The South: Crisis in Civil Rights

(See Cover)

On a bus traveling through the Deep South, a youthful Negro said calmly: "We can take anything the white man can dish out, but we want our rights. We know what they are—and we want them now." In the midst of a sleepless night in his Justice Department office in Washington, U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy, 36, hung up his telephone and said wearily: "It's like playing Russian roulette." And in Montgomery, the capital of Alabama and the birthplace of the Confederacy, Governor John Patterson, 39, wearing a pure white carnation in his lapel, complained bitterly: "I'm getting tired of being called up in the middle of the night and being ordered to do this and ordered to do that."

The young Negro, the young Attorney General and the young Southern Governor were central figures last week in a national drama. It was a drama of conflict and violence. It saw U.S. marshals and martial law in Alabama. It saw cops with police dogs on patrol in Mississippi. It was the drama of the Freedom Riders, and it represented a new and massive assault against segregation in the U.S. South.

The assault was launched late last month when a band of six whites and seven Negroes set out to ride by bus from Washington to New Orleans. The integrated trip was sponsored by the Congress of Racial Equality, a Manhattan-based organization. Its purpose was to prove, by provoking trouble, that Southern interstate travel is still segregated in fact, although integrated by law. The original Freedom Riders passed with little incident through Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. Then they came to Alabama—where they found the trouble they wanted.

For that, they could in part thank Governor John Patterson. A militant segregationist who solicited Ku Klux Klan support in his election campaign, Patterson once said that integration would come to Alabama only "over my dead body." In his inaugural address Patterson declared: "I will oppose with every ounce of energy I possess and will use every power at my command to prevent any mixing of white and Negro races in the classrooms of this state." Said he as the Freedom Riders approached: "The people of Alabama are so enraged that I cannot guarantee protection for this bunch of rabble-rousers."

Thus confident that state authority would not stand in their way, Alabama mobs attacked the Freedom Riders in Anniston and Birmingham. Battered and bruised, the original Freedom Riders decided to discontinue their bus trip and fly from Birmingham to New Orleans.

But what they had started was far from ended. Until then, little active support had been given the Freedom Riders by the Negro students who last year fought and won the sit-in battles against segregated Southern lunch counters (TIME, Feb. 22, 1960 et seq.). When the first Freedom Riders gave up, these students took over. They vowed that they would travel all the way to New Orleans by bus—or, literally, die trying. They were tactical disciples of Martin Luther King Jr., the Negro minister whose Gandhian methods of nonviolence won municipal bus integration in Montgomery in 1956. Willing to suffer beatings and endure jail, the students last week jumped onto regularly scheduled buses and headed south.