Set the Night on Fire. Mike Davis

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ