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Zero Tolerance:

The 1956 Montgomery Riots

 

By Chris Oakley

Part 4

 

 

Summary: In the first three episodes of this series we focused on the 1956 Montgomery riots and the global reaction to the horrific violence perpetrated against Montgomery’s black community; and the chain of events which followed President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s decision to deploy federal troops to the city to halt the riots. In this chapter we’ll look back at the results of the federal criminal trial against some of the riots’ chief instigators and the civil court battles between George Wallace and the federal government .

On March 27th, 1956 the two-month-long court battle between the Justice Department and the eleven defendants in the Montgomery riots case reached its climax. Although the defendants had gone into the trial expecting they’d be easily acquitted or-- at worst --get off with light sentences, those expectations had gradually diminished during the two months that the trial lasted. Throughout those same two months, the Atlanta courthouse where the trial was taking place had become the focal point for the movement of a young Baptist preacher named Martin Luther King to gain greater federal protection for the civil rights of African-Americans, voting rights in particular.

King had first risen to national prominence as one of the leaders of the original Montgomery bus boycott. When the tension between the NAACP and the segregationists had exploded into riots and the KKK had sought to terrorize the black community, it was King who had rallied Montgomery’s African-American population to stand fast against racist attempts at intimidation. Now he was at ground zero for a burgeoning campaign to ensure permanent strong federal projection for the rights his people wanted to exercise as citizens but had too often been denied since the end of Reconstruction.

Like everyone else in Atlanta, and across the U.S. for that matter, Dr. King had one ear glued to the radio on the day that the verdict came. He had even more reason than most people to listen to the verdict announcement; a guilty verdict against even one of the eleven defendants in the Justice Department’s criminal case against the riot instigators would boost the morale of those who supported his crusade for a federal civil rights law, while the acquittal of all eleven of those same defendants would constitute a major setback to King’s cause.

It was just past 11:30 AM Eastern Daylight Time when word came down that a verdict had been reached in the Montgomery riots trial. King leaned across his kitchen table to hear what that verdict would be; at the courthouse where the trial was being held, platoons of broadcast and print reporters from nearly every major media outlet in the Western stampeded into the main courtroom to record the final ruling in the case and get the reactions of the principals in the case along with those of the spectators in the public gallery. About twenty minutes after the announcement of an impending verdict, the foreman of the jury read the first ruling concerning the defendants-- guilty on the charge of conspiracy to incite civil unrest. Supporters of racial segregation let out an audible gasp of shock upon hearing the verdict; opponents of segregation were exhilarated, deeming that “guilty” as a victory for the cause of racial equality.

And there were several more “guilty” verdicts to come. Of the twenty-seven criminal counts on which the Montgomery trial defendants had been indicted, they were ultimately convicted on twenty-three of those counts(“not guilty” verdicts were returned on counts twenty-four through twenty-six and the twenty-seventh was dismissed because of a jury deadlock). The federal government had blasted a major hole in the social and cultural foundations of Jim Crow....

******

...and another such hole would be opened up shortly by the verdicts in the federal and state civil cases against George Wallace. In nearly every such court action, he was held to be responsible by word and deed for many of the innocent lives lost in the Montgomery riots and ordered to pay substantial damages to the families of the victims. Determined not to give his perceived racial antagonists a penny, Wallace immediately filed an appeal of the verdict, but there weren’t quite as many people flocking to his banner as he would have hoped; the riots had made many of his former supporters start to have doubts about their association with him and given those people who were already predisposed against him fresh material for their dislike. In fact, within two months after the verdict was handed down in the Montgomery riots case the White Citizens’ Council of Mississippi-- a group which under other circumstances might have backed Wallace to the hilt --published a letter in a Biloxi newspaper disavowing any links to the firebrand Alabama leader. The Washington Post editorialized at length on Wallace’s sins, as did the New York Times and the ChicagoTribune; one Seattle newspaper columnist blasted Wallace as a “1950s Huey Long”, referring to the Louisiana demagogue who’d been a major player in Southern politics two decades earlier before he was gunned down in Baton Rouge.

Wallace tried frantically but ineffectively to rally support back to his side, but it was like trying to put out a forest fire with a water pistol. The riots had damaged the cause of segregationism beyond repair, and Wallace’s own personal reputation had taken some serious hits too. For a time it seemed as if his political career was over; certainly his chances for halting the civil rights movement’s progress in Alabama had gone by the boards. By the time President Dwight Eisenhower was sworn in for his second term in January of 1957, Wallace was on the verge of bankruptcy from having to pay so much in damages to the families of those killed or injured in the Montgomery riots. Indeed, it’s questionable whether he would have had the chance to run for governor of Alabama in the early ‘60s if he hadn’t made the decision to tone down some of his more blunt political oratory as well as moderating(at least publicly) his views on race.

******

Meanwhile, Martin Luther King went from strength to strength as the new face of the burgeoning civil rights movement in America. Being one of the most charismatic figures associated with that movement was certainly a major aid to his efforts to win broader public support for the movement’s effort to strengthen voting rights protection for black Americans; in the 1960 presidential race every potential Democratic candidate-- and most of the Republican ones too --actively sought out Dr. King’s backing, and King played that card to immense political and social advantage for his people.

By 1962 King’s influence in America had grown to the point where a civil rights bill was being debated in the U.S. Senate over the repeated(and very loud) objections over the more segregationist members of the Congressional delegations from the states of the Old South. In spite of the best efforts of those same segregationists to filibuster the bill to death, it would pass by a fairly comfortable majority and from there move on to the House of Representatives. From that point it was just a matter of time before the bill reached the Oval Office, where it would be signed into law by President Kennedy in full view of the Washington press corps.

What may have been King’s finest moment, however, came in another Washington venue in July of 1963-- his legendary “I Have A Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Officially the National Park Service estimated that some 200,000 people came to hear Dr. King’s stirring words calling for racial harmony and justice in America; unofficially, it’s been suggested there may have been as many as one million listeners in attendance for the two-hour speech. And thanks to television’s growing influence as a disseminator of news and a societal unifying force, King’s reach was expanded still further to include parts of the country where it might otherwise have gone unheard. Even today, close to half a century later, the image of Dr. King addressing a racially integrated crowd before a granite likeness of “the Great Emancipator” still dramatically resonates in America’s collective memory.

In 1964 Dr. King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his use of nonviolence to challenge the discriminatory practices and attitudes which had prevailed in the Deep South at the time of the Montgomery riots. Equipped with this new platform from which to continue preaching his gospel of racial equality, he ventured down to Selma, Alabama to support an NAACP voter registration drive in that city in the spring of 1965. It was on the Selma visit that Dr. King encountered the greatest threat the civil rights movement had faced since the Montgomery riots-- Selma sheriff “Bull” Connor, an inveterate racist who used tear gas, attack dogs, and fire hoses as weapons in his efforts to squash the Selma black community’s hopes for equality. Connor regarded King as the Devil incarnate and was bent on either driving him out of town or putting him behind bars. But when Connor employed his customary tactics against Dr. King and his fellow NAACP activists, he succeeded only in exposing himself as a bigot for the whole world to see. In his attempts to destroy voter registration efforts among Selma’s blacks, Connor ironically became the most solid guarantee of their success; thousands of whites flocked to the city in a full-fledged repudiation of his bigoted attitudes and actions.

JFK’s brother and Attorney General, Robert F. Kennedy, wasted little time before unleashing the full power of the Justice Department on the Selma sheriff’s office. Even though Connor had been dismissed as sheriff by the time the federal probe of his actions was launched, the Attorney General’s investigators were still determined to make an example of him to those in positions of power who might be thinking of following his lead. They went after Connor with the full force of the federal government and RFK’s own righteous indignation to back them up
in the clinch; to use a metaphor that would increasingly come in vogue over the next two-odd decades, the federal probe of Selma would become Bull Connor’s Vietnam.

By the time the federal probe finally wrapped up in the late fall of 1966 at least a dozen of Connor’s former deputies had been sent to prison and Connor himself was facing serious jail time for his actions at Selma. Just over three weeks after Connor was indicted, the Selma sheriff’s office would recruit its first African-American deputy and topple another of the dwindling bastions of segregationism in the Old South. Connor would eventually serve five years in prison on multiple criminal counts ranging from obstruction of justice to assault with a deadly weapon ; when he was finally released from incarceration in the summer of 1972, it was into a world he scarcely recognized. America, while far from being a racial utopia, was certainly more integrated as a society than it had been when Connor and his deputies confronted Dr. King on Selma’s streets. George Wallace was sounding a distinctly more moderate tone on racial matters and now occupied the governor’s office in Montgomery. And King, Connor’s one-time antagonist, had met a very tragic end in a Memphis hotel suite....

To Be Continued


At the height of the unrest in Selma Connor had twice fired his service revolver at a black civil rights demonstrators; fortunately for both parties concerned, those shots went wide and hit a nearby telephone pole instead.

 

 

To Be Continued

 

 

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