Socialist Action /June 2001
Forty Years Since Freedom Rides Took
on the Segregationist South
By JAN BIRCH
 In 1961, members
of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), a Northern-based civil rights
group, relaunched the Freedom Rides.
The first Freedom Rides, sponsored by CORE and
the Fellowship for Reconciliation, a religious group, had taken place in
1947. Black members and white members had gone on a "Journey of Reconciliation,"
trying to force the federal government to uphold the 1946 Supreme Court
ruling that segregated seating of interstate passengers was unconstitutional.
The original riders were arrested in North Carolina and forced to serve
on a chain gang for six months.
The new round of Freedom Rides came on the heels
of the Southern student sit-in movement that had begun a year earlier when
four freshmen at A and T College in Greensboro, N.C., sat down at the whites-only
lunch counter at Woolworth. They were refused service but would not leave.
The lunch counter was closed down and no one was served.
Day after day they came back, bringing others with
them, sitting in silence. Over the next two weeks the sit-ins spread to
15 cities in five Southern states. Over the next year, more than 50,000
students participated in actions in 100 cities around the country, and 3600
were put in jail.
By the end of the year, Greensboro and many other
lunch counters had opened to Black people. In describing this movement,
Ella Baker, the backbone and organizer of much of the Southern civil rights
movement and a facilitator and advisor to the youth of the movement, said:
"I think it spread to a large extent because of the youths' enthusiasm
and need for action. There was a great deal of dissatisfaction among the
young with the older leadership. Part of the reason it spread was a sister
would call her brother at another college and ask 'why aren't you doing
it?'"
John F. Kennedy had recently been elected U.S.
president and during his campaign he had sent a message to the students
in Atlanta who were sitting in, saying, "They have shown that the way
for Americans to stand up for their rights is to sit down." Kennedy's
words encouraged many in the civil rights movement to see if his new administration
would be willing to take action.
But Robert Kennedy, through Martin Luther King
Jr., asked James Farmer, the executive director of CORE to call off the
rides-for a "cooling off" period. Farmer replied, "We've
been cooling off for 350 years, and if we cooled off any more, we'd be in
a deep freeze."
The Freedom Riders included James Farmer, John
Lewis of SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), and James Peck,
who had been on the original ride in 1947. They traveled on buses that left
Washington, D.C., on May 4, 1961, to New Orleans, planning to arrive on
May 17, the anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling
of 1954 that separate but equal facilities in the schools were unconstitutional-a
decision that had helped ignite the civil rights Movement.
The strategy of the Freedom Rides was for whites
to sit in the back of the bus and Blacks to sit in the front, both refusing
to move. At the stops, Black people would go to the whites-only facilities
and try to use them. Thirteen people went on the ride.
There was fighting in Virginia and the Carolinas
when riders tried to use the restrooms and lunch rooms. In South Carolina
the students were beaten with fists and iron bars. Neither the local police
force nor state or federal law enforcement officers interfered with the
beatings. The FBI, which had been informed of the rides in advance, simply
watched and took notes.
On May 14, the rides split into two groups to go
from Atlanta to Birmingham. The only scheduled stop was in Anniston, Ala.
The first group was stoned in Anniston and the tires of their bus were slashed
by an angry mob of 200. The bus high-tailed it six miles away to get the
tires repaired. Again they were attacked by a mob, which surrounded the
bus and tossed a firebomb in through the rear. The bus went up in flames
but the riders escaped. This photo of the burning bus hit the news around
the world.
When the next bus arrived in Birmingham, a mob
was waiting. Bull Connor, the police chief, said that he had given all his
cops the day off in honor of Mother's Day! The FBI had been informed in
advance of threats against the freedom riders but again had done absolutely
nothing.
The mob attacked. One of the riders, William Barbee,
was paralyzed for life from this attack. At a press conference after the
attack, Alabama Gov. John Patterson said he had no sympathy for the Freedom
Riders because "when you go somewhere looking for trouble, you usually
find it."
This was how the governments of the Southern states
upheld the Constitution in 1961! At this point the white bus drivers told
the company they would not drive for the Freedom Rides because it was too
dangerous. After two days of negotiations the Freedom Riders gave up and
went to the Birmingham airport and flew to New Orleans.
In response to the brutality against the CORE,
and their decision to give up, SNCC members, veterans of the lunch counter
sit-ins in Nashville, decided to take up the cause, riding from Nashville
to Birmingham. Before they left they called the Justice Department asking
for protection. The protection was refused.
The Justice Department officials said they would
investigate-if something happened. And something, of course, did happen.
The riders were arrested in Birmingham and spent the night in jail. Then
the police took them to the Tennessee border and put them out on the highway.
But SNCC brought cars and the students quickly returned to Birmingham.
They tried to get on a bus to Montgomery, Ala.,
but the bus driver refused to drive. Kennedy aides met with Gov. Patterson,
who threatened "warfare" if federal marshals were sent in. The
governor said he was ready on his own to protect "visitors to Alabama."
On May 20, a new group of 21 freedom riders got
on the bus with two Greyhound bus company officials and a private state
plane overhead and state police beside. But the moment the bus arrived in
Montgomery, the state protection vanished-just as an angry mob appeared.
As the riders got off the bus the mob attacked,
sending white rider James Zwerg to the hospital. From his hospital bed Zwerg
said, "We will take hitting, we'll take beatings. We're willing to
accept death. But we are going to keep coming until we can ride from anywhere
in the South to any place else in the South, as Americans, without anyone
making any comment."
When John Seigenthaler, Kennedy's aide, tried to
drive into the mob to save a young woman who was being attacked, he too
was knocked unconscious and ended up in the hospital. This was too much
for the Kennedy administration, which finally sent in 600 federal marshals.
Martin Luther King Jr. went to Montgomery to hold
a rally to support the Freedom Riders. The church where the meeting was
held was guarded by federal marshals. Still a mob surrounded the church.
The marshals fought with the mob and when tear gas was fired it went into
the church, choking the civil rights supporters inside.
Finally, Gov. Patterson declared martial law and
used the Alabama National Guard to disperse the mob. Robert Kennedy once
again called for a "cooling off period." The riders now proposed
to continue on despite the violence to Jackson, Miss.
By this time the worldwide publicity was really
embarrassing the U.S. government. How did it look to people in Africa and
Asia to see African American students beaten by mobs for demanding their
rights? How did it look that President Kennedy, who had gotten over 68 percent
of the Black vote, was refusing to do anything about the beatings and the
clear violation of federal law and the Constitution?
Even with all this pressure, the Kennedy boys did
not offer any real protection to the riders. They brokered a deal instead
with the Mississippi police to "protect the Freedom Riders from mob
violence."
On May 24, two days after the church incident,
27 freedom riders left Montgomery on two buses to go to Mississippi. They
were met at the border with the drawn guns of the Mississippi National Guard.
They entered Jackson without an encounter with
a mob, went into the whites-only waiting rooms, and were promptly arrested
and sent to jail. These Freedom Riders were tried in the Mississippi courts
and given 60 days in the maximum security state penitentiary. But as fast
as the riders were sent to jail more arrived to carry on the struggle.
During that summer there were more than 300 freedom
riders participating in the deep South. Over the next two years, as their
struggles spread out through out in a city by city assault, that challenged
all the aspects of segregation.
The Freedom Rides mark one of the most despicable
chapters in our history on the part of the Democratic administration at
every level of government. They mark one of the most courageous and uplifting
periods of time, as evidenced by the courage and determination of those
who put their bodies and their lives on the line to end racial segregation
and win social justice in this country.
The Freedom Rides and sit-ins showed the potential
that human beings have. It was a time when ordinary people did extraordinary
things, and the number of heroes was too great to be counted!
Socialist Action /June 2001 |