I was ordained, licensed and ordained. I never pastored a church or
anything like that. I guess you may call me a backslider, not really. I
saw the civil rights movement as an extension of the Church in a sense,
I guess as a real attempt to make organized religion relevant. The black
church has a strong influence on the black community by using the
church. The people in SNCC that went to organize people in some of the
small towns and rural areas many times worked through local church
groups, community organizations and the minister. When I left the
seminary in '61, I went on the Freedom
Page 14 Rides and
this was my first time going into the state of Mississippi, late May,
June of '61. It was a terrible experience to come through Birmingham and
Montgomery. I'll never forget, a group of us seven blacks and three
whites from the
[unclear] university,
colleges and universities in Nashville. After the CORE sponsored Freedom
Rides, a group of us left on May 17, 1961, and took a Greyhound bus, a
regular bus, to Birmingham. Before we arrived in the city of Birmingham,
the bus was stopped outside the city and a member of the Birmingham
Police Department
[unclear] got on the bus
and said, "Where are the Freedom Riders?" No one said anything. This
member of the Police Department literally took over the bus by asking
for the tickets and he looked at the tickets and saw that we all had
tickets from Nashville, making a stop in Birmingham, Montgomery,
Jackson, then on to New Orleans. He just literally identified us as
being the Freedom Riders and he was really correct.
When we arrived at the Birmingham bus station they took us off, placed us
in protective custody and
[unclear] and
other members of the Birmingham Police Department and took us to the
Birmingham City Jail. It was on a Wednesday. We stayed there Wednesday.
We went on a hunger strike. We refused to eat anything,
[unclear] Thursday and
Page 15
Friday morning about three o'clock in the morning Bull Connor and other
members of the Birmingham Police Department and a reporter from the
Birmingham News came up to the cell and said, "We are taking you back to
the college campuses in Nashville." But they took us to the
Alabama-Tennessee state line, a little town called
[unclear], Alabama or Tennessee, and left us there. Then we
made a call back to Nashville and spoke to Diane Nash in the general
office and told her what had happened. They would send cars to pick us
up, but in the meantime we tried to find a house or someone in the black
community. We did find a place where a black family lived and stayed
there until the car came to pick us up. We went back to Birmingham and
stayed at the bus station from Friday night,
[unclear] all night, and tried to get a bus to go from
Birmingham to Montgomery. In the meantime, Attorney General Kennedy was
negotiating with the Greyhound authorities, trying to get the bus
moving. All of the drivers from the Greyhound Bus Company were refusing
to drive the bus. We went out several times Friday night, at 8:30,
12:00, and 8:30 Saturday morning. We finally got a bus through from
Birmingham and to Montgomery. And over the bus there was a small plane
and every fifteen miles we would see state troopers from the state of
Alabama.
Page 16
It was only about a hundred miles between Birmingham to Montgomery. And
when we arrived about five or ten miles out, all signs of protection,
plane, the state troopers. I have gone this way many, many times before
riding the bus between Troy to Montgomery, Montgomery to Birmingham,
Birmingham to Nashville to school for four years. When you got near the
station you had this eerie feeling. It must have been about ten or
ten-thirty on a Saturday and you didn't see anything and all at once,
when the bus pulled up and we started out of the bus, an angry mob of
about a thousand people came toward the bus. And they first started
reporters and then they started attacking us. Several of us were beaten
and just left lying in the street. And there was one guy, that must have
been the chief officer for the Alabama state troopers. This guy, I can't
think of his name but Newsweek or Time did a big story on him, and he literally saved the day. He
kept people from literally being killed. He fired a gun to disperse the
mob. We went from there to different homes in the city of Montgomery.
Dr. King and Rev. Abernathy happened to be out of the city, they were
speaking some place, and they heard about what had happened and they
came back to Montgomery and planned for a big mass meeting in
Montgomery
Page 17 on that Sunday. Must have been May
22, but several hundred people from throughout the city came and several
national civil rights types came into the city. We got into the church.
The circuit judge, a judge named Walter B. Jones, had issued an order
against interracial groups traveling in the state of Alabama and they
had an order issued for us saying that we had violated the injuction and
cited us for contempt of court. At the same time, state officials
literally looking for us to serve the injunction. So all of the Freedom
Riders went into the choir stand and we were like members of the choir.
I had a patch on my head from the injury I received. Several people were
left and didn't make it to the church. That night before the mass
meeting started at eight o'clock
[unclear]
was literally just filled. An angry mob came to the church. This was the
First Baptist Church pastored by Rev. Abernathy and in the meantime, Dr.
King got on the telephone and called Bobby Kennedy and told him of the
atmosphere and the climate. The mob was coming closer to the church and
then, I think, President Kennedy federalized the National Guards in
Alabama—the only way we got away from the church that night. Hundreds of
people, not just Freedom Riders, were literally taken to their homes in
different parts of the community
Page 18 by the National
Guards in jeeps. Some of the people wanted to call the ride off. We had
a series of meetings Monday, Tuesday, and finally on Tuesday we decided
to continue the ride. On Wednesday . . .