The Burglary (83 page)

One year after they met, John and Bonnie were married, on August 17, 1962, in Grand Rapids. She left Michigan State at the end of her junior year. They started life together in New York the next month, and she immediately enrolled in City College of New York as an elementary education major. Their first child, daughter Lindsley, was born on September 10, 1963. Several months later, when she was pregnant with their second child, Mark, she and John went to Washington and stood with thousands of people in a round-the-clock vigil at the Lincoln Memorial protesting the filibuster then taking place on Capitol Hill in an attempt to block passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. That was the first time Bonnie Raines participated in a protest.

After they married, John kept going south. “Bonnie knew I would be going south again, and she wanted me to go,” John recalls. Each time he prepared to leave, “Bonnie never said, ‘I wish you wouldn't go, but go if you have to.' Instead, it was always, ‘Go. I wish I could go too.' ” She stayed behind in their small student apartment in Morningside Heights, near Union Seminary, alone the first year, but later with the company of their two babies.

John Raines was present at some of the pivotal events of the civil rights movement, beginning with the Freedom Rides in the summer of 1961. In 1964, he was in Mississippi during Freedom Summer. In April 1965, he answered Martin Luther King's plea for people to come to Selma, Alabama. King's plea went out after local black people were attacked by whites, led by state and local law enforcement officials on horseback, after local black people, including schoolteachers, were denied the right to register to vote and fired from their jobs for trying to do so. In the summer of 1965, Raines went to Baker County in southwest Georgia. That turned out to be his most unforgettable trip south.

In Mississippi in 1964, the most violent of the civil rights summers, John Raines walked the streets of Hattiesburg and drove country roads with black people as they tried to register to vote under extremely hostile conditions. Black leaders from Mississippi predicted months earlier that the situation might be explosive that summer and begged for federal protection. A new organization had been formed—the Association for the Preservation of
the White Race—by white people who wanted an organization even more aggressive in its support of racism and segregation than the
Ku Klux Klan and the
White Citizens' Councils. The new organization boldly and openly described itself as anti-Negro, anti-Catholic, and anti-Semitic. Thirty thousand members had signed up in fifteen counties across the state. In addition, the state legislature passed laws that spring designed to make it extremely difficult for civil rights workers to have a public presence. The new laws prohibited people from picketing any public buildings or demonstrating on public streets and sidewalks or on any property belonging to cities, counties, or the state. Enraged at the possibility of black people registering to vote, white people burned black homes and churches that spring with impunity. Local law enforcement officers not only didn't investigate the crimes, they often participated in them.

Black community leaders from Mississippi went to Washington to plead for the Johnson administration to send two hundred federal marshals to protect civil rights workers that summer. Their plea was made at the same time southern senators were conducting their
filibuster against the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Historian
Howard Zinn, writing about the refusal to send the marshals, said the request for two hundred marshals to protect civil rights workers and local black people as they tried to secure one of their most basic rights as Americans, the right to vote, was a pretty small request, especially when compared to the fact that by that time the government had 40,000 troops in Vietnam in a war U.S. officials said was being fought to secure basic rights for Vietnamese people.

The fears of Mississippi black people turned out to be more than justified. The tragedy that, more than any other during those summers, came to symbolize the extreme violence southern whites used against black people and their supporters took place that year: the murder of
James Chaney, a local young African American civil rights worker, and Andrew Goodman and
Michael Schwerner, two young white civil rights workers from New York.

It was in the midst of that terrible cauldron in Mississippi in summer 1964 that John Raines started thinking seriously about the role of the FBI. Like many civil rights workers, he wondered why the FBI was not on the scene there and elsewhere in previous years when violence was threatened against civil rights workers. Records that emerged years later showed that skepticism about FBI director J. Edgar Hoover's attitudes toward the civil rights movement was well placed. When asked to investigate threats against civil rights workers, he repeatedly claimed that the FBI could not
intervene—even when there was evidence that violence against civil rights workers was likely—because the bureau was an investigating agency, not a crime-fighting agency. This claim was the opposite of how the FBI had responded historically to predicted crime. Hoover and the bureau, in fact, gained their greatest fame for being crime fighters. The bureau's dramatic crime-fighting, crime-preventing efforts in the 1930s, when the FBI stopped the violent sprees involving John Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, and other well-known crime figures of that era, had been used by Hoover to build the reputation of the FBI. Hoover proudly trumpeted the bureau's crime-fighting image. In contrast, when civil rights workers were threatened in the 1950s and early 1960s, Hoover refused to be involved until he was forced to by President Johnson.

A few days after the three young men disappeared and were feared murdered, the White House recognized that the situation in Mississippi was at least as grave as black people had told them it would be when they asked for protection in May. At a planning session at the White House that involved Attorney General Robert Kennedy and his aides
Burke Marshall and
Nicholas Katzenbach, President Johnson summed up the law enforcement problem then in Mississippi this way: “There are three sovereignties involved. There's the United States, there's the state of Mississippi, and there's J. Edgar Hoover.”

President Johnson ordered his old friend the FBI director to take action in Mississippi. With that, the FBI opened an office in Jackson, the first in the state. Agents there—led by Roy Moore, the same agent the director appointed to be in charge of the MEDBURG investigation in 1971—conducted an intensive investigation. Forty-four days after the three men disappeared, their bodies were found. They had been ambushed, shot dead, and then buried in an earthen dam near Philadelphia, Mississippi, the town where Ronald Reagan launched his 1980 presidential campaign. They were victims of a conspiracy by local law enforcement agents and the
Ku Klux Klan. The FBI arrested eighteen men in October 1964.

From 1961 through 1965, on each of Raines's trips south, he faced the seething hatred of southern whites many times as they tried to prevent black people from registering to vote and from entering bus stations, restaurants, schools, voter registration offices, and other public places. He was in the center of angry white mobs and was arrested several times, but his most threatening experience took place in 1965, when he spent a night alone in a jail in Newton, Georgia. What happened that summer in Newton, a rural area in Baker County in southwest Georgia, was not a touchstone moment
of the civil rights movement as, say, Freedom Summer in Mississippi or the Selma-to-Montgomery march in Alabama had been. It was, however, a touchstone moment for the black people in that isolated part of Georgia and for John Raines.

He went to Newton in response to a call for help from
Charles Sherrod, his former classmate at Union Seminary in New York. Sherrod had left the seminary and gone to Baker County to establish a chapter of the
Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, then one of the most effective organizations supporting grassroots efforts by black people to claim their basic rights. By the time Sherrod asked Union Seminary for help in the summer of 1965, he had been working in Baker County for five years. It felt, he later wrote, as if there had been virtually no change. Segregation in southwest Georgia seemed to be total. Nearly every public institution was still off-limits to black people.

As violence against African Americans increased as they tried to register to vote that summer, Sherrod realized he needed public exposure of the attacks. He called Union Seminary president
John Bennett and said, “Get us a couple whites.” A familiar pattern went into play. Sherrod, Bennett, and students at the seminary, including Raines, knew that if northern whites came and were beaten along with local blacks, reporters would come. That meant the beatings might be shown on national television, and that, in turn, made it more likely that protection from the federal government might arrive.

When Bennett put word out at Union Seminary that Sherrod needed help, Raines and a few other seminarians responded—as they had in the past to calls from the South—as they would have if a member of their own family had asked for help during a crisis. They flew to Georgia immediately. As with the seminarians' earlier trips, travel costs were paid by the seminary.

A few days after he arrived, Raines was arrested at a rally in Newton and incarcerated. Instead of being placed in a jail inside a courthouse, where many southern jails were located, he was placed in a building behind the Baker County Courthouse. He remembers the space was very small and very dark. Given his isolation and the fact that the sheriff was someone who was known for turning a blind eye to violence against black people and their supporters, Raines realized he was in a dangerous situation, but he didn't realize how dangerous. He was completely helpless to do anything about it.

Without Raines knowing it, word spread in the local black community during the night that a civil rights worker was in trouble—that the local
White Citizens' Council was planning to attack him in jail. Frantic to save
him, leaders in the black community convinced a local black farmer to put up his modest farm for the bail needed to get John Raines out of jail. To this day, Raines is profoundly grateful for that act of generosity that may have saved his life. In that experience, more than any other, he said he learned how important the embrace of a community of resisters can be.

DURING HIS SUMMERS
in the South, Raines gradually realized that southern black people were giving him what he came to call his “second education.” It changed him forever. This new education was, in some ways, in opposition to what he calls his “first education.” Prestigious schools—Carleton College in Minnesota and Union Theological Seminary in New York before he became a minister on Long Island—were the venues of his “first education.” The lessons taught there, he recalled, were primarily “an education in deservedness. We were all being trained to be leaders of our generation—liberal leaders who would help others become more like us.…We were taught to want to become judges, to go to Washington and become part of Foggy Bottom [the U.S. State Department].…We were taught to aspire to what privileged white males should aspire to—which was leadership of the country.”

In his first education, Raines was taught to accept the world as it is, full of the coming together of ambiguity and tragedy. “We felt comfortable. We saw the everyday injustices of life, but we were persuaded that life had tragic moral limitations and that we were well qualified to become leaders because we did not bring impossible and disruptive expectations to the social system.”

Learning how to change, rather than accept, official systems was not part of Raines's first education. In fact, he had never thought about that concept—until 1961 as a
Freedom Rider. It was foreign to him. His motivation for going to the South had been to go help those poor people, but he discovered there was much more to it than that. It was a matter of “being invited into danger” in order to change powerful unjust systems. “I was exposed immediately to the power of a resisting community, people who were committed to being nonviolent, despite being treated very violently.…They were willing to expose themselves to great danger. They invited me into that danger with them while also protecting me from danger—the man who put his farm up, for instance. It was a very powerful experience for me.…I wandered in and was grasped by the movement.”

This “second education,” taught in the crucible of those summers in the
South, led, Raines said, to a major shift in “my whole understanding of the law.…Judges had always been friends of the family, and we knew policemen were there to protect us, and they did. Now I began to see another face of law and order: control over powerless people, such as the black majority in the South that couldn't vote. I began to get a different sense of how power is used in society.…I saw the law used to inflict injustice upon many people.” Until then, he had no idea that black Americans experienced profound injustice. Repeatedly, on each trip south, he saw firsthand evidence that law enforcement agencies—local, state, and federal—failed to protect African Americans, not only from having their basic rights withheld, but also from violent attacks.

Eventually, he defined his second education as an education “in how America looks from below and how it is lived from below.” That was the reverse of his first education, which he now saw as “an education that did not want you to ever experience America from below except as a situation where you might go and help once in a while.”

Raines's new education, he said, “made me look, from then on, at the government in a different way.” He looked at the government more carefully. He inspected power—the power of individuals and the power of institutions—for whether it was causing harm. “Without that experience, without what black people taught me about resistance,” says Raines, “I would have been a very different person ten years later. I would have been a different kind of teacher, a different kind of ethicist, a different kind of theologian.” Without that experience, the Raineses both agree, it is unlikely they would have driven to Media on that March evening in 1971.