders. Aside from fear, some of them were upset by Robert Kennedy's suggestion that their mission was unpatriotic, that it would weaken the President at the very moment he was trying to negotiate world peace with the Soviet Union. These were sobering, intimidating thoughts for people who were accustomed to life on the campus. “We're really just faced with a simple issue,” said King. “Do you want to go on?” He led them all in a prayer for guidance. Some wept openly under the crush of fear and conflicting loyalties, and in the end they passed out slips of paper to vote by secret ballot. When the tally came up unanimous in favor of going on—rejecting the Attorney General's advice—there was much hugging and rejoicing as they steeled themselves for the trip to the bus station.

Abernathy, Walker, Shuttlesworth, and Bernard Lee accompanied them for what turned out to be a short journey. While they were sitting at the lunch counter, surrounded by Guardsmen during their pre-trip integrated meal, Sheriff Mack Sim Butler walked behind their stools and counted off all eleven of them for arrest. The sheriff later stated that he had exhausted his forbearance protecting the original Freedom Riders. “I was so furious,” he said, “because I thought if I finally got that first bunch of roughnecks out, it would be all over!”

Attorney General Kennedy pulled five hundred of the six hundred federal marshals out of Montgomery that afternoon. To trusted reporters, he made public some of the complaints he had been making privately to King—attacking the wisdom, the motivation, and even the physical courage of the new Freedom Riders. “It took a lot of guts for the first group to go,” he told
The Washington Post
, “but not much for the others.” Lashing out, he called the Freedom Riders “the safest people in America” and derided their decision to remain in jail as “good propaganda for America's enemies.” The Attorney General, summarized the
Post
, “does not feel that the Department of Justice can, at these times, side with one group or the other in disputes over constitutional rights.” Gone, only eighteen days after his speech at the University of Georgia, were the grand words about how the department would move swiftly to enforce federal court decisions guaranteeing the constitutional rights of Negroes.

Kennedy's anger failed to dampen enthusiasm at CORE headquarters in New York. On the day after Farmer's arrest in Jackson, a CORE spokesman announced that contributions were pouring in through the mail and that more than a hundred people had volunteered to take up the ride. “We believe we can end segregation by the end of this year,” he told reporters.

In the education building at Ebenezer, King presided over the founding meeting of the Freedom Ride Coordinating Committee. Gordon Carey of CORE represented Farmer, who remained in the Jackson jail. Two Nashville preachers represented Bevel and Lawson, who were with Farmer, and an SCLC assistant sat in for Wyatt Walker, who was in the Montgomery jail. With a SNCC representative and an officer of the National Student Association, these six people pledged to “intensify” the Freedom Ride until bus segregation crumbled across the South. They planned to open recruiting offices in four Southern cities. They would raise money to pay for bus tickets and lawyers. They would request an audience with President Kennedy. They would seek a “strong ruling from the Attorney General in clearly establishing the rights of interstate travelers (possibly) through an order to the Interstate Commerce Commission.” They would “fill jails in Montgomery and Jackson in order to keep a sharp image of the issues before the public.”

That was on Friday, May 26, three weeks after the original CORE Freedom Riders had left Washington in utter obscurity. After an odyssey that had changed many lives and come to the attention of millions, they were allied formally with the heirs of the Montgomery bus boycott and the student sit-ins, maneuvering along a collision course with the federal government as well as the Southern states.

 

Then the Freedom Rides dropped precipitously and permanently from the headlines. The idea seemed to spread by osmosis that the South's best course, under the truce with the Justice Department, was to defend segregation quietly, under the color of law. Accordingly, the new Freedom Riders came to be funneled efficiently, almost protectively, into the Mississippi prison system. Their fate receded as an old story.

As the second wave of riders reached Mississippi, President Kennedy delivered an extraordinary second 1961 State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress. “I am here to promote the freedom doctrine,” he declared on May 25. “The great battleground for the defense and expansion of freedom today is the whole southern half of the globe—Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East, the lands of the rising peoples. Their revolution is the greatest in human history. They seek an end to injustice, tyranny, and exploitation.” But the President's address never mentioned racial injustice at home, let alone the Freedom Rides. He asked Congress for nearly $2 billion to “almost double the combat power of the Army” and to begin the race to the moon. Just after a contentious summit meeting with Khrushchev in Vienna, Kennedy had tripled draft calls and sought from Congress another $3.2 billion for weapons and fallout shelters. In short, he had moved the country toward a war footing over the disputed territory of Berlin, and in such a mood he was less inclined than ever to recognize the distracting problem of the Freedom Riders. At his press conference late in June, when the number of jailed Freedom Riders was approaching two hundred, the President volunteered nothing on the subject. Nor was he questioned about it.