1961-1965

 Day 41
1961: Freedom Riders Bus Burned, Brutally Attacked

In 1961, a group of civil rights activists known as the Freedom Riders began a desegregation campaign. The interracial group rode together on interstate buses headed south from Washington, D.C., and patronized the bus stations along the way, to test the enforcement of Supreme Court decisions that prohibited discrimination in interstate passenger travel. Their efforts were unpopular with white Southerners who supported segregation. The group encountered early violence in South Carolina but continued their trip toward the planned destination of New Orleans.

On Mother's Day, May 14, 1961, a Greyhound bus carrying Freedom Riders arrived at the Anniston, Alabama, bus station shortly after 1:00 p.m. to find the building locked shut. Led by Ku Klux Klan leader William Chapel, a mob of fifty men armed with pipes, chains, and bats, smashed windows, slashed tires, and dented the sides of the Riders' bus. Though warned hours earlier that a mob had gathered at the station, local police did not arrive until after the assault had begun.

Once the attack subsided, police pretended to escort the crippled bus to safety, but instead abandoned it at the Anniston city limits. Soon after the police departed, another armed white mob surrounded the bus and began breaking windows. The Freedom Riders refused to exit the vehicle but received no aid from two watching highway patrolmen. When a member of the mob tossed a firebomb through a broken bus window, others in the mob attempted to trap the passengers inside the burning vehicle by barricading the door. They fled when the fuel tank began to explode. The Riders were able to escape the ensuing flames and smoke through the bus windows and main door, only to be attacked and beaten by the mob outside.

After this attack, those men and women went home and another Freedom Rider group took their place. On May 18 in Montgomery, state police abandoned the Riders' bus (they had been on to supposedly offer protection); the Riders continued to the bus station unescorted and found no police protection waiting when they arrived. Montgomery Public Safety Commissioner, L.B. Sullivan, had promised the Ku Klux Klan several minutes to attack the riders without police interference, and the Riders arrival was met by a mob of several hundred angry white people armed with baseball bats, hammers, and pipes.

Montgomery police watched as the mob first attacked reporters and then turned on the Riders. Several were seriously injured, including a white college student named Jim Zwerg, and future United States Congressman John Lewis. John Seigenthaler, an aide to Attorney General Robert Kennedy, was knocked unconscious. Ignored by ambulances, two injured Riders were saved by good samaritans who transported them to nearby hospitals.

No wonder people of color today still do not trust the police.



Sources/Comments:

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Day 42
1962: More Black Churches Bombed (A Tactic Still Used Today)

In the early hours of September 25, 1962, St. Matthew Baptist Church in Macon, Georgia, was burned to the ground. Though the church’s minister expressed doubt that the fire was intentionally set or racially motivated, St. Matthew – which had served its Black congregation for nearly a decade – was the latest in a long list of Black churches attacked in the United States. In the past few weeks in Georgia alone, four other Black churches had been destroyed by fire.

During the Civil Rights era, Black churches were well-established social and political spaces that served as organizational and meeting headquarters for African Americans fighting against racial segregation and oppression. In the course of that activism, Black churches became the targets of racially-motivated violence. Churches in Montgomery and Birmingham in Alabama were sites of highly-publicized and, in some cases, deadly bombings that aimed to thwart civil rights efforts and terrorize the entire Black community. The most infamous example of racist church destruction occurred on September 15, 1963, when the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, was fire-bombed, killing four young Black girls attending Sunday school services.

By the late 1990s, at least 80 Black churches had been burned, firebombed, or vandalized. “In the African American community,” the Department of Justice noted in a 1998 report on church arson, “the church historically has been a primary community institution, so... it was decidedly disturbing to see the number of churches being burned.”

In November 2008, hours after the election of President Barack Obama, the Macedonia Church of God in Christ in Springfield, Massachusetts, was burned to the ground by three white men. Two of the men later admitted to dousing the partially-built church with gas and setting it aflame to denounce the election of the nation’s first Black president.

Sources/Comments:

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Day 43
1963: The Leesburg Stockade Girls

In July of 1963 in Americus, Georgia, fifteen girls were jailed for challenging segregation laws. Ages 12 to 15, these girls had marched from Friendship Baptist Church to the Martin Theater on Forsyth Street. Instead of forming a line to enter from the back alley as was customary, the marchers attempted to purchase tickets at the front entrance. Law enforcement soon arrived and viciously attacked and arrested the girls. Never formally charged, they were jailed in squalid conditions for forty-five days in the Leesburg Stockade, a Civil War era structure situated in the back woods of Leesburg, Georgia. Only twenty miles away, parents had no knowledge of where authorities were holding their children. Nor were parents aware of their inhumane treatment.

On August 28, 1963, as Martin Luther King Jr. gave his historic “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, DC, these children sat in their cell bolstering their courage with freedom songs in solidarity with the thousands of marchers listening to Dr. King’s indelible speech on the National Mall. Soon after the March on Washington, during the same week of the bombing of the five little girls at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church on September 15, 1963 (see comments for this horribly tragic story), law enforcement released the Leesburg Stockade Girls and returned them to their families.

Their story was part of the broader Civil Rights effort that engaged children in a variety of nonviolent, direct actions. In Alabama, for example, thousands of youth participated in the 1963 Children’s Crusade, a controversial liberation tactic initiated by James Bevel of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. After careful deliberation about the merit of involving children in street protests and allowing them to be jailed, Dr. King decided that their participation would revive the waning desegregation campaign and would appeal to the moral conscience of the nation.

On May 2, 1963, in response to an invitation from Dr. King, roughly a thousand students—elementary through high school—gathered enthusiastically at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and joined a civil rights march throughout the streets of Birmingham. By day’s end, law enforcement had jailed over 600 children.

The next day the number of children doubled. However, the training classes provided by SCLC leaders could not have prepared the children for the violence they would encounter. The Commissioner of Public Safety Eugene “Bull” Connor directed the use of fire hoses and attack dogs on the children, and people in America and around the world witnessed this brutality. Authorities arrested nearly 2,000 children—one as young as four years old. These protests continued throughout the first week of May, with over 5,000 children being jailed.

Sources/Comments:

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Day 44
1964: Pool Manager Pours Acid In Pool Where Blacks Are Swimming

On June 11, 1964, Martin Luther King, Jr was arrested for trespassing at the Monson Motor Lodge after being asked to leave from its segregated restaurant. This (and other things) helped spur on a group of protesters, black and white, to jump into the pool as a strategically planned event to end segregation at motel pools. The pool at this motel was designated “white only”. Whites who paid for motel rooms invited blacks to join them in the motel pool as their guests.

This swim-in was planned by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr and two associates. The motel manager, Jimmy Brock, in an effort to break up the party, poured a bottle of muriatic acid into the pool, hoping the swimmers would become scared and leave. One swimmer, who knew that the ratio of acid to pool water was so great that the acid was no longer a threat, drank some of the pool water to calm the other swimmers’ fears.

Muriatic acid is undiluted hydrochloric acid and is used in the cleaning of masonry surfaces such as pools. But what people heard was the word “acid”. It did not scare the swimmers, though it seems like it was effective in making the protesters at least nervous — the amount of acid to the amount of water being so small it was mostly safe—and so a cop jumped in to arrest people.

This is a story I had never heard before, but it shows how both blacks and whites worked together to try and stop the segregation of everyday activities, like swimming in a pool. But even when whites were also in the fight, other whites still used scare tactics like dumping acid in a pool to stop the protests.

Sources/Comments:

The hotel manager, James Brock, took a lot of heat for this photo. His friend, in 2003, said, “He was a nice guy.” And this is the crux of racism: In many instances, it is “nice guys” who are committing it. Obviously I don’t mean the KKK who are obviously NOT nice guys, but regular people who won’t go kill black people, but will hold prejudices like, “I don’t want my daughter dating a black man,” or “that man looks dangerous” when they see a black man out jogging. It’s little things from “nice” people that are just….there. People like James Brock, who didn’t actually do anything to hurt the swimmers, but did enough to scare blacks from coming back to his pool. Do you understand what I’m saying? I hope I’m making sense. The more I’m learning, the more I realize that I hold a lot of racism (albeit unintentional) in me that I want to let go of. I hope this makes sense.

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And, this is what is happening today (July 2020) with race relations:

Against the backdrop of this health catastrophe (Covid), the president is running a reelection campaign openly based on racism. This morning, he tweeted “I am happy to inform all the people living their Suburban Lifestyle Dream that you will no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low income housing built in your neighborhood…. Your housing prices will go up based on the market, and crime will go down. I have rescinded the Obama-Biden AFFH Rule. Enjoy!” This is no longer even coded racial language: the 2015 Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule (AFFH) was explicitly intended to end racial segregation in housing.

Other members of the Republican Party are following Trump’s lead on race, manipulating the images of their Democratic opponents to make them look more stereotypically racialized. Yesterday, Georgia Republican Senator David Perdue had to pull a Facebook advertisement that featured his Jewish opponent, Democrat Jon Ossoff, with a digitally altered face. Tapping into old anti-Semitic tropes, the ad lengthened and widened Ossoff’s nose in an image of him shown over the caption “DEMOCRATS ARE TRYING TO BUY GEORGIA.” Perdue’s campaign spokesman called the ad “an unfortunate and inadvertent error” and blamed it on “an outside vendor.”

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who is facing an unexpectedly strong challenge from Democrat Jaime Harrison, is doing something similar, running a Facebook ad in which Harrison’s face has been digitally altered to make his skin appear darker than it is (Harrison is Black). When called on the manipulation, Graham’s campaign accused Harrison of “manufacturing a fake controversy to inject race into this campaign at a time of great turbulence in our country.” Like the Nazi-themed ads from the Trump campaign, the backlash against such an ad provides free news coverage for the Graham campaign. Graham is the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, in charge of overseeing the appointments of America’s judges.

Day 45
1965: Bloody Sunday

Oh, how I am learning to love John Lewis! There is so much I never knew about that great man. Sadly, as I’m sure you all know, he passed away last week. We truly lost a legend- one of the great men of our times. And, by every account, a true hero of the Civil Rights Movement. Honestly, I get teary eyed thinking of it. He was part of this march that culminated in Bloody Sunday- peaceful protestors being beaten, arrested, and tear gassed. Remind you of anything similar happening today?

In early 1965, some 600 people began a 54-mile march from Selma, Alabama, to the state Capitol in Montgomery. They were commemorating the death of Jimmie Lee Jackson, who had been shot on Feb. 18 by a state trooper while trying to protect his mother during a civil rights demonstration.

After the marchers crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Selma’s outskirts, white state troopers assaulted them, knocking many to the ground and beating them with nightsticks. Another detachment of troopers fired tear gas while mounted troopers charged the marchers. In all, 17 marchers were hospitalized and 50 treated for lesser injuries.

A national uproar occurred when footage of the melee was broadcast on tens of millions of television sets across the country.

At the time, 100 years after the end of the Civil War, the 15th Amendment had been effectively nullified by discriminatory laws in much of the South, keeping many blacks from the polls. In Selma, where African-Americans made up more than half the population, they constituted about 2 percent of the registered voters.

ABC News interrupted its television premiere of the movie “Judgment at Nuremberg,” about the postwar Nazi war-crimes trials, to show footage of the violence in Selma. Soon thereafter, demonstrations in support of the Selma marchers occurred in 80 U.S. cities, while thousands of religious and lay leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr., flew to Selma.

In Montgomery, U.S. District Court judge Frank Johnson Jr. issued a restraining order barring the march from proceeding while he reviewed the case. President Lyndon B. Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress, saying, “There is no issue of states’ rights or national rights. There is only the struggle for human rights. ... We have already waited 100 years and more, and the time for waiting is gone.”

On March 9, King led an integrated group of protesters to the Pettus Bridge. That night, white vigilantes murdered a Northern minister.

On March 17, Judge Johnson ruled in favor of the demonstrators. “The law is clear,” the judge wrote, “that the right to petition one's government for the redress of grievances may be exercised in large groups ... and these rights may be exercised by marching, even along public highways.”

On March 21, protected by federalized National Guard troops, about 3,200 voting rights advocates left Selma and set out for Montgomery, walking 12 miles a day and sleeping in fields. They stood 25,000 strong on March 25 at the state Capitol in Montgomery. (The route along U.S. Highway 80 is now memorialized as the Selma to Montgomery Voting Rights Trail, and is designated as a U.S. National Historic Trail.)

These events proved to be the key to congressional passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

People died, were beaten with clubs, were tear gassed, and had every obstacle put in the way to keep them from voting. But, blacks continued to march (peacefully) for this right. We must stop any suppression that occurs today stopping their right to vote!

Sources/Comments:

Enjoy this video of John Lewis' casket crossing the bridge one last time. I cry every time.

Click HERE