Parting the Waters (85 page)

Public opinion leaders seemed only too eager to oblige the President by disengaging from the strife down in Mississippi.
The New York Times
, which gave King and the civil rights movement generally sympathetic coverage, opposed the extension of the ride. “They are challenging not only long-held customs but passionately held feelings,” the paper declared. “Non-violence that deliberately provokes violence is a logical contradiction.” A news story that same day, headlined “Dr. King Refuses to End Bus Test,” cast the issue in a most negative light. “Some liberal Southerners of both races joined moderates and others today in asserting that the Freedom Riders should be halted,” it began, consigning the renewed campaign to the far fringes of public support. This was the last page-one story on the Freedom Rides to appear in the
Times
. A Gallup poll in June showed that 63 percent of all Americans disapproved of the Freedom Rides.

Robert Kennedy, having denounced both King and the Freedom Rides in the most scathing terms on Thursday and Friday, arrived at the Justice Department on Monday morning, May 29, in an entirely different mood. He announced to his staff that King's suggestion of seeking a ruling from the Interstate Commerce Commission might not be so naïve after all, in spite of that agency's notoriously encrusted bureaucracy. In fact, the idea seemed so good upon reconsideration that Kennedy sent Justice Department lawyers scrambling into unfamiliar territory. They came up with the novel idea of a “petition” by the Attorney General to the nominally independent ICC. They researched, drafted, and cleared the document for Kennedy's signature—all on that same day. Justice teams gave ICC commissioners and assorted bureaucrats no peace until they issued the ruling Kennedy wanted, handed down that September. In so doing, they had telescoped a process that normally took years—even if the commissioners liked the proposal, which in this case they did not—into less than four months. Experts considered the lobbying feat a bureaucratic miracle.

The difference, after the early Freedom Rides, was that Justice Department officials pursued the private strategy with a vengeance. They immediately stepped up efforts to create a well-financed, tax-exempt organization to register Negro voters in the South. On the tax side, the clandestine pursuit resembled the campaign to secure tax benefits for those who helped ransom the Bay of Pigs prisoners. Kennedy himself intervened with IRS Commissioner Mortimer Caplan to help secure a tax exemption for the new Voter Education Project, housed in Atlanta's Southern Regional Council. When that organization's director, Leslie Dunbar, went to the IRS to negotiate for his exemption, Burke Marshall and other Kennedy officials went with him.

Marshall, Harris Wofford, and foundation executive Stephen Currier worked simultaneously to bring the various civil rights groups under uniform rules and a central budget. This task had been delicate enough earlier in the spring, given the touchy history between Roy Wilkins and King, but now the complications rose geometrically with the addition of CORE and the SNCC students. Logically, neither organization seemed promising for registration work. CORE had few members in the South; SNCC was not really an organization, having only one full-time staff member. Both organizations were deeply engrossed in the Freedom Rides. None of these objections mattered to the Justice Department, however. CORE and SNCC must be recruited, whatever it took, because one of Kennedy's goals was to coax them out of precisely the kind of confrontational actions around which they were shaping their identities.

In early June, Marshall attended a small conference that included several of the SNCC and CORE leaders not in Mississippi jails. At the Capahosic, Virginia, plantation once owned by Booker T. Washington's successor, R. R. Moton, Marshall sat under a live oak tree on the banks of the York River and made the case for voter registration. His most receptive listener among the students was Timothy Jenkins, who was bound for Yale Law School in the fall. Jenkins was deeply critical of what he called the “pain and suffering school” within SNCC. He did not share their religious zeal, and he thought direct action was a dead end. Whenever the zeal died out, he predicted, the movement would be left with no political protection, and to Jenkins all such protections were grounded in the vote. He believed this so strongly that he had already set out to win over three people he thought could swing the balance of power within SNCC. The “three Charlies,” he called them: Sherrod, Jones, and McDew. There were not three more dissimilar people in the SNCC leadership—Sherrod the country mystic, deeply religious with a stubborn streak; Jones the sophisticated dandy, son of a prominent Southern preacher, with his fancy clothes and a modulated baritone, a junior version of King; and McDew the Northern athlete, daring and “cool,” with a subtle appreciation of both labor history and Jewish prophets. To Jenkins, it was immensely hopeful that the same movement could attract three such people, and it was even more hopeful that they came to see the merits of voter registration after many all-night discussions.

On June 16, Attorney General Kennedy received in his office a delegation from the Freedom Ride Coordinating Committee. It included the “three Charlies,” plus Wyatt Walker, who had bailed out of the Montgomery jail, and Diane Nash, whom Jenkins had written off as “addled by piety” and “hopelessly committed” to nonviolence. They all hoped to secure some additional federal help for the Freedom Rides, but what they received instead was a counterpoint from the Attorney General. The Freedom Rides were no longer productive, he said. The committee members could accomplish more for civil rights by registering Negro voters, and if they would agree to move in that direction he would do everything he could to make sure they were fully supported and protected. He mentioned the confidential work already under way to secure a tax exemption and large foundation grants.

This was too blunt for Charles Sherrod, who was on his feet, nervous but angry, sputtering indignantly against what he regarded as a bribe to lure him from righteous work. “You are a public official, sir,” he said. “It's not your responsibility before God or under the law to tell us how to honor our constitutional rights. It's your job to protect us when we do.” Sherrod moved toward the Attorney General as he began preaching, and Wyatt Walker, fearing that he might attack Kennedy in the frenzy of his sermon, pulled him back toward his seat by the pocket of his pants. When the tension passed, Kennedy resumed his argument, pacing stocking-footed. By educating and registering Negro voters, he said, they might not make immediate headlines but they could alter the politics of the South.

Kennedy and his aides pressed their points then and later. They went so far as to extend confidential promises that the Administration would arrange draft exemptions for the students—so long as they confined themselves to quiet political work. Harris Wofford put the choice to them most graphically: they could have jails filled with Freedom Riders, or jails filled with white Southern officials who tried to obstruct federally protected voting rights. They could be persecuted or protected. To those who expressed interest in voter registration went phone numbers for Burke Marshall or John Doar, along with assurances that they could call the Justice Department collect anytime they got in trouble down South.

These arguments proved to be telling. They were made at a time when Robert Kennedy was being credited by Negro leaders for forceful intervention in the early Freedom Ride, when Shuttlesworth was telling Negro church crowds about the progress made already under the Kennedy Administration, shouting “We thank Jack, Bob, and God!” And even to those aware of Kennedy's abrasive criticisms, or those suspicious of his political motives, the Attorney General was appreciated for his combative involvement. He did not stand aloof, and he seemed to feel that if he shortchanged the civil rights groups in one way, he needed to compensate them in another.

On his wedding anniversary, Kennedy invited Harry Belafonte out to his Hickory Hill home and asked him once again to use his considerable influence among the SNCC students to encourage voter registration. Belafonte promptly invited a delegation of Freedom Riders to visit him in Washington, where he was performing. On the eve of the latter meeting, Kennedy and Marshall advertised their ability to make things happen by generating a front-page article in
The New York Times
, “Negro Vote Surge Expected in South—Administration Experts Sure of a Political Breakthrough.” In effect, the article summarized Kennedy's side of the private arguments. “The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and other leaders of the new militant movements—the sit-ins and the Freedom Riders—have come around to agree that the vote is the key,” it said. “…Confidence that the Government will do its best to protect those who try to register and vote also encourages Negroes to make the attempt.” Belafonte encouraged the students to dismiss as politics the article's suggestion that “Negro apathy” and a bad “attitude” among Negro leaders had held back the voting revolution in the past. In the end, the students said they would be willing to convene the Freedom Riders to propose the voter registration plan. Belafonte gave them $10,000 of his own money to get started.

Kennedy allowed no doubts to grow. By the end of July, the heads of all the major civil rights organizations were interested enough to attend an all-day meeting in New York, with Wofford and Burke Marshall representing the Administration. Farmer, just out of jail in Mississippi, had to be convinced that he was not abandoning CORE's entire purpose at its moment of glory. Roy Wilkins had to be convinced that the NAACP would not appear to be abandoning its banner of school desegregation. These were among the least of the problems. Nevertheless, a month later these same people were back in the Fifth Avenue offices of the Taconic Foundation, this time with “working papers.” They divided the territory of the South and resolved acute differences over the proportional allocation of funds. They recruited the Field Foundation and the Stern Fund to supplement the Taconic Foundation's money. They searched for administrators and conduits who were acceptable to all the various grantees, grantors, and intermediaries. They hammered out a hundred compromises. Within another month, foundation executives translated the deals into fuzzy language, and lawyers checked organizational flow charts against the tax code.
*

The Voter Education Project was created essentially by a forced march in the opposite direction from the Freedom Rides, in spirit if not in purpose. To accomplish the march that same summer of 1961, with the Freedom Rides still going on, was a tribute to the willfulness of the Kennedy Justice Department and a feat even more impressive than the bus order wrenched from the Interstate Commerce Commission. Both deeds had far-reaching implications for Southern politics. Insiders soon argued that these machinations were the significant events of the entire period, and dialectical disputes reminiscent of the Montgomery bus boycott arose as to whether the essential ingredient of progress was law or confrontation, reason or shock, decrees or changes of spirit.

 

Down in Mississippi, a very different transformation was taking place among the Freedom Riders. For some of the prisoners, survival was a letdown. Having absorbed so many mob beatings, or stories of them, and having passed so many angry crowds and imaginary ambushes, the Freedom Riders hyperventilated with religious fervor, in a sense, so that a few of them seemed to collapse of disappointment when they passed unscathed into custody. Others tore anxiously at their hair. All of them, once they recovered in the lower-floor cell block of the Hinds County jail, began to sing. Hank Thomas led them in “We Shall Overcome,” so loudly that the female prisoners across the way took up the same song. They ran through the repertory of movement songs, and when the singing finally died down into conversation between the cells, James Bevel could be heard preaching out loud from Acts 16, about how God sent an earthquake to shake open the foundations of the jail holding Paul and Silas in Philippi, and how He would send a similar earthquake to Jackson, Mississippi, within two days to liberate the Freedom Riders.

Bevel preached lyrically and almost continuously, leaving those within earshot alternately inspired, amused, and worried over his growing expectation of a divine jailbreak. When the deadline passed and Bevel seemed to fall into despondency, James Farmer and others feared that he might be cracking up. Most of the Freedom Riders did not know Bevel well, and those who did, like his fellow seminarians John Lewis and Bernard Lafayette, knew that he lived on the wispy edge between religious genius and lunacy. As it happened, a trusty left Bevel's cell without fully locking the sliding steel door, and Bevel, seeing his chance, asked Lafayette to pray again for a sign that their cause would prevail. During the prayer, Bevel slipped quietly out of his cell to stand in front of Lafayette's, and Lafayette, opening his eyes to this vision of freedom, shrieked in terror and dived headlong under his bunk. Bevel rejailed himself, laughing uproariously. He and Lafayette explained the shrieks and fits with various versions of the story, leaving their fellows in other parts of the cell block uncertain of their ballast. There was no question, however, that Bevel had moments of lucid practicality. When the jailers cut off cigarettes and snacks to the Freedom Riders because of their loud singing, he devised a clandestine exchange system with other parts of the jail.

Other prisoners revealed themselves to be variously meek, truculent, stolid, or hysterical in adapting to jail life. Some pledged grandly to stay “until hell freezes over” but then bailed out after a few days behind bars. Those behind remained roughly two-thirds college students, three-quarters male, and more than half Negro, with Quakers and Jews, including several rabbis, represented disproportionately among the whites. James Lawson, whose experience a decade earlier made him the recognized expert on prison culture, gave them advice about how to get along with the thieves and drunkards in the jail, and warned them against getting too attached to anything except their own inner strengths, because all their routines were beyond their control. Very soon, jail authorities sorely tested them by transferring most of the Freedom Riders to the Hinds County prison farm, out in the country. There the young prisoners were crammed by the dozen into thirteen-by-fifteen-foot cells with stopped-up toilets. The food was bug-ridden. For their singing they were stuffed into claustrophobic “sweatboxes.” Their only consolation was that there were not nearly boxes to hold all the singers at once.