FREEDOM
RIDERS
John
Lewis knew that something was wrong the moment he led the Freedom
Riders into the Montgomery bus station. The terminal was nearly
deserted—save for a pack of reporters, and a few figures loitering
in the shadows. Any police were conspicuously absent.
"It
doesn't look right," he told one of the other Riders.
That
was nearly all he had time to say before he was charged by a dozen
white men armed with bats, bottles, and lengths of pipe. A mob
soon followed, led by a woman yelling "Get those niggers!"
Even
the reporters were brutally beaten to the ground. John Seigenthaler,
a Nashville newspaper editor working as a special observer for
Robert Kennedy and the Justice Department, was clubbed unconscious
when he tried to push one of the Riders into a cab.
Yet
nothing compared to the brutality visited upon the young men and
women, black and white, trying to test whether the law of the
land applied to Alabama. Lewis, a seminary student and future
Georgia congressman, was knocked unconscious. Jim Zwerg, a white
exchange student from Wisconsin, was held down while his teeth
were methodically knocked out with his own suitcase. William Barbee
was slugged to the ground and stomped a few feet away from where
his classmate Lewis lay.
Nor
was this sort of treatment unusual. In a scene out of The Road
Warrior, a previous bus had been run down by fifty cars outside
of Anniston, Alabama, and firebombed, as its passengers barely
escaped with their lives. At nearly the same time in Anniston,
white thugs swarmed aboard still another Freedom Rider bus and
beat all aboard mercilessly, including a retired professor who
sustained permanent brain damage.
Nor
did the terror end there. The demonstrators who escaped the buses
were often arrested and imprisoned. Others were denied sanctuary
and even first aid at local hospitals. When some sheltered in
Montgomery's "Brick-a-Day" church, a massive white mob nearly
succeeded in storming and burning the house of worship—with Martin
Luther King, Jr., and dozens of other civil rights leaders inside.
The
time was the spring and the summer of 1961, and it was not the
first or the last time civil rights demonstrators put their bodies
on the line. That had started in 1955, when Rosa Parks refused
to give up her seat on a bus to a white person. There were countless
other heroes, great and low, in the face of relentless, massive
terror. There was King, and Fannie Lou Hamer, and Robert Moses,
the stubborn, soft-spoken New Yorker, who sustained his voting
rights campaigns for four years in Alabama and Mississippi against
incredible obstacles—once even making his bed in an office white
racists had firebombed that afternoon.
The
first, white-hot summer of the movement was heralded on February
1, 1961, when four students at all-black North Carolina A&T, in
Greensboro, staged a sit-in at a Woolworth's counter. The idea
spread like wildfire, and in Nashville, a group of idealistic,
religious, determined individuals, led by James Lawson, James
Bevel, Diane Nash, and Lewis, led a months—long protest that brought
down the city's public segregation laws.
The
Nashville protestors were the backbone of the tiny, new Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and with James Farmer's
Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) they decided to make a living
test of whether the Supreme Court's repeated decisions against
segregated federal facilities—including interstate bus facilities—were
worth the paper they were written on in the Deep South.
Busload
after busload of students—and their elders—put themselves on the
line. They endured beatings, prison, humiliation—and drew first
the support of the more established civil rights organizations,
then the Kennedy administration, and finally much of the public.
They were the first, mass, youth-led revolt of the 1960s, and
the finest.
They
were stubborn. Lewis' beating in Alabama was his second of the
trip; he had already been slugged and kicked to the ground for
trying to enter a white restroom in Virginia. Another carload
of demonstrators was intercepted in Alabama, driven out of the
state by notorious Sheriff Bull Connor himself—and returned the
next day.
They
won their bus stations—some of the first ground claimed for a
new, desegregated America. The movement still had much to endure,
but the children had already led the way. As Jim Zwerg told reporters
from his hospital bed:
"We
will continue our journey one way or another. We are prepared
to die."
American
Greats Edited by Robert A. Wilson & Stanley Marcus
Public Affairs Press, a member of the Perseus Group
