Freedom Riders by Arsenault Raymond;

Author:Arsenault, Raymond;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2011-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

7

Freedom’s Coming and It Won’t Be Long

We took a trip on a Greyhound bus,

Freedom’s coming and it won’t be long.

To fight segregation where we must,

Freedom’s coming and it won’t be long.

Freedom, give us freedom,

Freedom’s coming and it won’t be long.

—1961 “calypso” freedom song

The federal presence in Alabama and Mississippi was both everywhere and nowhere on Wednesday morning, May 24. Having asserted the power and authority of the national government, the Kennedy administration had withdrawn, at least temporarily, to the sidelines. The short-term, if not the ultimate, fate of the Freedom Ride had been placed in the hands of state officials who, paradoxically, had promised to protect both the safety of the Riders and the sanctity of segregation. When the Trailways group of Freedom Riders left Dr. Harris’s house at 6:15 a.m., they were escorted by a half-dozen jeeps driven by Alabama National Guardsmen. This unimpressive show of force raised a few eyebrows among the Riders, who knew next to nothing about the details of the plan to protect them. But as the convoy approached the downtown Trailways terminal, the familiar outline of steel-helmeted soldiers came into view. In and around the terminal, more than five hundred heavily armed Guardsmen stood watch over several clusters of white bystanders. Although the Freedom Riders did not know it, there were also several FBI agents and plainclothes detectives nervously wandering through the crowd.

As the Freedom Riders filed out of their cars, the scene was tense but quiet until the crowd spotted King, who, along with Abernathy, Shuttlesworth, and Walker, had agreed to accompany the Riders to the terminal. Still uncomfortable with his refusal to join the Ride, King was determined to provide the disappointed students with as much visible support as possible. During an early-morning prayer meeting at Harris’s house, he and Abernathy had blessed the Riders; and in a show of solidarity his brother, A. D., had flown in from Atlanta to help desegregate the Montgomery terminal’s snack bar. With some members of the crowd screaming words of indignation, King led the combined SCLC-Freedom Rider entourage through the white waiting room and up to the counter, where he and the others ordered coffee and rolls. As several reporters and cameramen pressed forward to record the moment, “the white waitresses removed their aprons and stepped back,” but, with the approval of the terminal’s manager, black waitresses from the “Negro lunch counter stepped up and took the orders,” thus breaking a half-century-old local color bar. Local and state officials, it seemed, had put out the word that nothing—not even the sanctity of Jim Crow dining—was to get in the way of the Freedom Riders’ timely departure from Montgomery. Pleased, but wary of this unexpected politeness, some of the Riders began to wonder what other surprises were in the offing. They did not have to wait for long to find out.

Upon arriving at the Trailways loading bay, the Freedom Riders discovered that there were no regular passengers waiting for the morning bus to Jackson. Alabama Guardsmen,

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