Spies of Mississippi by Rick Bowers Read Free Book Online Page A

those of freedom riders arrested in Jackson. Was their visit to Cuba—an island nation off the coast of Florida and a communist ally of the Soviet Union—proof of a link between the civil rights movement and international communism? Was this the bombshell the state needed to change the headlines?
    On June 29, Brigadier General T. B. Birdsong—director of public safety and founder of the Mississippi Highway Patrol—called a press conference at which he promised to remove any guesswork from the assembled journalists’ reporting by disclosing conclusive proof of a major communist role in planning and directing the Freedom Rides. He revealed that unnamed sources had provided unnamed state investigators with a verified list of 202 names of students who had attended a “Fair Play for Cuba” seminar in Havana the previous February. Birdsong named Kathleen Pleune of Chicago and David Wahlstorm of Madison, Wisconsin, as participants in the Cuban seminar. Both had been arrested as freedom riders in Jackson. “They’re pawns in the hands of the Communists,” Birdsong charged. He then went on to make a series of allegations that went far beyond the known facts. He claimed that the students had attended an intensive workshop on civil disobedience tactics conducted by nine agents of the Soviet Union in Cuba. He stated that the workshop had provided detailed instruction on carrying out “sit-ins and walk-ins and freedom rides”—and that the Russian instructors had “inspired and directed” the entire Freedom Ride movement.
    CORE immediately branded the allegations ridiculous and the press conference an unfounded “smear tactic.” An attorney for one of the students telegraphed Birdsong with a demand for proof that Soviet agents had led a workshop on freedom riding during the Cuban trip. Birdsong backed off. The subsequent reporting made the story relatively clear: The students had gone to Cuba with a leftist group seeking to improve Cuban-American relations, but there were no civil disobedience training sessions led by Soviet agents, and there was no tactical advice on freedom riding. The state’s bid to regain the propaganda edge fizzled as the northern press lost interest. And more freedom riders kept coming.
    Just a week later an even more insidious piece of propaganda hit the newsstands. This one came from black newsman and Commission collaborator Percy Greene. Greene’s Jackson Advocate ran an eight-column headline above his feature story daring Reverend Martin Luther King to join a Freedom Ride to Jackson. The piece predicted that King would be arrested and would face potentially deadly consequences at Parchman. On July 6, 1961, the inflammatory article was gleefully covered by the segregationist Jackson Daily News , which claimed that King had steered clear of the Freedom Rides because he was too busy “caddillacking around the country making speeches and taking bows.”
     
    Despite the public relations diatribes, the freedom riders continued to arrive at the depots, the police continued to make arrests, the judges continued to issue fines, and the guards kept ordering prisoners to stop singing. The scorecard of arrests and convictions that ran regularly in the Jackson Daily News was no longer a power statement of the state’s ability to punish the “invaders.” Now it was a reminder of the persistence of the protesters and the outside media attention it spawned.
    As events unfolded in Jackson, Washington was applying quiet but persistent power. U.S. attorney general Robert Kennedy pushed the Interstate Commerce Commission to issue a regulation specifically barring interstate bus and rail companies from allowing segregation at their stations. Now the companies that ran the bus and train lines were subject to serious fines for allowing segregation to continue. As of September 1, 1961, the “whites only” and “Negroes only” signs at bus and rail depots gradually began to come down. The freedom riders had