Parting the Waters (79 page)

The Freedom Ride, paralyzed since the Mother's Day beatings, resumed at 8:30
A.M.
on Saturday, May 20. In the interim, John Lewis and the other Nashville students had endured six days and nights on a roller coaster between joy and fear, exhilaration and boredom—largely uninterrupted by sleep—and several of them reacted to the moment of triumph by dozing off. Attorney General Kennedy, relieved at last, went out for a long horseback ride through the Virginia countryside.

 

The Special Agent in Charge (SAC) of the Montgomery FBI office sent word to headquarters, and from there the message reached Marshall at the Justice Department, that he did not believe a word of Police Commissioner Sullivan's promise to protect the Freedom Riders on their arrival in the capital. Back from Washington came orders to remind Sullivan of the governor's assurances. The SAC complied, telling Sullivan that the bus was on its way from Birmingham. Floyd Mann, equally skeptical of the Montgomery police, called Sullivan to make sure there could be no disputes about proper notice. Mann told Sullivan he had just received a radio report from his highway patrol airplane that the bus was fourteen miles outside Montgomery. Highway patrol units, forbidden to work within city limits, would be dropping off soon. Sullivan replied that there were plenty of Montgomery police at the bus terminal. This was true at the time, but the policemen promptly began to vanish.

Elsewhere in Montgomery, Seigenthaler finished breakfast with John Doar, who had been working on his voting rights a-suit in nearby Selma. Seigenthaler eagerly sought the experienced counsel of Doar, but he also knew to avoid public identification with him. Because Doar's lawsuits already marked him as an enemy to segregationist officials in Alabama, Burke Marshall had ordered Doar to stay clear of the Freedom Ride crisis. Accordingly, the two Justice Department colleagues had avoided all personal contact until the completion of Seigenthaler's visit to Patterson the previous night, and even now they were wary of being seen together. They decided to split up before the arrival of the Freedom Riders. Doar wanted to work on his Selma case. Seigenthaler, wearing a set of sports clothes he had borrowed from Doar, dropped him off at the downtown Federal Building, which overlooked the Greyhound terminal, and then, driving alone, began circling the block to look for a parking place. Figuring mistakenly from the regular bus schedule, he thought he had a half hour before the arrival of the St. Petersburg Express. In fact the high-speed bus was pulling into the terminal already, just out of sight. Seigenthaler saw a motorcycle policeman leaving the area in a hurry.

John Lewis, selected to speak for the group, stepped first off the parked bus and paused before a semicircle of reporters on the platform. As other reporters rushed up in front of him, and the Freedom Riders filled in behind, Lewis surveyed a terminal area that was familiar to him from scores of bus rides home to nearby Troy, where he had preached to the chickens. Now all the platforms and streets and parking lots were deserted. Aside from the drivers of a few taxis parked in the distance, the only people he could see beyond the reporters were a dozen or so white men hidden in a shadowy entrance to the terminal. Lewis felt an eerie foreboding. “It doesn't look right,” he whispered to a companion.

Facing a battery of cameras, microphones, and notepads, Lewis got halfway through an answer to the first press question before falling strangely silent, transfixed by what he saw coming up behind the reporters. Norman Ritter, the Time-Life bureau chief from Atlanta, reacted to Lewis' face by turning to confront the dozen white men who had been standing in the door. He held out both arms to create a boundary for the interview, but the men, brandishing baseball bats, bottles, and lead pipes, pushed past him. One of them slapped Moe Levy of NBC News, and this first act triggered a seizing and smashing of cameras and equipment.

“Let's all stand together,” said Lewis, as the Freedom Riders retreated backward along the enclosed loading platform. Hemmed against a railing that ran along a retaining wall, they stood helpless as the white men barreled into them. Some of Lewis' group jumped, some were pushed, and some were literally thrown over the railing onto the roofs of cars parked in the Post Office lot below. Those who did not take their luggage with them were soon pelted with their own suitcases. Above, on the platform, reporters who objected, or who tried to take photographs of the attack, were set upon by a small mob whose full fury was now released. The enraged whites smashed
Life
photographer Don Urbrock repeatedly in the face with his own camera. They clubbed Norman Ritter to the ground, beat a Birmingham television reporter, and chased the reporters who escaped.

Down below, the Freedom Riders realized that whites who had been secluded at various observation posts were closing in on them from all directions. Some stalked and some charged, egged on by a woman in a yellow dress who kept yelling “Get those niggers!” Fighting panic, the Freedom Riders made their way to two nearby Negro taxis and tried to send the seven females away to safety. Four of the five Negroes jumped into the backseat of the first taxi, whose driver had a little boy with him on the front seat. “Well, I can't carry but four!” cried the driver, when he saw that he was drawing the attention of the onsurging whites. There was no time to argue. The Freedom Riders shoved the fifth female Negro into the front seat anyway. “Well, I
sure
can't carry them!” shouted the driver, eyeing Susan Wilbur and Sue Harmann, the two white students. Doors slamming, he drove off as the two whites were pushed inside the other taxi. Before the second driver had a chance to say that it was illegal for him to transport whites, the mob yanked him and his keys outside to prevent the car from leaving, then dragged the two women from the back. Others chased the male Freedom Riders, some of whom were trying futilely to act on John Lewis' shouted directions about how to zigzag to Columbus Street and climb the long hill toward the refuge of Ralph Abernathy's church.

The first taxi, filled with screams and shouts, found one of the two exits from the parking lot choked off by a stream of angry whites. Swerving around, bombarded with conflicting advice, the driver found the other exit blocked by cars. This was too much for him. He told the Freedom Riders that he was going to abandon the taxi. While some of his passengers tried desperately to calm him, others looked back in horror at the loading platform. They, along with several Alabama reporters standing closer, saw a dozen men surround Jim Zwerg, the white Wisconsin exchange student at Fisk in Nashville. One of the men grabbed Zwerg's suitcase and smashed him in the face with it. Others slugged him to the ground, and when he was dazed beyond resistance, one man pinned Zwerg's head between his knees so that the others could take turns hitting him. As they steadily knocked out his teeth, and his face and chest were streaming with blood, a few adults on the perimeter put their children on their shoulders to view the carnage. A small girl asked what the men were doing, and her father replied, “Well, they're really carrying on.” The Freedom Riders in the nearby taxi turned away in sickened hysteria.

Upstairs at a window of the Federal Building, observer John Doar, his renowned dour composure already dissolved, was describing the sudden disaster over the telephone to Burke Marshall. “Oh, there are fists, punching!” he cried. “A bunch of men led by a guy with a bleeding face are beating them. There are no cops. It's terrible! It's terrible! There's not a cop in sight. People are yelling, ‘There those niggers are! Get 'em, get 'em!' It's awful.” One of Robert Kennedy's secretaries was taking notes on an extension phone. Marshall, still listening to Doar, asked another one to track down the Attorney General. Less than five minutes after the bus door opened in Montgomery, official Washington knew that pipes and bare knuckles nullified all the painstaking federal-state agreements.

Seigenthaler, driving slowly toward the scene through a mass of bystanders, first saw suitcases flying upward in the distance. He did not yet know that this was the Freedom Riders' luggage being thrown into the air—smashed open as trophies—but he could sense the contagion of a riot. As he moved within sight of the loading platform, a swarming mass of several hundred people came into view, running in all directions, to and from scattered pockets of violence. To Seigenthaler, it looked like a close-up of a giant anthill. He caught sight of one well-dressed Negro darting ahead of his pursuers, and then, closer to his car, he saw a cluster of people moving around a young white woman. This was Susan Wilbur, struggling to escape after being pulled from the Negro taxi. White women were beating her from behind with pocketbooks, and a teenager was jabbing her from the front, dancing like a prizefighter.

Seigenthaler decided to try to rescue her. He drove up on the curb and jumped out. As he did, a woman with an especially heavy shoulder bag knocked Wilbur across the right front fender of his car, and by the time Seigenthaler reached her lying there, the crowd of screaming, angry whites jammed in so tightly upon them that he could not push his way to the car's back door. He grabbed Wilbur by the shoulders, managed to pull the right front door open, and, shouting “Come on, get in the car,” began to slide across to the driver's seat. He saw in a flash that another white student—Sue Harmann, whom he had not seen before—had dived into the back.

Wilbur balked. Still absorbing blows, she shouted, “Mister, this is not your fight! Get away from here! You're gonna get killed!”

Seigenthaler jumped back outside, where people were climbing over his car. “Get in the damn car!” he shrieked at Wilbur.

Wilbur, not sure who Seigenthaler was, kept insisting during the struggle that she was nonviolent and did not want to get anybody hurt. As she did, two men stepped between Seigenthaler and the car door, one of them shouting “Who the hell are you?” With Seigenthaler frantically telling them to get back, that he was a federal agent, the other men brought a pipe down on the side of Seigenthaler's head. Then the crowd, crushing in to seize Sue Harmann, kicked his unconscious body halfway under the car.

His was not the only prostrate form littering the scene as the rioters kept scurrying, shouting, and celebrating. Zwerg was face-down in a patch of warm, gooey repair tar on the pavement. John Lewis lay unconscious near the retaining wall, felled by a blow from a wooden Coca-Cola crate, and his seminary schoolmate, William Barbee, lay some distance away. Barbee had been overtaken and knocked to the pavement, and was still being stomped and kicked by a taunting swarm of rioters when Floyd Mann suddenly appeared among them. “Stand back!” he shouted above the din, showing his drawn revolver. “We are going to keep law and order.” He cleared the attackers from Barbee and moved on to pull others from a television cameraman. Mann, a state official within city jurisdiction, was acting alone, without support or legal authority.

Police Commissioner Sullivan arrived with a squadron some ten minutes after the first violence. By then the Freedom Riders were either down or gone, but the milling crowd was still growing by the hundreds, gawking or looking for new targets. Behind Sullivan came Alabama Attorney General Gallion in the company of his assistants and a deputy sheriff. They made their way to John Lewis, who was pointed out to them as a Freedom Rider, and stood over him to read Judge Jones's injunction.

Struggling to his feet, Lewis managed to locate and revive Barbee and Zwerg. For safety, the three of them huddled near the same state officials who were serving them with an injunction that held them responsible for the riot. All three Freedom Riders were bleeding. Zwerg in particular was a hideous sight, moving Lewis and several reporters to beg the officials to have him taken to a hospital. Police officers kept saying that Zwerg was free to leave. Lewis and Barbee placed him gingerly into the backseat of a white cab, which was promptly abandoned by the driver. The deputy sheriff read Judge Jones's injunction to Zwerg as he sat motionless, uncomprehending. Some time later, a Negro taxi driver volunteered to take Lewis and Barbee to a hospital, but the segregation laws forced Zwerg to remain behind. Commissioner Sullivan told inquiring reporters that all the ambulances for whites were out of service with breakdowns. One reporter ventured to the taxi where Zwerg was sitting and tried to explain why it was taking so long to evacuate him. “You can't get me out of here,” Zwerg replied vacantly. “I don't even know where I am or how I got here.”

Some fifteen or twenty minutes later, a police lieutenant came upon the partially hidden form of Seigenthaler, who was just beginning to stir. “Looks like you got some trouble, buddy,” he said.

“Yeah, I did,” said Seigenthaler, waking to pain. “What happened?”

“Well, we had a riot.”

“Don't you think you better call Mr. Kennedy?”

“Which Mr. Kennedy?”

“The Attorney General of the United States.”

The lieutenant frowned. “Who the hell are you?” he asked.

“I'm his administrative assistant,” groaned Seigenthaler, in a manner that convinced the lieutenant he was talking with a bona-fide big shot. He ran for help, carrying news that reporters picked up instantly. Seigenthaler passed out again. He awoke in the X-ray room of a hospital, lying beside a doctor who was talking on the telephone with Byron White in Washington.

By that time, police had allowed Zwerg to be taken by a Negro ambulance to a Catholic hospital, which agreed to receive him. At the riot scene, the crowd swelled to upwards of a thousand people, still breaking into sporadic violence. A handful of whites ambushed two stray Negro teenagers half a block from the bus terminal, setting one briefly on fire with kerosene and breaking the other's leg with a stomping. Other rioters built an enormous bonfire from the scattered contents of the Freedom Riders' suitcases. Police began to make arrests, eventually hauling off seven people charged with disorderly conduct and two alleged drunks. In the midst of all this, Commissioner Sullivan sat on the back of a car, fielding press questions about police preparedness and the causes of the riot. “I really don't know what happened,” he said. “When I got here, all I saw were three men lying in the street. There was two niggers and a white man.”