February 1, 2020 • 34 mins
The Freedom Rides were happening at about the same time as the sit-in movement of the 1960s that we talked about this week – and involved some of the same people. Previous hosts Sarah and Deblina did two episodes on the Freedom Rides in the U.S. in September of 2011, and we’re playing them both together.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday everyone. Last Saturday, we had kind of a
classics double feature, and we are doing that again today
as well. The Freedom Rides were happening about the same
time as the sit in movement of the nineteen sixties
that we talked about this week, and some of the
same people were involved in both the Freedom Rides and
the sit ins. Sarah and Deblina did two episodes on
the Freedom Rides in the US since September eleven, and
(00:25):
they're a little bit shorter than our episodes typically are today,
so we are playing them both together, so enjoy. Welcome
to Stuff you missed in History Class, a production of
I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome to
(00:46):
the podcast. I'm Sarah Dowie and I'm Deblina Chalko Boarding
and you could be forgiven for thinking it's nineteen sixty
one again. With all of the big civil rights anniversaries
that have been in the news this year, fiftieth anniversaries,
that's so true, um, most notably the fiftieth anniversary of
the Freedom Rides this past May, when more than four
hundred people of all ages, male, female, black, white, different
(01:11):
religions from all over the country decided to challenge the
racial segregation of interstate buses, and the Freedom Rides have
been really well covered this year. There have been articles,
news stories, two reunions of writers, one in Jackson, Mississippi,
one in Chicago. I think that one was hosted by
Oprah herself. There was a fantastic American Experienced documentary based
(01:34):
on the book on the Freedom Writers by Raymond Arsenal.
There have been op eds and reflections from the writers
in national papers. But we are not ones to let
the May anniversary of the Freedom Rides stop us from
doing a podcast on them in September, because September is
also a really important date for the Freedom Rides. It's
(01:56):
when change actually happened, when the Interstate Commerce Commission finally
ruled that the signs segregating whites and blacks at bus
and train facilities had to come down, and actually backed
up that ruling with a really hefty fine for offenders.
So that ruling validated the riders in their tactics, and
(02:17):
that's worth pointing out before we get into this two
part episode on the Freedom Rides, and before we get
into how the ride started, because even though today the
riders are clearly celebrated as civil rights heroes at the time.
What they were doing was extremely controversial, even within the
civil rights movement itself, so they didn't know what they
(02:38):
were what they were setting out to do. They just
knew they had to do it. But before we even
get to the rides themselves, our story really starts in
nineteen with a woman named Irene Morgan. Now everyone knows
Rosa Parks right and her refusal to give up her
bus seat in the nineteen fifties, but a decade earlier,
Morgan refused to give up her seat on a Greyhound
(02:59):
traveling through Virginia. And Morgan, who made World War Two
bomber planes for a plant for a living, was coming
home to Baltimore after visiting her mother. So after refusing
to move, she kicked the sheriff's deputy who tried to
take her off the bus, and later she said, quote,
I started to bite him, but he looked dirty, so
I couldn't bite him, So all I could do was
(03:19):
claw and tear his clothes. Yeah, and that and other
great quotes are from her New York Times obituary. But
Morgan was arrested and went ahead paid that one hundred
dollar fine for resisting arrest, but she refused to pay
the ten dollar fine for violating a Virginia law about
segregated seating, so it was off to court she went,
(03:40):
and eventually the n double a c p. Took up
her case and appealed to the Supreme Court, and in
ninety the court actually ruled in her favor in Morgan
versus Virginia and um just the gist of the ruling here,
seating arrangements for the different races in interstate motor travel
require a sing goal uniform rule to promote and protect
(04:03):
national travel. Sounds simple enough. Basically, you can't make African
Americans sit in the back of the bus and white
people sit in the front, and nobody should be giving
up their seat unless just to an old person or
something like that. So it sounds simple, but it wasn't
because Southern states continued to flaunt the law with segregated seating,
(04:23):
segregated waiting rooms, restrooms, water fountains. So eventually somebody decided
that they needed to do something and actually test out
this new law, and that was a group organized by
the Congress of Racial Equality or CORE and the Fellowship
of Reconciliation. They decided to test the new ruling by
staging the Journey of Reconciliation through the Upper South. The
(04:47):
Upper South. Yeah, and that's important here, especially when we
get into the later Freedom Rides where they head into
Alabama in Mississippi and and things get a lot different.
Back in nine seven, they knew that wasn't an option, right,
So basically this is how it worked. Eight black men
and eight white men would ride on interstate buses and
trains and see if Morgan versus Virginia was a law
(05:10):
in action or in name only. So there was a
catch though it would be non violent. Even if they
were faced with arrests or beatings, the writers would not react.
So while Morgan had been the inspiration for this, she
was obviously not their non violent role model, with her
attempted bites and all of that. I think that makes
(05:30):
Morgan such an interesting character in this whole thing too,
which is such a famous non violent movement that she
is the inspiration for it. But for that non violent inspiration,
leaders instead turned to Gandhi, and he actually was the
inspiration for Courts Founding back in nineteen two. But the
Journey of Reconciliation, it sounds like it's gonna make waves.
(05:51):
It sounds like a big deal, but it really didn't
have that much of an impact. The writers did meet
with violence, three of them spent a month on a
North Carolina chain gang after violating segregation rules in Chapel Hill,
but the story wasn't really picked up by national media,
and folks just weren't that interested. So Arsenal writes that
(06:12):
the ride ultimately quote brought about little change and was
soon forgotten by all but a handful of non violent activists.
So a decade goes by, and then in nineteen sixty
some important things start to happen to inspire a new
wave of freedom rides. One of those things is that
JFK is elected president. Another is that Nashville sit ins
(06:34):
and segregation at city lunch counters there. And also the
Supreme Court issues another decision related to interstate travel. This
time it's a point in versus Virginia, which made any
racial segregation illegal in interstate commerce. And that's anything. So
not only should a black person be able to take
any seat on the bus, he should also be able
to use any waiting room, restroom, coffee counter, and so on.
(06:57):
All Right, so there's a new Supreme Court decision, and
this momentum going from the Nashville sit ins and Core
and its director James Farmer decide, let's test this new
ruling boy in versus Virginia. So this time, not only
would the new riders keep that direct action movement of
the sit ins going, they would help promote CORE too
(07:18):
on this national scale, since it was, after all, less
well known than the N double A c P or
SNICK or the S C l C. And that's something,
as we mentioned in the beginning, that this was kind
of controversial within the movement. That was something that added
to the ambivalence or sometimes outright hostility directed at the
(07:38):
initial ride by much of the movement um. But we've
got to give you a sense of how these initial
CORE riders were picked. Because they weren't just willy nilly
passengers on the bus. They all had to be trained,
they all had to come with recommendations even and again
they all kind of came from different sort of facets
(07:59):
of life. One member, James Peck, was from Manhattan and
he had participated in the nineteen forties Journey of Reconciliation,
so he had some experience with this. The others were
handpicked to maintain their non violent directive. So in addition
to having to get recommendations, as Sarah said, the youngest
of them also had to get parental permission. They also
(08:20):
underwent careful training to resist that violent impulse, but really
they only anticipated refusal of service and possibly maybe arrest.
You can see videos that of this training, and it's
pretty fascinating to watch and really uncomfortable because you know,
it is a simulated situation in these people actually all
know each other. Well, there's the man playing the antagonizer,
(08:41):
the woman playing the waitress, and it's it's strange to see.
But as you mentioned, they were from all different walks
of life. They were all ages, all professions, students, retirees, editors,
was a folk singer, and most were from the North
or the Midwest, with a few southern exceptions, including probably
the most famous rider, John Lewis, he was from Alabama. UM.
(09:04):
But that's something also to consider when we were mentioning
earlier about the hostility or ambivalence within the movement, that
these people were largely Northerners, were largely Midwesterners, and they
were coming into the South to to test these segregated
Jim Crow rules. So the first riders left May fourth,
nineteen sixty one. They were departing from Washington, d C.
(09:27):
And ultimately the final destination was going to be New Orleans,
which it's a bus ride that was going to take
a while, and they didn't really know what they would
encounter along the way. But the bus started out winding
its way through Virginia and North Carolina. There were thirteen riders.
They were taking Greyhound and Trailways buses, so two different lines,
(09:49):
just testing out the whole range of the system. And
at first they really saw what they expected. Stations would
sort of reluctantly break from their segregationists policies just while
the writers were there. So just go ahead and let
them sit in the black sitting room or the white
sitting room, whatever race. They weren't, let them use the
(10:11):
wrong restroom, whatever they were doing, and then just um
let them be, let them get on their bus and
move on through town, get out of their hair, and
presumably returned to business as usual, which was full on segregation.
But by Charlotte, North Carolina, that wasn't what was happening anymore.
People weren't just letting it slide until they were gone,
(10:32):
trouble started. There were arrests and beatings in rock Hill,
South Carolina, and by made their teenth be Writers finally
made it to Atlanta, where they had this little get
together sort of pause in the ride planned with Dr
Martin Luther King. Yeah, and they were really hoping that
when they got there he would join in become a
(10:53):
freedom writer with them, but instead he took a very
different attitude. He warned them. He told them that he
had heard bad news coming out of Alabama and they
should seriously reconsider continuing on and even questioning the wisdom
of what they were doing in the first place, whether
this was really helping the movement. So this is pretty
(11:14):
discouraging news to hear it their Atlanta reception, and to
make matters worse, James Farmer, the leader of Core, gets
word that his father has died and has to pull
out for a few days to go home. Still though
May fourteen, Mother's Day, the leaderless Writer set off from
Atlanta to Birmingham, Alabama, on Greyhound and Trailways buses that
(11:37):
are leaving one hour apart, and sure enough, shortly after
crossing the Alabama state line, one of the buses runs
into trouble. The greyhound hits a crowd of about two
hundred men in Anniston. Yeah, and it's all been planned.
A klansman lies down in front of the bus so
that the other members of the mob can slash the
(11:57):
tires and the bus maneuver out of town, but it's
followed and hounded by a car. Then finally the tires
go flat. The driver gets out, checks them and walks away,
just leaves the people on the bus. And there's this
really harrowing scene in the documentary where passenger may Francis
Moultrie here someone shouting where is the gas? Where is
the gas? Yeah, I'd really recommend to that documentary for
(12:21):
seeing some of these freedom writers reflect on it and
and say what they heard and what they experienced. But
the mob attacks the bus then and throws a firebomb
in through the back window and then blocks the door
to prevent the people from getting off. And also keep
in mind there aren't just freedom writers on this bus.
They're regular passengers to who are just trying to get
(12:44):
to Birmingham or wherever and are caught up in this.
Two things ultimately saved the riders and those unaffiliated bus passengers.
The fuel tank explodes, which makes the mob back away
(13:05):
from the bus, and then highway patrolman finally arrived, but
not until the coughing, choking passengers who have just escaped
from the bus are beaten by the crowd. There's one
catch though with this, With this violent scene, photographs are
taken and it becomes a major news story and they
(13:26):
go worldwide, not just a national news story, becomes worldwide news,
something terrible happening in the United States. But meanwhile, that
second bus is still chugging on towards Birmingham. Yeah where.
Little did they know, the city's Commissioner of Public Safety,
Bull Connor, has made a deal with the KKK. The
(13:47):
deal is that when the bus comes to town, the
clan will get fifteen minutes without police interference to do
whatever they want to people in the bus, no arrests,
no trouble at all. And there's another catch to this too.
The FBI had an informant and the clan, and he
knew the plan to attack the bus. J Edgar Hoover
didn't report the mob's plans to Attorney General Robert Kennedy.
(14:10):
The informant even participated when the mob attacked and beat
the writers as they came into the station, and we're
going to talk about that a little more in the
part two of this episode and and some of the
legal battles that ensued. But just like an Aniston, photographers
get pictures of this mob attacking the passengers coming from Atlanta,
(14:31):
and this news makes international headlines too. It's very disturbing
to people, and it's something that um, the federal administration
really can't ignore. So Jim Peck, who has been unofficially
in charge since James Farmer left, makes the call to
continue the ride from the hospital. He has been severely beaten.
(14:54):
And it's worth noting here too that a lot of
the white riders would be targeted initially sort of as
betrayers to their race by the mob. So Jim Peck
was really really bad off. Pictures of him are disturbing
to see, but he said that they felt quote they
must not surrender to violence. So let's not stop here.
(15:14):
There's a problem though, Like I mean, that's a very noble,
brave thing to do to try to continue the ride,
but there's a problem. None of the drivers out of
Birmingham are willing to take them. Nobody wants to risk it.
Nobody wants to risk being on a firebomb bus or
attacked by a mob and and dragged down with the
rest of them. Yeah, I mean, you can hardly blame them.
(15:35):
But they finally decide that the ride has to end.
They'll fly to New Orleans instead, but even that proves
to be quite difficult. The mob follows them, a bomb
threat is called in on their plane, and it seems
that they're stuck in Alabama and definitely can't get out
of the Birmingham airport. So, like we said, by this
point that Kennedy's really have to get involved with this
(15:56):
story all over the world's papers and the poor beaten
freedom writers stuck in the airport. They can't let things
get anywhere. So John Seigenthaler, who was the assistant to
Attorney General Robert Kennedy, arranges the rider's flight and escorts
them to New Orleans. They're they're met by state police
at the plane, who protect them but also curse them
(16:18):
as they walk to the terminal, and that ends the ride.
It's over. The Kennedys think that hopefully it's all over,
um they can get back to international pursuits, but it's
not because there is another wave setting out from Nashville.
The students in the Nashville Student Movement realized that they
(16:41):
couldn't let corps attempt and there end in violence. And
the leader of that movement, Diane Nash, who was a
student in the Nashville movement, told of Birmingham reverend quote,
if they stop us with violence, the movement is dead. Hello,
(17:03):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Sarah Daddy and I'm
to Blean and Chuck reporting. And this September we are
commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Interstate Commerce Commissions ruling
that all interstate bus and train facilities in the US
had to pull down signs segregating whites and blacks. And
it was the result of a summer long effort by
(17:26):
a group that called themselves the Freedom Writers to test
laws that were already on the books. But we're just
largely ignored through many Southern states. So picking up where
we left off, the original core writers have been badly beaten, traumatized,
and essentially evacuated out of Birmingham for New Orleans by
a special assistant to Attorney General Robert Kennedy. And it
(17:47):
seems like at this time that the freedom Ride that
had started May fourth, nine sixty one in d C
was over at this point. Yeah, well and we should
we should say too, Like, if you are a listener
who drops in on random podcast, it really is worth
going back and checking out that first episode because it
will help give you the context you need for this
one since it is a part two. But we left
(18:10):
it a real cliffhanger there. That was That was a
crucial moment there in New Orleans defeated. It seems the
Kennedy's feel that things are wrapped up to their satisfaction,
but then suddenly they get news out of Nashville that
things aren't over at all. Right. Students in Nashville, many
of them were veterans of the lunch counter sit ins,
(18:32):
though still in their teens in early twenties, they decided
that the ride could not end in violence. So, spearheaded
by Diane Nash, who was a Fisk student, many members
of the Nashville student movement decided to skip their finals
and go to Alabama. Get on a bus, and they
completely know what's at stake. This is the part that's
just crazy to me. They make their wills, these young kids,
(18:54):
and they board busses to Birmingham, nash who coordinates the
whole thing from home base in Nash. Bill basically tells
of Birmingham Pasture, We're coming, yeah, and I mean the
Wills is the really shocking part. But the leaving before
finals is a really big deal too, because a lot
of these kids are the first members of their family
to go to college. But they decide that continuing the
(19:16):
freedom rides, not letting non violence end in violence like this,
is more important. So this time, though, the makeup of
the riders is a little different from the first ride,
which was all staged by the group Core. It's still
a mix of black and white men and women, and
they're taking Greyhound and Trailways buss just like before, but
(19:36):
they're all quite young this time. There were middle aged folks,
retired people last time. Most of them now though, are
nineteen twenty. And there are also a lot more Southerners
in the group, so kids from Atlanta and Nashville, of course, Charleston, Tampa,
in addition to kids from other parts of the country
New York, Oklahoma, Illinois. It's it's kind of a more
(19:56):
diverse group in that sense. Strange thing happens when they
get to Birmingham, though, when the first bus arrives, Commissioner
of Public Safety Bull Connor, who we mentioned in the
last podcast, he lets the regular passengers off, covers the
window with paper, and then holds the remaining people on board,
and finally, after they sweat it out in the may
(20:18):
heat for a while, they're let off and then they
proceed to the white waiting area and they're arrested that night.
They're released from jail and put into cars, which is
very ominous, but they drive right to the state line
of Alabama and Tennessee and they're told by Connor to
get out and make their way back to Nashville. From there,
Tennessee State University student Katherine Burke's Brooks tells Connor that
(20:42):
we'll see you back in Birmingham by high noon. So
they're not about to be put down, no, and and
this is still a scary situation though, that they've just
been dropped off in the middle of nowhere, in the
middle of the night. They don't know if maybe there's
some vigilante group the Clan waiting for them on the
other side of the border. A bullet bull Connor is
just handing them off or what they're going to do,
(21:04):
so they hide. They find shelter with an older couple
and by the next day nash has arranged from Afar
a ride for them to get back to Birmingham, and
I don't think they make it by noon, but they
do make it back the next day. But by the
time they're back in Birmingham, the Nashville Riders meet the
second wave of their group. They are just like last time,
(21:27):
different buses traveling into Alabama, but there's a problem. Besides
bull Connor in the threatening crowd, the bus drivers won't drive,
so the riders are stuck there again. They're stuck in Birmingham,
and we mentioned this in the last episode, individual bus
drivers refusing to drive because they were afraid they would
get their bus set on fire or be beaten or something,
(21:50):
but in this case it's the entire union refusing to drive,
so there's really no way out of town again, so
for the moment, it's looking kind of hopeless, but the
Kennedy administration finally pressure's Alabama's Governor John Patterson to promise
protection or else face having the National Guard called in,
and so Paterson agrees to provide state protection as the
writers continue their trip to Montgomery, Alabama. Yeah. We mentioned
(22:13):
this American Heritage documentary in the last episode, based on
Raymond Arsenal's book, and it really contains some great interviews
with former freedom writers. But it's worth watching, I think
just to see Katherine Burke's Brooks expression as she recalls
feeling relaxed enough to doze on the bus. It's kind
of an expression like what was I thinking, mixed with
(22:34):
total disappointment, a little sarcasm thrown in there. It's it's
a you should watch it just to see that. But
that feeling, that total relaxation, able to fall asleep on
the bus feeling, obviously doesn't last very long because in Montgomery,
the state protection drops off, and they're thinking, well, the
(22:55):
city police will pick up protection, but nobody ever comes,
so here the bus is just rolling into Montgomery with
no one around them. Yeah, and John Seagan Thaler, Robert
Kennedy's assistant, the man who had been negotiating with the
governor about providing state protection. He remembered thinking, quote, I
knew suddenly betrayal, disaster, I hope not death. So he's
(23:15):
scared too. At this point, a mob of more than
two hundred weights at the Greyhound station for them, the
first target this time is the reporters and a cameraman,
because the mob has seen how quickly these pictures get out,
not just in the South, not just in the United States,
but all over the world, and they don't want that
to happen again. So for a sense of what this
(23:43):
would have been like for the reporters, Time reporter Calvin Trillin,
who took part in the rise as a journalist, recently
wrote in The New Yorker that he'd tell his friend,
a life photographer, quote, when we get in one of
those situations, At best, I don't know you. At worst,
I'm one of the people chasing you. Of course, the
writers were also very severely beaten. As a white writer,
(24:03):
Jim's work was quickly beaten, unconscious and kicked in the
face before going down. Though he remembered seeing men armed
with baseball bats, chains, hammers, and this is crazy, even
one guy with a pitchfork, so imagine that coming towards you.
Burke's Brooks remembers women shouting with babies in their arms.
It was a spectacle. In addition to this really violent scene,
(24:24):
and John Lewis, who had been part of the original
Core ride and had been actually attacked in South Carolina.
Was hit in the head with a wooden crate, and
William Barbie had somebody try to drive a steel rod
through his ear, and even Singing Dollar, who is the
direct representative to the President, was hit with a pipe
(24:45):
trying to help one of the female Freedom writers and
he was knocked unconscious. So finally the police arrived. They
broke up the crowd with tear gas. So the next
day May One sort of marks at turning point for
the Freedom rides. The riders and hundred supporters filled the
First Baptist Church in Montgomery for a meeting, and by
(25:07):
this point Martin Luther King and the larger movement really
had to get involved in stand behind the riders, even though,
as we mentioned before, many were ambivalent about the ride
initially or even thought it would come out hurting the movement,
But after the violence that had had happened, they had
to all stand together and and support the ride, And
(25:29):
so Martin Luther King actually comes down to Montgomery to
meet up with everyone here at the church. Outside the church, though,
a mob of three thousand gathers and they're breaking windows,
threatening to burn down the church. The marshals that are
set into control the crowd are just random federal workers.
They dispersed tear gas with the wind blowing towards them
(25:51):
and end up having to run away. They just have
little patches on their sleeves, not even uniforms. So after
that there's this night of phone calls. Martin lu Their
Kings on the phone with Robert Kennedy trying to get
them to do something. Robert Kennedy is on the phone
with Patterson trying to get him to act. Martin Luther
King even even gathers up a group of committed nonviolent
(26:11):
volunteers to leave the church and dissuade a group of
black cab drivers from using violence against the mom So
they're still trying to stick to their principle of non
violence here. It's the best way for them to hopefully
get out of this situation too. So finally the governor
puts the city under martial law, and people in the
church are free, you know, the crowd has broken up.
They're free to go, and the freedom writers are also
(26:33):
free to continue under the protection this time of the
Alabama National Guard. So they hit the road heading towards Mississippi,
and at the border, the Mississippi National Guard takes over
with commands to take the bus right on through to Jackson,
no stops, no trouble, and it kind of seems like
they're out of the frying pan into the fire here.
(26:55):
Because Mississippi was considered the most dangerous Southern state. You
can hear them talk about how as bad as Alabama
had had been for them, Mississippi seemed like there might
be worth the worst things waiting, And there were scary
signs right across the border. There were signs that said
things like quote prepare to meet Thy God. So it
looked like it was going to be as bad as
(27:16):
they thought it was going to be. But response that
they get there is quite different from Alabama's messy mob violence.
According to Trillan, the former Time reporter, Mississippi's Citizens Council
and State Sovereignty Commission wanted to avoid national news scandals
and presidential interference too, and the president an attorney general
wanted to avoid the violence and beatings on the national news,
(27:38):
so they made this compromise. Instead of mob violence, there
would be an organized, rapid police response. So what does
that mean? This basically means that the first writers from
trail Ways disembarked the bus, went to the whites waiting
room and were asked to leave politely, and after they refused,
they were arrested. And this happened again with the greyhound bus.
(28:01):
The charges against them are things like a breach of peace. Yeah,
so it's this very orderly, non violent, uh, comparatively calm. Yeah,
maybe even disturbingly calm. I don't know, after what they've
gone through. But from there they'd be quickly processed and
sent through court, put into the city jail, and then
(28:21):
eventually shipped off not just to any old prison, but
to the state penitentiary Parchment State Prison Farm, which was
one of the most notorious prisons in the country. Just
a little side note, even if you don't know about Parchment,
you've probably heard about it if you've listened really carefully
to blues or folk recordings, because in the nineteen thirties
(28:44):
Allen Lomax recorded singers and bluesmen for the Library of
Congress singing really sad songs about how hard life was
in Parchment. But the freedom writers didn't have the expected
reaction that all the authorities in Mississippi thought they would have.
They thought that they would just post bail, get out
and not got back. Yeah, get out of town. But
(29:05):
instead they take up the slogan jail no bail and
resolved to fill up the prison and clog up their system.
So busloads of them just keep coming through that summer,
even though on May Robert Kennedy petitioned the Interstate Commerce
Commission to prohibit segregation and interstate bus travel and pleaded
with the writers to take a cooling off period while
(29:26):
the request was processed. So he was basically like, Okay,
we're trying to put this through, can you guys please
stop for a little while. He was encouraging them to
shift their attention to voter registration, you know, something something
to work on. Please let this go, but they were
completely unwilling to do that. They rejected the cooling off
period and instead the rides intensified. Ultimately, three hundred of
(29:50):
the four hundred and thirty six Freedom Writers ended up
at Parchment Prison, and finally, by September, the anniversary we
are commemorating year, the i c C issued the order
that all segregated signs would come down at interstate bus
and train terminals. Um, and we've got to talk about
(30:10):
the the effect of the rides and what people thought
at the time, since they were kind of unpopular at
the beginning, even within the movement. According to the New
Yorker article we mentioned earlier, in nineteen sixty one Gallop
poll showed that only one in four Americans approved of
the rides, But after the victory, it was clear that
they had accomplished something, They had been effective. Yeah, so
(30:33):
they saw that nonviolent activism could really work. According to
a Smithsonian article by Marion Smith Holmes the New York Times,
for example, which was formerly critical of the rides, they
admitted that the Freedom writers quote started the chain of
events which resulted in the New I c. C Order.
It also had the effect of empowering young student leaders
in the movement and of forcing ties between the Kennedy
(30:55):
administration and civil rights leaders. Exactly those late night phone
calls we were talking about, where Martin Luther king Is
is calling up the Kennedy's and all of these nineteen
year old twenty year olds who decide to leave school
during their exams and go out and do this. But
in addition to Raymond Arsenal's book and that American Experience
(31:17):
documentary that is inspired by it. There is just so
much on this story. It's a really it's a really
great one if you want to do some research yourself
and get even deeper into it. Their countless interviews and
articles by former writers and politicians and journalists. And there's
a great photographic record too, And I wanted to just
talk about that a little bit more because I think
(31:38):
it's so interesting. So there aren't just images of the
violent beatings and the burning buses and the segregated waiting rooms,
those images that really went across international newspaper headlines. There
are also kind of more personal images too. So in
two thousand two, the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission was forced
(32:01):
to open its archives after this lengthy, like multi decade
long lawsuit with the American Civil Liberties Union. And after that,
three hundred mug shots of the freedom writers became available
for the first time, and an editor named Eric Etheridge
decided to he was really moved by all of these
(32:21):
photos of these people who have been arrested and kind
of have these defiant looks. Some of them are almost smiling,
some of them have clearly been roughed up, but he
decided to seek out the freedom writers that were photographed
and re photographed them, since they would of course all
be mature adults by that point, and he just cold
(32:42):
called them. He told Smithsonian that his quote best ice
breaker was, I have your mug shot from nineteen sixty one.
Have you ever seen it? It's a very cool story.
He got a lot of photos, made a book out
of it. And it is really interesting too to see
what these people went on to do the rest of
their lives after after doing something like this, maybe when
(33:03):
they're only nineteen years old. Yeah, I mean I have
to imagine that it was thrilling to call them and
maybe meet them. I mean, these people, no matter what
you think about their strategy, how they went about what
they did, they were uniquely brave people. Yeah, and to
find out how many of them were still involved in
activism or had continued work that seemed really fitting for
(33:26):
somebody who was a former freedom writer, somebody who would
go out and and do this. Thank you so much
for joining us today for this Saturday classic. If you
have heard any kind of email address or maybe a
Facebook you are l during the course of the episode,
that might be obsolete. It might be doubly obsolete because
(33:47):
we have changed our email address again. You can now
reach us at History podcast at i heart radio dot com,
and we're all over social media at missed in History,
and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcast Us,
Google Podcasts, the I heart Radio app, and wherever else
you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class
(34:09):
is a production of I heart Radio's How Stuff Works.
For more podcasts for my heart Radio visits, I heart
radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Happy Saturday everyone. Last Saturday, we had kind of a
classics double feature, and we are doing that again today
as well. The Freedom Rides were happening about the same
time as the sit in movement of the nineteen sixties
that we talked about this week, and some of the
same people were involved in both the Freedom Rides and
the sit ins. Sarah and Deblina did two episodes on
the Freedom Rides in the US since September eleven, and
(00:25):
they're a little bit shorter than our episodes typically are today,
so we are playing them both together, so enjoy. Welcome
to Stuff you missed in History Class, a production of
I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome to
(00:46):
the podcast. I'm Sarah Dowie and I'm Deblina Chalko Boarding
and you could be forgiven for thinking it's nineteen sixty
one again. With all of the big civil rights anniversaries
that have been in the news this year, fiftieth anniversaries,
that's so true, um, most notably the fiftieth anniversary of
the Freedom Rides this past May, when more than four
hundred people of all ages, male, female, black, white, different
(01:11):
religions from all over the country decided to challenge the
racial segregation of interstate buses, and the Freedom Rides have
been really well covered this year. There have been articles,
news stories, two reunions of writers, one in Jackson, Mississippi,
one in Chicago. I think that one was hosted by
Oprah herself. There was a fantastic American Experienced documentary based
(01:34):
on the book on the Freedom Writers by Raymond Arsenal.
There have been op eds and reflections from the writers
in national papers. But we are not ones to let
the May anniversary of the Freedom Rides stop us from
doing a podcast on them in September, because September is
also a really important date for the Freedom Rides. It's
(01:56):
when change actually happened, when the Interstate Commerce Commission finally
ruled that the signs segregating whites and blacks at bus
and train facilities had to come down, and actually backed
up that ruling with a really hefty fine for offenders.
So that ruling validated the riders in their tactics, and
(02:17):
that's worth pointing out before we get into this two
part episode on the Freedom Rides, and before we get
into how the ride started, because even though today the
riders are clearly celebrated as civil rights heroes at the time.
What they were doing was extremely controversial, even within the
civil rights movement itself, so they didn't know what they
(02:38):
were what they were setting out to do. They just
knew they had to do it. But before we even
get to the rides themselves, our story really starts in
nineteen with a woman named Irene Morgan. Now everyone knows
Rosa Parks right and her refusal to give up her
bus seat in the nineteen fifties, but a decade earlier,
Morgan refused to give up her seat on a Greyhound
(02:59):
traveling through Virginia. And Morgan, who made World War Two
bomber planes for a plant for a living, was coming
home to Baltimore after visiting her mother. So after refusing
to move, she kicked the sheriff's deputy who tried to
take her off the bus, and later she said, quote,
I started to bite him, but he looked dirty, so
I couldn't bite him, So all I could do was
(03:19):
claw and tear his clothes. Yeah, and that and other
great quotes are from her New York Times obituary. But
Morgan was arrested and went ahead paid that one hundred
dollar fine for resisting arrest, but she refused to pay
the ten dollar fine for violating a Virginia law about
segregated seating, so it was off to court she went,
(03:40):
and eventually the n double a c p. Took up
her case and appealed to the Supreme Court, and in
ninety the court actually ruled in her favor in Morgan
versus Virginia and um just the gist of the ruling here,
seating arrangements for the different races in interstate motor travel
require a sing goal uniform rule to promote and protect
(04:03):
national travel. Sounds simple enough. Basically, you can't make African
Americans sit in the back of the bus and white
people sit in the front, and nobody should be giving
up their seat unless just to an old person or
something like that. So it sounds simple, but it wasn't
because Southern states continued to flaunt the law with segregated seating,
(04:23):
segregated waiting rooms, restrooms, water fountains. So eventually somebody decided
that they needed to do something and actually test out
this new law, and that was a group organized by
the Congress of Racial Equality or CORE and the Fellowship
of Reconciliation. They decided to test the new ruling by
staging the Journey of Reconciliation through the Upper South. The
(04:47):
Upper South. Yeah, and that's important here, especially when we
get into the later Freedom Rides where they head into
Alabama in Mississippi and and things get a lot different.
Back in nine seven, they knew that wasn't an option, right,
So basically this is how it worked. Eight black men
and eight white men would ride on interstate buses and
trains and see if Morgan versus Virginia was a law
(05:10):
in action or in name only. So there was a
catch though it would be non violent. Even if they
were faced with arrests or beatings, the writers would not react.
So while Morgan had been the inspiration for this, she
was obviously not their non violent role model, with her
attempted bites and all of that. I think that makes
(05:30):
Morgan such an interesting character in this whole thing too,
which is such a famous non violent movement that she
is the inspiration for it. But for that non violent inspiration,
leaders instead turned to Gandhi, and he actually was the
inspiration for Courts Founding back in nineteen two. But the
Journey of Reconciliation, it sounds like it's gonna make waves.
(05:51):
It sounds like a big deal, but it really didn't
have that much of an impact. The writers did meet
with violence, three of them spent a month on a
North Carolina chain gang after violating segregation rules in Chapel Hill,
but the story wasn't really picked up by national media,
and folks just weren't that interested. So Arsenal writes that
(06:12):
the ride ultimately quote brought about little change and was
soon forgotten by all but a handful of non violent activists.
So a decade goes by, and then in nineteen sixty
some important things start to happen to inspire a new
wave of freedom rides. One of those things is that
JFK is elected president. Another is that Nashville sit ins
(06:34):
and segregation at city lunch counters there. And also the
Supreme Court issues another decision related to interstate travel. This
time it's a point in versus Virginia, which made any
racial segregation illegal in interstate commerce. And that's anything. So
not only should a black person be able to take
any seat on the bus, he should also be able
to use any waiting room, restroom, coffee counter, and so on.
(06:57):
All Right, so there's a new Supreme Court decision, and
this momentum going from the Nashville sit ins and Core
and its director James Farmer decide, let's test this new
ruling boy in versus Virginia. So this time, not only
would the new riders keep that direct action movement of
the sit ins going, they would help promote CORE too
(07:18):
on this national scale, since it was, after all, less
well known than the N double A c P or
SNICK or the S C l C. And that's something,
as we mentioned in the beginning, that this was kind
of controversial within the movement. That was something that added
to the ambivalence or sometimes outright hostility directed at the
(07:38):
initial ride by much of the movement um. But we've
got to give you a sense of how these initial
CORE riders were picked. Because they weren't just willy nilly
passengers on the bus. They all had to be trained,
they all had to come with recommendations even and again
they all kind of came from different sort of facets
(07:59):
of life. One member, James Peck, was from Manhattan and
he had participated in the nineteen forties Journey of Reconciliation,
so he had some experience with this. The others were
handpicked to maintain their non violent directive. So in addition
to having to get recommendations, as Sarah said, the youngest
of them also had to get parental permission. They also
(08:20):
underwent careful training to resist that violent impulse, but really
they only anticipated refusal of service and possibly maybe arrest.
You can see videos that of this training, and it's
pretty fascinating to watch and really uncomfortable because you know,
it is a simulated situation in these people actually all
know each other. Well, there's the man playing the antagonizer,
(08:41):
the woman playing the waitress, and it's it's strange to see.
But as you mentioned, they were from all different walks
of life. They were all ages, all professions, students, retirees, editors,
was a folk singer, and most were from the North
or the Midwest, with a few southern exceptions, including probably
the most famous rider, John Lewis, he was from Alabama. UM.
(09:04):
But that's something also to consider when we were mentioning
earlier about the hostility or ambivalence within the movement, that
these people were largely Northerners, were largely Midwesterners, and they
were coming into the South to to test these segregated
Jim Crow rules. So the first riders left May fourth,
nineteen sixty one. They were departing from Washington, d C.
(09:27):
And ultimately the final destination was going to be New Orleans,
which it's a bus ride that was going to take
a while, and they didn't really know what they would
encounter along the way. But the bus started out winding
its way through Virginia and North Carolina. There were thirteen riders.
They were taking Greyhound and Trailways buses, so two different lines,
(09:49):
just testing out the whole range of the system. And
at first they really saw what they expected. Stations would
sort of reluctantly break from their segregationists policies just while
the writers were there. So just go ahead and let
them sit in the black sitting room or the white
sitting room, whatever race. They weren't, let them use the
(10:11):
wrong restroom, whatever they were doing, and then just um
let them be, let them get on their bus and
move on through town, get out of their hair, and
presumably returned to business as usual, which was full on segregation.
But by Charlotte, North Carolina, that wasn't what was happening anymore.
People weren't just letting it slide until they were gone,
(10:32):
trouble started. There were arrests and beatings in rock Hill,
South Carolina, and by made their teenth be Writers finally
made it to Atlanta, where they had this little get
together sort of pause in the ride planned with Dr
Martin Luther King. Yeah, and they were really hoping that
when they got there he would join in become a
(10:53):
freedom writer with them, but instead he took a very
different attitude. He warned them. He told them that he
had heard bad news coming out of Alabama and they
should seriously reconsider continuing on and even questioning the wisdom
of what they were doing in the first place, whether
this was really helping the movement. So this is pretty
(11:14):
discouraging news to hear it their Atlanta reception, and to
make matters worse, James Farmer, the leader of Core, gets
word that his father has died and has to pull
out for a few days to go home. Still though
May fourteen, Mother's Day, the leaderless Writer set off from
Atlanta to Birmingham, Alabama, on Greyhound and Trailways buses that
(11:37):
are leaving one hour apart, and sure enough, shortly after
crossing the Alabama state line, one of the buses runs
into trouble. The greyhound hits a crowd of about two
hundred men in Anniston. Yeah, and it's all been planned.
A klansman lies down in front of the bus so
that the other members of the mob can slash the
(11:57):
tires and the bus maneuver out of town, but it's
followed and hounded by a car. Then finally the tires
go flat. The driver gets out, checks them and walks away,
just leaves the people on the bus. And there's this
really harrowing scene in the documentary where passenger may Francis
Moultrie here someone shouting where is the gas? Where is
the gas? Yeah, I'd really recommend to that documentary for
(12:21):
seeing some of these freedom writers reflect on it and
and say what they heard and what they experienced. But
the mob attacks the bus then and throws a firebomb
in through the back window and then blocks the door
to prevent the people from getting off. And also keep
in mind there aren't just freedom writers on this bus.
They're regular passengers to who are just trying to get
(12:44):
to Birmingham or wherever and are caught up in this.
Two things ultimately saved the riders and those unaffiliated bus passengers.
The fuel tank explodes, which makes the mob back away
(13:05):
from the bus, and then highway patrolman finally arrived, but
not until the coughing, choking passengers who have just escaped
from the bus are beaten by the crowd. There's one
catch though with this, With this violent scene, photographs are
taken and it becomes a major news story and they
(13:26):
go worldwide, not just a national news story, becomes worldwide news,
something terrible happening in the United States. But meanwhile, that
second bus is still chugging on towards Birmingham. Yeah where.
Little did they know, the city's Commissioner of Public Safety,
Bull Connor, has made a deal with the KKK. The
(13:47):
deal is that when the bus comes to town, the
clan will get fifteen minutes without police interference to do
whatever they want to people in the bus, no arrests,
no trouble at all. And there's another catch to this too.
The FBI had an informant and the clan, and he
knew the plan to attack the bus. J Edgar Hoover
didn't report the mob's plans to Attorney General Robert Kennedy.
(14:10):
The informant even participated when the mob attacked and beat
the writers as they came into the station, and we're
going to talk about that a little more in the
part two of this episode and and some of the
legal battles that ensued. But just like an Aniston, photographers
get pictures of this mob attacking the passengers coming from Atlanta,
(14:31):
and this news makes international headlines too. It's very disturbing
to people, and it's something that um, the federal administration
really can't ignore. So Jim Peck, who has been unofficially
in charge since James Farmer left, makes the call to
continue the ride from the hospital. He has been severely beaten.
(14:54):
And it's worth noting here too that a lot of
the white riders would be targeted initially sort of as
betrayers to their race by the mob. So Jim Peck
was really really bad off. Pictures of him are disturbing
to see, but he said that they felt quote they
must not surrender to violence. So let's not stop here.
(15:14):
There's a problem though, Like I mean, that's a very noble,
brave thing to do to try to continue the ride,
but there's a problem. None of the drivers out of
Birmingham are willing to take them. Nobody wants to risk it.
Nobody wants to risk being on a firebomb bus or
attacked by a mob and and dragged down with the
rest of them. Yeah, I mean, you can hardly blame them.
(15:35):
But they finally decide that the ride has to end.
They'll fly to New Orleans instead, but even that proves
to be quite difficult. The mob follows them, a bomb
threat is called in on their plane, and it seems
that they're stuck in Alabama and definitely can't get out
of the Birmingham airport. So, like we said, by this
point that Kennedy's really have to get involved with this
(15:56):
story all over the world's papers and the poor beaten
freedom writers stuck in the airport. They can't let things
get anywhere. So John Seigenthaler, who was the assistant to
Attorney General Robert Kennedy, arranges the rider's flight and escorts
them to New Orleans. They're they're met by state police
at the plane, who protect them but also curse them
(16:18):
as they walk to the terminal, and that ends the ride.
It's over. The Kennedys think that hopefully it's all over,
um they can get back to international pursuits, but it's
not because there is another wave setting out from Nashville.
The students in the Nashville Student Movement realized that they
(16:41):
couldn't let corps attempt and there end in violence. And
the leader of that movement, Diane Nash, who was a
student in the Nashville movement, told of Birmingham reverend quote,
if they stop us with violence, the movement is dead. Hello,
(17:03):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Sarah Daddy and I'm
to Blean and Chuck reporting. And this September we are
commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Interstate Commerce Commissions ruling
that all interstate bus and train facilities in the US
had to pull down signs segregating whites and blacks. And
it was the result of a summer long effort by
(17:26):
a group that called themselves the Freedom Writers to test
laws that were already on the books. But we're just
largely ignored through many Southern states. So picking up where
we left off, the original core writers have been badly beaten, traumatized,
and essentially evacuated out of Birmingham for New Orleans by
a special assistant to Attorney General Robert Kennedy. And it
(17:47):
seems like at this time that the freedom Ride that
had started May fourth, nine sixty one in d C
was over at this point. Yeah, well and we should
we should say too, Like, if you are a listener
who drops in on random podcast, it really is worth
going back and checking out that first episode because it
will help give you the context you need for this
one since it is a part two. But we left
(18:10):
it a real cliffhanger there. That was That was a
crucial moment there in New Orleans defeated. It seems the
Kennedy's feel that things are wrapped up to their satisfaction,
but then suddenly they get news out of Nashville that
things aren't over at all. Right. Students in Nashville, many
of them were veterans of the lunch counter sit ins,
(18:32):
though still in their teens in early twenties, they decided
that the ride could not end in violence. So, spearheaded
by Diane Nash, who was a Fisk student, many members
of the Nashville student movement decided to skip their finals
and go to Alabama. Get on a bus, and they
completely know what's at stake. This is the part that's
just crazy to me. They make their wills, these young kids,
(18:54):
and they board busses to Birmingham, nash who coordinates the
whole thing from home base in Nash. Bill basically tells
of Birmingham Pasture, We're coming, yeah, and I mean the
Wills is the really shocking part. But the leaving before
finals is a really big deal too, because a lot
of these kids are the first members of their family
to go to college. But they decide that continuing the
(19:16):
freedom rides, not letting non violence end in violence like this,
is more important. So this time, though, the makeup of
the riders is a little different from the first ride,
which was all staged by the group Core. It's still
a mix of black and white men and women, and
they're taking Greyhound and Trailways buss just like before, but
(19:36):
they're all quite young this time. There were middle aged folks,
retired people last time. Most of them now though, are
nineteen twenty. And there are also a lot more Southerners
in the group, so kids from Atlanta and Nashville, of course, Charleston, Tampa,
in addition to kids from other parts of the country
New York, Oklahoma, Illinois. It's it's kind of a more
(19:56):
diverse group in that sense. Strange thing happens when they
get to Birmingham, though, when the first bus arrives, Commissioner
of Public Safety Bull Connor, who we mentioned in the
last podcast, he lets the regular passengers off, covers the
window with paper, and then holds the remaining people on board,
and finally, after they sweat it out in the may
(20:18):
heat for a while, they're let off and then they
proceed to the white waiting area and they're arrested that night.
They're released from jail and put into cars, which is
very ominous, but they drive right to the state line
of Alabama and Tennessee and they're told by Connor to
get out and make their way back to Nashville. From there,
Tennessee State University student Katherine Burke's Brooks tells Connor that
(20:42):
we'll see you back in Birmingham by high noon. So
they're not about to be put down, no, and and
this is still a scary situation though, that they've just
been dropped off in the middle of nowhere, in the
middle of the night. They don't know if maybe there's
some vigilante group the Clan waiting for them on the
other side of the border. A bullet bull Connor is
just handing them off or what they're going to do,
(21:04):
so they hide. They find shelter with an older couple
and by the next day nash has arranged from Afar
a ride for them to get back to Birmingham, and
I don't think they make it by noon, but they
do make it back the next day. But by the
time they're back in Birmingham, the Nashville Riders meet the
second wave of their group. They are just like last time,
(21:27):
different buses traveling into Alabama, but there's a problem. Besides
bull Connor in the threatening crowd, the bus drivers won't drive,
so the riders are stuck there again. They're stuck in Birmingham,
and we mentioned this in the last episode, individual bus
drivers refusing to drive because they were afraid they would
get their bus set on fire or be beaten or something,
(21:50):
but in this case it's the entire union refusing to drive,
so there's really no way out of town again, so
for the moment, it's looking kind of hopeless, but the
Kennedy administration finally pressure's Alabama's Governor John Patterson to promise
protection or else face having the National Guard called in,
and so Paterson agrees to provide state protection as the
writers continue their trip to Montgomery, Alabama. Yeah. We mentioned
(22:13):
this American Heritage documentary in the last episode, based on
Raymond Arsenal's book, and it really contains some great interviews
with former freedom writers. But it's worth watching, I think
just to see Katherine Burke's Brooks expression as she recalls
feeling relaxed enough to doze on the bus. It's kind
of an expression like what was I thinking, mixed with
(22:34):
total disappointment, a little sarcasm thrown in there. It's it's
a you should watch it just to see that. But
that feeling, that total relaxation, able to fall asleep on
the bus feeling, obviously doesn't last very long because in Montgomery,
the state protection drops off, and they're thinking, well, the
(22:55):
city police will pick up protection, but nobody ever comes,
so here the bus is just rolling into Montgomery with
no one around them. Yeah, and John Seagan Thaler, Robert
Kennedy's assistant, the man who had been negotiating with the
governor about providing state protection. He remembered thinking, quote, I
knew suddenly betrayal, disaster, I hope not death. So he's
(23:15):
scared too. At this point, a mob of more than
two hundred weights at the Greyhound station for them, the
first target this time is the reporters and a cameraman,
because the mob has seen how quickly these pictures get out,
not just in the South, not just in the United States,
but all over the world, and they don't want that
to happen again. So for a sense of what this
(23:43):
would have been like for the reporters, Time reporter Calvin Trillin,
who took part in the rise as a journalist, recently
wrote in The New Yorker that he'd tell his friend,
a life photographer, quote, when we get in one of
those situations, At best, I don't know you. At worst,
I'm one of the people chasing you. Of course, the
writers were also very severely beaten. As a white writer,
(24:03):
Jim's work was quickly beaten, unconscious and kicked in the
face before going down. Though he remembered seeing men armed
with baseball bats, chains, hammers, and this is crazy, even
one guy with a pitchfork, so imagine that coming towards you.
Burke's Brooks remembers women shouting with babies in their arms.
It was a spectacle. In addition to this really violent scene,
(24:24):
and John Lewis, who had been part of the original
Core ride and had been actually attacked in South Carolina.
Was hit in the head with a wooden crate, and
William Barbie had somebody try to drive a steel rod
through his ear, and even Singing Dollar, who is the
direct representative to the President, was hit with a pipe
(24:45):
trying to help one of the female Freedom writers and
he was knocked unconscious. So finally the police arrived. They
broke up the crowd with tear gas. So the next
day May One sort of marks at turning point for
the Freedom rides. The riders and hundred supporters filled the
First Baptist Church in Montgomery for a meeting, and by
(25:07):
this point Martin Luther King and the larger movement really
had to get involved in stand behind the riders, even though,
as we mentioned before, many were ambivalent about the ride
initially or even thought it would come out hurting the movement,
But after the violence that had had happened, they had
to all stand together and and support the ride, And
(25:29):
so Martin Luther King actually comes down to Montgomery to
meet up with everyone here at the church. Outside the church, though,
a mob of three thousand gathers and they're breaking windows,
threatening to burn down the church. The marshals that are
set into control the crowd are just random federal workers.
They dispersed tear gas with the wind blowing towards them
(25:51):
and end up having to run away. They just have
little patches on their sleeves, not even uniforms. So after
that there's this night of phone calls. Martin lu Their
Kings on the phone with Robert Kennedy trying to get
them to do something. Robert Kennedy is on the phone
with Patterson trying to get him to act. Martin Luther
King even even gathers up a group of committed nonviolent
(26:11):
volunteers to leave the church and dissuade a group of
black cab drivers from using violence against the mom So
they're still trying to stick to their principle of non
violence here. It's the best way for them to hopefully
get out of this situation too. So finally the governor
puts the city under martial law, and people in the
church are free, you know, the crowd has broken up.
They're free to go, and the freedom writers are also
(26:33):
free to continue under the protection this time of the
Alabama National Guard. So they hit the road heading towards Mississippi,
and at the border, the Mississippi National Guard takes over
with commands to take the bus right on through to Jackson,
no stops, no trouble, and it kind of seems like
they're out of the frying pan into the fire here.
(26:55):
Because Mississippi was considered the most dangerous Southern state. You
can hear them talk about how as bad as Alabama
had had been for them, Mississippi seemed like there might
be worth the worst things waiting, And there were scary
signs right across the border. There were signs that said
things like quote prepare to meet Thy God. So it
looked like it was going to be as bad as
(27:16):
they thought it was going to be. But response that
they get there is quite different from Alabama's messy mob violence.
According to Trillan, the former Time reporter, Mississippi's Citizens Council
and State Sovereignty Commission wanted to avoid national news scandals
and presidential interference too, and the president an attorney general
wanted to avoid the violence and beatings on the national news,
(27:38):
so they made this compromise. Instead of mob violence, there
would be an organized, rapid police response. So what does
that mean? This basically means that the first writers from
trail Ways disembarked the bus, went to the whites waiting
room and were asked to leave politely, and after they refused,
they were arrested. And this happened again with the greyhound bus.
(28:01):
The charges against them are things like a breach of peace. Yeah,
so it's this very orderly, non violent, uh, comparatively calm. Yeah,
maybe even disturbingly calm. I don't know, after what they've
gone through. But from there they'd be quickly processed and
sent through court, put into the city jail, and then
(28:21):
eventually shipped off not just to any old prison, but
to the state penitentiary Parchment State Prison Farm, which was
one of the most notorious prisons in the country. Just
a little side note, even if you don't know about Parchment,
you've probably heard about it if you've listened really carefully
to blues or folk recordings, because in the nineteen thirties
(28:44):
Allen Lomax recorded singers and bluesmen for the Library of
Congress singing really sad songs about how hard life was
in Parchment. But the freedom writers didn't have the expected
reaction that all the authorities in Mississippi thought they would have.
They thought that they would just post bail, get out
and not got back. Yeah, get out of town. But
(29:05):
instead they take up the slogan jail no bail and
resolved to fill up the prison and clog up their system.
So busloads of them just keep coming through that summer,
even though on May Robert Kennedy petitioned the Interstate Commerce
Commission to prohibit segregation and interstate bus travel and pleaded
with the writers to take a cooling off period while
(29:26):
the request was processed. So he was basically like, Okay,
we're trying to put this through, can you guys please
stop for a little while. He was encouraging them to
shift their attention to voter registration, you know, something something
to work on. Please let this go, but they were
completely unwilling to do that. They rejected the cooling off
period and instead the rides intensified. Ultimately, three hundred of
(29:50):
the four hundred and thirty six Freedom Writers ended up
at Parchment Prison, and finally, by September, the anniversary we
are commemorating year, the i c C issued the order
that all segregated signs would come down at interstate bus
and train terminals. Um, and we've got to talk about
(30:10):
the the effect of the rides and what people thought
at the time, since they were kind of unpopular at
the beginning, even within the movement. According to the New
Yorker article we mentioned earlier, in nineteen sixty one Gallop
poll showed that only one in four Americans approved of
the rides, But after the victory, it was clear that
they had accomplished something, They had been effective. Yeah, so
(30:33):
they saw that nonviolent activism could really work. According to
a Smithsonian article by Marion Smith Holmes the New York Times,
for example, which was formerly critical of the rides, they
admitted that the Freedom writers quote started the chain of
events which resulted in the New I c. C Order.
It also had the effect of empowering young student leaders
in the movement and of forcing ties between the Kennedy
(30:55):
administration and civil rights leaders. Exactly those late night phone
calls we were talking about, where Martin Luther king Is
is calling up the Kennedy's and all of these nineteen
year old twenty year olds who decide to leave school
during their exams and go out and do this. But
in addition to Raymond Arsenal's book and that American Experience
(31:17):
documentary that is inspired by it. There is just so
much on this story. It's a really it's a really
great one if you want to do some research yourself
and get even deeper into it. Their countless interviews and
articles by former writers and politicians and journalists. And there's
a great photographic record too, And I wanted to just
talk about that a little bit more because I think
(31:38):
it's so interesting. So there aren't just images of the
violent beatings and the burning buses and the segregated waiting rooms,
those images that really went across international newspaper headlines. There
are also kind of more personal images too. So in
two thousand two, the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission was forced
(32:01):
to open its archives after this lengthy, like multi decade
long lawsuit with the American Civil Liberties Union. And after that,
three hundred mug shots of the freedom writers became available
for the first time, and an editor named Eric Etheridge
decided to he was really moved by all of these
(32:21):
photos of these people who have been arrested and kind
of have these defiant looks. Some of them are almost smiling,
some of them have clearly been roughed up, but he
decided to seek out the freedom writers that were photographed
and re photographed them, since they would of course all
be mature adults by that point, and he just cold
(32:42):
called them. He told Smithsonian that his quote best ice
breaker was, I have your mug shot from nineteen sixty one.
Have you ever seen it? It's a very cool story.
He got a lot of photos, made a book out
of it. And it is really interesting too to see
what these people went on to do the rest of
their lives after after doing something like this, maybe when
(33:03):
they're only nineteen years old. Yeah, I mean I have
to imagine that it was thrilling to call them and
maybe meet them. I mean, these people, no matter what
you think about their strategy, how they went about what
they did, they were uniquely brave people. Yeah, and to
find out how many of them were still involved in
activism or had continued work that seemed really fitting for
(33:26):
somebody who was a former freedom writer, somebody who would
go out and and do this. Thank you so much
for joining us today for this Saturday classic. If you
have heard any kind of email address or maybe a
Facebook you are l during the course of the episode,
that might be obsolete. It might be doubly obsolete because
(33:47):
we have changed our email address again. You can now
reach us at History podcast at i heart radio dot com,
and we're all over social media at missed in History,
and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcast Us,
Google Podcasts, the I heart Radio app, and wherever else
you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class
(34:09):
is a production of I heart Radio's How Stuff Works.
For more podcasts for my heart Radio visits, I heart
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