Read about the 1961 Freedom Rides, how the mug shots survived and my book.

See sample pages from my book.

Buy my book at Amazon.

Read Hank Thomas on the first time he was arrested.

See a copy of the letter from the Parchman warden to Joan Mulholland’s mom.

Twenty of my new Freedom Rider portraits are now on view at the Bronx Museum of the Arts through August 11, as part of the show Road to Freedom.

Plus much much more, in the archives.

Stokely Carmichael’s cry for Black Power in ‘66 was a cry of frustration. It did not have planning behind it, and in some ways I feel Stokely — whom I loved, whom I liked a good bit personally in 1960 when I first met him — betrayed the movement.

That’s Rev. James Lawson on the moment in June 1966 when Stokely Carmichael (above) unveiled his idea of Black Power.

Five years earlier, during the Freedom Rides, things had been different. Nonviolence was then the dominant model, in large part thanks to Lawson himself. His Nashville workshop had created the strongest student movement in the south. It was the Nashville Movement, notably Diane Nash along with Lawson and many others, who saved the Rides after the horrific attacks in Anniston and Birmingham, AL.

Stokely Carmichael was a student at Howard University in 1961, and as a Freedom Rider, any reservations he had then about nonviolence were publicly put aside, though they were certainly expressed behind bars in Parchman Prison, where he and the other Riders were locked up for several weeks.

By June 1966 Carmichael had been organizing in Lowndes County, AL, for over a year, and had helped force John Lewis out as the head of SNCC so that he could replace him. Lawson had moved from Nashville to Memphis, and was now the pastor of Centenary Methodist Church.

After James Meredith was shot on the second day of his solo March Against Fear (from Memphis to Jackson, MS), on June 6, 1966, Lawson along with other leaders rushed in to to fill the void, reconstituting the march with Meredith’s permission. Carmichael was part of that group, and ten days later, as the march passed through Greenwood, MS, he issued his first public call for Black Power.

(Read more details on that moment in The First Black Power Flyer?)

I interviewed Rev. Lawson in Nashville in the summer of 2007 as part of the research for my book. He visibly bristled when I used the word “radical” to describe certain events in the mid- to late ’60s.

The fact that Stokely’s cry was picked up by various revolutionary elements in the country as being radical and militant, that to me is a kind of white romanticism that is not connected to the effort to create a new nation. I don’t think anything was more radical than the Montgomery bus boycott or the sit-in campaign or the Albany movement or the Birmingham campaign.

Here are his comments on Carmichael and Black Power in their entirety:

Stokely Carmichael’s cry for Black Power in ‘66 was a cry of frustration. It did not have planning behind it, and in some ways I feel Stokely — whom I loved, whom I liked a good bit personally in 1960 when I first met him — betrayed the movement.

Stokely betrayed us in two ways: first, he became chair of SNCC after John Lewis had already been elected and had to leave, so that’s an old, tyrannical tactic that did not become Stokely or the movement. Second, because he wanted to plant this notion of black power into the Mississippi March Against Fear, in ‘66. He should have been talking to Martin as early as 1965. Stokely was getting frustrated in Lowndes County by that time. So he should have been talking to King and to others of us about all of this early on. We were his friends. We had spent time in jail together. So he should have been exploring that discussion early on, as soon as he was developing it instead of deliberately — as he admitted — injecting it into the ‘66 Meredith march.

On the day that [James] Meredith was shot, he didn’t have the courtesy to call me in Memphis and say, “I’m going to be on a plane Monday — the next morning, whenever this was — will you pick me up?” I picked him up, but that’s because I was picking up King.

King and I had talked about continuing the march, and I picked up Martin and a couple of other people at the airport. Lo and behold, Stokely’s there with a small entourage. So I picked him up too, because I had a nine-passenger station wagon. I brought him to the house, and he didn’t say any of this in the process of that day together. The first day when we started down the highway from Hernando [in north Mississippi], where Meredith had been shot, I don’t remember Stokely raising any of this about black power. There was no media there that day. There was no media there; we hadn’t announced that we were going do it, we were doing it quietly with Meredith’s consent.

I visited with Meredith the day he was shot, and he agreed that the march should not be stopped by his being shot and that some of us should do it. So we had not broken faith with Meredith over the issue. I mean, King and I saw to that. And so James received me that afternoon at the hospital, and we talked these things out; and he agreed, let’s go forward.

I don’t remember Stokely ever raising it that particular day. But he claims later on that he decided there, with King, when the media came, that he was going to put this out into the world. Well, that was a fairly unfaithful way of doing it. With folk who loved him and knew him.

The fact that Stokely’s cry was picked up by various revolutionary elements in the country as being radical and militant, that to me is a kind of white romanticism that is not connected to the effort to create a new nation. I don’t think anything was more radical than the Montgomery bus boycott or the sit-in campaign or the Albany movement or the Birmingham campaign.

The urban explosions that began in ‘64 in Rochester, NY, as I remember, that was only Americana coming to the surface. Urban explosions and riots against black people had had a long history in the United States. So to see those as a part of the movement, I do not. An urban explosion is an urban explosion.

Did the movement have an effect on them? Only in this sense: That we started the awakening of black people, and black people were saying enough is enough is enough. So that took place in ‘64 the first time. I don’t consider that part of the civil rights movement but part of America.

What I call the civil rights movement was the various efforts out of the NAACP, the Urban League, the Congress Of Radial Equality, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and other such groups to deliberately plan resistance, deliberately call for the awakening of people, the reaffirmation of equality, freedom, justice, and the dismantling the segregation system. That’s the movement, and it happened in a great variety of ways.

Two weeks ago, I posted her scan of what is perhaps the first Black Power flyer, which she had picked up on the last day of the Meredith March (aka, the March Against Fear) in June 1966 in Mississippi.

What occasioned both that flyer and this new one — “Black Out Downtown Canton” — was a brutal tear-gas-and-baton police attack on the Meredith marchers during an evening rally on the grounds of a black public school in Canton, MS, where the marchers also intended to camp for the night.

In the earlier flyer, the Madison County Movement calls for a “Black Out for Black Power,” employing the phrase that Stokely Carmichael had unleashed a few days earlier in a Greenwood, MS, speech. It exhorts people to quit shopping in downtown Canton and to stage a one-day strike “if you work for the White Man.”

The aim of the document below is more to provide background details on local organizers’ preparations for the march’s passage through Canton, especially of their efforts to secure proper permission for use of the school grounds.

We feel that many of you do not know of and understand the terrible incidents of brutality of the Madison County Law Force and the Mississippi Highway Patrol. You have a right to know the true facts. The leaders of the movement have spent several weeks . . . discussing and planning for the march which was to come through our town.

Like the earlier flyer, this one is a mix of hand-written and typewritten elements (the green type is in the original).

Rider Joan Mulholland emailed me the exquisite document above recently:

Here’s a scan of a handbill (from Canton?) I came across in my “stuff” the other day — something I’d forgotten about over the years. I got it on the Meredith March, which I joined at Tougaloo for the last day. It had been folded to fit in the back of the little New Testament (along with a copy of my birth certificate — for identification purposes, living or dead) which I always had with me on demonstrations.

I’m thinking it must be one of the earliest “printed” (as in flyer, poster, etc.) references to Black Power.

It’s easy to see why it sure seems like the first.

The flyer was created just days after Stokely Carmichael unveiled his new phrase — “Black Power” — on June 16, 1966, in Greenwood, MS. Carmichael was speaking to the protesters walking in the March Against Fear (aka, the Meredith March). He was one of several movement leaders who had rushed in to save the march when its instigator, James Meredith, was gunned down just two days into a planned solo walk from Memphis to Jackson.

Earlier that Thursday, Carmichael had been arrested and charged with trespassing after arguing with police about where the marchers, now several hundred, could set up their tents for the night. Once released from jail he went straight to the customary evening rally and spoke:

This is the twenty-seventh time that I’ve been arrested. I ain’t going to jail no more. The only way to we gonna stop them white men from whuppin’ us is to take over. What we’re going to start saying now is Black Power!

It was a contentious phrase within the movement, and a provocative one outside it. Its debut presaged a major evolutionary moment for the movement.

Eight days later — Friday, June 24 — the march reached Canton. Again there was a dispute about where the marchers could set camp for the night.

This time, however, in addition to a few arrests, authorities staged a tear-gas raid on the marchers’ evening rally, while Martin Luther King was speaking. David Garrow describes the scene in Bearing the Cross:

Suddenly, there was a loud noise and clouds billowed from a canister that had landed near the flatbed truck [on which the speakers stood]. “It’s tear gas. Everybody put a handkerchief over your face,” King bellowed. “Nobody leave. Nobody fight back. We’re going to stand our ground.” More canisters began to fall and as the tear gas welled up, King’s efforts to lead the crowd in singing “We Shall Overcome” failed. Choking and gagging, scores of marchers fled. The patrolmen advanced across the fields, swing their billyclubs at those who had not yet left.

King called the attack “one of the best expressions of a police state I have ever seen.”

Harry Benson was there and made this amazing photo.

[Last year Benson told blogger Tim Nokes: "It was a very nasty night in Canton, Mississippi, at the height of the civil rights protests."

[The entire] march was traumatic. You didn’t know from one day to the next what the hell would happen. You would see young kids from all over America — this was where they spent their summer holidays. There was violence on every march, but the Meredith march was the biggest. It was the one that really began to galvanise the country.]

The next day the local leaders in Canton — the Madison County Movement — declared a boycott on white-owned city businesses and spread the word via the flyer above, making prominent use of the new slogan.

(1) Black Out for Black Power

(2) Work Stop for Black Power

(3) Register to Vote for Black Power

Joan Mulholland got her copy on Sunday, June 26, when the march ended with an eight-mile walk from the Tougaloo campus to the state capitol in downtown Jackson.

The March Against Fear was over, but the struggle between Carmichael’s and King’s competing visions, between “Black Power” and “Freedom Now,” had only begun.

Though I’ve read very little of what is being written and said on behalf of states’ rights, I will still say that no one is arguing the case more floridly and fervently than this fellow:

State sovereignty is already being ravished by a trend toward a federal court dictatorship.

That’s MacDonald Gallion, the attorney general of Alabama, speaking on June 8, 1961, just days after mobs had, um, ravished the Freedom Riders in three attacks in his state.

Gallion delivered his speech, “CORE and Freedom Riders — Red Shadow Over America,” at the State Coliseum (which I think is this building in Montgomery). Luckily for us, the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission put a copy of it in its files, and we can read it today.

Gallion hits the usual marks of the day: the Freedom Riders are “so-called”; they are “meddlers” and “misfits”; he is in possession of “vital” information that will reveal the the Riders as Communist dupes.

The so-called “freedom riders” who have been swarming into Alabama and the Southland may be, in large part, a foolish group of meddlers, bleeding hearts, publicity seekers and assorted misfits, but make no mistake about it, those who are actually directing this assault are aware of the cause they serve.

I charge here and now that the cause they serve is not the cause of freedom – it is not the cause of democracy – it is not the cause of religion – and it is NOT the cause of Americanism.

IT IS A COLD, CALCULATED, DELIBERATE ATTACK UPON AMERICA ITSELF — UPON THE VITAL ORGANS OF OUR FORM OF GOVERNMENT – UPON AMERICAN PRESTIGE IN THE WORLD – AND UPON THE VERY EXISTENCE OF AMERICA AS THE LAST GREAT BULWARK ACROSS THE PATH OF ATHEIST COMMUNISM IN THE WORLD.

According to Gallion, the Communists were cleverly exploiting the race issue, promoting certain goals that would soften the United States and prepare it “for deliverance to the Red cause.” What were these goals?

School desegregation, desegregation in churches, in eating places, on buses and in parks, equal employment and membership in integrated trade unions, interracial housing and intermarriage.

It is frightening to note that in less than forty years, almost all of these goals have been achieved.

Frightening indeed. And here we not quite 50 years after Gallion’s dire warning, living in a Communist dictatorship. Fortunately, an Islamic takeover is expected soon.

The bulk of Gallion’s speech is a rather tedious red-baiting of one Rider in particular, Walter Bergman, a World War II veteran and professor.

Bergman was 61 when he rode the bus from Atlanta to Birmingham on May 14, 1961. It was Sunday, Mother’s Day. After the bus reached Alabama, Klansman on board took it on themselves to rearrange the passengers to their liking: whites up front, blacks in the back. When Bergman protested, the Klansmen stomped him unconscious, in front of his wife, Frances, also a Freedom Rider.

Along with several other riders, notably James Peck, Bergman was beaten again by the mob that was waiting for them — with police permission — at the bus station in Birmingham. Ten days later, he had a stroke. Bergman spent the rest of his life in a wheel chair.

“Walter Bergman, Champion Of Civil Liberties, Dies at 100” read the headline on his New York Times obituary, in 1999.

Finished with Bergman, Gallion moves on to his big finish:

I am firmly convinced that the South stands today as the last great bulwark of strength – the last bastion of defense – across this dangerous march to the left, and we have had our set-backs all the way from Virginia to New Orleans, to Little Rock, and here right in Montgomery, but let me further say that this is no time to stop fighting, this is no time to become discouraged. It is no time to bow our heads in object defeat.

ON THE CONTRARY, IT IS THE TIME TO FIGHT WITHIN THE BOUNDS OF THE LAW WITH ALL THE DETERMINATION AND WITH ALL THE HEART AND WITH ALL THE WISDOM THAT WE CAN MUSTER AT OUR COMMAND.

If we don’t, ladies and gentlemen, we will simply be stampeded, and unless the brakes are applied, constitutional government as originally contemplated in our scheme of government will be totally a thing of the past.

State sovereignty is already being ravished by a trend toward a federal court dictatorship.

But the hour is getting late and the hands of the clock move on.

A surreptitious and camouflaged tool in the scheme to destroy American democracy as we have known it, is the exploitation of the racial issue. More terrifying, are indications of federal sponsorship.

To my way of thinking, the race issue is a side issue to the real issue involved – that is the issue of maintaining the integrity of state sovereignty and our American way of life, as opposed to Communistic inroads.

We, the people of the State of Alabama, have been handed down a great heritage and the mandate to maintain our constitutional form of government as was originally intended by our founding fathers.

We, as Alabamians, as Southerners, and as Americans, must continue our fight for the integrity of state sovereignty and that original form of constitutional government, which has made this the greatest Nation on the face of the earth.

In this, I know we will not – we must not fail!

Recall that this stirring call to fight “within the bounds of the law” comes from the chief law enforcement officer of a state that had only days before outsourced the defense of “constitutional government” to the Klan and told police to look the other away. (The FBI looked away, on purpose, as well.)

And to think we are still arguing about what presidential candidate Ronald Reagan could have possibly meant when he uttered the phrase “states’ rights” nineteen years later in Philadelphia, MS.

The full text of Gallion’s speech after the jump. The original text is here.

CORE AND FREEDOM RIDERS – RED SHADOW OVER AMERICA
BY
MacDONALD GALLION, ATTORNEY GENERAL OF ALABAMA
STATE COLISEUM, JUNE 8, 1961

(Acknowledgment of Introduction)

We gather here tonight at a time of grave peril in the history of our beloved State of Alabama. It is an inspiration to me to greet you here tonight. I know that perhaps there are many things that you had rather be doing — many places you had rather be — than here tonight, but I know you came because of your concern for your Nation and your State and your community. You came because as good citizens you felt an obligation to be informed and thereby to inform others of some of the grave problems that we face, and to learn of some of the forces who have promoted and sponsored these troubles upon us.

When I was asked to speak here tonight, I very frankly could think of many things that I had rather be doing than discussing the distasteful matters before us, but as your Attorney General, and due to the fact that information has come into my hands which I think is vital to you, I felt an obligation to share this information with you in a frank discussion of the problems facing the South and for that matter the entire Nation today.

We here in Alabama have had a front-row seat in watching America’s Communist-front in action. We have seen peaceful, law-abiding communities in Alabama turned into arenas of violence and of conflict.

AND UNFORTUNATELY WE HAVE SERVED THE CAUSE OF THE COMMUNIST AGITATORS IN SO DOING.

I intend tonight to rip away the mask of so-called “peaceful or passive resistance” and reveal the ugly face of Communism behind it. I intend to reveal a portion of the shocking part that our Federal government has played in this deadly game, but let me first make one point crystal clear.

WE DO NOT SERVE THE CAUSE OF RIGHTEOUSNESS, THE CAUSE OF DEMOCRACY OR THE CAUSE OF THE SOUTH WHEN WE ALLOW OURSELVES TO BE DRAWN INTO VIOLENCE, NO MATTER HOW VEXING MAY BE THE PROVOCATION BEHIND IT.

The so-called “freedom riders” who have been swarming into Alabama and the Southland may be, in large part, a foolish group of meddlers, bleeding hearts, publicity seekers and assorted misfits, but make no mistake about it, those who are actually directing this assault are aware of the cause they serve.

I charge here and now that the cause they serve is not the cause of freedom – it is not the cause of democracy – it is not the cause of religion – and it is NOT the cause of Americanism.

IT IS A COLD, CALCULATED, DELIBERATE ATTACK UPON AMERICA ITSELF — UPON THE VITAL ORGANS OF OUR FORM OF GOVERNMENT – UPON AMERICAN PRESTIGE IN THE WORLD – AND UPON THE VERY EXISTENCE OF AMERICA AS THE LAST GREAT BULWARK ACROSS THE PATH OF ATHEIST COMMUNISM IN THE WORLD.

Let’s take a good hard look at the factual record.

A group known as Congress of Racial Equality, better known as CORE, has been the moving force behind these assaults that have brought a crisis to America and a grave invasion of our State sovereignty by the Federal government. This group, because of its rather recent origin, doesn’t itself as an organization, have the Communist Party appendage to its record by former investigations of the United states [sic] Attorney General; the United States House of UnAmerican Activities Committee, the United States Senate Internal Security Committee or like official investitative [sic] agencies.

But we do find CORE under the virtual sponsorship of the present United States Attorney General in its forays to create trouble in the South.

I am now going to read you a shorthand transcript of a conversation between United States Attorney General Robert Kennedy and Mr. George E. Cruet, Manager of the Greyhound Bus Terminal, in Birmingham.

Unknown to Mr. Kennedy, this was taken down by Mr. Cruet’s secretary on an extension phone. It was made during the actual conversation:

(QUOTE CONVERSATION)

Here then you have the United States Attorney General referring to the “freedom rider” trip as the “project” and you have him making the statement that “We” have gone to a lot of trouble to see that the “freedom riders” accomplish the project. You have the United States Attorney General threatening the bus management to continue on at a time when violence had already occurred and the situation was inflammable.

Here was the representative of the Federal Government encouraging instead of discouraging the continuation of a trip by wild-eyed radicals that had already created chaos. Certainly, the so-called, [sic]“freedom riders” were encouraged by Attorney General Kennedy. They had been advertised weeks in advance.

One Susan Wilbur was a white “freedom rider.” I have an affidavit in my hand stating that she was a student at Peabody College in Nashville and became a member of the Nashville Students Non-violence Group, which worked in conjunction with CORE. She stated that her bus fare was paid for her from Nashville to Birmingham and from Birmingham to Montgomery, and she indicated that Attorney General Kennedy had discussed the trip with Miss Diane Nash, who is the secretary of the Nashville Students Non-violence Group, and was considered by her the coordinator of the group. She stated that she thought the conversation was by telephone, and she further stated that to begin with they were not worried about anything as they understood “we had federal protection all the way to New Orleans, Louisiana.”

This shows clearly the juvenile approach of Bobby Kennedy who decided to play politics fast and loose to the endangerment of the security and peace of citizens in Southern cities whose emotions had already been rubbed raw by the taunting arrogance of the left-wing CORE directors.

You know what happened in Anniston, in Birmingham, and in Montgomery. You know of the almost constant contact of Attorney General Kennedy with Martin Luther King, Shuttles-worth and other agitators. You know of his ordering federal marshals in an invasion of Alabama — with a notable exception here and there – against the wishes of the overwhelming majority of Alabamians.

This was at a time of tenseness in the situation and wanton disregard for state sovereignty, for state laws, and for the peace, and was totally uncalled for and unnecessary.

It was while the United States marshals still patrolled our streets that I decided to seek an answer from President Kennedy himself as to whether he knew of the nature of CORE, and of James Douglas Peck, who led the first assault wave of the so-called “freedom riders” into Alabama.

I requested governmental investigation of the subversive background of the leaders of this group of highway agitators, and with your permission, I will read that letter.

(READ LETTER TO PRESIDENT)

To date I have received no answer, but I assure you I will continue to pursue the matter UNTIL I DO GET AN ANSWER.

In the meantime, let me supplement that record. Let’s turn our attention first to Dr. Walter Bergmon, who is an official of CORE in Detroit, who admittedly helped to organize the first “ride” and who himself physically was a “freedom rider”.

Official files of the United States House Un-American Activities Committee in my hands give a partial picture of the background of this 62-year old follower of the Marxist line.

He has been either a member or sponsor, or both, of at least six organizations officially listed as subversive Communist fronts.

I’ll name them — they included the Civil Rights Federation, Friends of the Soviet Union, Third Congress of the American League of Fascism, Commonwealth College of Mena, Arkansas, Council of United States Veterans, Inc., and the People’s Institute of Applied Religion.

This letter organization has been called by J. Edgar Hoover as one of the most violently pro-Communist fronts of them all.

The Federal government itself must have had something more than doubts about Dr. Bergman’s loyalty to America because in 1953, while on a so-called “study” tour in Europe, the United States State Department recalled his passport.

But let’s look a little further into the background of Dr. Bergman, the CORE organizer and “freedom rider.”

He was a research professor at Wayne University in Detroit before going into “simi-retirement” [sic] to better serve his radical masters.

Wayne University, you may recall, is the college which last year created such a turmoil in Detroit when it dropped its barriers against Communist lecturers and indeed invited Communist lecturers to come in.

The history of that college has been one of harboring Communists and allowing Communist-front student groups to operate openly on its campus. It is one of a half-dozen colleges widely enjoying the reputation as a safe harbor for Communists and for espousal of the idea of world revolution.

A booklet called “Commies On The Campus” was compiled a few months ago about this Wayne College, which nurtured such as Dr. Bergman. It tells of the history of the school in its defense of Red professors and Red causes.

I am going to quote just a few excerpts from this pamphlet:

“There was active on the Wayne campus a group known as American Youth for Democracy, listed officially as a Communist-front.

“A race riot broke out in an off-campus bar, and there appeared the next day the following newsletter:

“Because the CP (Communist Party) did not realize that racists would organize and use ‘force and violence’ upon students, we inadvertently warned them by stating the time the group of students were going to the Alcove. The CP (Communist Party) did not organize this group and most of the students were not political figures, however: “THE CP (COMMUNIST PARTY) SUPPORTS ANY ACTIVE MOVEMENT FOR THE ENFORCEMENT OF DEMOCRACY.

“We propose for immediate action:
“1. That the administration make a public statement condemning attacks upon students whose only crime was to drink with their friends.

“2. That the Student Council call a mass meeting to discuss concrete action on the Alcove and on Civil Rights in general.

“3. That the Student Council, all student organizations, and every student, send letters to the Police Commissioner protesting the facet that the police Commissioner protesting the fact that the police did not enforce the law.

“4. That all student aid the Student Council to boycott the Alcove.

/Signed/ THEODORE DREISER CLUB,
STUDENT DIVISION,
COMMUNIST PARTY, U.S.A.”

Does that sound shockingly familiar?

This group, like the “freedom riders” not only planned to break laws and customs, but NOTIFIED everyone of their intentions in advance.

They sought violence, promoted it, and then they found it. Then they screamed about lack of police protection, yelled about civil rights and talked of boycott.

Note, also, that while this was signed by this cell of the Communist Party, U.S.A., they didn’t hesitate to put their support behind ANY ACTIVE MOVEMENT TO ENFORCE DEMOCRACY.

Now remove that locale from Wayne University to Montgomery, Alabama.

The pattern is identical with the technique of the so-called “freedom riders” even down to the loose use of the word “democracy.”

Let’s look again at a familiar pattern for Wayne University, the base of Dr. Bergman’s operations, the Chairman of the MICHIGAN SENATE COMMITTEE IN CHARGE OF EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS, Senator Matthew Callahen accused the Wayne group, in his words, of:

“Inciting racial hatred and using minority groups as stooges in hope of creating civil turmoil.”

Is this picture familiar? Isn’t it the same pattern the so-called “freedom riders” and CORE have developed in Alabama and the South?

Wayne University, amazingly still, has on its staff a professor, Arvid Jacobson, who pleaded guilty to spy charges and served three years’ imprisonment after he admitted giving Finnish military documents to a Russian agent. However, this appears to be NOT SUFFICIENT EVIDENCE TO FIRE A PROFESSOR AT WAYNE.

Let’s go just one step further on Wayne, the base of “freedom rider” Bergman, and quote from a recent speech one of the history professors made to a club there. He said and I quote:

“The American faith in material and economic progress cannot stand up against Communism with the cutting edge of its faith sharp.”

And further noted that the Communists have “a purpose, a sense of destiny, conviction, and dynamism and thus it appeals to people in quest of social justice.”

So much for “freedom rider” Bergman and Wayne University, and back to Dr. Bergman’s CORE.

There is much additional testimony about the Red activity of Dr. Bergman going as far back as 1936.

In testimony before a special committee on Un-American Activities, October 13, 1938, Walter S. Reynolds, Chairman of the Subcommittee on Un-American Activities, American Legion, Department of Michigan, had the following to say of Bergman:

“Dr. Walter C. Bergman is a radical professor in the Research Department at Wayne University, who hides his real “red” color by calling himself a member of the Socialist Party and by being a personal candidate for political office on the Socialist ticket. August 31, 1936, with William Weinstone, SECRETARY OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY FOR THIS DISTRICT, he was present at a meeting sponsored by the Conference for the Protection of Civil Rights…where boycotting of Hearst papers was planned because of the exposure of the trustees of the Spanish Loyalist government…”

On September 3, 1936, he appeared at a meeting at Arena Gardens sponsored to aid the Spanish Communists. Quoting again:

“March 14, 1937, Bergman acted as Chairman at a meeting at Northern High School at which Weinstone appeared as the principal speaker…”

On October 19, 1938, a former Communist Party member, Clyde Morrow, of Detroit, testified about Bergman to the same committee.

I quote:

“On May 27, 1933, the Communist Party held a demonstration at Grand Circus Park, Michigan. . . Bergman asked the audience to arise and sing the “International” (the official song of the Communist Party).

“Winding up the talk by saying:

“‘The only form of government needed here is the same that we have in the Soviet Union.”

I could go on and on at great length to document Dr. Bergman’s activities under the Communist influence, but I believe this has been proved sufficiently.

This is the man, along with Peck, who we have already identified, who helped organize and physically lead the assaults of the “freedom riders” on the Southland.

Where was the real center of direction? Was it in Peck’s New York, or Bergman’s Detroit? Or was it in Moscow?

But let us follow the old saying that two swallows do not make a summer, and perhaps two Communists do not establish CORE as a Communist vehicle, and so let’s dig just a little deeper and look at the records of seven of CORE’s Advisory Committee members, and I want to emphasize that the records I quote on the seven Board members of CORE are from the official files of the United States Senate Internal Security Subcommittee:

(READ UNITED STATES SENATE INTERNAL SUBCOMMITTEE OFFICIAL REPORTS ON MUSTE, BALDWIN, RANDOLPH, LILLIAN SMITH, CHALMERS, REED AND WATSON)

In addition to these seven, a number of others listed with CORE have associations with Communist-front groups. I am naming names tonight — these records include Algernon D. Black, long a leader in the NAACP, as well as CORE, and Earl B. Dickerson.

We have many mis-leaders of the Negro race who fit into the pattern long ago laid down in the Communist blueprint for subversion. They have shown their true purpose and they openly declare they will disobey any laws that tend to restrict their activities, yet they hollo loudly for the federal government to force compliance, even at bayonet point, when they feel that such forced compliance is in keeping with their race-mixing programs.

In 1935, there was published by the “Workers’ Library Publishers,” officially representing the Communist Party, a 48-page pamphlet written by two well known Communists, James W. Ford and James S. Allen, and it was called “The Negroes in a Soviet America.” It urged the Negro of the South to rise up and promised that the Negro would be supported by RED ARMY VOLUNTEERS – we have seen the very same thing happen in Korea, in Iraq, and other countries that have been swallowed up behind the iron curtain.

The Communists further promised that “any act of discrimination, of prejudice, against a Negro would become a crime under the revolutionary law . . . ”

Now that’s not very much different from what is currently being proposed by some of the more left-wing civil rights advocates in Washington today.

Let’s go further and quote from another official Communist Party publication, a book entitled “A Racial Program for the Twentieth Century,” which sets forth Communist policy:

“We must realize that our party’s most powerful weapon is racial tension. By propounding into the consciousness of the dark races that for centuries they have been oppressed by the whites, we can mold them to the program of the Communist Party.

“In America we will aim for subtle victory. While inflaming the Negro minority against the whites, we will endeavor to instill in the whites a guilt complex for their exploitation of the Negroes.

“We will aid the Negroes to rise in prominence in every walk of life, in the professions, and in the world of sports and entertainment. With this prestige the Negro will be able to intermarry with the whites and begin a process which will deliver America to our cause.”

As far back as 1922, a Communist Party organizer in America by the name of John Pepper, wrote practically the same words and he listed twelve aims of the Communists in America, and stated that when these were achieved America would be softened and ready for deliverance to the Red cause. Among these aims included the following:

School desegregation, desegregation in churches, in eating places, on buses and in parks, equal employment and membership in integrated trade unions, interracial housing and intermarriage.

It is frightening to note that in less than forty years, almost all of these goals have been achieved.

It is interesting to further note that Pepper stated that the Negro was basically a religious race and that they would have to be approached by a massive infiltration and use of their churches. How well have we seen that come about with our Reverend Martin Luther Kings, Shuttleworths, and Abernathys!

It is of vital concern to you and to me – and it should be to every American, no matter what his color – that an active vehicle serving the cause of Communism in America is operating arrogantly in our midst.

And I charge that CORE which sponsors these so-called “freedom rides” is such an organization.

I do not say that every integrationist is a Communist – that, I think, would be a foolish statement to make. But I do say that many of these integrationist groups are under the Communist influence and the creation of civil disorders and racial unrest is certainly to the delight, and in many cases, under the direct sponsorship of the Communist cause.

We, particularly in the South, have had set-back after set-back in our fight in this cause. I am firmly convinced that the South stands today as the last great bulwark of strength – the last bastion of defense – across this dangerous march to the left, and we have had our set-backs all the way from Virginia to New Orleans, to Little Rock, and here right in Montgomery, but let me further say that this is no time to stop fighting, this is no time to become discouraged. It is no time to bow our heads in object defeat.

ON THE CONTRARY, IT IS THE TIME TO FIGHT WITHIN THE BOUNDS OF THE LAW WITH ALL THE DETERMINATION AND WITH ALL THE HEART AND WITH ALL THE WISDOM THAT WE CAN MUSTER AT OUR COMMAND.

If we don’t, ladies and gentlemen, we will simply be stampeded, and unless the brakes are applied, constitutional government as originally contemplated in our scheme of government will be totally a thing of the past.

State sovereignty is already being ravished by a trend toward a federal court dictatorship.

But the hour is getting late and the hands of the clock move on.

A surreptitious and camouflaged tool in the scheme to destroy American democracy as we have known it, is the exploitation of the racial issue. More terrifying, are indications of federal sponsorship.

To my way of thinking, the race issue is a side issue to the real issue involved – that is the issue of maintaining the integrity of state sovereignty and our American way of life, as opposed to Communistic inroads.

We, the people of the State of Alabama, have been handed down a great heritage and the mandate to maintain our constitutional form of government as was originally intended by our founding fathers.

We, as Alabamians, as Southerners, and as Americans, must continue our fight for the integrity of state sovereignty and that original form of constitutional government, which has made this the greatest Nation on the face of the earth.

In this, I know we will not – we must not fail!

On June 8, 1961, a Thursday, Percy Sutton flew from Montgomery, AL, to Jackson, MS. Traveling with him was Mark Lane, then a New York state assemblyman. On arrival at the Jackson airport, the two were arrested “as they entered white rest room facilities,” according to an account in a local paper. Sutton was 40 years old.

From the New York Times obituary:

Percy Sutton, who displayed fierce intelligence and exquisite polish in becoming one of the nation’s most prominent black political and business leaders, died on Saturday, The Associated Press reported. He was 89. . . .

Mr. Sutton stood proudly at the center of his race’s epochal struggle for equal rights. He was arrested as a freedom rider; represented Malcolm X as young lawyer; rescued the fabled Apollo Theater in Harlem; and became a millionaire tycoon in the communications business to give public voice to African Americans.

He was also an eminent politician in New York City, rising from the Democratic clubhouses of Harlem to become the longest serving Manhattan borough president and, for more than a decade, the highest black official in the city. In 1977, he was the first seriously regarded black candidate for mayor.

Read the rest.

While working on my book, I started to think about the connections between the sit-ins and the Freedom Rides with the Free Speech and anti-war movements that followed – all student-powered, often student-led, almost always at odds with if not in defiance of establishment allies. When I met Freedom Rider Charles Sellers, I met a literal connection between the Freedom Rides and the Free Speech movement.

Sellers was born in Charlotte, NC, in 1923, and arrived in Berkeley in 1958 to teach history at the university. There he was an active member of the local chapter of CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality, which was very active protesting discrimination in jobs and housing. Three years later he went to Mississippi as a Freedom Rider. Three years after that, he was an early and significant player in the Free Speech movement, which erupted on the Berkeley campus in the fall of 1964.

In this excerpt from our interview, Sellers talks about Berkeley in late ’50s and his roll in the Free Speech movement.

After I got to Berkeley in 1958 I was very active in the chapter of CORE here. It was a very small but devoted band and we raised a lot of hell. We forced all the downtown businesses to hire blacks and sued landlords and [laughs] marched and demonstrated.

There were a few graduate students from the university involved. No faculty that I can recall. Much later, when the demonstrations got to be really big, some faculty came out. The CORE people were just ordinary people from undistinguished backgrounds, in secular terms. But they were just really good people who somehow felt it in their hearts that this was the right thing. We were a devoted little band of brothers and sisters out there for a while, changing the world.

At the time Berkeley, as compared to Chapel Hill, had much the same discrimination in housing and in hiring. But the etiquette of racist supremacy wasn’t enforced so overtly as in the South. There was a black attorney on the city council.

The strange thing about Berkeley when I first came here was it was a Republican town politically. The liberal Democrats were just fighting and getting substantial representation as a minority. The one black council member was allied with these liberal Democrats and he was not too happy about having the boat rocked too much. The NAACP was more or less playing that same game. So we were creating discomfort with the local black middle class as well as the whites.

Berkeley was converted into a solidly, if not radically, Democratic town basically by the coincidence of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement. Robert Scheer, who today writes a syndicated column, performed the most profound political transformation I’ve ever seen by running for Congress in 1966 against our liberal Democratic Congressman, who was voting for all the war appropriation bills.

Though he did not win, just by going out and debating the issues openly and passionately, he absolutely turned this community against the war overnight and paved the way for Ron Dellums’ election to Congress four years later.

We also had the student rebellion at Berkeley. In fact, the Free Speech Movement grew out of the Civil Rights movement. A member of Berkeley CORE – our little band of 20 or so – was Jack Weinberg, who put up a table on the sidewalk to solicit support for CORE and was hauled off by the Berkeley police or the campus police, actually.

The next day, Jack was back with his table right in the middle of Sproul Plaza, a police car rolled up and they grabbed him and put him in the police car. Immediately people started sitting down around the police car and getting up on top of it, and that’s how the Free Speech Movement started.

My involvement was immediate. I can’t remember the exact order of events, but very early there was just a little group of 15 people picketing in circles on the Sproul Hall steps. When I saw this on my way to lunch, I decided to take a few turns in the picket line. “What are you doing up there, Charlie?” a passing colleague called out. “What are you doing down there, Waldo?” I replied too cleverly by half.

Then at another point – this captured-police-car incident went on for several days and nights – I got up on the car and said something, as had a lot of other people. So I was right into it from the get-go.

There was a lot of faculty politics in all of this and there was a big left/right split in the faculty. I helped organize the left caucus – it was even called the Sellers Group for a time. The one thing I learned in all this is that you can’t get anything by being reasonable, they’ll end up screwing you every time. You have to be totally unreasonable.

We were trying to organize support for the free-speech causes from nervous faculty liberals, who kept telling student activists to be nice and accept the latest nice offer from the administration. Again and again, the students proved their faculty sympathizers to be naïve wimps. Because every time the students were “nice” and “reasonable” they were betrayed, co-opted, disempowered and so forth.

The students had to bring the institution to a standstill before that changed. The only successful strategy was to be uncompromising in what you were expecting and demanding.

Later I could understand the Black Power motivation. I had some regrets that whites could no longer play a part in the movement, but I also understood why it needed to be a black struggle. I think the more militant phases of that black response were, on balance, probably more helpful than hurtful. Some people wouldn’t pay attention till they got scared.

Photographed Feb. 16, 2007, in Berkeley, CA

Joan Trumpauer Mulholland was a Freedom Rider from Arlington, VA. After the rides she stayed in Jackson, attending Tougaloo College and continuing to work in the movement. She participated in the famous May 1963 sit-in at the Woolworths lunch counter in downtown Jackson, which yielded a well-known photograph by Fred Blackwell.

Today she’s being honored in a performance by the band of Jackson Academy, a private school. Below is the story from Clarion-Ledger reporter Billy Watkins.

Jackson Academy’s three-song performance today at the Mississippi Private School Association’s state band competition will pump up the volume of history. The music, arranged by band director Bruce Carter and his 19-year-old son, Corey, is dedicated to Joan Trumpauer Mulholland, a white civil rights activist who is the focal point of an iconic 1963 photograph taken by Fred Blackwell of the old Jackson Daily News.

“I’m blown away that (JA) would do this in honor of me,” says the soft-spoken Mulholland, who resides in Arlington, Va. “It sends chills down my spine.”

Mulholland, 19 at the time of the photo, is shown being surrounded by an angry mob of young white people during a sit-in at Woolworth’s soda fountain counter in downtown Jackson. She had been doused with mustard, ketchup, water, Coca-Cola, spray paint and a bounty of insults.

Pictured at the right is Annie Moody, an African-American student at Tougaloo College in Jackson. A streak of mustard and ketchup drips onto her forehead. Pictured at the left is John Salter, then a Tougaloo professor. He is covered in condiments and blood.

He had been hit with brass knuckles.

Mulholland, a Virginia native, was part of the Freedom Riders, who traveled South in 1961 to test the laws of desegregation on interstate buses.

She was charged with breach of peace and jailed for more than two months. A portion of her imprisonment was spent in a death row cell at the State Penitentiary in Parchman.

After being released, she enrolled at Tougaloo, where she was one of about five white students. She graduated in 1964.

Corey Carter named his original arrangement Power of Conviction, in honor of Mulholland, to be sandwiched in the performance between Sevens by Samuel Hazo and Sinfonietta No. 3.

“To have this tribute played in Jackson by a private school … I think it means even more,” Corey says.

Most private schools in Mississippi were formed to fight integration in the late 1960s and early ’70s.

Many MPSA member schools are integrated to some extent now.

Bruce Carter’s concert band consists of all white students, but three African Americans are in the sixth-grade program.

How Mulholland became the inspiration for JA’s concert presentation is a story within itself.

Corey Carter, a music major at the University of Southern Mississippi, had arranged the band’s second song. “The melodies were sort of grand and heroic,” Bruce Carter says. “And I remember Corey saying, ‘We need a hero to focus this music on.’ ”

A few weeks ago, Corey Carter was standing in line at Walgreens in Jackson when he picked up the book, Breach of Peace by Mississippi native Eric Etheridge, and began to flip through it.

He saw a photograph of Mulholland, who had long dark hair, a face of innocence, and a Jackson Police Department sign draped around her neck with her booking number on the front – 20975. It was from June 8, 1961, when Mulholland was arrested for breach of peace during a Freedom Rider nonviolent demonstration.

Corey Carter combed the Internet, researching stories about Mulholland. He came away in awe of her.

“People have their own convictions about what is right and wrong,” Corey Carter says. “She was simply trying to do what she thought was right.”

“I remember he called me and said, ‘Dad, I think we’ve found our hero’ and began to tell me about this amazing woman,” says Bruce Carter, 55, who came to JA in 1989 from New Jersey, where he taught until 2005. He returned in 2007.

“Of course, I remembered the Woolworth’s photograph. Who could ever forget that?”

Bruce Carter waited until this week to share Mulholland’s story with his students. “I wanted them to focus on the notes, on timing,” he says. “Because I knew when I told them, it would give the song more meaning to them and probably raise their level of playing.

“They were quite inquisitive when I talked to them about Mulholland and the courage she had. They were like ‘Tell us more!’ ”

After Mulholland was informed by a Clarion-Ledger reporter of the scheduled tribute, she requested a telephone visit with Bruce Carter to thank him.

They talked for more than an hour Tuesday afternoon.

“It was quite a moving experience for me,” Bruce Carter says.

Mulholland is retired after teaching for 30 years in Virginia and raising five sons. She often comes back to Mississippi for various activities at Tougaloo.

She joined the Freedom Riders, she says, “because none of the things I was being taught in Sunday School were being applied in real life. ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’ The children’s songs we all learned – ‘Jesus loves the little children … red and yellow, black and white.’ ”

When asked about the photograph of the sit-in and what she remembers, Mulholland pauses for a moment, then chuckles.

“Everything,” she says. “I’ve heard of people during war time say their souls leave their body and serve as guardian angels. That’s what happened with me. I was sitting there, knew what was happening. But the ‘real’ me was like a guardian angel above me, protecting me.

“The worst thing they could have done was kill us. Once you accept that – and faith teaches us that there are better things to come after death – then there is nothing to worry about.”

The Freedom Rides were a model of several management principles en vogue, at least until recently, in the new economy. The Riders were strategically nimble, adeptly abandoning their original destination of New Orleans to pursue “jail, no bail” in Jackson. They employed just-in-time inventory controls: within a day or two of their arrival in one of the three staging cities (Nashville, New Orleans and Montgomery), new Riders were assembled into smallish groups and sent on to Jackson. They also practiced very decentralized management, pushing out to the edges of the enterprise the responsibility to find Riders and raise travel funds.

Recruiting also meant screening: potential Riders were vetted especially for a commitment to practice nonviolence, as well as any political liabilities. John Dolan (above), then a student at Berkeley, California, recalls one candidate who didn’t make the cut.

Vincent Hallinan was a well-known activist lawyer in the ’30s and ’40s in San Francisco, a Communist, pretty open. He had six or seven sons, and he taught them all to box. I knew two of them–Kayo and Dynamite. Kayo was a couple of years ahead of me at Berkeley. He was a light-heavyweight boxing champ and very left-wing.

Kayo wanted to go on the Freedom Rides. Ed Blankenheim, one of the original Freedom Riders, came out to organize our group.  He didn’t want Kayo to go on a Freedom Ride. I said, well, you tell him, not me. He did, and Kayo was pretty upset.

We were scared stiff that we’d be Red-baited if the Communists joined. At that point in the United States if you found a Communist involved in something, the whole thing was smeared. So that was one thing. But the reason Ed told Kayo he couldn’t go was that Kayo had gotten into a fistfight on a peace march, which was true and was also a good reason for him not to go. I’m sure that even if he hadn’t been a Communist, Ed would have been reluctant to let him go. Kayo wasn’t really big, but he was big enough and he was a very good boxer.

Terence “Kayo” Hallinan served one term as the San Francisco DA in the ’90s. Previously he’d been a member of the city’s board of supervisors. Today he sits on the advisory board of NORML.

I’ll be in Virginia in early March to do a reading and slide show for the Fairfax County Library in McLean, details below. Appearing with me will be Rev. Reginald Green (above and below), a Freedom Rider from Washington, DC, who will talk about his experiences in Mississippi and, with a small amount of encouragement, will sing a freedom song or two.

Fairfax Library
Thursday, March 5
7:30 PM
McLean Community Center
1234 Ingleside Ave.
McLean, VA 22101

Much later in the year I will be heading west to do my show at Nebraska Wesleyan in Lincoln. I’ll have a Freedom Rider with me, but haven’t figured out who yet.

Nebraska Wesleyan University
Thursday, Nov. 12
1 PM
Venue TBD
Lincoln, NE