Irrepressible (35 page)

In the June 1960 issue of
Frontier
magazine, Ralph Tyler, a journalist, reflected on the protest and its consequences:

Looking back, Decca would give full credit to those early student protests for loosening HUAC’s grip and holding the abusers of power up to the ridicule they deserved.

D
ECCA WANTED TO describe what life as a Communist had been like for her in 1950s America, but the subject was too unwieldy or still too close, and she couldn’t settle into it. Her interest, much like Dinky’s, was thoroughly arrested by the moment they were living. The newspapers were full of the stunning and dangerous, ever-expanding civil rights movement, and she had an idea for an article about how this movement was shaking up entrenched Southern customs. She planned a tour to record “how the southern psyche was faring in the aftermath of the victorious bus boycott,” and was offered a two hundred dollar advance from
Esquire
against a six hundred dollar publication fee. She would title it after Nancy’s essay “U and Non-U” and call it “You-All and Non-You All.”

The chameleon capacity was a happy gift to a good journalist. Decca could claim retreat rights to suburbia when that helped her mission, and she could rely on her contacts and the superfluities of the U-class to open doors when it was expedient. If things worked out, she’d gather enough material to write a book about society in flux and classes in crisis. “Stress the accent,” Virginia Durr suggested, “and you’ll have the Southern aristocracy eating out of your hand.” Mainly, Decca wrote Dinky, she wanted it to be “funny, the moral to emerge by inference.”

In May, Decca set off from Washington, D.C.—where she’d been visiting friends—toward Alabama, where she would rendezvous with Virginia Durr. The Durrs now lived in Montgomery, where Cliff had a law practice. Decca’s route would take her through Georgia and Kentucky, her dates and destinations incidentally coincided with those of the Congress of Racial Equality’s (CORE) Freedom Rides, during which a group of young black
and white civil rights activists defied segregationist laws by sitting together on interstate Trailways and Greyhound buses.

Decca viewed segregation as a direct continuation of the fascism she’d opposed since before World War II. What other word described the supremacist mind-set, the intolerance and dehumanization? Traveling across the South, she rubbed elbows with radicals, devotees of nonviolence, students, genteel lady observers (whose presence was presumed to lessen the threat of violence), and no-nonsense testers who followed up to make sure facilities, once integrated, stayed that way. She had gotten into the habit of studying global conflicts between the weak and strong, rich and poor. Now she wanted to track the contrasts between outsiders and insiders, urban and provincial, and the rivalries between enthusiasts—particularly those who sell and those who buy. She loved word games and dialects, could tell a great joke, and was by most accounts a wonderful listener. These last characteristics describe a universally desirable dinner guest, and when she turned on the charm, she penetrated the bastions and strongholds she planned to expose. At a Louisville country club, she wrote of meeting an affluent white couple:

Decca went on to Alabama, as did the Freedom Riders, and followed the reports as their various buses were harassed and attacked. At every stop, the young civil rights workers were abused, assaulted, and taunted with threats of rape, torture, castration, and death. One bus was shot at and forced to the side of the road; another set on fire. When Decca asked the white Southerners she met on her journey how this barbaric conduct could still be happening in President Kennedy’s America, their rationalizations seemed by turns mystifying, insufficient, and repetitious. (A few brave souls who understood the significance of these events urged her to record them.) The police departments of the various Southern states through which the buses traveled were doing little to protect the protesters. Neither, at first, were the government agents who tracked their activity and took copious notes on little spiral pads. Nevertheless, the Freedom Riders’ bravery and persistence made international news. And as their buses approached Montgomery, Alabama, reporters from around the world, including Decca, were on hand to cover the story.

On May 20, 1961, as the Alabama state troopers were escorting the Freedom Riders’ bus to the Montgomery city limits, Decca’s host Virginia Durr believed there was bound to be a riot, and she pleaded with her friend to be careful. The local police were supposed to meet and protect the young riders from the gathering crowd, but there wasn’t a cop to be seen. Cliff Durr’s law office was in a building across the street and had a clear view of the bus station. From their window, Virginia and Cliff saw the buses arrive and the crowd erupt. “‘Go get the niggers! Go get the niggers.’ It was the most horrible thing that I have ever seen,” Virginia remembered.

One of the last riders off the bus was Lucretia Collins. All of the riders were overtired and sleep-deprived. Collins had fallen asleep just before their arrival in Montgomery, and she was still a little drowsy as she emerged. Her dreamlike impression of the bus station was of a clutch of people straining at the station door and a reporter with his arms spread as if to hold back the crowd.

John Lewis, the future congressional representative from Georgia, and one of the group leaders had stepped off the bus and begun talking to an NBC television reporter when “a hundred white men and women surged around the bus, swinging metal pipes, sticks, bats, and pocketbooks.” Virginia Durr saw people randomly attacked. From within the crowd, Decca saw Frederick and Anna Gach, two local white residents, arrested while trying to protect a black bystander from assault. The police arrived, but the assaults and humiliations continued until the U.S. Justice Department finally sent armed marshals into Montgomery to reestablish law and order.

The Durrs’ office had become the central meeting point for witnesses and people escaping the riot. When Bob Zellner, a young friend of the Durrs, arrived, Virginia said that Decca was out there somewhere. Zellner gallantly agreed to bring her back safely. As he recalls, he found her

Despite her courtesy to Zellner, Decca was “furious” with Virginia for meddling. She hadn’t wanted to be rescued and resented the implication that she had needed to be.

Later Saturday afternoon, once traffic was moving again, Cliff, Virginia, and Decca returned to the Durrs’ home on the outskirts of town. Although Virginia, a native Alabamian, urged caution and predicted worse things to come, their guest was impatient to get back to where the action was. The Durrs didn’t have a telephone, and Decca wanted at least to phone her press
contacts and try to sell the story. More than anything, she was determined to attend the meeting to be held that night at the First Baptist Church. “This is absurd—to be so scared,” she told Virginia.

The Durrs lent Decca their old Buick for the night, and she drove to the church with Peter Ackerberg, a white student from Antioch College. Virginia remembers how Decca dressed for the meeting in her “Southern costume—a lovely sort of fluffy green hat with chiffon on it, and pearls around her neck and white gloves and a green chiffon dress.”

Outside the church, Decca saw outraged segregationists, freelance hoodlums, vigilantes, and snarling drunks (dressed in their summer riot clothes: men in dirty T-shirts and dungarees, women in sleeveless cotton dresses). They were circling the church to harass the thin line of deputy marshals protecting the church occupants. There were no city police officers, no state guards. Decca had planned to park blocks away and enter the church through a back way, but in the chaos, she had simply parked as near as she could and then with Ackerberg had stridden through the front doors of the church. They were just inside when the mob torched the Durrs’ car, down to its frame. Decca and Ackerberg wouldn’t learn this until later.

Inside the packed church, it was stifling. The congregation, a cross-section of the African American community—ministers, students, army veterans, teachers, farmers, owners of small businesses, lawyers, church elders, and schoolchildren—had been singing for hours, since the first black families in their church clothes had arrived around 5:00 P.M. Outside, the marshals had thrown tear gas at the increasingly hostile crowd, and the fumes had begun to float into the church just slightly. It stung the eyes, had a terrible sour smell, and made everything even more claustrophobic. All night, people urged one another to keep singing: “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around,” “We Shall Overcome,” “This Little Light of Mine.” Though there were only half as many people inside as out, every pew was full. There were pockets of chaos inside, but no panic as people rushed to the sinks to rinse their eyes and to the basement and closets to cover and protect their children. Church deacons closed any window still open, which cut down
on the ventilation and spiked up the heat even more
. Help will come
, the deacons counseled.

Martin Luther King Jr. arrived from Atlanta to address the meeting. He assured the congregation that the marshals were still in place, but he couldn’t guarantee that their line would hold. This was Decca’s first encounter with the Reverend King, and she was impressed by his sangfroid under pressure. Her companions in the church, particularly those who knew King or had heard him preach, had more than respect—they loved him and had no doubt he’d rescue them. She wanted to interview him, but King was surrounded by an entourage of bodyguards, advisers, politicians, and ministers, and the crisis point was close.

As the Reverend King and Attorney General Robert Kennedy negotiated on the phone to find a safe exit strategy, food was running low and children fell asleep on tabletops. Governor John Patterson of Alabama was balky and slow to compromise. The Democratic Party still relied on its Southern bloc. Kennedy, wary of violating state sovereignty, was reluctant to call the National Guard to help. Finally, Patterson declared martial law and activated the Alabama National Guard. These soldiers were also known as the Dixie division.

Decca watched the newly arrived police and soldiers disperse the mob. At first, she and others believed that these were their deliverers, so it was doubly shocking to see these young men—activated by the governor, not the Feds, and therefore under segregationist control—turn their guns toward the church and its congregation. Decca and her companions might not have understood the exact steps invoked in this federal-state minuet, but they knew they were hostages.

The Durrs listened to the radio news throughout the evening. Eyewitnesses delivered their reports from inside the church through its one telephone line. They heard that more federal marshals had been transported to the area in postal trucks and that U.S. Army troops might be flown in. That night around midnight, the general of the Alabama National Guard finally entered the church to address its occupants. Decca noted his words:
“While the mob had been cleared from the immediate vicinity, they were thought to be re-grouping in the dark surrounding streets.” Everyone would have to remain inside, said the general, until he deemed it safe for their removal.

It was still steamy at midnight as Decca shared a scavenged meal of matzos and grits (an odd mix but what was on hand) with her neighbors, then stood in line to use the phone in the church basement, her chiffon dress a sticky mess by then. (At some point, she ditched those white gloves for better speed and comfort.) In the one minute allocated to each caller, she reassured Virginia Durr (on a neighbor’s telephone) that she and Ackerberg were fine. Someone from the National Guard would drive them home.

Sometime close to dawn, the Durrs heard a vehicle roll into their drive. Virginia had the impression that the general of the Alabama National Guard himself was driving. Ackerberg, Decca’s companion, remembered their driver as a more modestly ranked guardsman who had first circled the church looking for the Durrs’ Buick. The gentle and conscientious Ackerberg thought they couldn’t find their car because they hadn’t paid attention to where they’d parked.

Decca was tired but exhilarated. As a journalist, she knew that a great story had fallen into her lap.
Life
magazine agreed to take an article on her firsthand view of the riot at the bus station and the church meeting. Decca’s successful work before then had been of a slower and more deliberate nature. She would become better at writing quickly, but beat reporting would never be her strong suit. It was difficult for her to keep her cool and amused voice under the stress of doing the story justice. As she’d begun her tour of the South, it had amused her to identify with the wry and quotable foreign correspondent who writes at a distance. But to successfully draw national attention to the struggle for civil rights, she couldn’t afford to be dismissed as an accidental tourist or a frivolous opportunist. She had been lucky to find herself on the spot. In her article, she wanted to do more than inform; she wanted to change minds, move people to act, provoke governments to reform. The word
muckraker
wouldn’t be attributed to Decca’s
writing for several more years, but it described the work she’d do to fortify her position and tell the truth as she saw it. Decca’s talent was to write with a light hand; it was the work of her life to combine a humorous quality with serious subject matter. These contradictory demands burdened Decca as she tried to write about Montgomery, and
Life
never published the piece she subsequently wrote. Of Decca’s
Esquire
article about the South, published under the title “Whut They’re Thanking Down There,” Virginia remarked, “All the funny ways she can write were muted because she was so upset and disturbed by the riot. The article was rather good, but it was not terribly funny.”