Set the Night on Fire. Mike Davis
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of the Watts branch of the NAACP, was arrested for remonstrating with LAPD officers who almost caused a riot by their rough arrest of two women on Central Avenue. In Sacramento, meanwhile, a white Democratic assemblyman from Compton, Charley Porter, had bottled up the Hawkins Fair Housing Bill in the Ways and Means Committee, where it languished and died.12
On June 18, Martin Luther King spoke at the Sports Arena on behalf of the Freedom Ride Coordinating Committee. In the morning Council Member Roz Wyman, the Westside Democratic power broker, introduced him to Jewish business and political leaders at the Hillcrest Country Club; he then attended a service at the People’s Independent Church of Christ, a congregation led by Reverend Maurice A. Dawkins, a friend of King’s with an ambition to play a similar role in Los Angeles. On the way to the arena, King and his entourage had no idea of what to expect. The event had been heavily publicized on radio and from the pulpit, but none of the organizers were prepared for the enormous turnout that Sunday afternoon. The arena (site of the Democratic Convention the year before) comfortably seated 12,000 people, and with reluctance the fire marshals agreed to allow 6,000 more to stand. But somewhere between 25,000 and 40,000 showed up—a Billy Graham–sized audience—so the Freedom Rally had to be split into two sessions. King himself was amazed, declaring from the podium, “I believe I can say without fear of contradiction that we are participating today in the greatest civil rights rally ever held in the United States.” On the stage with him were Governor Pat Brown (who introduced him), Dick Gregory (as MC), Sammy Davis Jr., Mahalia Jackson, and a dedicated civil rights activist whose role has now been largely forgotten, singer-songwriter Bobby Darin. (Bobby McFerrin’s father Robert, a famous baritone, was scheduled to sing the National Anthem, but he couldn’t squeeze through the crowd to reach the stage.)13
Twenty-three hundred miles away there was considerable anxiety at the Justice Department about what King would say. In Mississippi the Freedom Riders were being transferred to Parchman Farm, perhaps the scariest prison in North America, where discipline was enforced with wrist breakers and cattle prods, while in Washington Bobby Kennedy was cajoling a delegation from the FRCC to accept a “cooling-off period.” In fact he wanted them to give up direct action in exchange for a Southern voter registration program funded by private foundations and protected by the Justice Department. (In the event, the promise of protection proved a cruel deception, one of the most ignominious of the Kennedy administration.)14 King’s response in his Sports Arena address was uncompromising: “We cannot in good conscience cool off in our determination to exercise our Constitutional rights. Those who should cool off are the ones who are hot with violence and hatred in opposition to the rides.” The crowd overwhelmingly agreed, and for some it became a personal summons to Mississippi. “By the end,” ISUer Ellen Kleinman reminisced years later, “the combination of the voices of Mahalia Jackson and Martin Luther King Jr. had been so overwhelming that I decided that I, too, would become a Freedom Rider. It was a turning point, the moment at which my political talking also became serious political walking.”15
Those who immediately “walked the walk” were eleven L.A. CORE members who arrived in Jackson by train from New Orleans on June 25 and quickly vanished into Parchman’s maximum security wing. They included four LACC students, a seventeen-year-old from Fremont High, two artists, a housewife, the (nonviolent?) professional boxer John Rogers and his wife, and a teacher at a parochial school near Watts. The last, Mary Hamilton, became an important leader of CORE in the South, taking on dangerous assignments in Gadsden, Alabama, and Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, as well as winning a landmark Supreme Court case stemming from her refusal to answer an Alabama judge unless he addressed her as “Miss.”16 The second LA contingent, seven young Black activists with three others, arrived in Jackson by train on July 9 to share cells with Riders from Montgomery, along with teenage members of the Jackson Nonviolent Movement arrested the same day. One of the LA crew, 29-year-old Roena Rand, would go on to lead the large but tempestuous CORE chapter in Washington, DC.17
The third LA Freedom Ride—involving four Blacks and eight whites—was sponsored by the religious flagship of the Central Avenue corridor, the Second Baptist Church. Dr. Raymond Henderson had been at the pulpit of this famed church, long associated with the NAACP, since 1940, and his passionate endorsement of the Rides was a snub to Roy Wilkins, the organization’s executive secretary.18 Despite the popularity of the movement among the NAACP’s Youth Councils, Wilkins agreed with the Kennedys that the CORE-initiated movement had become an “extremist” threat to moderate reform. He also believed that CORE was infested with Communists and other left-wingers.19 Henderson was less worried. The Jackson-bound riders included two middle-aged Los Angeles lawyers, Jean Kidwell Pestana and Rose Schorr Rosenberg, whose leadership in the left-wing National Lawyers Guild and travels in the socialist bloc were widely publicized by Mississippi’s mini-KGB, the State Sovereignty Commission, with the help of McCarthyism’s poet laureate, the conservative columnist Fulton Lewis Jr.20
“The notion that the Freedom Rides were part of a Communist plot,” explains Raymond Arsenault, “first emerged in Alabama in mid-May when Bull Connor, Attorney General MacDonald Gallion, and others played upon Cold War suspicions of a grand conspiracy to subvert the Southern way of life. Later, after the focus of the Rides moved to Jackson, the Communist linkage became the stock-in-trade of Mississippi politicians and editors attempting to discredit the campaign.”21 This fusion of McCarthyism and white supremacy was serendipity for hardline Dixiecrats while allowing groups like the John Birch Society to exploit Northern racism. (As we shall see later, the Birchers—with Chief Parker’s unofficial sanction—had spectacular success infiltrating the LAPD and winning its rank and file to their ideas.)
By the end of July, scores of Freedom Riders, having served the thirty-nine days that CORE requested, were bailing out of Parchman and leaving the state. Mississippi’s leaders, as well as the Justice Department, assumed that the movement had run out of steam and would soon dissipate. However, Farmer, as we have seen, had prepared for such a contingency and now called for more CORE reserves from the West Coast. With the help of veteran activist Henry Hodge, Santa Monica CORE, led by Robert and Helen Singleton, dispatched a contingent that arrived in Jackson on June 25. Nine of the fifteen LA Riders were, like Bob Singleton, UCLA students, and they included Michael Grubbs, the nephew of famed historian John Hope Franklin.22 By now, the arrest and processing of Riders had become routine, and the volunteers were well informed of the treatment they could expect. But while waiting in the Jackson Jail to be transferred to Parchman, Helen Singleton was “most amazed but not amused” to find a portrait of LAPD Chief Parker on a wall. It was a recruiting poster extolling the opportunities offered by the LAPD.23
In early August Birmingham’s Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth came to L.A. In 1956 he had crawled out of the rubble after his parsonage was bombed by the Klan; more recently he had saved Freedom Riders from the Klan. He addressed almost a thousand people at Will Rogers Park in Watts, then, in a demonstration of Southern stamina, marched several hundred of them nearly ten miles to the Federal Building downtown to demand protection for civil rights workers in the Deep South.24 The spirit of that summer was also manifest in a successful boycott, organized by the Sentinel and the Eagle together with CORE and the NAACP, against the annual Times-sponsored charity football game on August 17 between the LA Rams and the Washington Redskins. The DC team, owned by the venomous bigot George Preston Marshall, was the last Jim Crow holdout against integration in the NFL, and the Sentinel’s sportswriters—“Brock” Brockenbury and Brad Pye—had long blasted the Times and the Rams for bringing “these Washington Redskins here every year to insult their Negro customers in the first game of the season.” In the event, most Black Rams fans stayed away from the game, and some joined the interracial protest of 500 people (including the great blues shouter, Jimmy Witherspoon) outside the Coliseum. The LA protest, moreover, catalyzed demonstrations at other “Paleskin” games, increasing the discomfort of Marshall’s rival owners and reinforcing threats from Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall to deny the team use of the new DC-owned Washington Stadium. In December, pro sports’ leading racist George Wallace finally capitulated and drafted Heisman Trophy winner Ernie Davis.25
Meanwhile the fifth and last LA Freedom Ride (with seven white and four Black participants) had set out for