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CHAPTER 9 Riots and Insurrection 136 D omestic racial issues pushed their way onto the agenda of President John F. Kennedy soon after he took office in 1961. That this happened should have been no surprise to Kennedy, who had criticized his predecessor, President Eisenhower, for not taking vigorous action on issues in the United States important to black Americans and for paying little attention to Africa, where eighteen new countries emerged from colonial status in 1960 alone.1 Racial problems had been a central focus of the 1960 election. Kennedy had done a better job of courting the black vote by focusing on improving American relations with the newly created African countries than had his opponent Richard Nixon. Although Kennedy had successfully linked Africa and civil rights at home during the campaign, his primary interest really was in foreign policy, and once in office, his priorities did not reside in domestic reforms.2 But exigencies such as the Freedom Ride of 1961, the desegregation of the University of Mississippi in 1962, and touchy protocol problems involving envoys from new African nations forced him to take action domestically. The Freedom Ride represented an embarrassment, inasmuch as the government had failed to enforce a Supreme Court ruling that struck down segregation in interstate commerce as unconstitutional. Despite the ruling, buses and terminals in the South remained segregated. The Freedom Ride was a project of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), whose executive director, James Farmer, intended to create a crisis that would generate headlines “all over the world” and compel the government to enforce the law lest there be further damage to the U.S. reputation overseas.3 An integrated party of thirteen Freedom Riders boarded two buses in Washington, D.C., on May 4 headed to New Orleans. Ten days later they were attacked along a highway at Anniston, Alabama, and another round of assaults followed on the streets of Birmingham, where young racists RIOTS AND INSURRECTION 137 flailed away at the Riders with iron bars and baseball bats when policemen did not show up for almost a quarter hour. Asked to account for their tardiness, Fire and Police Commissioner Eugene Connor—later to become infamous as “Bull” Connor—claimed disingenuously that most of them were off duty, visiting their mothers on Mother’s Day.4 Connor had seven of the Riders taken into “protective custody.” That night, they were driven to the Alabama-Tennessee state line and told to leave the state.5 But the next day reinforcements arrived, and the Riders left Birmingham, pushing on toward Montgomery. There, on May 20, they, along with John Seigenthaler, an aide to Attorney General Kennedy, were battered by a mob of several hundred people after the state police escort suddenly vanished. The Kennedys had counted on persuading Alabama’s Governor John Patterson, one of the few leading Southern politicians to support Kennedy for president, to protect the Riders, but Patterson refused even to take their calls, doubtless because he had no intention of protecting the Riders. In fact, Patterson’s attorney general sought an injunction from the circuit court forbidding CORE from testing bus segregation in Alabama. News of the writ, which prohibited the Riders from “entry into and travel within the state of Alabama,” appeared on the front page of the New York Times the following day, the day violence erupted in Montgomery. To protect the demonstrators, U.S. Attorney General Kennedy sent federal marshals, rather than the military, into Montgomery; having rebuked Eisenhower for dispatching troops to Little Rock, President Kennedy wanted no soldiers dispatched to Alabama.6 On the night of May 21, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Freedom Riders (some still nursing injuries from being beaten), and fifteen hundred black and white supporters were besieged in a church. King’s aide Wyatt Tee Walker recalled, “[I] thought we’d had it that night,” but unaccountably the “little handful of marshals repelled this mob of a couple of thousand” persons.7 Farmer now had his crisis, as did (unwillingly) Kennedy, who was preoccupied with preparations for an upcoming summit conference with Nikita Khrushchev of the Soviet Union. Kennedy wanted to avoid the appearance of disunity in the United States or weakness on his part, especially after the Bay of Pigs fiasco that had occurred a month earlier. “Tell them to call it off!” Kennedy ordered his civil rights liaison officer, Harris Wofford. “Stop them!”8 But the Freedom Riders would not stop. Two buses continued into Mississippi...

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