THE RIDERS
Kempton, Murray
THE RIDERS by MURRAY KEMPTON i Mississippi rpHE distance from Washington to the wagons of Greyhound and Trailways is the distance to the farthest stars. Its measurement was announced most...
...Jim Eastland took the privilege of the Senate to denounce a long list of sponsors of the Committee on Racial Equality for various subversions of the public order...
...He came upstairs to say: "We aren't going to become panicky...
...Its measurement was announced most definitively on a Sunday night in May in an old Negro Church in Montgomery, Alabama...
...little children were going to sleep on the plush in front of the altar...
...He finished...
...They refused, these strange invaders, not merely bail but the clemency of a fine and went off to the county farm...
...They go, without doubt or regret, where they want to go...
...The mere condition of their anonymity reflected the moral issue they embodied...
...If you see any of them on the way home, look, out for them...
...The Freedom Ride was tarrying in Montgomery when a visitor asked Martin Luther King when or if he thought the wagon would roll again...
...You are too wise to make a mistake and too powerful to fail...
...The peace of Montgomery and the honor of the nation had passed into the hands of gallant but overmatched conscripts whose fingers seemed already blistering from the tense and unfamiliar grip of the billy...
...the necessities of our political system make all other kinds and colors strangers to him...
...They are the children of the cooks in Montgomery, who walked in patient faith that their bodies were enough to prove that the past and present need not be the future...
...Here in their pathetic citadel—cut off from the terror outside—one suddenly understood that the cooks and janitors were merely marking time...
...where they land, the future opens, and, more terrible than an army with banners, sleepy adolescents climb off buses to meet whatever beast is waiting for them...
...from Montgomery, Washington is next door...
...Still they are at the door...
...The Negro has endured these many years and waited for them...
...But suppose he came down here...
...You, God, have been with us since 1955...
...He says no mob will be allowed to assemble...
...Most of them had jail time from the sit-ins...
...Still this was a restoration of law and order, and Robert F. Kennedy could go to sleep...
...The wagon was already loaded and ready to depart...
...The repentant heads nodded back, and they began singing...
...The misty glasses of the Reverend Mr...
...A Montgomery cook takes it for granted that, while she sits under siege, Martin Luther King can call the Attorney General of the United States on a princess phone downstairs...
...Bless our enemy "And we thank our Father for these fine young people...
...Her husband had interfered with a policeman in the performance of his duties by demanding to know why he did not help a boy lying on the pavement being kicked by six people...
...I see two of the hoodlums I work with downtown and they're carrying bayonets...
...There was not a breath of air in the room...
...I want to be respectful of our leaders and of the government of Alabama...
...To reporters who had watched him as approving witness, Sullivan had said: "We have no intention of standing guard for a bunch of troublemakers coming into our city and making trouble...
...Even so, they sang on, their chorus ragged and filled with the sadness of the loss of the hope they had held out for the white South five years ago...
...Solomon Seay, their presiding officer, grew heavy with reproach...
...And here began the definition of distance from Washington to Montgomery...
...B. D. Lambert began the prayer chant: "This is a great moment in history...
...Somewhere, in the world from which they were sealed off, the marshals and the fire trucks drove the mob off to disperse downtown to riot and throw rocks at the houses and cars of stray Negroes...
...Day came after day, and more of them came and were arrested and stood trial and went to the county farm...
...The marshals tried a flourish of tear gas...
...but there was every sign that he did not understand the fundamental issue...
...They were waiting for the Reverend Dr...
...Them that ain't, get out of the goddamn way.'" —William Faulkner, The Bear "Has the President ever said that this is a moral question...
...They were free sooner than General Graham had promised...
...Lambert beat on...
...They had closed their windows against the gas, and there was not even the rumble outside to indicate what was happening...
...Perhaps a thousand members of the Montgomery Improvement Association, those cooks and janitors and country preachers who were walkers in the bus boycott and have ever since been laughers in the dark, were gathering to greet those of their children who had ridden the bus from Birmingham and had been beaten by a mob and were waiting to set forth upon the road again...
...The image of a United States marshal as symbol of the awe and majesty of the government of the United States had been a favorite of President Kennedy's when he was a candidate...
...it was cool in the church now...
...If we stopped now," she said, "it would have been proved that violence can overcome non-violence...
...In such a spirit, law and order had been restored to Montgomery...
...they had that particular spirit without which no demonstrator can be a human being bearable to his fellows: they did not want to be arrested and beaten but would if they had to...
...They come from below...
...They are simple and thus strangers to a society by now habituated to the illusion that nothing but the complex is consequential...
...God holds us in the hollow of His hand," the Reverend Mr...
...Bless," he cried, "all those cowards standing outside that can't fight unless they've got a mob to come with them...
...A member of the congregation looked out: "Do you think I feel safe with that protection...
...But it is sad that Robert F. Kennedy did his best to protect them without understanding just what a precious piece of the legend of America it had fallen to him to defend...
...Riding into Mississippi, they were sleepy and stretched into the immemorial slouch of adolescence...
...Bless that stupid governor of ours...
...They have no ties to power or fashion...
...Then he flung the bottle from his lips without even lowering it, spinning and glinting in the faint starlight, empty...
...At 3:15, the Montgomery police radio broadcast: "We have just heard that the National Guard has turned those niggers loose from that church...
...The next day, law and order in Montgomery began trying persons arrested after Saturday's beatings in the bus station...
...They are unnamed and unnoticed...
...From Washington, Montgomery is far away...
...Them that's going,' he said, 'get in the goddamn wagon...
...Then they sat back to endure, as they have endured so many other things, the hours until the dawn...
...he pleaded with unknown colored children to cease their rides because they were embarrassing the President of the United States on the stage of the world...
...They were reading the papers, and they were coming to Montgomery with no call frdm anywhere but inside themselves...
...The Rev...
...A sophisticated Northern student reported after seeing his first lunch counter sitdown in North Carolina: "You know, I expected to see immensely-controlled hipsters sitting there reading their Kierkegaard...
...To him, as the week went on, the issue—with violence ended—became mere public relations...
...their jailers almost beg them not to sing...
...He is, even more than anywhere else, the invisible man...
...Oh, he talks about the law of the land...
...I just talked to Attorney General Kennedy...
...Gach was alleged to have insulted the free citizenry by crying out: "How can you cheer on people that are kicking the ones who are down...
...These grown-ups would have been surprised to know that they controlled these children...
...Martin Luther King, who was in the basement talking by telephone to Robert Kennedy...
...The high old room became stifling...
...He stood beside the wagon, in silhouette on the sky, turbaned like a Paythan and taller than any there, the bottle tilted...
...The court fined Anna Gach $100 and James Gach $200...
...They rose, gracious and patient to the last, once more insulted according to the habit of their state, and gave him their applause...
...His tone was matter-of-fact...
...Where they go, the glory of our history goes...
...A visitor came up from the pavement outside to whisper reports of a car burned and rocks hurled, and then stopped, caught up, as the Reverend Mr...
...The great majority are students at Jim Crow Southern schools, whose names are unfamiliar outside the borders of their states...
...two days later, they climbed on the next wagon and made a strange voyage in a sealed bus—commandeered out of interstate commerce—guarded by troops to Jackson where they were at once arrested...
...Lambert began to move the church into a world beyond troubles and menaces...
...Their voices were low...
...But we are with Him in His house...
...General Graham read it with proper embarrassment right down to the words about the great seal of Alabama, and closed by saying that, for their safety and the well-being of the city and the good of the state, he was ordering them to stay there until morning...
...They are a generation neither of conformists nor of rebels...
...he moved as swiftly as he could to restore the Alabama equivalent of law and order...
...he asked...
...At midnight, Henry V. Graham, state adjutant general, came to read to them Governor Patterson's proclamation of martial law...
...The vengeance of this outraged community fell first on James and Anna Gach, two white bystanders, who had demanded too loudly that the police did nothing to protect the victims of Saturday's mob...
...Such visions come easily to teachers of constitutional law in Cambridge...
...Boon would drive them out to the road, to the farmer's stable where the surrey had been left...
...Would they throw rocks at him...
...A choir began to sing...
...There was no way of controlling them...
...Police Commissioner L. B. Sullivan, who the day before had laughed at reporters who begged him to break up the mob that was beating the occupants of the bus from Montgomery, was standing on the steps trying to persuade the leaders of the meeting to go home...
...all they had to do was to get into it...
...They sing whenever they are frightened and lonely...
...He did his best at a distance to protect them...
...You have blessed us in so many ways that we have not the words to describe them...
...the Justice Department asked and Jackson agreed that they be let off without cash bail and their crimes forgotten if they would depart in peace...
...They care not for glory...
...The spirit of Montgomery in recollection was the spirit of Police Commissioner Sullivan at the scene of the bloodletting...
...He was reminding them that, as ever, they were all alone...
...And in a week in May, the Attorney General of the United States and the governors of Mississippi and Alabama sat up all night wondering about the intentions of a bunch of colored children...
...then, near the end, one came louder: "We stand in a row, and then, if there is violence, and it starts to break us, we clasp hands and stand as long as we can...
...And, there, finally, the distance was measured...
...no one in authority knew who they were...
...Two days later, Anna Gach was fired from her job in the composing room of the Montgomery Advertiser...
...We don't know whether we get home or not...
...The Negro is truly alone in the South...
...Fear not...
...Their children will never know their place in the history of their time...
...The church windows were opened to quiet streets populated by jittery boys with bayonets...
...They are, then, an inconvenience to established authority...
...But in the too, too flabby flesh, not even their six shooters could make these middle-aged men seem anything but overmatched...
...they are, by all accounts, not the brightest children nor the most ambitious in their classes...
...And it was nothing but a bunch of kids...
...By eight o'clock these curious sullen watchers had hardened into the vanguard of a mob and were pushing Attorney General Robert Kennedy's soft cordon of United States marshals back across a pavement beachhead the size of a postage stamp...
...For the first time in the long legend of the assemblies of Montgomery Negroes, they did not meet alone...
...The limitations of the official attitude were heavy on Martin Luther King as he sat on the porch of the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, the hostile eyes of his protecting guardsmen upon him: "They ate...
...They know—and it was hard to believe that Sullivan did not—what was waiting for them there...
...All afternoon, in the park across from the First Baptist Church, there had gathered silent clumps of teen-age couples and men in shirtsleeves to watch them go up the steps and wonder what to do to them...
...We have gone too far to turn back...
...We thank thee, Lord, for the protection Thou has given us...
...Mississippi and the Justice Department alike wanted them simply to disappear from wherever it was they had come...
...Robert Kennedy cannot be blamed if, thinking of Alabama, he thinks of white Democrats...
...We will stand up for what we know is right...
...The night before they left for Jackson, they drank cokes in a house in Montgomery, and Ruby Smith, who is twenty and from Atlanta, explained why they had to go on...
...They were terribly young, most of them, and their common weapon and possession were their bodies...
...Martin Luther King sitting at a telephone, the noise all about him, and the Attorney General explaining that no mob would be allowed to form...
...The notion that the freedom riders were troublemakers seemed, with a much better will, to have been Robert Kennedy's, too...
...One thought of a busload of Cabinet members, each side by side with his token Negro assistant, rolling into the Greyhound terminal at Montgomery and getting out and getting back on to be arrested at Jackson...
...The cooks and janitors and country preachers had every reason to believe themselves under bombardment...
...Yet, riding to Jackson, when the songs stopped and they had stared long enough at the cold backs of the National Guardsmen, they almost automatically went to the back of the bus and reviewed over again the subject which never tires them, how they must conduct themselves against every conceivable challenge...
...One of the bus riders felt the bandage on the back of his head and looked embarrassed at this compliment from a grown-up...
...It was a horrid stew of pompous lies blaming the victims for the crime...
...the fans went futilely beating the heavy air before faces unsurprised...
...That, King answered, was up to the kids...
...They went on, King spoke, the choirs sang...
...it floated back up the steps and Negroes came out of the be-leagured church coughing and wiping their eyes...
...I don't think," he said, "that was a document for cheering...
...They did not listen...
...we must by now, I suppose, accept the condition that those above are always surprised and often shocked by the appearance of the face that rises up and looks at them from below...
...But I think you ought to take those cheers back...
...There were no other cases of direct participation in these events called that day...
...The governor of Alabama had ordered out the National Guard...
Vol. 25 • July 1961 • No. 7
