C. T. Vivian was the old man of the dream team that magically assembled in Nashville in the late 1950s. He was even older, by four years, than James Lawson, the expert in nonviolent direct action and ostensible adult in the room. Vivian was 35 in the fall of 1959, almost half a generation older than the fresh-faced John Lewis (19), Bernard Lafayette (19), Diane Nash (21), James Bevel (23), and all the other college students drawn to Lawson’s weekly seminars on nonviolence, out of which grew the Nashville Student Movement.
But Vivian embraced the aggressive spirit of nonviolence as heartily as any of his younger colleagues. Not for him the cautious legality of the NAACP and the rest of the Civil Rights establishment. It was for a very good reason that, one day at Fisk University in early 1960, Thurgood Marshall leaned across a table and shouted at Vivian, “You are a dangerous man!”
In my interview with Vivian in Atlanta in 2007, I asked him about the charge, frequently leveled in 1961, that the Riders themselves were the ones responsible for the three violent Klan-led and state-government-approved attacks on them in Alabama. I also asked about the conspicuous lack of support on this point from most white Southern liberals.
The normal white response is that the Riders were creating violence. Some of them jeered at the idea of our being nonviolent. No, you’re not nonviolent. You actually are creating the violence. If you would just be, you know, quiet Niggs – I mean, colored people [Laughs.] — then there wouldn’t be any violence.
Of course, any dictator doesn’t want anybody to say anything about his dictatorship, ’cause obviously, he’s gonna create violence, but then obviously, he’s gonna blame it on the victim. Well, we didn’t play that game.
This was always not only a white line but a scared black line as well. “Oh, please don’t bother these white people. Oh, ’cause they’re gonna be violent. They’re gonna kill us. They’re gonna kill us. They’re gonna kill us.”
What these liberal white fellows were saying is to us was, you know that the non-liberals down here are gonna kill you, and you also know that we’re not gonna say anything to them. [Laughs.] We’re not gonna be active anymore, and we won’t be able to help you, because without our – this is now the unspoken stuff — without our help, you could never make it. And we were saying, you know, that’s your importance, all right, but you haven’t freed anybody.
All that’s nonsense, because it hasn’t worked. It gives you something to talk about, and we can all be in this “national debate.” But we all know where it leads, ’cause we’ve been there for 400 years. You expect us to go along with you when you’ve already failed? We gave you your chance. You’ve been at it for some time, and you have failed. Oh, so you got a law passed. That failed too, ’cause nobody was gonna obey it.
This is the genius of Martin as he speaks the whole thing so well, week after week, month after month, from that time on. Until we are in charge of our own freedom, there is not gonna be any freedom for us. As long as we allow someone else to speak for us, and they know each other very well, there’s not gonna be a breaking of the old order. We’re still going to be killed daily whenever any policeman decides to, all right? And they are always gonna be covered up if they care to cover it up at all.
Who’s gonna get honest enough to cut through this? This is who we are. We know we can be killed in the process. So? We’re gonna get killed anyway. But we’re not going to do it without it being obvious. We’re not going to do it without it being all over the world. And we’re not going to do it playing the game of your so-called democracy, which is undemocratic.
Let’s get some honesty about this. Plus the fact you want us to take up a gun to kill for other people’s freedom, because they’re white. We’re supposed to die in the process but get nothing out of it? And allow you to preach a lie from your pulpits? And allow you to speak legal lies in your courtrooms? And allow you to go home and tell your kids that those black people are not quite human?
Which brings us to the encounter with Thurgood Marshall. Sometime early in the 1960 Nashville sit-in campaign, Marshall came to speak to a mass meeting at Fisk University. He was not enamored of the sit-ins, and when he had the opportunity, he told Vivian so.
We had invited Marshall to speak in Nashville. We had a mass meeting at the Fisk Gym, and I was chairing it. Before we could get started firemen came in and said they’d gotten a call that the place was to be bombed. They came into to try to find the bomb, and everybody had to go out. Those of us who were part of the program went into a back room and sat around. At first there was a little chatting and niceties, and then there was that silence that comes just naturally comes to a group of people, like it did when you were in a school room and something was gonna happen. [Laughs.]
Suddenly Marshall reached across the table, pointed at me, and said, “You are a dangerous man!”
And I looked at him. In my mind, I’m wondering, what’s wrong with this guy?
And he repeated, “You are a dangerous man!”
And I’m trying to grab this. What he really meant was is that you’re out here getting these people to go to jail, and then the NAACP has to take care of it. What he was really meaning, the NAACP doesn’t operate that way.
He didn’t say any of this, this is my hearing him, ’cause this is what was happening in the atmosphere. All around us. Because this was the beginning of SCLC [Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Organization, for which Vivian would work].
The NAACP was saying, if you nonviolent types do anything, you get arrested and that ends that, and then we lawyers take it from there. My response, in my mind, was look, Doc, we’ve been through that. Your history is that you won the education cases in Kansas, but nothing opened in the south. We’ve sent people to jail, and they’re destroyed and forgotten, and nobody even knew that it happened. Your method didn’t get anything done, plus the situation is so grave and so important that the masses want to be involved, and you’re trying to dull that and keep it from happening. From our standpoint, the movement of the masses is more important than your legal stuff. We already understood. That’s something that’s always been very important to me.
Now, remember, this is an unheard debate going on between us, but it’s heard in the atmosphere. State’s rights, you have never been able to get state’s rights overturned. You got the Supreme Court, but politics determines a state’s rights, not law. And you’re talking law as though that’s the end-all, and we know it’s not. And until we remove state’s rights and all the rest of it, we’re not gonna be free in the south.
About the time all these unspokens were going to be spoken, the firemen came in and said it was just a crank call. No bomb. Instead of taking it to the next level, I just let it go, and we went on back to the program.
Six months later we invited him back to give another speech, and by then he understood. He understood who we were and what we were about. A quite different world had been formed in that short length of time.
We talked about Vivian’s time locked up in various jails in Mississippi, and I asked him what memory stuck with him the most.
The thing that I remember more than anything was a jailor, one of the policemen at the Jackson jail, his official title I don’t know, who just did not like me. He raised Cain with me for no reason, and I couldn’t understand that. I was in the same cell as [Freedom Rider and Nashville Movement colleague] Jim Bevel, who was from Mississippi. I said, “Jim, what is wrong with this guy?”
Jim smiled. “The only problem is,” he said, “is you look him in the eye. You talk to him like a man. He can’t take that. He’s a Mississippi white man, much less he’s a jailor, much less here you are this Freedom Rider person who is talking to him in a manner and in a way that he is not accustomed to. [Laughs.] He just can’t take it that you’re a man, and you just don’t give him special regard.” [Laughs.]
Well, I didn’t disregard him, it’s just – he just happened to be there, and that’s what he couldn’t take, that he just happened to be there. [Laughs.] So I didn’t get it. And I never would have gotten it had it not been for Jim interpreting. Mississippi’s hard to understand if you’re not a Mississippian. [Laughs.]
One final story, of the time, as Calvin Trillin tells it, “C.T. Vivian made what I later called the most elegant request to leave the room I had ever heard.”
Vivian rode on the first bus of Riders into Jackson, on May 24, 1961. All the way it was under the control of the National Guard: the Alabama guard from Montgomery to the state line, then the Mississippi Guard the rest of the way. The Mississippi troops were commanded by an officer named Sonny Montgomery, who would go on to serve 30 years as a congressman from Mississippi. Montgomery was under orders to get the bus directly to Jackson, which to him meant no stopping. For anything.
As a young reporter for Time magazine, Trillin was also on the bus, along with several other journalists, including Claude Sitton from the New York Times. As Trillin recalled the moment in 2008 interview with me:
I fell asleep at some point. Then Claude sort of gave me an elbow in the ribs. I woke up. And what had happened was that somebody really had to go to the bathroom. Somebody had asked for a stop.
Sonny Montgomery said, “My orders are to go to Jackson, and I’m going to Jackson.” And C.T. Vivian made what I later called the most elegant request to leave the room I had ever heard.
It was — God, I still remember some of the language. He said, “What do you say to your children when you get home at night — what you’ve done that day? What do you say to your wife? What do you say to your God, if you have a God?”
That’s almost, I swear, direct quotes from that speech, which was what? Something like 45 years ago?
It was brilliant. There was a reporter on the bus from the Toronto Globe & Mail or the Toronto Star. I’m not sure. He was moved by the speech, as we all were, I have to say.
He started yelling at Sonny Montgomery to stop the bus. And Sitton said, “Sit down. It’s none of your business. You’re a reporter. You’re not here to argue with the National Guard.” And the guy sat down.
And the bus didn’t stop until it got to the Trailways station in Jackson. Vivian picks up the story.
When we get there, everybody wants to go to the bathroom, because we hadn’t been able to. I was trying to shoot off, and then somebody said they needed a senior person to be at the back of the line. So they asked me, would I take the back end? I said, “Yeah.” You can’t say no. [Laughs.]
So I was the last one to get to the bathroom. By the time I got out, they already had locked everybody up. Capt. Ray [the Jackson police officer who arrested all the Riders] was getting the last people on the police bus and closing the door. I tapped Capt. Ray on the back. He turned around, and I said, “I’m with them.”
He looked in the other direction so he could smile. I think what he was smiling about was it’s the first time he ever heard anybody asking to be arrested – asking to get in the wagon. [Laughs.] I could see his face from the side. I could tell he was trying to hide his smile. Then he turned back around right quick and said, “Well, get in there!” [Laughs.]
John Lewis arrived in Jackson, Mississippi, on May 24, 1961, in the first wave of Freedom Riders to arrive in the state. He was 21, but like so many Riders he was already a veteran of nonviolent direct action. A member of the famed Nashville Student Movement, he had participated in numerous sit-in actions the year before. As a Rider had already been beaten and attacked, at stations in South Carolina and Alabama.
When I photographed and interviewed him in 2007, he talked about the role of the Freedom Rides in expanding the movement. “The Rides took the movement off of college campuses and out of selected communities, it took it to a much larger community. The movement became much more inclusive.”
Those of us in Nashville, that small group, we were committed to this idea of the beloved community, the redeemed America.
During our stay in Jackson and in Parchman, there was this commitment, almost a bond, that we would do everything possible to get everyone to adhere to the philosophy and discipline of nonviolence. That we would not let anything break that.
But the Freedom Rides took the movement off of college campuses and out of selected communities, it took it to a much larger community. The movement became much more inclusive. People saw these young Freedom Riders–and some not-so-young–getting on buses, traveling through the South, which was very dangerous. So people were willing and and ready to become part of that effort.
So when people left Parchman and went to southwest Georgia and the black belt of Alabama, to Arkansas and eastern North Carolina and other parts of Mississippi, and stayed there and started working, it became a different movement.
These new people were not altogether grounded in the philosophy and discipline of nonviolence. But they wanted to be part of this effort to change America. They has a degree of freshness and a greater degree of urgency. What I call militant nonviolence, or nonviolent militancy. These young people–and those not so young–were demanding change now. And by 1963, you had people in SNCC, even someone like myself, saying, “We want our freedom, and we want it now.”
John Lewis in Breach of PeaceIn 2007, on the balcony of his office.
The successive waves of de-Dixiefication that have washed over the South in the last five years have produced a number of arresting images. Bree Newsome triumphant atop the South Carolina state house flagpole, one rebel flag removed. New Orleans Robert E. Lee or Austin Jefferson Davis or Memphis Nathan Bedford Forrest floating off their pedestals into the sky, never to return. Now Richmond Robert E. Lee is being forced to serve his final public days as the mute star of his own vigorous public contextualization. Slide shows, graffiti, and dance are making for a remarkable send-off for the cornerstone of both Richmond’s Monument Avenue, from the get-go a mix of Confederate memorialization and real-estate hustle, and the Lost Cause, kinda same.
There’s another scene I want to add to this collection, from an earlier era of the war on Confederate propaganda. No photograph of it exists, so you will have to imagine the moment Freedom Rider Hank Thomas shot down a Confederate flag flying over an Army base in Vietnam.
After the Rides, Thomas continued organizing, working in Birmingham and Huntsville, Alabama, among other places. Like other young men in the movement, he was eventually tracked down by his local draft board (St. Augustine, Florida, in Thomas’ case). It was 1963. He was told to come in and explain himself. Why had he not been keeping the board current on his mailing address as he moved around the south?
Two years later, Thomas was in Vietnam as an Army medic, his bet as the best way to survive his tour, physically and spiritually. It was a good bet, as it turned out, though there were a couple of close encounters with combat. And there was this one encounter, at an Army outpost, with a rebel flag.
I had to take some action, once. Some people wanted to fly the rebel flag. I was threatened with court martial because when they ran the rebel flag up the flagpole, I shot it down. I’m not that good a shot, but if you put a M16 on fully automatic and just point —
I carried an M16, yes. I was a most unusual medic. I had a superstition. I was the most heavily armed medic you have ever seen. And this is the reason. I figured if I carried all this stuff, I will never get to use it. That was my rationale. And it almost happened, okay?
After I opened fire everybody runs out and here I am standing there. And there’s this rebel flag on the ground. By this time, the lines were drawn between blacks and white. It was a tickly situation. So we had a meeting. You don’t get together with soldiers to have a meeting to go to the commander during wartime. You just don’t do that. But we went to the captain and said, “We’re not going to be over here fighting for our freedom and you’ve got these racist symbols here.”
I could’ve been arrested right then and there and charged with mutiny. But if it was gonna get me back to the States, that would’ve been a good thing. So the word went out in our outfit, you cannot display the rebel flag.
Thomas recounted his Vietnam experiences to me when I interviewed him at his home outside Atlanta in 2007. That he would shoot down a rebel flag made perfect sense for someone whose life had been filled with protest. “It came natural to me,” said Thomas. His first “act of rebellion” came at 9 or 10, when he insisted a white door-to-door salesmen address his aunt be her last name and an honorific. Soon after he integrated the public library — by himself. At Howard University in 1960 he joined the Nonviolent Action Group and took part in numerous sit-ins. The next year he was on the bus that was attacked and firebombed in Anniston, Alabama. After brief R&R, Thomas was back on the bus, leading the Riders into Jackson.
You’re supposed to notify the draft board when you change your address, which I didn’t. Eventually a notice was sent to my home and my mother finally got in touch with me. I was supposed to report to the draft. No, I was supposed to come back to St. Augustine [Florida, his hometown] to explain to the draft board why I did not notify them. That’s when I began to hear what had happened to other folks — “they’re gonna get you.” I’d be subject to immediate induction, and a lot of those guys got put into combat infantry outfits.
Some, of course, decided to just defy the draft board all together and submit to arrest, or they left for Canada. By then, I was married and had a baby on the way. So I decided, well, to make the best of the situation, if I go on and report for the draft, then I would have a choice I was told of what branch of service or what job you can get. And the only thing I could think of since I wasn’t crazy about combat was to become a medic. I didn’t know [laughs] – I thought all medics were in a hospital some place. A nice hospital. Little did I know you gotta have the medics where the infantry is. So lo and behold, I’m still with the infantry.
I was inducted in ’63, and in ’65 I’m getting ready to go to Vietnam. And I’m thinking, “Ain’t this something? Just a couple of years ago you’re trying to kill me and now I’m going to Vietnam.”
I knew absolutely nothing about Vietnam, like most of the soldiers who went over there. I started to read, and I knew that the French had been there. And something told me that it looks like we’re going in there to replace the French. How do I reconcile that? I knew about communism and all of this. How do I reconcile this with my beliefs? Well, I did by saying, “I’m a medic. And one thing I’m gonna do, my job is to try to save lives.” And I had decided I was gonna save the lives of U.S. soldiers, and if I get an opportunity I’ll try to save the lives of Vietnamese soldiers.
But when I got to Vietnam, thankfully, the outfit that I was with was not involved in a great deal. No combat at all. So my job, since I was senior, was to supply medics to the other companies. With all of the patrolling and all of the movement, I was still out in the field. We would always go to the small, very, very rural Vietnamese villages. I got an opportunity to practice some of the medicine that I felt could salve my feelings about the war. We treated a lot of villagers. I carried extra medical supplies with me. It got to the point where I would carry an extra big boxy bag on my backpack that weighed as much as 50 or 60 pounds, full of medicines that could treat minor and tropical diseases. Often wherever they would see me and the great big box, the kids would come running up. Some of the other medics did the same. That was what I enjoyed doing.
I did get an opportunity to work on a couple of wounded Vietnamese soldiers. At one point, much to the chagrin of some American officers. I remember one lieutenant telling me, “Don’t waste any medicine on that gook.” I had to remind him of the Geneva Convention, that this man’s a soldier, and that we would want our soldiers to be treated that way. I’m only a corporal. And I’m talking to an officer this way. That did not go down well with him, especially being a white Southerner. But medics always got the respect from the soldiers, because you’re the man that is gonna help them when they get wounded. So those were the things I did in Vietnam that made me, I guess you can say, reconcile what I was doing, in terms of what I knew.
There was a lot of racism in the Army, both in the states and in Vietnam. It got really bad over there. The Army just about fell apart in Vietnam. It wasn’t so much when I was there, because I left in ’66. But ’67, ’68, it started to really fall apart because what was happening was you had kids who were coming from the inner cities. They had been participating in the revolutions in the inner cities. And they weren’t gonna take the stuff. When I was over there, there was a little bit of it. And there were some incidents. Fragging got started. I didn’t see any of it personally, but I heard about it.
I had to take some action, once. Some people wanted to fly the rebel flag. I was threatened with court martial because when they ran up the rebel flag up the flagpole, I shot it down. I’m not that good a shot, but if you put a M16 on fully automatic and just point —
I carried an M16, yes. I was a most unusual medic. I had a superstition. I was the most heavily armed medic you have ever seen. And this is the reason. I figured if I carried all this stuff, I will never get to use it. That was my rationale. And it almost happened, okay?
I think I would carry about 200 rounds of ammunition. I’d have three or four grenades. I’d have a pistol. Medics are normally just armed with a pistol. One day this guy says, “What are you doing? You’re a medic!” I said, “Never mind. I got my reasons.” [Laughs.] And, of course, until that day I never had the need to shoot it. Well, I had been caught in a couple of ambushes. But I never had a chance to fire back.
After I opened fire everybody runs out and here I am standing there. And there’s this rebel flag on the ground. By this time, the lines were drawn between blacks and white. It was a tickly situation. So we had a meeting. You don’t get together with soldiers to have a meeting to go to the commander during wartime. You just don’t do that. But we went to the captain and said, “We’re not going to be over here fighting for our freedom and you’ve got these racist symbols here.”
I could’ve been arrested right then and there and charged with mutiny. But if it was gonna get me back to the States, that would’ve been a good thing. So the word went out in our outfit, you cannot display the rebel flag. Other outfits did. There weren’t just fistfights. There were a couple of shootings, and a situation where grenades were tossed into a tent where white white officers were, NCOs. It really got bad two years, three years after that. And then the publicity of the problems got started. I’ll never forget one captain being interviewed on CBS. He could not order his company out on patrol. When the cameraman asked him why, he said, “Because when the shooting starts, I don’t know who’s gonna be shooting at whom.” That’s just how difficult things were there.
That’s when the Army realized it had a problem. And they began to work on it. I’ve written about it. I said the use of the word “nigger” was pretty common by some white officers. You can’t do that when the man you’re calling a nigger has a machine gun. Some of ’em found out the hard way.
Another thing some soldiers used to do is, when they went into town, they would teach the Vietnamese racial slurs. And lots of Vietnamese, not really understanding, got roughed up by blacks for then saying these racial words to them. So the Vietnamese or the Vietcong or the Viet Minh were not the only problems that the Army had. To its credit, the Army did start to correct a lot of the stuff that was going on in the Armed Forces. It set the tone. By the time the Vietnam War was over, the Army had set the tone for a lot of the changes that have occurred in society.
