American Experience; Freedom Riders; Interview with Ken Grove, 2 of 2

[Interviewer] So you see these people, one of the things that-- as I was started reading about the Freedom Ride that struck me was that on some level it's like it was all about sitting together on a bus, you know what I mean? So why, you see these people and this is a place where you've lived, you lived here all your life, right, and these people are so angry-- why? What's going on in their heads? [Grove] It's difficult to understand. It was one of the things that made me determined when I graduated from high school to get as far from Alabama as I could afford to go to college and I did that and when I got to college I became an immediate spokesman for Alabama for other people who wanted to know that very question. "Why, what's in their heads?" And as often as not I couldn't explain it because I didn't understand it. It was a set of ideas that seemed to be perpetuated, it was an ideology, it was not anything based in reality and you can't explain it, that

these people who I grew up with, a lot of them, they held it and they deeply believed it and it was their value system. Not that they were bad people, but they really felt threatened and that's the only-- in all of these years of thinking about it I think the one thing perhaps I didn't appreciate was just how much they felt threatened, whether that was real or not, they must've been behaving out of a motivation based on the fact that they felt their life, their world, was really really threatened by this change. [Interviewer] One of the guys that we talked to in Anniston, an editor of the paper there, said that, he had this great metaphor, it was like a ship that was taking on water and people were starting to really see that and panic, and they-- so talk about-- and I think that you also said that there's this idea that this

civilization, this thing, is starting to go under. [Grove] I think a lot of people looked at the Civil Rights Movement and they saw it as an erosion of the cultural standards they felt they had established. And it was based in the mistaken belief that for some reason black people are inferior to white people. That had to be their understanding of the situation. They saw a real threat and in retrospect looking back on it, they couldn't have known black people very well so it would be very easy to perpetuate this ideology or this set of myths that would carry forward and cause such a violent and adverse reaction. And it makes me appreciate how brave the Freedom Riders were. I don't think I really did at the time, I was very young of course and didn't understand what it takes to have the kind of courage to do the things and face the threats that they did. But having seen it and all of the press and

media coverage afterwards, the photographs and all of that, this was a truly remarkable and very very brave and courageous group of people that were willing to risk their life and limb to get out and emancipate us all from this set of ideologies that had confined us so much. I need a drink of water. [Interviewer] What happened that day? [Grove] What happened that day again is the Freedom Riders came to town, they were viciously and horribly assaulted without any police protection being present. The highway patrol escort that was escorting the bus-- [Interviewer] I'm sorry, let me ask this question again-- [Grove] I saw people intent on being-- [Interviewer] You can start over again, so where were you and what happened? [Grove] Okay, I was at the newspaper building of the Alabama Journal, which was co-published with the Montgomery Advertiser. Must've been a group meeting or something like that, that was the only time we ever went to that building and it had been known for some time that the Freedom Riders were

coming and word did spread throughout the building that they're here and there's a mob. So we tried to see what we could see, some folks went up to try to get on the roof of the building and a few of us went out the front door, went down Washington Avenue and we did see people with sticks, I recall largely men, in fact all men, I'm pretty sure, carrying sticks and bats and going and lots of shouting and that sort of stuff and I turned back. It was very fearful for me and we decided the best thing to do would be to get out of town and go home, which we did. The rest of the day was the news, we heard that the president might mobilize the National Guard and send them in to keep order and [coughs] excuse me. [cut] Only from a distance, I mean with enough acuity to know they were very angry. [Interviewer] Let's talk about that, what did you see as you saw these men go by? [Grove] Well I saw them moving

at a great hurry and they were very agitated in appearance, moving rapidly and I was close enough to see that they had very angry looks on their faces. [Interviewer] They were up to no good. [Grove] Well that's a classic way of saying it, they were up to no good. [Interviewer] I just wanted to ask you one more thing, you told me the story about being hunting and your friends saying to you, "don't ever say 'sir' to a nigger," and that was a-- what did that mean to you? [Grove] That meant that I had broken the code of this ideological standard that-- I took it as I was having an inappropriate interaction with a person of the other race, that that was forbidden, that's not in the system, you can't do that because it will give them, the term was "uppity ideas" and in that term "uppity ideas," I think there was some recognition of the potential that these people might really stand up and

achieve something someday and of course they had the misperception that that would be a threat to them, rather than addition to the community, to the society, and to the economy that our experience has been. You know, we tried to run the south on half of our economy and it's really been good in the interim to see the development of a black middle class and prosperity among black people and I think it's been of a major benefit especially to this city, we are after all half white and half black and we depend on each other now in ways that we never knew were possible during the Civil Rights Movement. [Interviewer] Great. I'm good-- [PA] This is room tone. [silence] Thank you.