Set the Night on Fire. Mike Davis
on trains, buses and airplanes to include terminals and waiting rooms, as well. In a situation where the law was now crystal clear but its application was bound to elicit violent reactions in hard-core segregationist states, Farmer calculated that Washington would be forced to act. The Ride would help sustain the energy of the student movement while redirecting it to a higher level of contestation involving governors and federal officials, as well as mayors and local business. Everything, however, depended on the volunteers’ willingness to risk their lives by riding into the heart of segregationist darkness.
The thirteen Riders, led by James Farmer, left Washington on May 4 in two groups, one on Trailways and the other on Greyhound, just as in 1947. Unlike the “Journey of Reconciliation,” however, which ventured no further South than North Carolina, their tickets were stamped “New Orleans,” via the Klan strongholds of Alabama and Mississippi. Outside of Anniston, Alabama, the Greyhound bus, its tires slashed, was forced off the road and then firebombed by pursuing Klansmen. According to Raymond Arsenault’s history, “Several members of the mob had pressed against the door screaming, ‘Burn them alive’ and ‘Fry the goddamn niggers,’ and the Freedom Riders had been all but doomed until an exploding fuel tank convinced the mob that the whole bus was about to explode.”7 As the attackers retreated, the passengers crawled out of the bus—only to be attacked with pipes and clubs.
Meanwhile the Trailways contingent, also badly beaten in Anniston, found themselves headed toward Birmingham with some Klansmen as fellow passengers. In Alabama’s largest city the police commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor met with the Klan to choreograph a welcome for the Freedom Riders. He gave Imperial Wizard Bobby Shelton and his carefully selected thugs fifteen minutes to set an example that would deter all future attempts at integration. Through a Klan informant, the FBI knew all about Connor’s sinister plan, but it made no effort to warn CORE or any of the local civil rights leadership. Nor did J. Edgar Hoover bother to inform anyone in the Justice Department.
The massacre that followed (on Mothers’ Day 1961) was such an enthusiastic affair that Klansmen armed with lead pipes and baseball bats hospitalized not only the Riders but also news reporters, Black bystanders and, mistakenly, even one of their own number. President Kennedy, a Cold Warrior first and foremost, was reportedly furious at James Farmer—not Bull Connor or Alabama Governor John Patterson—for embarrassing the administration on the eve of his Vienna summit with Khrushchev. “Can’t you get your goddamned friends off those buses?” he shouted at his White House civil rights advisor. “Stop them!”8
Huddled together at the parsonage of Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, the embattled headquarters of the Birmingham Freedom Movement, the CORE group vowed not to surrender and instead went downtown to catch the next Greyhound to Montgomery. But Governor Patterson stopped the departure, going on television to warn that he was unable to protect the Freedom Riders from Klan ambushes along the route. Bobby Kennedy finally convinced the group to fly to New Orleans, but they ended up spending the night on the plane at the Birmingham airport as one anonymous bomb threat after another was called in. Connor and his Klan allies gloated over their victory.
It was a miracle that several of the volunteers hadn’t been burned or beaten to death. Farmer, whom many in the NAACP regarded as irresponsible for concocting what Roy Wilkins had called a “joy ride,” now wavered in face of the near certainty that any attempt to resume the Ride from Birmingham would be a virtual death sentence for participants. But Diane Nash, the key strategist of the Nashville sit-in movement and cofounder of SNCC, urged him not to lose nerve and capitulate to white violence now that the very premise of nonviolent social change was at stake. Student reinforcements, she assured Farmer, were coming from Nashville under the leadership of John Lewis and were ready to sacrifice their lives if necessary. Although their first attempt to board buses in Birmingham was thwarted when Connor jailed and then deported them across the state line to Tennessee, the kamikaze contingent soon regrouped and clandestinely returned to Birmingham. One of their members was twenty-year-old Susan Hermann, a white exchange student at Fisk University in Nashville from Whittier College (her family lived in Mar Vista, just east of Venice Beach). After much arm wrestling between Alabama officials and the Justice Department, they were allowed to board a Greyhound for Montgomery, the state capital.
There another ambush awaited them, with the Klan again given ten minutes of police noninterference to commit maximum mayhem. When Bobby Kennedy’s representative at the scene, Assistant Attorney General John Seigenthaler, attempted to rescue Hermann and another young woman from the mob, he was beaten unconscious with a pipe. In an escalation that took Washington by surprise, the city and state police then allowed several thousand whites to besiege the injured Freedom Riders and their local supporters in the sanctuary of Ralph Abernathy’s First Baptist Church. A hastily cobbled-together task force of federal marshals sent to protect the church was attacked, and came close to being overrun, before Governor Patterson, aware that the Army was on alert at Fort Benning, finally sent in troopers to quell the mob. He had cut a cynical deal with the Justice Department: the bus carrying the CORE and SNCC volunteers would be escorted safely through Alabama and handed over to the Mississippi State Police. The Riders were unaware that Kennedy had also promised not to interfere with Mississippi authorities as long as they prevented white violence. Thus, upon arrival in Jackson, the Nashville contingent was arrested and then imprisoned after refusing bail. This became the routine for the rest of the summer: a grim endurance contest between waves of arriving Freedom Riders and their Mississippi jailers. To meet this new challenge, Martin Luther King and James Farmer convened a meeting in Atlanta where SCLC, CORE, SNCC and the Nashville freedom movement formalized their alliance as the Freedom Ride Coordinating Committee. The rides would continue, and in mid June King flew to California to raise money and publicize the FRCC’s demand for a summit conference with President Kennedy.9
Surprise Packages
As the organization’s historians point out, “the joint sponsorship arrangement notwithstanding, the major responsibility for recruiting, financing and coordinating the Riders fell upon CORE.” This commitment was symbolized by Farmer’s decision to join his young comrades in prison. Meanwhile the strong New Orleans chapter provided a regional base of operations, while CORE field secretaries in Atlanta, Montgomery and Jackson acted both as troubleshooters and emissaries to local Black communities. They also continued to test terminal facilities for compliance with the decision of the Supreme Court—until the Interstate Commerce Commission in September finally did what it always had the power to do and banned Jim Crow in facilities under its jurisdiction.10
Recruits for the June Freedom Rides came from divinity schools in the North and traditional Black colleges in the border South. West Coast CORE chapters were meanwhile nominated to serve as a strategic reserve—“surprise packages” of activists to be shipped to Mississippi when the need arose. CORE membership, as Farmer had originally hoped, grew explosively over the summer, as did the pool of potential Freedom Riders—their deployment primarily limited by training and legal resources.11 One example of CORE’s popular charisma was in the San Fernando Valley, where two Berkeley students, Ken Cloke and Pat Kovner (a Freedom Rider in August), had spent the beginning of the summer break assembling a surprisingly large and active chapter, many of them grads from Reseda High School, where Cloke had been student body president two years earlier.
At the beginning of June, CORE opened up an office around the corner from LA City College on Melrose Avenue. Ed Blankenheim, a white Marine veteran turned pacifist who had been on the Greyhound burned outside Anniston, was sent out by Farmer to interview volunteers and plan an LA-origin Freedom Ride that would proceed by train to New Orleans, then by bus to Jackson. But L.A. CORE was also debating how to respond to the area’s own simmering racial crisis. One provocation quickly followed another. Three of the Black youth arrested during the Memorial Day incident in Griffith Park, which Chief Parker had blamed on “the publicity coming out of the South in connection with the Freedom Rides,” were indicted for “lynching” and “assault with intent to commit murder,” while white youth who pelted sheriff deputies with sand-packed beer cans during a far larger “riot” at Zuma Beach a few weeks later were charged with no more than misdemeanors. (Even petty theft could become a capital offense in South Central: in February a fourteen-year-old trying to steal some candy had been shot to death in a darkened theater by