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L.A. to Mississippi, Goddamn: The Freedom Rides (1961)

In April 1947, shortly after the Supreme Court outlawed segregated seating on interstate bus routes, sixteen members of the Congress of Racial Equality and its mother organization, the radical-pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation, boarded buses to test the implementation of the ruling in the upper South. CORE had been started in 1942, the brainchild of James Farmer, a charismatic Black FOR organizer from East Texas. With a handful of others, he proposed planting the seeds of a freedom movement that would employ nonviolent direct action against segregation and inequality.¹ Although the philosophy of CORE was Gandhian (satyagraha), its methodology—sit-ins, jail-ins, wade-ins, boycotts—derived as much from the IWW and the CIO as it did from the Indian freedom movement. The primary organizer of the 1947 project was Bayard Rustin, then an assistant to FOR executive director A. J. Muste—a living legend of the American Left. Splitting into two teams to test both Greyhound and Trailways, the CORE riders avoided major violence, but twelve were arrested for defying the “back of the bus” rule. They called it a “Journey of Reconciliation.” Fourteen years later Farmer revived the tactic, renaming it the “Freedom Ride.”

The 1961 Freedom Rides relentlessly tested the mettle of civil rights activists against mob violence, police brutality, and a federal government unwilling to enforce federal laws. They also transformed CORE from a tiny pacifist sect into a major actor in the civil rights movement: the only one organized to launch direct action campaigns in both the North and the South. (SNCC and the SCLC, of course, were regional cadres, while the NAACP, with notable local exceptions, was primarily committed to political lobbying and judicial activism.) The Rides, of course, were more than just the Riders: they centrally involved Black campuses and communities in almost every Southern state, as well as tens of thousands of active supporters north of the Mason-Dixon Line, who marched in support demonstrations, organized hundreds of meetings, and raised funds to meet the extortionate bails set by segregationist judges. They also constituted a reservoir of volunteers to keep the Rides on the road. Los Angeles ranked second among CORE’s “fodder cities“ in the North (New York was first), sending five separate contingents of Freedom Riders southward in the summer of 1961. These forty-nine volunteers (twenty-six Black, twenty-three white) were vital reinforcements who braced the movement after the battlefield moved from Alabama to Mississippi, where segregationist officialdom tried to destroy it with mass arrests (nearly 300 of them) and imprisonment under appalling conditions.² CORE’s chapters in Southern California shared in this aura of courage and, for the next two and a half years, became the spearhead of a protest movement that culminated in the United Civil Rights Committee’s campaign of 1963 (see chapter 5).

A Los Angeles CORE chapter, the first on the West Coast, was founded soon after the end of the Second World War by Black draft resister Manuel Talley and a few other pacifists. Talley was a talented organizer and forceful speaker, but also a polarizing personality. Although the group won some victories against discriminatory restaurants, the pro- and anti-Talley factions soon split into separate chapters. Moreover, L.A. CORE, which adopted an anti–Communist membership clause in 1948, was completely overshadowed in the early Cold War period by the activities of Black progressives around the CP and the CIO. (Dorothy Healey estimated that there were 500 Black CP members in the LA area in 1946.) The national office thought Talley’s skills might be better applied as a Western field organizer; and indeed, he founded several new chapters before another feud led to his resignation.³ In any event Talley was frustrated by CORE’s lack of impact in the Black community, and he created as an alternative the National Consumers Mobilization to boycott products and firms associated with discrimination. He wrote Martin Luther King, for example, to offer support for the Montgomery bus boycott by organizing a parallel movement against Los Angeles Transit Lines, a subsidiary of National City Lines, which also owned the Montgomery system. King undoubtedly sensed that his correspondent was a general without an army, and he politely declined Talley’s offer.⁴ In 1962 Talley regained activist stature in L.A. as a leader of the Citizens Committee on Police Brutality and later as L.A. CORE’s spokesperson on the same issue.⁵ (He died in 1986.)

Los Angeles CORE was briefly revived in the mid 1950s when two experienced activists, Henry Hodge from St. Louis and Herbert Kelman from Baltimore, moved to the area. After a few arrests, the group successfully integrated Union Station’s coffee shop and barber shop, but a campaign to pressure the major downtown department stores to hire Blacks in non-menial positions quickly ran out of steam, leaving a demoralized residue of ten or twelve members.⁶ But the Southern sit-ins gave the chapter a powerful shot of adrenalin. CORE field secretary James McCain visited L.A. in March 1960 to rally troops for the Woolworth’s protests and assess the potential of the local chapter. In addition to the Independent Student Union (ISU) people, some of whom became Freedom Riders and CORE activists, the Woolworth’s campaign energized civil rights supporters at UCLA, where Robert Singleton, a Black economics major, led the campus NAACP group (later to become the Santa Monica CORE chapter), and Steven McNichols led PLATFORM, a student political party similar to SLATE at Berkeley. For several years they had been organizing protests against racial exclusion in Westwood student housing. Other members of the proto-CORE group included Robert Farrell (a navy midshipman and future member of the LA City Council), Ronald La Bostrie, Rick Tuttle (a future UCLA administrator and city controller) and at Santa Monica College, Singleton’s wife, Helen. Like so many other Black Angelenos, Farrell and La Bostrie had Louisiana roots, and they belonged to Catholics United for Racial Equality—a citywide group struggling uphill against the reactionary policies of Cardinal James McIntyre.

After Kennedy’s inauguration in January, 1961, the Southern movement began to lose national attention. In March, Martin Luther King, not invited to a meeting at the Justice Department that included other civil rights leaders, asked the White House for an appointment, but the new president had no time to see him. Confronted with an escalating crisis in Berlin, and in the final preparations for the CIA invasion of Cuba, the administration regarded civil rights as an annoyance rather than a priority. James Farmer, newly appointed national director of CORE, agreed with King and the SCLC that the Kennedys had to be prevented from sweeping their civil rights election promises under the carpet of continual Cold War crises. He proposed a Freedom Ride through the Deep South to test a recent Supreme Court decision that extended nondiscrimination in interstate travel on trains, buses and airplanes to include terminals and waiting rooms, as well. In a situation where the law was now crystal clear but its application was bound to elicit violent reactions in hard-core segregationist states, Farmer calculated that Washington would be forced to act. The Ride would help sustain the energy of the student movement while redirecting it to a higher level of contestation involving governors and federal officials, as well as mayors and local business. Everything, however, depended on the volunteers’ willingness to risk their lives by riding into the heart of segregationist darkness.

The thirteen Riders, led by James Farmer, left Washington on May 4 in two groups, one on Trailways and the other on Greyhound, just as in 1947. Unlike the “Journey of Reconciliation,” however, which ventured no further South than North Carolina, their tickets were stamped “New Orleans,” via the Klan strongholds of Alabama and Mississippi. Outside of Anniston, Alabama, the Greyhound bus, its tires slashed, was forced off the road and then firebombed by pursuing Klansmen. According to Raymond Arsenault’s history, “Several members of the mob had pressed against the door screaming, ‘Burn them alive’ and ‘Fry the goddamn niggers,’ and the Freedom Riders had been all but doomed until an exploding fuel tank convinced the mob that the whole bus was about to explode.”⁷ As the attackers retreated, the passengers crawled out of the bus—only to be attacked with pipes and clubs.

Meanwhile the Trailways contingent, also badly beaten in Anniston, found themselves headed toward Birmingham with some Klansmen as fellow passengers. In Alabama’s largest city the police commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor met with the Klan to choreograph a welcome for the Freedom Riders. He gave Imperial Wizard Bobby Shelton and his carefully selected thugs fifteen minutes to set an example that would deter all future attempts at integration. Through a Klan informant, the FBI knew all about Connor’s sinister plan, but it made no effort to warn CORE or any of the local civil rights leadership. Nor did J. Edgar Hoover bother to inform anyone in the Justice Department.

The massacre that followed (on Mothers’ Day 1961) was such an enthusiastic affair that Klansmen armed with lead pipes and baseball bats hospitalized not only the Riders but also news reporters, Black bystanders and, mistakenly, even one of their own number. President Kennedy, a Cold Warrior first and foremost, was reportedly furious at James Farmer—not Bull Connor or Alabama Governor John Patterson—for embarrassing the administration on the eve of his Vienna summit with Khrushchev. “Can’t you get your goddamned friends off those buses?” he shouted at his White House civil rights advisor. “Stop them!”⁸

Huddled together at the parsonage of Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, the embattled headquarters of the Birmingham Freedom Movement, the CORE group vowed not to surrender and instead went downtown to catch the next Greyhound to Montgomery. But Governor Patterson stopped the departure, going on television to warn that he was unable to protect the Freedom Riders from Klan ambushes along the route. Bobby Kennedy finally convinced the group to fly to New Orleans, but they ended up spending the night on the plane at the Birmingham airport as one anonymous bomb threat after another was called in. Connor and his Klan allies gloated over their victory.

It was a miracle that several of the volunteers hadn’t been burned or beaten to death. Farmer, whom many in the NAACP regarded as irresponsible for concocting what Roy Wilkins had called a “joy ride,” now wavered in face of the near certainty that any attempt to resume the Ride from Birmingham would be a virtual death sentence for participants. But Diane Nash, the key strategist of the Nashville sit-in movement and cofounder of SNCC, urged him not to lose nerve and capitulate to white violence now that the very premise of nonviolent social change was at stake. Student reinforcements, she assured Farmer, were coming from Nashville under the leadership of John Lewis and were ready to sacrifice their lives if necessary. Although their first attempt to board buses in Birmingham was thwarted when Connor jailed and then deported them across the state line to Tennessee, the kamikaze contingent soon regrouped and clandestinely returned to Birmingham. One of their members was twenty-year-old Susan Hermann, a white exchange student at Fisk University in Nashville from Whittier College (her family lived in Mar Vista, just east of Venice Beach). After much arm wrestling between Alabama officials and the Justice Department, they were allowed to board a Greyhound for Montgomery, the state capital.

There another ambush awaited them, with the Klan again given ten minutes of police noninterference to commit maximum mayhem. When Bobby Kennedy’s representative at the scene, Assistant Attorney General John Seigenthaler, attempted to rescue Hermann and another young woman from the mob, he was beaten unconscious with a pipe. In an escalation that took Washington by surprise, the city and state police then allowed several thousand whites to besiege the injured Freedom Riders and their local supporters in the sanctuary of Ralph Abernathy’s First Baptist Church. A hastily cobbled-together task force of federal marshals sent to protect the church was attacked, and came close to being overrun, before Governor Patterson, aware that the Army was on alert at Fort Benning, finally sent in troopers to quell the mob. He had cut a cynical deal with the Justice Department: the bus carrying the CORE and SNCC volunteers would be escorted safely through Alabama and handed over to the Mississippi State Police. The Riders were unaware that Kennedy had also promised not to interfere with Mississippi authorities as long as they prevented white violence. Thus, upon arrival in Jackson, the Nashville contingent was arrested and then imprisoned after refusing bail. This became the routine for the rest of the summer: a grim endurance contest between waves of arriving Freedom Riders and their Mississippi jailers. To meet this new challenge, Martin Luther King and James Farmer convened a meeting in Atlanta where SCLC, CORE, SNCC and the Nashville freedom movement formalized their alliance as the Freedom Ride Coordinating Committee. The rides would continue, and in mid June King flew to California to raise money and publicize the FRCC’s demand for a summit conference with President Kennedy.⁹

Surprise Packages

As the organization’s historians point out, “the joint sponsorship arrangement notwithstanding, the major responsibility for recruiting, financing and coordinating the Riders fell upon CORE.” This commitment was symbolized by Farmer’s decision to join his young comrades in prison. Meanwhile the strong New Orleans chapter provided a regional base of operations, while CORE field secretaries in Atlanta, Montgomery and Jackson acted both as troubleshooters and emissaries to local Black communities. They also continued to test terminal facilities for compliance with the decision of the Supreme Court—until the Interstate Commerce Commission in September finally did what it always had the power to do and banned Jim Crow in facilities under its jurisdiction.¹⁰

Recruits for the June Freedom Rides came from divinity schools in the North and traditional Black colleges in the border South. West Coast CORE chapters were meanwhile nominated to serve as a strategic reserve—“surprise packages” of activists to be shipped to Mississippi when the need arose. CORE membership, as Farmer had originally hoped, grew explosively over the summer, as did the pool of potential Freedom Riders—their deployment primarily limited by training and legal resources.¹¹ One example of CORE’s popular charisma was in the San Fernando Valley, where two Berkeley students, Ken Cloke and Pat Kovner (a Freedom Rider in August), had spent the beginning of the summer break assembling a surprisingly large and active chapter, many of them grads from Reseda High School, where Cloke had been student body president two years earlier.

At the beginning of June, CORE opened up an office around the corner from LA City College on Melrose Avenue. Ed Blankenheim, a white Marine veteran turned pacifist who had been on the Greyhound burned outside Anniston, was sent out by Farmer to interview volunteers and plan an LA-origin Freedom Ride that would proceed by train to New Orleans, then by bus to Jackson. But L.A. CORE was also debating how to respond to the area’s own simmering racial crisis. One provocation quickly followed another. Three of the Black youth arrested during the Memorial Day incident in Griffith Park, which Chief Parker had blamed on “the publicity coming out of the South in connection with the Freedom Rides,” were indicted for “lynching” and “assault with intent to commit murder,” while white youth who pelted sheriff deputies with sand-packed beer cans during a far larger “riot” at Zuma Beach a few weeks later were charged with no more than misdemeanors. (Even petty theft could become a capital offense in South Central: in February a fourteen-year-old trying to steal some candy had been shot to death in a darkened theater by an off-duty officer from the [Watts] Seventy-Seventh Division.) Also in early June, Edward Warren, president of the Watts branch of the NAACP, was arrested for remonstrating with LAPD officers who almost caused a riot by their rough arrest of two women on Central Avenue. In Sacramento, meanwhile, a white Democratic assemblyman from Compton, Charley Porter, had bottled up the Hawkins Fair Housing Bill in the Ways and Means Committee, where it languished and died.¹²

On June 18, Martin Luther King spoke at the Sports Arena on behalf of the Freedom Ride Coordinating Committee. In the morning Council Member Roz Wyman, the Westside Democratic power broker, introduced him to Jewish business and political leaders at the Hillcrest Country Club; he then attended a service at the People’s Independent Church of Christ, a congregation led by Reverend Maurice A. Dawkins, a friend of King’s with an ambition to play a similar role in Los Angeles. On the way to the arena, King and his entourage had no idea of what to expect. The event had been heavily publicized on radio and from the pulpit, but none of the organizers were prepared for the enormous turnout that Sunday afternoon. The arena (site of the Democratic Convention the year before) comfortably seated 12,000 people, and with reluctance the fire marshals agreed to allow 6,000 more to stand. But somewhere between 25,000 and 40,000 showed up—a Billy Graham–sized audience—so the Freedom Rally had to be split into two sessions. King himself was amazed, declaring from the podium, “I believe I can say without fear of contradiction that we are participating today in the greatest civil rights rally ever held in the United States.” On the stage with him were Governor Pat Brown (who introduced him), Dick Gregory (as MC), Sammy Davis Jr., Mahalia Jackson, and a dedicated civil rights activist whose role has now been largely forgotten, singer-songwriter Bobby Darin. (Bobby McFerrin’s father Robert, a famous baritone, was scheduled to sing the National Anthem, but he couldn’t squeeze through the crowd to reach the stage.)¹³

Twenty-three hundred miles away there was considerable anxiety at the Justice Department about what King would say. In Mississippi the Freedom Riders were being transferred to Parchman Farm, perhaps the scariest prison in North America, where discipline was enforced with wrist breakers and cattle prods, while in Washington Bobby Kennedy was cajoling a delegation from the FRCC to accept a “cooling-off period.” In fact he wanted them to give up direct action in exchange for a Southern voter registration program funded by private foundations and protected by the Justice Department. (In the event, the promise of protection proved a cruel deception, one of the most ignominious of the Kennedy administration.)¹⁴ King’s response in his Sports Arena address was uncompromising: “We cannot in good conscience cool off in our determination to exercise our Constitutional rights. Those who should cool off are the ones who are hot with violence and hatred in opposition to the rides.” The crowd overwhelmingly agreed, and for some it became a personal summons to Mississippi. “By the end,” ISUer Ellen Kleinman reminisced years later, “the combination of the voices of Mahalia Jackson and Martin Luther King Jr. had been so overwhelming that I decided that I, too, would become a Freedom Rider. It was a turning point, the moment at which my political talking also became serious political walking.”¹⁵

Those who immediately “walked the walk” were eleven L.A. CORE members who arrived in Jackson by train from New Orleans on June 25 and quickly vanished into Parchman’s maximum security wing. They included four LACC students, a seventeen-year-old from Fremont High, two artists, a housewife, the (nonviolent?) professional boxer John Rogers and his wife, and a teacher at a parochial school near Watts. The last, Mary Hamilton, became an important leader of CORE in the South, taking on dangerous assignments in Gadsden, Alabama, and Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, as well as winning a landmark Supreme Court case stemming from her refusal to answer an Alabama judge unless he addressed her as “Miss.”¹⁶ The second LA contingent, seven young Black activists with three others, arrived in Jackson by train on July 9 to share cells with Riders from Montgomery, along with teenage members of the Jackson Nonviolent Movement arrested the same day. One of the LA crew, 29-year-old Roena Rand, would go on to lead the large but tempestuous CORE chapter in Washington, DC.¹⁷

The third LA Freedom Ride—involving four Blacks and eight whites—was sponsored by the religious flagship of the Central Avenue corridor, the Second Baptist Church. Dr. Raymond Henderson had been at the pulpit of this famed church, long associated with the NAACP, since 1940, and his passionate endorsement of the Rides was a snub to Roy Wilkins, the organization’s executive secretary.¹⁸ Despite the popularity of the movement among the NAACP’s Youth Councils, Wilkins agreed with the Kennedys that the CORE-initiated movement had become an “extremist” threat to moderate reform. He also believed that CORE was infested with Communists and other left-wingers.¹⁹ Henderson was less worried. The Jackson-bound riders included two middle-aged Los Angeles lawyers, Jean Kidwell Pestana and Rose Schorr Rosenberg, whose leadership in the left-wing National Lawyers Guild and travels in the socialist bloc were widely publicized by Mississippi’s mini-KGB, the State Sovereignty Commission, with the help of McCarthyism’s poet laureate, the conservative columnist Fulton Lewis Jr.²⁰

“The notion that the Freedom Rides were part of a Communist plot,” explains Raymond Arsenault, “first emerged in Alabama in mid-May when Bull Connor, Attorney General MacDonald Gallion, and others played upon Cold War suspicions of a grand conspiracy to subvert the Southern way of life. Later, after the focus of the Rides moved to Jackson, the Communist linkage became the stock-in-trade of Mississippi politicians and editors attempting to discredit the campaign.”²¹ This fusion of McCarthyism and white supremacy was serendipity for hardline Dixiecrats while allowing groups like the John Birch Society to exploit Northern racism. (As we shall see later, the Birchers—with Chief Parker’s unofficial sanction—had spectacular success infiltrating the LAPD and winning its rank and file to their ideas.)

By the end of July, scores of Freedom Riders, having served the thirty-nine days that CORE requested, were bailing out of Parchman and leaving the state. Mississippi’s leaders, as well as the Justice Department, assumed that the movement had run out of steam and would soon dissipate. However, Farmer, as we have seen, had prepared for such a contingency and now called for more CORE reserves from the West Coast. With the help of veteran activist Henry Hodge, Santa Monica CORE, led by Robert and Helen Singleton, dispatched a contingent that arrived in Jackson on June 25. Nine of the fifteen LA Riders were, like Bob Singleton, UCLA students, and they included Michael Grubbs, the nephew of famed historian John Hope Franklin.²² By now, the arrest and processing of Riders had become routine, and the volunteers were well informed of the treatment they could expect. But while waiting in the Jackson Jail to be transferred to Parchman, Helen Singleton was “most amazed but not amused” to find a portrait of LAPD Chief Parker on a wall. It was a recruiting poster extolling the opportunities offered by the LAPD.²³

In early August Birmingham’s Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth came to L.A. In 1956 he had crawled out of the rubble after his parsonage was bombed by the Klan; more recently he had saved Freedom Riders from the Klan. He addressed almost a thousand people at Will Rogers Park in Watts, then, in a demonstration of Southern stamina, marched several hundred of them nearly ten miles to the Federal Building downtown to demand protection for civil rights workers in the Deep South.²⁴ The spirit of that summer was also manifest in a successful boycott, organized by the Sentinel and the Eagle together with CORE and the NAACP, against the annual Times-sponsored charity football game on August 17 between the LA Rams and the Washington Redskins. The DC team, owned by the venomous bigot George Preston Marshall, was the last Jim Crow holdout against integration in the NFL, and the Sentinel’s sportswriters—“Brock” Brockenbury and Brad Pye—had long blasted the Times and the Rams for bringing “these Washington Redskins here every year to insult their Negro customers in the first game of the season.” In the event, most Black Rams fans stayed away from the game, and some joined the interracial protest of 500 people (including the great blues shouter, Jimmy Witherspoon) outside the Coliseum. The LA protest, moreover, catalyzed demonstrations at other “Paleskin” games, increasing the discomfort of Marshall’s rival owners and reinforcing threats from Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall to deny the team use of the new DC-owned Washington Stadium. In December, pro sports’ leading racist George Wallace finally capitulated and drafted Heisman Trophy winner Ernie Davis.²⁵

Meanwhile the fifth and last LA Freedom Ride (with seven white and four Black participants) had set out for Jackson, via Houston and New Orleans. Once again the composition of the group reflected the important, even central, role played by red diapers in L.A. CORE. Bev Radcliff and Ellen Kleinman, already mentioned, were ISU activists, while Steven Sanfield (the night manager at the famed Larry Edmunds Bookshop in Hollywood) and artist Charles Berrard were close to the Southern California CP. Steve McNichols, also mentioned earlier, was with UCLA and Santa Monica CORE. Adding a different ideological tincture, Robert Farrell and his close friend Ronald La Bostrie represented the civil rights current among L.A.’s Black Catholics. Marjorie Dunson, slightly older, was a Jamaican citizen. En route to Mississippi by train, the contingent planned to meet up with young activists from Texas Southern University who had been struggling to desegregate the coffee shop at Houston’s Grand Central Station. Their Ride ended there.

In Houston’s Jim Crow jail, Ferrell, Berrard and La Bostrie, along with two local protestors, were welcomed “as heroes and treated accordingly” by Black male prisoners; likewise for Dunson, and for Marian Moore, one of the leaders of Houston’s Progressive Youth Association. With her Mediterranean complexion, Kleinman’s race confused her jailers, who initially put her in the Black female section. Sent back to the white women’s wing, she and Pat Kovner (who had helped found CORE in the Valley) became the subject of a hair-raising plebiscite by their fellow inmates, who decided by one vote not to beat them up. The four white male Freedom Riders, however, were greeted as “fuckin’ nigger lovers” and spent two terrible days as punching bags for the sadistic racists and anti-Semites in their part of the jail. McNichols from UCLA suffered the worst beatings, which permanently damaged his spine. As Ferrell would recall years later, “he was never the same physically … he was a damaged man.” Their lawyers were shocked at their battered state—reminiscent of the wounded on the first Freedom Rides—and bailed them out in time to prevent them being murdered. Ironically they would have been safer in Jackson, where Riders, however mistreated, were usually kept apart from other prisoners.²⁶

In September the last of the LA Riders were released from Parchman, although trials and legal battles would continue until 1962. CORE, meanwhile, supported the vigorous picketing of the LA Greyhound terminal that had been initiated by John T. Williams and other members of the Teamster Rank-and-File Committee for Equal Job Opportunity. The demonstrations continued through the fall until the company, profiting from contracts to carry mail and servicemen and therefore vulnerable to federal anti-discrimination law, finally agreed to hire their first Black driver.²⁷ L.A. CORE, while continuing to support the Southern struggle, turned its attention principally to housing integration, the issue that would most define the civil rights movement in Southern California for the next three years. The returning Riders, toughened by jail and profoundly inspired by the courage of their counterparts in the South, were eager to unleash nonviolent direct action on a new scale in Los Angeles. But another force was rising in Black communities throughout the North—one that rejected integration, Christian leadership and nonviolence. Although CORE would return to center stage in 1963, it was Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam that would transfix Los Angeles in the approaching year.