Parting the Waters (74 page)

After the Tallapoosa and Heflin stops, the Greyhound driver confided to group leader Perkins that drivers from buses heading east were warning of a mob up ahead in Anniston, where CORE scout Tom Gaither had predicted certain trouble. These were not idle rumors. When the bus eased into its berth at Anniston, new terminal signs reading “White Intrastate Passengers” and “Negro Intrastate Passengers” gave evidence that subtle legal minds had prepared to meet the constitutional challenge of the Freedom Rides. (The Supreme Court had banned segregation at facilities serving passengers traveling across state lines.) Still, the signs offered slight deterrence compared with the large crowd of men bearing clubs, bricks, iron pipes, and knives. The nine Freedom Riders and five regular passengers sat frozen to their seats as the mob shouted for the Freedom Riders to come out. Some tried to force open the door. This brought the two Alabama state investigators out from under cover—they ran to the front of the bus and braced themselves against the pull lever, holding the door shut. Enraged, the mob began pounding on the bus with pipes and slashing the tires. Those inside shouted that the driver should leave before the bus was disabled. The driver did not argue. He revved the engine and backed up. The numb, terror-stricken passengers watched Anniston policemen move in from positions on the fringe of the crowd to direct the bus out of town, as though they had suddenly awakened to a traffic problem.

The Greyhound escaped down Highway 78 at a high rate of speed, spurred on by reports from the back that the mob was in hot pursuit. About fifty cars, containing as many as two hundred men, soon were stretched out behind them as the Freedom Riders headed for Birmingham. Not far outside Anniston, the bus began to list to one side, and the driver realized that some of the slashed tires were going flat. Helpless, he pulled the bus off the highway, shut down the engine, and scampered off into the countryside. The sounds of slamming doors and shouts from the converging posse were amplified in the quiet of the bus.

This time the mob used bricks and a heavy ax to smash the bus windows one by one, sending shards of glass flying among the passengers inside. The attackers ripped open the luggage compartment and battered the exterior again with pipes, while a group of them tried to force open the door. Finally, someone threw a firebomb through the gaping hole in the back window. As flames ran along the floor, some of the seats caught fire and the bus began to fill with black, acrid smoke. When the choking passengers realized that the fire could not be contained, they gave way to panic. In the front, state investigator E. L. Cowling saw that the mob was no longer trying to force entry but now was barricading the door to seal them in the fire. Desperate and weak from the smoke, Cowling brandished his revolver and the attackers fell back. When he managed to get the door open, Albert Bigelow and others herded the passengers to the exit. The mob, frenzied by the sight of them but made panicky by Cowling's gun, danced around the perimeter of the smoke billowing through the door, taking swings at those escaping. Henry Thomas, the SNCC student from Howard, staggered into the clear and was felled by a blow to the head. The others tumbled out behind him, and the attacks continued until arriving Alabama state troopers fired warning shots into the air. The mob retreated to their cars, and the troopers eventually ferried the passengers to Anniston Hospital. A photographer took a shot of the flames leaping out the front window of the abandoned bus, with a thick column of smoke rising from windows all along the sides. By evening, this photograph would move on both the national and international wires for distribution around the world.

The Trailways bus pulled into Anniston an hour behind the Greyhound. Jim Peck and the other Freedom Riders encountered an eerie silence as they walked through the terminal to buy sandwiches in the whites-only restaurant. Most of the bystanders averted their eyes. A few mumbled something about a “race riot.” The Freedom Riders reboarded the bus with their sandwiches, noting that this was the first time the local whites seemed to be more on edge than they were. Charles Person, a Morehouse freshman, and Herbert Harris, a Morris Brown sophomore, sat back down in the front seat of the bus. When they did, the bus driver exited for a quick series of huddled conversations with Anniston police officers and with a small group of tough-looking men. Eight of them jumped on the bus just ahead of the driver and stood in the aisle as he flipped on the tour-guide microphone. “We have received word that a bus has been burned to the ground and passengers are being carried to the hospital by the carloads,” he announced nervously, giving the first report on the fate of the Greyhound. “A mob is waiting for our bus and will do the same to us unless we get these niggers off the front seats.”

One of the Freedom Riders broke the fearful pause with the dutiful reply that they were all interstate passengers with a legal right to sit anywhere on the bus, but the sentence was not yet completed when one of the whites standing over the front seat crashed his fist into Person's face. Another reached over to hit Herbert Harris. The whites yanked the two students into the aisle, kicking and slugging them from both ends of the confined space. As they did, group leader Peck and Walter Bergman, the retired professor from Michigan, jumped out of their seats at the back and ran forward, horrified, to protest. They did not get very far. One of the white men turned from the two students and hit Peck with a blow that knocked him backward over two seatbacks. Another fist dropped Bergman to the floor. Suddenly, the fury of the mob turned on the two downed white Freedom Riders. Some lifted Peck from the seat to rain blows on his bloodied face, while others stomped on the chest of the prostrate Bergman.

“Don't beat him any more!” cried Mrs. Bergman. “He's my husband!”

Some of the mob responded by snarling at Mrs. Bergman as a “nigger lover,” while others warned their friends not to kill Bergman, who lay unconscious on the floor. They soon stopped pounding long enough to drag Person and Harris back through the aisle, over Bergman, and to toss them across the backseat, on top of other passengers. They threw Peck on top of the two students, dragged Bergman to the back, and then, grisly work done, sat down in the middle seats to make sure no Negroes moved up front for the ride. The bus driver, who had disappeared during the fight, reboarded along with a policeman. A brief, silent survey of the new seating arrangement seemed to satisfy them, whereupon the policeman jumped off and the driver went tearing out of town on back roads, hoping to sneak around the mob waiting on the highway to Birmingham. Simeon Booker, sitting in the backseat amid the groans, shock, and blood, fumbled for a way to distract the whites from their unbearable leering stares. All he could think of was to offer them a copy of
Jet
magazine's preview story on the Freedom Ride.

 

There were few secrets in Birmingham. For two weeks, Fred Shuttles-worth had been telling King and others of rumors that the Ku Klux Klan would ambush the Freedom Riders at the bus terminal there. Gary Thomas Rowe, an FBI informant within Klavern Palace 13, had told his FBI handlers that the Birmingham police agreed to give the Klansmen fifteen unmolested minutes to beat the integrated riders. The SAC (Special Agent in Charge) of the FBI's Birmingham office had reported the details of the police-Klan agreement to FBI headquarters in Washington several times, beginning on May 5. He had also alerted the police department at least five times to the Klan's impending attack—never mentioning the police department's own complicity in the reported plans, on the usual security grounds, for fear of exposing Rowe as an FBI informant to the police, and through the police to the Klan. The Birmingham SAC kept a record of the many warnings he had passed along, as though the official notices conveyed responsibility to the police. It was an uncomfortable exercise for a law enforcement officer with advance knowledge of a crime. With almost transparent chagrin, he informed Director Hoover in Washington that he had been obliged to deliver his last warning on Sunday, May 14, to Detective Tom Cook, an officer he knew to be an active collaborator with the Klan, as Cook was “the only man on duty.”

Rev. John Rutland, Bull Connor's Methodist pastor, was down at city hall that morning, pleading with Connor not to let them beat up the kids on the buses. Among white newsmen, anticipation was so strong that half a dozen reporters, photographers, and television crews were gathered near the downtown bus terminals by midafternoon. CBS commentator Howard K. Smith, passing through Birmingham on his way back to New York, picked up rumors grave enough to make him drive downtown to investigate personally.

Actors in the impending drama played multifaceted roles, under various legitimate poses, but most of their actions worked to the immediate benefit of the Klan. Police detective Cook, Bull Connor's most trusted intelligence officer, told three reporters of the imminent arrival of an integrated bus group and then abruptly walked away toward the police station, leaving the reporters baffled about his retreat. At the Greyhound station, where the first Freedom Rider bus was scheduled to arrive, Gary Thomas Rowe learned by telephone from police headquarters that the first bus would come into the Trailways terminal instead. Rowe sounded an alarm to scores of Klansmen posted nearby, and they all dashed four blocks from Greyhound to Trailways.

When the Trailways bus pulled into the Birmingham terminal, the eight white men who had boarded in Anniston exited first—seemingly to lose themselves in the terminal crowd, forestalling any detection or questioning by the authorities. Charles Person and Jim Peck, the latter's face and shirt caked with blood, stepped first from the bus to the landing. As the designated testers for Birmingham, they stood quietly for a moment, surveying avenues of escape that appeared little more promising than the terminal itself. Peck, deciding that he could not bring himself to ask Person to carry on with the objectives of the Freedom Ride, glanced at his partner for a sign of his intent. “Let's go,” Person said simply, heading slowly for the white waiting room as planned. Peck fell in behind him. Walter Bergman and some of the others followed.

They walked into a corridor brimming with Klansmen, reporters, and witnesses transfixed by the premonition of violence. On their approach, a confused Klansman muttered that they should kill the Negro, Person, because he must have hurt the obviously wounded white man, Peck, but as they came forward Peck said they should not hurt Person. This gesture of cross-racial friendship ignited the crowd's rage, and the Klansmen roughly shoved Person back toward the Negro waiting room. When he turned and tried to walk through them once more, a Klansman shoved him sideways against a concrete wall. Others came up behind him. “Hit him,” someone shouted, and a Klansman obliged with a fist to Person's face. Person rose with a bloodied mouth, only to be hit again. This time he fell back into the arms of a Klansman, who held him to receive a third blow, after which he fell to his knees. Peck moved to help him up and was flattened by a rain of five or six punches. Then about a dozen Klansmen surrounded the two men and pummeled them with kicks, pipes, and objects that looked to one horrified bystander, Howard K. Smith, like heavy key rings. FBI informant Rowe contributed lustily to the beatings.

The Freedom Riders entering behind the lead pair tried to retreat from the mayhem, only to find their path blocked by Klansmen. When reporter Simeon Booker looked into the terminal a few seconds later, he saw a bloodied Walter Bergman on his hands and knees crawling desperately among the legs of the men beating him, groping for a door. Recoiling, Booker held a newspaper up in front of his face, punched a small hole in the middle of it for vision, and edged his way around the exterior of the building. Luck probably helped him more than this camouflage, but Booker did manage to find a Negro cabdriver who was as eager to leave the scene as he was. He jumped in the back and gave the driver Fred Shuttlesworth's home address.

The violence at the terminal was contagious, furtive, and often blind. A Birmingham white man, who had been in the men's room for some time, emerged with a look of innocent shock that provoked the mob. He became one of seven bystanders hurt badly enough to be hospitalized. A Negro man arriving to pick up his girlfriend was set upon, as were several reporters. A white photographer from the Birmingham
Post-Herald
, who had the presence of mind to remove the film from his camera after shooting the attack on Peck, was clubbed with a lead pipe and his camera smashed. Outside—where a hysterical woman passenger who had been caught on the Trailways ride from Anniston was shouting, “It started on the bus! It started on the bus!”—a handful of Klansmen came upon one Negro Freedom Rider
*
and knocked him repeatedly into a pile of trash boxes. Then, seeing a man talking into the car radio of a vehicle marked WAPI News, they smashed all the windows of the car, dragged news director Clancy Lake away from his live broadcast out into the street, ripped out his microphone, and fled. By the time the allotted fifteen minutes were up, and a phalanx of Birmingham policemen had trotted briskly into the Trailways terminal, the Klansmen were well dispersed and in a triumphant, surly mood. One retreating carload, a mile away from the terminal, came upon two Negro men talking on a street corner. They stopped abruptly, jumped the Negroes, and beat them.

When reporter Booker brought the first grim news to Shuttlesworth's house, the preacher summoned his deacons and some stalwart members of his Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. Before he could organize volunteer patrols to rescue the Freedom Riders, several of the victims straggled to his house in taxis. Charles Person arrived with a swollen face and open cuts on his head but remarkably coherent for one who had been beaten both in Anniston and in Birmingham that day. A frightened Negro doctor refused to treat Person's wounds, and while a woman was giving him first aid, Jim Peck, miraculously, spilled alone from a taxi with a crimson head and jagged broken teeth, and hunched over from the pain of blows to his ribs. “You need to go to a hospital,” Shuttlesworth said by way of a greeting. As they waited for the ambulance, Peck struggled over to Person and shook his hand.