American Experience; Freedom Riders; Interview with Evan Thomas, 2 of 2

do it to get out of birmingham they did get state police protection there are the buses escorted everybody thought wow we're done here solve this problem, turn to the next problem," but no, the bus gets to Montgomery and there ain't no more police, instead there's an angry mob waiting for the Freedom Riders, [pause/aah] the FBI is there watching but not stopping them and the mob sets upon these Freedom Riders and beats the living hell out of them, many of them, including one of the victims is John Seigenthaler, who is Bobby Kennedy's man on the scene. He's badly beaten when he's trying to rescue a woman who's trying to get into a car, [aah] he's left with his skull cracked on the sidewalk. Bobby's hearing about this firsthand because there's another justice department representative John Doar who's on the phone calling directly, saying something to the effect "it's terrible, it's terrible." He's watching it happen. "There are no police, they're

just beating them," so Bobby is getting this in real time [aah] as it's happening, from his own lieutenants. When he finds out that Seigenthaler's been beaten and is in hospital, he is really sore about it. [Interviewer] Umm, I just want to go back a minute and talk a little about the FBI. You mentioned the FBI watching, I think it's important, the FBI also, y'know, it's in the first time the FBI... [Thomas] In theory the Federal Bureau of Investigation works for the Justice Department, the director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, reports to the Attorney General, but in fact Hoover was more powerful than any Attorney General and although he had penetrated, the FBI had penetrated the white extremist movements down there, the Ku Klux Klan as a ... and had informants, they didn't do anything to stop the mob, so there was actually, there

were FBI informants watching all this happen but Hoover made no effort to stop the mob and he never told Kennedy about it. He never told his boss, the Attorney General, that he was watching the mob being formed and that the FBI was going to do nothing to stop it. When Bobby Kennedy later found out about this, this further strained the relationship between J. Edgar Hoover and the Attorney General. [Interviewer] I "I think that if you don't mind, can we cut for a second? Talk just a little more about Seigenthaler, and his relationship to Kennedy, RFK, and why he's still at this point finally after Anniston, after the beatings in Birmingham, why he sent down Seigenthaler to Alabama." [Thomas] John Seigenthaler was a young newspaperman in the 1950s who became friends with Bobby Kennedy. Bobby often worked with newspaper people, had symbiosis between prosecutors or investigators and newspapermen, and when Bobby became Attorney General he hired Seigenthaler to be one of his young aides. So he's using him as kind of a scout.

Seigenthaler is a Tennessean, he's a southerner, and Bobby wants to have a man on the scene so... to hold the hands of the Freedom Riders so he sent Seigenthaler down there. Well Seigenthaler gets there, and this riot breaks out, he's trying to save this young woman getting in a car, and he gets his head cracked by a guy, I think with a pipe. And this is classic Bobby Kennedy, Seigenthaler's groggily lying in the hospital, slowly coming to and Bobby calls him up on the phone and says "Thanks for helping us with the black vote." Typical Bobby Kennedy, using this sort of locker room, wise-ass humor. It's very important to Bobby Kennedy always to tease in adversity, the way you dealt with hard times was to be joking and self-mocking and to use black humor, and of course Seigenthaler's lying there barely conscious and he cracks some feeble joke about how Bobby should not run for governor anytime soon. But that's very much typical of the relationship between RFK and his aides, this kind of mocking teasing humor

in a very bleak circumstance. [Interviewer] "Let me just ask you to do that again, because I want you to give me the line again that Seigenthaler tells him not to run for governor anytime soon." [Thomas] Seigenthaler's lying there, very groggy, barely conscious, and the Attorney General calls him and tries to make a joke, as Bobby often did, saying "Thanks for helping us with the black vote." And Seigenthaler's kind of reeling, trying to come up with a response, a lame response, and says "well you'd better not run for Governor of Alabama anytime soon." And that was sort of typical of this sort of joking, locker room, mocking, gallows humor that Kennedy's justice department had, with these young eager tough guys that Bobby had working for him. [Interviewer] "We can cut for a second. At the Montgomery riots, what was the

FBI's role? The FBI was there, what did the FBI do?" [Thomas] The FBI was there watching and presumably reporting to Hoover, but they weren't doing anything about it. In other words, they were in cahoots with the local cops who just stood aside and let the rioters have their way. Hoover wanted the intelligence of what was going on but he didn't want to actually step in and stop what were of course grotesque criminal acts. [Interviewer] "Okay, I want to go on to the next day, the siege in the church, the Montgomery church. Talk about the siege and just.." [Thomas] Well here you have this church that's got 1500 black folks in it and they're surrounded by a screaming, raving mob of 3,000 whites who want to burn them, who want to kill them, and Martin Luther King is in there and he's scared. And he's on the phone, ah, and he should be scared, and he's on the phone with the Attorney General and he's asking for help, federal help. Bobby Kennedy was able to get together a kind of a rag-tag group of

US Marshals, sort of postal clerks, customs people. Their fleet was... they weren't driving tanks, they were driving postal trucks to come relieve this poor embattled church, and it's an interesting story really of the relationship between Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Bobby Kennedy and Dr. King should've had one of the great relationships of the 1960s. Bobby was the white guy who did more for blacks, King obviously the black man who did the most for blacks. They should have been an alliance, but they weren't really. They had a kind of a culture clash. King was a very proud man, and he kind of [had a ] was fascinated by the Kennedys, and when he was in Bobby's presence he was a prince of the church, he was very formal and wanted to be treated with the same level of respect. Bobby Kennedy wasn't that way at all. Bobby Kennedy was a joker, a teaser, believed in self- deprecation, and so the two kind of pass like ships in the night; and this is sad and ironic because actually Dr. King was

funny and loose and would have been the real Dr. King. The natural Dr. King would have gotten along just great with Bobby Kennedy but the rather formal Dr. King who's presenting himself as an ambassador from his nation, as it were, [ah] to Bobby, that didn't go down right and Bobby just didn't get him, didn't cotton to him. Ultimately he saw what a brave man King was, but as people they didn't really connect. This is relevant because on the night that the church is surrounded King has got his flock in there, they're afraid of getting burned to death in a church. King's on the phone to the Attorney General and he's frightened, and he should be frightened. Bobby Kennedy is sort of disappointed by this. Kennedy's... you're supposed to show gallows humor in this circumstance, you're supposed to make light of the whole thing, and so Bobby thinks that it's funny, King is violating some kind of cultural code that Bobby Kennedy holds dear by expressing the truth, which is they're in a dangerous situation and he's scared, when, by Bobby's lights, he oughta be making fun of it and saying

"Oh, we'll get through this," or "This is nothing." And so there's a kind of cultural disconnect there at a bad, [er] unfortunate time. Interviewer] "One of the things in reading your book that struck me was that, that in this situation, we can't ever doubt Martin Luther King's bravery, I think, but that, y'know, there's this culture clash because as a black minister, Martin Luther King was seeing he's responsible for the men, women, children, and I don't know if Bobby Kennedy had ever been in that situation where you're responsible. You're not. The main thing you're thinking about cannot be yourself." [Thomas] You have to think about the two men and their roles and their backgrounds. King is the pastor, he is responsible for the souls in this church, all 1500 of them, not just their bodies but their essence, and he wants to protect them no matter what. Bobby is in a slightly different place, he's not down there, he's not in the middle of it, he's sitting up in Washington, he's got a big agenda,

and Bobby starts talking to King about how "Well back in the day, you know, a century ago, Irish nuns get burned up in an... or Irish orphans got burned up in an orphanage," King doesn't want to hear about hundred-year-old Irish history, he's worried about the here and now, that his people are about to get killed in a church, and so they're just like ships passing in the night. [Interviewer] "Talk about the... just one more without the RFK, um, about the tension in the church. The tension in that church just must have been incredible, that there's actually a mob outside and they're trapped." [Thomas] Well, think of what it was like to sit in a hot steamy church hour after hour, nothing to do but sing prayerfully, [if/in...???] for your deliverance when outside there's a screaming mob of 3,000 people that wants to burn you alive. They're not kidding either, they're not, they're only a spark away from doing something that stupid now. It didn't happen 'cause there was finally some federal intervention by Federal Marshals and finally the National

Guard shows up but it was a close thing. [Interviewer] "I just want you to do it for me because you described the Federal Marshals, I just want you to talk about the fact because, when was that, I was talking to someone about this the other day and I had to keep going into it because you heyou hear 'Federal Marshals' and you think about that badge, you think about these tough guys, who are the Federal Marshals? [Thomas] You think of Federal Marshals as being guys in uniforms or the batons or badges or maybe even weapons. In fact it was a motley crew, a kind of a posse rounded up at the last second of federal workers. Postal workers, some customs officials, maybe some border guards, but they were ... and a lot of these guys were rednecks. The joking up in Washington, I think one of the Kennedys' aides said "I'm not too sure which side they're going to be on." In other words, they may not be defending the blacks, they may be trying to kill them, along with the rest of the mob. Now that's typical of the sort of dark humor, but they were

not any kind of organized army or efficient bunch of peacekeepers, they were a pretty rag-tag amateur group. [Interviewer] "They're finally replaced by the Alabama National Guard, who-- there's no doubt who they were, " (inaudible) [Thomas] The Marshals do finally get replaced by the National Guard but the National Guard's probably on the side of the rioters. I mean these are good local boys led by white officers who are segregationists. Aah, now, nothing happened but, but it's not a sure bet that those National Guardsmen would stop a mob from killing black people. [Interviewer] "Cut for a second. Why were the Kennedys so-- why were they so reluctant to just send in federal troops early on, why don't you just say "Okay, [unclear line] you guys' getting beat, let's send in federal troops." [Thomas] President Kennedy, remember that his predecessor President Eisenhower had to send federal troops

in Little Rock, Arkansas, when they're trying to desegregate the schools after the Brown v. [??] Board decision, and it was an ugly scene to have federal paratroopers, federal soldiers marching in, [ah], to tell the locals what to do. That was not a scene that you wanted to have just in political terms. [ah] If Democrats are running in the south and they need southern votes, southern white votes, they don't want to be seen sending in the troops to put down the southern whites. [Interviewer] "I think the other thing is that what also it does is it sets up this precedent, and so that you send them in, then they go on another Freedom Ride, you got to send them in again, then they do a sit-in and they got to send them in again." [Thomas] I can do that. You have to think about the precedent here, what's to stop the Freedom Riders from doing this again and again and every time they do it, is President Kennedy going to have to send in federal troops? Pretty soon you're going to have an occupied south and maybe another Civil War. [Interviewer] "Great. I think it's kind of like this agreement,

this arrangement, that it's almost like a guarantee, "Mississippi is not going to beat them, we're not going to put the mob on them, we're just going to arrest them," so talk about that-- [Thomas] I don't remember. They end up at the local prison there, don't they? [Interviewer] "Yeah, they do --" [Thomas] Parchman, that awful prison. The Freedom Riders were protected in the sense that they weren't beaten in bus stations in Mississippi. On the other hand they're put into the worst penal system in the United States, Parchman, where a lot of people never emerge from. [Ah] Just a brutal place, brutal guards, brutal manual labor, brutal prison conditions, not a, no day at the beach and in fact a pretty cruel fate for anybody. [Interviewer] "You don't remember if it was an agreement with ?Russburn? or how that happened?" [Thomas] I don't, I don't. [Interviewer] "How do you think that the Kennedys, especially RFK maybe, progressed and

changed during the Freedom Ride period?" [Thomas] There's no question that Bobby Kennedy was changed by the Freedom Riders. Bobby Kennedy was experiential, when he had direct experience with things, it affected him. He had a conscience and he allowed it to be pricked. He went into the Freedom Riders just annoyed by them, wishing they'd go away, but when he came out, after seeing his own aide, John Seigenthaler, beaten by the mobs and seeing how vicious it was down there, it had an impact. He saw injustice and he wanted to stop it, maybe not right away, maybe not overnight, but it set him on a path that led inevitably to him pressing his brother to introduce civil rights laws. There's a direct line from the Freedom Riders to the speech that President Kennedy gave in June of 1963 calling on Congress to pass legislation to get rid of Jim Crow and to give civil rights protection to all citizens. [background speech] [Interviewer] "RFK called for a cooling-off

period. He says he wants for everybody to just cool off after the Montgomery church, do you remember that, what does he want, and why do the Freedom Riders refuse?" [Thomas] Kennedy doesn't want to have to be sending in troops to stop riots so he wants to stop these overt demonstrations and of course Martin Luther King is going to keep on doing it and the Freedom Riders are going to keep on doing it because they know that's the way to get people's attention. That's the way to bear witness and to arouse the press and get them down there. Bobby Kennedy wants to take a more indirect approach here. He is in favor of voting rights. He does send Justice Department folks in a real way down south to try to enroll voters and to exercise their voting rights. That's his approach to dealing with the civil rights movement, it's to try to give them the power of the ballot box so ultimately they can elect their own representatives. [Interviewer] "Let's cut and let's get some room tone. We just need 15, 20 seconds of quiet. [silence] [cut]

What was it that the Kennedys thought the Freedom Rides, how did they think that would affect the Cold War? Why... you always hear that they [unclear words] wanted Khruschev to make of it, what does that mean?" [Thomas] The United States in 1961 at the height of the Cold War, the depth of the Cold War, was trying to project an image that we were on the side of freedom and peace. The Russians, the Communists, they were the oppressors, they were the bad guys, they were the enslavers. Well you couldn't very well be projecting this image of peace and freedom when in your own country you had police beating black people who didn't have the same rights as white people. That's a pretty bad PR statement. [Ah] And it was intolerable, really. [Ah] and at first the Kennedys wanted it just to go away, sweep it under the rug, don't let the rest the world see it. But ultimately they realized they had to do something about it. [Interviewer] Great.