Freedom Ride

by James Peck

Grade Level and Copyright 

Grade Level is 9.4 using the Flesch-Kincaid readability test.

First edition published by Simon and Shuster, 1962.

Second edition published by Ebooks for Students, Ltd., 2016.

Copyright © 2016 by Ebooks for Students, Ltd.

All rights reserved.

Washington, D.C. (202) 464-9126

Comments  to support@ebooksforstudents.org.

To Paula Sam and Charles

FOREWORD

by James Baldwin

If we cannot reorganize our society on a more human and equitable basis, we will soon, as citizens, have lost any ability to reorganize it at all. This is why the Negro’s struggle in America today is of the greatest importance for all Americans, whether they know it or not. Countless people, both white and black, are now undergoing the most brutal hardships in order to drive this fact deep into the public consciousness. Here is the testimony of one of them: and the moral of his story is that, however painful it may be for us to change, not to change will be fatal.

INTRODUCTION

by Lillian Smith

Racial segregation is not basically an economic or political complex, except for its exploiters. It is a symbol and a symptom of a deep illness that affects men everywhere: the creeping, often invisible deterioration of man’s spirit which we call “dehumanization.” It is a spiritual disease, call it psychic if you like, that reminds one of leukemia: a ceasing of differentiation, a massing by multiplication of the wounded.

We are sick with the craving for proof. And since we cannot prove what is most important to the human spirit, we settle for small answers to those old questions: Who am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going? Why am I here? Who is God? What is death?

To that question “Who am I?” which Adam must first have asked when he split in two and stood facing Eve, his mirror—that question he must have whispered as he looked for himself in her—some of the bewildered ones answer with the words, “A white man.” How pitiful that the never-ending hunger which keeps us human, the asking of what cannot be answered, is for the speakers a hand across the mouth: “I am a white man.” Once that is said, nothing can be said, no questions asked again. (It is not necessary to suggest the words might as easily be “I am a Communist,” or “I am a black man,” or “I am a Jew,” or “I am a Hindu.”)

To destroy the earth—as we may do—with our small answers: what a poor way for the human race to end! With a whimper.

I have been deeply stirred by the sit-ins and the Freedom Rides. Here, I felt, was not another small answer but a new way of asking the old great questions. Segregation, as set up in the South, has been for a long time an elaborate ritual which all of us, white and black, have been compelled to observe, however dissenting might be our feelings and values, however sharp our inner protests. So—what do these young students do? Intuitively, with perhaps little grasp of the symbolism, they set up a new way of acting, the beginnings of a new ritual: one of human acceptance, of—not freedom (that word is too big)—but free movement in the public places of the earth. And with direct action, they bring the human being’s most powerful defense: compassion, understanding, forgiveness, nonviolence. How can you fight a compassionate man? You can kill him, sure; but you never come in physical contact with his spirit. It is there, you feel it, but you cannot touch it, and you know this spirit will survive you and him. The rioters feel this and are bewildered and shaken; they feel they are fighting ghosts; they are haunted by something stronger than they. And they will continue to be haunted by these ghosts who will, in an inexplicable way, become the Holy Ghost. And these rioters, these killers, these policemen and officials will finally begin to feel they are in the presence of something numinous which they cannot reduce to small answers.

This is the test, the test of anything we mortals do or think or create: can it be reduced to small answers? If it can be, then it isn’t worth much; it holds only fleeting value.

I think the Freedom Riders—not all of them, for some are mediocre in spirit or perhaps just bewildered and confused—are, themselves, experiencing a new and terrible strength. They are, sometimes—at least, it seems so from the quiet talks I have had with them— wrestling, like Jacob, with the angel. They are discovering that suffering does have redemptive power. They have in a sense memorized that phrase, but when the test comes, and they survive it, mauled and beaten and slashed but without hate and often without fear, it does something tremendous to them. A journalist recently said—let me paraphrase—that the Southern student, certainly the Negro student, does not seem as afraid of belief in God, not as ashamed of prayer, as his Northern student friends. I think the journalist felt something true: something we might call naïveté but, again, we might call it a newborn wisdom. And the sophisticated may, once more, as has happened through history, be led by the profound and childlike faith of those who are not afraid of accepting the unchangeable fact of the human condition: what we deeply believe, and must believe, can never be proved.

I think we are, once more, completing a spiral curve: the absurd and naïve skepticism, the disbelief of the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth is turning into a new faith, a faith frankly based on the uncertainties, frankly grounded on the knowledge that while more and more can be proved by science, the questioners always arrive at an invisible line where proof ends. Heisenberg says it in brilliant words that scientists can respect; the sit-in students, the Freedom Riders, are saying it in a simpler, more earthy way. They are acting this out: human beings are on this earth for an unknown purpose; hence every one is important and in a sense holy, for there is something we call “human relations” which must be created and re-created again and again in new patterns, and who knows which of the three billion earth children is needed for a special point in the intricate design?

Their acts are saying this: dehumanization will cease only when we learn to believe that we have no inalienable right to a proof or an answer; the time has come when we must acknowledge that small answers won’t do; the North’s and the South’s and the world’s small answers must be brushed away so that the questions, Who am I? What is death? Who is God? can be heard again. We are men; and as men we must declare our right to move freely in our search for meaning; we have a God-given right to be and to become. Sitting at lunch counters, riding the buses are symbolic rights. They are small, but we need to claim them, not because they are enough or because we really want them, but because an unclaimed human right bars a man in his search for significance.

So, this story of how it all happened is important; the vivid, detailed account of how a few people, accidentally or spontaneously, found the symbols that speak to everybody: the need to eat, the need to move—how they went at it, what they endured, how they changed within themselves.

I am glad Jim Peck, who is a courageous and thoughtful participant in ideas and acts, wrote it down so quickly after it happened. It is factual stuff, valid for historians of this age; I can find no important errors or oversights, and I have been close to this group. There is little of the reaction of the “good people” of the South in the book but perhaps the “good people” did not do much, or not enough for the embattled ones to be aware of. And perhaps, too, that is another story to be told by someone else.

The hope of our future lies in the fact that how change will come cannot be predicted. There is always the moment when the astonishing thing happens, when the changers abruptly leave the highway marked out for them and take to new, unmade paths. This is as it should be. I, as one human being, pray that more astonishing things will come to pass, and quickly, for we on this earth have little time left and none for the repetition of old, cautious errors.

Members of the Journey of Reconciliation in 1947. Left to right: Worth Randle, Wallace Nelson, Ernest Bromley, James Peck, Igal Roodenko, Bayard Rustin, Joseph Felmet, George Houser and Andrew Johnson.

Freedom Rider Mae Frances Moultrie Howard stands by a burning Greyhound bus in Anniston, Ala. on May 14, 1961. Courtesy, Federal Bureau of Investigation.

James Peck after being beaten in a Birmingham, Alabama bus terminal in May, 1961.

Additional photos are available at sites such as http://www.pophistorydig.com/topics/freedom-riders-1961/

1.

FIRST “FREEDOM RIDE”-1947

“Was the Freedom Ride worth it?” “Would you do it again?”

These questions were tossed to me by reporters as I lay on an operating table in Hillman Clinic, Birmingham, Alabama, waiting for the doctor to finish sewing fifty-three stitches in my face and head. It was Mother’s Day 1961. I had been beaten almost to death by a Birmingham mob for the “crime” of trying to eat with a Negro at the Trailways terminal lunchroom. I had a throbbing headache, I was weak from loss of blood, and I felt nauseous—not so much from physical pain as from utter disgust at the exhibition I had just experienced.

Yet I said yes to the reporters’ two questions. The same questions were put to me over and over by interviewers throughout the following week when my head and face were half buried in bandages. To their surprise, I explained that this was not my first Freedom Ride, that I had been on a previous one in 1947.

The 1947 trip was not called “Freedom Ride,” a term coined by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) for the 1961 bus trips. It was called the Journey of Reconciliation, co-sponsored by the Fellowship of Reconciliation and CORE. It took place just a year after the first Supreme Court decision to outlaw segregation in interstate travel, the Irene Morgan case. The Supreme Court decision would be meaningless unless people actually put it into practice when they traveled—so reasoned George Houser and Bayard Rustin, originators of the Journey. If an organized, interracial group set an example, wouldn’t other people be encouraged to follow?

I agreed thoroughly. Furthermore, I thought that the proposed Journey would have wide appeal. I had discovered and joined CORE just a few months before, and this would be my first major CORE project. I decided to volunteer.

So, on a sunny April morning I reported to a co-op house in Washington for an intensive two-day training period in nonviolence. Many of the sixteen Negro and white participants were pacifists, as I am. Others were not pacifists, but they believed that to combat racial discrimination, Gandhian nonviolent action is the most effective method.

Moreover, the training session taught not only the principles but the practices of nonviolence in specific situations that would arise aboard the buses. What if the bus driver insulted you? What if you were actually assaulted? What if the police threatened you? These and many other questions were resolved through sociodramas in which participants would act the roles of bus drivers, hysterical segregationists, police—and “you.” Whether the roles had been acted correctly and whether you had done the right thing was then discussed. Sociodramas of other bus situations followed. In all of them, you were supposed to remain nonviolent, but stand firm.

If a driver or a policeman should order you to move to the segregated section of the bus, refuse in a polite manner. Tell him simply and briefly that you are within your rights under the Supreme Court decision. In the case of a policeman, do not leave your seat and accompany him unless you actually are placed under arrest. In other words, do not let the police violate your legal rights by sheer intimidation.

After two days of training, we felt better prepared. Jim Crow custom confined Negroes riding in buses to the long, rear seat and the two double seats directly in front of it. That rear seat would be occupied by whites in our group, while Negroes in our group would sit toward the front. The segregated pattern would be broken.

Just which individual sat where on each lap of our trip would be planned at meetings of the group on the eve of departure. A few were to act as observers. They necessarily had to sit in a segregated manner. So did whoever was designated to handle bail in the event of arrests. The roles shifted on each lap of the Journey. It was important that all sixteen not be arrested simultaneously and the trip thus halted.

The Journey was through the upper South only. To penetrate the Deep South at that time would simply have meant immediate arrest of all participants, an end to the trip—and possibly of us. As a Negro told us on the first lap, “Some bus drivers are crazy; and the farther south you go, the crazier they get.” Putting it still more graphically, a white South Carolinian commented about one of our Negroes sitting in front, “In my state he would either move or be killed.” Starting in Washington, the two-week Journey was to take us through Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky and then back through Virginia to Washington. Half of our group would travel by Greyhound, the other half by Trailways.

There would be regular overnight stops in cities where we were to address meetings in churches. Such meetings in the South are permitted only if they are held in churches as part of a religious service. Most of these meetings were planned by local branches of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). NAACP attorneys in these cities were prepared to defend us in the event of arrest. NAACP members were ready to take us into their homes during our stopovers. The NAACP branches offered us this invaluable support, although our Journey was not backed by the national NAACP office, whose policy was to stick to legal cases and education and to shun nonviolent action.

Support of the NAACP branches was successfully solicited by George Houser, who had traveled the entire route of the trip a month before it started and planned all the details of our stopovers.

Although each stopover was on our tickets, we had to make sure that our tickets’ ultimate destination was in another state. This was so we could at all times be interstate passengers and hence covered by the Supreme Court decision.

Boarding the buses in Washington was exciting. We had rehearsed the various situations which could arise during the training session’s sociodramas but now we were “on stage.” I was aware that a Journey such as ours had never been undertaken before—at least not in the South.

Regarding the North, I did not discover until fourteen years later, in reading a syndicated article by Professor Leon Litwack, that “more than one hundred years ago, Negro and white ‘Freedom Riders’ challenged racial segregation on public transportation facilities in the North. Employing the weapons of nonviolent resistance and agitation, they pleaded their case for equal rights before a generally hostile or indifferent public. Although finally victorious, these early ‘Freedom Riders’ had to wage a long and often bitter struggle, marked by occasional violence, before the proprietors of Northern railroads, omnibuses, and streetcars reluctantly agreed to give up segregation practices.”

It would not be too long until Greyhound and Trailways would “give up segregation practices” in the South, I thought optimistically while waiting for our bus to pull out of 'the Washington station and head toward Richmond, Virginia—our first overnight stop. On this lap segregated seating already had been eliminated and we didn’t expect any incident. There was none, either aboard Greyhound or Trailways.

The first arrest of the trip occurred on a Trailways bus leaving Petersburg for Durham, North Carolina. My own first arrest took place on a Trailways bus leaving Durham.

One glance at the Durham bus station was enough to illustrate the separate and unequal treatment which Negroes receive in the South. On one side of the ticket window was the “white” waiting room, well painted and with seats, telephone booths, and all necessary conveniences. On the other side of the ticket window was the “colored” waiting room, completely bare, unpainted, without seats, telephones, or conveniences of any kind. Negroes wanting to buy bus tickets had to wait patiently on the colored side of the ticket window until all ticket buyers on the white side were served. Even when nobody was waiting on the white side, I observed the ticket sellers simply not bothering to wait on Negroes standing in line.

This inequality was observable throughout the downtown Negro section of town, and Durham is a prosperous place. None of the sidewalks were paved as they were in the white section. There was not a single phone booth. All phones were simply hooked on to a wall The lone hotel was ramshackle and the restaurants were all of the greasy-spoon type. The entire downtown Negro section was decrepit, squalid, cheerless—in stark contrast to the modem, bustling, white downtown section.

Out Fayetteville Street, beyond the Negro downtown section, is an area of prosperous Negro homes. There are a number of such homes since Durham is a center for Negro insurance companies. Residents of these homes are sealed off from the humiliations of segregation. They don’t have to walk on sidewalkless pavements, talk on boothless phones, eat at greasy-spoon-type restaurants, ride in the back seats, or stand up in overcrowded city buses. Whenever they emerge from their prosperous homes, they ride in cars. These people, we were told, had opposed our Journey, as many prosperous Negroes oppose action which threatens their privileged status. They had tried to get the local NAACP to call off the meeting, which it had planned for us in a church, and to dissuade C. Jerry Gates from being our lawyer.

They were unsuccessful. The church where our meeting was held was completely full, and when Bayard Rustin, Andrew Johnson, and I were arrested, Gates was down at the jail to help us. The three of us were taken in a police car to the jail where we were questioned, put in cells for about twenty minutes, and then set free. A waiting car took us to nearby Chapel Hill where our next meeting was already under way.

Both Northerners and Southerners were surprised that the only violence on our Journey occurred at Chapel Hill, which they associated with the liberalism of Dr. Frank Graham, then head of the University of North Carolina. We were surprised, too, until we later learned that our action on the bus was but one of a series of recent acts against the Jim Crow pattern of Chapel Hill.

It just happened to be our action which exploded the growing hatred among the poor whites, many of whom tenaciously cling to their only privilege in Southern society—that of being recognized as superior to Negroes.

The explosion might have occurred when Eleanor Roosevelt, refusing to eat at a segregated function of the university, dined on Coca-Cola and sandwiches on its steps. It might have occurred when Dorothy Maynor, noted Negro singer, gave a concert on the campus at which seating was unsegregated. It might have occurred when Reverend Charles Jones, courageous white minister who housed our group, permitted an interracial CIO union meeting in his church some weeks before our meeting.

It was a particularly quiet, gray Sunday afternoon in the village and white cab drivers were hanging around the bus station with nothing to do. Then they saw our Trailways bus delayed and learned the reason why. Here was something over which they could work out their frustration and boredom. Two ringleaders started haranguing the other drivers. About ten of them started milling around the parked bus.

When I got off to put up bail for the two Negroes and two whites in our group who had been arrested, five of the drivers surrounded me.

“Coming down here to stir up the niggers,” snarled a big one with steel-cold gray eyes. With that he slugged me on the side of the head. I stepped back, looked at him, and asked, “What’s the matter?” He gave me a perplexed look and started to walk away awkwardly. My failure to retaliate with violence had taken him by surprise. I have found that use of nonviolence in such situations often has this effect. As the driver walked away a passenger who was standing outside the bus shouted at him, “What’s wrong with you? That man didn’t do anything to you.”

I later learned that the sentiment among passengers waiting aboard the bus was predominantly in our favor. A pretty blonde from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, spoke up for us in a discussion of the incident among the passengers—and even gave one of our observers her name and address in case we should want her to testify in court. Another white passenger got off the bus, went into the station, and protested to the driver against his ordering the arrests.

From the courthouse windows, as I observed the hate-filled drivers, I recalled that, of the thirty-one men indicted two months previously in Greenville, South Carolina, for lynching Willie Earl, twenty-eight were white cab drivers. Every few minutes a driver would come into the courthouse allegedly to get a drink of water. One of them, regarding us, said, “They’ll never get a bus out of here.”

When the four of us who were arrested were bailed out and left the courthouse in Reverend Jones’s car, twelve of the drivers piled into three cabs and sped after us. We succeeded in getting to Reverend Jones’s home before them. When we got inside and looked out of the window, we saw 'two of the drivers getting out with big sticks. Others started to pick up rocks by the roadside. Then, two of the drivers, apparently scared, motioned to the others to stop.

They drove away. But a few minutes later Reverend Jones, who since the CIO meeting in his church had been marked as a “nigger lover,” received an anonymous phone call. “Get the niggers out of town by nightfall or we’ll bum down your house,” threatened a quivering voice.

That night we had a meeting scheduled in Greensboro—about fifty miles away. The only bus which would get us there in time had left. We remained in Reverend Jones’s house, standing watch at the windows, while he rounded up three university students with cars who would drive us to Greensboro.

After we left, he took his wife and two children to another home where they would be safe. The following day he got a second anonymous phone call threatening him with murder. A number of the students offered to guard his house. But the threats against him did not materialize. The only further act was the 'throwing of a rock at his assistant who was coming to visit.

The three cars drove us directly to Shiloh Baptist Church in Greensboro, where the meeting was held. I remember this church on two counts. First, it was the scene of the warmest reception we had yet received on the trip. Second, it was at this same church fourteen years later that our Greensboro Freedom Ride meeting was held.

The church was crowded to capacity and an atmosphere of excitement prevailed. Word had spread about what had happened to us and why we were late. All eighteen of us sat behind the pulpit. After the usual invocation, hymn-singing, scripture-reading and prayer, Rustin, who is a particularly talented speaker, told our story. He interrupted it only to get one or another of us to rise and tell about a specific incident or experience. Then he continued. When he finished, the people in the crowded church came forward to shake hands and congratulate us. A number of the women had tears in their eyes. A few shook my hand more than once. As at almost all our meetings, there were not more than two or three whites in the audience.

Asheville was the home town of Joe Felmet, a white member of our group. Some of us stayed at his house there. It was a conventional frame house on the outskirts of town. To permit our staying there took great courage on the part of Felmet’s parents—and of Joe himself if he intended to continue living there. As we walked around town, Joe greeted people affably in his slow Southern drawl. They pointedly refused to answer and turned the other way. The day we were to leave, somebody in the house opposite yelled in a derisive tone, “How’re your nigger friends this morning?” Joe did intend to continue living in Asheville. He intended to get his degree and practice law there. But a person needs some social life, and he found that in Asheville he remained ostracized. After a few years he moved North. He married and started working as a newspaperman in Hartford, Connecticut.

Upon leaving Asheville for Knoxville, Tennessee, I was arrested for the second time on the Journey. No sooner had Dennis Banks, a Negro musician from Chicago, and I taken seats near the front of a Trailways bus, than the driver asked us to move. We refused, and within minutes police boarded the bus and arrested us.

Sitting in a lower court and seeing the underprivileged victims of society being sentenced is depressing anywhere. It is worse in the South. In a Roxboro, North Carolina, courtroom, I saw a Negro, unrepresented by counsel, sentenced to thirty years for breaking into a house and stealing a flashlight. I have seen Negroes, invariably without lawyers, sentenced to from ninety days to six months on the road gang for misdemeanors such as vagrancy and drunkenness. That’s how Southern roads are kept in repair. Whites, for the same misdemeanors, in the same courts, get either suspended sentences or ten to fifteen days. In the courtroom where we were tried, I saw the most fantastic extreme of segregation in my experience—Jim Crow Bibles. Along the page edges of one Bible had been printed in large letters the word “white.” Along the page edges of the other Bible was the word “colored.” When a white person swore in, he simply raised his right hand while the clerk held the white Bible. When a Negro swore in, he had to raise his right hand while holding the colored Bible in his left hand. The white clerk could not touch the colored Bible. While at first I thought this manifestation of Jim Crow unprecedented, I later learned that Asheville was not the only Southern town where it prevailed.

An unprecedented manifestation of desegregation was the presence of Curtiss Todd, who had traveled from Winston-Salem to be our attorney. Never before had a Negro attorney appeared in court in Asheville, we were informed. Also, it was the first time that a white and Negro sat side by side at the defendants’ table. Glancing back at the segregated courtroom, I observed that the head of the local NAACP was in court, looking very nervous and alone. Only a few persons had attended a meeting we held in his home.

Police Judge Sam Cathey was reputed to be a very corrupt politician who remained in office because he was blind and nobody had ever dared run against him. Our case was over in a few minutes. Judge Cathey turned to the district attorney and asked, “Is thirty days the maximum sentence under the state law?” When the district attorney confirmed this, the judge said, “Then it is thirty days under supervision of the State Highway Commission.” It was a polite way of saying thirty days on the road gang. He then made a little speech which started, “We pride ourselves on our race relations here.”

Never have I seen a look of hatred like the one a court attendant gave me as we were being locked up after trial. Antisegregationist whites are viewed in the South with even more contempt than antisegregationist Negroes.

We were transferred to the city jail. Banks was a sort of hero in the Negro cell block. But in the white cell block, I was the very opposite. An angry group of men surrounded me and demanded to know the nature of my case. When I told them, a big man charged toward me with fists clenched and shouted, “Defending the niggers? They should have given you thirty years.” Remaining seated, I said calmly, “I was just traveling with my friend and I happen to believe that men are equal.”

An awkward moment of silence followed. Then one of the other men said, “Well, it’s too bad that all men can’t get along together, but they can’t.” Somebody else said something else. The man with the clenched fists started talking to another prisoner. The threatened assault had been halted by nonviolence. I might well have been beaten to death. There was no guard in sight. It was several hours before Banks and I were released on bail. We never had to serve our thirty days on the road gang. When our attorney filed appeal papers, the state dropped the case, apparently aware that it would not hold up on appeal. We lost only one of the five arrest cases arising from the trip. As a consequence of that case, Bayard Rustin, Igal Roodenko, and Joe Felmet served thirty days on the road gang.

At the end of our Journey, there were no reporters flocking around us to ask whether it had been worth while or whether we would do it again—as they did after the Freedom Ride fourteen years later. If there had been, most of us would have answered yes. In fact our group had held several enthusiastic discussions on the possibility of another interracial Southern bus trip.

Our Journey had shown that drivers and passengers were ready to accept desegregation. Aboard buses where drivers ignored our Negroes sitting in front seats, passengers did likewise. This was the pattern on most of our trip. Arrests or threatened arrests were the exception, and even when they occurred, there were no outbreaks of violence—except at Chapel Hill. The bus companies’ general policy was to act as if the Supreme Court decision didn’t exist.

We realized that our Journey had not prompted Negroes to flock immediately to front seats on Southern buses. But we hoped that a few Negroes would act as a result of the example we had set and that the desegregation process would thus get slowly under way. A number of students and a few adults whom we had encountered in the course of our meetings had pledged to sit unsegregated on their next trip back home or visiting relatives.

In light of our hope, it was gratifying fourteen years later when I observed on the Freedom Ride that Negroes occupied front seats without hesitation, and drivers did not give them dirty looks in scanning the buses before departure.

2.

ALABAMA IN NEW JERSEY

Another question asked me by reporters after the mob violence in Birmingham in May 1961 was, “How could you take such a beating without fighting back?”

I have found that the impulse to retaliate with physical violence can be curbed through a complete realization of its futility. Anger is a natural response to the physical pain resulting from assault. But when 1 am attacked, my reaction has come to be a sick feeling inside, a sort of overpowering nausea caused by the spectacle of physical violence. During beatings I have attempted to cover my head with my arms as best I could until the hatred of my assailants was expended. After it was all over, the sick feeling remained with me. On some occasions I actually vomited. But on every occasion I felt that my remaining nonviolent had proved worth while.

In the summer of 1954, on the crowded block where our suburban Long Island beach bungalow was located, two white residents assaulted a Negro handy man. He was turning around his employer’s car when accidentally he backed into a woman’s chair at the curb’s edge. The son and son-in-law of the woman, without even stopping to see whether she was hurt (it turned out she wasn’t), rushed over to the car, opened the doors, and mercilessly started slugging the Negro. The Negro finally managed to get away and seek refuge in the house where he was employed. His nose was broken and blood was streaming down his chin.

The two assailants then stormed up and down the street, shouting racist epithets as a crowd of onlookers gathered. At this point my wife, who had seen the beating, summoned me from inside the bungalow where I was working. I rushed out, approached the more vociferous of the two men, and tried to persuade him to stop his shouting.

He punched me in the mouth, drawing blood. My refusal to retaliate in kind surprised him. He stepped back and started to argue with another man. My nonviolence put a number of the onlookers on my side. Had I fought back, the resulting tussle would have obscured completely the unjustified beating of the Negro.

In telling reporters that Birmingham had not been my first experience with violence, I recalled not this purely personal incident, but instead, CORE’S 1947-48 successful campaign to end discrimination at Palisades Amusement Park’s swimming pool.

Palisades Park, located in New Jersey just across the Hudson from New York City, is a long way from Alabama. Yet, if an observer had stopped off there on certain summer Sundays in 1947 and witnessed the violence to which CORE members were subjected, he would have believed himself transported to the heart of the South.

It was on Sundays that interracial CORE groups would remain peacefully lined up in front of the pool’s ticket booth after being refused admission.

Our nonviolent technique succeeded in closing the pool on the first Sunday in July. Violence occurred for the first time on July 13, when police officer Arthur Bruns manhandled Melba Valle, a pretty Negro model who was in the CORE group.

On July 27, park guards charged at our standing line. Some pushed us bodily away from the ticket window. Others slugged us. Jim Robinson, who is slight of build, was singled out as a particular target for bullying. Robert Auerbach was shoved flat on his face on the cement pavement. We tried to return to the ticket window and again were shoved and slugged. Police watched but took no action.

Finally, police were ordered by Irving Rosenthal, the park’s owner, to get us off the premises. The order was carried out so brutally that even he protested, only to be told by Police Chief Fred Stengel, “We’re handling this.”

Police and park guards seized four of us bodily, carried us aboard an empty bus outside the park gate, and told the driver to head for the New York ferry. Sam Scott, a Negro in our group, was blackjacked in the back by one of the guards.

On August 3, seven of our group were beaten by park guards and arrested at the pool ticket booth. Four others were seized as they started to picket at the entrance gate. While police pinned back my arms, a very fat guard beat me, fracturing a rib and making a deep cut over my left eye. In the police car, Morris Horowitz, who was sitting next to me, was blackjacked by a police officer whose badge number I recorded as 118.

It got so that each Sunday when we went to Palisades, we knew in advance that we would be beaten, arrested, or both. As I stood in the crowded bus climbing the steep hill from the ferry to the park gate, I would gird myself in the same way I do when a dentist is about to apply his drill to an open-nerved tooth. It was the same in Birmingham fourteen years later when I got off the bus and saw the mob waiting. One member of our Palisades group aboard the bus told me once that he had a stiff feeling in his stomach. We generally used to joke during the brief five-minute climb. It helped to relieve the tension. Prior to leaving .the New York side of the ferry, all of us took part in a briefing session on nonviolence in general and the day’s strategy in particular. On August 10, six CORE members were arrested as soon as they started distributing leaflets at the entrance gate. On August 31, upon Rosenthal’s personal orders, police for a second time forcibly deported our stand-inners to New York. When Albert Morris, a Negro, tried to take a picture of the scene, Rosenthal seized his camera. When Morris tried to grab it back, he was arrested and charged with assault.

As our bus was leaving and we were leaning out of the windows shouting antidiscrimination slogans, a police officer, whose badge I saw was 109, spat in my face. Immediately following our deportation, eighteen of us returned to picket. We were quickly arrested. While we were awaiting arrival of the police car, a park guard approached me and announced, “I’d like to kill you!” The next thing I knew, I was in the police station—twenty minutes later. The guard had knocked me unconscious and broken my jaw.

The Palisades authorities also employed the timeworn device of the fake membership club, known in this case as the Sun & Surf Club. Whereas a white would be admitted to the pool if he bought an admission ticket, a Negro would be told he had to join the club. If he pursued the matter further, he would be instructed to go to the administration building and fill out an application blank. If he took this step he would be told that he would get word by mail regarding his application. Of course, no word from the Palisades was forthcoming. We knew, because a couple of our group had gone through these futile motions.

The attitude of the park crowds on discrimination can be summed up in the remark of the girl who told us, “Why don’t you go away and let us enjoy ourselves?” But although the crowds were at first only mildly annoyed or indifferent, there were some protests once the brutality started. A few visitors, including the son of the Haitian consul in New York, were mistaken for members of our group and were pushed around by park guards. Some had their cameras snatched from them.

From the start of that violence-filled summer of 1947, we were aware of Rosenthal’s economic influence over the governments of Cliffside Park and Fort Lee, the two villages within which Palisades Amusement Park is located. We knew that Police Chief Frank Borrell of Cliffside Park had a substantial financial interest in the park’s concessions, and that both Cliffside Park and Fort Lee policemen augmented their incomes by working on off-duty days as park guards. We also realized that, had we called for a government investigation, the investigator would have been Bergen County Prosecutor Walter Winne, whose law firm represented Palisades Park at the first hearing on our damage suit under the federal civil rights law.

What we did not know until the Kefauver crime probe three years later, was the link between the two police chiefs, the county prosecutor, and some of the underworld’s biggest gambling operators.

Police Chief Borrell, along with two Cliffside Park cops, was indicted by a Bergen County grand jury for malfeasance in office and perjury. He left town before the case was resolved. The indictments were based on the police protection given to the big-time gambling operations of Frank Erickson, who was subsequently jailed. A Cliffside Park house owned by a cousin of Borrell’s was the location of Erickson’s local gambling establishment. Prior to the indictment, Borrell, who arrested over forty pickets during the CORE campaign, testified that he had never made a gambling arrest in twenty-five years.

Police Chief Stengel was indicted by a Bergen County grand jury for laxity in investigating a Fort Lee gambling establishment operated by Joe Adonis, another big-time underworld figure. Four days later, Stengel committed suicide. It was he who supervised the brutal dragging away of CORE members from the ticket booth and who winked at the repeated beatings by park guards.

Prosecutor Winne was indicted by a Bergen County grand jury on nineteen counts of misconduct in office in connection with the gambling probe. When his term expired, he quit office.

Willie Moretti, a big-time gambler who figured in the Bergen County investigation, was shot dead in September 1951 in a bar just opposite the entrance gate where Police Chief Borrell arrested our pickets during the summer of 1947.

Testifying on one of these arrest cases, Police Chief Borrell asserted he would continue to arrest any members of our group who picketed or distributed leaflets at the Cliffside Park entrance to Palisades. By the summer of 1948 he belatedly discovered that these rights are legal. So, throughout the hot Sundays of that summer, we picketed and distributed leaflets at that gate.

CORE’S direct action campaign was accompanied by legal action, pursued by Hiram Elfenbein, who volunteered his services. All our convictions arising from the 1947 arrests were either reversed by the higher courts or dropped. Civil rights suits against the park were initiated in both state and federal courts. From the federal suit resulted a precedent-setting civil rights decision by the Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia, namely, that the sale of tickets constitutes a contract and that, constitutionally, a Negro must have the same right to make a contract as does a white.

Elfenbein testified at hearings on the 1949 New Jersey civil rights bill to make sure that the law specifically mentioned swimming pools. This he succeeded in accomplishing. Enactment of the bill into law (the Freeman law) was partly due to the news stories and editorials which had appeared in northern New Jersey newspapers during the summer of our beatings and arrests.

Following passage of the law during the winter of 1949, Rosenthal reached a verbal agreement with New Jersey’s newly created Division Against Discrimination to end racial bias at the pool. In discussing details he told Harold Lett, head of the Division, in referring to CORE members, “But, I won’t admit Communists.” Lett retorted that Rosenthal knew as well as he did that CORE is not Communist. He added that if Rosenthal refused admission to any Negro, even a Communist, he would be subject to penalties of the civil rights law. Rosenthal did not press the point further.

It was not the owner’s first attempt at the McCarthy-type smear. In arguing against a writ of certiorari enabling an appeal of one of our arrest cases, his attorneys, Joseph Marini and Albert Gross, called the CORE campaign “a Communist-inspired attempt to force admission of minority groups.” And at the trial of our damage suit, Gross made a point of asking all of our witnesses whether they were Communists.

Rosenthal’s verbal agreement was observed fairly well throughout the summers of 1949 and 1950, CORE tests showed. But by the summer of 1951, he began to backslide, admitting only Negroes whom he recognized as being CORE members and who therefore would make an issue if refused. Other Negroes were barred.

So early in the summer of 1952, four Negro CORE members who had not been so recognized and had been refused admission filed complaints with the Division Against Discrimination. Faced with an impending hearing on these cases, Rosenthal, at Lett’s insistence, put into writing the verbal agreement which he had made in 1949.

Since then, CORE tests have shown no violations. Occasionally, a rumor comes to CORE that somebody has been refused admission to the Palisades pool, but none has been verified. Ever since the pool changed policy, CORE has emphasized the importance of reporting any violation to CORE and to the Division Against Discrimination.

This advice was contained in the thousands of leaflets which CORE distributed throughout Harlem after the pool started admitting Negroes. The leaflets urged Negroes to patronize the pool and thus to make the new nondiscrimination policy a reality. This proved a difficult educational task. Negroes were slow to learn of the change. But sizable numbers of Puerto Ricans began patronizing the pool. Puerto Ricans had previously been barred along with Negroes.

As for Irving Rosenthal, the park’s owner, he confessed to Lett at the end of the first season of desegregation that he had been a fool not to change the pool’s policy long ago. He had discovered firsthand that his fear of business losses—a fear expressed by so many businessmen faced with desegregation—had proved unfounded. It was this fear alone which had prompted his ruthless resistance to desegregation.

One day during the summer of 1947 as Rosenthal stood supervising one of the violent onslaughts by park guards against CORE members, Vivien Roodenko of our group went over and started a conversation with him in Yiddish. When it turned out that their families came from the same part of the Ukraine, Rosenthal volunteered that he knew what persecution was, that he had had relatives imprisoned in concentration camps and even killed by the Nazis. He concluded by asking her, “Now won’t you please go get your friends and try to persuade them to get out of here?”

The fact that Rosenthal belongs to a persecuted minority has nothing to do with his having cracked down on another persecuted minority. If he were not Jewish, he would have acted in exactly the same manner. It is hard for the owner of a lucrative business to believe that desegregation, aside from being good ethics, can be good business practice in the long run.

3.

PIONEERING IN NONVIOLENCE

At the time when the 1956 Montgomery bus boycott was making international headlines, Ted Poston wrote in the New York Post: “Long before Montgomery joined the passive resistance movement, CORE had been effectively fighting bias on the Gandhi nonviolence principle.”

By “long before” he meant since 1942 when the first CORE group was organized in Chicago, or possibly he meant since 1943 when a number of similarly aimed groups joined in making CORE a national organization.

I did not learn of CORE’S existence until late in 1946. As soon as I did, I joined. Since my student days I have believed in brotherhood. More than that, to treat a person as superior or inferior because of his skin color struck me as ridiculous.

I came to this conclusion through my own thinking, reading, and observing. My father died when I was eleven, so I never knew what he thought on the subject. My mother referred to Negroes as “coons.” She frequently remarked that she would never hire one as a servant because “they are dirty and they steal.” The same viewpoint was held by my other relatives and throughout my mother’s circle of friends.

My first act of revolt against this attitude occurred when I was a student at Harvard in 1933. I brought a Negro girl to the freshman dance. She wore a red dress. The somberly dressed Boston matrons on the sidelines stared at us, whispered, and then stared again. Two of my friends dared to have a dance with her during the evening—nobody else. When we were ready to go, we left. Nobody said anything to us.

Yet the incident became legendary. Years later, when I was working for CORE, I happened to get into conversation at a party with a Bostonian who didn’t know my name or background. At one point he said, “You know, some years ago, I heard, a guy took a colored girl to a dance at Harvard.” I started laughing. “I happen to be the guy,” I explained.

In the years that followed, I continued to feel strongly on the subject. I never could let a racist remark pass without countering. During my three years as a seaman, I welcomed and supported the National Maritime Union’s policy of nondiscriminatory hiring through the union hall. Living and working aboard ships with interracial crews strengthened my beliefs in equality.

But it was not until ten years after the Harvard incident that I myself engaged in action against discrimination. As a pacifist in World War II, I was imprisoned for three years in a Danbury, Connecticut, prison. Although a federal prison, it had a segregated mess hall.

A group of twenty-three pacifists decided to end this indignity by going on strike. I was one of them. Refusing to work in prison means solitary confinement. The twenty-three of us were locked in solitary cells for four and one-half months. Then, on Christmas Eve 1943, the warden came to our cells and announced that as of February 1 prisoners could sit where they chose in the mess hall.

A major factor in winning our strike was that it had been well publicized by our friends and relatives on the outside. News of it had appeared in the Negro press and a special supporting committee had been formed, headed by Adam Clayton Powell. The Roosevelt Administration was sensitive to the problem. A. Philip Randolph’s plan for a nonviolent “March on Washington” had led to FEPC, a Presidential executive order barring employment discrimination. The climate of national opinion was on our side.

When the new policy was first announced in the prison mess hall, a few Southern-minded whites shouted how they’d “never sit next to any damn nigger.” They also threatened to beat up those of us who had taken part in the strike. The only Negroes opposed to nondiscriminatory seating were four members of the Israelite sect, who took the Negro nationalist position, and one out-and-out Nazi who openly favored Hitler.

Prior to the strike, the warden, though professing nondiscrimination, had argued that the other prisoners might not accept desegregation, that a bloody riot might result, and that such changes take years.

However, when February 1 came, desegregated seating went into effect without incident. Within a few days even the white Southerners took it for granted. Under the new arrangement they were not compelled to sit with Negroes; they could sit anywhere they liked.

At first many of the Negroes, through habit, sat in the former Jim Crow section. But within six months this was no longer the case. Danbury, a short-term prison, has a fast turnover of prisoners. Hence most of the prisoners who were there six months later had never known the segregated set up, and those who had known it had completely forgotten it.

I relate all this to show how I learned firsthand, not just the effectiveness of nonviolent action in changing from segregation to desegregation, but the important fact that such a change can be accomplished peacefully now, today, without the dire consequences so often predicted. True, this firsthand experience was in a prison. But human beings in prison react no differently to basic situations than human beings on the outside. I felt certain that nonviolence would prove as effective in combating discrimination on the outside as it had in Danbury.

However, it was not until over a year after my release from prison that I discovered CORE. The first major CORE project in which I participated was the Journey of Reconciliation in the spring of 1947. My second was the Palisades campaign, which started that summer and lasted through the summer of 1948. These experiences made me want to work for CORE. There were no salaries in those days; the entire CORE staff consisted of volunteers. I started work in March 1949.

George Houser, national director, was permitted to do some CORE work during his office hours with the Fellowship of Reconciliation. He could no longer do this when he changed jobs to become secretary of the American Committee on Africa.

At that point I took over all CORE’S office work. I also continued editing the CORElator, an assignment which Houser had given me soon after I started work with CORE. The Fellowship allowed CORE a little free office space after Houser left. I had a typewriter on the end of a shipping table, a file cabinet, and a couple of shelves for address stencils. That was the CORE “office.” Jim Robinson worked evenings raising the minimum funds needed for operating expenses, and Lula Farmer handled the treasurer’s duties from her home. These were CORE’S lean years—the years when social consciences throughout the United States were numbed by the infection of McCarthyism. While the number of CORE groups throughout the country reached a new low during this period, some of those in operation made striking advances.

In St. Louis and Baltimore, CORE groups ended lunch-counter discrimination on a city-wide basis. St. Louis CORE started its campaign in 1949—eleven years before the South-wide sit-in campaign made this technique nationally famous. The Baltimore campaign started in 1953.

At the start of these campaigns, no eating places in the two cities, with the exception of those in the railroad stations and in Negro ghetto areas, served Negroes. When St. Louis CORE ended its campaign in 1953 and Baltimore CORE in 1954, all downtown dime stores in the two cities served everybody, regardless of color, at their lunch counters.

Once the dime stores’ policy was changed, CORE found it less difficult to get drugstores, cafeterias, and department-store restaurants to end discrimination.

CORE’S plan of “trying on” nondiscrimination before “wearing” it succeeded in proving unfounded the stereotyped fears of management, fears of business losses, riots, and so on. In some instances management agreed to let CORE send only one group to their lunch counter a week; in other instances, they accepted as many as one group a day. The fact that there were no adverse reactions from other customers was real proof to management.

At the halfway mark of the St. Louis campaign, in the summer of 1951, CORE participants faced a number of violent assaults by members of Gerald L. K. Smith’s Christian Nationalist Party. Members of this group sneered, “Let’s get the Kike,” when they beat Marvin Rich over the head as he left a CORE project at the Forum Cafeteria. But the CORE members responded nonviolently and by summer’s end the attacks ceased.

During a sit-in on August 11 at Kresge’s three Christian Nationalists were permitted to distribute racist leaflets inside the store. CORE got a snapshot of one of them in friendly conversation with the assistant manager.

On this occasion a Negro CORE member sat at the counter with a sign on her back saying: “We have been waiting for service hours and minutes.”

Another group member changed the time on the sign as each quarter hour passed. In the next seat was Billie Ames with a little box of CORE leaflets on her back inscribed with the words: “Take one.” Customers took eight hundred of them.

About a year after the end of the dime store campaign, following eighteen months of sit-ins and leaflet distributions by CORE, Stix Baer & Fuller, a big department store, opened its downstairs lunch counter to everybody. The group had initiated its campaign there five years previously even before starting on the dime stores. Famous-Barr, another big department store where CORE had been using the same testing plan as in the dime stores, soon followed suit and opened its lunch counter.

Extending the new pattern from downtown into the suburbs, by the fall of 1954 CORE succeeded in changing the lunch-counter policies of all three dime stores in suburban Wellston.

By the fall of 1958, Famous-Barr extended its non-discriminatory lunch-counter policy to the table restaurants—not only at the main store but at branches in outlying shopping centers.

Several months previously, in an attempt to persuade Stix Bauer & Fuller to extend its lunch-counter nondiscrimination, ten CORE members stood in line for two hours seeking service at the tearoom—and it became a sort of alumni day.

Although several years had elapsed since the group’s eighteen-month campaign to open the lunch counter, several of the store personnel, and particularly the detectives, recognized CORE members, greeted them, asked after their families, how many children they had, and so on.

The store personnel could not help but be impressed by CORE and its nonviolence. They had not forgotten over the years. Their friendliness reflected the attitude of many in St. Louis toward CORE’S campaign. The “show-me” state of Missouri had been shown.

The CORE method of nonviolent action has proved successful in all types of public accommodation. It has been used by various groups to end discrimination in theaters, amusement parks, swimming pools, barbershops, hotels, motels, drive-ins, bowling alleys, skating rinks, playgrounds, and YMCAs.

One of CORE’S very first projects gives a good picture of the method of action patiently repeated over the years.

Three CORE members were refused lunch at Stoner’s, a white-tablecloth restaurant in the heart of Chicago’s Loop, in October 1942. Mr. Stoner met the three as they came through the swinging doors and said he could not give them a seat, he did not serve colored people. He seemed annoyed when the three asked him why he had this policy. When he stated that he could do as he liked in his own restaurant, they sat down on a sofa near the door to await service.

They waited for forty-five minutes in vain.

They asked for seats at tables on several occasions. Mr. Stoner refused to make an appointment to discuss the question with CORE committees. Attempts were made by letter and phone. Finally CORE decided to send committees to see him without appointment. Two white women ate lunch there one noon and had a brief talk with Mr. Stoner. He claimed he would lose all his white trade if colored people came to his restaurant. He said that 90 per cent of his trade came from women and they would not want to eat beside Negroes. He said that if members of the two races ate in the same restaurant, it would lead to interracial marriages and he was opposed to this.

Another interracial CORE committee visited Mr. Stoner in his office one morning before the restaurant opened for business. This committee talked with him for fully half an hour, but without satisfaction. He claimed that other restaurants of his class did not serve Negroes.

Following these attempts to negotiate, small interracial groups visited the restaurant on many occasions to try to get service. At first Mr. Stoner refused to allow the hostesses even to seat the groups at the tables.

As time passed, some of the small test groups would be seated after a considerable wait, only to be served meat with egg shells scattered on it, or a plate of food salted so heavily that it could not be eaten, or a sandwich composed of tomato cores and lettuce picked out of the garbage in the kitchen. (So the group was told by Negro bus girls who witnessed the making of the sandwiches.)

For one entire week in December 1942, CORE passed out leaflets to the patrons of Stoner’s both at noon and in the evening, calling their attention to the policy of discrimination and asked them to protest as they paid their bills.

The facts of the case were publicized among many groups in Chicago, and again and again the question was asked of CORE, “Why pick on Mr. Stoner? Don’t other restaurants discriminate as well?” As a result of this prodding, CORE investigated the policies of all eating places within a Loop area of sixteen square blocks. In not a single case was outright discrimination practiced. A leaflet entitled “Fifty Loop Restaurants Which Do Not Discriminate” was published by CORE as a result of this investigation, and it received wide circulation among both Negro and white groups.

Following the survey, CORE felt entirely justified in taking action against Stoner’s, for no other place was known to be so flagrant in its violation of the civil rights law of Illinois. Mr. Stoner was informed of the results of the survey. When a few further attempts were made to receive service in Stoner’s without success, it was decided that a sit-in should be tried. CORE realized that it would be difficult to stage a successful sit-in at Stoner’s, for this restaurant could seat at least two hundred persons. Nevertheless, the sit-in was planned and executed in June 1943.

Approximately sixty-five persons participated—sixteen of whom were Negroes. All participants were pledged to nonviolence. The whites had agreed to remain in their seats all night if necessary until the Negroes were seated and given good service. The action took place in late afternoon and early evening of a Saturday. Between four-thirty and five-ten most of the white participants went by twos, threes, and fours into the restaurant. They were, of course, seated without difficulty by the hostesses. At five-fifteen the first of two interracial groups, consisting of six Negroes and two whites, walked through the revolving doors of the restaurant. This group was ignored when the spokesman asked for seats. So the group stood quietly at the front of the restaurant, waiting to be seated and watching while others who had come in after them were seated by the hostesses. Finally, after a wait of only half an hour, one of the hostesses approached the group and asked them to follow her. A special table, large enough for all, had been set in a prominent place. Immediate service was given these persons. The only regrettable event marking the seating of this first interracial group was that Mr. Stoner, without provocation, kicked one of the white persons in the leg.

The seating of the first group was the signal for the second group to enter. Nine Negros and one white made up this unit. They were not seated by the hostesses, but rather were threatened by Mr. Stoner. For an hour and a half this group of ten persons stood at the front of the restaurant. During that time the police were called on three occasions. The police were, however, quite friendly to the CORE members. They wanted to know what was going on and were told. There was nothing they could do, for the interracial group was far from causing a disturbance. The third time the police were called, they told Mr. Stoner not to call them again or they would arrest him.

The attention of everyone in the restaurant was, of course, attracted to the interracial group. CORE members who were seated explained the situation to other patrons. Much sympathy was aroused. Even some of the white employees expressed sympathy, including one of the hostesses who whispered into the ear of a sit-inner, “Keep it up—we’re all with you.” The Negro bus girls were excited about the nonviolent action. They said to several CORE members that they planned to quit their jobs immediately if the interracial group were not served. Only two persons (a middle-aged couple) were observed walking out of the restaurant without eating. It was evident that most of the patrons supported the action.

It began to look as though the second group might have to stand all night. But unexpectedly the deadlock was broken. An elderly woman, not connected with CORE, walked up to one of the Negro girls who was standing and asked if she would sit down at the table with her. Of course, the CORE member accepted. Then several of the seated white CORE members followed the lead of this woman. In a very few minutes only two of the ten persons in the second interracial group were still standing. One of the hostesses advanced toward them and asked them to follow her. She seated them at a table for two near the center of the restaurant. Then a very unexpected, spontaneous demonstration took place —wild applause broke out. Practically everyone in the restaurant took part in this sustained acclamation. It was a fitting climax to a well-executed nonviolent demonstration for racial justice.

Although good food was served to all the persons who participated in this action, Stoner’s was not yet clear of discrimination. On two occasions, Negroes received service, but only after carrying on a conversation with Mr. Stoner, explaining why they wanted to eat there. On another occasion two girls, one white and one colored, were seated but were not served for the hour in which they remained in their seats. Finally, according to all reports, the policy of the restaurant changed completely. Over three years after the sit-in, in the fall of 1946, interracial groups visiting the restaurant indicated that they had no trouble.

4.

MILESTONE OF MONTGOMERY

For an entire year, starting on December 5, 1955, forty-two thousand Negroes in Montgomery, Alabama, completely boycotted the city’s buses rather than be humiliated by segregated seating. How all these people felt about the hardship and sacrifice of walking many miles to and from their jobs, month after month, is expressed in the Montgomery freedom song, “My Feet Is Tired, but My Soul Is Rested.” The song’s title is an actual quote from an elderly Negro woman walking her daily four miles to work. It was her reply to a passerby who, after seeing her trudge along each morning for ten months, finally inquired whether her feet didn’t get tired.

How an entire Negro population could brave such a struggle in a city of the Deep South, where white supremacists openly advocated violence, was explained by E. D. Nixon, an initiator of the bus boycott. He said, quite simply, “Our people are no longer afraid.” Nixon struck me as a man who has himself been unafraid for many years. A story to illustrate his strength was told by A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, as he introduced Nixon to a small group of us assembled in his office.

Nixon had been representing the Brotherhood in Montgomery for many years. The first time he negotiated with the local superintendent of the Pullman Company, he was received as an inferior. He thereupon told the company official, “I am not here today as a Pullman porter in my uniform. I am here as a representative of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and as such, I must be dealt with on a basis of equality.”

The superintendent refused to proceed with the negotiations and the matter was referred to company headquarters. The superintendent was thereupon instructed by Pullman that he was obligated to bargain in good faith with whomever the Brotherhood designated as its representative, and that if he refused to do so, he could not retain his position. Bargaining relations between Nixon and the superintendent have been amicable ever since.

Following this introduction, Nixon told of his role in helping to initiate the Montgomery boycott. He spoke in a manner as casual and unassuming as if he were relating something strictly routine.

“My wife phoned and told me that Rosa Parks had been arrested on the bus. I went down and put up the bail for her. That night I started thinking. I told my wife, ‘Our people should just stop riding the buses.’ She said, ‘Stop daydreaming. Put out the light and go to sleep.’ But I didn’t. I took out a piece of paper and started writing down the names of all the people who should be contacted.

“When the ministers first got together to talk things over, the discussion went on and on. Finally I got up and asked, ‘Am I to tell our people that you are cowards?’ Reverend King (Martin Luther King) raised his hand to signify he was not. Before you know it, he was nominated, seconded, and became president of the Montgomery Improvement Association (the organization leading the boycott).

“From the start of the protest action, luck was with us. A few of our people might have been scared into going back on the buses. But they saw that the city had put two policemen on each bus and concluded, ‘Maybe we’re not allowed to.’ Then the buses were taken off so nobody could ride them even if they wanted to.”

That’s how the Montgomery bus boycott got started on December 5, 1955. Soon thereafter, the buses were back on the streets again—but almost empty because Montgomery’s Negroes stood firm and unafraid.

The Negroes’ renunciation of fear was demonstrated by the uninhibited manner in which they testified about their long-standing grievances on bus segregation at the trial of Reverend King, who along with Nixon, Reverend Abernathy, Reverend Seay, and eighty-six other boycott leaders had been indicted under a 1921 state anticonspiracy law directed originally against unions.

Georgia Gilmore testified how a driver once ordered her, “Come out, nigger, and go in the back door,” and drove away as soon as she got off the front steps.

Sadie Brooks told of seeing a Negro man forced from a bus at pistol point because he did not have the correct change.

Martha Walker related how her blind husband’s leg was hurt when a driver shut a door on him.

Stella Brooks testified that her husband had been shot to death for disobeying a driver, but her testimony was struck from the record because she had not been an eyewitness to the act.

No wonder the Negroes of Montgomery were determined in their aim. A well-organized car pool was maintained throughout. Every morning at seven-thirty about one hundred and fifty cars reported at thirty-five locations. By nine-thirty, three thousand Negroes had been transported to work. Another five thousand walked, in some cases ten miles a day.

One of the many walkers commented philosophically in the fifth month of the boycott, “We have walked in cold and rain, but it’s spring now.” It was winter again before the boycott’s successful conclusion, but the Negroes continued walking.

Morale, which remained high despite the prolonged hardships, was maintained through weekly mass meetings. These meetings, held alternately at the churches of different leaders, were invariably packed to overflowing.

The Montgomery Improvement Association, which led the boycott, was fortunate in having a number of really able leaders—not just one—and in being democratically controlled. All policy decisions were made by a steering committee of over one hundred persons. Only when the committee was stalemated was final strategy delegated to smaller subcommittees.

Repeated emphasis on nonviolence was made by Reverend King, Reverend Abernathy, and other boycott leaders. It was not easy to maintain nonviolence, particularly after the bombing of Reverend King’s home. A number of Negroes had stored away arms and favored using them in retaliation against the bombings and provocative acts by the White Citizens Councils. Fortunately, the leaders favoring nonviolence prevailed by pointing out that if the Negroes resorted to violence, the outcome would be not simply a defeat on the bus issue but a setback to the whole civil rights front.

The provocation by the White Citizens Councils was lurid. A leaflet headed “A Preview of the Declaration of Segregation,” distributed at one of their rallies in Montgomery, opens: “When in the course of human events it becomes necessary to abolish the Negro race, proper methods should be used. Among these are guns, bows and arrows, slingshots and knives. In every stage of the bus boycott we have been oppressed and degraded because of black, slimy, juicy, unbearably stinking niggers.”

A few days after distribution of these leaflets, which upheld “the pursuit of dead niggers” as a “right,” the sale of firearms and knives was prohibited—to Negroes. Whites were encouraged to “stock up.”

The urgency for keeping to nonviolence after bus desegregation had been won was emphasized by boycott leaders at mass meetings held on the eve of the Negroes’ return to the buses.

A characteristic instance on the first day of desegregation occurred when a white man seated behind a Negro remarked facetiously to the person next to him, “I see this isn’t going to be a white Christmas.” Ignoring the remark’s intent, the Negro smiled good-naturedly and replied, “Yes sir, that’s right,” whereupon a number of the other passengers smiled and all bitterness seemed to vanish.

By adhering to this policy, the Negroes prevented the scattered incidents which occurred during the first weeks of bus desegregation from turning into the riots and bloodshed which the White Citizens Councils had hopefully predicted. Through nighttime bombings of Negro leaders’ homes, they did succeed in making the City Commission suspend bus operations for a brief period.

But the buses resumed operations and the incidents subsided. Most of Montgomery whites—though they may not approve of bus desegregation—accepted it peacefully.

The Montgomery story is not complete without mention of the Tallahassee story. In that Florida city, under the leadership of Reverend C. K. Steele and the InterCivic Council, Negroes maintained a similar bus boycott. City officials harrassed car-pool drivers and arrested a number of them including Reverend Steele. But the boycott continued for seven months, ending three days after Montgomery’s. The outcome, as in Montgomery, was desegregation with a minimum of friction—until Florida’s governor halted the process with an executive order suspending Tallahassee’s bus operations. The buses started running again some weeks later.

As I did not participate in the bus boycotts, I have told the story as I heard it from various leaders on their trips to New York. At that time CORE was in such financial straits that it could give only moral support to Montgomery. But independent of CORE I worked with Bayard Rustin in promoting public meetings and concerts to raise funds for Montgomery. And, in the summer of 1956, in response to an emergency appeal from Reverend Steele, CORE sent one hundred and fifty dollars to Tallahassee, which was receiving less support because its boycott, starting after Montgomery’s, received far less publicity. Though I wanted to go to Montgomery myself, I could not see an effective role for a nonresident in this particular situation.

In concluding the Montgomery story, I feel impelled to quote the eloquent ending by Martin Luther King to his first article on the bus boycott, written for a small monthly called Liberation.

Every attempt to end the protest by intimidation, by encouraging Negroes to inform, by force and violence, further cemented the Negro community and brought sympathy for our cause from men of good will all over the world. The great appeal for the world appears to lie in the fact that we in Montgomery have adopted the method of nonviolence. In a world in which most men attempt to defend their highest values by the accumulation of weapons of destruction, it is morally refreshing to hear five thousand Negroes in Montgomery shout “Amen” and “Halleluh” when they are exhorted to “pray for those who oppose you,” or pray “Oh Lord, give us strength of body to keep walking for freedom,” and conclude each mass meeting with, “Let us pray that God shall give us strength to remain nonviolent though we may face death .”

And death there may be. Many white men in the South see themselves as a fearful minority in an ocean of black men. They honestly believe with one side of their minds that Negroes are depraved and disease-ridden. They look upon any effort at equality as leading to “mongrelization.” They are convinced that racial equality is a Communist idea and that those who ask for it are subversive. They believe that their caste system is the highest form of social organization.

The enlightened white Southerner, who for years has preached gradualism, now sees that even the slow approach finally has revolutionary implications. Placing straws on a camel’s back, no matter how slowly, is dangerous. This realization has immobilized the liberals and most of the white church leaders. They have no answer for dealing with or absorbing violence. They end in begging for retreat, lest “things get out of hand and lead to violence.”

Writing in Life, William Faulkner, Nobel prize-winning author from Mississippi, recently urged the NAACP. to “stop now for a moment.” That is to say, he encouraged Negroes to accept injustice, exploitation, and indignity for a while longer. It is hardly a moral act to encourage others patiently to accept injustice which he himself does not endure.

In urging delay, which in this dynamic period is tantamount to retreat, Faulkner suggests that those of us who press for change now may not know that violence could break out. He says we are “dealing with a fact: the fact of emotional conditions of such fierce unanimity as to scorn the fact that it is a minority and which will go to any length and against any odds at this moment to justify and, if necessary, defend that condition and its right to it.”

We Southern Negroes believe that it is essential to defend the right of equality now. From this position we will not and cannot retreat. Fortunately, we are increasingly aware that we must not try to defend our position by methods that contradict the aim of brotherhood. We in Montgomery believe that the only way to press on is by adopting the philosophy and practice of nonviolent resistance.

This method permits a struggle to go on with dignity and without the need to retreat. It is a method that can absorb the violence that is inevitable in social change whenever deep-seated prejudices are challenged.

If, in pressing for justice and equality in Montgomery, we discover that those who reject equality are prepared to use violence, we must not despair, retreat, or fear. Before they make this crucial decision, they must remember: whatever they do, we will not use violence in return. We hope we can act in the struggle in such a way that they will see the error of their approach and will come to respect us. Then we can all live together in peace and equality.

The basic conflict is not really over the buses. Yet we believe that, if the method we use in dealing with equality in the buses can eliminate injustice within ourselves, we shall at the same time be attacking the basis of injustice—man’s hostility to man. This can only be done when we challenge the white community to reexamine its assumptions as we are now prepared to reexamine ours.

We do not wish to triumph over the white community. That would only result in transferring those now on the bottom to the top. But, if we can live up to nonviolence in thought and deed, there will emerge an interracial society based on freedom for all.

5.

AFTER MONTGOMERY

Civil rights optimists had hoped that the successful Montgomery bus boycott would spark similar nonviolent mass protests led by Martin Luther King, who as Montgomery leader had become a symbol of Gandhi-ism in action. This did not happen. The nationwide publicity about Montgomery, which had acquainted many newspaper readers throughout the country for the first time with terms such as “nonviolence” and “passive resistance,” subsided.

These readers still did not know of the existence of CORE, but CORE groups in various cities continued to pioneer in nonviolence. In 1956, CORE for the first time ventured to set up an office of its own—not much bigger than a closet—and I left my shipping table at the Fellowship office to move there. Soon thereafter, Jim Robinson quit his proofreading to take a job in the CORE office. Next, CORE hired its first field secretary. Until then, field secretaries, like other staff members, had been volunteers.

Following the Supreme Court’s key antisegregation decision of 1954 outlawing the antiquated “separate but equal” doctrine in regard to public schools, school desegregation became a realizable aim.

In Nashville, Tennessee, CORE together with the Negro PTA helped to make school integration work, despite the mob violence which marked the change-over from segregation in the fall of 1957. In so doing, CORE evolved a workable community program which might well be applied in any Southern community where court- ordered school desegregation is being thwarted.

“If Little Rock had had a similar interracial group, Governor Faubus might have been checked without the use of federal troops,” wrote Martin Luther King. Specifically, he pointed out, “The key to success in Nashville was CORE’S policy of backing up the parents —by visiting them and by escorting their children to integrated schools.”

King wrote this in a preface to a CORE pamphlet which I persuaded Anna Holden, dynamic leader of the Nashville CORE group, to write. Anna Holden is a white Southerner, born in Ocala, Florida, and a graduate of Florida State University. Her white Southern origin and upbringing are unquestionable. But her race was at times challenged by incredulous segregationists, who suggested she go up North where she could “pass” for white.

Rejecting this kindly advice, she chose to remain in Nashville until she saw through the job which she had helped start, the job of making school desegregation work.

The day the Hattie Cotton School in Nashville was bombed, her pamphlet relates, “Mrs. Watson telephoned Dr. Miller [a member of the CORE group]. ‘If I ever needed anybody, I needed somebody that morning,’ she recalled. ‘I had gotten a phone call threatening to set the house on fire if Barbara Jean went to school. I couldn’t go off and leave the rest of the children alone. And I knew she had to go to school.’

“Barbara Jean was dressed and ready. Dr. Miller came promptly. He drove the child five blocks to her school. Then he took her by the hand and they walked through a crowd of jeering whites.

“The same morning Mrs. Charles Martin, another CORE member, walked to the Jones School with her neighbor, Mrs. Myrtle Battle and another first-grader, Charles Edward Battle. In the Glenn School area of East Nashville the Reverend R. W. Kelley of Clark Memorial Church accompanied several children to school. Teen-age boys in the booing crowd got themselves photographed for newspapers by standing behind Reverend Kelley, pretending to measure him for a coffin.”

The pamphlet goes on to relate how “the crisis was soon reduced to manageable size” and how Kasper (John Frederick Kasper, professional segregationist who had come to Nashville for the occasion) and his mobs were suppressed. As Anna Holden explains it, “The tide was turned because the police finally enforced the law and because a handful of Negro parents, staunchly backed by the Negro PTA, CORE, ministers, and other forces of decency, persisted in sending their children to formerly white schools.”

The following year, 1958, Nashville took the second step of its grade-a-year plan, extending integration from first to second grade. Though Anna Holden feels that the grade-a-year plan is too slow (total number of Negro children enrolled for the 1958—59 school year was thirty-four), she concluded, “Considering the general pattern in the South and last year’s mob violence, CORE and other interested organizations feel gratified by the outcome of Nashville’s ‘second step.’ ” By September 1959, forty-one Negro students were attending integrated schools.

Another CORE achievement on the school issue was mobilization of the Pilgrimage of Prayer for Public Schools, which brought two thousand persons to Richmond on New Year’s Day 1959 to protest Virginia’s “massive resistance” program.

“Passive Resistance Opposes Virginia’s Massive Resistance” was the apt headline of one Southern newspaper. The demonstration was precedent setting in that is took place not in New York, Washington, Chicago, or other cities where big civil rights rallies had been held in the past, but in a Southern city. This Pilgrimage played a significant role in the subsequent collapse of Virginia’s “massive resistance” program which had deprived thirteen thousand children of education for the first half of the 1958-59 school year.

On the right to vote, Congress enacted in 1957 the first civil rights law in eighty-seven years. To translate this law into reality by getting Negroes to vote, Jim McCain, a CORE field secretary, started organizing a registration campaign in an area of South Carolina where he has lived and worked for civil rights for the major part of his life. McCain had been fired from his position as school principal on suspicion of soliciting parents’ signatures in connection with one of the school desegregation cases involved in the key 1954 Supreme Court decision. He got one more job for only a brief period after that. Since then, blackballed as a “bad nigger,” he was unable to obtain employment in South Carolina. In 1958 he went to work for CORE.

McCain’s procedure was to establish in each county a committee which instructs persons on how to fill out application blanks, accompanies them to registration offices, and remains with them until they receive their certificates for voting. Applicants who fail to receive certificates because of any error on the blank are given further instruction by the committee and are taken back to the registration office to reapply.

Commenting on the South Carolina registration campaign a year after it started, McCain said, “In counties where we have CORE affiliates, the percentage of Negroes registered is higher than in counties where no such group has been organized. For the first time, during the year’s primary runoffs, candidates have invited Negroes to meet with them and discuss community problems. In a number of communities, candidates who stressed segregation were defeated. Negroes ran for public office in larger numbers this year than in any year since Negroes won the right to vote in the South Carolina state primaries.”

For example, in 1958, Negroes for the first time took over all Democratic Party offices in Sumter’s Precinct 3-B and elected sixteen of the seventeen delegates to the Democratic County Convention. Reverend Fred C. James, a Negro and a leader of Sumter CORE, set a precedent by running for city council. In Columbia, according to The State, a local newspaper, “the predominantly Negro ward 9 . . . was more than enough to make the difference” of fourteen votes by which Lester Bates nosed out his strongly segregationist opponent in the 1958 mayoralty election.

It is the policy of CORE to work to increase the number of Negro voters. However, CORE, being nonpolitical, does not endorse candidates or engage in partisan politics.

As the Jim Crow line receded southward, so did the focus of CORE activity. In Marion, South Carolina, in the spring of 1959 the operator of Hewitt Esso Service Station ran a drive-in ice cream stand next door where he required Negroes to go to a side window for service. In his service station, he had a water fountain with paper cups and a sign “For Whites Only.”

“As chairman of CORE, I had a talk with him,” relates George Kelly. “Then I called a meeting and we went into action. Several CORE members who had large monthly accounts at the station went to the stand and tried to get ice cream at the front window. They were told to go to the side window.

“They then stated that if they couldn’t be served at the front window, they didn’t want the ice cream. Next they went over and paid up their accounts at the gas station, announcing to the operator that they would not trade with him any more.

“Other Negroes did likewise, until finally he had to close the service station. But rather than close the ice cream stand, he shut the side window and started serving everyone from the front window.

“Word of this spread and Negroes began getting better service from other businesses in town.”

The importance of this action is not that it constituted a major project but that it took place as far south as South Carolina, which would have been unthinkable a few years before.

Never, prior to the spring of 1959, had the sit-in technique been used as far south as Miami, Florida. The furthest south it had been employed until then by CORE was over one thousand miles northward in St. Louis and in Charleston, West Virginia.

True, Miami is sometimes described as “south of the South” to differentiate it from its geographic location. It has many permanent residents who have migrated from the North and Midwest, not to speak of the hordes of sun-seeking vacationists. But the Deep South pattern of total racial segregation prevailed.

In such a locale it was big news on April 29 when twenty Negro and white CORE members sat down at Grant’s lunch counter and remained there though they were refused service. Reporters, photographers, and TV men were out in force to cover this unprecedented event. Thus opened the initial campaign by a newly formed CORE group.

Negroes were already permitted to eat next to whites —standing up but not sitting down. They could eat at stand-up sections of the counters but not at the main sections which have stools. There was no downtown Miami lunch counter where a United States Negro could sit down for a meal, though some served Spanish-speaking Latin Americans of equally dark complexion. Being the United States city closest to Latin American countries, Miami had a sizable Spanish-speaking community even before the influx of Cuban refugees.

The justice and logic of CORE’S request that Negroes be served sitting down was not denied by store managers with whom the group had negotiated. But each one refused to be first to change.

The public readiness for such a change was indicated by a local TV commentator’s survey made outside Grant’s during the first sit-in. Of one hundred white passersby interviewed, ninety-eight not only had no objection to Negroes being served seated, but were unaware of the existence of the prevailing policy. Another indication was the fact that during sit-ins at Grant’s five months later, white customers would take seats next to the interracial groups sitting-in without paying the slightest attention.

Throughout the campaign, customers showed little hostility and, on occasion, sympathy. Only a few reacted to the sit-ins by making anti-Negro or anti-Semitic remarks. By August 1960, the dime store lunch counters were open to all, regardless of color.

Since the fall of 1959, members of Miami CORE, in co-operation with the local NAACP, have gone occasionally to Miami’s white beaches. They have encountered no objection either on the sand or in the ocean.

As CORE groups in the South concentrated on schools, voting, and public accommodations, those further north focused on employment and housing. In these two areas, nonviolent action can prove as effective as in restaurants, theaters, and amusement parks, with which this technique is generally associated.

In employment, particularly, successful CORE actions have taken place in a number of communities. As a result of picketing and boycott, individual companies have been persuaded to change to a fair employment policy under which employees are hired regardless of color in skilled as well as unskilled capacities.

In the field of housing, CORE groups have used a variety of techniques to establish the right of everyone to the best home available. To prove discrimination at a hotel or motel, a white CORE member will secure a room or cabin within a few minutes after a Negro has been refused. Similarly, white CORE members may apply for an apartment or a house within minutes of the refusal to rent or sell to a Negro. This can help to disprove landlords’ contentions that there are no vacancies or that apparent vacancies have already been rented or sold, though they have not yet been occupied. If a landlord persists in discriminating, picketing or sit-ins at rental offices prove effective.

When the first Negro family moves into a previously all-white neighborhood, there may be threats of violence. In 1958, Los Angeles CORE had an emergency committee, prepared to stand nonviolent guard duty at threatened homes and to find neighborhood families who would welcome the new family and stand by through the crisis. A Negro teacher, his wife, and two children bought a home in a formerly white area. Violence was threatened and CORE members established an all-night vigil. Their presence helped to prevent violence.

I had firsthand experience in successful housing desegregation in the co-operative apartment house where I live on New York’s upper West Side. The change took place gradually through the efforts of those residents who favored it. We were disappointed that some of the residents who opposed discrimination in principle were not with us in a specific situation which involved their pocketbooks. They adhered to the prevailing myth that housing desegregation always depresses real-estate values.

Our group would get together each year prior to the annual residents’ meeting to rally support for the election of antisegregationists to the board of directors.

The first nonwhite to move in was a Chinese woman. A petition to oust her was initiated by a Southerner who belonged to the board. On one occasion he had taken a shot at a Negro in the basement who, he claimed, had broken into the building, and at another time he had commented regarding the death of a resident, “She died because they took her to a nigger hospital.” In his zeal to collect signatures for his petition to oust the Chinese woman, he affixed the names of several residents without their knowledge. But his petition proved ineffective, and as the color line in the building started to break, he sold his apartment and moved out.

Several other Asians had become apartment owners in the co-op. The building’s nearness to International House, the Columbia University residence for foreign students, facilitates the admission of these non-American colored people.

It was not until the summer of 1955, however, that an American Negro family, the Lawrence Howells, were admitted. The woman whom we succeeded in electing board chairman that year had done a particularly effective job in paving the way for the board meeting at which the Howells were accepted.

At the 1957 annual meeting Howell was elected to the board. The following year he was not only re-elected but received a greater number of votes than any other candidate. Other American Negroes have been admitted since the Howells. However, our building has not become all-Negro, as often occurs once there is desegregation. It has remained racially balanced.

Desegregation came to our building without any ill will. A Negro couple, old friends of ours who vacationed in our apartment in the summer of 1956, were deeply impressed by the genuine friendliness they encountered in the hallways and elevator. Our building was the first in the neighborhood to become desegregated. Since then several other buildings have followed and there have been no incidents of violence or threatened violence.

6.

SIT-INS—THE STUDENTS REPORT

On February 1, 1960, a student sit-in at Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina, set off a South-wide movement of student sit-ins which became the most significant nonviolent action since Montgomery.

The technique in which CORE had pioneered without publicity for eighteen years had finally become daily nationwide news copy. As a result, CORE for the first time became widely know throughout the United States.

The CORE office became unrecognizable to me. Although it had expanded into adjacent rooms, it was as jammed as the New York subway at rush hour. Volunteers worked on mailings. Paid staff members— now four—answered endless long-distance phone calls, many from Southern student leaders wanting CORE to send down a field secretary, to bail out arrested students, or simply to give strategy advice on sit-ins, picketing, and so on. Reporters frequented the office daily, seeking interviews with Southern students whom CORE would bring North to tell their stories on radio and TV and at big public meetings.

Some of the students told their stories more vividly than could the best author or reporter writing from the sidelines; they made me feel as though I were on the scene. I decided that a written account of the sit-ins must be done by the students themselves. Here are their stories, written at the peak of the sit-in movement—not by me—but by them. Only the compiling and editing are mine.

TALLAHASSEE: THROUGH JAIL TO FREEDOM

by Patricia Stephens, Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University

I am writing this in Leon County Jail. My sister Priscilla and I, five other A & M students, and one high school student are serving sixty-day sentences for our participation in the sit-ins. We could be out on appeal but we all strongly believe that Martin Luther King was right when he said, “We’ve got to fill the jails in order to win our equal rights.” Priscilla and I both explained this to our parents when they visited us the other day. Priscilla is supposed to be on a special diet and mother was worried about her. We did our best to dispel her worries. We made it clear that we want to serve out our full time.

Students who saw the inside of the county jail before I did, and were released on bond, reported that conditions were miserable. They did not exaggerate. It is dank and cold. We are in what is called a “bull tank” with four cells. Each cell has four bunks, a commode, and a small sink. Some of the cells have running water, but ours does not. Breakfast, if you can call it that, is served at six-thirty. Another meal is served at twelve- thirty and in the evening, “sweet” bread and watery coffee. At first I found it difficult to eat this food. Two ministers visit us every day. Sundays and Wednesdays are regular visiting days, but our white visitors who came at first are no longer permitted by the authorities.

There is plenty of time to think in jail and I sometimes review in my mind the events which brought me here. It is almost six months since Priscilla and I were first introduced to CORE at a workshop in Miami. Upon our return we helped to establish a Tallahassee CORE group, whose initial meeting took place last October. Among our first projects was a test sit-in at Sears’ and McCrory’s. So, we were not totally unprepared when the South-wide protest movement started in early February.

Our first action in Tallahassee was on February 13. At eleven A.M. we sat down at the Woolworth lunch counter. When the waitress approached, Charles Steele, who was next to me, ordered a slice of cake for each of us. She said, “I’m sorry. I can’t serve you,” and moved on down the counter, repeating this to the other participants. We all said we would wait, took out our books, and started reading—or at least, we tried.

The regular customers continued to eat. When one man finished, the waitress said, “Thank you for staying and eating in all this indecency.” The man replied, “What did you expect me to do? I paid for it.”

One man stopped behind Bill Carpenter briefly and said, “I think you’re doing a fine job. Just sit right there.” A young white hoodlum then came up behind Bill and tried to bait him into an argument. Unsuccessful, he boasted to his friends, “I bet if I disjoint him, he’ll talk.” When Bill didn’t respond, he moved on. A number of tough-looking characters wandered into the store. In most instances the waitress spotted them and had them leave. When a few of them started making derisive comments, the waitress said about us, “You can see they aren’t here to start anything.” Although the counters were closed twenty minutes after our arrival, we stayed until two P.M.

The second sit-in at Woolworth’s occurred a week later. The waitress saw us sitting down and said, “Oh Lord, here they come again!” This time a few white persons were participating secretly. They simply sat and continued eating without comment. The idea was to demonstrate the reality of eating together without coercion, contamination, or cohabitation. Everything was peaceful. We read. I was reading the Blue Book of Crime and Barbara Broxton, How to Tell the Different Kinds of Fingerprints—which gave us a laugh in light of the arrests which followed.

At about three-thirty P.M. a squad of policemen led by a man in civilian clothes entered the store. Someone directed him to Priscilla, who had been chosen our spokesman for this sit-in. “As Mayor of Tallahassee, I am asking you to leave,” said the man in civilian clothes.

“If we don’t leave, would we be committing a crime?” Priscilla asked. The mayor simply repeated his original statement. Then he came over to me, pointed to the “closed” sign, and asked, “Can you read?” I advised him to direct all his comments to our elected spokesman. He looked as though his official vanity was wounded but turned to Priscilla. We did too, reiterating our determination to stay. He ordered our arrest.

Two policemen “escorted” each of the eleven of us to the station. I use quotes because their handling of us was not exactly gentle nor were their remarks courteous. At four forty-five we entered the police station. Until recently the building had housed a savings and loan company, so I was not surprised to observe that our cell was a renovated bank vault. One by one, we were fingerprinted.

After about two hours, the charges against us were read and one of us was allowed to make a phone call. I started to call Reverend C. K. Steele, a leader of nonviolent action in Tallahassee whose two sons were involved in the sit-ins. A policeman stopped me on the grounds that Reverend Steele is not a bondsman. I heard a number of policemen refer to us as “niggers” and say we should stay on the campus.

Shortly, the police captain came into our cell and announced that someone was coming to get us out. An hour later we were released—through the back door, so that the waiting reporters and TV men would not see us and give us publicity. However, the reporters were quick to catch on and they circled the building to meet us.

We were arraigned February 22 and charged with disturbing the peace by riotous conduct and unlawful assembly. We all pleaded not guilty. The trial was set for March 3. A week prior to the date the entire A & M student body met and decided to suspend classes on March 3 and attend the trial. The prospect of having three thousand students converge on the small courtroom was a factor, we believe, in causing a two-week postponement.

Our biggest single demonstration took place on March 12 at nine A.M. The plan was for Florida State University students, who are white, to enter the two stores first and order food. A & M students would arrive later and, if refused service, would share the food which the white students had ordered. It was decided that I should be an observer this time rather than a participant because of my previous arrest.

The white and Negro students were sitting peacefully at the counter when the mayor and his corps arrived. As on the previous occasion, he asked the group to leave, but when a few rose to comply, he immediately arrested them. As a symbolic gesture of contempt, they were marched to the station in interracial pairs.

After the arrests many of us stood in a park opposite the station. We were refused permission to visit those arrested. I rushed back to report this on campus. When I returned to the station, some two hundred students were with me. Barbara Cooper and I, again, asked to visit those arrested. Again, we were refused.

Thereupon, we formed two groups and headed for the variety stores. The seventeen who went to McCrory’s were promptly arrested. The group headed for Wool- worth’s was met by a band of white hoodlums armed with bats, sticks, knives, and other weapons. They were followed by police. To avoid what seemed certain violence, the group called off the sit-in at Woolworth’s and returned to the campus in an orderly manner.

We asked the president of the student body to mobilize the students for a peaceful march downtown. He agreed but first tried, without success, to arrange a conference with the mayor.

However, the mayor was not too busy to direct the city, county, and state police who met us as we neared the downtown area. There were one thousand of us, in groups of seventy-five—each with two leaders. Our hastily printed posters said: “Give Us Our Students Back,” “We Will Not Fight Mobs,” “No Violence,” “We Want Our Rights: We are Americans, Too.”

As we reached the police line-up, the mayor stepped forward and ordered us to disperse within three minutes. But the police did not wait. They started shooting tear- gas bombs at once. One policeman, turning on me, exclaimed, “I want you!” and thereupon aimed one of the bombs directly at me.

The students moved back toward campus. Several girls were taken to the university hospital to be treated for bums. Six students were arrested, bringing the total arrests for the day to thirty-five. Bond was set at five hundred dollars each and within two days all were out.

The eleven of us arrested on February 20 were tried on March 17. There was no second postponement. The trial started promptly at nine-thirty. Five additional charges had been made against us, but were subsequently dropped. During the trial, Judge Rudd tried to keep race out of the case. He said it was not a factor in our arrest. But we realized it was the sole factor. The mayor in his testimony used the word “nigger” freely. We were convicted and sentenced to sixty days in jail or a three-hundred-dollar fine. All eleven had agreed to go to jail but three paid fines upon advice of our attorneys.

So, here I am serving a sixty-day sentence along with seven other CORE members. When I get out, I plan to carry on this struggle. I feel I shall be ready to go to jail again if necessary.

PORTSMOUTH: A LESSON IN NONVIOLENCE

by Edward Rodman, Norcom High School

Our story here in Portsmouth, Virginia, begins on February 12, Lincoln’s Birthday. Several girls decided to observe the occasion by staging a sit-in, in sympathy with the students of North Carolina. So after school, the first sit-in of Portsmouth’s history took place. There was no violence, but no one was served. We sat until the lunch counter at Rose’s Variety Store closed.

Our group was a loosely knit collection of high school students, each with the same ideal: equality for all. Frankly speaking, that is about all we had in common. We were lacking organization, leadership, and planning.

By February 15, our numbers had increased considerably. We demonstrated at two stores at the Shopping Center. Again we met no obstruction—only a few hecklers, whose worst insults we passed off with a smile. Things were looking good. The newspaper and radio reporters were there getting our story.

Our spontaneous movement was gaining momentum quickly. We were without organization; we had no leader and no rules for conduct other than a vague understanding that we were not to fight back. We should have known the consequences, but we didn’t.

I was late getting to the stores the following day, because of a meeting. It was almost four P.M. when I arrived. What I saw will stay in my memory for a long time. Instead of the peaceful, nonviolent sit-ins of the past few days, I saw before me a swelling, pushing mob of white and Negro students, news photographers, TV cameras, and only two policemen. Immediately, I tried to take the situation in hand. I did not know it at the time, but this day I became the sit-in leader.

I didn’t waste time asking the obvious questions, “Who were these other Negro boys from the corner?” “Where did all the white hoods come from?” It was obvious. Something was going to break loose, and I wanted to stop it. First I asked all the girls to leave, then the hoods. But before I could finish, trouble started. A white boy shoved a Negro boy. The manager then grabbed the white boy to push him out and was shoved by the white boy. The crowd followed. Outside the boy stood in the middle of the street, daring any Negro to cross a certain line. He then pulled a car chain and claw hammer from his pocket and started swinging the chain in the air.

He stepped up his taunting with the encouragement of others. When we did not respond, he became so infuriated that he struck a Negro boy in the face with the chain. The boy kept walking. Then, in utter frustration, the white boy picked up a street sign and threw it at a Negro girl. It hit her and the fight began. The white boys, armed with chains, pipes, and hammers, cut off an escape through the street. Negro boys grabbed the chains and beat the white boys. The hammers they threw away. The white boys went running back to their hot rods. I tried to order a retreat.

During the fight I had been talking to the store manager and to some newspapermen. I did not apologize for our sit-in—only for unwanted fighters of both races and for their conduct. Going home, I was very dejected. I felt that this outbreak had killed our movement. I was not surprised the following day when a mob of three thousand people formed. The fire department, all of the police force, and police dogs were mobilized. The police turned the dogs loose on the Negroes—but not on the whites. Peaceful victory for us seemed distant.

Next day was rainy and I was thankful that at least no mob would form. At ten A.M. I received a telephone call that was to change our whole course of action. Mr. Hamilton, director of the YMCA, urged me to bring a few students from the original sit-in group to a meeting that afternoon. I did. That meeting was with Gordon Carey, a field secretary of CORE. We had seen his picture in the paper in connection with our recent campaign for integrated library facilities and we knew he was on our side. He had just left North Carolina where he had helped the student sit-ins. He told us about CORE and what CORE had done in similar situations elsewhere. I decided, along with the others, that Carey should help us organize a nonviolent, direct action group to continue our peaceful protests in Portsmouth. He suggested that an all-day workshop on nonviolence be held February 20.

Reverend Chambers organized an adult committee to support our efforts. At the workshop we first oriented ourselves to CORE and its nonviolent methods. I spoke on “Why Nonviolent Action?” exploring Gandhi’s principles of passive resistance and Martin Luther King’s methods in Alabama. We then staged a sociodrama acting out the right and wrong ways to handle various demonstration situations. During the lunch recess, we had a real-life demonstration downtown—the first since the fighting. With our new methods and disciplined organization, we were successful in deterring violence. The store manager closed the counter early. We returned to the workshop, evaluated the day’s sit-in, and decided to continue in this manner. We established ourselves officially as the Student Movement for Racial Equality.

Since then, we have had no real trouble. Our struggle is not an easy one, but we know we are not alone and we plan to continue in accordance with our common ideal: equality for all through nonviolent action.

NASHVILLE: A COMMUNITY STRUGGLE

by Paul Laprad, Fisk University

There were about thirty of us in the first group of sit-inners arrested in Nashville. It was approximately one- thirty P.M. on February 27. We were escorted from the store by police—not too gently. There were cheers from hundreds of people along the sidewalks. The cheers, I fear, were for the police, not for us.

During the few minutes it took the paddy wagon to get from the store to the city jail, I reflected on what a long way we had come since the idea of sit-ins first hit Nashville. The present action climaxes nearly two years of work by Jim Lawson of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the Reverend Kelly Miller Smith of the Nashville Christian Leadership Conference, and Nashville CORE.

Back in 1958, following the opening of the new Cain-Sloan store with its segregated eating facilities, desegregation of restaurants became a prime objective. Starting last fall, Jim Lawson, as projects director of the NCLC, began holding training sessions on nonviolence, which were attended by Fisk and Tennessee A & I students. Although Nashville was almost completely unaware of it, test sit-ins were held at Harvey’s department store on November 28, 1959, and at Cain- Sloan’s on December 5. Hence, the movement which spread from Greensboro did not strike a vacuum when it hit Nashville.

The morning of February 10, Jim Lawson called me to say that CORE’S field secretary Gordon Carey and the Reverend Douglas Moore had called him from Durham asking Nashville to help the North Carolina sit-ins. I told him I would talk with some of the students on campus. They were already quite excited over the North Carolina developments.

The next evening we were able to get together about fifty students from Fisk, A & I, and American Baptist Theological Seminary. We decided to go into action and the first sit-in took place February 13. About one hundred students participated—at three stores: Woolworth’s, McLellan’s, and Kress’s. We were refused service and remained seated until the stores closed. There was no hostility. Five days later, we tried again. This time two hundred students took part and we were able to cover a fourth store, Grant’s.

First sign of possible violence came on February 20, a Saturday, with school out and the white teenagers downtown. Some of them jeered at the demonstrators. At Walgreen’s, the fifth store to be covered, a boy got into a violent argument with a white co-ed from Fisk.

Police were present during all of these sit-ins, but did not make arrests or attempt to interfere with the demonstrators. Between February 20 and 27, however, a merchants’ committee called upon Mayor Ben West to halt the sit-ins. He said city attorneys had advised him that anyone has the right to sit at a lunch counter and request service. However, he expressed the viewpoint that it is a violation of law to remain at a lunch counter after it has been closed to the public.

This set the stage for February 27, again a Saturday. Every available man on the police force had been ordered into the downtown area at the time of our demonstration. I was with the student group which went to Woolworth’s. Curiously, no police were inside the store when white teenagers and others stood in the aisles insulting us, blowing smoke in our faces, grinding out cigarette butts on our backs and, finally, pulling us off our stools and beating us. Those of us pulled off our seats tried to regain them as soon as possible. But none of us attempted to fight back in any way.

Failing to disrupt the sit-in, the white teenagers filed out. Two or three minutes later, the police entered and told us we were under arrest. To date, none of the whites who attacked us have been arrested, although Police Chief D. E. Hosse has ordered an investigation to find out why.

As might be expected, even the jail cells in Nashville are segregated. Two other white students and I were isolated from the others in a fairly large room, but we managed to join in the singing which came from the horribly crowded cells where the Negro students were confined.

There were eighty-one of us, in all, arrested that day. We hadn’t been in jail more than a half hour before food was sent in to us by the Negro merchants. A call for bail was issued to the Negro community and within a couple of hours there was twice the amount needed.

Our trials were February 29. The regular city judge refused on a technicality to handle the cases and appointed a special judge whose bias was so flagrant that Negro lawyers defending us were shocked. At one point, Z. Alexander Looby, a well-known NAACP attorney and city council member, threw up his hands and commented, “What’s the use!” During the two days I sat in court, every policeman who testified under oath stated that we had been sitting quietly at the lunch counters and doing nothing else.

The judge’s verdict on disorderly conduct charges was guilty. Most of us were fined fifty dollars and costs. A few of the cases are being appealed as test cases. Next, we were all rearrested on state charges of conspiracy to obstruct trade and commerce, but the district attorney has expressed doubts as to the validity of this charge and to date no indictments have been returned by the grand jury.

On March 2 another sixty-three students were arrested at Nashville’s two bus stations—Greyhound and Trailways. They too were charged with disorderly conduct and then conspiracy. It began to look as though we might well fill the jails. The next day, however, a new development occurred. At the urging of the Friends Meeting, the Community Relations Conference, the Ministerial Association and other groups, Mayor West appointed a seven-man biracial committee to try to work out a solution.

Although some Negroes expressed doubts about whether the committee was truly representative, we decided to discontinue the sit-ins temporarily to give it a chance to deliberate. However, a boycott of the stores by the Negro community was started at this time. By March 25, we felt the committee had had sufficient time to answer what is essentially a moral problem and we took action again. This time we covered an additional drugstore, Harvey’s, and Cain & Sloan’s. Only four students were arrested—all at the drugstore. Police appeared to have received orders not to molest us.

This sit-in provoked a violent reaction from Governor Buford Ellington, who charged that it was “instigated and planned by and staged for the convenience of Columbia Broadcasting System.” The charge stemmed from the fact that two CBS documentary teams had been with us for a week, filming our meetings and getting material for “Anatomy of a Demonstration.” Of course, the idea that we would stage a sit-in purely for the convenience of cameramen is ridiculous.

Meanwhile, the first breaks in the pattern had occurred. On March 16, four Negro students were served at the Greyhound bus station.

The Mayor’s committee announced it had been ready to report but, because of the March 25 sit-in, was unable to do so. On April 5 the committee recommended that for a ninety-day trial period the stores “make available to all customers a portion of restaurant facilities now operated exclusively for white customers,” and that pending cases against the sit-in participants be dropped.

The plan of the Mayor’s committee was rejected by the store management and by the student leaders. The students said, “The suggestion of a restricted area involves the same stigma of which we are earnestly trying to rid the community. The plan presented by the Mayor’s committee ignores the moral issues involved in the struggle for human rights.” We were not prepared to accept “integrated facilities” while “whites only” counters were maintained.

Demonstrations were resumed April 11. A month later, on May 10, under a city-wide agreement, Nashville’s lunch counters desegregated.

One final note should be added about the effects of file sit-ins here. They unified the Negro community in an unprecedented manner. The boycott proved effective in sharply curtailing seasonal Easter business in the variety stores. On April 19, within only a few hours after the bombing of Looby’s home, over twenty-five hundred demonstrators marched on City Hall. Adult leaders assured us that, even if the students suddenly vanished from the scene, the action campaign would continue unabated. In Nashville, this is not a “students only” struggle.

I can not close without reference to the academic freedom fight involving Jim Lawson, one of three Negro students at Vanderbilt’s divinity school. He was expelled March 3 because of his “strong commitment to a planned campaign of civil disobedience.” He did not actually participate in the sit-ins, but he was our adviser and counselor throughout. His expulsion touched off a storm of protest not only in Nashville but in academic and ministerial circles from coast to coast.

BATON ROUGE: HIGHER EDUCATION- SOUTHERN STYLE

by Major Johns, Southern University (until March 30, when he was expelled for his role in the student protest)

Some Negro university and college administrations have supported their students’ lunch-counter sit-ins or, at least, have remained neutral. Others have taken a stand in opposition to the students. Southern University in Baton Rouge and its president, Dr. Felton G. Clark, fall in this latter category.

Dr. Clark had the opportunity of taking a courageous position and becoming one of the world’s most respected educational leaders. Instead, he chose to buckle under to the all-white State Board of Education, which administers the university.

Early in March the Board issued a warning that any student participating in a sit-in would be subject to “stem disciplinary action.” The sit-in movement had not yet spread to Baton Rouge but, as one law student expressed it, “When the Board spoke, it became a challenge to us and we could not ignore it.” A representative student committee then met with Dr. Clark and asked, specifically, what would happen to students who sat-in. He replied that the Board had left him no alternative but to expel them.

On March 28, seven students sat-in at the Kress lunch counter. In less than twenty minutes they were arrested. Bond was set at the astronomical figure of fifteen hundred dollars each. However, the money was promptly raised by the Negro community and the students were released. A mass meeting was held on campus at which students pledged support of the jailed sit-inners. The following day, nine more students engaged in sit-ins at Sitman’s drugstore and at the Greyhound bus station. They remained in jail six days pending a court hearing and were released on bond April 4. These cases eventually reached the Supreme Court and resulted in its key decision of December 11, 1961, outlawing “disorderly conduct” statutes as a device for arresting Negroes seeking equal service. The same issue is involved in the mass arrests of Freedom Riders in Jack- son, Mississippi.

The day after the second arrests, thirty-five hundred students marched through the center of town to the State Capitol, where we held an hour-long prayer meeting. As chief speaker, I attacked segregation and discrimination not only here in Baton Rouge but in other parts of the country.

I was unaware that this speech would sever my connections with the university before the day was over. That afternoon Dr. Clark returned from a conference in Washington and immediately cast his lot against the students. He summoned faculty members who were known to oppose the sit-ins and were furthest removed from really knowing the students. Immediately following this meeting, he announced the expulsion of seventeen students, the sixteen who had participated in the two sit-ins and myself.

This suddenly shifted the focus of the Baton Rouge student protest from lunch counters to the university administration. As Marvin Robinson, participant in the first sit-in and president of the senior class, expressed it, we had a choice, “Which is the more important, human dignity or the university? We felt it was human dignity.”

The students voted to boycott all classes until the seventeen of us were reinstated. Lines were tightly drawn: the students on one side; the administration, faculty, State Board of Education, and a group of handpicked alumni on the other. We seventeen were no longer permitted on campus. But twice daily, in the morning and afternoon, we would address the students from the balcony of a two-story house across a railroad track from the campus. By using a loudspeaker we were able to make ourselves heard by the large groups of students assembled on the campus side of the track. This went on for two days.

Unable to get the students back to class, administration officials started calling their parents and telling them that the student leaders were inciting to riot. This move boomeranged. It caused many parents to fear for their sons’ and daughters’ safety to the extent of summoning them home. The administration countered by announcing that any student who wanted to withdraw from the university and go home could do so. Such a sizable number of students applied at the registrar’s office for withdrawal slips that the administration amended its ruling to the effect that these slips would have to be cosigned by parents.

Meanwhile certain persons in the community and on campus moved to negotiate a settlement. They initiated several meetings with administration officials. Dr. Clark admitted to friends that he had acted in haste, but remained adamant in refusing to readmit the seventeen expelled students. Finally, he agreed to meet with eight of the student leaders. The meeting started at five P.M. on April 2 and lasted until eleven-thirty. Throughout the six and one-half hour meeting over three thousand students sat in front of the building where the meeting was held. When the eight emerged, announced their decision to leave the university, but urged the other students to stay on and return to classes, there was an outcry. Some burst into tears, others shouted that they wanted to quit also. The student leaders reaffirmed their decision and gave assurance that they had reached it on their own after the administration had agreed not to dismiss anyone else.

The following morning, however, the administration broke its part of the agreement and expelled another student. The leaders thereupon called a meeting and urged that the students stay out of class. A local citizens’ committee, which had raised bail-bond money and had agreed to use some of it to help home-going students pay their transportation, requested a meeting with Dr. Clark. The upshot was that the committee reversed itself and decided that money raised could be used only for bail bond and not for students’ bus or rail fares home.

Jim McCain, CORE field secretary who had come to Baton Rouge to help us, tried to dissuade the committee from this decision, but without success.

“I tried my best to show them that helping the students to leave Southern, even if the university should close as a result, would strike a real blow at segregation,” McCain said.

Withdrawal of the transportation funds was responsible for reducing considerably the total number of students who withdrew in protest. Nevertheless, the number who left on the weekend of April 2 was in the thousands. Of those, between one thousand and fifteen hundred have not yet returned. As I write this, I do not know the exact number of students who permanently withdrew to protest an administration which serves segregation and discounts human dignity.

The protest movement by students at Southern will be remembered in Baton Rouge. One instructor died, another had a heart attack, and we are told that Dr. Clark is under medical care. It is reported by persons close to Dr. Clark that he has received several hundred letters and wires from all over the world—not one of them complimentary. Dr. Clark, I am sure, has lost many friends because of the position he has taken against his students. Until this protest, Southern University was an island unto itself. Dr. Clark has been its president since 1938, and his father was its president from 1914 until 1938. Southern University will not be able to live by itself any longer. How far the community will proceed in continuing the movement which the students have started, only time will tell. But segregation in Baton Rouge has received a severe jolt.

7.

STUDENTS ON A ROAD GANG

“I don’t think I ever got it explained completely to my great-grandmother,” commented John Gaines after the ninety-five-year-old woman in a wheel chair visited him in the York County road-gang stockade. What he couldn’t explain to her was why he, a college student who hadn’t stolen anything or killed anybody, should be sent to jail—should choose to be jailed-in.

The term jail-in was coined in February 1961 by newspapermen in reference to the increasing number of Southern students who, to emphasize the injustice of being arrested for protesting racial discrimination, chose to remain in jail rather than pay fines or go out on bail. The total number of jail-ins during that month reached almost one hundred.

The jail-in which sparked this trend is the one described here by a young man who participated, Thomas Gaither. I prompted him to write it after hearing his story. The previous year he was a student leader at Claflin College in Orangeburg, South Carolina, where on March 15, three hundred and fifty students marching peacefully into town were arrested and herded into an open-air stockade. Upon graduating from college, he became a CORE field secretary. Here is his story.

Eight Friendship Junior College students and I served thirty days on the York County road gang for the “crime” of sitting-in at McCrory’s lunch counter in Rock Hill, South Carolina. While hundreds of students have been jailed since the start of the sit-in movement, we were the first to be committed to a road gang.

We could have paid one-hundred-dollar fines, or we could have posted two hundred dollars’ bail each and gone out, pending appeal. Instead, we chose to be jailed-in. All nine of us felt that this would strengthen the impact of our protest. Furthermore, instead of the city being nine hundred dollars richer for the injustice it had committed, it would have to pay the expense of boarding and feeding us for thirty days.

The story behind our case opens on Lincoln’s Birthday 1960. This was the date of the first sit-ins at Rock Hill, which were also the first in the state of South Carolina. Immediately following the original sit-in at Greensboro, North Carolina, on February 1, students at Friendship Junior College in Rock Hill expressed interest in joining the South-wide protest movement. Under the very able leadership of Abe Plummer and Arthur Hamm, they sought advice from Reverend C. A. Ivory and other local civil rights leaders. CORE field secretary Jim McCain, who has worked for civil rights in South Carolina for most of his life, was dispatched to Rock Hill to help train the students in sit-ins and other nonviolent techniques. A Student Civic Committee was established for the purpose of planning and coordination. By Lincoln’s Birthday, preparations for the first sit-in were complete.

On that date groups of students entered the Woolworth and McCrory stores and sat down at the lunch counters. A gang of whites rapidly gathered, some of them armed with homemade ammonia bombs, which were hurled at the sit-inners. A counterman kept wiping the surfaces with an ammonia-soaked rag. The students remained quietly in their seats.

Violence by whites continued in the days that followed. Negro adults, who were not involved in sit-ins in any way, were assaulted on the streets. Reverend Ivory received repeated threatening phone calls.

On March 15, Friendship Junior College students joined a mass protest demonstration in Orangeburg in which three hundred and fifty were arrested and herded into an open-air stockade. Being a student at Claflin College, I was among those jailed on that day. It was on this occasion that Governor Hollings asserted that no such demonstrations would be tolerated, adding, “They think they can violate any law, especially if they have a Bible in their hands.”

In Rock Hill, sit-ins and picketing continued throughout the school year. After the college students left for summer vacation, a number of high school students became involved. Arthur Hamm, one of the college students’ leaders, remained in town to give them direction. On June 7, Hamm was arrested while sitting-in at McCrory’s. Arrested with him was Reverend Ivory, who had the courage to engage in this type of action even though he is crippled and confined to a wheel chair. The gross indignity of arresting a crippled minister in a wheel chair gave this incident nationwide publicity. Wheeling Reverend Ivory out the rear entrance and across the street to the jail was an awkward task for Police Captain Honeysucker. Shaking down the minister in his wheel chair for concealed weapons and taking him downstairs for fingerprinting also presented a problem. Finally, after going through all the procedures of being booked, Reverend Ivory was rolled into a cell where he stayed until his attorney got him out on bail. Hamm, too, was released. Next day he was back at his sit-ins and picketing with a group of high school students. Before the end of June, Hamm had to leave Rock Hill for a summer job with the American Friends Service Committee.

During July and August the campaign slowed down. But with September and the reopening of college, sit-ins were resumed. At about this same time, I went to work as a CORE field secretary and one of the first places to which I was dispatched was Rock Hill.

This textile manufacturing town of thirty-three thousand people was not new to me. Both my father and mother had attended Friendship Junior College. As a child, I used to come into town often. I even recalled visiting the McCrory and Woolworth stores, now the focal points of the struggle for lunch-counter integration in Rock Hill. I never bought more than a bag of popcorn or some cashews, but it occurred to me even then to wonder why we couldn’t ever sit down and get something to eat at the counter. Of course, I didn’t realize why.

By the time of the memorable Montgomery bus boycott, I was seventeen and I well remember the sympathy action taken by Negroes in Rock Hill. Following the lead of Montgomery, they too decided to stop riding the buses until they were free to sit where they chose. Within a few months the bus company went out of business. The job of furnishing transportation for Negroes was undertaken by a special committee initiated by Reverend Ivory. The committee eventually bought two buses, one of which is still running today.

As I walked up the street upon arrival in Rock Hill last fall, a little Negro boy suddenly rushed out in front of me. He was dirty, ragged, and suffering from a severe cold. We got to talking. His mother is a domestic worker who, in addition, brings home wash. His father has worked for years in the bleachery. He has never been promoted and never will be. His wage scale is low; unions have somehow not been able to make inroads at Rock Hill. The total weekly income of both him and his wife is less than forty-five dollars. I describe this family because it seems to me so typical of the Negro’s lot in a town like Rock Hill.

It is a town of many churches, but the worship of God is on a strictly segregated basis. Rock Hill’s first kneel-ins occurred only recently, on the Sunday of the big supporting demonstration on our behalf when we were on the road gang. The Negro kneel-inners were admitted to three of the white churches but barred at two others. Even the Christian so-called liberals in Rock

Hill feel that Negroes should be satisfied with second-class citizenship. One exception is the Catholic school in town, which desegregated without incident—and without any outcry from the segregationists. In addition to Friendship, the town has another small Negro church- run college, Clinton, and a state-operated white girls’ college, Winthrop. The heads of the two Negro colleges were at first fairly neutral in regard to the local sit- ins. They did not come out in public support, but neither did they pressure students against participation, as was the case in Baton Rouge and in some other Negro college communities. However, as the situation developed, James Goudlock, president of Friendship College, took a strong position in support of the sit-ins.

As for the public officials, they have been blatantly prosegregation and opposed to any compromise. Rock Hill’s mayor has flatly refused to set up a biracial committee of the type which has been established in some Southern communities as an outcome of the student protests. Much of the ill will evidenced by whites when the Rock Hill sit-ins started was brought on by the segregationist agitation of local and state political leaders.

My familiarity with Rock Hill, coupled with my experience in the student movement in South Carolina, were factors in CORE’S dispatching me there soon after I took the field secretary’s job. Upon arrival, it didn’t take me long to conclude that the most urgent need was for training student leaders. The Friendship students who had become involved in sit-ins and picketing at the start of the 1960-61 school year were mostly Freshmen. I suggested that CORE hold an action workshop. This took place on the weekend of December 9-11 at the college from which I had graduated the previous year, Claflin, in Orangeburg. One outcome was a full understanding by the students of the effectiveness of jail-ins, as opposed to accepting bail or paying fines. Immediately after the workshop a really intensified program of sit-ins and picketing got under way in Rock Hill.

As Robert McCullough, one of our jail-inners, later told the press regarding the month of January preceding our arrest, “City officials pointed out that we had staged nineteen demonstrations during January and suddenly we felt sort of ashamed of ourselves that we hadn’t staged thirty-one. After all, there are thirty-one days in January, so what had we been doing the other twelve days?”

The 26th day of January had been selected as the date for the sit-in, which inevitably would lead to the jail-in. Reverend Diggs, the college chaplain, had suggested that the students involved should first register for the spring term to make sure of being able to return to classes following release from jail. To facilitate this the sit-in date was changed to the 31st. From Sumter, where I had been working with students at Morris College, I returned to Rock Hill on January 25.

On the 29th we held a meeting in an attempt to enroll more students in the action. Two members of the basketball team, Mack Workman and David “Scoop” Williamson, signed up. The way some of the original members of our group felt was summarized by John Gaines when he said, “I will go to jail and stay there, even if no one else does.”

Making a decision to go to jail for the first time was not easy. In some cases, it meant leaving a girl friend; in others, antagonizing parents who had little understanding of nonviolent action and much fear for their children’s safety. There was also the danger that parents might be fired from their jobs as a result of their children’s action.

On the night before the scheduled sit-in—in fact at about one in the morning—Clarence Graham, who had been considering the matter for some days, reached his final decision and got out of bed to write a letter of explanation to his mother and father.

“Try to understand that what I’m doing is right,” the letter said. “It isn’t like going to jail for a crime like stealing or killing, but we are going for the betterment of all Negroes.”

Came January 31, the nine of us committed to be jailed-in and one who was to come out on appeal as a legal test assembled in the college lounge. Willie McCleod was prepared to the extent of carrying his toothbrush in his pocket. Surprised to see Willy Massey, a student with a goatee dressed like a typical cool cat, I asked why he had come to the meeting. “Man, I’m going to jail!” was his reply. An atmosphere of parting sorrow filled the room. Girl friends were there to say goodbye and, in some cases, to ask their boy friends to reconsider.

At the end of the meeting we headed uptown for McCrory’s and Woolworth’s. Woolworth’s lunch counter had been discontinued in the course of the month-long intensive campaign and had been replaced with a flower counter, but picketing continued. McCrory’s lunch counter was still open. It closed down the day after our demonstration. As we walked uptown, some of us wondered whether any of our group would change his decision on the way and withdraw. None did.

As we approached the stores we were stopped briefly by Police Captain Honeysucker and an official of the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, who advised us to return to the campus and avoid “getting in trouble.” Instead, we established picket lines at the two stores. Fifteen minutes later, our group entered McCrory’s and took seats at the lunch counter.

The manager, who was perspiring and obviously jittery, told us, “We can’t serve you here.” Hardly were the words out of his mouth when city and state police who were standing by roughly pushed us off our stools and hauled us out the back door into a parking-lot area and across the street to jail. We were first searched and then locked in cells. We started singing freedom songs and spirituals. An hour or so later we were joined by another Negro prisoner named NuNu, who had been picked up for being drunk. At five-thirty we were fed a piece of cold barbecued chicken and cold coffee without sugar. Then we received a visit from Reverend Ivory and Reverend Diggs. We slept on bare steel bunks, which bruised our bones but not our morale. At dawn we were awakened by a prisoner on the white side asking for a cigarette. He kept yelling and banging on the walls.

It was February 1 and, as I noted mentally, the first anniversary of the South-wide sit-in movement. We were taken into the courtroom for trial. The charge was trespassing.

On direct examination, Lieutenant Thomas admitted that he had given us only between three and fifteen seconds to leave the store. However, he changed this to between three and fifteen minutes when cross-examined by our attorney, Ernest A. Finney, Jr. So confused did the lieutenant become with his two stories that he requested and obtained permission to rest a little before proceeding. Finally, even Judge Billy Hayes stated that, according to the evidence, we had not been given sufficient time to leave the store even if we had wanted to take the opportunity of doing so. Police Captain Honeysucker, who was seated to the judge’s right, looked dejected. An atmosphere of indecision prevailed. Were we finally going to win a legal case in a lower court in the Deep South? We were called upon to enter our pleas. We pleaded not guilty. Hardly were the words out of our mouths, when the judge pronounced us guilty and sentenced us to thirty days’ hard labor on the road gang or one-hundred-dollar fines. Surprise and shock filled the courtroom when it became known that we had chosen to be jailed-in. The only thing they had to beat us over the head with was a threat of sending us to jail. So we disarmed them by using the only weapon we had left—jail without bail. It was the only practical thing we could do. It upset them considerably.

From the courtroom we were taken to the York County road-gang stockade. We got there about four in the afternoon. It consisted of two large dormitories, one for whites, the other for Negroes. It was like a barracks except for the bars and mesh wire which made it unmistakably like a jail.

First, we were taken to the clothing room to get our prison clothes. In charge was Captain Dagler, who, as we learned later, was one of the toughest guards in the camp. “Boy, cut that thing from under your chin and pull off that jitterbug hat,” he said to Willy Massey. “You’re on the chain gang now!” Meanwhile, “Scoop” Williamson was trying to scoop a pair of shoes out of the huge pile on the middle of the floor. He finally found a pair that fitted.

Inside the prison, our initial feeling was one of uncertainty. As we entered the Negro dormitory, we were met with curious stares from the other prisoners. Some already knew, via the grapevine, why we were there; others didn’t.

One prisoner commented, “The stuff is on, now!” Others echoed the slogan. By the “stuff” they meant anti- Negro hatred. They explained that the “stuff” had been “on” only recently in the white dormitory, following the much-publicized marriage of the Negro singer-actor, Sammy Davis, Jr., and the white screen star, May Britt.

“If anybody bothers you, let us know; we can handle them,” volunteered one of the prisoners in talking to James Wells. The latter explained that all in our group believe in nonviolence. Our would-be protector seemed surprised.

As it turned out, the Negro prisoners’ fears regarding our effect on the white prisoners proved unfounded. Most of us worked in integrated gangs (until after we were put in solitary) without incident. In fact, when we were in solitary, a white prisoner took the initiative of writing the FBI that he considered this unjust. Another white prisoner volunteered to assert that it was wrong to single out Negro prisoners only—including us students—to go out on Lincoln’s Birthday, a Sunday, and erect a barbed-wire fence in anticipation of the crowds expected to visit us on that occasion. By the end of our stretch, some of the white prisoners would actually request us to sing one of the freedom hymns which we had sung at our morning devotional services.

The only “stuff” which did occur was a single incident in which a white prisoner serving life, upon coming in from work one day, started cursing at Clarence Graham and Robert McCullough and finally drew a knife on them. The two simply looked at him and walked on. When the Negro prisoners heard about it, some of them were ready to fight. Again, we had to try to explain our adherence to nonviolence.

As to the Negro prisoners, they held us in high esteem. We were called upon repeatedly to serve as final authorities in arguments. Our presence prompted frequent discussions of world problems. We conducted classes in English and current events.

But we were barred from keeping up with our studies. On our sixth day in jail, Captain Dagler ordered me to gather up all the college textbooks which the students had brought along and carry them up front. He said that the books were being taken away from us because the prison did not want to be responsible for them. I assured him that each of us was willing to assume responsibility for his own books. He retorted that he was simply carrying out orders. I then inquired who had given the orders, to which he answered, “Quit asking questions. This is a prison—not a damned school. If this was a school, we’d have teachers here.”

Obviously, it was a prison. We got up at five-thirty in the morning, ate a breakfast of grits, fat back with flour gravy, and black coffee. Then, we went out for the day’s labor. On our first day, the temperature was 24 degrees.

My first job was loading sand onto a truck. There was one white prisoner on my gang; the rest were Negroes. Among them was NuNu, who had been thrown into our cell at the city jail the day we were arrested. NuNu was always the center of attention. He had apparently been involved in numerous petty difficulties with the law.

The guards’ attitudes toward us ranged from indifference to hostility. Captain Jim, the guard bossing my work gang, was a fat, jovial type who seemed to me surprisingly broad-minded. I discovered he had been raised among Negroes. He frequently recalled how, when he was a youth, he used to play baseball with Negro kids on Sundays and whenever there was spare time. He usually referred to Negroes as “darkies,” not seeming to realize that the term is derogatory.

On February 7, we were joined by a student from Charlotte, North Carolina, and one from Petersburg, Virginia. Along with two female students from Nashville and Atlanta, Diane Nash and Ruby Smith, they had sat-in at a Rock Hill lunch counter. Like us, all four had been sentenced to thirty days and had refused to pay fines. There being no road gang for women, the two girls were confined to the women’s county jail.

With the addition of the two new students—Charles Jones and Charles Sherrod—the jail-inners on our road gang totaled eleven. Our original group included John Gaines, Clarence Graham, Willie McQeod, Robert

McCullough, Willy Massey, James Wells, David Williamson, Mack Workman, and myself.

February 7 was memorable for us because we spent the entire morning in solitary confinement. The periodic shouting, cursing, and other loud noises which emanated from the prisoners’ quarters apparently did not bother the officials. However, for several days they had objected to our singing hymns at the morning devotional services which we had initiated.

One line that particularly irritated them was “Before I'll be a slave, I’ll be buried in my grave.” No sooner would we start to sing than a guard would order us to “cut out that damned fuss!” Of course, we refused and simply kept on singing. When this happened on February 7, Captain Maloney, the prison superintendent, put us in solitary.

He accused us of “trying to run the prison.” I tried to explain that we were simply exercising our right of religious freedom. He replied, “If y’all are that religious, why ain’t y’all preachers?” I explained that two of us were actually studying for the ministry.

At this point, Charles Jones, as a good-will gesture, stepped forward and presented the prison superintendent with a box of chocolates which he had received as a present. Maloney slammed it down on a table outside the solitary-cell door and proceeded to lock us in.

We found ourselves in a 12-by-12-foot dark room furnished with a commode, a small sink, and one lone drinking cup. Obscuring the window was a metal sheet with steel bars. Lights went on at mealtimes only and meals, in solitary, consisted of bread and water.

But on this occasion we never got a chance to taste this sumptuous food. Shortly after noon, Captain Maloney unlocked our door and asked if we were ready to go back to work. He fully realized that we had no intention of ceasing our morning hymn singing, but in order to save face he did not raise the issue.

We were given a meal of beans, corn bread, milk, and a peach, and were driven under heavy guard to the city dump, where the county maintains a topsoil pit. We eleven students were now on a separate work gang. It soon became clear that in putting us back to work, rather than keeping us in solitary, the prison officials’ strategy was to “work the hell” out of us. By quitting time we had shoveled fourteen loads of topsoil onto the seven-ton dump tracks. It was backbreaking work.

The parents’ difficulty at grasping what we were trying to accomplish did not deter them from coming to the camp on visiting days. I mentioned earlier how Clarence Graham had been so worried about his parents’ reactions that he drafted an explanatory letter to them at one A.M. of the day we were to be arrested. Both his father and mother came to visit. So did John Gaines’s ninety-five-year-old great-grandmother, who is in a wheel chair. She brought two hundred dollars cash just in case John should want to change his mind and accept bail.

“I don’t think I ever got it explained completely to my great-grandmother,” Gaines commented. “She was afraid they’d work me too hard and that I couldn’t stand it. She was still puzzled when I told her that it was a privilege for a Negro to go to jail for his rights.”

Regarding his grandmother, who is a cook at the college, Gaines said, “She told me I was disobedient when I said I had to go to jail. But once I got locked up, she was quite changed. She came to jail and asked me if I was all right or needed anything.”

Gaines’s grandmother’s attitude was typical of many of the parents who came to visit. In addition to relatives, friends and supporters came from many parts of the country. This gave us great encouragement. On our first Sunday, a caravan of sixty cars and a bus brought more than three hundred Negro and white visitors to the isolated road camp.

The following Sunday, Lincoln’s Birthday, over one thousand local citizens and students from other states participated in a pilgrimage to Rock Hill on behalf of our cause. It was early that morning that we were ordered to erect a barbed-wire fence around the compound. From the dormitory window, I could see an endless line of highway patrol cars. Some residents in the vicinity had posted their property in such a way that if Negroes should step on it, they could be accused of trespassing. A few white hoodlums speeded their cars up and down the road in an attempt at intimidation. But the pilgrimage was not deterred. Guards, posted between us and our visitors, started to take notes on what was being said. They failed to dampen our enthusiasm over this significant demonstration of support for our efforts. We were additionally encouraged to learn that since our arrest, the jail-ins had spread to Atlanta and Lynchburg, bringing the total number of students involved—including us—to almost one hundred.

As the days went by, following our return to work from solitary, it became increasingly clear that we were the victims of a speed up. Starting the second day, we were expected to load thirty-six trucks of topsoil, or double the work load of other prisoners. I was cited by the captain as an experienced chain-gang man—possibly because I was the oldest in the group—and singled out to lead the pace. In a kidding vein, Massey kept yelling at me to shovel faster. “Come on Moses!” he would say.

We decided to refuse to go along with the speed up. Two of our gang, Jones and Sherrod, had gotten sick, the former with an injured shoulder muscle. On February 13, our work output decreased considerably. The following morning, the prison superintendent warned us that unless we worked faster we would be transferred to the state penitentiary. When we reached the topsoil pit, we found an additional truck had been dispatched for us to load. We worked at a moderate pace and after about an hour and a half, a group of prison officials arrived to inspect us. As they departed, John Gaines waved to them in a joking manner. His wave was misinterpreted as a threatening gesture, and Gaines was ordered into the officials’ car.

The rest of us stopped work and planted our shovels in the topsoil. We started toward the officials to inquire where they were taking Gaines. They told us to resume work—or join Gaines. We chose the latter, as a move of solidarity. We were then loaded onto one of the dump trucks and driven back to camp.

Upon arrival at the stockade, we found ourselves back in solitary confinement for a second time. But before locking us in, a guard came and took Gaines away. Our attempts to inquire where he was being taken proved fruitless. Aware of what might happen to a lone Negro “agitator” in the hands of white Southern prison guards, we feared for Gaines’s safety. We decided to go on a hunger strike until we learned his whereabouts. This did not constitute too much of a sacrifice since the only food in solitary was bread—three times a day. But it was at least some demonstration of our concern.

Furthermore, it had an impact on the guards. They seemed quite disturbed at the end of the first day to discover there were twenty-four pieces of com bread to be removed from our cell. Lying on the floor in this cramped space, with only our jackets on or under us—and with Mack Workman’s snoring—we didn’t get too much sleep during our first night in solitary. The lack of sleep added to the gnawing of the hunger in our stomachs made us feel miserable on the second day. Some of us had stomach aches; others felt as if our bellies had shrank. Graham described it as “a turbulent dispute between my backbone and my stomach.” We kidded ourselves with graphic descriptions of our favorite things to eat.

In the course of the third day, we were finally told what had happened to Gaines. He had been transferred to the county jail and was unharmed. Upon learning this, we decided to end our hunger strike. The superintendent and the guards had become so worried over the hunger strike that when we resumed eating, they were happier than we were. They brought us seconds on everything. We were ordered back to work.

The labor was not easy, but the speed-up plan prescribed for us earlier was no longer in evidence. During our last few days on the road gang, we worked laying drainage pipes under rural roads. Prison officials were anxious to avoid any publicity or supporting demonstrations on the day of our release. Captain Dagler made this known to us on our final day, March 2. After only a half day’s work, he took us back to the stockade. We were given lunch, ordered to change into our regular clothes, and loaded aboard a caged truck. The prison superintendent and his assistant escorted us to the Rock Hill city limits.

There we were set free and walked in a group to the Friendship campus. Our thirty days on the road gang were over, but not our struggle to end lunch-counter discrimination in Rock Hill.

As Clarence Graham expressed it at our first major press conference after getting out, “If requesting first- class citizenship in the South is to be regarded as a crime, then I will gladly go back to jail again.”

One of our group, Willy Massey, was back in jail again less than two weeks later. He and four other students were arrested March 14 while picketing a drugstore with a segregated lunch counter. Like our group, they refused to pay fines. The day before, two other members of our group—John Gaines and Robert McCullough—were assaulted on the picket line by white hoodlums. Gaines was clubbed unconscious and taken to York County hospital. Two hours later, he and McCullough resumed picketing accompanied with three others of our group—Clarence Graham, James Wells, and me.

These students are determined to carry on the nonviolent action campaign until Rock Hill’s lunch counters desegregate. Our jail-in has strengthened—not weakened—that determination. Unfortunately, I cannot stay with them. CORE field secretaries have to cover considerable territory and I will be dispatched elsewhere. For me, Rock Hill was my second jail-in. My first was in Miami, Florida, in August, when seven of us at CORE’S Interracial Action Institute remained ten days in jail rather than accept bail. The Rock Hill experience has fortified my conviction on the effectiveness of jail-ins in cases of unjust arrests.

8.

FREEDOM RIDE—1961

Little did I realize that my second interracial bus trip through the South would end in a mob beating which almost cost me my life. Such a trip had been contemplated even before the 1947 Journey of Reconciliation was over. Several years thereafter, Billie Ames of the St. Louis CORE group started to organize one, but it never materialized. In the winter of 1961, riding aboard a bus together, Thomas Gaither, whose story is told in Chapter 7, and Gordon Carey, CORE field director, broached the subject in earnest and devised the term Freedom Ride. The idea was accepted enthusiastically by the next national CORE council meeting. The Ride would take place in the spring.

What made the timing particularly opportune was that in December the U.S. Supreme Court had issued a decision in the Bruce Boynton case extending the Irene Morgan ruling which had been the basis for the 1947 Journey. The Morgan decision had outlawed segregation of interstate passengers only aboard the vehicles on which they traveled. The Boynton decision extended that ruling to cover facilities used by interstate passengers outside the actual vehicles. This meant waiting rooms, rest rooms, terminal restaurants, rest stops, and so on. The Freedom Ride would test all these facilities, not merely the seating aboard buses.

Also, the Freedom Ride would penetrate the Deep South, not merely the upper South as had the 1947 Journey. The route decided upon was Washington to New Orleans. The starting date was May 4. Gaither traveled the entire route, as Houser had traveled the Journey’s route, setting up meetings and arranging housing for the overnight stops.

Applications for participants went out from the CORE office. It was made clear that the policy in event of arrest was to remain in jail rather than pay fines or bail out. The first two volunteers were Jim Farmer, one of CORE’S founders who had become national director, and myself. The group which assembled May 1 at Fellowship House in Washington for training totaled thirteen. It was a very different type of group from the one which had gathered in Washington fourteen years previously for the same type of project. It included a number of what has become known as “the new Negro”—Southern students who took part in the sit-in movement and for whom arrest or the threat thereof had become commonplace. Most of the group were young people in their twenties. Very few of them were pacifists. I was the only participant who had been on the 1947 Journey, and was therefore in a good position to make contrasts or comparisons with the trip fourteen years before.

The outstanding contrast, and most heartening to me, was that, aboard the buses, desegregation had become a reality. On the Journey, members of our group had been the only passengers to sit unsegregated. On the Freedom Ride, even in the Deep South, ordinary Negro passengers no longer confined themselves to the rear seats.

The outstanding comparison was that, in the terminals and at the rest stops—even in Virginia’s larger cities where the white and colored signs had been removed—segregation still prevailed as it had aboard the buses in 1947. Our Freedom Riders were about the only persons to wait, wash, and eat unsegregated in these terminals.

It was disheartening to me that in a city such as Richmond, which is not far from the nation’s capital and where the color signs had been removed, Negroes were sticking to the formerly separate and grossly unequal colored waiting rooms and restaurants. This was true both in the Greyhound and Trailways terminals.

The first white and colored signs encountered were only fifty miles south of Washington—atop the restroom doors at the Greyhound stop in Fredericksburg. Charles Person, a Negro student from Atlanta, went into the white rest room and I went into the colored rest room without incident.

In Farmville, center of Prince Edward County, where school closing had left Negro children schoolless since 1959, the white and colored signs were painted over but still visible. Freedom Riders were served without incident.

While there were no color signs in the Lynchburg Trailways terminal, there was a divider in the middle of the counter, making persons on one side virtually invisible to those on the other.

Danville, Virginia, was the first place where testers were refused service. At the colored counter, Ed Blankenheim, a white, sat for ten minutes until his bus was ready for departure. Genevieve Hughes, a white, and I, aboard a later bus, were at first refused service but we—and Walter Bergman—finally got refreshments after a brief discussion with the manager.

Greensboro, though reputed for its liberalism, was the first city where the color signs started to become the rule. The first greetings to arriving bus passengers are oversized signs all around the building with arrows pointing to the colored waiting room. On the other hand, the colored lunch room, which was no bigger than a good- sized closet and equally gloomy, had been closed permanently a week before our arrival. A Negro in the colored waiting room told me he was amazed when upon entering the colored lunch room one day, he was advised to walk around to the formerly white restaurant.

Our meeting in Greensboro was at the Shiloh Baptist Church, the same church where fourteen years ago our Journey group had gotten such a moving welcome following the incident of violence in Chapel Hill. The church looked exactly the same. But now Greensboro had become famous, civil-rights-wise, as being the birthplace of the sit-in movement. Chairman of our meeting was Dr. George Simkins, Jr., head of the local NAACP, who the day the first sit-in started, phoned CORE to get the benefit of its long experience in this technique.

The local NAACP was sponsoring our meeting, although the Freedom Ride, like the 1947 Journey, got no backing from the national NAACP office. The NAACP rallied to support the Freedom Rides only after they had gained national momentum.

From Greensboro on, we were venturing into territory not covered by the 1947 Journey. In Salisbury, the color signs were on every terminal facility. However, two Negro women passengers from our bus, after watching our testers, sat down and ate at the white lunch counter.

Charlotte was the scene of the trip’s first arrest— and the birth of a new “in,” the shoe-in. Charles Person climbed onto a shoeshine chair and, after being refused service, remained seated until a cop with handcuffs arrived. Person then left, since no polity regarding shoe-shines had yet been decided by the group and, as on the Journey, each step and who was to take it would be decided at group meetings before every lap of the Ride. When Person went for the shine, he didn’t even think of it as a test. He simply looked at his shoes and thought he needed a shine. It was then hastily decided by the group that Joe Perkins should make a test and stay in the shoeshine chair until arrested. The trip’s first arrest came within minutes. Attorney Thomas Wyche won an acquittal on the basis of the Supreme Court’s Boynton decision, and Perkins rejoined us a day later.

Violence against the Freedom Riders erupted for the first time in Rock Hill, South Carolina, where the press had headlined our arrival and where hoodlums had recently attacked lunch-counter pickets. In fact several of the hoodlums waiting at the Greyhound station were recognized as the same individuals who had assaulted the local student pickets.

As the Greyhound contingent of Riders arrived, some twenty of these ruffians were waiting. When John Lewis, who is Negro, approached the entrance of the white waiting room, he was assaulted by two of them. Three started slugging Albert Bigelow, a white, who was next in line.

Aside from their commitment to nonviolence, these two Freedom Riders were as dissimilar as any two individuals could possibly be. Lewis is a short, muscular divinity student. Bigelow is a tall, grey-haired, ex-naval commander. Lewis is taciturn. Bigelow is articulate. Lewis is one of ten children born on a southern Alabama farm—the only one to finish high school. Bigelow’s family background is blueblood, New England. Lewis got his extensive nonviolent training during the lunch counter sit-ins in Nashville, where he was studying for the ministry. Bigelow became a pacifist in revulsion over his World War II experiences as a naval commander and had, like me, participated in protest actions against nuclear tests and war. Had it not been for the Freedom Rides, these two never would have met. Yet, here they were together, being slugged in front of the Greyhound terminal in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and remaining completely nonviolent.

In the course of the slugging, Genevieve Hughes, who was behind Lewis and Bigelow, was pushed to the ground. At that point the police, who had been standing by but taking time in performance of their duty, arrived. The police captain asked Lewis and Bigelow whether they wanted to press charges against any of their assailants. They declined. Thereupon, the Riders entered the white waiting room unmolested.

When the group with which I was riding arrived at the Trailways terminal a few hours later, some of the hoodlums were waiting in cars. However, they did not attack, but only drove after us a few blocks toward Friendship Junior College. The Trailways terminal building was completely locked up. Its eating facilities had been closed since Friendship students had conducted sit-ins there.

It was a memorable experience to meet and talk with the nine jailed-in students and with Reverend C. A. Ivory, the courageous, crippled minister, whose stories are related in Chapter 7. (He died six months later.)  When Reverend Ivory met us at the bus station, he stared right back at the hoodlums in the other cars. Later, at his home, he told us of the continuous telephone threats he received. He went on to explain that none of them materialize and that they don’t frighten him. “The other night the person on the other end threatened to plant a bomb under my house,” he related. “‘Why don’t you plant two, while you’re at it?’ I asked. Nothing ever came of it.” Reverend Ivory was chairman of our meeting that night, and the nine jailed-in students sang along with our group’s chief singer, Jimmi McDonald.

When we left the next day, the Trailways white waiting room was open and a test team sat there unmolested. The same was true at the Greyhound station. The hoodlums did not stage a repeat performance.

Our Trailways group left Rock Hill about lunchtime. At what was supposed to be the lunch stop in Chester, “closed” signs had been hastily put on the doors.

The lunch stop turned out to be Winnsboro, an ultrasegregationist little town. Here occurred the Freedom Ride’s first arrest of lunch-counter sit-inners. It all happened so quickly it seemed like a film being reeled too fast.

Henry Thomas, a lanky Negro student, and I entered the white lunch room and sat at the counter. The restaurant owner dashed away from the counter to phone the police. Within two minutes a police officer who was a stereotype for such a role in Hollywood, stepped over and drawled to Thomas, “Come with me, boy!”

I stepped over to ask about my teammate and was also promptly arrested. We were driven away in a police car before the bus had left the rest stop. Aboard the bus, there was no outspoken reaction, as we learned later from others in the group. Mrs. Bergman, an elderly woman, who had been designated as our observer, got off the bus and braved the hate-filled town alone, trying to find out what the authorities intended to do with us.

We were segregated in the jail and unable to communicate with each other. It was several hours before we were told what the charges against us were. The officer who booked us had been overanxious to fill in that section but the cop who drove us had kept insisting, “Don’t write anything down before we talk with the chief.” The charge against Thomas turned out to be “trespass,” and that against me, “interfering with arrest.” However, after eight to ten hours in jail, we were released and the charges dropped. Local officials apparently concluded that our cases would not hold in view of the Supreme Court’s Boynton decision.

Thomas was released in the middle of the night, as carloads of hate-filled segregationists still roamed around town. One of them had parked directly in front of the jail with his car’s headlights glaring into my cell. I didn’t know that Thomas had been released. By the time I was set free, it was dawn. Jim McCain had driven over from his home in Sumter to give me a ride. I learned for the first time that Thomas had gotten out.

After his release, Thomas went to the bus station. A cluster of segregationists were there and it was too late for a bus. “Go in the nigger waiting room,” one of them ordered. Thomas entered the white waiting room, bought a candy bar and walked out past the gaping segregationists. Such is his boldness. Some call it foolhardiness. An aunt in Georgia, whom he sometimes visits, prays that God guide him to cease these hazardous activities. But Thomas is determined to make the world better than the one he knew as a youth. He was raised along with nine other children by a drunken stepfather in an overcrowded Georgia shack. While still attending the separate and very unequal school, he worked as road laborer and cotton chopper. He finally managed to win a scholarship at Howard, where he was studying when he joined our Freedom Ride.

Although it was well past midnight and he had been threatened with arrest for “vagrancy,” he finally found refuge in the home of a Negro minister who got him a ride to Columbia. From there he took a bus to Sumter. Just as I hadn’t known that he had been let loose, he didn’t know that I had. When he entered McCain’s home and saw me, he came over and shook hands. I crossed the room to meet him. It was a meaningful handshake.

At Sumter, both on arrival and on departure, the white waiting room was tested without incident. There is no restaurant in the Sumter terminal.

In Augusta, Georgia, at both the Trailways and Greyhound terminals, Freedom Riders used all facilities without incident. It marked the first time that Negroes had ever eaten at the terminal restaurants. In fact, only a few months before, a Negro serviceman had been arrested for trying to eat there. Yet our presence at the tables drew little attention. Neither racist hoodlums nor mere curiosity seekers gathered.

To make sure that the policy change was not solely for our arrival and departure, a test team—Herman Harris and Walter Bergman—went back to both terminal restaurants during the evening of our overnight stop and were served courteously.

The rest stop on the way from Augusta to Atlanta was Athens, scene, the previous fall, of mob action against admission of two Negro students to college. Freedom Riders were served at the lunch counter without question. Again, there were no gapers. A person viewing the Athens desegregated lunch counter and waiting room during our fifteen-minute rest stop might have imagined himself at a rest stop up North rather than deep in Georgia.

In Atlanta we were welcomed at the Greyhound terminal by a large group of students, many of whom had participated in the local lunch-counter picketing and sit-ins. The terminal restaurant was closed but we used the waiting room and rest rooms. The Trailways terminal restaurant was open and two of our teams tested it on departure without incident. During our evening in Atlanta, Martin Luther King, who lives there, stopped by to talk with us and express his support. So did Lonnie King and Ed King, local student leaders. (Neither is related to Martin Luther King.)

Our experiences in traveling through Georgia were clear proof of how desegregation can come peacefully in a Deep South state, providing there is no deliberate incitement to hatred and violence by local or state political leaders. In Alabama, it was the flagrant incitement on the part of Governor Patterson, Eugene “Bull” Connor, Birmingham’s notorious police chief, and other high- placed politicians which built up the mob violence which we were to face.

The most nightmarish day of our Freedom Ride was Sunday, May 14, Mother’s Day. I identify the date with Mother’s Day because when Police Chief Connor was asked why there was not a single policeman at the Birmingham Trailways terminal to avert mob violence, he explained that since it was Mother’s Day, most of the police were off duty visiting their mothers. That there was going to be a mob to meet us had been well known around Birmingham for several days. Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth told me so when I phoned to give him the scheduled arrival times of our two buses.

However, we did not know in advance that a similar mob was waiting in Anniston, a rest stop on the way. Our first contingent, aboard Greyhound, learned of this when their bus stopped just outside of Anniston and their driver conferred briefly with the driver of a bus going the other way.

When the Greyhound bus pulled into Anniston, it was immediately surrounded by an angry mob armed with iron bars. They set upon the vehicle, denting the sides, breaking windows, and slashing tires. Finally, police arrived and the bus managed to depart. But the mob pursued it in cars. One car got ahead of the bus and prevented it from gathering speed. About six miles out, one of the tires went flat and the bus was forced to pull over to a gas station.

Within minutes, the pursuing mob was again hitting the bus with iron bars. The rear window was broken and a bomb was hurled inside. Suddenly the vehicle became filled with thick smoke. The passengers, including the Freedom Riders, ducked toward the floor in order to breathe. A few climbed out of a window. Some tried to get out the door, but it was being held shut from the outside.

As Henry Thomas tells it, he shortly succeeded in pushing the door open. As he stepped out, he walked toward a man who looked friendly. Suddenly the man wielded a club from behind his back and struck him over the head.

All the passengers managed to escape before the bus burst into flames and was totally destroyed. The extent of the destruction was shown in the grim newspaper photos of its charred interior and exterior. Policemen, who had been standing by, belatedly came on the scene. A couple of them fired shots in the air. The mob dispersed and the injured were taken to a local hospital. The Freedom Riders were finally transported to Birmingham in cars dispatched by Reverend Shuttlesworth.

When the Trailways bus carrying our contingent arrived in Anniston an hour later, the other passengers learned of what had happened to the Greyhound bus and discontinued their trip. While waiting for the bus to proceed, we heard the sirens of ambulances taking the injured to the hospital, but we didn’t know what had happened.

We learned of it only when eight hoodlums climbed aboard and stood by the driver as he made a brief announcement. He concluded by stating that he would refuse to drive on unless the Negroes in our group moved to the formerly segregated rear seats. They remained quietly in their front seats. The hoodlums cursed and started to move them bodily to the rear, kicking and hitting them at the same time.

Walter Bergman, who is a retired professor, and I were seated toward the rear. We moved forward and tried to persuade the hoodlums to desist. We, too, were pushed, punched, and kicked. I found myself face downward on the floor of the bus. Someone was on top of me. I was bleeding. Bergman’s jaw was cut and swollen. None of us realized that he also had received a crushing blow on the head which would bring him close to death four months later. Following an appendicitis operation, he suffered an almost fatal stroke which attending doctors attributed to a “pre-existant condition of brain damage” resulting from the Anniston assault. They notified police, because had Bergman died, it would have been a case of murder. Fortunately he recovered.

Mrs. Bergman, who observed the beating, commented later, “I had never before heard the sound of human flesh being hit; it was terrible!”

Finally, all of our group—whites and Negroes—and one Negro passenger who had not gotten off, had been forced to the back of the bus. The hoodlums—together with a pregnant woman whom they had brought aboard —sat in the very front. The seats in between remained empty. At that point the driver agreed to proceed to Birmingham. Some of us doubted whether he would really head there or turn up some obscure side road for another mob scene. For the entire two-hour ride to Birmingham, the hoodlums craned their necks to make sure we didn’t move into any of the empty rows of front seats.

Upon arrival in Birmingham, I could see a mob lined up on the sidewalk only a few feet from the loading platform. Most of them were young—in their twenties. Some were carrying ill-concealed iron bars. A few were older men. All had hate showing on their faces.

I looked at them and then I looked at Charles Person, who had been designated as my team mate to test the lunch counter. Person, a slim youth, quiet and determined, had been jailed-in for sixteen days during the campaign to desegregate Atlanta lunch counters. On our overnight stop in Atlanta he visited his parents—reluctantly, he said, because he knew they would try to dissuade him from continuing the Freedom Ride. At departure time, one of us wondered whether the parents had prevailed. Most of us were confident that they hadn’t and sure enough, just as we were leaving for the bus station, Person appeared.

Now we stood on the Birmingham unloading platform with the segregationist mob only a few feet away. I did not want to put Person in a position of being forced to proceed if he thought the situation too dangerous. When I looked at him, he responded by saying simply, “Let’s go.”

As we entered the white waiting room and approached the lunch counter, we were grabbed bodily and pushed toward the alleyway leading to the loading platform. As soon as we got into the alleyway and out of sight of onlookers in the waiting room, six of them started swinging at me with fists and pipes. Five others attacked Person a few feet ahead. Within seconds, I was unconscious on the ground.

I learned only later that the mob went on to assault Tom Langston of the Birmingham Post-Herald and smashed his camera. Langston had been sufficiently quick-witted to remove his film, and the photo of my beating, clearly showing the hate-filled expression of my assailants, appeared in next morning’s Post-Herald and in many newspapers throughout the country. Then, Clancy Lake, a radio newsman, was attacked as he sat in his car, broadcasting an account of the onslaught.

When I regained consciousness, the alleyway was empty. Blood was flowing down my face. I tried to stop the flow with a handkerchief but it soon became soaked. A white soldier came out of the waiting room to see whether I needed help. I declined, because I suddenly saw Bergman coming from the loading platform. He helped me to get a cab. The first two refused to take me, but a third agreed. I told the driver to go to the home of Reverend Shuttlesworth, which was our Birmingham headquarters.

The first thing Reverend Shuttlesworth said to me as I got out of the cab was, “You need to go to a hospital.” He called an ambulance. While waiting for it to arrive, I looked for Person among the assembled Negro onlookers. I finally found him and we shook hands. He had a gash in the back of his head and his face was swollen, but he did not require hospitalization. I did not realize how seriously I had been hurt. My head required fifty- three stitches. X rays were taken to determine whether my skull had been fractured and whether my ribs were intact.

I was on an operating table for hours. The doctor who was sewing my stitches had to leave periodically to attend to other emergency cases. During one of these interruptions, reporters arrived. Hospital regulations required that I sign a paper permitting them to interview me and snap photos. I did. Although I was feeling weak and nauseous, I answered their questions to the best of my ability.

Finally, after eight hours in the hospital, I was discharged, my face and head half hidden by bandages. It was two A.M. I had missed the meeting at Reverend Shuttlesworth’s church, which I later heard had been packed to capacity. The first thing I did was phone my home in New York to make sure my wife and children wouldn’t be frightened by what would appear in the morning papers. Next, I phoned Reverend Shuttlesworth to say that I was ready to leave the hospital. He drove down himself to get me.

I went outside the hospital door to watch for him, but soon a cruising police car drove up and I was warned that if I didn’t get off the street, I’d be arrested for vagrancy. I went inside, only to be told by a hospital guard that discharged patients were not permitted in the hospital. I went out again and soon Reverend Shuttlesworth’s car arrived. Apparently, the police had been watching, for they followed us and stopped the car after it had gone only a few blocks.

A policeman started harassing the driver until Reverend Shuttlesworth, who was sitting next to him, spoke up. We were then allowed to proceed. “They don’t want to get into another tangle with me,” Reverend Shuttlesworth explained. The most militant civil rights leader in Birmingham, Reverend Shuttlesworth had been arrested many times. His church had been bombed and his children had been assaulted. Yet he remains undaunted.

We reached his house and I lay down on the living- room couch. I felt too tired and sick to sleep. I must have looked sick for, next morning, some of the group insisted that I should fly home immediately. I said that for the most severely beaten rider to quit could be interpreted as meaning that violence had triumphed over nonviolence. It might convince the ultrasegregationists that by violence they could stop the Freedom Riders. My point was accepted and we started our meeting to plan the next lap, from Birmingham to Montgomery. We decided to travel in a single contingent on a Greyhound bus leaving at three in the afternoon.

Reverend Shuttlesworth and two members of his church drove us to the terminal, but the bus never left.

Drivers of both Greyhound and Trailways had determined to refuse to drive the Freedom Riders. We waited more than an hour on the loading platform as the mob started to gather. We recognized some of their faces. We sat down in the white waiting room. As evening approached, it became clear that we would not get out of Birmingham in time to make our scheduled meeting in Montgomery—and that in fact we might not get a bus out of Birmingham for several days. We decided to fly to New Orleans to make sure of being at the mass rally there marking the end of the Freedom Ride on May 17, anniversary of the Supreme Court’s key antisegregation decision.

In cars supplied by Reverend Shuttlesworth, we rode from the bus terminal to the airport and got reservations on an Eastern Air Lines plane leaving about an hour later. No sooner had we boarded it than an announcement came over the loudspeaker that a bomb threat had been received, and all passengers would have to debark while luggage was inspected. Time dragged on and eventually the flight was canceled. The mob started to gather in the airport. Dressed in T shirts and dungarees and clustered in groups, they were obviously not airline passengers. Near the doorway to the the loading gates, I heard a youth tell his girl friend, “We’re going to get them as they come through this way.” What deterred the ever-growing mob from staging a repeat performance of the previous day’s assault was that, this time, police were present in sizable numbers.

One heartening incident occurred. A white man approached us and introduced himself as a resident of Birmingham. He said he was sorry about what had happened to us there and wanted us to know that there were some whites in the city who thoroughly disapproved.

We got reservations aboard a Capital Airlines plane, which was the next flight to New Orleans. That flight was canceled also, though no public announcement was made of a bomb scare.

By about ten P.M., police cleared the mob out of the airport and set up a roadblock nearby to prevent them from returning. We finally took off on an Eastern Air Lines plane at eleven, after six tense hours in the airport. An hour later we landed in New Orleans. A deputation of the New Orleans CORE group was at the airport to welcome us. A battery of newspaper photographers snapped photos as we walked from the plane into the waiting room. The first Freedom Ride had ended.

9.

FREEDOM RIDES ROLE ON

I was not surprised that photographers and reporters met us at the New Orleans airport to cover the wind-up of the Freedom Ride. But I was surprised when a newsman’s flashbulb popped as I embraced my wife, Paula, at New York’s International Airport at five in the morning, and that the photo appeared that afternoon on the front page of the New York Post. I had not realized that I, as well as the Freedom Ride, had been catapulted into fame.

It was brought to my attention a second time that day on the platform of the IND Columbus Circle subway station. A complete stranger dashed out of the local, walked up to me, and asked, “Aren’t you Jim Peck of the Freedom Ride?” When I answered yes, he shook my hand and said, “I just wanted to congratulate you.” Then, in characteristic New York fashion, he dashed across to the waiting express, getting aboard just as the doors closed. This sort of incident was repeated several times in the weeks to come.

I also was to learn that the photo of my bandaged head had appeared all over the world. Bayard Rustin, who was in London at the time, wrote that he had seen me on TV and that the story of mob violence in Alabama had been telecast and broadcast throughout western Europe. Mrs. Sokolowski, who for years had been our baby sitter, showed me a newspaper photo of myself which a friend had sent from Poland. Earle Reynolds, a friend of mine teaching in Hiroshima, sent a batch of newspaper clippings from Japan. Alice Citron mailed to the CORE office a photo from The New Age in Capetown, South Africa, with the comment, “The world does take note of great deeds.”

I was impressed by the support given to me in my own neighborhood, particularly in a city like New York which is noted for its callousness and impersonality. The very day I got back I was asked to address a youth group at nearby Riverside Church, one of the city’s largest churches, and to write a story for The Morningsider, our neighborhood weekly publication. A few days later residents of my co-op apartment building gave a party at which over one hundred dollars was raised for CORE. Residents of another building followed with a party at which even a greater sum was collected. In another building, residents prepared a mimeographed fund appeal which they circulated door to door.

My home address having appeared in the newspapers, I received over one hundred letters of support, many of them heart warming. One, taken at random, is signed Margaret Morton. She writes: “Today I wish to express my deep thanks for the Freedom Rides and the suffering you went through in the cause of Negro equality in the South. I saved a New York Post picture of you in your beaten state. I am a Negro. One day I wish to teach in the South. Perhaps segregation will have been lessened if not eradicated in the main businesses and in traveling facilities by then. I would like to have memories such as that photograph to remind me that brave individuals of other races were out front, fighting dedicatedly for my people.”

I made a point of answering each of the letters I received if only with a post card. Some of the letters came from high school students who enclosed dimes and quarters for CORE. My older son, Sam, eleven and a half, and six of his classmates each wrote me letters. Their teacher, John Darr, had done a particularly effective job of explaining to them the issues involved in the Freedom Ride. Both Sam and my younger son, Charles, had been a bit frightened when I first arrived home with my head bandaged. Edward Gottlieb, a friend of mine who is principal of a nearby elementary school, sent two of his young students to interview me, and then had me speak before the school assembly. That same day I had to address hospital workers in the early evening, tape a program for Mike Wallace’s “PM East” TV program, and finally appear for a second time on Barry Gray’s midnight radio broadcast. This was a typical day for me. I had at least two speaking engagements daily, generally at churches, union halls, or schools. Meanwhile, I had to get out a special Freedom Ride issue of the CORElator and write lengthier articles about our trip for other publications. My phone kept ringing. For an entire month and a half, I had two free evenings and no free days, weekends included.

In contrast to almost one hundred favorable letters, I received only three hostile pieces of mail—all anonymous, of course. One was a post card with “Drop Dead!” scrawled in red ink. The second, postmarked Warner Robins, Georgia, contained a small calling card on which was printed “HELP INTEGRATION, Take a nigger home to lunch.” The third contained two copies of the antisemitic publication, “Common Sense.”

We received a couple of two A.M. anonymous phone calls which Paula answered. On the first call a man’s voice threatened to kill her, my two children, and finally me. On the second call the same voice, identifying himself this time as the “Confederate Underground,” reported that I was “dead.” This could have shocked Paula, had I not been lying asleep beside her at the time. When she told me about it next morning, I recalled Reverend Ivory in Rock Hill, South Carolina, telling us about the threatening phone calls he received. Such phone calls are commonplace to leading antisegregationists living in the South, but are unusual in the North.

A week after I got back, I was attacked by Senator Eastland of Mississippi, who is chairman of the Senate Internal Security Committee. Speaking on the Senate floor on May 25, he singled me out as “a Communist agitator and organizer of the most dangerous kind” who is “disloyal to his country.”

Countering Eastland’s outburst, the New York Post commented editorially: “Surely Eastland should have learned the distinction between a pacifist and a Communist, no matter how much he dislikes both. But he is unable or unwilling to learn. He took the Senate floor for a raucous attack on Jim Peck, the Freedom Rider who was so savagely assaulted by an Alabama mob. Peck’s pacifist convictions are long a matter of record; he has suffered imprisonment for them on other occasions. Does Eastland really not grasp the distinction? Is he a fool or a faker?”

Nevertheless, three weeks later, Alabama’s attorney general, MacDonald Gallion, on the Dave Garroway program over which I had spoken a couple of weeks earlier, accused me of being a “Communist associate.” His key “evidence” was that “James Peck is listed on the letterhead of the Civil Defense Protection Committee which is on the subversive list of the United States Attorney General.”

Actually there is no such organization as the Civil Defense Protection Committee. The Civil Defense Protest Committee, on whose letterhead I am listed, is not on the United States Attorney General’s subversive list. It is a pacifist group which co-ordinates the annual nonviolent protest action on the day of the nationwide civil defense drill.

Not a shred of real evidence as to my being a Communist was presented either by Gallion or by Eastland. I have always been an outspoken critic of all forms of dictatorship, Fascist and Communist. Yet, unfortunately, in the minds of many people who do not have the time or willingness to seek out the truth, I have now been tagged a Communist and, through me, the Freedom Ride has been made suspect. Many responsible employment opportunities are now completely closed to me, should I want to apply.

Not until I got back to New York did I learn that a second Freedom Ride was on the road. Members of a student group in Nashville, Tennessee, had decided to travel by bus over the yet untested portion of our original route—from Birmingham to New Orleans, via Jackson, Mississippi.

Upon arrival in Birmingham, twelve of them were arrested, held in “protective custody,” and then taken by police to the Tennessee border. They returned to Birmingham and went to the Greyhound station. At first no driver would take them, as had been the case with us, but finally they boarded a bus for Montgomery under guard of the state highway patrol, United States marshals, and a helicopter.

At Montgomery, they were awaited by a mob even bigger than the one which had attacked us in Birmingham. Again, no uniformed police were at the bus station. The riders were beaten ruthlessly as they debarked. Police did appear soon after the original assault, but the mob attacked twice more. A Negro—not a Freedom Rider—was set afire by some of the mob after they had poured kerosene over him. Jim Zwerg, a white Freedom Rider, after receiving the same kind of beating as I had, lay in the street for more than an hour awaiting a Negro ambulance. White ambulances refused to service the Freedom Riders. Finally, police used tear gas to break up the mob.

Throughout the night there were bomb threats, car burnings, and threatened house fires. Fifteen hundred persons attending a meeting addressed by Martin Luther King and Jim Farmer spent the entire night in the First Baptist Church. To venture into the streets would have meant risking severe injury or even death. Over six hundred federal marshals were dispatched to Montgomery. Finally, Governor Patterson, who had played a key role in inciting the mob to violence, became fearful that the situation had gone beyond control and called out the National Guard.

The Nashville students met and decided to continue the Ride to Jackson and New Orleans. With them were three who had been on our Ride—Jim Farmer, John Lewis, and Henry Thomas. Farmer had been forced to quit our Ride in Atlanta because of the death of his father. Lewis had left us in Sumter to go back to Nashville for his final exams. Both were anxious to complete their Rides. Thomas was ready for a second one. In addition five members of the New Orleans CORE group had journeyed to Montgomery to join the Nashville group. The total number boarding two Trailways buses from Montgomery to Jackson was twenty-seven. Prior to departure, several of the group ate at the terminal restaurant without incident. Both buses were escorted by large contingents of national guardsmen and highway patrolmen.

A threat to dynamite the first bus as it crossed the Mississippi line failed to materialize. The buses drove to Jackson without making any rest stops. City police had cleared the terminal of spectators and had stationed fifty officers there. In front of the station were three of the police dogs which had almost become the trade mark of Mississippi in dealing with antisegregationists.

All twelve from the first bus were arrested upon attempting to use the white rest room in the terminal. The fifteen from the second bus, including Farmer, were arrested while lining up to eat at the terminal’s cafeteria.

The procedure was cut and dried. Police Captain Ray ordered the Riders to “move on.” They refused. He arrested them on charges of “breach of the peace.” Charles Oldham, CORE national chairman and an attorney, hastened from St. Louis to Jackson to help defend the arrested Riders. The trials took five minutes. The judge rejected all attempts to introduce the key issue—Mississippi’s illegal segregation of interstate passengers. The twenty-seven received sixty-day suspended sentences and two-hundred-dollar fines. Having decided on a policy of refusing to pay fines, they went to jail. To work out the fines—at three dollars a day—would require sixty-seven days in jail. However, under Mississippi law, if those arrested should desire to appeal their convictions, they would have to leave jail after forty days and bail out for the balance of the sentence. This course of action was chosen by most of the Riders.

The policy set by Jackson in these original arrests was pursued as Freedom Riders continued to come into the city by bus, train, and plane throughout the summer. The only change was that the judge increased the jail sentences to the maximum: four months and two- hundred-dollar fines.

Starting in June, an intense mobilization of Freedom Riders was coordinated by CORE; the Nashville Nonviolent Movement, which had initiated the second Ride; the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which had been set up in 1960 in connection with the lunch-counter sit-ins; and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which had been established in 1957 by Martin Luther King and other Negro ministers interested in nonviolence.

In Atlanta, a coordinating committee representing these four groups started to operate. In New Orleans, a nonviolent training center for Freedom Ride participants got under way under the direction of Jim McCain, CORE field secretary from South Carolina, and Walter Bergman, a participant in our original Ride.

Volunteers from all over the country applied. Most of the Negroes were Southern students, many of whom had been involved in the lunch-counter sit-ins. Most of the whites were young people from sections other than the South. One contingent of Freedom Riders journeyed all the way from California, and another from the state of Washington.

William Coffin, the chaplain of Yale University, led a group of ten ministers on a Freedom Ride in late May. They were arrested in Montgomery, whose bus terminal restaurants stopped enforcing segregation shortly thereafter. About a month later, CORE organized an interfaith Freedom Ride including four rabbis and fourteen ministers. Ten of them were arrested for trying to eat at the Tallahassee airport. In September, twenty-eight Episcopal clergymen took a Freedom Ride from New Orleans to their church convention in Detroit. Ten of them, including the son-in-law of Governor Rockefeller of New York, were jailed in Jackson.

One of the Episcopal clergymen, whom I have met personally, Reverend Lee Belford, is an example of the minority of white Southerners who do not go along with white supremacism. He is a native Georgian who has lived and preached in that state for many years. His wife’s great-grandfather was governor of Mississippi during the Civil War and was later impeached by the carpetbaggers. Because of his background, Reverend Belford was asked by his fellow-Riders to avoid arrest in Jackson so that he could meet with the mayor and other civic leaders and explain to them, in language that they might at least start to understand, why Episcopal clergymen were willing to go on a Freedom Ride.

Jackson became the focal point of the Freedom Rides. More than three hundred Riders were arrested there during the summer and early fall. The appeal trials started August 22, with Carl Rachlin, William Kunstler, and Jack Young as attorneys. Starting in November, the NAACP undertook defense of the Freedom Ride appeal cases.

New trials were required because the original ones were unrecorded. Like the original ones, the new trials resulted in convictions.

In the first case, that of Henry Thomas, prosecutor Jack Travis told the jury in his final argument, “Turn him loose . . . and blood will flow.” But, speaking off the record after the trial, he expressed the opinion that the “breach of the peace” conviction would not hold up in federal court. In other words, a lengthy and costly appeal to the Supreme Court is required to void Mississippi’s illegal arrests.

Making the process more costly for CORE, Judge Russel Moore quadrupled the bail in Thomas’s case, setting it at two thousand dollars, tripled it in the second case, and so on. In another move to break CORE financially, Hinds County Court, giving less than two weeks’ notice, ordered all one hundred and eighty-nine Freedom Riders out on appeal to return to Jackson on August 14 for setting trial dates, or they would forfeit their five-hundred-dollar bonds. Ordinarily, only attorneys are required to be present for setting trial dates. State officials, who had hoped to fill the coffers with forfeited bond money, were disappointed when all but six of the one hundred and eighty-nine converged on Jackson on August 14. CORE had succeeded in the nearly impossible task of rounding them up from all sections of the country and transporting them back to Jackson.

Following a precedent-setting mass meeting there, they went back home but had to return a second time for their appeal trials.

Jim Farmer wrote in the CORElator:

Jail at best is neither a romantic nor a pleasant place, Mississippi jails are no exception. The first twenty- seven Freedom Riders to arrive in Jackson saw the inside of two different jails and two different prisons— the Jackson City Jail, the Hinds County Jail, the Hinds County Prison Farm, and the State Penitentiary at Parchman. Jails are no new experience for most of the Riders, but Riders were definitely a new experience for Mississippi jails. For the first time, penal authorities in the citadel of segregation had a glimpse of the New Negro and the Emancipated White. I do not think they can ever be quite the same again after this experience.

Nor will the other prisoners, black and white, be the same again, after having seen in the flesh men and women who do not believe segregation to be in the very nature of things, and who are willing to defy it.

Jail and prison authorities frequently said, and really seemed to believe, that other Negro prisoners like things the way they are and have no sympathy with us, and that it was for our own protection that we were isolated from them. However, the Negro trusties went out of their way whenever the guards were not present to show their sympathy by word and deed. “Keep up the good work,” one said. “I admire you guys and what you are doing,” said another. “I wish I could do the same thing, but I have to do what these people tell me to do.” They smuggled newspapers in to us, delivered notes and messages between our cell block and that of the girl Freedom Riders, and passed on rumors which they had heard in jail or in the community.

One night at the county jail, a voice called up from the cell block beneath us, where other Negro prisoners were housed. “Upstairs!” the anonymous prisoner shouted. We replied, “Downstairs!” “Upstairs,” replied the voice, “sing your freedom song.” The Freedom Riders then sang. We sang old folk songs and gospel songs to which new words had been written, telling of the Freedom Ride and its purpose. We sang new words to old labor songs, too. One stanza rang out, “They say in Hinds County no neutrals have they met/You either follow Freedom Ride or you ‘tom’ [Uncle Tom] for Ross Barnett [Mississippi’s ultrasegregationist governor].” After the impromptu concert, the downstairs prisoners, who the jailers had said were our enemies, shouted back, “That sounds good, Freedom Riders; you’re our friends.” They then sang for us. The girl Freedom Riders, in another wing of the jail, joined in the Freedom Ride songs, and for the first time in history, the Hinds County Jail rocked with unrestrained singing of songs about freedom and brotherhood.

Then an interesting incident occurred. In a burst of profanity, a white prisoner who was not a Freedom Rider, shouted to the Negro prisoners to shut up. The girl Freedom Riders immediately met the challenge by singing “We Shall Overcome Someday.” Another white prisoner, with an unmistakable Mississippi accent, then shouted his approval of the songs and the singing, and volunteered, “I am for integration one hundred per cent. Sing some more songs, Freedom Riders.” The first white prisoner then offered to shut his mouth for him. “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me,” came the reply. The first prisoner then offered to back up the words. Our new-found white Mississippi friend then asked his antagonist if he had ever heard of Booker T. Washington. Receiving a negative reply, of course, he said, “That’s what I thought. Well, Booker T. Washington was my uncle, so if you still want to back those words up, come on down here as soon as the jailer opens the cell gates in the morning.” When the cell gates were opened no violence occurred, much to our relief.

One evening at the county jail, after the rumor of our imminent transfer to die state penitentiary had reached us, the jailer came quietly to our Freedom Riders cell block. He called me, and we stood there with the bars between us, chatting. He did most of the talking. He told me about his family, his wife, and four or five children—the good records they had made in schools, including Ole Miss. He told me of his sons’ prowess in sports and of their marriages and his grandchildren. He told me, too, of his dislike of violence, and of his children’s upbringing in that regard. I asked him how, on his meager income, he had been able to send his children through Ole Miss. Then came the inevitable story of their Negro housekeeper, “Aunt Lucy.” His wife had also been able to work throughout the years because they had Aunt Lucy, who lived in the home and was a part of the family, took care of the children; in fact, raised them and even slept in their rooms. The old man’s eyes filled with tears as he told me of Aunt Lucy’s death two years earlier, and he proudly asserted that his entire family came back to town on the anniversary of her funeral to place a fifteen- dollar wreath on Aunt Lucy’s grave. The jailer stood there talking for more than an hour in the first conversation we had with him. This, I am sure, was his way of saying goodbye, and of telling us that he respected the Freedom Riders, and that whatever unpleasantness we might meet at the state penitentiary would be something of which he did not approve.

This “unpleasantness” is described vividly by William Mahoney, a Howard University student and a Freedom Rider, in Liberation.

To relieve the crowding [in the Jackson jails], about fifty of us were piled into trucks at two A.M., June 15, and sped off into the night. It was rumored that in spite of a law against putting persons convicted of misdemeanors into a penitentiary, we were going to the state penitentiary.

In the light before sunrise a small caravan of trucks led by a police car sped north on Highway 49 over the flat Mississippi land. Two Negro children walking through a field of young cotton were silhouetted against an orange-and-blue horizon as they stopped and pointed to the swiftly moving prison trucks. The procession turned on to the grounds at Parchman Penitentiary, stopped briefly at the main gate, and then moved directly to a restricted area of the sprawling penitentiary.

One of the larger vehicles containing twenty-six of the political prisoners had broken down and was being towed the last few miles to the prison by a pick-up truck which carried luggage. The little pick-up towed its monstrous burden past an observation tower, through a barbed-wire fence gate, and came to rest in a muddy yard by the front door of a squat, modem, red-brick building.

The barked commands of a law officer sent all except two of the Freedom Riders scurrying from the track into a double line at the front of the building. Surrounded by a group of gun-brandishing hecklers, tired, unshaven men helplessly listened as sun-reddened faces, sagging from age and dissipation, spat vile remarks at them.

Terry Sullivan and Felix Singer, the two white men who remained in the truck, were refusing to co-operate with their captors. So far their limp bodies had been carefully handled. Hearing a commotion behind them, the men in line turned around in time to see Terry and Felix being thrown from the van onto the wet sand-and- gravel drive. They were then dragged through the wet grass, through mud puddles, and across a rough cement walk to the rear of the group. There was both pain and conviction on their faces. One of their tormentors laughed. “Ain't no newspapermen out here, what you actin’ like that for?” Terry replied, “We refuse to cooperate because we have been unjustly imprisoned.”

As they were pulled down the walk and into the building, a fat, red-faced man wearing cowboy boots ran after them, stamping on the corrugated bottoms of Felix’s canvas shoes and yelling, “Pull them by the feet, pull them by the feet.”

A guard with a serious face under his Stetson hat, examining a long black rubber-handled tube, walked through the gate, past the smiling guards and police and the curious worried prisoners, and into the building.

The black tube was a cattle-shocker, which delivers a powerful charge of electricity when applied to the flesh. After the two passive resisters refused to obey a command to undress, the instrument was applied to their bodies. When they realized that the men squirming in pain on the cement floor were not going to yield to the torture, the officials ripped the clothes from their bodies and threw them into a cell. All of this, even though the law forbids corporal or any unusual punishment of recalcitrant prisoners.

The group outside was brought into the hallway, asked to undress, and then herded, two per cell, into the little 6-by-10 compartments they were to occupy for the next month or more. The cells were segregated but the cell blocks were not.

A 6-foot-3-inch, two-hundred-and-fifty-pound guard stuffed shorts and T shirts through the bars. These were the only garments we were to wear while inmates of the maximum security unit.

On June 24, the guards decided that the Freedom Riders’ singing was too loud and took their mattresses away as a punishment. At first this was taken as a joke and songs were made up about the incident, but after three days of sleeping on a cement floor or steel shelf with an air-conditioning system on full blast, the cell block became silent and gloomy. Another time when the Riders sang too loud for the guards, six of them were dragged down the hall with wrist-breakers (clamps tightened around the wrists) and thrown into dark 6- by-6 boxes for a couple of days. As they were being taken to solitary they sang, “I’m Going to Tell God How You Treat Me.”

When fellow-prisoner Jim Farmer, national director of CORE, went before the superintendent to protest the treatment, he was told that if we didn’t cooperate, conditions would deteriorate. A request was made for a written statement of rules to define what was meant by cooperation, but none was ever issued. Consequently, the imprisoned men drew up their own code of minimum standards, for they felt that although they were obligated to respect the authorities, the authorities had an obligation to treat them as human beings.

Most felt that the search for order and meaning in life could best be carried out in group devotion, where sermons could be delivered and group singing take place. Phrases pertaining to the Freedom Rides were put to the tune of Negro spirituals, work songs and union songs. [It should be explained here that singing and talking constituted the sole occupation. No reading material was permitted except Bibles. In addition, the whites were given copies of Race and Reason—A Yankee View by Carleton Putnam. Actually the book presents the Dixiecrat view, depicting the Negro as anthropologically inferior.]

Cleansing of the mind and body included fasting for some. Fasts were also engaged in as protest. The purpose of these acts of dedication was misrepresented to the public. For example, the press reported that Price Chatham lost three pounds. Actually he lost about thirty- five pounds.

Some prisoners refused to fast and flaunted the fact in front of others who were fasting, perhaps in order to compensate for their guilt. Others gave in to their hunger after a few days and soon became boisterous eaters. A few fasted until there was a thin veil between them and death.

Questions have been raised as to the character of people who willingly withstand such punishment. Are they publicity seekers? Are they Communists?

In cell 14 was a middle-aged art dealer from Minnesota who had three dollars to his name and had come on the Freedom Ride “because it is one way of fighting a system which not only hurts the Negro but is a threat to world peace and prosperity. Some of the same men in whose interest it is to have segregation, so it is for them to have war industries, to recklessly speculate in other countries, and in general to meticulously exploit masses of people. I also came because I wanted to see for myself what is happening in the South.”

My cell mate, a Negro worker, came because he had been chased home by white toughs once too often, because his sister was determined to come, and because a friend of his, William Barbee, had been almost killed by a mob while on a Freedom Ride. He admits that his behavior is not ordinarily disciplined, but he readily accepted any restrictions required of him by the movement. He had sung professionally and took the lead in many of our group songs.

On my right, in cell 12, was the son of a well-to-do businessman who had come because it was his moral duty. His aim was “to change the hearts of my persecutors through the sympathy and understanding to be gained by nonviolent resistance.” He spoke proudly of his father who had fought hard and “made it,” and was constantly defending North America’s economic and political system from the attacks made upon it by myself and the art dealer. We never changed each other’s views but the arguments passed time and give us mental exercise.

These three philosophies—political, emotional, and moralist—represent the three major viewpoints I found while spending forty days in various Mississippi prisons.

The name of Gandhi was constantly on the minds and lips of most of the imprisoned Riders. Anything Gandhi had said or done was interpreted and reinterpreted to be applied to the situation in Mississippi. As with all religious movements, from Christianity to Marxism, factions arose which read their prophet’s teaching as best suited them. Those who went on long fasts justified Gandhi’s remark that at times he had to fast in spite of his followers’ refusal to join him; others, who would fast only when there were numbers large enough to be politically effective, said that they took this stand in accord with Gandhi’s practice of only making meaningful sacrifices.

At five P.M. on July 7 those remaining of the first and second groups were released on appeal bonds after forty days in jail. When we left, the number of Freedom Riders in jail was close to one hundred. [Within the next few weeks, the total reached almost two hundred.]

Jim Farmer cited the influence of Freedom Riders inside jail. They also had an impact outside jail, on both the white and Negro communities.

A group of white women living in Jackson volunteered funds with which to buy toilet articles and other necessities for imprisoned Riders. In handing over the money to Jack Young, the Riders’ local attorney, they naturally insisted on anonymity. Had their names been made public, they would have been socially ostracized. Their act was an instance of human decency transcending prejudice and hate.

Another such instance was the serving—instead of arresting—of a blind white Rider, Norma Wagner, accompanied by a Negro student from Chicago, Earl Bohannon, Jr. They became the first and only Freedom Riders to date to be served at the Jackson bus terminal, thanks to human decency.

When the first sizable group of Riders returned to Jackson for setting of trial dates, they found to their surprise that the white and colored signs had been removed from the courtroom toilets. While this was an infinitesimal change in the city-wide segregation pattern, it constituted a realization by the authorities of the issue involved.

As for Negroes in the community, the Freedom Riders gave them courage. A substantial number of local Negroes turned out for the mass rally held after the initial setting of trial dates. A local committee of Negro women served Freedom Riders their first real meal after getting out of jail and helped them in the details of starting on their journeys home. Several young Negroes from Jack- son actually bought interstate bus tickets, challenged segregation at the terminal, and joined the Riders in jail.

An illustrative story of the effects of the Freedom Rides on Jackson is the zoo story. In Jackson’s zoo, there used to be benches which, until the Rides, had been used by whites only. Then, one day, a few Negroes sat down on one of these benches and were arrested. City officials realized that this arrest would not solve the problem. They considered setting up benches marked colored, but concluded that wouldn’t be a solution either in light of the Rides. Their decision was simply to remove all the benches. Thereafter, no humans, either white or colored, could sit down in the zoo, only the animals.

10.

AFTER FREEDOM RIDES

I decided to approach former President Harry Truman during his early morning walk on June 5 to take issue with a statement he had made on his walk a couple of days earlier. He had said that “Northerners who go South as Freedom Riders are meddlesome intruders [who] . . . should stay at home and attend to their own business.”

Although I had been told by a reporter that Truman, when in New York, emerges from the elevator in the Hotel Carlyle at seven twenty-nine A.M. on the dot, I took no chances. I was sitting in the lobby at seven. Truman did not come down until seven twenty-nine. As he walked toward the door, I approached him and introduced myself as “a Freedom Rider from the North.” Truman interrupted with, “Better stay up North, then.”

I went on to express the view that “ending racial segregation in the United States is the business of ALL conscientious citizens, north, south, east and west.” I added—and I felt this with the utmost conviction—that “racial segregation—more than any other single factor —besmirches the United States in the world’s eyes and aids the Communist propaganda machine.”

Truman then interrupted again with, “That’s just what YOU’RE doing: helping the Communists!” I tried to get in a final sentence, but Truman cut me short with, “I’m not going to say any more.”

However, I continued to walk with him—along with eight reporters—up Park Avenue to Eighty-third Street, west to Fifth Avenue, down Fifth Avenue. We had to maintain a fast pace to keep up with him. After the other reporters had questioned him on other matters and apparently had run out of questions, I addressed him again. I expressed regret that he would not discuss the Freedom Rides in a more serious manner in view of the fact that many prominent Americans view them favorably. “Just troublemaking,” was his final comment on the Freedom Rides.

Reporters told me it was the first time that Truman on his morning walks had been confronted with a key social issue of this kind. The confrontation, which received considerable publicity, had been worth while, I felt. Truman’s unintelligent and unresponsive remarks and his rudeness of attitude certainly lent no dignity to his position.

I had expected nothing different. I recalled how, when asked a year before about his opinion on the lunch- counter sit-ins, he had stated that if he had a business and an unwelcome customer refused to leave the premises, he would kick him out. Shortly thereafter, he tried unsuccessfully to smear the sit-in movement as Communist-inspired, just as he had done with the Freedom Rides in talking to me.

Truman had expressed himself bluntly, but that is his characteristic way of talking. His general attitude toward the 1961 Freedom Rides was no different from President Kennedy’s or President Eisenhower’s viewpoint of the 1960 lunch-counter sit-ins.

The prevailing official United States attitude, both under the Republicans and the Democrats, has been that public protest against segregation, rather than segregation itself, constitutes the greatest obstacle for the United States in winning favorable world opinion.

In line with this mistaken attitude, Attorney General Robert Kennedy pleaded with Freedom Ride leaders for a “cooling off” period aimed at averting embarrassment for the President at the then forthcoming Summit Meeting in Vienna.

He failed to realize that the chief embarrassment for President Kennedy and for the United States is the segregation which prompted the Freedom Rides. He did not have the foresight to see that the most effective way to avert this embarrassment would be a forthright statement in Vienna by the President supporting the Freedom Rides in particular and civil rights in general. This would have gained for the United States the respect of the world’s peoples.

Upon return to the United States, the President could have used his moral weight to advantage by making a public speech in Birmingham, Montgomery, or Jackson, stating plainly that the United States is a democracy with equal rights for all, regardless of color. Instead, shortly after his return, he appointed to a United States judgeship in Mississippi, a boyhood friend of ultrasegregationist Senator Eastland—Harold Cox. Soon after his appointment Judge Cox refused federal jurisdiction over a Freedom Riders’ case, holding that “their status as interstate passengers is extremely doubtful; their objective was trouble.” Getting a civil rights case into federal court constitutes the only hope for a fair judgment in the South. But even this becomes impossible when federal judgeships are filled by ultra-segregationists like Judge Cox.

In the fall of 1960 when the United States was embarrassed before the world’s eyes by the spectacle of segregationist mobs terrorizing New Orleans over the admission of three little Negro girls to white schools, President Kennedy could have gone to New Orleans and delivered a major talk. Such a talk would have undermined completely the segregationist leadership of Governor Jimmy Davis.

In 1957 when the United States was put to shame the world over by segregationist mob violence in Little Rock, President Eisenhower could have gone to Little Rock and made a major speech which would have cut the props from under Governor Orval Faubus, the guiltiest leader there. Had President Eisenhower done this in time, he might not have had to send in federal troops as a last resort.

Unfortunately, our national leaders, both Democratic and Republican, have never taken a stand on civil rights which would show the world that we want to practice democracy, not just preach it. On this question, so vital to the peoples of Asia and Africa, the Democrats remain tied to the Dixiecrats and the Republicans remain indifferent.

As for the Attorney General’s suggested cooling off period, it strikes Negroes as completely ludicrous. As a number of Negro speakers on platforms with me have expressed it, “Our people have been cooling off for over one hundred years. How about a cooling off period for the segregationist mobs?”

The proposed cooling off period was in the news at a time when two young Negro Freedom Riders were visiting our home. They were fine examples of “the New Negro” and my wife was tremendously impressed.

She heard one of them, Jerome Smith, tell a meeting in our neighborhood, “I want to go back to school to complete my education. But I feel that the Southern jails must be filled again and again until the whole system which can imprison men just for insisting on being treated as human beings is defeated.” A month later, Smith was in jail in Jackson as a result of his Freedom Ride. He served the maximum prison term—six months. Soon after his release, he and four other New Orleans CORE members were beaten by segregationists while testing the Greyhound terminal in McComb, Mississippi, which was under federal court order to desegregate. Two days later another CORE test team used the terminal’s facilities without incident.

In giving her friends her own impressions of “the New Negro,” my wife says, “They are the young people who have decided they cannot accept the kind of humiliation forced on their families for generations. They are intelligent and they have dignity. The cause for which they are working is precious to them because it is an acutely personal one. How can there be a cooling off period for them?”

There can be no cooling off period in the struggle for equal rights, either in the South where extreme segregation prevails, or in the rest of the country where there is housing segregation resulting in school segregation, and where there is employment discrimination in all but menial jobs.

The Interstate Commerce Commission on September 22 implemented the Supreme Court decision with new regulations prohibiting interstate buses both from segregating and from using terminals which segregate. On October 16 three major railroads serving the Deep South publicly announced an end of segregation in both trains and terminals. The role of the Freedom Rides in bringing about these developments was cited in much of the newspaper, radio, and TV coverage. As soon as the ICC regulations went into effect on November 1, CORE dispatched test teams throughout the Deep South. They found a pattern of substantial compliance except in Mississippi and most of Louisiana. In several communities within those states where local officials tried to block compliance and substitute municipal “white” and “colored” signs for those removed by the bus companies, the federal government obtained injunctions.

Surprisingly, Alabama was found to be not in the ranks of the two holdout states. At the Trailways terminal in Birmingham, where I had been so brutally beaten, and at Anniston, where our Greyhound bus had been bombed and set afire, test teams were served without incident. However, in Alabama, as in South Carolina, Georgia and Florida, compliance is by no means complete—particularly at the smaller, outlying rest stops. To win full compliance with the ICC there must be more Freedom Riding. Eventually, the Freedom Rides may slacken in pace as did the lunch-counter sit- ins. But new nonviolent protest actions will evolve.

The longer the time lag in attaining equality, the stronger will become the Negro nationalists who preach black supremacy in the same hate-inciting manner as the white segregationists preach white supremacy. Already, the Muslims and other Negro nationalist groups are gaining strength.

Should it come, eventually, to a violent showdown, whether initiated by the white or the black supremacists, all semblance of justice and brotherhood will vanish from our land.

About the Author

Radical journalist and pacifist James Peck was the only individual to participate in both the Fellowship of Reconciliation's 1947 Journey of Reconciliation and the 1961 CORE Freedom Ride.

Born into the family of a wealthy clothing wholesaler in 1914, Peck was a social outsider at Choate, an elite Connecticut prep school, in part because his family had only recently converted from Judaism to Episcopalianism. At Harvard he quickly gained a reputation as a campus radical, shocking his classmates by bringing a black date to the freshman dance. Peck dropped out after the end of his freshman year, spending several years as an expatriate in Europe and working as a merchant seaman. Returning to the United States in 1940, Peck devoted himself to organizing work and journalism on behalf of pacifist and social justice causes. He spent almost three years in federal prison during World War II as a conscientious objector.

After his release from prison in 1945, he rededicated himself to pacifism and militant trade unionism. In the late 1940s, Peck became increasingly involved in issues of racial justice, joining the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) as a volunteer.

On May 14, Peck assumed de facto leadership of the 1961 CORE Freedom Ride after James Farmer returned to Washington for his father's funeral. Peck sustained heavy injuries to the face and head during the Ku Klux Klan riot at the Birmingham Trailways Bus Station.

It took more than an hour for Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth to find an ambulance willing to take Peck to the all-white Carraway Methodist Hospital, where staff refused to treat him. Peck was finally able to see a doctor at Jefferson Hillman Hospital, where he received 53 stitches. Undeterred by his injuries, he urged the riders to continue.

"If he could be beaten as he was and still go on, we certainly felt we could go on," says Genevieve Hughes in Freedom Riders.

In 1976, Peck, along with Walter Bergman, filed a lawsuit against the FBI, seeking $100,000 in damages for the lasting injuries he sustained as a result of the riot, in which paid FBI informant Gary Thomas Rowe Jr. was an active participant. In 1983, he was awarded a partial settlement of $25,000.

James Peck passed away in 1993.

Source: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/freedomriders/people/james-peck 

A Note from the Publisher

Race in the United States today.

It is traditional in the middle Atlantic state of Maryland where I live to shake our fingers at Southerners and wonder why they did not do better with race over the years.

But my neighborhood of Bethesda in Montgomery County in Maryland is hardly innocent on the question of race. School busing did occur here very smoothly in 1957, much earlier than in the neighborhood state of Virginia. I remember when the black kids arrived on the school buses at my elementary school that fall. I was in third grade. In other areas concerning race, Bethesda fails and may still be failing. It took demonstration after demonstration to integrate the nearby Glen Echo Amusement Park in the early 60s. Since this was a commercial establishment, it did not fall under the jurisdiction of the Brown case.

Is Bethesda failing on race and class integration now? The county where Bethesda is located is highly diverse but the three high schools in the southwest corner of the county are very white. For example, at football games opposing fans often take up the cheer of "Whiteman, Whiteman," after the Walt Whitman team falls to score since the whiteness of Walt Whitman is so well-known in the county. Whitman is less than 5% black in a county whose schools are 22% black on average. And less than 5% be misstating the situation. Less than 5% is the lowest category the school system uses. The actual number may be 2% or 3%.

A Whitman parent with whom I watched many, many basketball games as our children played on school and travel teams insists that further integration of school is the way to reduce the achievement gap between white and Asian students, and black and Latino students. My neighbor, Richard Kallenberg, cited the James Coleman studies of the 60s which showed that the race of one's classmates was the most influential variable in the achievement of black students. Apparently, if black students attended schools with whites they would pick up the beliefs that the if you work hard in school, the system will work for you.

As a former public school teacher who never had any decent reading materials for my students in Cleveland, and as an education writer who saw this problem in New York City many years later, and wrote a book about the achievement gap, I argued that the capacity of teachers and the curriculum were the problems. I think that the ability to provide culturally relevant reading materials at the students' reading level would do much to reduce the achievement gap.  Many times I told my neighbor that teachers lacked authority to purchase good reads and were stuck with boring textbooks with trivial reading assignments that could not influence the achievement gap. 

But my neighbor's point is powerful, and is widely accepted in education. Black students in white schools do better than black students in black schools. His point brings up a number of choices for Americans to make. Inviting black and Latino students from less affluent neighborhoods on the east side of Montgomery county into the white and Asian schools such Walt Whitman might not make parents happy. If 250 new students arrived, modular classrooms would need to be purchased. Some might be put in the parking lot until the school could be expanded, reducing parking spaces so fewer students could drive to school. There also might be other sacrifices with more students in a building. Some students might have to wait a semester to enroll in the coveted AP classes so necessary for admission to highly selective classes. Would parents allow this to happen? Is sacrifice a part of citizenship?

And what about bringing in students from poor neighbors in the District of Columbia where drugs and crime are still major problems. Would they be welcome or would they be suspects? They would have long commutes but it can be done. My friends and I commuted to downtown each day in the 60s from the suburbs to a Catholic high school. We survived. Exactly what is our responsibility as citizens to reduce class stratification in the United States? What is a reasonable starting point? What would the parents of Walt Whitman—the doctors, lawyers, scientists, and lobbyists who can afford the expensive local real estate—be likely to accept, or would the decision be up to the Montgomery County School Board? In a similar situation, what would your suggestions to a school board be? (Creating paired schools and then busing between the elementary schools was not popular in the 70s in the county when it was tried.) But back to James Peck.

Jim Peck obviously was an outlier. He risked his life to challenge segregation in the 40s, 50s, and 60s. And he suffered for it: four and half months in solitary after a protest against segregation in a prison as you read in Chapter 3. Most of us don't have the courage or are willing to make the time to challenge the evils of the status quo as he did. But what is our responsibility to each other in the second decade of the 21st century? I think that if he was still with us, he would have strong opinions about sharing educational resources as widely as possible. But what about you? As you attend high school, should this school be open to anyone who wants to enroll or be limited to the children of local taxpayers? Of course, the school systems the arriving students came from would have to pay for their educations, but would you welcome them?

While the battles against segregated buses are over, the question about how we should treat each other in a society that is segregated by race and class remain. I found the example of James Peck in the pages very inspiring, and I wish I had had this book to read in 1962 when it was originally published. As a high school student in the early 60s, I had no idea that CORE existed and had worked against segregation as early as the 40s. Having his book to read, discuss, and write about then might have prepared more of us to participate in the civil rights movement then and now. I hope that you have found Jim Peck's history of his protests against racism useful.

Jim McCabe

EbooksforStudents.org

More Titles

Class set licenses which provide a teacher with ebooks for students at 10¢ a copy are available at http://ebooksforstudents.org/

Individual licenses of all of the ebooks below are available on Amazon.

Young Adult Books (6th to 12th Grades-see samples on Amazon)

Benito Juarez-Builder of a Nation by Emma Gelders Sterne

Revolution in Mexico-Death is Incidental by Heath Bowman and Sterling Dickinson

Flight to Freedom-The Story of the Underground Railroad by Henrietta Buckmaster

Mary McLeod Bethune by Emma Gelders Sterne

The Life of W.E.B. Du Bois-His Was the Voice by Emma Gelders Sterne

Malcolm X-Another Side of the Movement by Mark Davies

Trade Biographies and Histories (9th Grade and up depending on the title-see samples on Amazon)

Thurgood Marshall: From His Early Years to Brown by Hunter R. Clark and Michael D. Davis

Thurgood Marshall: His Triumph in Brown, His Years on the Supreme Court by Hunter R. Clark and Michael D. Davis

Mrs. R: The Life of Eleanor Roosevelt by Alfred Steinberg

Mississippi Notebook: Freedom Summer June-August 1964 by Nicholas Von Hoffman

Freedom Ride: Civil Rights and Non-Violent Resistance, Foreword by James Baldwin, by James Peck

A Stranger in My House: Jews and Arabs in the West Bank by Walter Reich

The Lonely Warrior: The Life and Times of Robert S. Abbott, Founder of the Chicago Defender by Roi Ottley

Harlem: People, Power, and Politics 1900-1950 by Roi Ottley (previously published as New World A-Coming for which Ottley won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award)

Agent in Italy by S.K. (an anonymous secret agent)

War in Korea: the Report of a Woman Combat Correspondent by Marguerite Higgins (Pulitzer Prize Winner for International Reporting)

Leatherhead in Korea: On the Front Lines with a U.S. Marine Combat Artist by Norval E. Packwood

The Legend of John Brown by Richard O. Boyer

(Most of the titles above were written by journalists and have straight-forward narratives and could be read by students with 8th to 9th grade reading levels. For example, an excerpt from Freedom Ride scored a Flesh-Kincaid Grade Level of 7.7. The Lonely Warrior, one of our favorite books, scored 10.1. The exception to this is The Legend of John Brown which is college-level reading.) 