L.A. to Mississippi, Goddamn: The Freedom Rides (1961)

      In April 1947, shortly after the Supreme Court outlawed segregated seating on interstate bus routes, sixteen members of the Congress of Racial Equality and its mother organization, the radical-pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation, boarded buses to test the implementation of the ruling in the upper South. CORE had been started in 1942, the brainchild of James Farmer, a charismatic Black FOR organizer from East Texas. With a handful of others, he proposed planting the seeds of a freedom movement that would employ nonviolent direct action against segregation and inequality.¹ Although the philosophy of CORE was Gandhian (satyagraha), its methodology—sit-ins, jail-ins, wade-ins, boycotts—derived as much from the IWW and the CIO as it did from the Indian freedom movement. The primary organizer of the 1947 project was Bayard Rustin, then an assistant to FOR executive director A. J. Muste—a living legend of the American Left. Splitting into two teams to test both Greyhound and Trailways, the CORE riders avoided major violence, but twelve were arrested for defying the “back of the bus” rule. They called it a “Journey of Reconciliation.” Fourteen years later Farmer revived the tactic, renaming it the “Freedom Ride.”

      The 1961 Freedom Rides relentlessly tested the mettle of civil rights activists against mob violence, police brutality, and a federal government unwilling to enforce federal laws. They also transformed CORE from a tiny pacifist sect into a major actor in the civil rights movement: the only one organized to launch direct action campaigns in both the North and the South. (SNCC and the SCLC, of course, were regional cadres, while the NAACP, with notable local exceptions, was primarily committed to political lobbying and judicial activism.) The Rides, of course, were more than just the Riders: they centrally involved Black campuses and communities in almost every Southern state, as well as tens of thousands of active supporters north of the Mason-Dixon Line, who marched in support demonstrations, organized hundreds of meetings, and raised funds to meet the extortionate bails set by segregationist judges. They also constituted a reservoir of volunteers to keep the Rides on the road. Los Angeles ranked second among CORE’s “fodder cities“ in the North (New York was first), sending five separate contingents of Freedom Riders southward in the summer of 1961. These forty-nine volunteers (twenty-six Black, twenty-three white) were vital reinforcements who braced the movement after the battlefield moved from Alabama to Mississippi, where segregationist officialdom tried to destroy it with mass arrests (nearly 300 of them) and imprisonment under appalling conditions.² CORE’s chapters in Southern California shared in this aura of courage and, for the next two and a half years, became the spearhead of a protest movement that culminated in the United Civil Rights Committee’s campaign of 1963 (see chapter 5).

      A Los Angeles CORE chapter, the first on the West Coast, was founded soon after the end of the Second World War by Black draft resister Manuel Talley and a few other pacifists. Talley was a talented organizer and forceful speaker, but also a polarizing personality. Although the group won some victories against discriminatory restaurants, the pro- and anti-Talley factions soon split into separate chapters. Moreover, L.A. CORE, which adopted an anti–Communist membership clause in 1948, was completely overshadowed in the early Cold War period by the activities of Black progressives around the CP and the CIO. (Dorothy Healey estimated that there were 500 Black CP members in the LA area in 1946.) The national office thought Talley’s skills might be better applied as a Western field organizer; and indeed, he founded several new chapters before another feud led to his resignation.³ In any event Talley was frustrated by CORE’s lack of impact in the Black community, and he created as an alternative the National Consumers Mobilization to boycott products and firms associated with discrimination. He wrote Martin Luther King, for example, to offer support for the Montgomery bus boycott by organizing a parallel movement against Los Angeles Transit Lines, a subsidiary of National City Lines, which also owned the Montgomery system. King undoubtedly sensed that his correspondent was a general without an army, and he politely declined Talley’s offer.⁴ In 1962 Talley regained activist stature in L.A. as a leader of the Citizens Committee on Police Brutality and later as L.A. CORE’s spokesperson on the same issue.⁵ (He died in 1986.)

      Los Angeles CORE was briefly revived in the mid 1950s when two experienced activists, Henry Hodge from St. Louis and Herbert Kelman from Baltimore, moved to the area. After a few arrests, the group successfully integrated Union Station’s coffee shop and barber shop, but a campaign to pressure the major downtown department stores to hire Blacks in non-menial positions quickly ran out of steam, leaving a demoralized residue of ten or twelve members.⁶ But the Southern sit-ins gave the chapter a powerful shot of adrenalin. CORE field secretary James McCain visited L.A. in March 1960 to rally troops for the Woolworth’s protests and assess the potential of the local chapter. In addition to the Independent Student Union (ISU) people, some of whom became Freedom Riders and CORE activists, the Woolworth’s campaign energized civil rights supporters at UCLA, where Robert Singleton, a Black economics major, led the campus NAACP group (later to become the Santa Monica CORE chapter), and Steven McNichols led PLATFORM, a student political party similar to SLATE at Berkeley. For several years they had been organizing protests against racial exclusion in Westwood student housing. Other members of the proto-CORE group included Robert Farrell (a navy midshipman and future member of the LA City Council), Ronald La Bostrie, Rick Tuttle (a future UCLA administrator and city controller) and at Santa Monica College, Singleton’s wife, Helen. Like so many other Black Angelenos, Farrell and La Bostrie had Louisiana roots, and they belonged to Catholics United for Racial Equality—a citywide group struggling uphill against the reactionary policies of Cardinal James McIntyre.

      After Kennedy’s inauguration in January, 1961, the Southern movement began to lose national attention. In March, Martin Luther King, not invited to a meeting at the Justice Department that included other civil rights leaders, asked the White House for an appointment, but the new president had no time to see him. Confronted with an escalating crisis in Berlin, and in the final preparations for the CIA invasion of Cuba, the administration regarded civil rights as an annoyance rather than a priority. James Farmer, newly appointed national director of CORE, agreed with King and the SCLC that the Kennedys had to be prevented from sweeping their civil rights election promises under the carpet of continual Cold War crises. He proposed a Freedom Ride through the Deep