G-Man, page 76
The episode was nonetheless a disaster for Hoover—and a warning about the tenuous state of his relations with Southern law enforcement. From the moment agents arrived in town, the residents of Poplarville had complained about federal interference, accusing Hoover’s men of “harassment” and “gestapo tactics.” Local police were no friendlier. “We encountered open hostility from some officials in the Poplarville area,” Hoover later acknowledged. In response, his former agents had tried to defend the Bureau. In a speech before a local civic group, Van Landingham insisted that the FBI’s investigation helped to preserve rather than undermine the “total and complete segregation of the races in Mississippi” by showing that the system could right itself. Hugh Clegg backed him up by attempting to organize local ex-agents into a chapter of the Society of Former Special Agents, from which they could sing Hoover’s praises. But the rest of Hoover’s former employees around the state, men he had trained and indoctrinated, rejected that idea, and refused to speak out on the Bureau’s behalf. Clegg felt their decision “showed weakness” and “a very wishy-washy attitude.” He apologized to Hoover on their behalf.
Under the circumstances, Hoover was not surprised when the local prosecutor refused to consider the FBI’s report or to allow FBI agents to testify in front of the grand jury. A federal grand jury, convened by the Justice Department but populated by local residents, rejected the attempt to find a federal statute that would make prosecution viable. Hoover was livid about the pointless effort and expense—$87,150 of taxpayer funds, all down the drain. He was furious, too, that federal power looked so impotent in the face of local resistance. “We were able to establish the identity of a number of members of the mob who participated in the abduction of Parker and obtained admissions from some of the participants,” he noted in his appropriations testimony. Then “the Pearl River County grand jury met at Poplarville . . . and ignored the case.”[4]
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When Kennedy arrived in office, Hoover initially assumed that little would change. Despite rumblings of party secession over the years, in 1960 the Solid South remained a bedrock of the Democratic coalition. Georgia and Louisiana had given Kennedy greater margins of victory than his home state of Massachusetts. Hoping for just this outcome, Kennedy had hedged on civil rights during the campaign. His boldest proclamation was the vow to eliminate discrimination in federally subsidized housing with “a stroke of the Presidential pen.” Once in office, however, he moved slowly, failing to sign much of anything.[5]
The Freedom Ride was an attempt to force his hand. As civil rights leaders pointed out, major pillars of the Jim Crow system had long ago been declared unconstitutional. Little was being done, however, to translate those fine words into deeds. The Brown decision, now seven years old, had little to show for itself beyond partial school desegregation in willing cities such as Washington, D.C. Another troubling example could be found in interstate transportation, where the Supreme Court had ruled as early as 1946 that segregation violated the Constitution. In December 1960, during the interregnum between Kennedy’s election and his assumption of office, it extended that ruling to bus stations and other transit facilities, declaring separate water fountains, lunch counters, restrooms, and seating areas unconstitutional as well. By the spring of 1961, however, the “Colored” and “White” signs were still hanging, and drivers were still forcing Black interstate passengers to the back of the bus. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), a small civil rights group based in New York and Washington, sought to challenge that situation, and to call attention to the Kennedy administration’s lack of action.
Their Freedom Ride plan was brilliantly simple: leaving from Washington on May 4, an interracial group of men and women would ride south, with the goal of arriving in New Orleans on May 17 to mark the seventh anniversary of Brown. Along the way, they would test compliance with the Supreme Court decisions by sending “colored” passengers to use “white” restrooms and eat at “white” counters (and vice versa), and by seating themselves aboard the buses in violation of segregation ordinances. On paper, this was no more than an exercise of constitutional rights. But everyone understood that federal court decisions and Southern practices were two different things. The friction between them could be explosive.
The chief goal of the Freedom Ride was to insist that the federal government enforce its own laws, to make it impossible for John and Robert Kennedy—and, by extension, Hoover—to sit on the sidelines. A full two weeks before departing, CORE sent letters to the FBI, the Justice Department, and the White House outlining the Freedom Riders’ itinerary and asking for federal protection. Receiving no reply, the group reached out again through journalist Simeon Booker, the FBI’s longtime contact at Jet magazine, who planned to ride along with the activists and document their journey. On May 3, Booker met briefly with Bobby Kennedy, who said that CORE should let him know if they ran into any problems. Booker also spoke with at least one FBI official. On the night before their departure, he called FBI headquarters to say that the Freedom Ride was preparing to head out and that they were concerned about the prospect of violence.[6]
Had he been a different sort of man, Hoover might have decided to make a grand gesture: to offer FBI protection to the Freedom Riders, or at least to assure them that federal authorities would be working to keep them safe. Instead, he took the opportunity to articulate the limits of FBI involvement. FBI agents would gather intelligence, observe any conflicts, and conduct the needed investigations, he informed the attorney general, but they would not act as bodyguards, intervene to prevent violence, or interfere with the jurisdiction of local police. According to CORE director James Farmer, Hoover’s approach included recruiting an informant among the riders—perhaps Booker, perhaps someone else. Other than that, the FBI mostly ignored the start of the Freedom Ride. So did the national press, the Justice Department, and the White House.[7]
The only hint of official acknowledgment came from Bobby Kennedy, who ventured south in early May to deliver a speech at the University of Georgia. The occasion for the speech was Law Day, recently established as a federal holiday to counterbalance the May Day long celebrated by communists and leftists. In that appearance, he affirmed the supremacy of Supreme Court decisions, “however much we might disagree with them.” He also begged white Southerners to avoid acts of violence and lawbreaking, assuring them that the federal authorities meant business. “I say to you today that if the orders of the court are circumvented, the Department of Justice will act,” he proclaimed. A week later, as their bus headed into Birmingham, Alabama, the Freedom Riders put that claim to the test.[8]
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To most Americans, Birmingham was well known as a hotbed of racial violence—a city “fragmented by the emotional dynamite of racism, reinforced by the whip, the razor, the gun, the bomb, the torch, the club, the knife, the mob, the police and many branches of the state’s apparatus,” as one New York Times writer described it in 1960. To Hoover, it was infamous for a slightly different reason. Long before most other Southern law enforcement officials rose against the Bureau, Birmingham’s public safety commissioner, Eugene “Bull” Connor, had rejected Hoover’s leadership. A die-hard Southern segregationist unwilling to compromise with federal power, Connor was more than a policeman. He was one of Birmingham’s chief power brokers and helped to call the shots around town. He was also widely known for his sympathy with the Ku Klux Klan, which often acted as an auxiliary arm of the Birmingham police.[9]
Connor had come to office in the 1930s as a Hoover-style reformer, promising to bring the latest science to a police culture dominated by handshakes and cronyism. As a young man, he had supported civil service rules and appealed to the FBI for help in establishing the city’s first crime lab. Beginning in the 1940s, however, Connor had turned on Hoover, concerned with the rise in lynching investigations and the enforcement of civil rights. From that point on, he had refused to enroll Birmingham police officers at the FBI Academy, shipping them off instead to a Louisville, Kentucky, training school that specialized in “Southern” police techniques. By the late 1950s, with civil rights conflicts in full bloom, he had taken to openly denouncing the FBI as a tool of Northern liberals.
Connor was forced nonetheless to deal with Hoover’s men, because in Birmingham, as elsewhere, former agents and academy graduates were an indelible part of the law enforcement landscape. When Connor took an unexpected four-year hiatus from office beginning in 1953, his replacement as public safety commissioner quietly started sending local officers back to the academy. One of those men was Jamie Moore, a “large, heavy-set, pleasant amiable southern gentleman,” in the words of one Bureau report, appointed as Birmingham’s chief of police by the new commissioner. FBI instructors had seen in Moore a way to crack the culture of resistance that Connor had introduced. “Moore can be expected to be a loyal supporter of the Bureau,” they noted, the highest praise that could be afforded an academy graduate. When Connor returned to the commissioner’s office in 1957, he was appalled to find a Hoover loyalist running the police department. “You don’t fit into the picture as my chief of police,” he informed Moore, and promptly launched a campaign to remove him from office. But Moore faced him down, holding on to the post while also winning election as the president of the Alabama chapter of the FBI National Academy Associates. As the Freedom Riders approached the city in the spring of 1961, he still held both positions.[10]
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Hoover knew that there might be violence in Birmingham once the Freedom Riders arrived—not just because of the city’s reputation, but because a key source had told him so. As early as April, before the activists left on their trip, the local FBI field office sent along rumblings of a plot being hatched between the local police and the Klan’s outlaw vigilantes. The information came from a man named Gary Rowe, a former Marine turned Ku Klux Klan member and, as of 1960, a paid informant for the Bureau. Hoover put his hopes for the police in academy graduates like Moore, but he counted on men like Rowe to keep the FBI in the know about Klan activities.[11]
Hoover had set his sights on infiltrating the Klan as early as the 1940s. As with the lynching investigations, his initial efforts came to little in terms of prosecution or jail time. But they did produce some rudimentary lists and files, the start of a long-term inquiry. Hoover carried that inquiry into the massive-resistance era, relying on the FBI’s growing roster of secret intelligence-gathering techniques to enhance the Bureau’s knowledge. Among his initiatives was a small-scale but ongoing effort to cultivate Klan informants. Some were “plants,” recruited by agents to join the Klan on the FBI’s behalf. Others were existing Klan members who proved willing, for one reason or another, to go on the Bureau payroll.[12]
Rowe fell somewhere in between. In 1960, the Klan’s Eastview 13 Klavern in Birmingham had set its sights on recruiting him. As part of their due diligence, a local Klansmen had called the FBI to ask, oh so casually, if Rowe had any connection to the Bureau. Intrigued by the strange question, local agents had gone to Rowe themselves to ask if he might indeed be willing join the Klan—but on behalf of J. Edgar Hoover. To both sides, he seemed like a ready-made Klansman: “young, twenty-six, and strong,” in one historian’s description, “with a hair-trigger temper and a habit of solving problems with his fists.” He also happened to be a “cop buff” with a history of idolizing law enforcement, an attitude that primed him to say yes to the Bureau’s offer.
Hoover’s instructions in recruiting informants like Rowe called for “a thorough, intensive background investigation and careful personal scrutiny” of all candidates. Rowe passed the Bureau’s test, but his behavior since then showed just how fine the line between acceptable and unacceptable behavior could be. In the summer of 1960, he became his klavern’s “Night-Hawk-in-Chief,” charged with recruiting members and personally hoisting the burning cross. By fall, he had moved up to an “Action Squad” that carried out the group’s most secretive and violent operations. Under those auspices, in April 1961 he had participated in an attack on an elderly white couple temporarily caring for a Black child. He also helped to plan the much more ambitious scheme aimed at the Freedom Riders, all while keeping the FBI in the loop.
As Rowe and his fellow Klansmen envisioned it, the attack on the Freedom Riders was supposed to play out in several distinct stages. On Sunday, May 14, when the Freedom Riders would be departing Atlanta and heading west into Alabama, a few Klansmen would buy tickets aboard the buses, posing as ordinary passengers. Once the vehicle or vehicles crossed the Alabama state border, those men would begin intimidating and attacking the activists. Then, when they reached the town of Anniston, about sixty-five miles east of Birmingham, a large crowd of supporters would be waiting to lend a hand. If either bus made it beyond Anniston, thirty more Klansmen would be on call at the Birmingham bus terminals to deliver the final blows.
Ordinarily, on learning of such a violent plot in the making, the FBI would contact the city police, expecting the local authorities to inform and protect everyone involved. But according to Rowe, the Birmingham police knew all about the scheme, and had agreed to play their part by delaying any intervention once the beatings began. Sergeant Thomas Cook, a Connor loyalist and the Klan’s main point of contact with the police department, promised that the Klansmen could “beat ’em, bomb ’em, maim ’em, kill ’em” for a full fifteen minutes before worrying that the police would come in. Under the circumstances, Hoover tried to finesse the situation by turning to police chief Jamie Moore—“confident that Chief Moore, a graduate of the FBI Academy, would safeguard the Freedom Riders,” in the words of Bull Connor’s biographer.
Moore quickly betrayed Hoover’s trust. On the night of Saturday, May 13, he called the local field office to say that he was leaving town, ostensibly to visit his mother for Mother’s Day, when the Freedom Riders were due to arrive in Birmingham. He suggested that they communicate any future updates about the buses to Sergeant Cook, the very man (as both Moore and the FBI knew) who was helping to plan the attacks. Hoover still might have done something at this point: instructed his agents to protect the buses, warned the attorney general, even alerted the Freedom Riders themselves. But it was the weekend, he was not in the office, and there is no evidence that anyone thought he would want to take such action. Instead, with Moore out of the picture, local agents kept Cook up-to-date about the Freedom Riders’ schedule, calling in when the buses left Atlanta for Birmingham. In effect, they helped to make sure that the Klan was ready once the Freedom Riders arrived.[13]
The attacks came off more or less as Rowe had predicted in his advance reports, a well-coordinated, multistage assault masquerading as spontaneous mob violence. The Greyhound bus ran into trouble first, just as it pulled into Anniston. Having caught wind of rumors describing a bloodbath in the offing, hundreds of townspeople lined the route, many still dressed in their Sunday best, to “welcome” the Freedom Riders into town. The bus station itself appeared to be locked and deserted until a whooping gang of Klansmen, armed with bats, pipes, and pistols, came rushing toward it. While they slashed the tires and pounded on the metal frame, the police were nowhere to be seen. Eventually a desultory band of officers showed up to escort the bus away, only to abandon it once again at the town line. A few miles outside Anniston, the bus rolled to a stop, disabled by its slashed tires, and became a sitting target for the carloads of Klansmen trailing behind. After several more minutes of jeering and taunting, someone threw a burning pile of rags into the bus through a broken window, sending black smoke swirling through the interior. A few minutes later, just after the passengers had fled the burning bus, the gas tank exploded. The confrontation finally ground to a halt when highway patrolmen showed up and fired warning shots into the air. They looked the other way as the Klansmen dispersed, failing to note any license plates or physical descriptions.
The second bus, from Trailways, showed up in Anniston an hour later to find a deserted station and no mention of what had taken place. Fatefully, the driver proceeded on to Birmingham, where the next phase of the plan was already underway. Several Klansmen had boarded this second bus back in Atlanta, posing as passengers. Before the bus pulled out of Anniston, they began to terrorize riders, pummeling their targets into unconsciousness and then hauling their bodies to the back of the bus. The greatest violence came in Birmingham itself, where several dozen Klansmen lay in wait. They allowed the passengers to exit the bus and enter the terminal before the assault began, a full fifteen minutes during which the unarmed passengers—including several innocent bystanders—were beaten, kicked, and punched, sometimes by half a dozen men at a time. When the fifteen minutes were up, the Birmingham police finally appeared to clear the station and enforce the law.
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If the Klansmen had been able to keep their mouths shut, the whole saga might have ended then and there, just another of the gruesome flare-ups that seemed to characterize the Southern struggle over segregation. But the plotters had boasted around town about what was going to happen, and so photographers and reporters were on site when the Trailways bus rolled in. Their ranks included Howard K. Smith, a national correspondent for CBS. That afternoon, Smith began to broadcast a string of national radio reports, describing how what appeared to be “spontaneous outbursts of anger” were actually “carefully planned and susceptible to having been easily prevented or stopped had there been a wish to do so.” By the next morning, when Hoover returned to the office, the violence visited upon the Freedom Riders was front-page news. Even in Birmingham, the local paper ran a page-one photograph of the melee at the bus terminal: a circle of angry white men punching, kicking, and beating a hunched-over victim.[14]
