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

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456 Freedom Riders

on, segregation was dead.” In the aftermath of the November 1 confronta-

tion, the black community in Albany seemed to take on a new spirit of

assertiveness and pride. Indeed, despite persistent disputes over organiza-

tional authority and the advisability of outside involvement in the local

struggle, the expectation of direct and even militant action would soon be-

come a widely accepted fact of life in Albany.

BY THE END OF THE YEAR the gathering movement in Albany would become

one of the freedom struggle’s most visible manifestations, but in early No-

vember it was still a minor sideshow in the larger drama prompted by the

implementation and testing of the ICC order. At the CORE and NAACP

offices in New York, at SCLC’s headquarters in Atlanta, and at the FRCC

recruiting stations around the South, the focus of attention was the system-

atic testing of the order by several hundred volunteers. After weeks of care-

ful preparation, CORE, acting on behalf of the FRCC, dispatched several

dozen bands of Freedom Riders during the first week of November. With

Gordon Carey and Marvin Rich serving as the primary coordinators, teams

of testers traveled designated routes in sixteen states, from the Deep South

to the border regions of Oklahoma, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware.

The goal was to get a comprehensive picture of compliance and noncom-

pliance that could be reported to the press and forwarded to the ICC and

the Justice Department.

Publicly CORE and other FRCC leaders predicted near universal com-

pliance, but privately they conceded that there was no way of knowing how

the white South would respond to the ICC order. In truth, they expected a

mixed response, ranging from gracious acceptance to grudging acknowledg-

ment to outright resistance. Since the mass testing represented the most

ambitious short-term project ever attempted by CORE or any other civil

rights organization, there were also concerns about logistical shortcomings

and possible lapses in nonviolent discipline. While some of the testers were

veterans of earlier Freedom Rides, most were new and untested volunteers—

a less than ideal situation for a movement that could ill afford a misstep.

Since CORE wanted the tests to replicate the experiences of normal travel-

ers, local volunteers were essential, but this strategy carried obvious risks.

Whatever the degree of compliance, getting to the end of the day without

suffering an embarrassing incident or losing anyone along the way would be

an accomplishment in itself.

Fortunately for CORE, as the reports trickled in during the first week

of testing, it became clear that even the unseasoned testers were living up

to the high standards of poise and discipline that had characterized the

Freedom Rider movement since early May. Perhaps even more important,

the reports indicated that most of the testers were encountering less resis-

tance than expected. The best news came out of Virginia, Kentucky, Texas,

and West Virginia, where the tests found total compliance. In Florida, where

Oh, Freedom 457

tests were conducted at bus stations in Jacksonville and the Panhandle com-

munities of Tallahassee and Marianna, there was compliance but no sign of

the required ICC postings; the same was true in Arkansas, where Freedom

Riders were served at bus stations in six cities. In Tennessee there was compli-

ance in four of the five bus stations tested, with mandated segregation per-

sisting only in the small town of Linden. In North Carolina the only

community to enforce transit segregation on the first day of the new order

was the tiny Piedmont town of Wadesboro, just down the road from Mon-

roe. And in Oklahoma noncompliance was limited to McAlester, a remote

hill town in the southeastern part of the state.

The reports from the Deep South, though decidedly mixed, were more

troubling. In South Carolina testers were served without incident in Charles-

ton, Columbia, Greenville, Rock Hill, Spartanburg, and Sumter, but segre-

gated facilities persisted in Camden, Florence, and Lancaster. In some South

Carolina communities—in Camden, where a follow-up test revealed compli-

ance, and in Greenville, where the manager of the Trailways station endorsed

compliance but insisted that many black passengers were confused by the

ICC order and “didn’t know where to sit”—the situation was difficult to evalu-

ate. Similar inconsistencies appeared in Louisiana, where compliance was

generally limited to New Orleans and the southern Cajun parishes. When a

group of Freedom Riders arrived in the southwest Louisiana town of Crowley,

they were greeted by “policemen armed with sawed-off shotguns and tear gas

guns.” Though fearing the worst, the Riders soon learned that the somewhat

overzealous local sheriff simply “wanted to avoid an Alabama or Mississippi

incident.” Adding to the confusion, the waiting room at the Crowley Grey-

hound terminal complied with the ICC order, but the adjacent terminal res-

taurant remained closed to black patrons. There was more consistency in the

northern and central part of the state, where Freedom Riders encountered stiff

resistance from police determined to maintain segregated facilities. In Shreve-

port, Monroe, Alexandria, and Lafayette, black Riders were barred from en-

tering white waiting rooms, and in Baton Rouge a terminal restaurant was

closed. When the manager of the Shreveport Trailways terminal defied a po-

lice order and removed several

WHITES ONLY signs, he ended up in jail. And when

Trailways officials removed segregation signs in Alexandria, a state judge imme-

diately ordered the installation of new signs.

The situation was no less confusing in Georgia, where state officials had

taken preliminary steps to challenge the legality of the ICC order in federal

court but where Freedom Riders also found compliance in a number of com-

munities, including Thomasville, Valdosta, Macon, and Augusta. At this point

the only sign of active noncompliance outside of Albany was an ugly incident

at the Atlanta Trailways station, where Jim Forman, Charles Jones, Bernard

Lafayette, and Jim Bevel were arrested after trying to desegregate the whites-

only lunch counter at Jake’s Fine Foods. The Atlanta arrests surprised some

458 Freedom Riders

movement observers who had expected more from a city that had taken the

first steps toward school desegregation earlier in the year. But no one was

surprised by the turmoil that ensued when CORE testers attempted to de-

segregate bus station facilities in Birmingham, Alabama.

Hoping to avoid violence, CORE leaders scheduled a minimal number

of tests in Alabama. The symbolic importance of Birmingham, however, was

impossible to ignore, and Freedom Riders were sent into the city on Novem-

ber 3. Two days earlier, on the day the ICC order went into effect, the trial

of the Anniston bus burners had opened in the courtroom of U.S. District

Judge H. Hobart Grooms, an unfortunate coincidence that concerned both

government and movement observers. Almost simultaneously Grooms’s col-

league in Montgomery, Judge Frank Johnson, had issued an injunction en-

joining Trailways and Greyhound officials, as well as state and local officials,

from maintaining segregation among interstate passengers at any of the ter-

minals located in the twenty-three counties of the Middle District of Ala-

bama. Unfortunately, this injunction did not apply to Birmingham or Bull

Connor, who promised to arrest anyone who violated the city’s segregation

ordinances. Though somewhat less specific, Governor Patterson appeared

to endorse Connor’s threat, labeling Johnson’s ruling an “insult to every citi-

zen of Alabama.” If the Freedom Riders “continue to invade our state and

continue to try to run over us,” Patterson warned, “we want to serve notice

that we are going to defend ourselves and we are not going to take it lying

down.” This bluster did not prevent compliance in several Alabama towns

and cities, including Anniston, where CORE testers successfully desegre-

gated the lunch counters at both of the city’s bus terminals. But Connor’s

Birmingham was another matter.

When the testers arrived at the Birmingham Greyhound station, the re-

quired ICC posting was, predictably, nowhere in sight. But Ralph Sizemore,

the thirty-four-year-old manager of the Greyhound cafeteria, agreed to serve

the testers anyway. Moments later, a Birmingham policeman stepped forward

to arrest Sizemore for violating a city ordinance outlawing mixed dining. While

the Freedom Riders themselves escaped arrest, Sizemore was carted off to jail

before being released on a hundred-dollar bond. On November 5, when Free-

dom Riders made a second attempt to desegregate the cafeteria, Sizemore was

rearrested along with two waitresses. And over the next three days the plucky

manager was arrested two more times. Caught in the middle, Greyhound offi-

cials urged the Justice Department to intervene, but department officials in

Washington were reluctant to do so, fearing that a precipitous attempt to en-

force the ICC order would only make matters worse. The only “official” re-

sponse from the Federal government came from Malcolm Weaver, the U.S.

attorney in Birmingham, who worked out a tentative compromise with city

attorney John Breckinridge. If the city called a halt to the arrests, Weaver

promised, the Justice Department would not contest state court jurisdiction

over the Sizemore case. Summarily rejected by Bull Connor, the proposed

Oh, Freedom 459

agreement had little discernible effect on a legal impasse that would bedevil

lawyers and politicians for several months. But the Justice Department’s ti-

midity did not go unnoticed among movement leaders awaiting confirmation

of the department’s determination to enforce the ICC order.

Judging by the early reports from Mississippi, the ICC was going to need

all the help it could get. Although there was an encouraging report from the

Delta town of Greenville, where a group of interracial testers was served

without incident, Mississippi Freedom Riders met stiff resistance everywhere

else. In Hamilton and Tupelo testers were told that the local bus stations had

been closed “for repairs,” and in a dozen other communities the ICC order

was simply ignored. In Grenada city officials challenged the order with a new

ordinance prohibiting race mixing in all public facilities, and in Meridian the

police installed new signs directing passengers to separate waiting rooms. In

the Vicksburg station the ICC order was prominently displayed, but that did

not stop the local police from escorting two black Freedom Riders out of the

white waiting room.

Although the Vicksburg testers avoided arrest, three Freedom Riders

who tried to desegregate the Jackson Trailways terminal were not so fortu-

nate. The first tester arrested was the Reverend Charles Jones, dean of

Campbell Junior College, the institution that had welcomed the McComb

students expelled from Burgland High School. Entering the white waiting

room at the Trailways terminal just after dawn, Jones was promptly arrested

for breaching the peace. An hour later a policeman patrolling the same wait-

ing room arrested Levert Taylor and Glenda Jackson, two veterans of Shreve-

port CORE who had just arrived on an overnight bus. In Jackson, as in

McComb, bus company officials had posted the ICC order and had even

painted over the

WHITE and COLORED door signs that identified separate waiting

rooms. But just before the order went into effect, city officials in both cities

countermanded these actions by placing temporary Jim Crow signs on the

sidewalks adjacent to the cities’ bus and railway stations. When asked to ex-

plain this apparent inconsistency, Mayor Thompson told reporters that he

had consented to the ICC posting and the sign removal because he “didn’t

want to embarrass the bus and train people.” Denying that the arrests at the

Trailways station constituted a violation of the ICC order, he repeated the

familiar refrain that he was simply trying to keep the peace. “We’re going to

see that there’s no violence from these agitators coming from the outside,”

he declared with a hint of a smile, “even if we have to have policemen for

each one.”

Though not unexpected, the situation in Mississippi posed a difficult

problem for movement leaders, who did not want to give the impression that

white Southerners were defying the ICC order with impunity. Allowing sto-

ries of resistance to overshadow evidence of compliance would not serve the

interests of the movement, but neither would ignoring or glossing over out-

right acts of defiance. Somehow Farmer, Carey, and Rich had to find a way

460 Freedom Riders

to accentuate the positive while simultaneously pointing out the need for

continued pressure from activists and governmental officials. In a November

4 interview with New York Times reporter Claude Sitton, Rich made a valiant

attempt to provide a balanced assessment, stressing reports of successful de-

segregation but also listing several troubling examples of noncompliance.

CORE leaders adopted a similar strategy a few days later when they for-

warded a more systematic report to the Justice Department and the ICC. In

this and other communications, the message was clear: Timely enforcement

of the ICC order was crucial. Straightforward and prescriptive, the order

presented a welcome alternative to the “all deliberate speed” syndrome that

had slowed the pace of school desegregation. But it also carried a sobering

responsibility to assert the authority and legitimacy of federal law. If the Jus-

tice Department allowed a defiant minority to ignore the order, the conse-

quences could be catastrophic, not only for the cause of desegregation but

also for the broader interests of the Kennedy administration. After six months

of involuntary zigzagging across the political landscape, the Freedom Rider

crisis had finally brought the administration to a crossroads. Like it or not,

federal authorities entrusted with enforcement of the ICC order faced a clear

choice that would influence the course of American democracy for months

or even years to come.

Despite the foot-dragging in Birmingham, proof of federal resolve came

almost immediately. In fact, the Justice Department’s first request for an

injunction enjoining local officials from obstructing compliance actually pre-

ceded the ICC order by several hours. On October 31 department attorneys

asked District Judge Claude Clayton to overrule a state circuit court order

forbidding the removal of Jim Crow signs at the Greenwood, Mississippi,

bus station. Clayton refused to grant an immediate restraining order, but he

scheduled a November 20 hearing to discuss the matter. Though disappointed

with Clayton’s response, Department officials decided to take even bolder

action three days later. Responding to both the Greenwood situation and the

obstructionist actions of city officials in McComb, a suit filed with the fed-

eral district court in Jackson requested the convening of a three-judge fed-

eral panel that could rule on the constitutionality of Mississippi’s bus

segregation laws. The suit targeted McComb and named Mayor C. H. Doug-

las and Police Chief George Guy as defendants. On November 3 a similar suit

was filed against officials in Monroe, Louisiana, and department officials prom-

ised additional actions would be forthcoming in other non-compliant commu-

nities. Almost simultaneously, the ICC district office announced that it had

opened an investigation of complaints by Levert Taylor and Glenda Jackson,

the two Louisiana Freedom Riders arrested in Jackson on November 1.

The balance sheet at the end of the first week of implementation was

mixed but generally encouraging. Although several Deep South communi-

ties were resisting the order, there were signs of hope almost everywhere—

even in Birmingham. On November 7 an unidentified high-level official at

Oh, Freedom 461

the Justice Department hinted to one Birmingham reporter that additional

arrests at the Trailways café would force the government to seek relief in the

federal courts. The attorney general, the official was careful to add, preferred

to avoid such action, but the department was ready to add Birmingham to

the growing list of communities under a court order to desegregate. Adding

force to this threat, on the following day Judge Grooms issued an injunction

prohibiting the city of Birmingham from enforcing segregation in public parks,

theaters, and auditoriums.

Despite these promising developments, CORE and other movement lead-

ers were wary of putting too much faith in federal power. Even though out-

right defiance of the ICC order was limited to the Deep South, resistance to

the spirit of the law clearly extended to all parts of the segregated South.

Segregation in intrastate transit and other public accommodations remained

almost universal across the region, and even in the border states the color

line was, with few exceptions, still in force. The extent and persistence of

discrimination became painfully clear during the second week of November

when CORE activists stepped up the pressure along Route 40 in an action

designed to complement an ongoing federal desegregation initiative. Seven

weeks earlier, on September 13, State Department protocol officer Richard

Sanjuan had addressed the Maryland legislature on the importance of elimi-

nating segregation along the diplomatic corridor from Washington to New

York. Couched in the rhetoric of Cold War patriotism, Sanjuan’s appeal

stressed the international implications of discrimination. “When an Ameri-

can citizen humiliates a foreign representative or another American citizen

for racial reasons,” he insisted, “the results can be just as damaging to his

country as the passing of secret information to the enemy.” Stunned by the

bluntness of Sanjuan’s words, and more incensed than chastened, the Mary-

land legislators promptly dug in their heels on the Route 40 desegregation

issue. CORE, however, seized upon the Sanjuan episode as a rationale for

organizing a formal campaign to desegregate Route 40.

In mid-October Washington CORE leader Julius Hobson announced

plans for a massive Freedom Ride to be held on Saturday, November 11.

Hoping to dramatize the issue in a way that would force Maryland governor

Millard Tawes to call a special legislative session for the purpose of passing

an equal access public accommodations law, CORE recruited a large number

of Riders willing to stage sit-ins at restaurants along the route. Behind the

scenes, Hobson and others, including Sanjuan, tried to persuade the restau-

rant owners to desegregate voluntarily. But there were few signs of coopera-

tion until early November, when the ICC order gave added force to the

effort. On November 8, just three days before the scheduled sit-ins, forty-

seven restaurants (thirty-five in Maryland and twelve in Delaware) agreed to

desegregate. Although this left approximately half of the restaurants outside

of the agreement, CORE leaders decided to suspend the scheduled protest.

Declaring a partial victory, Hobson congratulated the compliant restaurant

462 Freedom Riders

owners and managers but warned that CORE would conduct a series of de-

segregation tests later in the month.

Though the Route 40 campaign was far from over, its trajectory pro-

vided movement leaders with a measure of encouragement. While no one

expected limited progress in the borderlands to resolve the impasse in the

Deep South, the State Department’s unofficial alliance with Maryland CORE

reinforced the expectation that the Justice Department would do whatever

was necessary to enforce the ICC order. Reaching beyond bus terminals and

the ICC mandate, the Route 40 campaign also demonstrated the broadening

sweep of the Freedom Rider movement. Even universal compliance with the

ICC order, it now seemed, would not bring the crisis to a close. As many

segregationists had feared, partial desegregation had unleashed a revolution

of rising expectations that virtually ensured a recurring cycle of movement

and resistance. For movement activists, the Freedom Rides, along with sit-

ins and other forms of nonviolent direct action, had confirmed the power of

public protest, signaling the emergence of a new democratic ethos. Thus,

even though the desegregation of interstate transportation was far from com-

plete in November 1961 and federal officials remained reluctant to force the

issue in the absence of outright violence, observers close to the action were

confident that the ICC order was propelling the Freedom Riders towards

the promised land.

IN SOUTHERN BUS TERMINALS, as in other areas of regional life, old ways died

hard even in the face of a clear federal mandate. Here, as elsewhere, the

power of law to effect social change was limited and uncertain, as many com-

munities along the Southern front continued to embrace the traditional in-

stitutional arrangements and customs that discouraged blacks and whites from

intermingling. All of these communities, in varying degrees, would eventu-

ally adapt to the implications of the ICC order. But ironically, among the

first to do so were the noncompliant Deep South towns and cities that ini-

tially defied the order. In McComb and Albany, for example, institutional

and social inertia gave way to racial polarization and creative disorder during

the final weeks of 1961. In both of these troubled communities, Freedom

Rides produced dramatic confrontations that demonstrated the potential

volatility of Southern race relations.

In the case of McComb, the common determination of movement activ-

ists and white supremacists to force a showdown tested the resolve of federal

authorities and helped to dispel any lingering doubts about the wisdom of

timely intervention. Emerging at a critical moment, the McComb crisis sim-

plified the normally complex calculus of decision-making at the Justice De-

partment, where policy makers struggled to balance legal and political

considerations. In a department run by the president’s brother, there was

normally a strong sensitivity to the political price of legal interference in

local and state affairs, but such considerations fell by the wayside when the

Oh, Freedom 463

attorney general and other high-level officials became convinced that reso-

lute action was the only way to prevent massive civil disorder in McComb

and other areas of Mississippi. As soon as the Justice Department learned

that a group of Freedom Riders planned to conduct a compliance test in the

troubled southwest Mississippi town, some level of federal involvement be-

came almost inevitable. But the decision to place new Jim Crow signs on the

sidewalk outside the McComb bus and railway terminals on November 1

pushed the department to intervene before the situation got out of hand.

After the request for a federal injunction was filed on November 2, de-

partment officials waited for nearly three weeks before the court responded

favorably. In a November 21 ruling, Judge Elbert Tuttle, the chief judge of

the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, and his liberal colleague, Judge Richard

Rives, granted an injunction against McComb’s noncompliant officials over

the objection of Judge Sidney Mize. At the same time, Tuttle and Rives ruled

that three Mississippi laws requiring racial segregation among intrastate pas-

sengers were unconstitutional. Both of these rulings carried broad implica-

tions and were a welcome relief to department officials still smarting from a

November 17 federal district court ruling that effectively nullified an NAACP

McComb police chief George H. Guy poses beside the new WHITE WAITING ROOM

signs placed on the sidewalk outside the McComb Greyhound bus station, No-

vember 2, 1961. (AP Wide World)

464 Freedom Riders

suit seeking to overturn the convictions of the Freedom Riders arrested in

Jackson earlier in the year. Overriding a sharp dissent by Rives, Claude Clayton

and Sidney Mize informed NAACP attorneys that they “must first seek re-

course through state courts.” Tantamount to an endorsement of segrega-

tion, the two-to-one decision convinced John Doar and others that resistance

to the ICC order was hardening in Mississippi, even among some judges

who had sworn to uphold constitutional authority.

With this in mind, Justice Department attorneys began to view McComb

as a crucial test case in the campaign to convince Mississippi authorities that

continued resistance to the ICC order was futile. Although targeting the ultra-

segregationist community of McComb carried obvious risks, aiming at the

heart of the beast made the move toward enforcement even more emphatic.

The move, when it came, was swift and decisive. On Monday, November 27,

department attorneys filed official papers at the federal courthouse in Jack-

son, and on Tuesday a federal marshal delivered copies to Mayor Douglas,

Police Chief Guy, and the McComb city selectmen. At the same time, sev-

eral FBI agents were dispatched to the city as observers. In response, Mayor

Douglas issued a public statement assuring federal authorities that the city

would abide by the court order: “There are no two ways about it. That means

no attempt will be made to separate as far as race is concerned.” With Free-

dom Riders expected in the city as early as Wednesday, Douglas ordered the

police to remove the Jim Crow signs outside the local Greyhound and Illi-

nois Central terminals, though he made sure they did so “during the night

when there’s nobody around.” Despite this move toward compliance, he could

not resist making the prediction that “our local people are going to respect

the color line whether the signs are there or not.” What he did not say was

that no amount of careful maneuvering could quell the rising anger in a white

community that had already proven its segregationist mettle by putting sev-

eral SNCC volunteers and many of the Burgland student rebels behind bars.

As news of the federal presence and rumors of an impending Freedom Ride

spread throughout the city and into the surrounding countryside, some of

southwestern Mississippi’s roughest characters began to organize a rude wel-

coming party.

Even before the Freedom Riders arrived on Wednesday morning, a small

but angry crowd outside the McComb bus station assaulted Johann Rush, a

freelance television cameraman from Jackson. A few minutes later, five Rid-

ers led by Jerome Smith, only recently released from Parchman, stepped off

a Greyhound from New Orleans and walked toward the white waiting room.

All five—including two eighteen-year-old students, Doratha Smith and

George Raymond—were veterans of New Orleans CORE. Turned away from

the waiting room by a station agent who claimed that a gas leak made the

station unsafe to enter, the Riders piled into a taxi that whisked them away to

the black section of town. Returning later in the morning, they made a sec-

ond attempt to enter the waiting room. This time they succeeded, sidling

Oh, Freedom 465

through a crowd of scowling whites to a lunch counter in the rear of the

waiting room. Refused service and ordered to leave by the station manager,

who informed them that “Greyhound does not own this building,” they soon

found themselves being attacked by several enraged white onlookers.

Raymond was struck in the head with a half-filled coffee cup, and Jerome

Smith was assaulted by a man screaming, “I’ll kill him.” Other assailants soon

jumped in, shoving and kicking all five Riders onto the sidewalk, and slam-

ming Smith into the pavement. Though bloodied, Smith, along with the

others, managed to stagger to a waiting cab and escape. No one at the scene,

including the FBI observers, made any attempt to intervene on the Riders’

behalf. The local police, though headquartered only a block away, did not ar-

rive at the station until after the Riders had left. To Claude Sitton, who wit-

nessed the melee from a few yards away, the combination of mob behavior and

negligent law enforcement “repeated on a smaller scale the riots that greeted

Freedom Riders last May in Anniston, Birmingham, and Montgomery, Ala.”

After belatedly clearing the streets surrounding the station and arresting

four of the assailants, Chief Guy joined Mayor Douglas for an impromptu

news conference, during which both men assured reporters that they were

determined to maintain civil order and enforce the law. While no one who

had followed the recent course of events in McComb put much stock in this

pledge, city officials and other civic leaders held an extended discussion of

the situation on Thursday, prompting Douglas to issue a second public state-

ment calling for compliance with the desegregation order. “The law regard-

ing our bus and railroad terminals is a Federal law,” he declared. “We did not

make it at the local level, but it is our purpose to enforce it. We are deter-

mined to this end.” The previous night, the police had escorted the injured

Riders to the station, where they boarded a bus for New Orleans. But the

ability of local officials to maintain order in the difficult days ahead seemed

questionable.

On Friday afternoon, when a group of six Freedom Riders from Baton

Rouge arrived at the McComb station, the police had to hold back a mob of

more then five hundred white protesters. Finding the lunch counter closed,

the Riders sat in the waiting room for a short time before leaving the station.

When they returned two hours later, roughly half of the crowd had slipped

away. Still, after putting the Riders on an outbound bus, the police had to

deal with a minor riot that injured a Time reporter and two photographers,

one of whom was “knocked through a plate glass window.” While no one was

bold or foolish enough to attack any of the forty FBI agents at the scene,

several members of the crowd could not resist the opportunity to take out

their frustrations on some of the prying newsmen assumed to be movement

supporters.

Though alarmed by the rising resistance in McComb, CORE officials

soon authorized a third attempt to desegregate what was fast becoming the

most notorious small-town bus terminal west of Anniston. This time the