Freedom Riding to Canaan's Edge

Journey of Reconciliation participants in front or civil rights lawyer Spottswood Robinson's office, 1947. Image from the documentary, You Don't Have to Ride Jim Crow!, www.robinwashington.com

Eleven years before Rosa Parks sparked the Montgomery bus boycott by refusing to leave her seat on a city bus, Irene Morgan, a 27-year old mother of two from Baltimore, was arrested in Virginia for refusing to cave in to segregated seating on a Greyhound bus. Unlike Parks, Morgan was no activist. But like Parks' arrest, Morgan's fit into an NAACP strategy to challenge segregation, in this case on interstate buses.

Within two years the NAACP had a victory. The Supreme Court declared on June 3, 1946 that segregated seating on interstate buses was an illegal infringement on commerce. But the NAACP still had a problem: bus companies and local governments ignored the ruling.

Another group of activists, more radical than the legalistic NAACP, was also waiting for an opportunity to test Gandhian nonviolence as a method to challenge Jim Crow. Instead of another lawsuit, they initiated the "Journey of Reconciliation," an inter-racial ride through the upper South on interstate buses under the sponsorship of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). The NAACP's Thurgood Marshall denounced the proposal, stating that a "disobedience movement on the part of Negroes and their white allies, if employed in the South, would result in wholesale slaughter with no good achieved."

Bayard Rustin, one of the Gandhian project's architects responded that only nonviolent direct action had a chance to succeed. "The simple truth is this: unless we find non-violent methods which can be used by the rank-and-file who more and more tend to resist, they will more and more resort to violence," Rustin wrote in early 1947. "And court-room argumentation will not suffice for the activation which the Negro masses are today demanding."

The Journey of Reconciliation left Washington three months later. It lasted two weeks, involved sixteen men, resulted in twelve arrests and one act of violence against the riders, but had little immediate wider impact on the system of segregation. NAACP lawyers lost the riders' bus tickets, crucial evidence necessary to challenge the arrests in court. "While the first freedom ride had demonstrated the viability of nonviolent direct action in the Upper South, it had not precipitated wholesale desegregation or even protest on a mass scale," writes Raymond Arsenault. "With few exceptions, company rules and social inertia still kept the races apart on interstate buses and trains, and no one, other than a few die-hard optimists, expected the situation to change any time soon."

The Montgomery bus boycott, which started on December 1, 1955 and ended slightly more than a year later after a Supreme Court victory, didn't set off an immediate region-wide nonviolent chain reaction either. That wouldn't happen until the sit-ins of 1960 and the Freedom Rides of the following year. Arsenault's new book, Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice, documents in copious detail how James Farmer, CORE's leader, launched a second freedom ride in 1961. This time the nonviolent initiative drew an intensely violent reaction from white supremacists, including southern police officers and the complicitous FBI. Farmer's and CORE's commitment appeared to flag. Diane Nash and other college students who had participated in lunch counter sit-ins argued that to back away now would send the dangerous signal that racist violence could stop desegregation efforts. They bravely stepped in to continue the freedom rides. Nonviolence proved to be infectious despite the risk. Soon, new riders were headed to all parts of the South. They experienced beatings, arrests, and imprisonment. That September, the Interstate Commerce Commission issued a new order banning segregation in all interstate travel.

The "last freedom ride," by train from Los Angeles to Houston in August 1961, ended with arrests in Houston. Freedom riders Steve McNichol, Joe Stevenson, and Bob Kaufman (with visible gash behind his ear where his head was slammeed into the bars of a jail cell), meet with attorneys Haymah R. King and George Washington, Jr. Photo from unidentified Houston Black Newspaper, freedomridersfoundation.org

By the end of 1961, 436 people - 230 Blacks, 204 Whites, and 2 Asians - had participated in the freedom rides, and this time more than one quarter were women. The Freedom Rides also captured the public's imagination. The term "freedom rider" would soon be applied to any activists who stirred up civil rights activism in southern communities, even if their objectives were unrelated to buses. Many of the freedom riders went on to leadership in other campaigns, notably those of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was not at the center of the freedom rides. But his own "pilgrimage to nonviolence" during the Montgomery campaign had made him the nation's most prominent spokesperson for nonviolent resistance to segregation. The freedom rides and SNCC's voter registration campaigns brought new spirit to the struggle which King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference dramatized in campaigns in Birmingham and Selma. Again facing Klan and police violence, thousands of activists demonstrated the ability of dramatic nonviolent action to move the federal government to act against US apartheid.

At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years 1965-68, the third and final volume of Taylor Branch's sweeping survey of the civil rights movement, picks up mid-way through the Selma campaign. But by the time it ended and President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, the heady moment for Gandhian campaigns was on the wane. King would spend his remaining three years trying to uphold nonviolence as the central strategy for the movement while continuing his quest to "redeem the soul of America."

While serving as SCLC leader, King jetted back and forth across the country giving speeches and sermons while providing support through his presence for SCLC campaigns in Alabama and Chicago. The Chicago campaign brought King and the tactics which had led to measured success in the South face-to-face with Mayor Richard Daley's urban machine. Focused on the city's segregated housing, the SCLC organized marches, experienced violent resistance, won their way to negotiations, and emerged with measured success in the form of a ten-point agreement involving city political, religious, and business leaders.

The Chicago campaign showed that racism was not just a southern issue, according to Branch. But while the agreement was superior to existing fair housing laws at the federal level, the Chicago campaign had little impact beyond the city. "The Selma campaign itself never defeated or converted Sheriff Jim Clark, but the nation democratized voting rights to make segregationists such as him relics of the past," writes Branch. "No corresponding shift enhanced the Chicago settlement in outcome or reputation, and all its shortcomings remained an eyesore."

By 1966, "nonviolence became passé across the spectrum," Branch observes. "Black people discarded it like training wheels to claim the full belligerent status of regular Americans. Even stalwart practitioners … yearned for something stronger, doubting its reward…. Almost no one honored or analyzed the broader legacy of nonviolent citizens."

Almost no one that is, except Martin Luther King, who "would grow ever more lonely in his conviction" that nonviolence was the best approach to liberation. King's loneliness among the key figures in the Black freedom struggle was compounded by his deepening alienation from President Johnson (LBJ) as the US war in Vietnam escalated. Facing opposition from more mainstream civil rights leaders, resistance from his own circle of advisers (with the exception of James Bevel, Vincent Harding, and a few others), and intense hostility from J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, King nevertheless followed his conscience into the anti-war movement.

And he followed the movement to Memphis, again against the advice of members of his inner circle already anxious about King's plan to bring poor people to Washington for an inter-racial economic justice encampment. "For King," Branch says, "Memphis prefigured the huge dilemma of Washington. How could he mobilize a large coalition in the face of a hostile consensus that nonviolence would not work?"

The rest, one could say, is history, and relatively known history at that. King was killed in Memphis where he was supporting striking sanitation workers. The Poor People's Campaign was known for mud more than for its political impact. The SCLC, having lost its founder and the one leader who could contain the rival egos and ambitions of his followers, lost its stature. And nonviolence lost its greatest American champion.

What Taylor Branch adds to the story is the interplay between King's movement and the Vietnam War, which became the dominant political issue of the late '60s. As King and his advisers muddle over what path to take to end racist oppression, LBJ and his own inner circle likewise ponder how to avoid losing a war they realized they could not win. J. Edgar Hoover and his minions lurk in the background, spreading lies and actively aiming to undermine King's efforts. Rather than a conventional biography, Branch's three volumes place Martin Luther King, Jr. at the center of sweeping historical events. Harvesting details from FBI wiretaps, LBJ's own White House tapes, and dozens of civil rights era archives, Branch provides an indispensable view.

Arsenault's book, on the other hand, is closely focused on one year. Rich in detail, Freedom Riders tells a compelling story with hundreds of characters and enough dramatic tension to satisfy a Hollywood producer. Together, the new books add to an extensive library that shows why the civil rights movement still maintains such a hold on our collective imagination.

Arsenault quotes A. Phillip Randolph, the legendary head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, who called for "a fusion of Gandhi's Satyagraha with the sit-down strike of the industrial union movement." At the time, King was only 13 years old. Within a few years, though, Randolph's vision had come alive, at least for a few too brief years.