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PART ONE Mississippi Revisited CHAPTER 1 WHEELS OF TERROR CAPTAIN RAY'S INDEX FINGER shot through the air. "Follow that police officer," he said with professional aplomb, "and get into the patrol wagon." That was a gesture and those were words destined to be repeated by Jackson's police chief hundreds of times in the next three months as Freedom Riders from twenty states saturated Mississippi jails. Captain Ray's stabbing finger carne to symbolize his role in the drama being played out-that of the little Dutch boy of legend vainly trying to plug a breach in the dike of segregation in order to hold back the floodwaters of resistance-to save his city, his state, his way of life. Scarcely four hours earlier on that day in May 1961, the Greyhound bus had left a riot-torn Montgomery, Alabama, where mobs of white men had rampaged and held Freedom Riders prisoners through the night in the First Baptist Church. Martin Luther King had flown in from Atlanta to join us for a rally at the church and he, too, was caught in the siege. Robert Kennedy had flown in U.S. marshals. Martial law had been declared and the Alabama National Guard called to duty. The next day, curfew had been enforced and sporadic gunfire could be heard, shattering the quiet. Now, jeeps patrolled the streets. The atmosphere was warlike. As thirty or forty nonviolent black youths readied themselves for their ride into bigotry's main den, to beard the beast lurking there, individual apprehensions were eclipsed by collective determination . 2 LAY BARE THE HEART The eclipse was only partial, though; fear shone through. If any man says that he had no fear in the action of the sixties, he is a liar. Or without imagination. If there are those who think that the leaders were exceptions to that and were strangers to fear, let me quickly disabuse them of such a notion. Frankly, I was scared spitless and desperately wanted to avoid taking that ride to Jackson. Alabama had chewed up the original thirteen interracial CORE* Freedom Riders; they had been brutalized, hospitalized, and in one case disabled-by flame, club, and pummeling fists. Across the Alabama line from Georgia, blacks had been brutally pistol-whipped and clubbed with blackjacks and fists and then thrown, bloodied, into the back of the bus. Whites had been clobbered even worse for trying to intervene -one suffered a stroke as a result and was paralyzed forever. A bus had been burned to the ground in Anniston, Alabama, and the Freedom Riders, escaping with their lives, were hospitalized for smoke inhalation. In the Birmingham bus depot, Jim Peck, a white man, had been left for dead in a pool of his own blood. His head required fifty-three stitches. How many stitches could repair the heart that bled for the nation ? And, fortuitously, I had missed that carnage on the ride from Atlanta to Montgomery due to the death of my father. But how would I escape Mississippi? If Alabama had been purgatory, Mississippi would be hell. Black students from Nashville, members of SNCC,** their numbers augmented by youthful black CORE members from New Orleans, had dashed in to catch in midair the baton dropped by the initial thirteen. They had not asked if I would ride with them: they assumed that I would. I had different thoughts, though. I had decided not to ride. Definitely, at any cost, not to go. Catalogued in my mind were all the necessary excuses. When the inevitable question came, I was ready with answers. But that decision had not come without inner pain. After all, when I took over the helm of CORE, four months earlier, I had said that I would be no armchair general, tied to the tent. I would not send troops, but would go with them. But that was bravado born of remoteness from reality. Who would expect me to risk being cut down so early in the promise of a leadership career? Everyone would understand when they thought about it. There would be many other battles, much time to show courage. And how could I let myself be wiped out now, before anyone outside the inner circle of the movement even knew I was there? Not now, maybe later. And my father hadjust died. I should not follow him so soon. Two deaths in two weeks would be too much for my mother. The family needed me now. Yet...

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