The Abolitionist Centennial:
ROCHE, JOHN P.
Freedom Riders and the Civil War The Abolitionist Centennial By John P. Roche As the year 1961 opened, it looked as though the Civil War Centennial Commission, ponderously chaired by a...
...Normally, Thompson, like others (Negro and white) in the same predicament, would have either paid the fine or worked it off in prison...
...With the same moral courage and dedication that the fiercely determined Abolitionist "agents" of the 1840s and '50s displayed, the Freedom Riders set forth to serve as witnesses to truth...
...AT this point, however, a group of New Abolitionists entered onto the scene: Young men and women began to buy bus tickets to Jackson, Mississippi...
...In this situation, the Negro pays his fine or serves his time...
...By the time anyone outside learns of an unjust decision or act, it is usually, in legal terms, too late to do anything about it...
...I doubt if historically minded Negroes are interested in a joint North-South fete in honor of the War...
...Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and the other "fathers of the Confederacy" were not playing at some innocuous political game...
...One of the smiling boys inscribed the picture, "He will stay free...
...A terrible conflict was fought to end the rebellion, and 600,000 men went to their graves in the first modern approximation of "total war...
...Conviction is by summary process before a magistrate for any one of a number of common-law misdemeanors...
...In conservative, Burkean Britain, they would have been ceremonially hanged...
...About 150 of them are now serving time in Mississippi jails for "breach of the peace...
...There, in marble, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw forever leads his Negro soldiers down the road to freedom—soldiers who were shot on the spot if they fell into Confederate hands...
...Whites control the instruments of legal coercion, and Negroes are seldom rash enough to challenge the white power system head-on...
...When President Kennedy queried the Commission about this discrimination, former Governor William M. Tuck of Virginia blandly replied: "It is the goal of the National Commission to bring to the attention of all Americans—and especially our young people—the lessons we gained from our great war of the Sixties, acknowledged to have been one of the costliest on record and yet, from the standpoint of our American unity today, one of the most rewarding...
...He was convicted on both counts in Police Court and fined $20 (he could have been imprisoned...
...Freedom Riders and the Civil War The Abolitionist Centennial By John P. Roche As the year 1961 opened, it looked as though the Civil War Centennial Commission, ponderously chaired by a grandson of Ulysses S. Grant, was going to have things all its own way...
...he cannot point out with any hope of success that what appears to be a normal conviction for breach of the peace is in fact an enforcement of white supremacist doctrine...
...In my wife's family album there is an old photograph that shows two handsome youngsters (her greatgreat uncles) in Federal uniforms, their arms around an old, weatherbeaten Negro...
...I suspect that such warriors for human freedom as James G. Birney, William Lloyd Garrison and the other original Abolitionists, would appreciate this version of commemorating the Civil War Centennial...
...But when a "Nigra gets uppity" in some small, rural Mississippi township, the local power system closes in on him and there are no civil libertarians in town to come to his defense...
...But somehow he turned up in Police Court with a crack civil liberties lawyer who raised objections at every point in the legal process...
...now they are more covert...
...The ACLU or the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) may provide legal protection in special cases...
...This justice usually involves law enforcement on an "invisible" level...
...they were traitors, conspirators in arms against the lawful authority of the United States, and they were fortunate to escape with their heads...
...On the way to the police station, Thompson peacefully argued with them, so they threw in a charge of "disorderly conduct...
...Two policemen came in, were annoyed by his antics and arrested him for "loitering...
...A century ago a large group of leading American politicians and military men, including one ex-President and most of the top officers of the United States Army, were prepared to commit treason in the interests of human slavery and the social system built upon it...
...I am glad they were not hanged —indeed, I think the compassion of Lincoln, Grant and Sherman was a compelling demonstration of national virtue—but I insist that they lost...
...The lawyer introduced evidence that Thompson was a reputable citizen, that he had purchased supper in the cafe, was waiting for the 7:30 bus and had merely exercised a citizen's right to declare his innocence of wrongdoing to the police...
...Tuck, it seems, thought segregation of Negro and white delegates was a good way of teaching young Americans the lessons learned from the War...
...Indeed, all the record shows is a routine conviction for "disorderly conduct" or "breach of the peace...
...It was the first time the Supreme Court had ever taken such a conviction under review, and, needless to say, it would never have taken place if the Kentucky chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) had not carried the burden of the defense...
...But the Freedom Riders have nevertheless exposed the South's great masquerade of justice and made it a matter of national news and international shame...
...that they were not being convicted for violating Jim Crow laws but only for disturbing the peace...
...He has inherited with his culture a built-in survival mechanism and, whatever he may think as he reads the newspaper, he lies low...
...He minds his own business and hopes that trouble will avoid him...
...If we commemorate the Civil War, we should do so in the spirit of Robert Penn Warren's Legacy of the Civil War, a book which emphasizes with poetic brilliance the tragedy and trauma of the War of the Rebellion...
...By rejecting the use of legal defense and going to jail, they, like the Abolitionists of old, have laid a concern on the national conscience that transcends legal niceties...
...If we are to pay tribute to bravery detached from ideals, we must also tip our hats to Kamikaze pilots, S.S...
...Throughout the South early this year, local committees were sponsoring authentic reproductions of events in that baleful spring of 1861: Sumter was again fired upon, Jefferson Davis was inaugurated once more and the "Bonnie Blue Flag" flapped defiantly in the breeze...
...The forms of coercion in our time are different from those of the ante-bellum South, where the "slave patrol" rode nightly...
...THE average Negro caught in the web of white justice does not usually have an able attorney on hand...
...The judges who sentenced them were very careful to announce that racial problems were totally irrelevant...
...and they both died to insure it...
...They injected a new element into the battle against white supremacy, exposing the structure of white domination to a degree that lawsuits cannot accomplish, and added a new and unexpected note to the Civil War Centennial celebrations...
...This may sound bitter, but I deeply resent the general assumption of Southern whites that the "War between the States" (as they call it) was a legitimate undertaking...
...On Saturday evening, January 24, 1959, Sam Thompson, a Louisville, Kentucky, Negro went into the Liberty End Cafe and, while waiting for a bus, apparently amused himself by shuffling his feet in rhythm to the juke box...
...The very idea of "celebrating" the Civil War strikes me as a form of sacrilege and desecration—particularly since it is taking place under bipartisan auspices which add retrospective legitimacy to the rebellion...
...A good example of invisible adjudication in the South was an exceptional case that came before the Supreme Court in 1960...
...And I resent even more the Southern success in frustrating the libertarian objectives of the War during the past three-quarters of a century...
...To do otherwise is to insult the legion of brave men who sacrificed their lives for the Union...
...But if a Southern Negro rejects these political groundrules, he is a sitting duck for the white man's brand of justice...
...Yet under the auspices of the Commission, this sanguinary holocaust became an event worthy of gay celebrations...
...they fought for the most despicable ideal Americans have ever held—the right of a man to own human slaves...
...Southern abuse of justice has been laid bare by the nonviolent revolutionary techniques of the Freedom Riders...
...The self-validating claims of police officers serve as evidence and the magistrate acts on the assumption that if the accused were not guilty, he wouldn't be in court...
...But their courage provides no justification for their cause...
...Symbolic of this success was the attempted segregation of Negro delegates by Charleston Centennial authorities at the Fort Sumter re-enactment...
...The average Southern Negro is not terrorized...
...No Federal court can take cognizance of facts that were not introduced in the trial record...
...No one, white or Negro, has a constitutional right to engage in disorderly conduct—and that is generally the charge...
...from their point of view it might seem like a joint GermanJewish commemoration of Buchenwald...
...he is simply no more heroic than the average white in, say, Indonesia...
...Without deprecating the great job of the NAACP in using the courts to undermine the legal standing of Jim Crow, one must also pay tribute to these brave young people for employing the methods of non-law to subvert the illegal and invisible foundations of racial discrimination...
...The decision was appealed through two Kentucky courts to the United States Supreme Court, which unanimously ruled that Thompson's constitutional right to due process of law had been denied...
...In an appeal at the appellate level, the lawyer usually cannot introduce new evidence (with rare exceptions, only matters of law are subject to review...
...Of course brave, decent men also left Southern hamlets to fight and die...
...In a sense, the entire Negro community in the deep South, and generally in the rural South, lives in a state of siege...
...officers and Communist spies as well as those who sacrificed themselves for liberty and justice...
...Visiting the State House in Boston, one is reminded of the forgotten sacrifices...
Vol. 44 • August 1961 • No. 30
