by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s library movie was Freedom Riders, a PBS American Experience documentary produced by Boston’s public TV station
WGBH — imdb.com dates the film from 2010 but the copyright date on the closing
credits was 2011 and obviously
the film was being targeted for the 50th anniversary of the actual
events. In 1961 James Farmer, director of the African-American civil rights
organization Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), decided on a bold gesture to
establish the credentials of his group and place it on an equal footing with
the NAACP and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership
Conference (SCLC). He hit on the idea of challenging racial segregation in the
Deep South by sending groups of both Black and white people to take bus rides
through several Southern states. At the time, Black and white passengers were
still separated on Southern buses despite two U.S. Supreme Court decisions, Morgan v. Virginia in 1946 (eight years before Brown v. Board of Education!)
and Boynton v. Virginia in 1960, that held that segregation on buses
traveling between states (and therefore covered by the federal Constitution’s
commerce clause) was unconstitutional. With their typical resourcefulness and
sliminess, white Southerners got around this by designating separate waiting
rooms in the bus depots and marking them for “intrastate passengers,” but
insisting that Black passengers sit in the separate waiting rooms and use the
separate water fountains, rest rooms and diners and food counters regardless of
whether or not they were traveling between states. The initial Freedom Ride was
supposed to start on May 4, 1961 in Washington, D.C. and end in New Orleans on
May 17 — a date picked because it was the seventh anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. The riders were expecting resistance from
the local authorities — one of the most interesting clips director Stanley
Jordan included in his film showed the resistance training the Freedom Rider
volunteers went through to learn how to react nonviolently to verbal and
physical provocations from racist whites.
What they weren’t expecting was the sort of mass mob violence they got
from hundreds of white Southerners anxious to protect “the Southern way of
life. There were only isolated attacks on the Freedom Riders in North and South
Carolina — notably someone sneaked behind the young Black activist John Lewis
in Rock Hill, South Carolina and hit him in the head with a crate (Lewis, now
an elder statesman of the civil rights movement as well as a long-time U.S.
Congressmember, appears quite a lot in the film; he’s also the sole surviving
speaker from the 1963 March on Washington, though a number of the musical
performers at the post-march rally, notably Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, survive) —
but all hell broke loose when the buses (there were two, one Greyhound and one
Trailways) arrived in Alabama. The violently racist Birmingham, Alabama police
commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor (who’s shown in this film in archival clips,
spouting racist drivel with such venom modern-day viewers would be forgiven if
they thought he was an actor playing a caricature of the Southern racist pig)
plotted with police sergeant Tom Cook and Cook’s fellow Ku Klux Klan members to
launch an initial attack on the buses in Anniston, Alabama and then stage the
main event in Birmingham. The “law enforcement” authorities promised the
Klansmen that the mob they arranged to attack the buses would have 15 minutes
to do whatever they wanted before the police moved in. Gary Thomas Rowe, an
informant the FBI had planted in the Alabama Klan, reported this to the FBI’s
national headquarters but FBI director J. Edgar Hoover did nothing to stop the
attack. The mob in Anniston surrounded the Greyhound bus station to prevent the
bus from leaving, and also KKK members slashed its tires, so when it finally did leave Anniston it was stranded along the highway
when the tires blew out. Then someone threw a firebomb into the bus, it burned
and the Riders were lucky to escape with their lives. (The photo of the
burned-out bus was circulated by news media worldwide.) A local civil-rights
activist in Anniston, Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, organized a rescue to get the
injured Freedom Riders out of the hospital before a white mob could attack them
there.
The Trailways bus made it to Anniston safely but was attacked there by
eight Klansmen who beat up the Freedom Riders. Things got worse in Birmingham,
where 400 Klansmen and white rioters attacked 21 Freedom Riders with iron
pipes, baseball bats and bicycle chains. James Peck, the white man who was
co-leading the action, was beaten so severely he needed more than 50 stitches
in his head and the white hospital refused to treat him — so the Black hospital
did. The white attackers also set up a line around the Birmingham bus station
and did not allow the Freedom Riders to leave — until attorney general Robert
Kennedy, realizing that the U.S. was looking bad in the eyes of the world
because of the violence being visited on the Freedom Riders just as his
brother, President John F. Kennedy, was about to attend his first summit with
Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna, sent an emissary, staff member John
Siegenthaler, to try to negotiate a truce between the Alabama state authorities
and the federal government to allow the Ride to continue and the buses to leave
Alabama. Siegenthaler ran into Alabama’s ferociously racist governor, John
Patterson, who had begun as a crusading district attorney closing town the vice
dens in Phenix City, an Alabama town across the state line from Fort Benning,
Georgia and had been depicted as a decent guy and a friend to Blacks in the
1955 film The Phenix City Story
(in which Richard Kiley played him). The real Patterson was a vicious racist,
and ironically one of the candidates he beat in the 1958 Alabama gubernatorial
election was George Wallace, then a protégé of former Alabama Governor “Big
Jim” Folsom and, like Folsom, a relative moderate on racial issues. When
Patterson beat him, Wallace told friends, “He out-niggered me, and I’m never
going to be out-niggered again,” and four years later Wallace ran to succeed
Patterson as an ardent racist … and won. Patterson told Siegenthaler right out
that he couldn’t guarantee the safety of the Freedom Riders — only he was
double-crossed by the state commissioner of public safety, who flat-out told
both Patterson and Siegenthaler that he could protect the Riders if only Patterson would let him. Patterson
reluctantly promised protection to the Riders on the route to Alabama’s state
capitol, Montgomery, after Greyhound had had to send a replacement driver
because the first one had refused to drive a bus containing Freedom Riders for
fear of his own safety. (Teamsters Union president Jimmy Hoffa, Robert
Kennedy’s arch-foe, at one point intervened on the side of the racists by
saying no Teamsters member would drive a bus with Freedom Riders on it.)
There
was another savage attack on the Riders at Montgomery, and this time the
racists were smarter than they had been before: realizing that media coverage
of the event was going worldwide and making them look bad, this time they
targeted the journalists and attacked them first, particularly going after people with still cameras and the
movie cameras and parabolic microphones TV stations then used to make news
footage. Then they attacked the
buses and their riders, and that night the Riders retreated to the
African-American First Baptist Church pastured by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s
right-hand man, Rev. Ralph Abernathy, where 1,500 mostly Black people attended
a night event that was a mix of church service and civil-rights rally — while
3,000 whites surrounded the church and threatened to burn it down. King himself
spoke at the event and was criticized by some of the younger Black leaders for
refusing to join the Freedom Rides himself — which Nelson’s narration suggests
was the beginning of the split that tore the civil rights movement apart five
years later with the emergence of so-called “Black Power” activism and a
younger group of African-Americans who rejected coalitions with liberal whites
and insisted that only Blacks themselves should participate in their own
liberation struggle. Only by calling in U.S. marshals was Robert Kennedy’s
Justice Department able to get the Riders safely out of Alabama and into
Mississippi — whose governor, Ross Barnett, was just as racist as Patterson but
also a much better strategist. He was able to convince the Mississippi Klan and
the sorts of free-lance whites who had attacked the Riders in other states to
stand down, avoid attacks on the Riders and let him solve the problem — which he did by having the
Riders arrested on whatever charges local authorities could cook up, including
violating the segregation laws, and sent to the notorious Parchman state
prison, described by Mississippi native William Faulkner and hundreds of blues
lyric writers as a hell on earth. James Farmer, back in New York after he’d
been forced to leave the Freedom Ride early on because of a death in his
family, decided to send more
Freedom Riders to Mississippi, get them arrested and pack Parchman until the state authorities couldn’t run it
anymore and would have to let the Freedom Riders go. More Freedom Rides were
organized and the actions continued until November, 1961 when the U.S.
Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) adopted an administrative rule prohibiting
segregation on all interstate bus travel — and while the Southerners had
ignored or worked around similar rulings, including two U.S. Supreme Court decisions, before, this time,
with the whole world watching, they complied.
One of the less well known
aspects of the civil rights movement was how its African-American leaders were
aware of how much they were embarrassing the U.S. in the eyes of the rest of
the world — particularly the Third World countries with populations of color
who had just won independence from white colonial overlords — and how much they
were giving the Communists of the Soviet Union and China a propaganda point to
convince leaders in the newly independent Third World states that they represented freedom and liberation, while the U.S.
represented continuing racial oppression. Stanley Jordan makes this point in Freedom
Riders via a Czech newsreel of 1961
containing footage of the Freedom Riders being beaten by racist mobs and making
it clear — far clearer than any U.S. newscasters would have dared in an era in
which “objectivity” ruled the airwaves and the Fairness Doctrine precluded any
TV news outlet from being as outright propagandistic for one political point of
view as Fox News (or, to a much lesser extent, MS-NBC) is today. Obviously the
Communist overlords of the media in Czechoslovakia were using the Freedom Rider
footage to tell their people, “You think the U.S. is so great? Here’s what they
do to their own Black people — and
to white people who stand up for equal rights.” The San Diego Public Library
had shown Freedom Riders before
at the old Central Library location on 8th and “E” around the time
it was made (indeed, they previewed a number of PBS films before they aired
locally, and sometimes showed movies the local PBS station, KPBS, had decided
not to show at all) and ran it again in part because John Lewis’s memoir had
been the 2018 choice for the “One Book, One San Diego” program — a
library-sponsored effort to spawn public discussions of an issue by promoting a
book about it and getting as many San Diegans as possible to read it — and they
brought in a speaker named Rebecca Romani, a film professor at San Diego State
and Palomar College and a guest blogger about film for KPBS, to introduce it
and lead a question-and-answer session afterwards — and I could probably have
monopolized the post-film discussion because though I was only seven years old
when the first Freedom Rides happened, my mother was a heavy-duty activist in
the civil rights movement and so I was unusually aware of what was going on.
I
also have enough of an historical mind to have savored the ironies of much of
the situation, including the sequence of the movie in which one of the
interviewees is shown saying, “Some day we may even have a Black President” —
who knew, in the two-steps-forward-one-step-back way in which history in
general and U.S. history in particular moves, that one day we would have a Black president (a half-Black president,
anyway — one member of the library audience mentioned that in 1961, both the
year the Freedom Rides took place and the year Barack Obama was born, Obama’s
parents’ marriage would have been illegal in 16 states), or that when he left
office he’d be followed by a white racist whose father was a Ku Klux Klan
member. (Fred Trump, Donald’s father, was one of seven Klan members arrested at
a New York City rally in 1927; it’s mentioned in several online sources,
including https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/charlottesville-latest-donald-trump-father-fred-arrested-ku-klux-klan-kkk-rally-riot-queens-new-york-a7891701.html.)
It may seem clear to us watching in relatively liberal California in 2018 that
the Freedom Riders were right and the racists who attacked them were wrong —
and I would certainly agree that it’s utterly absurd to think that any one
race, or for that matter any one gender, has a monopoly on human intelligence,
or human stupidity — but in a way the racists had their own twisted brand of
idealism and were doing this out of a sincere belief in white superiority and
the need to defend it by isolating Blacks into separate waiting rooms,
restrooms, public parks, public schools and all other walks of life, “separate
but equal” in theory and separate and highly unequal in practice. (This fascinated me when I
recently watched another PBS presentation, a 2012 American Masters show about Gone with the Wind author Margaret Mitchell, which mentioned that one
of the big things Mitchell did with the money she made from writing the
best-selling novel of all time was to endow the historically Black Morehouse
College with scholarships, especially for medical students, and also to build a
state-of-the-art hospital for Blacks in her home town of Atlanta, Georgia. In a
way Mitchell was a racial liberal, but it’s also clear that by giving money to
build a Black hospital and to train Black doctors to staff it, she was a
“liberal” only in the sense that she wanted to realize the promise of “separate
but equal” without actually integrating Blacks with whites.)
Throughout the
movie I kept thinking of white Southern writer William Faulkner’s famous quote,
“The past isn’t dead — it’s not even past.” We nice white liberals like to
think of racial equality in the U.S. as a check mark we’ve ticked off — “been
there, done that, move on” — when in fact the spirit of racism rears its ugly
head again and again in this country. It did so in 1968, when Richard Nixon and
Strom Thurmond cooked up the “Southern Strategy” and essentially flipped the
two major U.S. political parties’ positions on civil rights; taking advantage
of the fact that the Democrats, once the party of slavery, segregation and the
Klan, had pushed through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act
of 1965, so the Republicans could now achieve political dominance by
reinventing themselves as the party of racism and cultural repression.
Originally worked out merely as an ad hoc response to the threat of George Wallace’s independent U.S.
Presidential campaign in 1968, this proved so successful long-term that they
not only turned the South in a generation or so from solid Democratic to almost
as solid Republican, they also finally broke the New Deal coalition that had
kept the Democrats in power from 1932 to 1968 by using the racial and cultural
prejudices of white working-class voters in the Northeast and Midwest (and to a
slightly lesser extent in the West as well) to move them from Democratic to
Republican. I’ve been writing in my analyses of the Trump campaign and
presidency on the Zenger’s Newsmagazine blog, http://zengersmag.blogspot.com,
that Trump’s victory in 2016 was just the final triumph of a long Right-wing
campaign that included not only the Southern Strategy but also the repeal of
the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, which allowed an entire parallel Right-wing
media universe to come into existence so people could read, watch and listen to
only Right-wing political news
and commentary, and therefore be exposed to that world-view and hear no other —
or, when they did hear another
point of view, they would dismiss it as the work of the “liberal media,” the
“dark state” or whatever name by which Right-wing propagandists denote the
infernal conspiracy that is keeping them and their vision of truth and right
from absolute political, economic and cultural authority.
The nationwide
opprobrium that the violence against the Freedom Riders sparked, given the
flat, “objective” way the media covered it, would not happen today — devotees
of the Right-wing media would watch the footage and say it was either being
taken out of context (“Those anti-racist meanies threw the first punches — our
guys were just defending themselves!”) or being outright faked in the movie
studios of “liberal Hollywood.” Obviously the spirit of the KKK and the other
attackers on the Freedom Riders was alive and well in Charlottesville, Virginia
over a year ago, and the President sent a nod-and-wink message to them when he
said “there were good people on both sides” and added two days later, “You had
a group on one side that was bad and you had a group on the other side that was
also very violent. And nobody wants to say that. But I’ll say that right now.”
Trump is appealing to the same people who watched the riots at the 1968
Democratic National Convention on TV, in which the Chicago police attacked
peaceful protesters and polls showed that 70 percent of Americans supported the
police — he has literally said that violence and mass poverty will be the
results if the Republicans lose control of the U.S. Congress in this year’s
elections — we see the film of the racists in 1961 attacking the Freedom Riders
and like to think that history is safely past, when it’s not only not dead,
it’s not even past — indeed, it’s running the country right now and it’s only
through a lot of effort, quite probably including the same kind of willingness
to put people’s lives and bodies on the line the original Freedom Riders of
1961 showed, that we can avoid the wholesale reversal in civil rights and a
return to the outright racism (and sexism, homophobia and hatred of
non-conformity in general) with which this country was run from the 1880’s to
the 1950’s until the Black (and white) activists behind Brown v. Board of Education, the Greensboro, North Carolina sit-ins of 1960 and
the Freedom Rides rose up and (at least for a time) successfully challenged it.
