Lay Bare the Heart: An Autobiography of the Civil Rights Movement

By James Farmer and Don E. Carleton

Texas native James Farmer is one of the “Big Four” of the turbulent 1960s civil rights movement, along with Martin Luther King Jr., Roy Wilkins, and Whitney Young. Farmer might be called the forgotten man of the movement, overshadowed by Martin Luther King Jr., who was deeply influenced by Farmer’s interpretation of Gandhi’s concept of nonviolent protest.

Born in Marshall, Texas, in 1920, the son of a preacher, Farmer grew up with segregated movie theaters and “White Only” drinking fountains. This background impelled him to found the Congress of Racial Equality in 1942. That same year he mobilized the first sit-in in an all-white restaurant near the University of Chicago. Under Farmer’s direction, CORE set the pattern for the civil rights movement by peaceful protests which eventually led to the dramatic “Freedom Rides” of the 1960s.

In Lay Bare the Heart Farmer tells the story of the heroic civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s. This moving and unsparing personal account captures both the inspiring strengths and human weaknesses of a movement beset by rivalries, conflicts and betrayals. Farmer recalls meetings with Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Jack and Bobby Kennedy, Adlai Stevenson (for whom he had great respect), and Lyndon Johnson (who, according to Farmer, used Adam Clayton Powell Jr., to thwart a major phase of the movement).

James Farmer has courageously worked for dignity for all people in the United States. In this book, he tells his story with forthright honesty.

First published in 1985 by Arbor House, this edition contains a new foreword by Don Carleton, director of the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin, and a new preface.

• Language: English
• Publisher: TCU Press
• Release date: May 31, 2013
• ISBN: 9780875655208

James Farmer

James Farmer is currently Chief Network Architect, for Aurora Networks where he leads the strategy and design of Aurora’s next generation broadband network. Previously Jim was the Chief Technical Officer and Executive Vice President of Quality at ANTEC. A respected industry expert and communicator, Jim is widely published and is active in the National Cable Television Association (NCTA), the Society of Cable Television Engineers (SCTE), and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), among others. Jim is the co-author of Modern Cable Television Technology 2E (Elsevier 2003) and Broadband and Cable Access Networks (2008 Elsevier).

Book preview

Lay Bare the Heart

An Autobiography of the

Civil Rights Movement

James Farmer

With a New Preface

Foreword by Don Carleton

Texas Christian University Press / Fort Worth

Copyright © 1985 by James Farmer

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Farmer, James, 1920-

Lay bare the heart: an autobiography of the civil rights movement /James Farmer; foreword by Don Carleton.

p. cm.

Originally published : New York : Arbor House, 1985

Includes index

ISBN 0-87565-188-7 (alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-87565-520-8 (e-book)

1. Farmer, James, 1920- . 2. Afro-American civil rights workers — Biography. 3. Civil rights workers — United States — Biography. 4. Afro-Americans — Civil Rights — History — 20th Century. 5. Civil rights movements — United States — History — 20th Century.

I. Title.

E185.97.F37A3   1998

323’.092 — dc21

[B]

98-21434

CIP

First published by Arbor House, 1985; reprinted, Penguin USA, 1986

We Shall Overcome. New words and musical arrangement by Zilphia Horton, Frank Hamilton, Guy Carawan, and Pete Seeger. TRO copyright © 1960 and 1963 Ludlow Music Company. Used by permission. Royalties derived from this composition are being contributed to the Freedom Movement under the trusteeship of the writers.

Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me ’Round. Traditional song, arranged and adapted by Joan Baez © 1978, Chandos Music ASCAP. Used by permission.

Material contained in Chapter 23 has been revised and reprinted from Freedom When by James Farmer, 1965, with permission of Random House © Congress of Racial Equality.

The Bourgeois Blues. Words and music by Huddie Ledbetter. Edited and with new additional material by Alan Lomax. Copyright © 1959 Folkways Music Publishers, Inc., New York, NY. Used by permission.

Errata

On page 35, the title of Dr. Farmer’s father’s dissertation should read, The Origin and Development of the Messianic Hope in Israel, with Special References to Analogous Beliefs Among Other Peoples.

On pages 44 and 46, the name of the college should be Samuel Huston.

On page 48, the boxer’s name should be spelled Louis, not Lewis. The same error is found in the index.

To Lula

This book is in her memory

Contents

Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgments

PART ONE: Mississippi Revisited

Wheels of Terror

Which Side Are You On?

I’ll Keep My Soul

PART TWO: PK (Preacher’s Kid)

Holly Springs

Growing Up in Texas (Stage One)

Growing Up in Texas (Stage Two)

PART THREE: Drawing Board

The Windy City and Winnie

For Conscience: Objection and a Projection

Memo Memories

CORE is Born

PART FOUR: Intellectual Coming of Age

Tolstoi and Tolson

God and Goddamn

PART FIVE: Looking for a Place to Stand

Big Apple Blues

Heartbreak

Lula

PART SIX: Spreading of the Wings

King and the Greening of the Movement

The Freedom Ride Begins

Siege in Montgomery

The Cutting Edge

The Big Six

If Any Man Molest You . . .

The March and Its Genesis

The Manhunt

The Cannibalizing of the Movement

Tomorrow is for Our Martyrs

The Muting of the Piper

Tryst with Death

PART SEVEN: Cut Off at the Pass

Betrayal on the Potomac

In Limbo

PART EIGHT: The Nixon Foray

The Road In

The Way Out

Footnote to Watergate

PART NINE: Ebbtide

Come Back, Lula

Epilogue

Appendices

Index

Foreword

 Doing this book has been a kind of catharsis, James Farmer wrote in 1984 as he completed the manuscript of his remarkable autobiography. It did not rid me of the past. Instead, it placed that which has gone before in perspective, bringing me to terms with the present. . . . " This was the spirit that moved Farmer as he filled several hundred pages of legal-sized note pads with the hand-written memories of his role in the greatest social justice movement in the history of twentieth-century America.

Farmer’s memories of a lifetime struggle against racial injustice were made available to the public in 1985 as his published memoir, Lay Bare the Heart. Widely praised for its soul-stirring eloquence and its unsparing honesty, Lay Bare the Heart has become one of the classic textual documentaries of the civil rights movement. Never promoted or distributed properly, Lay Bare the Heart has been out of print for several years, and it has been hard to find even in the vibrant used book market. This problem has now been remedied with the publication of this new edition by TCU Press.

It is appropriate that Farmer’s memoir bear the imprint of a Texas press. James Farmer is a native of the northeastern Texas town of Marshall, and he spent several of the most formative years of his childhood in east Austin, where his father was a professor at Samuel Huston College (now Huston-Tillotson). He returned to Marshall in 1933 and attended Wiley College before continuing his education at Howard University in Washington, D.C., in 1938. In the turbulent decades that followed, as Farmer planned and directed his campaigns of non-violent protest against racial segregation, the Lone Star state remained a presence in his life through his relationships and dealings with other native Texans such as attorney Percy Sutton, political activist and humorist John Henry Faulk, President Lyndon B. Johnson, and journalist Bill Moyers.

Farmer’s Texas roots played a role in his decision in April 1987 to donate his historically significant papers to the Center for American History at The University of Texas at Austin. The Center is a special-collections library, archive, and museum that facilitates research and sponsors programs on the historical development of the United States.

The Farmer papers, which document his life and career from 1942 until the late 1980s, include a significant collection of material related to his work with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), especially in the early 1940s and during his service as national director from 1961 until 1966. The papers also contain extensive documentation of three organizations that Farmer founded in the 1960s and 1970s: the Center for Community Action Education, the Council on Minority Planning and Strategy (COMPAS), and the Public Policy Training Institute. In addition, the Farmer papers contain important material relating to his unsuccessful campaign for Congress in 1968 and his tenure as assistant secretary of the U. S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (1969–1970). Farmer’s handwritten drafts of Lay Bare the Heart are also in the papers.

Because of James Farmer’s generous gift, an important archive of the civil rights movement is now preserved and available for reference and study at the Center’s Research and Collections unit on the campus of UT-Austin.

James Farmer currently resides near Fredericksburg, Virginia, where he teaches history at Mary Washington College. He also serves as a member of the Advisory Council of the Center for American History. In a White House ceremony in January 1998, President Bill Clinton officially recognized Farmer’s contributions to the civil rights movement by awarding him with the nation’s highest civilian honor: the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Don E. Carleton

Director, Center for American History

Preface

Gail Beil, Journalist, biographer of James Farmer’s father, and longtime friend and supporter of Farmer himself, planned to work with him on the preface to this new edition of Lay Bare the Heart. When failing health prevented Farmer from writing the preface, she wrote the following, summarizing what she believed the author himself would have said.

James Farmer didn’t want his written chronicle of the Civil Rights movement to end with Lay Bare the Heart. As late as 1996, he spoke of a new book he would call The Old Warrior Speaks. Because he has lost his eyesight and both legs and suffers from congestive heart failure, another book is unlikely. However, in the thirteen years since Farmer penned his autobiography of the 1960s civil rights movement, he has spoken on hundreds of college campuses and has been interviewed again and again. Those speeches and interviews reveal that he has not backed away from his commitment to ending racism by non-violent means. Racism, he insists, is still alive in the United States thirty-five years after another Texan, President Lyndon B. Johnson, eliminated Jim Crow with the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Farmer remains a consummate integrationist. Separatism was not the kind of America I was working for at all, he said of the movement in that direction led by African American leaders who reject his idea of integration. I understand it, though I grieve. I grieve for my people because there is no future in separatism. Our lives are too intertwined, he told the Dallas Morning News in January 1996. None of us is going anywhere else. We are going to be here forever. So we’re going to have to live with détente if not rapprochement. One of the ways in which he would diminish the lure of separatism and the cancer of racism is by encouraging residential integration, he told the Marshall News Messenger. Racism is taught from generation to generation. Children reason that ‘minorities don’t live among us so there must be something wrong with them.’ 

The public schools should be enlisted as well. Change the curricula of schools from kindergarten through college and teach the youngsters that the difference in skin color, hair texture, shape of features, the way people dress, the way they talk, the music they listen to merely indicates difference–not inferiority or superiority, he said in an interview with the Free Lance-Star of Fredericksburg, Virginia. That can be taught. It can be done easily. There has not been the will to eliminate racism. Perhaps we are approaching the day when that will surface.

Farmer, the father of affirmative action, saw that the concept had been twisted since then-Vice President Lyndon Johnson first proposed it at Howard University in 1963. Numerical goals and timetables are not euphemisms for quotas, he said in a 1991 Marshall News Messenger interview. It means that line managers or foremen would be told, ‘I don’t see any black faces here. Your goal for such-and-such is to go out and recruit some.’ But they had to be qualified. Affirmative action did not mean hiring unqualified people.

He still sees its worth. In March 1998 he told the members of the Texas State Historical Association, I think that the need for affirmative action is just as great, even greater now than it was at the beginning. We need to move from color blindness to color-consciousness to eliminate color discrimination. If we didn’t have affirmative action, I think the nation would drift rapidly back to the old system of blacks and other minorities being the last hired and the first fired. It can stop when we have effectively eliminated all the gaps in education, housing and all the other fronts where racism affects the quality of life and living.

Farmer called war on Jim Crow much easier than the one which must still be waged on racism. Attacking it is more complex, because the manifestations are more subtle. He hasn’t given up the fight. Why do you think I’m killing myself speaking on college campuses wherever they will have me?

On January 15, 1998–the tenth birthday of his beloved grand-daughter, Abigail–President Bill Clinton awarded Farmer the Medal of Freedom. In doing so, the president said, Visionary civil rights hero, James Farmer has inspired millions of Americans with his passionate convictions, committed activisim and unwavering dignity. He never sought the limelight, and, until today, I frankly think he’s never gotten the credit he deserved for the contribution he has made to the freedom of African Americans and other minorities.

Gail K Beil

Marshall, Texas

Acknowledgments

In any undertaking of this magnitude, noting all indebtedness would exceed the limitations of space. I would be remiss, though, if I did not especially thank Dr. William Haddon, president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, for permitting the institute’s word processor to be used in the drafting and editing of the manuscript.

My gratitude also goes to Rea Tyler, a good friend, writer and editor, who spent countless hours applying her professional skills in helping to craft this book, staying with it through the late evenings and weekends, through numerous debates with the author on content and style, but persevering until the job was finished. Appreciation also is due her husband and daughter for their forbearance throughout.

Two young historians, Rebecca Rogers and Joel Treese, helped greatly by validating my assertions and checking my recollections against historical sources. They dug up names and dates I had forgotten and detected certain errors in chronology, which, uncorrected, would have damaged the authenticity of this work.

Another writer/editor and friend, Scottie Dalsimer, gave encouragement and advice throughout, especially during my tussles with the particularly troublesome parts of this work.

Dee Wilson took weekend respites from her administrative job to resurrect superb shorthand and typing skills as I raced to meet the final deadline. Jackie Linsdell, my former secretary, typed and retyped the early chapters and, despite my season of sadness, forced me to go on.

A student intern in history, Richard Marcolis, did the initial research, piling up documents to refresh my memory as I contemplated writing this book.

Several friends, in addition to those already mentioned, who shared various parts of my life and work, read the draft manuscript and came together for no-holds-barred discussions and criticism. Among those participating in that constructive free-for-all were: Val Coleman, a splendid writer and literary technician; Ruth and Antoine Perot, Jr., both fine thinkers with encyclopedic knowledge of the black experience; and Donald Wendell, in whose perceptive mind disparate events always seek a rational linkage.

In the early processes of the book, Professor John Pearce, a historian who shared a daily commuter bus with me, read the first eight chapters, providing penetrating observations and highly useful suggestions. Finally, another historian and movement scholar, Dr. Lawrence Reddick, carefully went over the manuscript and gave me many lively comments and helpful suggestions.

From all of their efforts, the book has benefited immeasurably. Its shortcomings, however, are mine alone.

James Farmer

1985

Lay Bare the Heart

Man was not born to solve the problem of the universe, but rather to seek to lay bare the heart of the problem and then to confine himself within the limits of what is amenable to understanding. The question to ask is not whether we are perfectly agreed, but whether we are proceeding from a common basis of sentiment.

—JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

1749–1832

PART ONE   

Mississippi Revisited

CHAPTER 1   

WHEELS OF TERROR

Captain Ray’s index finger shot through the air. Follow that police officer, he said with professional aplomb, and get into the patrol wagon.

That was a gesture and those were words destined to be repeated by Jackson’s police chief hundreds of times in the next three months as Freedom Riders from twenty states saturated Mississippi jails.

Captain Ray’s stabbing finger came to symbolize his role in the drama being played out—that of the little Dutch boy of legend vainly trying to plug a breach in the dike of segregation in order to hold back the floodwaters of resistance—to save his city, his state, his way of life.

Scarcely four hours earlier on that day in May 1961, the Greyhound bus had left a riot-torn Montgomery, Alabama, where mobs of white men had rampaged and held Freedom Riders prisoners through the night in the First Baptist Church. Martin Luther King had flown in from Atlanta to join us for a rally at the church and he, too, was caught in the siege. Robert Kennedy had flown in U.S. marshals. Martial law had been declared and the Alabama National Guard called to duty.

The next day, curfew had been enforced and sporadic gunfire could be heard, shattering the quiet. Now, jeeps patrolled the streets. The atmosphere was warlike. As thirty or forty nonviolent black youths readied themselves for their ride into bigotry’s main den, to beard the beast lurking there, individual apprehensions were eclipsed by collective determination.

The eclipse was only partial, though; fear shone through. If any man says that he had no fear in the action of the sixties, he is a liar. Or without imagination.

If there are those who think that the leaders were exceptions to that and were strangers to fear, let me quickly disabuse them of such a notion. Frankly, I was scared spitless and desperately wanted to avoid taking that ride to Jackson. Alabama had chewed up the original thirteen interracial CORE* Freedom Riders; they had been brutalized, hospitalized, and in one case disabled—by flame, club, and pummeling fists. Across the Alabama line from Georgia, blacks had been brutally pistol-whipped and clubbed with blackjacks and fists and then thrown, bloodied, into the back of the bus. Whites had been clobbered even worse for trying to intervene—one suffered a stroke as a result and was paralyzed forever.

A bus had been burned to the ground in Anniston, Alabama, and the Freedom Riders, escaping with their lives, were hospitalized for smoke inhalation. In the Birmingham bus depot, Jim Peck, a white man, had been left for dead in a pool of his own blood. His head required fifty-three stitches. How many stitches could repair the heart that bled for the nation?

And, fortuitously, I had missed that carnage on the ride from Atlanta to Montgomery due to the death of my father. But how would I escape Mississippi? If Alabama had been purgatory, Mississippi would be hell.

Black students from Nashville, members of SNCC,** their numbers augmented by youthful black CORE members from New Orleans, had dashed in to catch in midair the baton dropped by the initial thirteen. They had not asked if I would ride with them: they assumed that I would.

I had different thoughts, though. I had decided not to ride. Definitely, at any cost, not to go. Catalogued in my mind were all the necessary excuses. When the inevitable question came, I was ready with answers.

But that decision had not come without inner pain. After all, when I took over the helm of CORE, four months earlier, I had said that I would be no armchair general, tied to the tent. I would not send troops, but would go with them. But that was bravado born of remoteness from reality. Who would expect me to risk being cut down so early in the promise of a leadership career? Everyone would understand when they thought about it. There would be many other battles, much time to show courage. And how could I let myself be wiped out now, before anyone outside the inner circle of the movement even knew I was there? Not now, maybe later. And my father had just died. I should not follow him so soon. Two deaths in two weeks would be too much for my mother. The family needed me now.

Yet, a grain of ambivalence stuck in my craw. Maybe a still, small voice would speak. A part of me hoped so. But if it spoke, I was certain that I would close my ears. Though, just in case, I had packed my suitcase and tossed it into the trunk of a staff car. And along with it my inner turmoil.

When the kids boarded the buses, I watched as a father seeing his children leave the home, as they must, and race into an uncertain future. Typically, the father was sad because he could not go with them; they had to go alone.

On the first bus, the Trailways, they were not alone. With them was a young black Methodist minister, the Reverend James Lawson. A man of much imagination, Jim Lawson must have had the same apprehensions that I had. But he had decided to go anyway. Courage, after all, is not being unafraid, but doing what needs to be done in spite of fear. He fairly leaped onto the bus, with a grim gladness. The students on board smiled and gave me a thumbs up gesture and shouted, See you later, Jim. I returned the gesture and the smile, hoping that they would see me later, much later.

The second bus, the Greyhound, was boarded by some SNCC people, but mostly by CORE people. The CORE contingent had come at my urging, transmitted by my staff in New York, to keep the revolution going. They fully expected the protection my presence would provide. They filed in and took seats. I stood outside and waved farewell. The windows were open and I extended my hand through to shake hands with a pretty seventeen-year-old CORE girl from New Orleans. She took the hand with some puzzlement. My prayers are with you, Doris, I said. Have a safe trip, and when it’s over, we’ll get together and decide what we have to do next to finish the job.

Doris Castle’s eyes, strafed with fear, became huge balls of terror. You’re coming with us, aren’t you, Jim? she whispered. I went through my prearranged litany of excuses: I’d been away from the office for four weeks; my desk was piled high with papers. People would be angry with CORE if they got no timely response to their letters, would not contribute money. Someone had to raise money to fuel these buses, to keep the revolution going. As national director, I had a solemn responsibility to mind the store. All of us want to be where the action is, but no such luck. Some of us are stuck with the dull jobs, the supportive ones. I could not be there in person, but she knew I’d be there in spirit.

Eyes wide, she shook her head slowly, brushing away all my words. Brain did not believe what ears were hearing. She spoke softly, in a stage whisper. But the words hit like a trip-hammer, driving me, it seemed, partway into the pavement. "Jim. Please."

Get my luggage, I shouted to a CORE staffer standing nearby. Put it on the damn bus. I’m going.

Doris didn’t smile, she just looked. And she suddenly looked tired. Kids grow up fast under fire, and sometimes grow old. Like in war.

In addition to the kids, six reporters were aboard. This was the story of the day. The headlines. TV. No reporter worth his salt would miss it, whatever the risk. On their faces was the expectancy of great by-lines, immortal photos.

Six Alabama National Guardsmen were on the bus, too. With rifles and fixed bayonets. Their hearts, no doubt, were on the other side. Which way would they point their guns? I wondered.

Helicopters chopped overhead, scanning the woods and roads. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy had moved at last. He had ignored the Freedom Ride until the bus was burned at Anniston and blood was splattered over Alabama and headlines screamed the tale all over the world. I had rejected his call for a halt and a cooling-off period.

But he had moved. State police sirens howled up and down the highway, warning Klansmen that they were outgunned. The feds were watching.

As wheels pounded concrete, a lavender haze fogged my brain. I longed for rest. Some of the kids were writing something. Diaries? No. We don’t write; we talk. I looked, and it was names and addresses of next of kin. The young men stuffed those grim messages in their pockets; the women, in their bras.

I dozed. When the senses can endure no more, mercifully, they cut off.

Later, I was told that we had not stopped at Selma as planned for there had been a mob waiting—with chains, clubs, and guns. We would have to stop at Jackson, for that was our destination. What would be waiting there?

Mississippi’s governor, Ross Barnett, had been on the airwaves and television for several days, urging the rural folk, the red-necks, to stay home and let the law take its course. Whoever violated their sacred segregation laws would be duly punished. But by the law. I felt, of course, that Governor Barnett was not concerned for our lives, but for his state’s image while he romanced northern industry. If we got ourselves killed, let it be not on his turf, but across the state line.

But who or what could control the haters? The governor? The president? The spirit of Gandhi? Or the barrel of a gun!

The wheels rolled and I tossed in the reclining seat. The state line, and that fabled sign: WELCOME TO THE MAGNOLIA STATE.

The bus pulled off the road onto the shoulder and stopped. We had no forewarning of this, so anxiety reigned. The Guardsmen showed no concern. The reporters and photographers stiffened to an alert, their pads and pencils and cameras at the ready. The Freedom Riders all looked at me, searching for a cue. I tried to remain emotionless.

The driver of the bus left and was replaced by another. The Alabama National Guardsmen left and were replaced by a Mississippi contingent. The director of public safety of the state of Alabama, Floyd Mann, boarded the bus and whispered a message into the ear of one of the reporters. He then left the bus and the privileged reporter passed his new knowledge on to the other five. Those five then left the bus.

The door was closed and the wheels rolled again. I asked the remaining reporter what the message had been.

I was informed, he replied, that this bus will be ambushed and destroyed inside the Mississippi border. The Freedom Riders’ eyes were on me, questioning. I relayed the ominous report.

I forced a smile, as though everything were under control. They smiled back.

We rolled on. One young man, Hank Thomas, burst into song to break the tension:

I’m a-takin’ a ride

On the Greyhound bus line

I’m a-ridin’ the front seat

To Jackson, this time.

Everyone joined lustily in the chorus:

Halleluja, I’m a travelin’

Halleluja, ain’t it fine?

Halleluja, I’m a travelin’

Down freedom’s main line.

The next stanza:

In Nineteen Fifty-four,

The Supreme Court has said,

Looka here, Mr. Jim Crow

It’s time you were dead.

And we felt better: song stiffens the spine. Sleep was gone. This was Mississippi.

We reached a heavily wooded area. On both sides of the road, great forest. One could almost see the water moccasins and hear the rattlesnakes. Huge oak trees rose in majesty from the swamplands, laden with moss. The foliage was dense.

I imagined runaway slaves a century ago, sloshing through water and hiding behind trees as they fled pursuing hounds. Visions of Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad. Visions, too, of black bodies swinging, with bulging eyes and swollen tongues.

National Guardsmen flanked the highway, rifles pointed toward the forests. Audible to us in the bus was an order shouted by an officer over a bullhorn: Look behind every tree!

This clearly was where the ambush was expected. It did not come.

When the bus pulled into Jackson, there was an eerie stillness. The streets were nearly deserted. Maybe Ross Barnett had succeeded. Or maybe everyone was at the bus terminal. Waiting for us.

We pulled into the terminal. And there it was. The huge crowd of white men, standing there. Solemn, unexpressive faces. Just standing.

This is it, I thought. But it’s what we came for; we can’t sit here and hide.

I made my way down the steps of the bus. A Nashville student, Lucretia Collins, followed me out the door and linked arms. Her soft nearness was reassuring, and her faint fragrance comforted me.

The crowd curiously did not attack, but divided, forming a passageway to the white waiting room. They knew where we were going. Head high, I looked to neither side, trying to conceal my apprehension.

(That crowd, I later learned, was made up of federal agents, plainclothes policemen, and media people. Ross Barnett’s appeal had worked.)

Lucretia and I, arm in arm, crossed the white waiting room, sipped from the white water fountain, and walked to the white restaurant entrance.

And there was Captain Ray, blocking the doorway. He asked my name and nodded slightly when I told him. Three times he ordered us to move on, and three times I refused, on grounds of the Supreme Court decision in the Boynton case.* He asked me if we understood his order and I replied, Perfectly.

It was all very civilized; the nation was watching through newsreel cameras. Bigotry had many faces, and unlike Alabama, where Klan hooliganism had been allowed to run amok, Mississippi was putting its best face forward.

When the captain ordered the arrest and commanded us to the patrol wagon, a grimace swept Lucretia’s features and quickly vanished. What are the charges? I asked.

He looked at the ceiling momentarily, then replied, Disturbing the peace, disobeying an officer, and inciting to riot.

My companion and I turned, followed the waiting policeman, and climbed into the patrol wagon. The wagon filled quickly with youthful Freedom Riders directed there by Captain Ray’s thrusting forefinger. The doors were slammed shut and latched, and the wagon leaped forward toward jail. The quiet of the city was violated by the siren of the squad car escorting us. Somehow, the sirens of Jackson seemed fiercer and angrier than any I’d ever heard.

Suddenly, the air was rent with another sound exploding through the barred windows of the paddy wagon. We Shall Overcome came first, and we sang at the top of our lungs, as though shouting to straining ears in cotton fields and shacks on plantations in the far reaches of the state. It was Lucretia who had said, Let’s sing, and then, Louder, louder.

The greatest fervor was reserved for the stanza We are not afraid. We are not afraid. We are not afraid, today. Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe, we shall overcome, someday.

I wished, I must confess, that singing it could make it so. It almost did. We sang loudly to silence our own fears. And to rouse our courage. There is no armor more impenetrable than song.

The wagon drew to a halt. Its doors were unlatched and we filed out. Camera eyes blinked. Two dozen policemen with rifles stood at alert. We were silently motioned through the door of the Jackson City Jail. In single file, we entered through the cordon of protectors.

As the door closed behind us, it shut out the smell of magnolia blossoms.

It also locked out civility.

*Congress of Racial Equality

**Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee

*Boynton v. Virginia, 1960, in which the court ruled that segregation according to race in the use of bus terminal facilities used by interstates passengers was unconstitutional.

CHAPTER 2   

WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?

The Fourth Estate, our chief protection, was not there in the Jackson City Jail. The pads brought out when we entered were not note pads of reporters, but ink pads for fingerprinting. The only camera, for mug shots; the only interviews, interrogations—bristling and hostile.

The police processing us made no attempt to hide their hatred and frustration at being forced to exercise even a modicum of restraint. Their habit, beyond doubt, was to beat and even kill blacks with impunity, and they baited us, digging for an excuse to indulge the habit. No real provocation was needed. Our presence, challenging what was beyond challenge, was provocation enough. But Washington was watching now, and they had their orders. They had better not take liberties with the hated Kennedys.

They needed no excuse, though, to hurl epithets. We were called niggers and black bastards and threatened with billy clubs. A particularly red-faced cop fingered his holstered revolver when one youth breathed up into his face, "I’m not a nigger. I’m a Negro." I froze, and relaxed only when one of the policeman’s peers tapped him on the shoulder, shaking his head. I cautioned our group to patience and forbearance, for we had a long ordeal ahead of us.

A young minister in clerical collar smiled when called boy by his interrogator and quietly said, "My church generally ordains men, not boys. The officer leaped to his feet, billy club aloft: I’ll knock yo’ fuckin’ black nappy head through that goddamn wall if you don’t shut yo’ goddamn mouth, nigger." I held my breath. The minister, the Reverend C. T. Vivian, smiled even more broadly, looking the officer coolly in the eye. The policeman sat down, deprived of the opening he sought.

That we were making this challenge in Mississippi was beyond the comprehension of our interrogators. They tried to extract from each one of us a confession that we were communists, drug addicts, homosexuals, we didn’t know what we were doing, or we were being paid by some organization to do it. Niggers don’t do things like this, they kept saying.

I was treated with a kind of sullen caution, if not a begrudging deference—almost like a captured general. The word evidently had come down. I was called neither nigger nor boy; not even uncle, a favorite appellation for older black males. In fact, they didn’t call me anything; they just spoke, looking everyplace except at me.

The photographing, fingerprinting, and questioning seemed interminable. Shortly, as other buses arrived, more Freedom Riders came in. They only fanned the fury of these minions of the law. The hole in the dike had not been sealed by Captain Ray’s finger; it was growing bigger.

Some of the new insurgents were whites who had been recruited by CORE. They were arrested by Captain Ray in the colored waiting room, but were processed separately. Segregation did not end at the jailhouse door. Two of the white Freedom Riders paused at the open door of the room where we were, started to walk in, and were jerked back. They grinned and gave us the V for Victory sign before being roughly shoved on.

Our group broke into loud applause and shouts of All right. Then the irrepressible and thunderous singing. It was the second stanza of We Shall Overcome.

Black and White together

Black and White together

Black and White together, now,

Oh-oh, deep in my heart,

I do believe,

We shall overcome someday.

Like an echo, the same words blasted back at us from down the corridor. Then there was scuffling down there and some poundings of fists against flesh and the singing stopped.

In our room, our tormentors began rushing around in panic, waving billy clubs over their heads, shouting, "Cut out that noise. Cut it out, Now!"

When we finished the chorus, we stopped singing. And we felt good. There were lumps, I’m sure, in all of our throats, and tears in more than a few eyes. That we had obeyed the command to stop singing did not bother us at all. The cops suddenly seemed irrelevant. We had the boost we needed. We could face anything now. We were not alone.

Soon, there were too many of us for the Jackson City Jail, so they prepared to move us to the Hinds County Jail. Though it was only across the street, the preparation was as if for doomsday. It was a midnight operation and our pathway was flanked by Jackson’s finest, shoulder-to-shoulder, armed with rifles, shotguns, and submachine guns—wary, no doubt, of a sudden Klan attack. Other police stood in readiness down the streets, and silhouettes were visible on rooftops. An ambulance idled at the curb.

I led the procession, trying my best to exude confidence for the benefit of those who followed. The sweat dripping from my face was from the Mississippi heat, I hoped all would believe, not from anxiety.

Still cameras flashed and television cameras whirred under blazing lights. Yes, the nation was watching now, and the state wanted no accident to happen.

In the county jail, we black male Freedom Riders occupied one cell block, with enough two-bunk cells and a common room. There was a john in the quarters and one wash bowl in the common room. So inadequate were the sanitation facilities, that body odors soon permeated the place. It was not long before nostrils rebelled and stopped sending their messages of offensiveness to our brains.

I wondered aloud how our white counterparts were faring, somewhere in the same jail.

One Nashville student sneered, Oh, they prob’ly have a suite of rooms with hot and cold running maids; ‘If you’re white, you’re right; if you’re brown, stick around; if you’re black, get back.’ 

Others jumped in, all talking at once. Man, you gotta be from the North; you don’t know nothing about the South. If they’re on our side, they’ll get their asses kicked more than us. They always do. Man, the whites caught more hell riding through Alabama than the Negroes did. They almost got killed. Ain’t that right, Jim? You tell him about it, Jim, said a slight, bony youth, Bernard Lafayette, whom I called Little Gandhi. He looked exactly as Gandhi must have looked at twenty, and he sat on the floor, cross-legged, contemplating like the little brown man of India who, with passive resistance, had brought the British Empire to heel.

I agreed with his observation.

Each one had an anecdote to prove it: On our picket line last month in Memphis, we got pushed around by the red-neck cops, but the whites got their heads split open.

Remember that sit-in in Nashville in March? When they got through with us, all we needed was some Band-Aids and some rubbing alcohol. But, man, the whites had to go to the hospital.

Yeah, man, the whites are looked at like traitors to their race, on top of everything else.

That settled, I wondered about the women, black and white, also somewhere in the building—and also segregated.

One skinny youth said, "Well, they better not touch my girl."

No one wanted to talk much about what might happen to the women. Imaginations were running wild.

A Nashville Bible student, James Bevel (referred to as Bible Student throughout) began clapping his hands in rhythm, and his song filled the room, spilling out the windows onto the 2:00 A.M. Jackson streets. And everyone joined in, hands clapping.

The jailer rushed to our cell block, eyes red from lack of sleep. Trembling with nervousness, he shouted, Y’all will have to stop that singing. It’s two o’clock, and if you wake up those people out there in the city, no telling what they gonna do to you. Now we don’t want nothing like that to happen. And the other prisoners wanna sleep, too, and they can’t sleep with all that noise.

An athletic youth from Nashville, LeRoi Wright, six foot two and 190 pounds (referred to as Six-Two throughout), swung his fist toward the ceiling and yelled, Come on, let’s sing some more. Let’s let ‘em know we’re here and let ‘em know who we are.

They needed no urging:

If you can’t find me in the backa the bus;

You can’t find me nowhere,

Oh-h, come on up to the fronta the bus,

I’ll be ridin’ up there.

I’ll be ridin’ up there—up there,

I’ll be ridin’ up there.

Oh-h come on up to the fronta the bus;

I’ll be ridin’ up there.

We sang it over. And over. Women’s voices wafted through the doors and crevices of another wing, with the same song. From another floor, white Freedom Riders answered, changing a few words:

If you can’t find me in the fronta the bus;

You can’t find me nowhere,

Oh-h, come on back to the backa the bus;

I’ll be ridin’ back there.

I’ll be ridin’ back there—back there;

I’ll be ridin’ back there.

Oh-h, come on back to the backa the bus;

I’ll be ridin’ back there

Sound then blasted from still another corner of the jail, the white women’s quarters—some voices breaking as they belted out the song.

The jailhouse rocked with songs of the Freedom Riders. Predawn Jackson had never heard the likes of it before.

We were all hyper from the adrenaline pumping madly through our bodies. We had raced into the bowels of the never-never land. And we were still alive. If only we could keep the momentum of this drive going, southern segregation was doomed!

A black jail trusty watching us from outside the cell came close to the bars and whispered, Come here close. I can’t talk loud.

Everyone went to the bars.

Don’t you tell nobody who told you this. If you do, they’ll kill me.

We promised, then the trusty related his extraordinary tale. Some officials of Mississippi had tried secretly to get hardened black convicts in the state, long-termers, to meet the Freedom Ride buses at the terminal and beat the riders severely as they disembarked. In return, the prisoners would be given reduced sentences or early parole. One lifer had agreed to the deal, but all of the others had refused. So the plan was aborted.

I know it was true, whispered the trusty, cause a friend of mine, my boon coon, my main man, was one of those asked, and he told me about it. And he don’t lie. Not to me.

The men in the cell block stood in stunned silence.

What a coup that would have been for Mississippi. What a public relations bonanza for the state. Imagine the nationwide headlines: FREEDOM RIDERS AXED BY MISSISSIPPI BLACKS. The whole South would have been vindicated. Our colored people are happy the way things are, they always said; they don’t want those outside agitators coming down here stirring up trouble. This would have proved it!

What words could I have found to counter that stroke of tactical brilliance? The explanation would have been simple, yet nothing could have erased the indelible image such a tragedy would have stamped on the movement.

The cell block was sobered, and I suggested that we try to get some sleep. Our adversary was crafty and tomorrow might hold more surprises. We had to be alert.

Morning came early with a breakfast of cold grits with a dab of grease and a piece of fatback. And biscuits so hard that the men tossed them around the common room in mock baseball double-play action.

Lunch was no better. It was so bad that it inspired several to announce a hunger strike—a fast till death to protest segregation on the buses or segregation in the jail, or simply to protest our imprisonment.

The enthusiasm of these college students ran high and they were full of Mahatma Gandhi and imbued with a sense of history in the making. But clearly there was too little discipline and not enough maturity for such a decision. I tried to talk them out of it by reminding that till death meant not until some romantic, fictional tomorrow, but until you die.

That persuaded most, but two persisted in the idea—one’s fast lasting two days, the other’s two meals.

Our trial was perfunctory, and the verdict instantaneous: one year in jail for everyone. I urged all who could to remain in jail for forty days, the maximum one could serve and still file an appeal in Mississippi. We wanted to fill up the jails and place as great a burden on the state as possible, for as long as we could. Perhaps segregation would be seen as too heavy an albatross for the ship of state to bear.

All were aware of the jail-filling tactic of the Ride—a step beyond the lunch counter sit-ins of the year before, where the jailed were sprung as soon as bail could be arranged—and most eagerly agreed to stay in. The forty days and forty nights seemed somehow symbolic. A few, of course, had personal commitments and obligations that precluded a long stint behind bars. CORE bailed them out as quickly as needed.

For those who stayed, the days wore heavily with boredom and the youthful longing for the sensory excitements of the world outside. Tempers grew short; arguments and even fights occurred. A smaller man, for instance, raised a chair to smash Six-Two. How our captors would have loved the spectacle of a Freedom Rider hospitalized by Freedom Rider violence. I jumped between the two. The chair was returned to its place on the floor and the warriors separated.

Each day during the first week was an eternity. Bible Student announced categorically that if we continued to sing and shout, like Paul and Silas, the jail doors indeed would open and we, too, would walk out. This miracle, he informed us, would be wrought within forty-eight hours.

Where’re the bail bonds coming from? I asked.

God don’t need no bail, Bible Student replied.

The more the others taunted and laughed their disbelief, the more withdrawn and brooding he became. As the deadline approached, and passed, Bible Student sat alone most of the time, apparently feeling betrayed by the God of biblical miracles.

A few who had pledged to stay inquired of me privately if CORE could bail them out right away because they wanted to go home.

On one of his daily visits to us, I instructed our lawyer, Jack Young, to bail out two Riders—one black, one white—every other day and set up a press conference for them. In addition to releasing those who wanted to get out, the controlled bail-out also would provide us with a protective shield; any brutality in jail would be quickly exposed. Our numbers inside would continue to grow, for I had sent instructions to my staff to keep Riders coming into Jackson on virtually every bus. Some came by train or plane and then rushed to the bus terminal restaurant to keep their rendezvous with Captain Ray.

Morale got a boost with each new arrival. Applause and singing accompanied every lift of spirit. Many of the new recruits were not schooled in nonviolence. So the Reverend Jim Lawson proposed a daily workshop in the common room on nonviolence and Gandhi. This was promptly instituted and he and I alternated in leading the sessions.

Early one morning, after breakfast, the jailer came to the bars of the cell block slightly bug-eyed. Mr. Farmer, he called.

I walked to the bars.

You got a visitor, he announced in hushed tones.

You mean Jack Young, our lawyer? I said.

No, he replied. Somebody else.

But I thought we weren’t allowed any visitors except our lawyer.

That’s what I thought, too, he shrugged, "but they let this man in. They sent him over here from across the street."

I glanced at the other Freedom Riders, and they stood still, or sat upright, braced for trouble. Who was this mystery caller? Friend or foe? Was this another cunning ploy by our captors?

Maybe it’s the KKK with machine guns, Six-Two said, and we ain’t got no place to run. I motioned him to silence.

Moments later, my visitor walked to the bars. Roy Wilkins, smiling. Nattily attired in a crisp, white Palm Beach suit, tan shirt and shoes, and white tie, striped with red.

I stood still, looking at Roy, my face surely mirroring my surprise. Why had they let him in? Were they awed by the head of the vaunted NAACP? Or maybe they thought this established leader would tell us to come out of jail and stop this wild stuff and go back to familiar terrain—working in the courts.

As I stood there, flashing through my mind was the vision of Roy twenty years earlier, along with Thurgood Marshall, disguised as a sharecropper, investigating a lynching on a plantation in Mississippi. Then, his long, artistic fingers—a dead giveaway despite the field hand’s clothing—had blown his cover. Furthermore, this proud man could not possibly have shuffled convincingly.

Roy had not thought the Freedom Ride a good idea. He thought it would be suicidal and had tried tactfully to dissuade me. How well I remembered that conversation. I’d made an appointment with him and gone to his office at 20 West Fortieth Street in New York. He sat behind his huge mahogany desk piled high with papers, all in neat stacks. The desk was on a slightly raised platform so he peered down at his guests. He leaned back in his high-backed executive chair, swiveled to one side, and his long fingers gracefully moved an expensive cigar to and from his mouth.

After I’d explained the plan of the Freedom Ride, he frowned. Jim, he said, "I respect your intelligence and admire your guts. But this plan of yours will mean, at the very least, mass arrests with high bail bond, exorbitant lawyers’ fees, and enormous costs for multiple appeals piled on top of multiple appeals.

Why? Why do you want to do that when money is scarce? All we really need is one good test case so we can fight it out in the courts and put an end to segregated travel in this country, just as we reduced the concept of segregated schools to ashes.

Roy, I answered, we’ve had test cases and we’ve won them all and the status remains quo. I have a dozen letters on my desk from Negroes saying that they had tried to ride in the front of the bus or use terminal facilities without segregation as the Supreme Court has said they have a right to do, and they were jailed, or beaten, or both. Despite the court rulings, nothing has changed. We’ve got to force the federal government to act to enforce its laws over state laws.

Is Martin going? he asked.

I don’t know, I replied. I haven’t asked him yet, but I probably will in a few days.

The next day, Wilkins called to say that he’d spoken by phone with his Mississippi staff leader, Medgar Evers, and Medgar thought the Freedom Ride a bad idea and hoped we wouldn’t come to Mississippi. I told Roy that I’d send a member of my staff into Mississippi if we got that far, and hoped that my man and Medgar could work well together.

Roy replied softly, You’re making a big mistake, Jim. Give it a lot of thought.

And that had ended the conversation.

Yet, here he was, with a full heart and two books in his hand as gifts to help me pass the prison hours. One was Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. I walked to him and we embraced through the bars.

He said, You look all right, Jim, but you need a shave.

I smiled and thanked him for the books.

You’ve really shaken them up, fellow, said he. I’m watching closely and if I can be of any help, if you need anything at all, just have Jack Young give me a call.

Everyone in our cell block came up and shook his hand. He and I embraced again and he turned and walked out. We all stared after him.

As soon as Wilkins had left, the jailer came back in, still bug-eyed. "That man, Wilkins, he’s a big nigra, ain’t he?"

One of the biggest.

Like Martin Luther King? he asked.

I nodded.

He was clearly impressed as he slowly shook his head and departed.

Once again there was an explosion of song, joined by the other groups in other quarters—black females, white females, white males. We sang and sang, and then paused to catch our breath.

We heard a voice softly calling from upstairs: Hey, Freedom Riders.

We all rushed to the window nearest the sound.

Freedom Riders the voice continued, if you teach us your songs, we’ll teach you ours.

Needless to say, we complied. They were taught freedom songs and we learned work songs, protest songs, unfamiliar gospel songs. One man upstairs had a magnificent voice and a style that defied description. I asked his name, wrote it down, and promptly lost it.

Earlier, I had requested that the jailer put us in with other black prisoners; we did not like being isolated from our brothers—separated like lepers, from the other prisoners. The jailer had replied, No, we can’t do that. Them other nigras would kill y’all. They know their place and they hate y’all for coming down here stirrin’ up trouble.

I didn’t believe that and said we would gladly take our chances with our brothers. His answer still had been emphatically no. (I had suspected, of course, that the real fear was that we might contaminate the convicts, turning them into Freedom Riders.)

Now, contact had been made with our anonymous brothers, at their initiative. We felt good. We knew which side they were on.

Our communication with the floor above did not escape the notice of the authorities. The jailer rushed to our cell block, shouting, If you boys don’t stop that singing right now, the store ain’t gonna come to this cell block no mo’.

What a compelling threat! The store was a cart of goodies for sale, wheeled in by a trusty. It dispensed candy, chewing gum, potato chips, pretzels, pork skins, and most other junk food. And cigarettes. This little luxury each day made the next day somehow more bearable in anticipation.

When the threat was made, some faces fell. It was Little Gandhi this time who started our musical response.

Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me ‘round,

Turn me ‘round, turn me ‘round.

Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me ‘round.

Gonna keep on decidin’

To keep on a-ridin’

Ridin’ to the Promised Land.

That does it, yelled the jailer as he walked out, no mo’ store!

Bible Student said, I have a plan.

Rushing to the communication window, he called upward, Hey, upstairs!

Yeah, Freedom Riders.

Bible Student explained our punishment and learned that they faced no similar reprisals. He disclosed a simple plan: each day before time for the store, we would make a list of desired items, and that list and the money, wrapped in a handkerchief,