Parting the Waters (75 page)

Among the alarms to reach Shuttlesworth's house in the next hour was a call of distress from Anniston Hospital, where Freedom Riders from the burned Greyhound bus were besieged. A large contingent of the white mob had pursued them there, and hospital personnel, intimidated by the mob, ordered the Freedom Riders to leave, saying their presence endangered other patients. Trapped between the mob's anger and the hospital's nerves, without means of transportation, the Freedom Riders huddled in one hospital corner after another, being told repeatedly to go somewhere else. In Birmingham, Shuttlesworth issued another call for volunteer drivers, saying he would lead a caravan on the sixty-mile mission to Anniston Hospital and back. There would be no weapons allowed, he declared, “not even a toothpick.” Soon there were eight drivers, all of whom made a fuss over Shuttlesworth, insisting they could not allow a recognizable leader like him to expose himself to the danger. Their concern was genuine, but some of it may have been born of the judgment that nonviolence was an unaffordable luxury in this emergency. Soon eight cars of Negro churchmen, brimming with shotguns and rifles, took off down Highway 78 to pick up the enervated but immensely grateful pacifists in Anniston.

From Shuttlesworth's home, Booker after many attempts finally reached John Seigenthaler, the Attorney General's special assistant. After reminding Seigenthaler of his predictions of trouble, Booker told him of the day's bloody events and of his fears that the Freedom Riders would not get safely out of Birmingham. Seigenthaler took Shuttlesworth's number and called back shortly with an encouraging report. The Justice Department would be in touch first thing Monday morning, he promised, and would make sure that the right to safe interstate travel was protected. When Seigenthaler suggested that the job would be easier if Booker and other reporters downplayed the story for a while, Booker replied that this would be impossible. The story was too big. White reporters were milling around everywhere. Some of the reporters had themselves been assaulted.

That evening in Shuttlesworth's Bethel Baptist Church, a battered Walter Bergman explained to the small crowd that CORE was a nonviolent action group that believed in racial equality. Shuttlesworth told them about the frantic efforts to locate the lost, scattered riders, and about Bull Connor's threat to have him arrested for harboring interracial gatherings in his home. Still, Shuttlesworth's tone was defiant as he cried out that they had gone through the worst of it. “When white men and black men are beaten up together,” he declared, “the day is coming when they will walk together.”

The ambulance bearing Jim Peck had been turned away from Carraway Methodist Hospital, and he now lay under the surgery lights in the Hillman Hospital emergency room. It took fifty-three stitches to patch his six head wounds, most prominently a four-inch horseshoe-shaped gash on his forehead. Photographers standing behind the doctors took pictures of the gore for the local newspapers, and a clutch of reporters tossed questions to the woozy and nauseated patient. Peck answered questions coherently, though weakly, sometimes pausing in the effort to distinguish the attack in Anniston from the one in Birmingham. To a final series of questions about his plans, and whether the ferocious attack had been worth it, he replied simply, “The going is getting rougher, but I'll be on that bus tomorrow headed for Montgomery.” Reporters looked incredulously at Peck and then at one another. As they broke up, a policeman remarked that Peck did not even have one penny on his person. On hearing this, a well-dressed Negro—one of Shuttlesworth's men—slipped up to the operating table and folded Peck's hand around a dime. “Call us when they get through with you, and we'll come get you,” he said quietly.

At two o'clock on Monday morning, jittery hospital officials peremptorily discharged Jim Peck into the night. Shuttlesworth came to retrieve him, and they drove through an equally jittery Birmingham, heavily patrolled by police cars. Stopped once for interrogation, Shuttlesworth finally made it home and put Peck to bed on a couch.

 

In Nashville, James Bevel presided over a glorious Sunday picnic in celebration of a victory settlement in the movie theater campaign. Noting that there had been some forty days and forty nights of demonstrations since February, Bevel was preaching happily about the Great Flood, the temptations of Jesus, and other famous “forty stories” from the Bible, while otherwise letting go of the tension by eating, flirting, and having a good time, when someone heard a radio report about the burned Grey-hound bus. Almost immediately, Diane Nash suggested that Bevel, as temporary chairman of the Nashville movement, call an emergency meeting to discuss a student response. Bevel replied that there was nothing they could do or say about distant Alabama that could not wait until they had finished their picnic, but Nash was insistent. The movement was about selflessness, she said. Individual people didn't matter, and neither did distance, time, or picnics. She kept up a running attack, picturing the Freedom Riders waiting for help in a burning bus some-where while the Nashville veterans lingered over their fried chicken and cakes. Bevel withdrew to consult with his closest friends. “She's going to keep talking nasty about us,” he lamented. Concluding forlornly that the picnic was ruined anyway, Bevel moved the proceedings to the First Baptist Church.

Everyone knew about the Freedom Ride. John Lewis, just back from his interview in Philadelphia, was with them that day, having stopped off in Nashville on his way to rejoin the CORE group. The initial question among the Nashville students was whether the bus-burning presented another Rock Hill. Were the Freedom Riders going to jail? Should they go and join them? As grimmer and grimmer reports filtered in from Birmingham, however, the issue became death instead of jail. Would the Freedom Ride produce the first martyrs to nonviolence? If so, would it help or hurt the movement? Should the Nashville students welcome such a risk for themselves, even seek it out? A marathon debate ensued as to whether the adult supervisors of the Nashville Christian Leadership Council, who controlled the organization's funds, would agree to support a venture that might well lead to the deaths of the young people.

The Nashville debate lasted all night and continued into Monday, overlapping with the regathering of the Freedom Riders at Shuttles-worth's house in Birmingham. A jolt of publicity greeted the new day. Shuttlesworth marveled to see the local papers filled with sympathetic accounts of the attacks, written by reporters he had always viewed as segregationists. The Birmingham
News
published a pained front-page editorial headlined “People Are Asking: ‘Where Were the Police?'” Beneath it, alongside graphic pictures of the beatings, appeared Police Commissioner Connor's statement: “I have said for the last 20 years that these out-of-town meddlers were going to cause bloodshed if they kept meddling in the South's business…. It happened on a Sunday, Mother's Day, when we try to let off as many of our policemen as possible so they can spend Mother's Day at home with their families.” The
News
dismissed Connor's explanation as lame and all but accused him of conspiring with the Klan. Birmingham's leading businessman told
The Wall Street Journal
that the violence gave the city “a black eye.” In New York, where the story played on the front page, the
Times
editors decided to run a separate article about the “eyewitness account” that Howard K. Smith had broadcast on CBS Radio. In Washington, seeing the photograph of the burning Greyhound on the front page of his morning
Post
, James Farmer called his CORE staff in New York and instructed them to superimpose that shot over one of the Statue of Liberty to form a new emblem for the Freedom Ride.

In faraway Tokyo, the morning newspapers shocked no one more than Sidney Smyer, the incoming president of the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce. Smyer, leading the city's business delegation at the International Rotary Convention, could not read the Japanese writing, but he could recognize the ugly photographs of the bus station riot. The
Post-Herald
photographer's carefully preserved roll of film had survived his beating to move on the international wires. As a result, Smyer found himself the object of cold stares and perplexed questions from his Japanese hosts and the assembled international businessmen, who had suddenly lost interest in Birmingham's climate for investment. Words failed Smyer and his Birmingham friends as they tried to explain that the incident was grossly unrepresentative of their city. They felt like zoo specimens on display. Smyer, though a stout segregationist and a Dixiecrat from 1948, told his Birmingham colleagues that something must be done about Bull Connor.

At the Shuttlesworth home, fame struck at ten o'clock that morning with the announcement that the Attorney General of the United States was on the telephone, asking to speak with Simeon Booker. The
Jet
reporter told Kennedy that the Freedom Riders considered themselves “trapped” in Birmingham by hostile mobs that were reported to be forming near the bus station. Booker gave the phone to some of the group leaders and then to Shuttlesworth, who told Kennedy that their most urgent need was for police protection on the ride to Montgomery. Kennedy's first suggestion was that they consolidate into one bus. Crisply, he promised to arrange bus security and call back. There was great rejoicing when Shuttlesworth recounted this conversation to the assembled Freedom Riders, who, with their swollen faces, surgical stitches, and lungs still burning with smoke, sagged at the prospect of facing another mob.

In Washington, Kennedy was working under a severe handicap—his chief civil rights man, Burke Marshall, was confined to his apartment at the end of a two-week case of the mumps. Kennedy established a telephone network between his office, Marshall's apartment, liaison people at FBI headquarters, and Shuttlesworth's house, and was soon back on the line with the Birmingham preacher. “Okay,” he told Shuttlesworth, “Mr. Connor is going to protect you at the station and escort you to the city line.” This was a concession relayed through the FBI from Connor, under pressure from Birmingham leaders angry over the previous day's violence.

Shuttlesworth thought it over. “They were escorted to the city line in Anniston,” he replied, as politely as he could. “That's where the bus burned.” He and Kennedy quickly established that they needed protection as far as the Alabama line.

“Wait,” said Kennedy. “I'll call you back.” This was a problem for Governor Patterson, whom Kennedy had known as a political supporter since the 1956 Democratic Convention. The Attorney General initiated a series of calls to Patterson and his aides, during which Patterson complained that the Freedom Riders were not “bona fide” interstate travelers, and that as governor he could not help people violate the Alabama segregation laws. Kennedy and Burke Marshall kept arguing that the federal government would have to protect the riders from violence if the state could not, and that since nobody wanted federal intervention, all sides should cooperate to get the Freedom Riders out of Alabama as quickly as possible.

Surrounded by reporters, policemen, supporters, and darting carloads of hostile whites, Shuttlesworth led the eighteen Freedom Riders down to the Greyhound terminal, across the street from Bull Connor's jail, to catch the three o'clock bus to Montgomery. They listened en route to nearly continuous radio bulletins on their exact position, on the size of the mob waiting at the station, and on the latest reports of the personal diplomacy between Governor Patterson and Attorney General Kennedy, which itself was big news. At the terminal, they made their way to the bus landing and braced themselves for the wait. Birmingham policemen dutifully kept angry whites away from them, but hate and violence were again close enough to touch, even before their arrangements began to come undone. Radio reports announced that Governor Patterson was correcting previous statements attributed to him. “I refuse to guarantee their safe passage,” he said, soon adding that “the citizens of the state are so enraged that I cannot guarantee protection for this bunch of rabble-rousers.” A spokesman for the governor said that angry whites had been spotted all along the highway from Birmingham to Montgomery.

These reports put Shuttlesworth back on the telephone with Kennedy, and so did notice from Greyhound clerks that the bus drivers were refusing to drive. “Get a Negro to drive it,” Kennedy told Greyhound officials, and, impatient with their recital of obstacles and impossibilities, he said he might have to send an Air Force plane down for the Freedom Riders—he could have it there in two hours—if Greyhound failed to find a white bus driver brave enough to do his job. Shuttlesworth, hoping to maintain pressure on the various officials, said the Freedom Riders would sit there peacefully at the terminal until the impasse was resolved.

The Freedom Riders felt the pressure, too, and their resolve began to fray under cumulative exposure to dread. Trapped again, public targets more than ever, the eighteen riders began to talk among themselves of diminishing returns. Already, they had called national attention to racial hatred more dramatically than they had ever hoped. Further beatings would not accomplish anything, and further delays would make it impossible for them to reach New Orleans on Wednesday, May 17, for the big rally on the seventh anniversary of the
Brown
decision. They notified Shuttlesworth that they had decided to jump over their opponents by taking an airplane directly to New Orleans, No sooner had they made flight reservations and begun their retreat from the terminal than radio reports of the change signaled a general stampede. Elements of the mob reached the airport ahead of them, transplanting the siege.