Bayard Rustin and the Journey of Reconciliation, April 9-23, 1947

In these days of political turmoil and protest, it can be encouraging and instructive to look to the bravery, determination, and commitment of those who preceded us in challenging cultural and institutionalized inequality and racism.

In 1944 Irene Morgan, recovering from a miscarriage, was arrested on an interstate bus in Virginia for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger. Morgan plead guilty to resisting arrest and paid the $100 fine, but she refused to pay the $10 fine for disobeying Virginia’s 1930 Jim Crow seating law. Her appeal reached the U.S. Supreme Court, and on June 3, 1946 the court ruled that segregation on interstate buses was unconstitutional.

Also in 1944 Bayard Rustin, a seasoned activist and proponent of nonviolent protest, was imprisoned as a conscientious objector. Upon his release in 1946 he returned to work for the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Never one to shy away from danger in the face of injustice, Rustin proposed to George Houser, a white colleague, that they organize a bus journey, the “Journey of Reconciliation (JOR),” to test the effectiveness of the Morgan decision.

On this journey, racially mixed groups would travel with Black riders sitting in the front and white ones in the back, and sometimes with Black and white sitting together. Other riders would sit “in a segregated manner” to serve as witnesses and to provide assistance as necessary. They decided not to travel through the deep South, where violence would be inevitable, and – in spite of objections from Ella Baker and Pauli Murray – to include only men in the group, so as not to exacerbate an already volatile situation.

Eight Black and eight white participants set out from Washington, DC, half on Greyhound and half on Trailways to avoid any claim that they were targeting a particular company, and all tickets purchased included a destination in another state to ensure that they were covered by the law as interpreted by the Supreme Court. Over the two weeks of the Journey there were twelve arrests in six different incidents. For most of these the charges were dismissed or the accused were acquitted:

April 11, Durham-Oxford, N.C.: Bayard Rustin and Jim Peck, a white cofounder of CORE, sat together near the front of the bus. Rustin was ordered to move, but the Oxford police decided not to arrest him.

April 11, Petersburg, Va.: Conrad Lynn was arrested for “disorderly conduct;” his $25 bail was paid and violence averted.

April 12, Raleigh, N.C.: Conrad Lynn and Wally Nelson refused to move back, but the driver did nothing, though a white passenger had offered to “help” him.

April 12, Durham, N.C.: Rustin and Andrew Johnson, a Black college student from Cincinnati, were arrested “for refusing to move when ordered to do so.” Jim Peck, a white member of FOR, then volunteered, “If you arrest them, you’ll have to arrest me, too, for I am going to sit in the rear.” All three were released when a lawyer arrived to represent them.

April 13, Chapel Hill, N.C.: Johnson and Joseph Felmet, a white representative of the Southern Workers Defense League, sat together at the front of the bus to Greensboro and were quickly arrested. When Felmet asked if they were under arrest, he was pulled from his seat and shoved off the bus. Rustin and Igal Roodenko, a white activist from New York, then took the forward seats vacated by Johnson and Felmet and were also arrested. Johnson and Rustin were charged with “disorderly conduct for disobeying the order of the bus driver,” Felmet and Roodenko with “interfering with arrest.”

As the delay stretched into two hours, a group of white taxi drivers nearby became agitated and one of them hit Jim Peck a hard blow to the head. Peck just stood quietly looking at them and said nothing. Another taxi driver went into the courthouse and on returning was heard to say, “They’ll never get a bus out of here tonight.” When the four were released on $50 bail, Rev. Charles Jones, a white Presbyterian minister, drove them to his house. As they approached the porch, two taxis pulled up and men got out armed with sticks and rocks. A few minutes later, Reverend Jones received an anonymous phone call threatening to burn his house down.  Rustin and the others decided it would be best to leave during daylight and they were driven to Greensboro in two cars.

April 17, Asheville, N.C.: Dennis Banks and Jim Peck sat in the second seat of a Trailways bus. When Banks refused to move, the driver called the police and Banks was arrested. Peck again insisted that he be arrested, too. At their trial the next day, Peck first encountered the “fantastic extreme” of Jim Crow Bibles to swear in Black witnesses. The judge sentenced them to thirty days on a road gang, but released them on a $200 bond, pending appeal.

April 19, Weaverville, N.C.: Dennis Banks was the only Black person on a crowded Greyhound bus. Rather than share the long five-person rear seat with four white passengers, the driver had him sit in the two-person seat in the next-to-last row, where he “had a friendly conversation with a young white farmer.”

April 22, Lynchburg, Va.: Wally Nelson and George Houser sat together a the front of a bus headed back to Washington. Outside Lynchburg, Nelson was arrested and taken to Amherst, Va. Houser left the bus to pay Nelson’s $50 bail, and then the two decided to take a train to Washington. Though the conductor threatened to have them arrested in Charlottesville for sitting together, no arrests were made.

April 23, Culpeper, Va.: Dennis Banks was arrested for sitting near the front of a bus going to Washington, but two white riders, Jim Peck and Worth Randle, were not arrested for sitting in the “black seat” in the rear.

The trial of Rustin and Roodenko came up on May 20. Judge Henry Whitfield found them both guilty, sentencing Rustin, whom he described as “a poor misled nigra from the North,” to pay the court costs. Roodenko, on the other hand, he sentenced to thirty days on a chain gang, saying, “I presume you’re Jewish, Mr. Rodenky. Well, it’s about time you Jews from New York learned that you can’t come down here bringing your nigras with you to upset the customs of the South.” The NAACP attorneys filed an appeal to the state superior court. The next month Whitfield fined Johnson $50 and sentenced Felmet, a North Carolina resident, to six months on a road gang. When Whitfield learned that the maximum sentence allowed was one month, he changed Felmet’s sentence to thirty days and Johnson’s to $25 plus court costs.

On appeal in superior court, Judge Chester Morris declared that the men were intrastate passengers, not interstate, and he sentenced all four to thirty days on the road gangs. This was upheld by the North Carolina Supreme Court. The NAACP was unwilling to carry the case further. Rather than ask the governor for pardons, which might imply that they were guilty of a crime, it was decided that the most honorable solution would be to serve the sentences. On March 21, 1949, Rustin, Felmet, and Roodenko surrendered themselves at the Orange County Courthouse. Andrew Johnson was about to graduate from college and enter law school, and rather than jeopardize his future and his health, he chose not to show up. The three prisoners served for twenty-two grueling days, with eight days off for good behavior. Rustin wrote a memoir, “Twenty-Two Days on a Chain Gang.” After being serialized in the New York Post and the Baltimore Afro-American, this exposé prompted the state legislature to investigate North Carolina prison camps.

While the Journey of Reconciliation is not widely remembered, it has had an enormous impact, providing the model for the Freedom Rides of the early 1960s. Rustin himself went on to become a key advisor to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and was the chief architect of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.