Raymond Arsenault Traces Freedom Riders' Road

DATE May 4, 2007 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: James Farmer, co-founder of the Freedom Riders,
reminisces about being jailed for protesting; Raymond Arsenault
on his new book "Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for
Racial Justice"
DAVID BIANCULLI, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli, TV critic for the New York Daily
News, sitting in for Terry Gross.

Forty-six years ago an integrated group of self-proclaimed `Freedom Riders'
challenged segregation by riding together on buses through the deep South.
They demanded unrestricted access to segregated buses as well as to bus
terminal restaurants and waiting rooms. The Freedom Riders were pledged to
nonviolence and kept that pledge, even when attacked and bloodied by their
racist opponents.

Today's guest, Raymond Arsenault, has written a memoir about those historic
civil rights confrontations. His book, called "The Freedom Riders," is now
out in paperback.

Before we listen to his interview with Terry, let's begin with an excerpt from
another of Terry's interviews. In 1985 she spoke with James Farmer, one of
the co-founders of the Freedom Riders and of CORE, the Congress of Racial
Equality. Farmer recalled a turning point for the Freedom Riders when the
group with which he was traveling was arrested in Mississippi.

Mr. JAMES FARMER: There were three charges: disobeying an officer,
disturbing the peace and inciting to riot. We were arrested by Captain Ray,
who was the chief of police of the city of Jackson. When he ordered me to
`Move on' and I asked `Where?' the young lady with me who had locked arms with
me, she and I were about to go into the restaurant there in the waiting room,
the white waiting room for dinner, and other Freedom Riders followed the two
of us and were similarly told to get into the paddy wagon, and we were taken
to jail. Then I sent orders by my lawyer to my CORE staff in New York to
begin immediately recruiting Freedom Riders, white and black, from all over
the country, sending them into Jackson to try, in true Gandhian fashion, to
fill up the jails. We were not going to bail out. We were going to stay in
as long as we could stay in and still file an appeal, and that turned out to
be 40 days and 40 nights.

TERRY GROSS, host:

Did the jails want you out?

Mr. FARMER: Yes. They quickly found out that we were not going to bail out
right away and then what they wanted to do was to make it so uncomfortable for
us that we'd wish we had never come and we'd stop others from coming. They
did not physically beat us, though they tried once at one place, and that
backfired because I got one young man bailed out and he called the FBI and he
also held a press conference. So that stopped the physical violence,
brutality.

But they did such things as putting so much salt in the food we couldn't eat
it. Many of us were chain smokers and we were denied any cigarettes, but the
guards would walk by our cells puffing on cigarettes and blowing the smoke
into our cells at great length. We were students, or readers. They denied us
any newspapers or any books, refused to let any come in, refused to let us
have any paper or any pencils to do any writing whatsoever. We were denied
any visitors except our lawyer. This was psychological brutality.

GROSS: You were also banned from singing at one point.

Mr. FARMER: Well, they tried to stop us from singing. We sang. We sang all
the freedom songs we knew and we made up new ones. I made up one song, wrote
one song. Actually I put new words to an old labor song, "Which Side Are You
On?"

GROSS: What were the words you wrote?

Mr. FARMER: Well, these words--I can't sing so I won't even try to sing it,
said, `Come all you Freedom Fighters, good news to you I'll tell, of how the
good old freedom ride has come in here to dwell. Which side are you, which
side are you on? Which side are you on, which side are you on? They say in
Hines County'--where Jackson was, Jackson, Mississippi--`no neutrals have they
met. You're either for the freedom ride, or you're Tom for Ross Barnett.' He
was the governor of Mississippi. `My father was a Freedom fighter and I'm a
freedom fighter's son, and I'll stick to the freedom ride till every battle's
won.'

Well, the jailers went wild at our singing because we were singing as loudly
as we could and our voices were wafting out over the city of Jackson, and the
windows were open. They would come in and slam our windows shut, and we would
open them again and sing more and more and more of other Freedom Riders. The
black women in another wing, the white men in another wing, the white women in
another wing, would pick up the song. And so the jailhouse was rocking with
freedom song. The jailers are running around saying, `Stop that singing!
Stop that singing! Stop it!' And we continued singing because it was good for
our morale. It was good for our morale, and if there were any fear left in
us, that fear was dissipated by the song.

GROSS: What did they do to try to prevent you from singing after closing the
window and yelling at you didn't work?

Mr. FARMER: Well, in Parchman, the state penitentiary, said, `If you don't
stop that singing we'll take away your mattresses.' Now, that sounds like a
juvenile threat but it was an important threat because the little thin straw
mattress was the only comfort we had. Everything else was cold, hard stone
and steel in those tiny little cells. But there was this little mattress
which was comfort, which was a symbol of home, symbol of domesticity. Now
they're going to take that away. We had nothing else. Well, that caused some
people to stop singing for a while, until one young man, who was a Bible
student, reminded everybody what they were doing. That, `Here, they're trying
to take your soul away, you see. It's not the mattress, it's your soul.' And
then one Freedom Rider yelled, `Guards! Guards! Guards!' and the deputy came
running out into the cellblock to see what was wrong, and this Freedom Rider
shouted, `Come get my mattress. I'll keep my soul.' And then song exploded
again and he began singing.

Then another time--I have to laugh when I think of this--one Freedom Rider was
complaining that this deputy who was in charge of the guards always called us
`boy.' `You boys.' He said, `Why does he always call us boy? We're men. I
think we ought to refuse to answer until he calls us men.' Another one
reminded him that that was just a custom down South and he didn't mean
anything derogatory by it, so this first fellow said, `I think I'll ask him.'
He called Deputy Tyson. He said, `Deputy Tyson?' `What?' He says, `Do you
mean anything derogatory when you call us boy?' Deputy Tyson said, `I don't
know nothing about no 'rogatory. All I know is if you boys don't stop that
singing, you're going to be singing in the rain.' And then somebody started
singing again. They pulled in the high pressure fire hose and washed us all
down with it. We tumbled over, and everything was floating underwater in our
cells. One of the Freedom Riders then yelled, `Deputy Tyson, next time you
going to do that bring us some soap so we can take a shower.'

BIANCULLI: The late James Farmer, talking with Terry Gross about the Freedom
Riders in a 1985 interview.

Now to Raymond Arsenault. He's the author of "Freedom Riders: 1961 and the
Struggle for Racial Justice." The book, now out in paperback, is part of the
Oxford University Press series "Pivotal Moments in American History."
Arsenault is a professor of Southern history at the university of South
Florida. Terry spoke with him last year.

GROSS: Raymond Arsenault, welcome to FRESH AIR. We heard James Farmer
describing that the Freedom Riders didn't want to be bailed out of the
Parchman Prison. What was the philosophy behind that `jail, no bail' approach
they took?

Professor RAYMOND ARSENAULT: This was one of the most controversial
innovations of the Congress of Racial Equality. There had been talk about
jail no bail for years in the late 1950s, but no one had either marshalled
enough courage or audacity to try it on any kind of mass level. And the first
jail no bail actually took place in Tallahassee, Florida. A young activist
named Patricia Stephens and several other activists decided to take Gandhian
philosophy literally and to fill the jails as best they could. And then there
was another jail no bail incident in Rock Hill, South Carolina, in early 1961.
And this gave the CORE--Congress of Racial Equality--leaders hope that this
could become kind of standard operating procedure in the movement. But the
freedom rides was really the first time this was tried on any kind of mass
level.

GROSS: Why was it controversial within the civil rights movement?

Prof. ARSENAULT: It seemed to go against common sense. It seemed
counterintuitive, I think, to a lot of people. Thurgood Marshall made a
famous statement in Nashville when he was lecturing at Fisk, and he was
criticizing the jail no bail, and he said, `For God's sake, if somebody can
get you out, get out. Take the offer. Anybody who knows what it's like to be
in a Southern jail, to be a black person or even a white person who's a
dissenter in jail, knows it's a very dangerous place to be.' So Marshall was
taking perhaps the more pragmatic view, but jail no bail became a badge of
honor and an elemental strategy for CORE during the early 1960s.

GROSS: Was it a troublesome mood for the prison authorities because they had
to deal with all of these civil rights activists who were being very
disruptive to the prison system?

Prof. ARSENAULT: I think it was very confounding for them. They were
accustomed to intimidating people, particularly young people. They had all
kinds of ways of manipulating and threatening and, in many cases, actually
physically harming people in, you know, Southern jails and particularly
Southern prisons, and Parchman being the most notorious, but even the county
jails and the city jails. They weren't accustomed to people, you know, trying
to stay inside the bars. And so it defied logic for them, and they didn't
know quite how to deal with it and never, I think, really figured out a way to
counter the tactics of these pesky kids and their allies.

GROSS: So when the Freedom Riders refused to post bail, how did they get out
of prison?

Prof. ARSENAULT: Well, in the case of most of the Freedom Riders who ended
up behind bars in Mississippi--more than 300 ended up in Parchman
Prison--there was a quirk of Mississippi law which said you had to get out
before 40 days to be able to file an appeal. And, of course, ultimately what
the Congress of Racial Equality and the Freedom Riders and the other
organizations involved wanted to do was to create a test case to force the
legal justice system--if possible at the local and state level, but at least
at the federal level--to endorse and to sustain and protect their
constitutional rights. So they needed these appeals. So they would stay in
for 39 days, but they would get out on time so that they could file their
appeals in the Mississippi case. And almost all the Southern states had some
quirks like this.

Part of the game in the freedom rides between whites--the white
segregationists and the Freedom Riders was a test of resources. They kept
increasing the bond that they had to post. They tried to break the civil
rights movement financially. They knew that resources were limited and that
most of those resources were with the NAACP, which had an ambivalent attitude
towards the freedom rides; that there was a feeling that by going into prison
on a mass level was subjecting the civil rights movement to a lot of pressure,
making it more vulnerable; that the freedom rides was an enormous gamble; that
if all this money was poured into it and there were no positive results, then
this movement would be set back, that it would not advance. So there were a
lot of people within the movement who had very serious questions about the
wisdom of playing this very dangerous game.

BIANCULLI: Raymond Arsenault, speaking with Terry Gross last year. More
after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

BIANCULLI: Let's get back to Terry's 2006 interview with professor and author
Raymond Arsenault. His book about the Freedom Riders, an integrated group of
civil rights activists in the early 1960s, is now out in paperback.

GROSS: The Freedom Riders were challenging segregation on interstate bus
rides. Now, buses had long been the center of protests in the South. Why
were buses at the center of civil rights actions throughout the 20th century?

Prof. ARSENAULT: Well, there was an ongoing debate among civil rights
activists as to where to place stress on the move for desegregation. Where
should they begin? Should they begin with the schools? Should they begin
with the public housing? Should they begin with unemployment or employment
policies? Should they begin with transportation? And there was no consensus
on this matter. They were fighting on all fronts. But the buses and trains
and streetcars were a daily irritant for blacks, so it was a natural place
where people would file lawsuits, where they would try to test the limits of
Jim Crow culture. And this was particularly true in the 1940s, when people
begin to have sort of individual freedom rides. They didn't use that term,
but there were a number of people who challenged the Jim Crow conventions.
Jackie Robinson, 1944, refused to move to the back of the bus near Ft. Hood
in Texas and he was court-martialed. He was eventually exonerated, but that
was just one example of an African-American who was not willing to put up with
this.

GROSS: Now, the initial group of Freedom Riders that CORE organized was
basically hand-picked. I mean, you almost have to audition to be part of it.
Why were they so carefully selected?

Prof. ARSENAULT: CORE had a philosophy of using a vanguard of carefully
trained, disciplined, nonviolent activists who would not strike back no matter
what happened. They felt that this was absolutely crucial, that you needed
people who understood the responsibilities of nonviolence. They were
terrified that if undisciplined activists were provoked, it would turn into
violence, and the cause of the movement would be set back. So they were very
carefully chosen. There were several dozen applicants, and they had to be
vouchsafed by ministers, by employers. If they were under 21, they had to get
their parents' signature. They had to explain why they wanted to go on the
freedom ride and that they were willing to follow the orders of CORE. This
was an extremely important part of the strategy of the original freedom ride.

GROSS: And did that careful selection continue through the history of the
Freedom Riders?

Prof. ARSENAULT: It actually didn't continue exactly the way they hoped it
would. There were ultimately 436 Freedom Riders, a remarkably diverse group
of people. It was intergenerational; it was interregional; it was
interracial. The pace of events dictated trying to fill the buses, to fill
the jails in Mississippi, to maintain the pressure, to convince Southern
segregationists that the Freedom Riders were not going to go away. So there
were instances where people got on the freedom buses without being carefully
screened, and there were a couple of cases where Freedom Riders turned on each
other with recriminations; there were--it was an enormously difficult thing to
organize, to administer.

The civil rights movement was just emerging as a national phenomenon. They
never tried to do anything on this scale before. You had several
organizations--CORE, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the
Nashville Movement, the NAACP, Fellowship of Reconciliation. Getting all
these people to be on the same page and to make sure that there were no
provocateurs, that there weren't FBI informers or Klan informers or people who
were not working in the best interests of the freedom rides. It was not easy
to maintain the discipline. And I think in general they were remarkably
successful in doing so; there were relatively few incidents. But it didn't
have the purity of the original rides, certainly, in the later stages.

GROSS: It was the job of the Freedom Riders to remain nonviolent in spite of
whatever anyone tried to do to provoke them. What were some of the violent
acts directed against them that they had to endure?

Prof. ARSENAULT: Well, of course, the most famous violent acts were the
bombing of a bus in Anniston, Alabama, where the Freedom Riders, the original
Freedom Riders, one group of them--there was an attempt to burn them alive in
the bus. They were attacked by a mob of Klansmen, actually both--men, women
and children dressed in their Sunday best. It was a horrific episode which I
think really scarred many of the people who endured it, who survived it.

Then, of course, the other bus that had been sent from Atlanta got to
Birmingham, and there had been collusion between the commissioner of public
safety, "Bull" Conner, and the police department and several klaverns of the
Ku Klux Klan, and there was a Klan mob which attacked the Riders as soon as
they got to the Birmingham station.

There were, of course, later attacks in Montgomery. After that, the civil
rights movement sort of decided they had to take a stand, that they could not
allow the violence in Alabama to end the Freedom Riders in failure. And so
Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders flew into Montgomery to hold
a rally in First Baptist Church, Reverend Ralph Abernathy's church. The
church was surrounded by a mob of several thousand white supremacists. There
was a fear that they actually were going to burn the church to the ground.
This was all in front of a number of reporters and television cameras.

Eventually Governor John Patterson, who was a committed segregationist but
decided to mobilize the National Guard at the last minute to save the church
and to save the Freedom Riders and their allies. And of course, this is
what--this episode in Montgomery on May 21st, 1961, is what drew the Kennedy
administration into the fray. They had to send several federal marshals to
try to mitigate the situation.

BIANCULLI: Raymond Arsenault, speaking with Terry Gross in 2006. We'll hear
more of their interview in the second half of the show. I'm David Bianculli
and this is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

BIANCULLI: This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli. Let's rejoin Terry's
conversation with Raymond Arsenault, the author and professor who has written
a book about his experiences in the civil rights movement as a young man. Now
out in paperback, it's called "Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for
Racial Justice." Terry spoke with Raymond Arsenault last year.

GROSS: What did the FBI do about the Freedom Riders and about the white
supremacists who were attacking them and the Southern police and sheriffs who
weren't doing much to protect the Freedom Riders?

Prof. ARSENAULT: One of the important subthemes of the freedom rides is the
role of the FBI. J. Edgar Hoover had no sympathy for civil rights activists.
He was an avowed segregationist, a supporter of the status quo. And he sent
that message down to the FBI, and basically the FBI in the Southern scene,
they were note-takers. They observed. They often knew what was about to
happen. And, of course, they had advance information about the bus burning in
Anniston and the mob gathering in Birmingham, but this information was not
forwarded to the rest of the Justice Department. And from that day on, Robert
Kennedy was not able to trust J. Edgar Hoover, even though Hoover
had--continued to have enormous power, and he and Kennedy had an interesting
back-and-forth relationship. This was a major turning point in the sense that
the FBI could not be trusted.

But ironically, many white Southerners thought the FBI was part of the federal
government and in many times was in cahoots with the civil rights activists.
And General John Patterson in Alabama actually threatened to arrest any FBI
agent who interfered on behalf of the Freedom Riders.

GROSS: In your book about the Freedom Riders, you describe the Kennedy
administration as initially seeing the Freedom Riders as a distraction from
what the Kennedy administration really wanted to deal with at the time, which
wasn't the civil rights movement. It was the Cold War. It was Cuba. It was
the Soviet Union. So would you describe a little bit the Kennedy
administration's take on the freedom rides and how they initially handled it?

Prof. ARSENAULT: Both President John Kennedy and Attorney General Robert
Kennedy initially, at least, and for a long time, considered the Freedom Rides
to be a very disturbing distraction. The Cold War was at its height. The
Freedom Rides came just after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. John Kennedy was just
about to go on his first international summit meeting in Vienna. He had
Khrushchev to deal with. The building of the Berlin Wall was imminent. The
world seemed to be coming apart at the seams, and he did not want, you know,
strife in the streets of Alabama to be on the front page.

There was a strong sense among the Kennedys and many other Americans that what
the Freedom Riders were doing was disloyal, that even though they may have
admired their courage, they questioned their wisdom. And there were very
often charges of disloyalty. Why couldn't the Freedom Riders wait for a
better time? Couldn't they see that there was a deeper agenda of countering
the propaganda of the Soviet Union, of making the United States look bad on
the international scene?

And of course, what all this had to do with was the changed situation with
respect to the decolonization of the Third World. Suddenly people of color
had an important part to play in the balance of power in the world, and the
civil rights leaders, particularly those involved in the freedom rides, sensed
this, that they could use this as a lever, as a way of saying, `You know, if
you want to claim a legitimacy to American democracy and to spread it abroad,
then you've got to live up to your own ideals at home.'

GROSS: So what action did the Kennedy administration take when the Freedom
Riders were being jailed and beaten?

Prof. ARSENAULT: The Kennedy administration, at first they sent John
Seigenthaler, who was a native of Nashville, Tennessee, a personal
representative of both the president and the attorney general, down to try to
make sure that the Freedom Riders stayed--the original freedom ride stayed
alive. He flew with them--when they gave up traveling from Birmingham to
Montgomery by bus, he flew with them on the freedom plane from Birmingham to
New Orleans. And both he and the other administration officials thought that
was the end of it.

What they didn't realize is that there was a band of student activists, the
Nashville Movement students, followers of the Reverend Jim Lawson, who decided
the freedom ride could not end this way. They could not allow the CORE Riders
to be chased out of Alabama, to flee by plane. And it was a disappointing end
for the original freedom ride. So the student activists in Nashville and
other movement centers in the South said, `We can't let it end this way.' So
they organized another set of freedom rides, which was a terrible, terrible
turn of events for the Kennedys, said, `Oh, my God, the crisis is reheating.
Now we've got all these students threatening to come into Birmingham.' And so
that's how it restarts, and it just won't go away.

By the end of May, Bobby Kennedy decides to turn to the Interstate Commerce
Commission to beg them to pass a sweeping desegregation order. Now, he knew
this would take weeks and even months, and, in fact, he doesn't get his order
until September 22nd, 1961--it's not effective until November 1st--and of
course, even though the civil rights activists, the Freedom Riders,
appreciated what Kennedy was doing, they did not adhere to his call for a
cooling-off period. They said, `We've been cooling off for a century. We're
not going to cool off anymore. We want freedom now. We want you to prove to
us that the ICC will render a sweeping desegregation order.'

So that's why those Freedom Riders continue to board the buses and to continue
to have these freedom rides throughout the summer. And more and more people
get involved as they come into--mostly into Jackson, Mississippi, and
ultimately into Parchman Prison.

BIANCULLI: Raymond Arsenault, speaking to Terry Gross last year. More after
a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

BIANCULLI: Let's get back to Terry's 2006 interview with civil rights
activist, professor and author Raymond Arsenault.

GROSS: Now, one of the things you write about in your book about the Freedom
Riders is how the media covered the Riders and what impact the media coverage
had. And something I found really surprising in your discussion of the media
is what you write about David Brinkley. You write David Brinkley
editorialized that the Freedom Riders are, quote, "accomplishing nothing
whatsoever and, on the contrary, are doing positive harm. The result of these
expeditions are not of benefit to anyone, white or Negro, the North or the
South, nor the US in general. We think they should stop it." Where did he say
this?

Prof. ARSENAULT: David Brinkley did a commentary on the NBC "Nightly News."
He, of course, was from North Carolina and considered himself to be a moderate
liberal, certainly someone who didn't normally endorse Jim Crow segregation.
But he felt that the Freedom Riders were being unreasonable. And he was not
alone in this. There were a number of sort of mainstream--many mainstream
journalists who were supported by the public opinion polls. In general, more
than two-thirds of Americans, although they supported the ideal of
desegregation in most cases, rejected the tactics of the Freedom Riders.

And Brinkley was speaking for them, suggesting that there was something
unpatriotic about what the Freedom Riders were doing by not recognizing the
damage that they were doing to America's reputation, to its image around the
world. And he felt that they simply were naive, that they were provocateurs,
that they were largely young kids who didn't know what they were doing. And
he was, I think, furious at them, as many Americans were, because they would
not allow the United States to go back to business as usual until the problems
that they were addressing were paid attention to.

GROSS: You found a lot of former Freedom Riders for your book as part of your
research. Is there anything, any kind of observation that nearly every
Freedom Rider you spoke to shared? Is it something that they all had in
common about the way they saw the freedom rides?

Prof. ARSENAULT: You know, I've often said that the freedom rides showed
that ordinary people could do extraordinary things. But after working 10
years on this book, I really don't believe that these are or were ordinary
people. You know, there were 436 of them. They took amazing risks, displayed
extraordinary courage in the face of widespread censure. I mean, their own
families, in many cases, telling them that they were doing things that were
making them ashamed, that they were making the mistake of their lives, that
they were being unreasonable, that they were going down a road that would hurt
themselves and hurt the nation.

And how they stayed the course, how they kept their eyes on the prize, is
sometimes beyond me. I just have--you know, I've thought--you know,
oftentimes historians, when they dig deeper into a topic, when they see the
real historical figures, it can be kind of disillusioning. That's not what
happened here. The deeper I probed, the more respect I had for them, and I
just am, I'm in awe, really, not only of what they did in 1961, but what many
of them have continued to do. They really dedicated their lives to social
justice, and it's just an incredibly empowering message, it seems to me.

GROSS: Among the people who you interviewed who had been Freedom Riders, did
any of them have scars? And I don't mean emotional scars; I mean physical
scars or disabilities from beatings that they had taken during the freedom
rides. And if so, how do they regard those scars or disabilities now?

Prof. ARSENAULT: There were a number of Freedom Riders who emerged with
physical scars. Most of them are dead now. Walter Bergman, who was a white
Freedom Rider from Michigan who was nearly beaten to death on the original
freedom ride, eventually filed a lawsuit where he won a kind of nominal
judgment against the FBI for its complicity in the--for an FBI informer in the
beating. He lived to be 99 despite his--he was in a wheelchair most of the
rest of the years of his life.

William Barbee, one of the most poignant of the Riders, who was the advance
scout into Montgomery--he was attacked at the bus station in Montgomery, and
they stuck a jagged piece of metal into his temple. He never recovered, and
he lived 20 more years but was never the same.

Ed Blankenheim, a Rider that I interviewed at great length, a white Rider who
died last year in San Francisco, had been a carpenter and a part time student
at the University of Arizona. The joke in the--among the Freedom Riders, even
though he was a secular Rider, as Hank Thomas, one of the other Riders, said,
`Jesus sent us a carpenter from Arizona.' Ed suffered a stroke later in his
life; I think was in part a result of some of the things that he experienced
in the rides.

And--but they wear them as badges of honor. I can't tell you how many times
the Freedom Riders told me, often with tears in their eyes, that this was the
moment of their lives. You know, at the time, even though they were being
told they were making a mistake, they now know that this was--whatever else
they did in their lives, whatever injuries they suffered, that their lives
made a difference. They didn't get everything they wanted. Some of the
ideals have not been realized. But they stood up for justice at a critical
moment in American history when relatively few people were willing to do so.
And so whatever injuries they suffered--and they certainly did suffer
them--they wore them, I think, and continue to wear them as a badge of honor.

GROSS: Raymond Arsenault, thank you so much for talking with us.

Prof. ARSENAULT: Oh, it's been my pleasure.

BIANCULLI: Raymond Arsenault, speaking to Terry Gross in 2006. His book
about the civil right struggle of the early 1960s, "Freedom Riders: 1961 and
the Struggle for Racial Justice," is now out in paperback.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Review: John Powers reviews "Killer of Sheep"
DAVID BIANCULLI, host:

It's taken 30 years for Charles Burnett's acclaimed film "Killer of Sheep" to
get a theatrical release. Set in Watts in the late '70s, it presents a slice
of African-American life that critics have called both despairing and hopeful.
Our critic at large John Powers finally gets a chance to review it.

JOHN POWERS reporting:

A few years ago, an LA newspaper asked me to name the best movie ever made
about Los Angeles. There were lots of world famous contenders, of course.
"Sunset Boulevard," with its fabulous title and unforgettable swimming pool.
"Chinatown," with its incestuous history lesson. And "Blade Runner," with
those rainy noodle shops and eloquent replicants. But there was one problem.
Nearly all the trademark LA films are steeped in the myths of film noir.
They're more concerned with an idea of Los Angeles than the reality of life as
it's lived here. That's why I decided the greatest movie about LA was "Killer
of Sheep," Charles Burnett's hauntingly poetic portrait of one family's daily
existence in the inner realm of Watts. Made in the 1970s for a mere $10,000,
this masterpiece also just happens to be the finest film yet made about
African-American life. But even though it was one of the first 50 films
chosen for protection through the Library of Congress' National Film Registry,
you couldn't see it anywhere--until now.

Henry Gale Sanders stars as Stan, the film's title character, who works at a
Watts slaughterhouse. While the job supports his family, Stan's worn down by
the cruel nature of his work and by a nagging sense of futility. He has
trouble sleeping, rebuffs his wife's affections, and he seems cut off from his
kids, who spend the movie doing the things that kids do: yelling, sobbing,
building forts, riding bicycles recklessly, and in one scene of astonishing
loveliness, they leap from one apartment building rooftop to the next. They
look like angels brought down to the earth to frolic.

But there's no flying away from these dispiriting sun-lashed streets, with
their dilapidated houses, bombed-out buildings, predatory shopkeepers, and
easygoing crooks who don't understand why Stan doesn't just wise up and join
in their crimes. After all, God gave man fists for a reason. But Stan has
his pride, as is clear in this scene, when a friend asks him about buying a
car.

(Soundbite of "Killer of Sheep")

Unidentified Actor #1: What do you want with another raggedy-ass car for,
huh?

Unidentified Actor #2: Just trying to get ahead, man.

Unidentified Actor #3: You niggers are sick.

Actor #1: Now you think you're middle class.

Mr. HENRY GALE SANDERS: (as Stan): Man, I ain't poor. Look, I give away
things to the Salvation Army. You can't give away nothing to the Salvation
Army if you po'. I mean, we may not have a damn thing sometimes. You want to
do see somebody that's po'?

Unidentified Actor #4: Mm-hmm.

Mr. SANDERS: (as Stan) ...now you go around and look at Walter. Now, he be
sitting over a oven and--with nothing but a coat on and sitting around there
rubbing their knees all day and eating nothing but wild greens picked out of a
vacant lot. No, that ain't me, and it damn sure won't be.

Unidentified Actor # 5: And tomorrow after I cash my check, let's go over to
Sybil's and buy that motor and put it in.

Unidentified Actor #6: Right on.

(End of soundbite)

POWERS: "Killer of Sheep" was Burnett's MFA thesis film. I suspect he
passed. And it showed him already to be a mature artist in his 20s. He
doesn't share the hipsterism that defines so much indie film, nor is he a
provacateur, like better known African-American directors, such as Spike Lee
or John Singleton. His work is actually far more daring because it violates
our expectations of what black filmmaking is or can be. Not without a cost to
his career. Although he's worked often and well over the last 25 years--his
most famous film is probably "To Sleep with Anger"--he's never really been
commercial, in no small part because he refuses to play with the usual
cliches. As he once remarked, black filmmakers are the only ones whose work
is considered realistic when it's demeaning.

Burnett works in a style that recalls international art films. It contains
echoes of Rossellini, Bresson and Ozu, but his subject matter is steeped in
the facts of American life. "Killer of Sheep" shows us profound truths about
race, work and the spiritual cost of poverty, truths no less stingingly
relevant today than three decades ago. Political but not doctrinaire. He
doesn't sentimentalize or demonize anybody. Instead, he shows life's radiant
complexity in the violent beauty of kids throwing stones in the street or a
woman's zinging a would-be Lothario with a joyously disdainful putdown: "You
about as tasteless as a carrot." In one exquisite scene, the exhausted Stan
embraces his young daughter as his wife looks on, wounded that just seconds
before he's again rejected her romantic overtures.

For all his clear-eyed vision, Burnett possesses what may be the rarest
quality in American film: tenderness. It shines through the film's memorable
black and white images, now restored to a splendor I've never before seen. In
in his delicate handling of amateur cast and in his richly expressive music,
from Louis Armstrong's `la-da-da' warble on the West End blues, to Dinah
Washington's ravishing version of "This Bitter Earth." The song plays over the
fatalistic final scene when Stan, doing the slaughterhouse job that keeps his
family alive, leads sheep to their inevitable doom. It's just one measure of
Burnett's compassionate brilliance that he understands how killers and sheep
can become one and the same.

BIANCULLI: John Powers is film critic for Vogue. Here's Dinah Washington.

(Soundbite of "This Bitter Earth")

Ms. DINAH WASHINGTON: (Singing)
Lord, this bitter earth
Yes, can be so cold
Today you're young
Too soon you're old
But while a voice within me cries
I'm sure someone may answer my call
And this bitter earth
May not be oh so bitter after all

(End of soundbite)

BIANCULLI: Coming up, David Edelstein on "Spider-Man 3." This is FRESH AIR.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Review: Film critic David Edelstein on new "Spider-Man 3"
DAVID BIANCULLI, host:

In 1962, Marvel Comics introduced the character of Spider-Man, a teenage crime
fighter with spider-like superpowers. Four decades later, the amazing
Spider-Man became an amazing cinematic blockbuster, director by Sam Raimi.
Now comes "Spider-Man 3," the latest sequel and, reportedly, the most
expensive movie every made. Film critic David Edelstein has a review.

Mr. DAVID EDELSTEIN: Some grownups I know complain about the relentless tide
of 100, 200, $300 million comic book superhero sequels every summer. So it's
worth pointing out that whatever you think of them, they're not all mindless
escapism. Some are this generation's religious parables. The last Superman
movie, "Superman Returns," explicitly linked the "Man of Steel" to Christ,
bearing the sins of mankind on his broad, but not that broad, shoulders.

The new "Spider-Man 3" is practically a "Ben Hur" for our time, a film that
delivers state-of-the-art spectacle but also throws a spotlight on its hero's
struggle between good and evil, that ends in deathbed conversions and churchy
epiphanies and that offers more homilies than the average Sunday sermon. I
don't want to sound churlish. So many of its bits are exuberant and its
special effects are a wow. It's an embarrassment of riches. But it's also
flabby and overinflated. It doesn't have the snap of the last two
"Spider-Man" movies, in which director Sam Raimi proved a whiz at mixing pop
and torment.

In the first, he toyed with real adolescent confusions as the nerdy Peter
Parker, played by Tobey Maguire, had to cope with sudden bodily eruptions as
well as his love for the beauteous Mary Jane, played by Kirsten Dunst. What
marred the movie was how this very grounded protagonist suddenly morphed into
a computer-generated videogame figure, swinging through a cartoony cityscape.
But the sequel was a triumph. The villain, played by the soulful Alfred
Molina, had real dramatic stature, and it was amusing and affecting to watch a
hero so conflicted that neither side, human or superhuman, functioned
properly.

Peter's "Spider-Man 3" trajectory is more of a slog. At the start, Spidey is
a big celebrity and Peter is so darn happy. It's lovely when he and Mary
Jane, now his girlfriend, lie on a web high over Central Park, and gaze at a
meteor shower, talking of her recent Broadway debut and smooching.

(Soundbite of "Spider-Man 3")

(Soundbite of music)

Mr. TOBEY MAGUIRE: (as Peter Parker) Wow.

Ms. KIRSTEN DUNST: (as Mary Jane) Ooh.

Mr. MAGUIRE: (as Parker) You see that one?

Ms. DUNST: (as Mary Jane) You know what?

Mr. MAGUIRE: (as Parker) Mm?

Ms. DUNST: (as Mary Jane) I'd like to sing on stage for the rest of my life
with you in the first row.

Mr. MAGUIRE: (as Parker) I'll be there.

Ms. DUNST: (as Mary Jane) Tell me you love me.

Mr. MAGUIRE: (as Parker) I love you. I love you so much. I always have.

(Soundbite of music)

(End of soundbite)

Mr. EDELSTEIN: This is the cue for the crash of a meteor that bears black
sticky stuff with legs, a blob with no apparent purpose except to attach
itself to Peter and bring out his supposed dark side. Our hero becomes more
self-centered, more prone to anger and vengeance. The charcoal-black
Spider-Man that emerges is pretty cool looking, and the ostentatiously hip,
black-clad Maguire brings off some snazzy funny moves in a jazz club. He's
like Jerry Lewis's Buddy Love in "The Nutty Professor."

But Spidey's dark night of the soul is very vanilla. He doesn't do anything
particularly mean or destructive. The filmmakers take up the slack with three
supervillains: Harry Osborn, played by James Franco, still bent on vengeance
for his father, the Goblin's, death; Venom, played by Topher Grace, a jerky
photographer who gets black slimed; and most memorably the Sandman, played by
Thomas Haden Church. He's an escaped con, accidently pulverized in a particle
physics lab. He has to practice, in an exquisite sequence, holding together
the millions of grains that constitute and reconstitute his body. The clashes
between Spider-Man and his foes still look a tad videogamesque, but who cares
with all these rock-'em sock-'em new permutations. They're dazzling, and they
should be at these prices. And hey, today's kids have more incentive than
every to study math and physics. They can devise better CGI superhero
battles.

But the climatic battle is a big porridge of stunts and effects. I lost count
of the times Dunst plunges from a building, enough to make you think, `Put her
on the ground or let her fall already.' With all these bad guys, the movie
never builds any momentum. The script is full of dead spots, like the sermons
of old Aunt May, played by Rosemary Harris. The bloat and the religiosity
made me nostalgic for the days when comic books were nerdy and disreputable
rather than overstuffed tales of spiritual anguish. There's so much to love
in "Spider-Man 3." I just wish its hero were more concerned with saving
falling bodies than fallen souls.

BIANCULLI: David Edelstein is film critic for New York Magazine.

(Credits)

BIANCULLI: For Terry Gross, I'm David Bianculli.

(Soundbite of music)
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