Arsenault Raymond. Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice

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226 Freedom Riders

Farmer was not the only person perplexed by King’s decision to interject

himself into the Montgomery crisis. At the Justice Department, Robert

Kennedy nearly exploded when he received word that King had agreed to

lead a rally at First Baptist. The decision to send in the marshals was risky

enough, but King’s involvement presented Kennedy with a nightmare sce-

nario. Already the subject of intense news coverage, the Montgomery situa-

tion would become a media circus if King were allowed to take center stage.

Considering the probable threat to King’s safety, the federal government

would have no choice but to offer him protection, a development that was

bound to add fuel to the fire of massive resistance. In an effort to forestall

this escalation of the crisis, Kennedy called King in Chicago to plead with

him to stay away from Montgomery. To Kennedy’s dismay, King refused to

change his plans. After a follow-up call from Burke Marshall produced similar

results, Kennedy, in desperation, turned to Seigenthaler for help, hoping that

a plea from his injured assistant might change King’s mind. Kennedy arranged

for Seigenthaler to make the call, but before Seigenthaler actually talked to

King, Kennedy called back to say it was no use. The SCLC leader had made it

clear that nothing could dissuade him from appearing at the rally.

The near certainty that King was coming to Montgomery erased any

doubts at the Justice Department about the wisdom of mobilizing a force of

federal marshals. Convinced that the crisis was deepening, Kennedy sum-

moned his staff, set up a round-the-clock command center in his office, and

established an open phone line to his brother’s weekend retreat at Glen Ora,

Virginia. While the Kennedys and other administration officials still held

out some hope that state authorities—perhaps with the help of the National

Guard—could keep things in hand, King’s involvement dramatically increased

the likelihood that the marshals would actually be used. Even if no actual

rioting ensued, marshals would still be needed to escort King to and from the

church—an unwelcome development that would provide Alabama segrega-

tionists with a convenient symbol of federal encroachment. All of this weighed

heavily on Robert Kennedy’s staff as they proceeded with the mobilization of

the marshals. But by early Saturday evening there was no turning back. White,

Oberdorfer, and several other Justice Department officials had already boarded

a plane to Montgomery provided by Najeeb Halaby, the head of the Federal

Aviation Administration and White and Oberdorfer’s former classmate at

Yale Law School.

Arriving at Maxwell Air Force Base at eight o’clock, White and his staff

set up headquarters in a vacant Quonset hut that soon became a processing

center for hundreds of newly deputized marshals. McShane and other expe-

rienced marshals from the District of Columbia, who had arrived earlier in

the day, provided a core of professionalism, but White soon discovered that

most of his makeshift civilian army was a motley assortment of revenue agents,

prison guards, and border patrolmen. As Marshall later acknowledged, “the

border patrol were the only ones that could shoot. . . . Most of them,” he

If You Miss Me from the Back of the Bus 227

admitted, “were the product of senatorial patronage, middle-aged, fat, le-

thargic people with no law enforcement experience. Many of them came

from the South and really thought they were being asked to protect black

people whom they considered Communists, or worse. We weren’t sure which

side they would be on.” White himself, of course, was no general, though he

had served in the navy during World War II. His sense of command stemmed

primarily from his years as an All-American football star at the University of

Colorado, where he had earned the nickname “Whizzer.” Renowned for his

bulldog demeanor, he was a self-professed political realist who, as head of

Citizens for Kennedy during the 1960 campaign, had counseled against ide-

alistic involvement in civil rights matters. He was also politically ambitious.

On the flight down, he and Oberdorfer had speculated about the likely po-

litical fallout from their mission to Montgomery, wondering aloud whether

the expected ire of Southern conservatives would doom his chances of mov-

ing up the ladder at the Justice Department. White’s own conservatism was

one of the reasons why Robert Kennedy had entrusted him with command

of the marshals, but whether he could survive the counter-pressures of duty

and practical politics remained to be seen.

Across town John Doar faced pressure of a different kind. While White

and Oberdorfer were busy assembling their peacekeeping force, Doar was

running out of time in his efforts to secure a temporary restraining order

against the Klan and other groups determined to break the peace. Although

he was confident that Judge Frank Johnson would sign the order, Doar had

to find him first. Johnson, as it turned out, was spending the weekend at his

summer cottage fifty miles north of Montgomery. Fortunately, Lee Dodd, a

lifelong friend of Johnson’s who also served as his marshal, agreed to guide

Doar to the cottage. After driving through the Alabama woods and crossing

a small lake by boat, Doar and Dodd finally reached Johnson’s cottage a few

minutes after midnight. As expected, the judge promptly granted the restrain-

ing order, though he surprised Doar by limiting the order’s scope to the

alleged perpetrators of the Montgomery riot. For the time being, the Klans-

men responsible for the previous week’s violence in Birmingham were off

the hook. Though disappointed, Doar realized that granting even a limited

order was an act of courage for an Alabama judge. Accordingly, as soon as he

returned to Montgomery he quietly arranged for a band of federal marshals

to protect Johnson’s life.

Along with the marshals’ arrival, the granting of the temporary restrain-

ing order set the stage for a dramatic political showdown between state and

federal authorities. By Sunday morning Governor Patterson, who seemed to

relish his new role as the South’s leading defender of states’ rights, was fulmi-

nating against Washington’s unwarranted invasion of Alabama. Pushed into a

dangerous but politically promising corner, he demanded a meeting with White

in full view of the press. When White arrived at the capitol, the governor was

flanked by the entire Alabama cabinet and a gaggle of reporters. Wasting no

228 Freedom Riders

time, Patterson immediately took the offensive. “We consider you interlop-

ers here,” he declared, “and we feel that your presence here will only serve to

agitate and provoke the racial situation. We don’t need your marshals, we

don’t want them, and we didn’t ask for them. And still the Federal Govern-

ment sends them here to help put down a disturbance which it helped cre-

ate.” Declining to take the bait, White remained calm. But Patterson refused

to let up, warning White that the federal marshals risked arrest if they chal-

lenged state sovereignty. “Make especially certain,” he counseled, “that none

of your men encroach on any of our state laws, rights or functions, because

we’ll arrest them just like anybody else.” Patterson went on to grill White

about the motives and location of the Freedom Riders, who he claimed were

Communist-inspired agitators. After denying that there was any evidence of

Communist infiltration into the Freedom Rider movement, White bravely

added that “no matter what this group’s connection may be, if any, that is no

reason why they shouldn’t be assured of the right to travel peacefully by

bus.” Undeterred, Patterson demanded to know if federal marshals were will-

ing to help state authorities enforce Judge Jones’s injunction against outside

agitators. Caught off guard, White pleaded ignorance of the injunction—

and of the Freedom Riders’ exact whereabouts. No, he would not arrest the

Deputy Attorney General Byron “Whizzer” White (seated on left) discusses

the Freedom Rider crisis with Governor John Patterson (seated at the head

of the table) and his cabinet at the Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery,

Sunday, May 21, 1961. (Getty Photos)

If You Miss Me from the Back of the Bus 229

Freedom Riders or even help state authorities to apprehend them. Satisfied

with this admission, Patterson allowed the forty-five-minute ordeal to end.

The political battle lines had been drawn, though neither side was quite sure

how far the other was willing to go to make its point.

Deeply discouraged by his meeting with Patterson, White took the risky

step of bypassing the chain of command with a late-morning call to the White

House. Although the attorney general was his immediate superior, he felt

more comfortable speaking directly with the president, whom he had known

since their navy days in the Pacific. The marshals’ presence in Alabama seemed

to be making matters worse, he told John Kennedy, adding that it might be

prudent to have them withdrawn. Wisely, Kennedy sidestepped White’s sug-

gestion with a gentle admonition and a plea for fortitude. But White’s mo-

mentary crisis of confidence would later prove embarrassing when word of

the proposed withdrawal reached Patterson via an eavesdropping telephone

operator.

After assuring the president that he would do his best, White steeled his

nerves and turned his attention to the crisis of the moment. A plane carrying

Martin Luther King was scheduled to arrive around noon, and White had

dispatched an armed guard of fifty marshals to the Montgomery airport to

make sure that no one got hurt. Fortunately, the scene at the airport was

quiet, and the marshals safely escorted King to a brief private meeting with

Nash, Lewis, and Lafayette at an outlying black church before proceeding

on to Abernathy’s downtown parsonage. Later in the afternoon twelve of the

marshals returned to the airport to provide an escort for Shuttlesworth, who

soon joined the Freedom Riders who had gathered in the basement library at

First Baptist, where they were hiding as fugitives from the injunction issued

by Judge Jones. Zwerg and Barbee were still in the hospital, and Wilbur and

Hermann were already back in Nashville, but the rest were on hand to wel-

come a procession of rallying friends and allies that included Shuttlesworth,

Nash, Walker, Len Holt, and NAG volunteers Paul Dietrich and John Moody.

The reunion with Nash was especially emotional. For nearly a week she had

been physically removed from the action in Alabama, trying to maintain a

steady hand without actually confronting what she and the Freedom Riders

were up against. Now she was in the thick of things, trying to comprehend

the drama that was unfolding before her.

ALTHOUGH THE MASS MEETING was scheduled to begin at eight o’clock, the

faithful began to arrive at First Baptist as early as five. At that point only a

few protesters were in sight of the church, and the early-comers had no trouble

making their way to the sanctuary. Outside, a dozen marshals wearing yellow

armbands stood quietly by, warily observing the surrounding streets. Then,

and for several hours thereafter, the only other law enforcement officers

present were a handful of FBI agents and two plainclothes state detectives

sent to monitor the situation. Indeed, the most striking aspect of the scene

230 Freedom Riders

was who was not there. Throughout the day local radio stations had broad-

cast “the news that Negroes would hold a mass meeting that night at the

First Baptist Church,” virtually ensuring that a large crowd of white protest-

ers would eventually descend upon the church; and “all day long,” according

to one observer, “carloads of grim-faced whites converged on Montgom-

ery.” Yet there were no city policemen, no uniformed highway patrolmen,

and no National Guardsmen on the scene. As events would soon prove, this

was a formula for mob violence. At the time, though, authorities on all sides

seemed determined to play a dangerous guessing game of holding back and

waiting for their counterparts to make the first move. Sullivan and the police

wanted nothing to do with protecting the Freedom Riders, and among state

officials only Mann showed any inclination to accept responsibility for keep-

ing the peace—and even he wasn’t much help, hamstrung as he was by

Patterson’s stubborn determination to extract as much political capital out of

the affair as possible.

Despite all the rhetoric of the past twenty-four hours, federal authorities

in Washington and at Maxwell Field were also reticent to do anything be-

yond the minimum effort needed to forestall disaster. Even as dusk approached

and the crowd outside the church swelled to two thousand and beyond, Jus-

tice Department officials stuck to the plan of waiting for Patterson’s call for

assistance. Unless the situation got completely out of hand, they would not

reinforce the small band of marshals at the scene until officially asked to do

so. This hesitancy to act reflected political sensitivity to Patterson’s charges

of federal encroachment, but more than politics was involved. The scene at

Maxwell Field on Saturday afternoon bordered on chaos as White and his

staff readied the marshals for duty. Although William Orrick, an assistant

attorney general with some military experience, did his best to organize the

nearly four hundred marshals into workable units, severe organizational and

logistical problems persisted. Not only did properly arming the marshals prove

to be a challenge, but for a time the marshals even lacked a means of getting

downtown. When local army officials unexpectedly refused to allow the mar-

shals to use military trucks, White and Orrick had no choice but to comman-

deer an assortment of air force vehicles and mail trucks borrowed from the

Montgomery post office. By nightfall both the marshals and the trucks were

more or less ready for action, though White still held out some hope that

they would not be needed.

Despite the sense of foreboding that dominated the marshals’ periodic

reports, so far the crowd outside First Baptist had limited its protests to name-

calling and occasional jostling. By eight o’clock fifteen hundred people were

inside the sanctuary, and the rising sound of hymns and amens signaled the

beginning of the program. The vast majority of the crowd inside the church

was black—the only whites being news reporters and television cameramen,

plus a few white liberals such as Jessica Mitford. Many of those present were

veterans of the mass meetings that had sustained the bus boycott five years

If You Miss Me from the Back of the Bus 231

earlier, but nothing quite like this had been seen in Montgomery for a long

time. With King still downstairs polishing the speech that he had written on

the plane, the Reverend Seay opened the program with a description of how

the Freedom Riders, who had gathered at his home to restore their energies

for the coming struggle, had inspired him with their courage. The Freedom

Riders were in the sanctuary, he told the crowd, but he did not dare intro-

duce them because an unjust law had made them fugitives. The only “Free-

dom Rider” that he could safely identify was Diane Nash, who had been

given a seat of honor near the front of the church. Eventually, without nam-

ing names, he asked a couple of the Riders to make a brief statement, but the

fear of arrest kept them in the background for most of the evening. As an

extra precaution, all of the Riders were dressed in choir robes to make them

more difficult to identify.

While Seay presided over the emotional opening of the mass meeting, a

drama of a different sort was developing downstairs, where a conclave of

ministers—including King and Abernathy—was growing increasingly con-

cerned about the size and mood of the crowd outside. The last few parishio-

ners who had straggled into the church had encountered screamed epithets

and a shower of rocks, and some protesters were beginning to smash the

windows of cars parked along Ripley Street. Even more alarming to King

was the rumor that a group of armed black taxicab drivers was planning to

confront the white protesters. No one had been hurt, and so far the cabdriv-

ers had kept their distance from the mob, but the situation was serious enough

to prompt King to venture outside to see for himself. Ignoring the strong

objections of his aides, he and a few volunteers spent several minutes circling

the church and eyeing the crowd across the street. At first the protesters

seemed stunned by the scouting party’s audacity, but eventually someone

recognized the famous Atlanta preacher and began screaming, “Nigger King!”

Before long, rocks and other missiles were being thrown in King’s direction—

including a metal canister that one of his aides feared was a bomb. As the aide

tossed aside what turned out to be an empty tear gas canister, King and the

others scurried back inside the church.

A few minutes later Shuttlesworth had his own brush with the mob. Ear-

lier in the evening, before the crowd had grown unruly, he had volunteered

to pick up Farmer at the airport. Now, as he and Farmer approached the

church, the scene was much more menacing. Surrounded by a group of an-

gry whites who began to rock their car, the two men fled on foot through a

nearby cemetery. Before reaching the church, they encountered an even larger

mass of protesters. To Farmer’s amazement, Shuttlesworth simply plowed

through them, screaming, “Out of the way! Come on! Let him through! Out

of the way!”—as if he were escorting a visiting dignitary. With Shuttlesworth

waving his arms wildly above his head, the protesters in front of him stepped

aside just long enough to allow the two civil rights leaders to make it to the

church’s basement door. “That Shuttlesworth, who’s just a little fellow, was

232 Freedom Riders

either insane or the most courageous man I’ve ever met,” Farmer recalled

with a chuckle years later. “I tried to hide behind him, but I didn’t fit. Fortu-

nately, those people didn’t know who I was. Shuttlesworth just walked through

them, cool as a cucumber.”

Once inside, Farmer and Shuttlesworth were taken upstairs to the sanctu-

ary, where King introduced the CORE leader to a congregation that was grow-

ing increasingly concerned about what was going on outside. Following his

encounter with the tear gas canister, King had tried to reassure the men, women,

and children inside the church that the marshals had everything under control;

and now the safe arrival of Shuttlesworth and Farmer served as proof that all

was well. As Farmer embraced Lewis, whom he had grown fond of during the

first week of the original Freedom Ride, and Nash, whom he had never met, a

rush of amens filled the sanctuary. Farmer then stepped to the pulpit for a few

salutary words before retiring to the basement to join King, Abernathy, and

the other movement leaders, who were busily assessing the situation.

It was now a few minutes past eight, and the crisis of the moment was an

overturned car. The car, it was later discovered, was an ancient Buick that

the Durrs had loaned to Jessica Mitford. Ignoring Virginia Durr’s advice to

park no closer than “three or four blocks,” Mitford had left the car directly in

front of the church. As King and others watched through a half-open window,

Ministers and other civil rights leaders address the Freedom Rider rally at the

besieged First Baptist Church in Montgomery, Sunday evening, May 21, 1961.

The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. is standing in the center of the group at the

pulpit. Jim Farmer is the figure on the far right of the pulpit. (Getty Photos)

If You Miss Me from the Back of the Bus 233

the crowd torched the car’s gas tank, causing an explosion that seemed to

signal an assault on the church itself. Up to this point, the marshals had man-

aged to keep the protesters off of church property and on the far side of

Ripley Street, but now the mob was closing in amid screams of “Let’s clean

the niggers out of here!” Regrouping along the near side of Ripley Street,

the marshals, with the encouragement of Mann’s two detectives, used their

nightsticks to keep the mob at bay. But, as they soon informed White by

radio, it was only a matter of time before the thin shield of marshals was

pushed aside. White immediately relayed this alarming message to Robert

Kennedy, who reluctantly gave the go-ahead for the deployment of the nearly

four hundred marshals at Maxwell Field. Within minutes McShane, an ex–

New York cop who had served as John Kennedy’s bodyguard and chauffeur

during the 1960 campaign, was back on the road, this time leading a convoy

of postal trucks and air force vehicles toward First Baptist. With the marshals

jammed in the back and with black drivers at the wheel of several of the red,

white, and blue postal trucks, the convoy made for a strange sight as it ca-

reened through the streets of west Montgomery. Not since the Reconstruc-

tion era of the 1870s had Montgomerians seen anything quite like this.

While McShane and the reinforcements were en route, the situation

outside the church grew increasingly ominous. As rocks, bricks, and Molotov

cocktails rained down on the church grounds, the hopelessly outnumbered

marshals—led by William Behen, a revenue agent from Florida—bought a

few minutes of time by firing several rounds of tear gas into the crowd of

protesters, some of whom waved Confederate flags in defiance. With each

round the crowd fell back for a moment, only to advance again as soon as the

air cleared. Inside the church, the Reverend Seay led the congregation through

several rousing choruses of “Love Lifted Me” in a spirited attempt to stem a

full-scale panic. “I want to hear everybody sing,” Seay roared from the pul-

pit, “and mean every word of it.” Sing they did, but the stanzas of faith and

hope did not stop them from preparing to defend themselves and their fami-

lies. Anticipating trouble, many of the men—and some of the women—had

come to the church armed with knives and pistols, and there was little doubt

that they would use them against the white mob if necessary. “We riders

were nonviolent, steeped and trained in the teachings of Gandhi,” Lewis

later explained, “but most of the people of Montgomery were not.”

All of this, plus the news that some members of the mob had broken

through the line of marshals and were banging on the church door, prompted

King to ask Wyatt Tee Walker to call Robert Kennedy in Washington. Sec-

onds earlier Kennedy had received an ominous report from White, who had

been monitoring the assault via an open radio line, so he was not surprised

when Walker, and then King, described the situation as desperate. Dispens-

ing with formalities, Kennedy immediately assured King that a large contin-

gent of marshals was on its way. After Walker and Abernathy rushed upstairs

to deliver the good news, King pressed Kennedy for details. Unsure of the

234 Freedom Riders

marshals’ exact location, Kennedy responded that they would be there soon.

When King pressed him again a few seconds later, Kennedy tried to change

the subject. Wasn’t it time to call off or at least postpone the Freedom Ride?

he asked. Would the Freedom Riders agree to some sort of “cooling-off pe-

riod” that would give federal and state authorities the opportunity to work

out a solution? Not quire sure how to respond to this request, King explained

that he could not speak for the Freedom Riders; he would, however, broach

the idea with Jim Farmer and Diane Nash. Satisfied that he had at least planted

the idea of a cooling-off period, Kennedy tried to ease the tension with a

nervous quip: “As long as you’re in church, Reverend King, and our men are

down there, you might as well say a prayer for us.” Unimpressed with this

strained attempt at gallows humor, King respectfully reminded Kennedy that

the mob was closing in. If the marshals “don’t get here immediately,” King

exclaimed, “we’re going to have a bloody confrontation.” Fortunately, the

marshals’ arrival soon brought what was becoming an awkward conversation

to a close. Before signing off, a greatly relieved King thanked Kennedy for

his intervention and promised to call back as soon as the crisis had subsided.

They would not talk again until 12:10

A.M. Montgomery time, three long

hours later.

Before making his way upstairs, King quickly briefed Abernathy, Nash,

and Farmer on the essentials of his conversation with Kennedy. Turning

Freedom Rider supporters choke on tear gas as they step outside the First Baptist

Church in Montgomery, Sunday evening, May 21, 1961. The man standing near-

est the right-hand door is CORE attorney Len Holt. (Bettmann-CORBIS)

If You Miss Me from the Back of the Bus 235

first to Farmer, the organizer of the original Freedom Ride, King relayed the

suggestion about the cooling-off period. Though obviously pleased to be

consulted, Farmer did not think much of Kennedy’s suggestion. “I won’t

stop it now,” he replied. “If I do, we’ll just get words and promises.” After

King hinted that he was inclined to agree with the attorney general’s conclu-

sion that “the Freedom Ride has already made its point and now should be

called off,” Farmer asked Nash what she thought of the idea. “No,” she re-

sponded, with a flash of irritation. “The Nashville Student Movement wants

to go on. We can’t stop it now right after we’ve been clobbered.” Buoyed by

her certainty, Farmer gave King a definitive answer. “Please tell the attorney

general that we’ve been cooling off for 350 years,” he declared in a voice loud

enough to be heard throughout the basement. “If we cool off any more, we

will be in a deep freeze. The Freedom Ride will go on.” Nash was relieved

when King agreed to deliver the message, but as the group of leaders walked

upstairs to see what was happening, she couldn’t help wondering what might

have happened if the decision had been left to the great men of the move-

ment. In the days ahead, she and other members of the Nashville Movement

would have to keep vigilant watch over their nervous elders, or so she feared.

King and his colleagues had no idea how many marshals had been dis-

patched, but as they peered out the church windows, the situation seemed to

be improving. After pushing part of the mob back with their nightsticks, the

marshals lobbed a massive round of tear gas that momentarily cleared the

church grounds. Unfortunately, the retreat proved to be short-lived, and sev-

eral members of the mob were soon back pounding on the church’s front

door. To make matters worse, the besieged congregation had to contend

with a cloud of tear gas that had drifted into the sanctuary. The marshals,

most without gas masks, also found themselves gasping for air. Forced to

withdraw from the area in front of the church, they temporarily lost what-

ever tactical advantage they might have enjoyed. Suddenly an aroused van-

guard of protesters was on the verge of breaking into the front of the church.

Cutting through the church basement, a rescue squad of marshals managed

to block the intruders with nightsticks and an additional round of tear gas,

but not before one of the rioters shattered a large stained-glass window with

a brick. The brick also struck the forehead of an elderly parishioner, who was

soon being attended by several nurses. Most of the congregation, however,

sought refuge on the sanctuary floor. At Seay’s urgent request, the children

were evacuated to the basement, just in time to escape a volley of rocks that

broke several windows. Before long, however, no one in the church, not even

those in the basement, could avoid the sickening fumes of the tear gas that

had seeped through the building’s exterior. Despite the marshals’ good in-

tentions, the rescue was turning into a fiasco.

Even so, there was no wholesale panic in the church. Over the next thirty

minutes, as the outnumbered marshals struggled to keep the mob at bay, the

besieged parishioners at First Baptist continued to tap an inner strength that