Carolina Israelite by Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett

Author:Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2015-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Freedom Riders

On the heels of his Eichmann project came the Freedom Rides, launched by CORE in 1961. Even Golden’s harshest critics had no quibble with him covering this news, which played to his strengths and knowledge in a way that international journalism did not. For all his globe-trotting and heightened celebrity, Golden was still most interested in and moved by the people back home who repeatedly put aside their own safety to bring about change.

Segregated seating on interstate transit had been successfully challenged in court six years earlier, but it continued on buses that traveled through the South and the stations that served them. The premise of the protest was simple: Thirteen carefully screened, polite, neatly dressed riders of various ages, white and black, boarded two buses in Washington, D.C., and chose seating that violated the usual practice. The minute they sat down, the riders created “one of those unforeseen tectonic shifts at which history blithely excels,” wrote Diane McWhorter in the foreword to Breach of Peace by Eric Etheridge, a stirring book crafted of mug shots and photographic portraits, then and now, of Freedom Riders.13

Golden credited black churches and Christianity as he marveled at the nonviolent approach of these campaigns. “They beat them with chains and brass knuckles and they bomb their houses,” he wrote, and yet the victims didn’t raise their fists; they prayed. “Some day all of us everywhere will rise up to cheer this most wonderful story of the American civilization,” he declared in an essay written during the first wave of Freedom Rides. (His use of the word “wonderful” when he clearly meant “heroic” was an extremely poor choice. Even those familiar with Golden’s strong words against the violence visited on movement protestors would have winced.)14

The first trip was tense from the start, with arrests, threats, and at least one rider beaten at a stop in South Carolina. On 14 May, in Anniston, Alabama, about 150 miles northeast of Birmingham, a mob attacked one bus and set it on fire, coming within seconds of killing the riders by holding the door shut as the vehicle burned. At the last moment the passengers escaped, some by clambering out windows. Riders in the second bus were beaten when they arrived in Birmingham. With police commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor and Ku Klux Klan members masterminding the plan, local police stayed away and let the mob have its way for fifteen bloody minutes.15

When riders moved on to Montgomery, rioting broke out at the bus depot on 21 May, and a gathering in the Reverend Ralph Abernathy’s First Baptist Church, with the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. asking his listeners to remain calm and committed to nonviolence, turned into a terrifying scene. The Kennedy administration struggled to control the situation, now rapidly becoming an international embarrassment just as the president was poised to meet with overseas leaders, including the Soviet Union’s Premier Nikita Khrushchev. Hundreds of U.S. marshals struggled overnight to hold back an angry crowd of whites outside the church.

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