Civil Rights Events

Freedom Rides

SNCC to the Rescue

 

The survivors of the two Freedom Rides that began in Washington, D. C. were scattered about Birmingham.  James Farmer had arrived from the nation’s capitol.  The Riders wanted to continue their journey.  Farmer was apprehensive.  The Greyhound bus company “did not want to risk losing another bus to a bombing, and its drivers, who were all white, did not want to risk their lives” (Cozzens 4).  U. S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy sent Justice Department aide and native Tennesseean John Seigenthaler to Birmingham to negotiate air transportation of the Riders to New Orleans, the final destination of their journey.  Kennedy wanted the Freedom Rides ended.  Farmer declared the CORE project terminated. 

 

On the evening of May 15, the CORE Freedom Riders finally arrive in New Orleans aboard an airplane arranged for by John Seigenthaler ….On the airport tarmac, they are met by a crowd of white police officers in riot gear who shout racial epithets at the Riders as they make their way to the terminal and a small, welcoming group of CORE volunteers (Journey 1).

 

The decision to end the ride frustrated student activists, such as Diane Nash, who argued in a phone conversation with Farmer: “We can’t let them stop us with violence. If we do, the movement is dead.” Under the auspices and organizational support of SNCC, the Freedom Rides would resume out of Nashville.  SNCC mentors were wary of this decision, including King, who had declined to join the rides when asked by Nash and Rodney Powell.  Farmer continued to express his reservations, questioning whether continuing the trip was “suicide” ((Freedom Stanford 4).

 

Diane Nash recognized “that if the Freedom Ride was ended right then after all that violence, southern white racists would think that they could stop a project by inflicting enough violence on it … and we wouldn’t have been able to have any kind of movement for voting rights, for buses, public accommodations or anything after that, without getting a lot of people killed first.”  Robert Kennedy instructed Seigenthaler to speak directly with Nash to get her to change her mind (Morgan 2).

 

Seigenthaler recalled their telephone conversation.

 

I felt my voice go up another decibel and another and soon I was shouting, ‘Young woman, do you understand what you are doing? You’re gonna get somebody . . . Do you understand you’re gonna get somebody killed?’ And there’s a pause, and she said, ‘Sir, you should know, we all signed our last wills and testaments last night. . . . We know someone will be killed. But we cannot let violence overcome non-violence.’ That’s virtually a direct quote of the words that came out of that child’s mouth. Here I am an official of the United States government, representing the president and the attorney general, talking to a student at Fisk University. And she in a very quiet but strong way gave me a lecture (Lifson 4).

 

 

Jim Zwerg, whose subsequent Freedom Ride participation would make him famous, recalled the following.

 

Well, we got word on the CORE Freedom Ride, and we knew that John Lewis, a member of our organization, was going to be involved in it. We got word of the burning in Aniston... we had a meeting long into the night as soon as we heard about it. The feeling was that if we let those perpetrators of violence believe that people would stop if they were violent enough, then we would take serious steps backwards. Right away the feeling was that we needed to ride. We called Dr. King, we called James Farmer. There was an awareness that our phones were being tapped, so the feeling was that they knew what we were about to do. Our plan was different from CORE's. Whereas they chartered their buses, we were just going to get tickets and get on the bus. We felt that was even more important -- to buy a ticket just like any other traveler. We weren't getting a special bus, we were just going to get on the bus.

 

It was decided that we would send twelve people. I was one of 18 that volunteered to go. I've been asked why I volunteered to go... I would have to say, at that moment, it wasn't even a question. It was the right thing for me to do. I never second-guessed it (Simkin 3-4).

 

Zwerg was drawn to the Freedom Rides after he was assigned a black roommate while attending Beloit College in Wisconsin. He grew to admire his roommate and was shocked to see how the young man was treated by whites when they went out in public together. So he volunteered to be an exchange student at Fisk University in Nashville, an all-black college, for one semester. He wanted to know how it felt to be a minority.

 

Zwerg had gone to a city that had become a launching pad for the civil rights movement. He was swept up in the group of Nashville college students who were initiating sit-ins and Freedom Rides. He was awed by their commitment (Blake 5).

 

It was the dance craze “The Twist” that ushered Jim Zwerg of Gallup, N.M., into the civil rights movement.  At a party while attending Fisk University I was showing them what a poor twist dancer I was,” he said. “We were having such a good time and I said, ‘Hey, we’ve got time, why don’t we take in a movie this afternoon?’ ” That was when he learned that blacks and whites could not attend a movie together in Nashville. His involvement in efforts to desegregate local movie theaters led to his participation in the ride (Colvin 9).

 

Ten volunteers left Nashville for Birmingham May 17 on the 5:15 a.m. Greyhound bus; thirteen more got on a second bus the next day. Interviewed in 1995, Zwerg described the ride from Nashville to Birmingham and his subsequent incarceration.

 

We just got the tickets and got on the bus. I was going to sit in the front of the bus with Paul Brooks. [22, from East St. Louis, student at American Baptist Theological Seminary, would-be editor of Mississippi Free Press in Jackson, Mississippi, 1962–1963]  Paul sat by the window; I sat by the aisle. The rest of the blacks and one white girl, Celine McMullen, were going to sit in the back.

 

It was an uneventful ride until we got to the Birmingham city limits. We were pulled over by the police... They came on the bus and said, "This is a Freedom Rider bus, who's on here from Nashville? And the bus driver pointed to Paul and myself. They came up and really started badgering Paul, you know, "Get up... why aren't you in the back of the bus?" And he said he was very comfortable where he was. So they placed him under arrest. And they asked me to move so they could get to him... and I said, "I'm very comfortable where I am too."

 

We were both placed under arrest, taken off the bus, seated in the squad car for I don' t know how long. Finally they took us to Birmingham Jail and fingerprinted us. They put me in solitary for a little while. Then they put me in with a fellow who was a felon. I mean, I'm in my suit and tie and I've got my pocket bible with me. I think he thought I was some clergyman making calls. Ultimately they threw me in a drunk tank, with about twenty guys in various states of inebriation, and announced in no uncertain terms that I was a ******-lover for the Freedom Riders. Here he is, boys, have at him! I didn't know what was going to happen and I kind of said, "How do you guys feel about this? Do you know what they're talking about?" And they started asking me some questions.

 

One of the things we agreed on is that if you were jailed, number one, you go on a hunger strike, because in our minds we were jailed illegally. You don't cop a plea, you don't pay the bail and jump. You stay. But here I was. One single white guy. And I didn't know what had happened to Paul. I didn't know what had happened to the rest of the people on the bus. I began to see the state that some of drunks were in, and I tried to get some towels and clean up the guys who were sick. I just got talking to some of them and none of them ever laid a hand on me. Basically, we talked about what I believed and what they believed.

 

I discovered that since the South was predominately Baptist, Catholics were kind of looked down on at the time. Surprisingly, 19 of the 20 guys in the drunk tank were Catholics! So we kind of had something more in common than they realized. (Simkin

 6-8).

 

The other Riders were placed under “protective custody.”   “Music was the way we communicated in jail.  … ‘Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on.’  I sang it for my cellmates and they liked it. So I got probably ten of these guys singing with me. They had taken all the rest of the people on the bus into protective custody, and I had heard them singing. Now they could hear this group singing, and know I was okay.”

 

We still had to go to mess even though you didn't eat. One day a fellow came in who was quite sick and I smuggled a sandwich back to the cell for him. I didn't know that act was punishable by three months in jail. But by giving him a sandwich -- suddenly I was a good guy and nobody was going to lay a hand on me. So the two and a half days that we were in jail were fine. We got to know each other. We talked. When I was in court I was really pleased that a number of these guys came over to me and said, "Jim, we really don't agree with you, but we wish you all the best" (Simkin 6-10).

 

Seven Freedom Riders who had been arrested the previous day were transported from the Birmingham jail north to the Tennessee border.  Early in the morning of May 18, Bull Connor and other police officers drove the Riders under cover of darkness to Ardmore, Alabama., near the Alabama/Tennessee border.  

 

Birmingham, AL native, 21-year-old Catherine Burks was a student at Tennessee State University when she volunteered for the Nashville Movement Freedom Ride. On May 18, she bantered with the ultra-segregationist Birmingham Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor as he drove the Nashville riders from jail back to the Tennessee state line.

 

 In Freedom Riders, Burks says she borrowed a line from the Westerns of the day, telling Connor, "We'll see you back in Birmingham by high noon” (Meet 2).

 

Left on the side of the road, the Riders were told to make their way back to Nashville.  The Riders found refuge in the home of an elderly black couple.  From Nashville, Diane Nash made arrangements for a car to transport the Riders back to Birmingham the following day.

 

Federal intervention began to take place behind the scenes as Attorney General Robert Kennedy called the Greyhound Company and demanded that it find a driver.  Seeking to diffuse the dangerous situation, John Seigenthaler, a Department of Justice representative accompanying the freedom riders, met with a reluctant Alabama Governor John Patterson.  Seigenthaler’s maneuver resulted in the bus’s departure for Montgomery with a full police escort the next morning (Freedom Stanford 7).

 

 

Works cited:

 

Blake, John.  “Shocking photo created a hero, but not to his family.”  CNN.  Web.  http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/05/16/Zwerg.freedom.rides/index.html

 

Colvin, Rhonda.  “As Trump attacks John Lewis, here’s how freedom riders broke the chains of segregation.”  The Washington Post.  January 15, 2017.  Web.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/we-were-soldiers-the-flesh-and-blood-behind-the-new-civil-rights-monument/2017/01/15/4d1c9edc-42dc-11e6-88d0-6adee48be8bc_story.html?utm_term=.3a43ab1ea4f6

 

Cozzens, Lisa.   “Freedom Rides.”  Watson.org. Web.   http://www.watson.org/~lisa/blackhistory/civilrights-55-65/freeride.html

 

“Freedom Rides.”  Stanford: The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute.  Web.   https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/freedom-rides

 

“The Journey to Freedom.”  Oprah.com.  Web.  http://www.oprah.com/oprahshow/journey-to-freedom-retrace-the-freedom-rides/all

 

Lifson, Amy.  “Freedom Riders.”  Humanities: The Magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities.  May/June 2011.  Web.  https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2011/mayjune/feature/freedom-riders

 

“Meet the Players: Freedom Riders.”  American Experience.  Web.  http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/meet-players-freedom-riders/

 

Morgan, Thad.  “How Freedom Rider Diane Nash Risked Her Life to Desegregate the South.”  History.  March 8, 2018.  Web.  https://www.history.com/news/diane-nash-freedom-rider-civil-rights-movement.

Simkin, John.  “Freedom Riders.”  Spartacus Educational.  August 2014.  Web.  https://spartacus-educational.com/USAfreedomR.htm