Set the Night on Fire. Mike Davis

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ