The Race Beat by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History
ISBN: 9781608125012
Publisher: Playaway
Published: 2007-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

Back in Birmingham, the new group of Freedom Riders persisted, even as Greyhound drivers repeatedly refused to take them to Montgomery and Mississippi. They appealed to Attorney General Robert Kennedy, and the U.S. Justice Department interceded. Despite Governor Patterson's resistance, Greyhound officials drafted a driver. Kennedy dispatched one of his key aides, John Seigenthaler, formerly a reporter with the Nashville Tennessean, to tell Patterson that enough was enough; if the state of Alabama wouldn't protect the riders, the federal government would. At 8:30 a.m. on Saturday May 20, six days after the bus burning and the Birmingham beatings, the riders were on their way.

An Alabama state patrol plane flew above the bus. State patrol cars were fore and aft. The riders couldn't believe the long line of press cars that trailed the convoy, not a single one bearing a New York Times reporter. In less than an hour, the convoy reached Montgomery's city line and, instantly, the patrol cars and the plane turned away. No Montgomery police cars replaced them. The riders and the press, naked of protection, pulled into the bus terminal. Journalists formed in front of Lewis to interview him; it was Lewis, looking past them, who first saw tens, then scores, then hundreds of white men, women, and children swarming into the station from all directions.

The mob carried an astonishing array of makeshift weapons: baseball bats, tire irons, garden tools, Coca-Cola crates. When Norm Ritter, a Life magazine reporter, saw the look of horror on Lewis's face, he wheeled around with his arms out as if he could hold back the screaming people. Not a chance. The mob beat Ritter in the face and kicked Maurice Levy, an NBC cameraman, in the stomach and then pounded him with his heavy television camera. A Life photographer, Don Uhrbrock, was also beaten with his camera, and James Atkins, a Birmingham television newsman, was attacked. Lewis had not expected that the white press would come under assault before the Negro Freedom Riders and might not have believed it if he hadn't seen it with his own eyes. The segregationists, he realized, hoped to destroy the movement by destroying its witnesses, the reporters. Then a Coke crate crashed into Lewis's head, knocking him onto the pavement and into unconsciousness for perhaps twenty minutes.58

Seigenthaler of the Justice Department drove into the station and attempted to rescue one of the riders, a white woman. He shouted that he was a federal agent. It didn't work. A man smashed a pipe into Seigenthaler's head. The mob kicked him as he lay unconscious. Nearby, a black youth was doused with an inflammable liquid and set afire. Twenty people were injured, and the Associated Press, which became the chief provider of on-the-scene coverage in the Times, estimated that a thousand people were in the mob at the peak of the rioting.

From Washington, the attorney general ordered four hundred federal marshals into Montgomery.

In New York, the Times, proud of its unparalleled ubiquity among American newspapers, did something

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