Buses are a comin, p.22
Buses Are a Comin', page 22
“I’ll let you off here. Head across those tracks.” His voice had empathy. He wasn’t ordering me off or telling me where I should “git” to. He was offering me something. A sense of direction. Like a compass.
“Thanks,” I said, returning his gentleness with a tone of gratitude. I stepped off.
It was such a brief exchange. He didn’t charge me anything. He didn’t snarl or bully or mutter indignantly. He was kind. It was so different from what I had experienced all day—the nicest thing that had happened to me since entering the state of Alabama.
* * *
As a child, I reveled in choo-choo trains, huffing and puffing and billowing thick black smoke. Kenneth and I would sit down as close as we could to the rumbling iron so we could feel the ground shake as trains passed. We loved the smell of burning coal and the sight of something so big and powerful.
My parents commanded us not to cross the tracks. It was too dangerous. We thought they wanted to keep us safe from the train cars. And they did. But as I grew, I came to understand “Don’t cross the tracks” was a different instruction from “Don’t play on the tracks” or “Don’t walk on the tracks.” I came to understand Mom and Dad were protecting Kenneth and me from what was on the far side of the tracks.
* * *
That’s what the driver was doing. Taking me to the tracks. Protecting me. He and I both knew the other side of the tracks meant the Black section of town—“my” section of town—where people like me would take care of people like me. In other words, the poor section, the area of urban blight that my social studies book at David T. had taught me about. In Atlanta, I lived on “the other side of the tracks.” He was dropping me off in the same relative place in Birmingham. In his kindness to me, he was saying all I had to do was cross them and I would be okay. I’d be safe.
I crossed the tracks and spotted a phone booth. All of us on the Ride were required to carry pocket change, so we could place phone calls if needed. This was my day to need the change. I picked up the receiver and inserted a coin. The voice on the other end was Fred Shuttlesworth.
* * *
“What do I do?” I said. My thoughts fuzzy, my surroundings unfamiliar. I had just escaped and was in a strange city. Now what?
It was a question familiar to Fred Shuttlesworth.
“Where are you?”
“I don’t know. The tracks.”
That could have been anywhere. Birmingham’s industry guaranteed railroad tracks. My memory of this is in pieces, but I must have given enough landmarks.
“Stay there. Help’s coming.”
Birmingham was Fred Shuttlesworth’s city. He knew how to find people in trouble.
I felt light-headed. Unsteady. I sat down on the tracks. And waited. Cars passed. None slowed. My head felt wet. I didn’t care. I cared about a car stopping.
One did. Who knows how long it took? Two men got out. The driver didn’t. They introduced themselves. I don’t remember their names. Deacons from Reverend Shuttlesworth’s church, they said. They checked me over and looked alarmed. The top of my head, they told me, had a gash. That’s why my fingers were wet. I don’t remember reaching up to feel it.
“You need to see a doctor.”
We drove off. Time disappears when you’re in shock. Feeling wet doesn’t matter. You think of minor stuff and ignore the major.
“Where’s my coat? What happened to my coat?”
That’s what you think. The blood doesn’t matter, but who the hell took my coat?
They gave me a towel and told me to press it against my head. We pulled into a driveway. The men told me to stay put. I don’t know how long I waited. They came back and started the car.
“What was that about?”
“He’s not going to see you. We’re moving on to the next one.”
Two more stops. Two more “moving on.”
There were three black doctors in Birmingham, I found out that day. All were afraid to treat me. The doctors saw us as “outside agitators.” Birmingham’s segregationist propaganda had seeped into the black community. That’s the depth of fear Birmingham fostered. Members of my own community saw me as trouble. For them.
Thugs on a bus. A mob attack. Now, Negro doctors refusing to treat me, a Negro patient. This day told me in Birmingham there lived a different brand of segregationist. The whites of this city saw war coming to their community, saw me as an invader. They were prepared to defend their city. Or at least their lifestyle, their customs, and their prejudices. They were prepared to defend them with deadly force. The blacks lived in tangible fear of the consequences of getting “out of line” with white standards.
“What now?” I asked.
“We’re going to the church.”
* * *
Bethel Baptist Church stood on Twenty-Ninth Avenue in Birmingham. The other side of the tracks from where the bus driver let me off. A double staircase rising from the sidewalk to a single front door took parishioners to a long lengthwise sanctuary with tall, arched stained glass windows. Beautiful. Majestic. I had never been to Birmingham, so I had never seen it. Beside it, the parsonage, rebuilt after the 1957 bombing took Fred Shuttlesworth from bed to crater, provided church-supported housing for the pastor and his family. Ruby Shuttlesworth loved her husband, but years of confronting Birmingham’s racism was taking a toll on her and her children—Fred, Jr., Ricky, Carolyn, and Pat. When the deacons couldn’t find a doctor to treat me, it was Bethel Baptist’s parsonage they headed for.
* * *
I held the towel to my head. By the time we arrived at Bethel, blood had begun to soak the towel. The deacons led me inside the parsonage. Reverend Shuttlesworth came to my aid. One look at my head put him on the phone for a doctor. I was starting to pay attention to the wet. My fingers were slick and sticky simultaneously.
A nurse in the congregation said she could bandage my injury with a patch that would pull the open wound together until we could find someone willing to treat it. She cleaned the area and bound the wound. Knowing the blood flow was stopped relaxed me. I was grateful.
Jim and Walter arrived. Bethel members rushed to help Jim into the parsonage, his forehead a mass of red. Both men looked awful. Jim saw me and shook my hand. It might have been reflexive. He didn’t seem much aware of what he was doing.
Reverend Shuttlesworth switched tactics. Not able to find a doctor to help with my wounds, he turned to calling for an ambulance to aid Jim. No ambulance would come. White emergency providers had no intention of coming to the other side of the tracks. Black providers balked. It was the doctor scenario all over again. Fear. Concern for their own safety. Worry over arrest. Worry for their families. Birmingham’s oppression mired an entire community in a bog of inaction. Reverend Shuttlesworth was furious. He bristled at their fear. He thought it cowardice. He thought it contemptible.
My wound seeped. Jim’s practically gushed. I had no way to see my injury; Jim’s skull was exposed from his.6 He was in far worse shape than I was.
Somehow Reverend Shuttlesworth prevailed. An ambulance was on its way. So were the police. They challenged Reverend Shuttlesworth to turn our white Riders over for arrest. Segregation laws extended to residences. Walter and Jim were breaking them.
Where had the police been earlier in the day when we needed them? Even The Birmingham News wanted to know the answer to that. “Where Were the Police?” was the headline on the front-page editorial on Monday, May 15.7 We later found out the commissioner of public safety, Bull Connor, had given the Klan fifteen minutes free rein to do whatever they wanted before he would bring his forces to the bus stations and stop them. Connor could get away with it. It was Mother’s Day after all. He could claim it took time for his officers to report in from their celebrations. And no one would question Connor’s authority.
Except Fred Shuttlesworth.
Reverend Shuttlesworth challenged back. He wasn’t surrendering Riders to police when what Jim needed was medical care. The police backed down and left. Fred Shuttlesworth was accustomed to intimidating the police as much as they tried to intimidate him. Finally, an ambulance took Jim to the hospital. My bleeding was sufficiently stopped that I stayed at the parsonage.
All the Riders in our Trailways group found a way to Reverend Shuttlesworth’s church. Simeon Booker showed up, too, and we all started to piece together our individual experiences of the day. Each had a story to tell. Herman and Jerry avoided the melee at the Birmingham bus station by escaping moments before the violence began. Frances, too, dodged disaster by taking a city bus, at Walter’s insistence, away from the trouble before it started—as I had done after it ended. Walter, himself, chose to stand with Jim and me. I did not know it, but Walter followed us into the station disregarding his injuries. It was a near-fatal decision. The mob descended on this older, already-wounded gentleman with ferocity. He did not remember what had happened, but Simeon witnessed it.8 The mob hammered Walter till he collapsed to the floor. A new layer of bright, fresh blood lined his head atop the dried blood from the bus ride. Walter crawled and pawed the floor like a stunned, wounded animal seeking safety.
Jim was beaten unconscious by the mob that encircled him. But more than that, Jim’s head was busted open, his nose crumpled, his face gashed, his clothes soaked with blood. That was when Simeon knew he had to leave to get help.
When Walter awoke from his stupor on the floor of the station, the depot was almost empty. The storm had passed. The mob gone. He stumbled upon a nearly incoherent Jim. Together, the dazed pair succeeded in hailing a cab with a black driver who brought them to Bethel. To Fred Shuttlesworth.
Ike Reynolds was roughed up and deposited in a Dumpster much the way we all had been deposited in the back of the bus in Anniston.9 He was injured, but nothing like Jim or Walter or, for that matter, me. CBS newsman (and future anchor of ABC’s national news broadcast) Howard K. Smith was coincidentally in Birmingham filming for a special documentary called CBS Reports: Who Speaks for Birmingham?10 Having been tipped off to the coming violence, Smith was on-site during the riot. Smith came across Ike and took him to a hotel room to get a firsthand account for the evening news. Somehow Smith’s report and Ike’s testimony never made it on air. Ike got to Bethel Baptist thanks to Smith’s news team.
* * *
As Jim headed for medical help, the caravan carrying our Greyhound companions from Anniston arrived at Bethel Baptist. Hank. Genevieve. Relief replaced our fears created earlier in the day by the ambulance sirens we heard and the ominous words of our bus driver. Al. Mae Frances. Stunned and battered. But alive. And mobile. To us they seemed resurrected from the dead. Jimmy. Joe. Ed. We were so glad—and so thankful—to see them. All were present and accounted for. Joy abundant. Grace overflowing.
Details emerged as each of them related the difficulty of their day and the fate of their bus.
When the Greyhound stopped in the alley adjacent to the bus station in Anniston, Hank told us, the scene was as tranquil as … well, as Mother’s Day. Anxieties the Riders felt seemed misplaced. Quiet and calm and Sunday-in-May serenity pervaded the air. Then, it didn’t.
From nowhere Anger surrounded the bus. Clubs. Chains. Bats. Sticks. Hatred smashed against windows. Outrage beat on the body of the bus. Testosterone spewed venom. It was madness. Genevieve could not believe her eyes or her ears. Hank felt caged. The bus started rocking. One man lay down in front of the tires to block the bus from leaving. Others stabbed at the tires with blades to keep the bus from leaving.
A half hour of trapped terror ensued. Riders watched with the horror of fatal inevitability. A window shattered. An object hit the side of the bus. Another thud. Another. Hank and Genevieve and Joe and Mae Frances looked through windows in shock at Anger screaming at them to come off the bus. Another window shattered. Hatred demanded Al and Ed and Jimmy to get off the bus. Their fear commanded them to stay on. They stayed on. Fists pounded the bus, bats struck. More windows broke. More shouts. Riders were powerless against the violence. The confusion of yells and thuds, the vibrations and rocking of the bus, the shattering of more glass added to the terror, to the inexplicable vehemence of pent-up, now-outpoured, aggression.
Then it was over. Police sauntered in and made a show of restoring stability. They cleared enough of a way for the bus to leave. The driver backed out of the alley. It drove—more like limped—away.
But not alone.
Cars and trucks followed. Some passed the bus then slowed to keep the bus from speeding up or getting away. As if it could with punctured tires. A bizarre and dangerous caravan of vehicles left Anniston heading west down Highway 202.
Riders wondered what possible path to safety could be available. Then they found out.
None.
Five miles out of Anniston, the Greyhound’s tires lost all air. Riding on rims, it lost the ability to continue. The driver pulled over at an intersection with a lone country grocery store, Forsyth and Son. He abandoned the vehicle, leaving Riders and regular passengers at the mercy of men intent on teaching the Riders the last lesson of their lives: Don’t. Don’t think of changing our ways. Don’t dare to try your laws in our state. Don’t ever come this way again.
Men beat the bus with arms and fists and crowbars and pipes and chains. One man tossed an incendiary device through a broken window. It went off. Smoke filled the cabin. Passengers coughed and panicked.
Where to go?
What to do?
Genevieve bent low to let the smoke rise over her. Hank, too. First, he crouched. Then, he lay in the aisle. He could try to make it out of the bus and into the mob. Or he could die. He could save himself from murder by choosing to suffocate to death. He could fall asleep from breathing smoke, or he could die at the hands of a mob. Fear of the mob surpassed fear of the smoke. He chose asphyxiation. Hank determined to stay down.
Genevieve chose life. She told us she shouted out, asking for direction, “Is there air anywhere?” No reply.
Smoke turned to fire. Panic turned to desperation.
That’s when Genevieve acted.
Genevieve rose from her knees and sought a window to slip through. She squirmed and writhed her way out and down to the ground. There she saw Jimmy and Charlotte Devree, the journalist. They had wedged their way out of windows, too. They all crawled, then scooted, as best they could from the bus now turning into flame.
Hank discovered his instinct for survival overcame his inclination to die. He rushed for the front door and pushed with all his considerable strength. That’s when the voices lashed out.
“Let’s burn them niggers alive. Let’s burn ’em alive!”11
Hank pushed. The mob pushed harder. Stalemate. The door did not budge.
Nowhere to go. No way out. Hank could not fit through a window. His first decision to choose death on the bus would end up matching the mob’s final verdict. Smoke or heat or flame would suffocate or burn him to death.
Then something remarkable happened.
An explosion in the back of the bus. Where the fuel tank was.
A mob, prepared to burn human beings alive, was not prepared to suffer the same death. They backed away. The door opened.
Hank tumbled out the door, followed by a chain of passengers hurrying from the flames, stumbling to the ground. Confusion consumed the dazed escapees. Fire consumed the bus. Thick black smoke billowed from windows. Yellow flame flew up. Clouds of charcoal and ash and dust and soot climbed skyward. The broken front windshield served more like a train’s smokestack, allowing massive plumes to rise. Hank, Mae Frances, Joe, and Ed sat in enfeebled fatigue looking back at the conflagration. The bus was a furnace. The door from which they’d escaped now engulfed in incineration.
Hank told us a man approached him expressing concern.
“Are you okay?” the man asked as if he meant it.
Hank nodded yes, and a baseball bat struck his head. Now he wasn’t. The bat flattened him to the ground.12
Mae Frances was grounded, too. Lying prone in her white dress, weakened from smoke inhalation, Mae Frances needed help. Her face pressed against the grass and earth. In that moment of need, help showed up. No adult. A child.
While adults conspired to kill, a child tried to save. Janie Forsyth, twelve-year-old daughter of the owners of Forsyth and Son, brought life-restoring water. She was old enough to know she was supposed to be against those lying on the ground. She helped anyway. People needed water. She provided it. Glass after glass.13
Hank and Joe told us what happened next.
Police broke up the crowd. A white couple took Genevieve to a hospital. An ambulance came for the white Riders, but would not take our black colleagues anywhere. The driver finally relented and took everyone to the Anniston hospital.
In a sense, the hospital was simply a larger version of the bus. Riders inside. Mob forming outside. Buildings don’t rock as buses do, but they can burn. Our Greyhound colleagues feared another fire might be set. Joe Perkins saw the writing on the wall and called for help. He called Reverend Shuttlesworth.
Reverend Shuttlesworth would have driven two hours to Anniston and headed into the threat of the mob without wavering, but we were already at his parsonage, and we needed his help. Instead, he sent his longtime bodyguard, Stone Johnson, with carloads of deacons telling them they must remain nonviolent in the face of any violence perpetrated upon them. All agreed. But Stone Johnson believed in maintaining equality, or at least equilibrium, with what he called his “nonviolent .38.”14 Fred Shuttlesworth may not have known it, but his bodyguard was not about to sacrifice himself at an altar of pacifism. He was a bodyguard for goodness’ sake.
Others riding in the caravan brought shotguns. They drove up to the hospital, confronted the antagonistic crowd, picked up the Riders, and raced back to Bethel Baptist in Birmingham. When they arrived, their guns were gone. Stone Johnson’s form of nonviolent, direct action had provided safety and rescue.
