Parting the Waters (93 page)

Slater King recommended as president a doctor named William G. Anderson, who had come to Albany from his hometown of Americus, Georgia, only four years earlier. In the elite Criterion Club, Anderson had distinguished himself for persistence and diplomacy. He was handsome, well-spoken, ambitious, and unscarred. The founding members of the Albany Movement elected him president that night. Slater King became vice president. Before adjourning, the members adopted a cautious declaration of method. In language that bore signs of C. B. King's draftsmanship, the document concluded: “It has been our vicarious experience, that when positive actions in matters of this kind have become necessary in order to implement the achievement of these constitutionally guaranteed rights, it has been detrimental to the best interests of the communities involved, economically, socially, and morally. In view of the threat of such detriment, it is our hope that such positive actions will not be necessary in the city of Albany.” A copy soon found its way into the hands of Mayor Kelley and Police Chief Pritchett.

Sherrod and Reagon had reason to be pleased. After about two months' work, they were being incorporated into a leadership organization much broader than anything ever created in McComb. Expected SNCC demonstrations were the unspoken cause of unity, and the qualms of the local leaders were so feeble against the tide of student sentiment that the first of the “positive actions” took place on November 22, only five days after the founding of the Albany Movement. Three high school students from Chatmon's Youth Council walked into the white sections of the bus station to confront the officers stationed there during the continuous “alert.” After they refused orders to move on, even in the commanding presence of Chief Pritchett himself, they were hauled off to jail under the fixed gaze of several dozen bystanders. Tom Chatmon bailed them out within an hour, but Albany had its first arrests on the day before Thanksgiving.

Late that same afternoon, Albany State College dismissed its students for the holiday weekend. Hundreds of Negro students walked or rode across the Flint River bridge to the Trailways station in downtown Albany, bound for their hometowns. Because of the earlier arrests and the persistent rumors of race trouble, the dean of students went ahead of them. He took up a post outside the station, from which he directed the herd of students toward the colored waiting room. All obeyed him except two, Blanton Hall and Bertha Gober. They broke away to “go clean-sided,” which was the local Negro slang for entering the white waiting room. The distraught dean, forbidden to pursue them there, peeked in from the outside along with gaggles of awestruck students. A policeman quickly approached Hall and Gober in the line at the white ticket window and said, “You'll never get your ticket there.” The two students asked why, nervously and politely standing their ground. A detective laid the groundwork for arrest by advising them that their presence was “tending to create a disturbance,” and when they still did not move from the line, Laurie Pritchett ordered them to jail. Word had flashed through Negro Albany by suppertime: two groups to jail in a single day. By morning, nearly everyone knew that two Albany State students were spending their Thanksgiving away from home, behind bars. Although they were almost completely unknown, being from out of town, their plight drew sympathy eclipsing that for the three Youth Council members. Strangers took plates of turkey down to the jail.

The two students stayed in jail through Thanksgiving night, receiving more food and visitors. Frequent bulletins about their condition pulsed outward by telephone and word of mouth. As in McComb, the sentiments of parents and other adults fell heavily to their support, so that the leaders of the new Albany Movement determined on Friday to call their first mass meeting for Saturday night. With a campus crisis, a high school crisis, and a growing fear of violence over segregation, they had a compelling opportunity to introduce their organization to the general public. Anderson and Slater King obtained permission from Rev. E. James Grant to use Mount Zion Baptist Church. This was a breakthrough in itself, as Mount Zion was the church of the Baptist elite.

On Saturday morning, Blanton Hall and Bertha Gober each received in jail an official notice from Albany State, that “as a result of your being apprehended and arrested…you are hereby suspended indefinitely as a student.” If the mass meeting was not already a guaranteed success, it became one as soon as the leafleters and runners spread word that President Dennis had decided to stand with the white segregationists. Rumors flew—that the students were in tears, that Reverend Grant had resisted pressure to withdraw his permission to use Mount Zion, that Dennis would not dare show his face at his own church.

Dr. Anderson presided at the meeting. Slater King made a speech, as did C. B. King and several others. A. C. Searles, editor of the local Negro weekly, reported on his emergency conference that afternoon with President Dennis. To all his arguments that the student suspensions were not only wrong but improper—handed down without any notice or hearing, in advance of any conviction in the courts—Dennis had replied tersely that the students would be suspended “forever.” Dennis had been overwrought, Searles declared, and Searles himself was upset enough to call Dennis—his old friend, fellow deacon and Criterion Club member—“the blackest white man I ever saw.” Sharp words ostracized Dennis, and stirring words called for unity against segregation. Long-standing patterns were turned upside down, with age and conciliation giving way to youth and confrontational witness.

Cordell Reagon, an extroverted performer with a clear tenor voice, had discovered in the SNCC workshops two gifted singers, Rutha Harris and Bernice Johnson, both of them preachers' daughters studying voice in the hope of becoming opera stars. The trio had been singing freedom songs together for weeks, and that night they climbed into the Mount Zion pulpit to lead the singing. By prearrangement, no one played the piano or organ for either the freedom songs or the church hymns. The harmonies and intensities of naked voices became a trademark of the Albany Movement. All sounds, from the soaring gospel descants of the soprano soloists to the thunderous hand-clapping of the congregation, were created by human flesh. The songs harked back to the moods of the slavery spirituals. There were tragic, sweet songs like “Oh, Freedom” and rollicking ones like “This Little Light of Mine.” At first, the SNCC leaders accepted the songleader role because of their appreciation for movement singing, and the elders conceded them the role because music was of marginal importance to the normal church program. But the SNCC leaders soon developed a manipulative guile about the music. Their
a capella
singing took the service away from established control by either the preachers or the organist. The spirit of the songs could sweep up the crowd, and the young leaders realized that through song they could induce humble people to say and feel things that otherwise were beyond them. Into the defiant spiritual “Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around,” Sherrod and Reagon called out verses of “Ain't gonna let Chief Pritchett turn me around.” It amazed them to see people who had inched tentatively into the church take up the verse in full voice, setting themselves against feared authority.

Between songs, Anderson invited the five arrested students to tell the congregation why they had decided to defy segregation at the bus station, and what had happened to them. One by one they spoke, with the last student in the pulpit being Bertha Gober, a diminutive young woman with the small voice of a child. She described her arrest, her jailers, the sordid details of her cell. “I felt it was necessary to show the people that human dignity must be obtained even if through suffering or maltreatment,” she said. “…I'd do it again anytime…After spending those two nights in jail for a worthy cause, I feel that I have gained a feeling of decency and self-respect, a feeling of cleanliness that even the dirtiest walls of Albany's jail nor the actions of my institution cannot take away from me.” The trembling simplicity of her speech washed over the audience. “There was nothing left to say,” Sherrod wrote. He and everyone else were reduced to tears, including the “hard, grown men.” They all swayed to the closing song, “We Shall Overcome,” and about a third of them stayed on after the benediction to keep singing on their own. Dr. Anderson sang a solo, as did Sherrod and people rising from the audience. The singers stayed on well past midnight, not wanting to let the moment end.

More than five hundred people gathered outside city hall the following Monday for the swift trial and conviction of the five arrested students. Previously, Sherrod had introduced the milling crowd outside to Charles Jones, his SNCC colleague and former Rock Hill cellmate, who was newly arrived from Atlanta, and during the trial Jones marched the crowd slowly back to Shiloh Baptist Church. Chief Pritchett, moving alongside them, wavered between good-natured jokes and orders to disperse—seemingly on the verge of making arrests. The next day, when Sherrod ventured onto the turbulent Albany State campus to address a student gathering, police arrested him on a trespassing warrant signed by President Dennis and two professors. Sherrod spent the night in jail before bonding out.

 

Sherrod, Reagon, and Jones found themselves hanging on a ledge. Support for them as catalysts had waxed strongly in the recent public meetings, but they sensed that it was unstable. If they engineered another challenge to segregation, the new adults in the movement were likely to turn against them as provocateurs. If they did nothing, however, the movement would dissipate during its recuperation. To break through the impasse, they hit upon the idea of inviting a spark from Atlanta. This would enable them to rekindle the movement with minimal risk of backlash. Accordingly, they called James Forman, the new executive secretary of SNCC, and suggested that he organize a group of Freedom Riders to test the Albany train station.

Forman liked the idea. He was a publicist who had come South from Chicago to write stories about the movement. Forman could be abrasive—he had been thrown out of the sharecroppers' “tent cities” in Fayette County, Tennessee, on charges of “factionalism”—and he had brought to SNCC's autumn meeting a taste for apocalyptic heroics that had struck Bob Moses as amusing. But Forman's aggressive competence filled a vacuum in SNCC. He raised money to pay overdue bills. Through phone calls and press releases, he expanded SNCC's role as a press agent just as reporters were looking for ways to keep up with the unpredictable student demonstrations across the South. Having been active in the predominantly white National Student Association, Forman helped make minor news by encouraging the students of exclusive Sarah Lawrence College in New York to send a telegram of support to Brenda Travis at her Mississippi reform school. He had helped recruit Tom Hayden, a white activist from the NSA, for a publicity trip to McComb, during which Hayden was dragged from a car and beaten.

Inasmuch as SNCC headquarters was too poor to do much administration anyway, Forman decided that little would be lost if he cleared the place out for a Freedom Ride to Albany. He assembled a motley group that included himself, his new office manager, a student volunteer, a touring Danish writer, Nashville Freedom Rider Selyn McCollum, and three whites who had emerged from ordeals in McComb: Bob Zellner and newlyweds Tom and Casey Hayden. All they lacked was money for the train tickets, and for that Forman sounded out Bernard “Jelly” Lee. Since drifting away from SNCC during its summer infighting, Lee had modeled himself more closely than ever on Martin Luther King. Having left his wife, children, and two colleges, he had been taken into the household of Wyatt Walker more or less as a ward. Lee took Forman's idea straight to Walker, who agreed to subsidize the cost of a few train tickets. Lee joined the ride. Forman advised Sherrod of their itinerary. Sherrod alerted the Albany Movement, and someone in turn alerted Chief Pritchett.

The train pulled into Albany's Union Railway Terminal on Sunday afternoon, December 10. Chief Pritchett allowed only Charles Jones and Bertha Gober to meet the train, along with Negro editor A. C. Searles, who claimed status as a media observer. Searles, fidgeting with a camera and a press ID, tried to cut the tension by making nervous jokes with Pritchett, saying, “You wouldn't arrest a newsman like me, would you, Chief?” Forman, Lee, and the other seven Freedom Riders emerged to this dampened reception. Ahead of them was a nearly vacant station, as a squadron of police had sealed off and occupied the white areas. When Pritchett and a few officers tried to escort the integrated group hurriedly through the station, the riders veered off to sit down in the white waiting room. Pritchett tersely ordered them to leave. They complied, hustling toward the white exit as pointed out by Gober and Jones.

At the moment the mixed group of riders stepped unharmed through the door, several hundred waiting partisans of the Albany Movement sent up a cry of relief and triumph. Chief Pritchett became instantly perturbed. With hugs, handshakes, and cheers breaking out all around his porous line of officers, he tried to shout above the noise that they should clear the sidewalks. The intertwined mass moved slowly toward the waiting cars of a small motorcade. It would be impossible to convince the gawking white bystanders and their representatives on the City Commission that this joyous spectacle did no serious damage to segregation.

Pritchett's temper snapped. “Officers, move out!” he shouted to his reserves, and to the celebrants he thundered, “Don't move! You're under arrest.” He waded into the crowd to point out the culprits he wanted: the nine Freedom Riders, plus Gober and Jones. Some of them already were inside the waiting cars, with others strewn among people suddenly frozen in surprise. The arresting officers made only one mistake: in the confusion, they seized an Albany State student and missed one Freedom Rider. Eleven prisoners quickly found themselves in a paddy wagon, headed for city hall to be booked on charges of disorderly conduct, obstructing the flow of traffic, and failure to obey an officer. The motorcade left behind was transformed into a dirge recessional to Shiloh Baptist Church.