Freedom Ride 67fishing.’ Exasperated, Kennedy reached the Greyhound superintendent in
Birmingham and barked at him: ‘Somebody better get in the damn bus and
... get these people on their way.’ Finally, the attorney general sent an emis-
sary, John Seigenthaler, a native Tennessean, to talk turkey to Patterson.
Although Patterson warned Seigenthaler that there would be ‘blood in the
streets’ if the president sent US marshals, Seigenthaler held his ground until
state public safety director Floyd Mann promised to protect the riders.
Instead of quitting, frantic SNCC leaders in Nashville continued the Ride,
lest mobs conclude that violence could preserve segregation. Farmer warned
SNCC that the trip might be ‘suicide,’ but an iron-willed Diane Nash was
undeterred. ‘If they stop us with violence,’ she insisted, ‘the movement is
dead. We’re coming.’ She dispatched ten riders to Birmingham, where the
police put them in protective custody. In the middle of the night, public
safety commissioner Connor drove the students to the Tennessee line, where
they were dumped on the side of a road in klan country. John Lewis said he
was never ‘so frightened in all my life.’ Fortuitously, the dazed students found
a shack owned by a frightened old black couple who took them in. The
students called Nash for food and a car and headed back to Birmingham
immediately.
The students wanted to continue the journey, but fearful bus drivers
would not drive them. When blacks boarded a bus to leave Birmingham, a
white driver nervously told them, ‘I understand there is a big convoy down
the road and I don’t have but one life to give and I don’t intend to give it to
CORE or the NAACP.’ With that, the driver disappeared. Governor Patterson
nonetheless advised the riders to ‘get out of Alabama as quickly as possible’
because ‘the state... can’t guarantee the safety of fools.’ The bus company
produced the missing white driver after the attorney general threatened to
send down a black driver in an Air Force fighter plane. As policemen sur-
rounded the bus to protect a new group of twenty-one freedom riders bound
for Montgomery, Fred Shuttlesworth was delighted: ‘Man, what this state’s
coming to! An armed escort to take a bunch of niggers to a bus station so
they can break these silly old laws.’
The police protection vanished when the bus entered Montgomery. The
moment the riders got off the bus all hell broke loose as Tommy Rowe and
hundreds of klansmen went ballistic, shouting, ‘Go get the niggers!’ They
went first for the news photographers who could rally support for the riders.
Thugs then seized John Lewis and beat him bloody with a Coca-Cola crate.
While James Zwerg, a Wisconsin exchange student attending Fisk University,
prayed that God would forgive the assailants, he was knocked out and had
his teeth kicked in. After watching the sordid beating on television, Zwerg’s
father suffered a heart attack and his mother a mental breakdown. The thugs
broke another boy’s leg and set a man on fire with kerosene. When John