Civil Rights Events

Freedom Rides

Greyhound Bus -- Anniston

 

Following the momentum of student-led sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina and Nashville, Tennesssee in early 1960, an interracial group of activists, led by Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) Executive Director James Farmer, decided to continue to challenge Jim Crow segregation in the South by organizing “freedom rides” through the region.  They used as their model CORE’s 1946 “Journey of Reconciliation” where an interracial group rode interstate buses to test the enforcement of the Supreme Court’s decision in Morgan v. the Commonwealth of Virginia which outlawed segregation in interstate travel. White southern segregationists resisted CORE’s efforts. When most of the demonstrators were arrested in North Carolina, the police effectively aborted the Journey of Reconciliation.

 

Recalling that failed effort 15 years earlier, James Farmer organized a new generation of black and white activists to travel on interstate buses to test the 1960 United States Supreme Court decision in Boynton v. Virginia which reiterated the earlier ruling prohibiting racial segregation in interstate transportation (Mack 1). 

 

"So that everything would be open and above board, I sent letters to the

President of the United States, President Kennedy; to the Attorney General,

Robert Kennedy; the Director of the FBI, Mr. Hoover; the Chairman of the

Interstate Commerce Commission, which regulated interstate travel; to the

President of Greyhound Corporation; and the President of Trailways Corporation.

And I must say we got replies from none of those letters,” Farmer would state later (Freedom Quotes 1).

 

John F. Kennedy had been elected president, in large part due to widespread support among blacks who believed that Kennedy was more sympathetic to the civil rights movement than his opponent, Richard Nixon. Once in office, however, Kennedy proved less committed to the movement than he had appeared during the campaign. To test the president's commitment to civil rights, CORE would send two interracial groups on chartered buses into the deep South. The whites would sit in the back and the blacks in the front. At rest stops, the whites would go into blacks-only areas and vice versa. "This was not civil disobedience, really," explained … Farmer, "because we [were] merely doing what the Supreme Court said we had a right to do." But the Freedom Riders expected to meet resistance. "We felt we could count on the racists of the South to create a crisis so that the federal government would be compelled to enforce the law," said Farmer. "When we began the ride I think all of us were prepared for as much violence as could be thrown at us. We were prepared for the possibility of death" (Cozzens 1).

 

Half of the Freedom Riders would travel on a Greyhound bus and the other half on a Trailways bus.  Their ultimate destination was New Orleans, Louisiana. 

 

Prior to the 1960 decision, two students, John Lewis and Bernard Lafayette, integrated their bus ride home from college in Nashville, Tennessee, by sitting at the front of a bus and refusing to move. After this first ride, they saw CORE’s announcement recruiting volunteers to participate in a Freedom Ride, a longer bus trip through the South to test the enforcement of Boynton. Lafayette’s parents would not permit him to participate, but Lewis joined 12 other activists to form an interracial group that underwent extensive training in nonviolent direct action before launching the ride (Freedom Stanford 1).

 

“One of the most remarkable things about the Freedom Rides is that …there was not a single incident of breaking the discipline,” Raymond Arsenault, author of Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice, said.  “It’s hard to think of anything more striking in American history than that.”

 

Even seemingly minor details were not overlooked. For the day of the rides, a dress code was implemented: women in dresses, skirts, and the men in sport coats. “They wanted to look like they had just come out of church or Sunday school,” Arsenault said (Colvin 1).

 

The Freedom Riders left Washington DC on May 4, 1961. It was scheduled to arrive in New Orleans on May 17, the seventh anniversary of the Brown v Board of Education decision. 

 

The first significant confrontation with segregationists occurred in Charlotte, North Carolina.  Joseph Perkins, twenty-seven year-old CORE Field Secretary, was arrested for trespassing for attempting to have his shoes shined at a whites-only shoe stand.   Perkins refused to post bail and spent two nights (May 8 and 9) in jail. On May 10, Judge Howard B. Arbuckle found him innocent of the trespassing charge based on the precedent set in Boyton v. Virginia.  Perkins would rejoin the riders May 11.

 

On May 10 several white men attacked a group of Freedom Riders at the Greyhound bus terminal in Rock Hill, South Carolina, as they attempted to enter the whites-only waiting room. John Lewis, Al Bigelow and Genevieve Hughes sustain injuries.  Two men set upon Lewis, battered his face and kicked him in the ribs.  The attack was broken up by local police. 

 

Lewis received then a telegram inviting him to Philadelphia for an interview for a position with the Peace Corps. He decided to go, intending to rejoin the Freedom Riders in Birmingham. 

 

The Freedom Riders arrived in Atlanta on May 13 and attended a reception hosted by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. They wanted King to join them on the buses, to become a Freedom Rider himself. King passed on a warning that the Klan had "quite a welcome" prepared for the Riders in Alabama.  He urged them to reconsider traveling through the Deep South.  He whispered prophetically to Jet Magazine reporter Simeon Booker, who was covering the story, “You will never make it through Alabama” (Freedom Stannford 2).  Despite King’s warning, the CORE Freedom Riders left Atlanta on May 14, bound for Alabama.

 

Informed that his father had died unexpectedly, James Farmer needed to return to Washington, D.C. to attend his father’s funeral.  James Peck replaced Farmer as leader of the perilous project.  Peck phoned Fred Shuttlesworth, the pastor of Birmingham's Bethel Baptist Church and the leader of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, to give him the exact arrival times of the two Freedom Buses.  Shuttlesworth told Peck that Birmingham was alive with rumors that a white mob planned to confront the Riders at the downtown bus stations.  Peck calmly told his riders about Shuttlesworth’s warning.  He also related a warning he had received about potential difficulties that might arise at Anniston, a rest stop on the bus route to Birmingham.  To allay fears, he stated he had no reason to believe the Riders would encounter serious trouble prior to their arrival in downtown Birmingham.  The four-hour ride would give them considerable time to prepare an effective nonviolent response to the waiting mob, should such an eventuality exist.

 

The Greyhound Bus
 

The two busses carrying the riders left Atlanta an hour apart. The Greyhound group, with Joe Perkins in charge, left first at 11:00 A.M. The bus was more than half empty. Fourteen passengers were on board: five regular passengers, seven Freedom Riders, and two journalists, Charlotte Devree and Moses Newson.  The riders were Genevieve Hughes, white, 28, CORE field secretary;  Al Bigelow, white, 55, retired naval officer; Hank Thomas, black, 19, Howard University student; Jimmy McDonald, black, 29, CORE volunteer; Mae Frances Moultrie, black,  24, Morris College student; Joe Perkins, black, 27, CORE field secretary; and Ed Blankenheim, white, 27, a carpenter.  Three of the regular passengers were Roy Robinson, the manager of the Atlanta Greyhound station, and two undercover plainclothes agents of the Alabama Highway Patrol: Eli Cowling and Harry Sims.  Following the orders of Floyd Mann, the director of the Alabama Highway Patrol, Cowling carried a hidden microphone to be used to eavesdrop on the Riders. Unsure of the Freedom Ride's itinerary, Mann and his boss, Governor John Patterson, wanted to know what the Riders planned.

 

Just south of Anniston, the driver of a northbound Greyhound motioned to the driver of the Freedom Riders' bus, O. T. Jones, to pull over to the side of the road. A white man then ran across the road and yelled to Jones through the window: "There's an angry and unruly crowd gathered at Anniston. There's a rumor that some people on this bus are going to stage a sit-in. The terminal has been closed. Be careful." With this message the Riders' worst fears seemed to be confirmed, but Joe Perkins — hoping that the warning was a bluff, or at least an exaggeration — urged the driver to keep going. A minute or two later, as the bus passed the city limits, several of the Riders couldn't help but notice that Anniston's sidewalks were lined with people, an unusual sight on a Sunday afternoon in a Deep South town. "It seemed that everyone in the town was out to greet us," White Rider Genevieve Hughes, 28-year-old CORE Field Secretary, later commented.

 

Nineteen-year-old Hank Thomas, who had joined the 1961 CORE Freedom Ride at the last minute after his Howard University roommate John Moody had dropped out with a bad case of the flu, remembered the strange feeling that he and the other Riders felt as the bus turned into the station parking lot. The station was locked shut.  There was utter silence.  Then, suddenly, a screaming mob, led by Anniston Klan leader William Chappell, surrounded the bus. Thomas thought he heard the driver, O. T. Jones say, "Well, boys, here they are.  I brought you some niggers and nigger-lovers."

 

An eighteen-year-old Klansman and ex-convict, Roger Couch, stretched himself out in front of the bus.  The others, approximately fifty in number, carrying metal pipes, clubs, and chains — milled about, many screaming: "Dirty Communists!  "Sieg heil!" No policemen were present, even though the manager of the Anniston Greyhound station, had warned local officials earlier that a potentially dangerous mob had assembled.

 

After the driver opened the door, Cowling and Sims hurried to the front and managed to close the door.  Frenzied attackers began to smash windows, dent the sides of the bus, and slash tires.  Genevieve Hughes watched a man walk by the side of the bus, saw him slip a pistol from his pocket, watched him stare at her for several minutes.  She heard the sound of shattering glass.  She shouted, "Duck, down everyone," thinking that a bullet had struck one of the windows.  It had been a rock.  A second man cracked the window above her seat with brass knuckles.  Joe Perkins's window was also cracked.  The assault continued for almost twenty minutes.

 

The Anniston police finally arrived.  The officers examined the broken windows and slashed tires but made no attempt to arrest anybody.  Eventually, the officers cleared a path in the crowd and motioned for the bus to leave the parking lot.

 

A police car led the Greyhound to the city limits and then turned back, leaving the bus to the mercy of the pursuing mob. A long line of cars and pickup trucks, plus one car carrying a news reporter and a photographer, followed.  Two of the cars, ahead of the bus, forced it to slow down.  The thirty or forty cars and trucks were occupied mostly by Klansmen, none wearing hoods or robes. Some had just come from church, wearing coats and ties and polished shoes.  Some had children with them.

 

Two tires now flat, six miles southwest of Anniston, in front of the Forsyth and Son grocery store, the driver pulled over to the side of the road.  Roy Robinson and the driver ran into the grocery store hoping to call a local garage that might have replacement tires.  Back in the bus, Eli Cowling had retrieved his revolver from the baggage compartment.  A teenage boy smashed a side window with a crowbar.  A group of men and boys rocked the bus trying to turn it over on its side.  A second group attempted to enter through the front door. Brandishing his gun, Cowling blocked them, retreated, locked the door behind him.  For the next twenty minutes Klansmen pounded on the bus demanding that the Freedom Riders come out.  Two highway patrolmen arrived.  Neither made an effort to disperse the crowd, Cowling, Harry Sims, and the Riders stayed inside.

 

One members of the mob, Cecil "Goober" Lewallyn, tossed a flaming bundle of rags through a broken window.  The bundle exploded; dark gray smoke spread throughout the bus.  Genevieve Hughes, seated only a few feet away from the explosion, thought first that the bomb-thrower had thrown a smoke bomb.  The smoke got blacker.  The flames started to engulf several of the seats. Crouching in the middle of the bus, she screamed: "Is there any air up front?"  No one answered. "Oh, my God, they're going to burn us up!" she yelled.  She found an open window six rows from the front, thrusted out her head, and saw the outstretched necks of Jimmy McDonald and Charlotte Devree.  Seconds later the three Riders squeezed through their opened windows.  Choking from the smoke and fumes, they staggered across the road.  They were afraid that the other passengers were trapped inside, but then they saw that several passengers had escaped through the front door on the other side.

 

Members of the mob were pressing against the door screaming, "Burn them alive" and "Fry the goddamn niggers."  An exploding fuel tank persuaded the mob that the whole bus would within seconds explode.  The frightened mob retreated.  Cowling pried open the door.  The choking occupants escaped.  Hank Thomas was the first Rider to exit the front of the bus.  A white man rushed toward him, asked: "Are you all okay?" Before Thomas could answer, the man struck Thomas’s head with a baseball bat. Thomas fell to the ground and remained barely conscious while the rest of the gasping Riders collapsed on the grass.

 

Several white families had gathered in front of the grocery store.  Twelve-year-old Janie Miller gave choking victims water, filling and refilling a five-gallon bucket, ignoring the Klansmen’s insults (Gross/ Arsenault 3- 7)

. 

 

“It was the worst suffering I’d ever heard,” Miller would recall in the PBS /American Experience film, Freedom Riders. “I walked right out into the middle of that crowd. I picked me out one person. I washed her face. I held her, I gave her water to drink, and soon as I thought she was gonna be okay, I got up and picked out somebody else.” For daring to help the injured riders, she and her family were later ostracized by the community and could no longer live in the county (Doyle 7).

 

Twenty-four-year-old Morris College student Mae Frances Moultrie was the only African-American CORE female on the bus.  She had joined the Ride on May 11th in Sumter, SC.   Moultrie was so badly overcome by the heat and smoke, she could not remember "if I walked or crawled off the bus" (Meet 3).  

 

Cowling's pistol, the heat of the fire, and the acrid fumes from the burning seats kept the mob away.  A second fuel tank explosion drove them farther back.  Two warning shots by the highway patrolmen on the scene persuaded the Klansmen to slip away.  Minutes passed.  Cowling, Sims, and the patrolmen stood guard over the Riders, lying and sitting yards away from the shell of the bus.  No one in a position of authority had attempted to make an arrest.  Nobody had recorded the license numbers of the Klansmen's cars and pickup trucks.  No one attempted to call an ambulance. Finally, a white couple who lived close by permitted Genevieve Hughes to make a call.  Nobody answered.  The couple drove Hughes to the hospital.  One of the state troopers called for an ambulance. Its driver refused to carry any of the black Riders. Already loaded, refusing to leave behind their black friends, the white Riders began to exit.  Cowling spoke sternly to the driver.  He relented.  All who needed to be transported were driven to Anniston Memorial Hospital.

 

Genevieve Hughes discovered that only a nurse was at the hospital.  The nurse gave her pure oxygen to breathe.  It burned her throat, did not relieve her coughing.  She was burning hot.  Her clothes were a wet mess. After awhile Ed Blankenheim and Bert Bigelow were brought in.  Laying on their beds, they continued to cough.  Eventually a woman doctor arrived, having taken several minutes to reference smoke poisoning.  A Negro man (not a Freedom rider) who had been in the back of the bus with Genevieve was brought in.  She told the nurse and doctor to take care of him.  They did not. They did nothing for Hank Thomas.  Of the thirteen people brought to the hospital, only Ed Blankenheim, the Negro man and Genevieve had been admitted.

 

After awhile, having slept, Genevieve was questioned about the bombing by an FBI agent.  She was unaware that he or another FBI agent on the scene had persuaded the medical staff to treat all of the injured passengers.  Perhaps the cause of their failure to comply had not been entirely racial.  A group of Klansmen made an unsuccessful attempt to block the entrance to the emergency room.  The crowd outside swelled in numbers.  Several Klansmen threatened to burn the building down.  With nightfall approaching, recognizing that he had no police protection, the hospital superintendent ordered the Riders to leave.

 

Even though Hughes and several other Riders needed to stay, Joe Perkins had to comply.  It took him more than an hour to arrange safe passage out of the hospital.  The state troopers and the local police refused to provide the Riders transportation or escort even when they were transported.  Bert Bigelow called friends in Washington hoping to receive help from the federal government.  Perkins called Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth in Birmingham.  Shuttlesworth mobilized a fleet of eight cars.  He reminded the volunteer drivers that they had to behave non-violently.  “You mustn't carry any weapons. You must trust God and have faith."  Out of sight, several of the deacons pulled out shotguns from beneath their seats.

 

Shuttlesworth's deacons made their way across the back roads toward Anniston.  The hospital superintendent insisted that the interracial group could not stay the night.  At last the rescue mission pulled into the parking lot.  The police holding back the jeering crowd and the deacons showing their weapons, the Riders climbed into the cars.  The cars left. One rescuer remarked: “You couldn't tell the deputies from the Ku Klux."

 

The Riders wanted to know the fate of the Trailways group.  Perkins's phone conversation with Shuttlesworth earlier in the afternoon had informed him that the other bus had also run into trouble.  The deacons knew few details of the story.  Even so, it was evident to all that the defenders of white supremacy in Alabama had decided to smash the Freedom Ride with violence.  They would not countenance the law, the U.S. Constitution, or anything else interfering with the preservation of racial segregation in their state (Gross/ Arsenault 8-11)

 

 

Works cited:

 

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

 

Doyle, Jack.  ““Buses Are A’Comin’- Freedom Riders: 1961.”  PopHistoryDig.com.  June 24, 2014.  Web.  http://www.pophistorydig.com/topics/tag/james-farmer-freedom-rider/

 

“Freedom Rides: American Civil Rights Movement.”  Encyclopedia Britannica.  Web.  https://www.britannica.com/event/Freedom-Rides

 

“Freedom Rides Quotes.”  Uen.org.  Web.  https://www.uen.org/freedomrides/downloads/Freedom_Rides_Quotes.pdf

 

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

 

Gross, Terry.  “Get On the Bus: The Freedom Riders of 1961,” containing excerpts from Raymond Arsenault’s Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice.  NPR.  Web.  https://www.npr.org/2006/01/12/5149667/get-on-the-bus-the-freedom-riders-of-1961

 

Mack, Dwayne.  “Freedom Rides (1961).”  BlackPast.org.  Web.  https://blackpast.org/aah/freedom-rides-1961

 

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

Civil Rights Events

Martin Luther King, Jr. and the 1960 Presidential Election -- Part Two

 

When Shriver got to the hotel suite he found Kennedy surrounded by aides, all rigidly opposed to the idea. Although the senator had already expressed his concerns privately to Governor Vandiver, he worried that a public telephone call to Coretta King could be perceived as a “gimmick” to reel in black votes. His key advisor, Ken O’Donnell, saw little political upside. “I felt my job was to always focus on the political factors and implications,” O’Donnell recalled. “The moral issues would be raised by Bobby [Kennedy], Sarge [Shriver], Harris Wofford, or others.” When John Kennedy pulled O’Donnell aside to confer privately, Ken told him: “While I am sympathetic to what Mrs. King and her family must be going through, from a political point of view, all I can see is that it could backfire.” How could Kennedy, a candidate who was criticized for his lukewarm support of black issues, justify this unusual bighearted action? “There are a million ways politically it could be a mess,” he warned Kennedy.

 

Shriver hovered, waiting to make his case alone. Finally the aides began to disperse: Wordsmith Ted Sorensen left to work on a speech, and press secretary Pierre Salinger went out to speak with reporters. But O’Donnell stuck around—besides advising Kennedy, he was the man who controlled access to the candidate and later to the president, and he now stood between Jack and his brother-in-law. Ready to pull rank as brother in law, Shriver approached O’Donnell. “I never use my family connection or ask for a favor, but you are wrong, Kenny,” he said. “This is too important. I want time alone with him.”

 

In O’Donnell’s view, the issue was decided and he didn’t want it reopened. But he also knew Shriver didn’t use his family position to advantage. “Unlike others,” O’Donnell said of Shriver, “he never asked or abused that [family] relationship, and, at some level, morally I suspected he might be right, though politically I still was against it.” Out of respect, or courtesy, or simply because he was hungry, O’Donnell stepped aside, allowing Shriver a private moment with Jack.

 

In parting, O’Donnell said softly he hadn’t eaten, he was going to get a hamburger, and the two men shook hands.

 

“You know I am right,” Shriver said as O’Donnell started off.

 

“Maybe,” O’Donnell replied. Then reminding him of how things often went in the rough and tumble of politics, he observed: “If it works, you’ll get no credit for it; if it does not, you’ll get all the blame.”

 

Shriver went into Kennedy’s room and found his brother-in-law alone, folding his clothes into his suitcase. As Shriver built his case, describing King’s terrifying drive through rural Georgia and Coretta’s anguish, Kennedy didn’t seem to be listening. His mind was elsewhere. “Jack,” Shriver pressed, “you just need to convey to Mrs. King that you believe what happened to her husband was wrong and that you will do what you can to see the situation rectified and that in general you stand behind him.”

 

Kennedy was not paying attention. To engage him, Shriver appealed to his conscience. “Negroes don’t expect everything will change tomorrow, no matter who’s elected,” he told Jack. “But they do want to know whether you care. If you telephone Mrs. King, they will know you understand and will help. You will reach their hearts and give support to a pregnant woman who is afraid her husband will be killed.”

 

Although cool and detached, Kennedy was in a quiet way sympathetic to the suffering of others and had a reflexive dislike of unfairness. All at once, Shriver noticed a change of heart in his brother-in-law. As he remembered it, Jack zipped up his suitcase then turned to him and said: “That’s a pretty good idea. How do I get to her?”

 

When Shriver handed over Coretta’s telephone number to him, Kennedy said: “Dial it for me, will you? I’ve got to pack up my papers.” As Jack filled his briefcase, Shriver sat down on the edge of the bed and put his finger into the rotary dial.

 

When the phone rang that morning, Coretta listened as Sargent Shriver introduced himself and told her he was with Jack Kennedy in Chicago. Senator Kennedy “wanted to speak with her for a moment,” Shriver informed her. “Would that be okay?”

 

After several seconds, she heard a voice familiar to her; she had just recently watched Kennedy give a smooth performance in the televised debates. “Good morning, Mrs. King,” the voice said. “This is Senator Kennedy.” After a brief exchange of pleasantries, Kennedy offered his sympathy: “I want to express to you my concern about your husband. I know this must be very hard for you.” He mentioned that he was aware she was expecting a baby. “I just wanted you to know that I was thinking about you and Dr. King,” he said cordially. “If there is anything I can do to help, please feel free to call on me.”

 

Coretta thanked him, saying: “I would appreciate anything you could do to help.”

 

And that was it: The call lasted no more than ninety seconds.

 

When Shriver informed Kenny O’Donnell, the campaign’s political master groused: “You just lost us the election.”

 

Inevitably, word of Kennedy’s gesture trickled out to the press, and pressure now mounted from several directions for King’s release.

 

Just as he protected his Vandiver conversation, Jack Kennedy was in no hurry to reveal that he had chatted with Coretta. He didn’t tell his press secretary Pierre Salinger until his campaign plane lifted off that afternoon from Chicago’s O’Hare Airport on its way to Detroit. In the air, he nonchalantly mentioned it to Salinger who, recognizing a potential media firestorm, immediately relayed the news via the onboard radiophone to campaign manager Bobby Kennedy in Washington. Bobby was apoplectic when he learned that Shriver, Wofford, and Louis Martin had conspired and put Jack up to the call. Now the campaign had to prepare to control the damage.

 

For Sargent Shriver, it was impossible to forget Bobby’s irate phone call. “Bobby landed on me like a ton of bricks….He scorched my ass,” Shriver recalled. “Jack Kennedy was going to get defeated because of the stupid call,” Bobby fumed. He then turned his wrath on Wofford and Louis Martin, summoning the men to the campaign headquarters and berating them “with fists tight, his blue eyes cold,” as Wofford remembered it. Bobby had made the political calculations and didn’t like what it all added up to. “Do you know,” he fumed, “that three Southern governors told us that if Jack supported Jimmy Hoffa, Nikita Khrushchev, or Martin Luther King, they would throw their states to Nixon? Do you know that this election may be razor close and you have probably lost it for us?”

 

The next morning, Thursday, October 27, Judge Oscar Mitchell announced the release of the prisoner on a $2,000 bond, saying his action was mandatory under Georgia law. That afternoon, after about thirty hours of confinement at Reidsville, Martin Luther King Jr. walked out of his cell for his flight home to Atlanta. About two hours later he stepped off a chartered plane at Peachtree-DeKalb Airport into the arms of his relieved wife and other supporters.

 

Speaking to reporters at the airport, King said he was indebted to Kennedy for his role. “I understand from very reliable sources that Senator Kennedy served as a great force in making the release possible,” he said. “For him to be that courageous shows that he is really acting upon principle and not expediency.” Kennedy’s participation, he said, was “morally wise.” Leaving no doubt about his appreciation, King nonetheless stopped short of endorsing the candidate. “I hold Senator Kennedy in very high esteem,” he said. “I am convinced he will seek to exercise the power of his office to fully implement the civil rights plank of his party’s platform.”

 

King also took the opportunity to say that he had not heard from Vice President Richard Nixon and knew of no Republican efforts on his behalf (Levingston 11-18).

 

King did not endorse Kennedy, but news of the phone call spread quickly and undoubtedly energized black voters in a close election. Among those whose minds were changed was a black Southerner who (unlike most) could vote. He was Martin Luther King Sr. “I had expected to vote against Senator Kennedy because of his religion,” Daddy King said. “Now he can be my president, Catholic or whatever he is.”

 

Kennedy was amused. “Imagine Martin Luther King having a bigot for a father,” he said. Then: “Well, we all have our fathers, don’t we” (Goodman 2)?

 

According to his aide William Safire, Nixon said he had not spoken out because doing so would have been “grandstanding.”  Nixon’s real motive, though, seems clear: it was a close election and he was willing to lose black support if it meant gaining a new harvest of white votes in the once-Democratic south. Eight years later, this approach became the carefully considered “Southern strategy” (Frank 3).

 

“Back in 1960, there was a real battle for the black vote,” wrote author Larry Sabato.   “The GOP was still seen as the party of Lincoln in many parts of the country, while JFK’s Democrats had loads of segregationists in powerful posts.”

 

The campaign feared that these actions would hurt Kennedy with white southern voters, so they produced a pamphlet on blue paper, which became known as “the blue bomb.” Neither the candidate’s name nor the Democratic Party appeared on the pamphlet, but it still gave Kennedy credit for his sympathetic call by contrasting his actions with Republican nominee Richard Nixon’s silence on the issue.

 

Staffers distributed approximately two million copies in African American churches across the country just weeks before the election.  … So while the pamphlet became well known in many African-American communities, it could be overlooked in other areas.  … “At the same time, Kennedy’s campaign had plausible deniability for Southern whites,” Sabato said. “JFK needed plenty of electoral votes from Southern segregationist states” (Hiegel 2).

 

King’s release had an immediate and profound impact on the black community, unleashing a wave of support for Kennedy. In a single day, the senator beat back years of skepticism about his commitment to racial justice. Debates raged over whether his call to Coretta was a calculated political act or a true expression of compassion. Whatever the truth was, the act inspired a flood of raw emotion. The front page of the Chicago Defender featured a photo of King holding his young son and rubbing cheeks with him while his wife, Coretta, kissed him on his other cheek and his daughter stood at his elbow peering up at him. Above the photo was a large headline: REV. KING FREE ON BOND—HAIL SEN. KENNEDY’S ROLE IN CLERIC’S RELEASE. The New York Post sent a reporter into Harlem to gauge the reaction. “Many Harlemites were indignant at Nixon’s refusal even to comment on the case,” the reporter wrote. The Post published the comments of John Patterson, publisher of the Harlem paper Citizen-Call. “Mr. Nixon, in his refusal to comment or take a stand on the civil rights issue that Rev. King’s arrest symbolized, merely extends the say-nothing, do-nothing rule by golf-club philosophy of President Eisenhower regarding this moral issue.” By contrast, Senator Kennedy was praised in newspapers across the country. A widely distributed Associated Press dispatch reported a version of the comforting words Kennedy said to Coretta on the phone: “This must be pretty hard on you, and I want to let you both know that I’m thinking about you, and will do all I can to help.”

 

Kennedy suffered only minor fallout among Southern white voters. On the Sunday following King’s release, Claude Sitton of the New York Times reported that Kennedy appeared “to be gaining strength in Southern states once considered safe for Vice President Nixon.” In the concluding paragraphs, Sitton acknowledged that Kennedy’s role in King’s release from prison “may hurt the Democratic cause somewhat among white Southern voters” but that the repercussions “had been milder than expected.” If there was a strong reaction, it was among Southern blacks who were now more favorably disposed toward Kennedy. Despite voting restrictions that prevented Southern blacks from casting ballots in numbers that their population justified, their impact could be substantial. As Sitton reported, blacks “cast the decisive vote in close elections in some Southern states.”

 

On Election Day, if blacks hadn’t turned out for him in large numbers, Kennedy might have had to deliver a concession speech. In Illinois, for instance, where he topped Nixon by 9,000 votes, 250,000 blacks voted for Kennedy. In Michigan, he won the votes of another 250,000 blacks and carried the state by 67,000 votes. In South Carolina, he carried the state by 10,000 votes with 40,000 blacks casting ballots for him.

 

In his book The Making of the President 1960, campaign historian Theodore White assessed the impact of the call to Coretta. “One cannot identify in the narrowness of American voting of 1960 any one particular episode or decision as being more important than any other in the final tallies,” he wrote. But, he added, the “instinctive decision must be ranked among the most crucial of the last few weeks.” White observed that blacks were convinced that they had anointed Kennedy. “Some Negro political leaders claim,” White wrote, “that in no less than eleven states (Illinois, New Jersey, Michigan, South Carolina, Texas, Delaware, Maryland, Missouri, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Nevada), with 169 electoral votes, it was the Negro community that provided the Kennedy margin of victory.”

 

Nationwide, Kennedy got only 118,574 more votes than Nixon did out of a total 68,370,000 ballots cast. Kennedy tallied 49.7 percent of the popular vote to Nixon’s 49.6 percent. In the crucial electoral votes, Kennedy amassed 303 to Nixon’s 219, enough to catapult him into the White House. Altogether, blacks turned out for Kennedy in staggering numbers. A Gallup poll put the figure at 70 percent, and an IBM poll came up with 68 percent. (In 1956, Adlai Stevenson got 60 percent.) From the black perspective, those numbers left no doubt of the community’s role in sending Kennedy to the White House.

 

Nixon was embittered by his narrow loss and the surprising black turnout for Kennedy. Later explaining his “no comment” at the height of the King uproar, he admitted “this was a fatal communication gap. I had meant Herb [Klein, his press secretary] to say that I had no comment at this time.” This explanation doesn’t quite conform to reality. Nixon in fact had heard a drumbeat of voices within his campaign begging him to speak out immediately, but he remained silent.

 

John Kennedy never explained his reason for placing the call to Coretta King. Was the candidate driven by politics or by goodwill? Cynics see only a man of callous manipulation, and torchbearers for Kennedy see only his grace and humanity. As Martin Luther King Jr. himself recognized, both impulses inspired Kennedy’s call, and they did not necessarily contradict each other. And that ninety-second conversation laid massive expectations on the Kennedy presidency. Before he even settled into the White House, Jack Kennedy was put on notice that blacks from Harlem to Montgomery expected him to listen to their leader Martin Luther King Jr. and hear their cries for equality. (Levingston 19-22).

 

Martin Luther King never gave Kennedy total credit for his release from the Georgia state prison.  A recording of an interview of him conducted December 21, 1960, in Chattanooga, Tennessee, by a man who intended to write a book about the civil rights movement has King saying the following.

 

"Well, I would say first that many forces worked together to bring about my release," King said. "I don't think any one force brought it about, but you had a plurality of forces working together.  …

 

"Now, it is true that Sen. Kennedy did take a specific step.  He was in contact with officials in Georgia during my arrest and he called my wife, made a personal call and expressed his concern and said to her that he was working and trying to do something to make my release possible.

 

"His brother, who at that time was his campaign manager, also made direct contact with officials and even a judge in Georgia, so the Kennedy family did have some part, at least they expressed a concern and they did have some part in the release, but I must make it clear that many other forces worked to bring it about also."

 

The interviewer never finished the book and the tape was lost until the man's son rediscovered it five decades later while rummaging through dilapidated boxes left there by his father (Duke 1-2).

 

I detect regret in King’s remarks made later about his relationship with Richard Nixon.  “I always felt that Nixon lost a real opportunity to express … support of something much larger than an individual, because this expressed support of the movement for civil rights in a way. And I had known Nixon longer. He had been supposedly close to me, and he would call me frequently about things, getting, seeking my advice. And yet, when this moment came, it was like he had never heard of me, you see” (Frank 4). 

 

Knowing what transpired during the next five years, I am gratified that Kennedy, not Nixon, made that necessary call. 

 

 

Works cited:

 

Duke, Allan.  “Rare recording of Martin Luther King Jr. talking about John F. Kennedy released.”  CNN.  January 20, 2014.  Web.  https://www.cnn.com/2014/01/20/us/mlk-kennedy-recording/index.html

 

Frank, Jeffrey.  “When Martin Luther King Jr. and Richard Nixon Were Friends.”  Daily Beast.  January 21, 2013.  Web.  https://www.thedailybeast.com/when-martin-luther-king-jr-and-richard-nixon-were-friends

 

Goodman, James.  “How Martin Luther King Persuaded John Kennedy to Support the Civil Rights Cause.”  The New York Times.  June 29, 2017.  Web.  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/29/books/review/kennedy-and-king-steven-levingston.html

 

Hiegel, Taylor.  “Remembering Kennedy's micro-targeting in the 1960 election.”  NBC News.  November 2, 2015.  Web.  https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/remembering-kennedys-micro-targeting-1960-election-flna2D11641336

 

Levingston, Steven.  “John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Phone Call That Changed History.”  Time.  June 10, 2017.  Web.  http://time.com/4817240/martin-luther-king-john-kennedy-phone-call/



Civil Rights Events

Martin Luther King, Jr. and the 1960 Presidential Election -- Part One

 

Before dawn, on Wednesday, October 26, 1960, Martin Luther King Jr. was sleeping in a prison cell in DeKalb County, Georgia, when sheriff deputies aimed their flashlight beams into his face and barked at him to get up. They handcuffed him, shackled his legs, and hustled him out of the cell. It was 4 a.m. Hurried along, he asked repeatedly for an explanation, but the men said nothing. With a terrible foreboding, King soon found himself seated in the back of a police car rolling into the night; the only light came from the headlamps piercing the darkness.

 

Like all black men, King feared the chilling portent of a late-night drive into the countryside; it had happened to others, the stories he’d heard were horrific.

 

At home in Atlanta, Coretta King knew nothing of her husband’s ominous ride. She was six months pregnant with their third child, and she had already had an emotional week.

 

King hadn’t wanted to join the student-led sit-in. But the band of youths, members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, insisted. The SNCC was well-organized and impatient. Its target was one of Atlanta’s venerable institutions, Rich’s department store; its goal: to desegregate the store’s snack bars and restaurants. The young activists urged King to come along—and go to jail with them—to draw attention to their campaign. King advised the students to hold off until after the presidential election now just weeks away; but the students saw an opportunity to force the candidates to address the issue of segregation. If King were arrested with dozens of young protesters, then both contenders would have no choice but to speak out. “We thought that with Dr. King being involved in it,” said student leader Lonnie C. King, “we would really see where these guys stand.” The students’ passion—and conscience—were impossible for Martin Luther King Jr. to ignore (Levingston 1-2).

 

King and the SNCC demonstrators had been arrested at an Atlanta department store lunch counter, “and then, after all those arrested with him were released, held for violating the terms of his ‘probation’ for an earlier traffic violation: driving (while black) with an expired license.  The judge sentenced the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to six months’ hard labor” (Goodman 1).

 

On that early Wednesday morning, Martin Luther King Jr. had no idea where the two deputies were taking him. An hour passed, and he realized he was deep into “cracker” country where no one protested a lynching. By dawn, King discovered he had been granted a less evil fate as the squad car turned into the maximum security state prison in Reidsville.

 

But his danger was far from over. If he were put to hard labor, as the judge had ordered, he would work side by side in a road gang with ruthless white criminals, many of them killers who had nothing to lose and everything to gain—national notoriety and prison respect—by murdering a black celebrity.

 

On that same Wednesday morning, Senator John Kennedy phoned the governor of Georgia, Ernest Vandiver. Some quiet, back-channel way had to be found to free the civil rights leader. Kennedy was motivated by his outrage, by his sympathy for the King family, and by bald political calculation. In a meeting with Kennedy just weeks earlier, King had urged the senator to take some dramatic action to prove to blacks that his commitment to their cause was genuine. His moment had arrived. If Kennedy were able to play a decisive role in King’s release, the black community was likely to reward him with an outpouring of support. But if he acted on King’s behalf, he risked a vicious backlash from Southern whites. The senator had to walk a fine line: show decency to a black man without alienating the white community.

 

During the presidential campaign, Kennedy raised suspicions in the black community by his blatant courtship of Southern white support. After the Democratic National Convention in July, he began shoring up his reputation among Southern leaders, meeting privately with them to allay fears that he would be an aggressive civil rights president. Kennedy promised Governor Vandiver that as president he would never use federal troops to force Georgia to desegregate its schools. In return, Vandiver declared his preference for the senator and vowed to lead Georgia into the Kennedy column on Election Day.

 

Now, some three months later, early in the morning at the governor’s mansion in Atlanta, the telephone jangled on the bedside table, waking Vandiver and his wife. On the line was Senator John Kennedy speaking in his New England accent. “Governor,” he said, according to Vandiver’s recollection of the conversation, “is there any way that you think you could get Martin Luther King out of jail? It would be of tremendous benefit to me.”

 

“Senator, I don’t know whether we can get him released or not,” Vandiver replied.

 

“Would you try and see what you can do and call me back?” Kennedy said.

 

Working in secrecy, Vandiver swung into action for the senator.

 

As news of King’s jailing spread, both presidential candidates received a petition from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and nearly twenty other civil rights organizations demanding that they “speak out against the imprisonment” (Levingston 3-7).

 

King had developed a better relationship with Richard Nixon than he had developed with the Kennedys. 

 

King, when he was 28 and famous for his role in the Montgomery bus boycott, met Nixon in March 1957, in Africa, when Ghana celebrated its independence. They agreed to stay in touch and met three months later in Nixon’s office at the Capitol to discuss among other topics the 1957 Civil Rights Bill. That summer Nixon worked to strengthen the bill, taking on such powerful Southern Democrats as Richard Russell, who opposed it, and the Senate Majority Leader, Lyndon Johnson, who had been pushing for a weaker version of the voting-rights section.

 

“I will long remember the rich fellowship which we shared together and the fruitful discussion that we had,” Dr. King later wrote to the vice president, telling him “how deeply grateful all people of goodwill are to you for your assiduous labor and dauntless courage in seeking to make the Civil Rights Bill a reality… This is certainly an expression of your devotion to the highest mandates of the moral law.” Nixon replied in much the same spirit: “I am sure you know how much I appreciate your generous comments. My only regret is that I have been unable to do more than I have. Progress is understandably slow in this field, but we at least can be sure that we are moving steadily and surely ahead.” They talked frequently after that, and in September 1958, after a deranged black woman in Harlem stabbed Dr. King almost fatally, Nixon was among the first to write to him. He praised King’s “Christian spirit of tolerance,” which he said would ultimately win over “the great majority of American for the cause of equality and human dignity to which we are committed” (Frank 1).

 

In his book “The Promise and the Dream: The Untold Story of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy,” David Margolick opines that King and Bobby were never close. They were intermittent allies but never friends. They spoke infrequently. Almost never socialized together. Seldom did they candidly share their thinking with one another. According to Margolick: “Theirs was an uneven relationship, and for King, a slightly degrading one: he was the black man invariably asking for things, and Kennedy the white man doling them out. . . . King was the one to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ ” (Kennedy 1).

 

John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Martin Luther King shared an era and a cause, but they were not close allies …. They admired each other’s best qualities but were suspicious of the other’s flaws. On civil rights, they marched to different cadences (Grier 2).

 

In the Nixon camp, strategists calculated the political consequences and concluded the best course of action was silence. Nixon held fast to his decision even after a visit from his staunch supporter baseball hero and civil rights activist Jackie Robinson. As William Safire, then Nixon campaign aide and future New York Times columnist, told the story, Robinson came out of his ten-minute meeting with “tears of frustration in his eyes.” Complaining bitterly, he told Safire: “He thinks calling Martin would be ‘grandstanding.’” Robinson was so distraught he declared: “Nixon doesn’t deserve to win.” Yet, the baseball star continued to support the Republican and later said the outcome of the election had left him “terribly disappointed.”

 

In the Kennedy camp, the imprisoned preacher had two passionate proponents: White House aide Harris Wofford, a longtime friend of the Kings, and Sargent Shriver, the senator’s brother-in-law and head of the campaign’s Civil Rights Section. Because of their fervor for black rights, Wofford and Shriver were regarded as overly sentimental activists with impaired political judgment and were relegated to the periphery of the campaign. But the two men exerted a subtle yet powerful influence on the campaign: They forced a sense of conscience upon the political realists.

 

 Wofford phoned Louis Martin, a successful black businessman and newspaper publisher who had deep political roots and was helping the campaign reach out to the black community. Martin was concerned about King, and after commiserating, the two men batted around some ideas. “What Kennedy ought to do is something direct and personal,” Wofford told Martin, “like picking up the telephone and calling Coretta.” It would be enough, Wofford observed, for the candidate to show his sympathy for her.

 

“That’s it, that’s it!” Louis agreed. “That would be perfect.”

 

Now came the hard part: getting this idea to Kennedy, who was campaigning in Chicago, and persuading him to act on it. After his private call to Governor Vandiver in the morning, the candidate had attended a breakfast with fifty businessmen. Now he was in a hotel suite at O’Hare Airport waiting to leave town.

 

After several tries Wofford finally tracked down Sargent Shriver, who was also in Chicago but not with the Kennedy entourage out at the airport. Understanding the urgency, Shriver listened to Wofford then said, “I’ll go right straight out to the airport. I’ll put it to Jack right now. It’s not too late” (Levingston 8-10).

 

 

Works cited:

 

Frank, Jeffrey.  “When Martin Luther King Jr. and Richard Nixon Were Friends.”  Daily Beast.  January 21, 2013.  Web.  https://www.thedailybeast.com/when-martin-luther-king-jr-and-richard-nixon-were-friends

 

Goodman, James.  “How Martin Luther King Persuaded John Kennedy to Support the Civil Rights Cause.”  The New York Times.  June 29, 2017.  Web.  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/29/books/review/kennedy-and-king-steven-levingston.html

 

Grier, Peter.  “Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy: civil rights' wary allies.”  The Christian Science Monitor.  January 20, 2014.  Web.  https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/DC-Decoder/2014/0120/Martin-Luther-King-Jr.-and-John-F.-Kennedy-civil-rights-wary-allies

 

Kennedy, Randall.  “Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy: a fraught relationship.”  The Washington Post.  April 27, 2018.  Web.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/martin-luther-king-and-robert-kennedy-a-fraught-relationship/2018/04/27/227e8f82-4712-11e8-8b5a-3b1697adcc2a_story.html?utm_term=.923d82f02fef

 

 

Levingston, Steven.  “John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Phone Call That Changed History.”  Time.  June 10, 2017.  Web.  http://time.com/4817240/martin-luther-king-john-kennedy-phone-call/