Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure: The True Story of a Great American Road Trip by Matthew Algeo Page A
Authors: Matthew Algeo
Tags: United States, General, History, Biography & Autobiography, Travel, 20th Century, Essays & Travelogues, Presidents & Heads of State, Presidents, Automobile Travel
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“ranging from 20-year-old jalopies to spanking new Cadillacs,” according to the
Baton Rouge State-Times.
Practically every black-owned car in the city displayed a small handmade sign in the window reading FREE RIDE . Black churches collected over six thousand dollars in donations to pay for gasoline and other expenses. Compliance with the boycott was nearly total. A local reporter who rode buses for three hours on the first day of the boycott saw just three black passengers.
On the night of June 20, a cross was burned on the lawn of Mt. Zion Baptist Church, a prominent African American church whose minister, T. J. Jemison, was the president of the UDL. A cross was also burned on the lawn of Jemison’s home.
The privately owned bus company, meanwhile, was reporting daily losses of more than fifteen hundred dollars. “A continuation of this loss will ultimately mean that we will have to cease operations,” the company’s manager warned.
Behind the scenes, African American leaders, city officials, and the bus company were negotiating an end to the boycott. On June 24, the city council passed a new ordinance. It was a compromise of sorts: The first two seats on buses were reserved for whites, the last two for blacks. The remaining seats would be filled by blacks from the back and whites from the front.
At a rally attended by more than eight thousand black citizens that night, T. J. Jemison reluctantly announced that the UDL was calling off the boycott. He said the organization had accepted the new ordinance “under strong protest.” “I’m not going to tell you you have to ride the buses,” Jemison said. “And when I say put your cars up, I don’t mean lock them up and throw away the keys. I want you to keep them handy.”
The Baton Rouge bus boycott received scant attention in the mainstream media, but black newspapers covered it extensively. That’s probably how a young African American minister named Martin Luther King Jr. heard about it. At the time King was newly married and studying for his doctorate in Boston. He would later call T. J. Jemison to discuss the tactics used in Baton Rouge—tactics that King himself would employ in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955.
Harry and Bess Truman enjoyed discussing current events, so it is all but certain that, as they cruised along Highway 24 on that hot summer morning in 1953, their conversation turned at some point to the day’s biggest news story: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were scheduled to be executed later that day at Sing Sing, the maximum-security prison in upstate New York.
Three years and three days earlier—on June 16, 1950—Julius Rosenberg, an electrical engineer from New York City, had been arrested and charged with espionage. His wife, Ethel, was arrested a short time later. The couple was accused of giving nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. That they had communist sympathies is undeniable—after all, they met in New York’s Young Communist League—but the evidence against them was hardly overwhelming. At their trial the prosecution’s star witness was Ethel’s brother, David Greenglass, who had worked on the Manhattan Project. Greenglass had already confessed to spying for the Soviets and agreed to testify against his sister and her husband in exchange for a lighter sentence. On the witness stand Greenglass said he had passed secrets to the Rosenbergs, who in turn handed them over to the KGB. Greenglass would recant his testimony more than forty years later, saying he’d lied to protect his wife and children. He served just ten years in prison and now lives in New York under an assumed name. (In 2008, Morton Sobell, a friend of the Rosenbergs who was also convicted of espionage, told the
New York Times
that Julius Rosenberg was indeed a spy but that Ethel was not, though she knew what her husband was doing.)
A jury convicted the Rosenbergs on March 29, 1951. A week later, Judge Irving Kaufman sentenced them to die in the electric chair.
Baton Rouge State-Times.
Practically every black-owned car in the city displayed a small handmade sign in the window reading FREE RIDE . Black churches collected over six thousand dollars in donations to pay for gasoline and other expenses. Compliance with the boycott was nearly total. A local reporter who rode buses for three hours on the first day of the boycott saw just three black passengers.
On the night of June 20, a cross was burned on the lawn of Mt. Zion Baptist Church, a prominent African American church whose minister, T. J. Jemison, was the president of the UDL. A cross was also burned on the lawn of Jemison’s home.
The privately owned bus company, meanwhile, was reporting daily losses of more than fifteen hundred dollars. “A continuation of this loss will ultimately mean that we will have to cease operations,” the company’s manager warned.
Behind the scenes, African American leaders, city officials, and the bus company were negotiating an end to the boycott. On June 24, the city council passed a new ordinance. It was a compromise of sorts: The first two seats on buses were reserved for whites, the last two for blacks. The remaining seats would be filled by blacks from the back and whites from the front.
At a rally attended by more than eight thousand black citizens that night, T. J. Jemison reluctantly announced that the UDL was calling off the boycott. He said the organization had accepted the new ordinance “under strong protest.” “I’m not going to tell you you have to ride the buses,” Jemison said. “And when I say put your cars up, I don’t mean lock them up and throw away the keys. I want you to keep them handy.”
The Baton Rouge bus boycott received scant attention in the mainstream media, but black newspapers covered it extensively. That’s probably how a young African American minister named Martin Luther King Jr. heard about it. At the time King was newly married and studying for his doctorate in Boston. He would later call T. J. Jemison to discuss the tactics used in Baton Rouge—tactics that King himself would employ in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955.
Harry and Bess Truman enjoyed discussing current events, so it is all but certain that, as they cruised along Highway 24 on that hot summer morning in 1953, their conversation turned at some point to the day’s biggest news story: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were scheduled to be executed later that day at Sing Sing, the maximum-security prison in upstate New York.
Three years and three days earlier—on June 16, 1950—Julius Rosenberg, an electrical engineer from New York City, had been arrested and charged with espionage. His wife, Ethel, was arrested a short time later. The couple was accused of giving nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. That they had communist sympathies is undeniable—after all, they met in New York’s Young Communist League—but the evidence against them was hardly overwhelming. At their trial the prosecution’s star witness was Ethel’s brother, David Greenglass, who had worked on the Manhattan Project. Greenglass had already confessed to spying for the Soviets and agreed to testify against his sister and her husband in exchange for a lighter sentence. On the witness stand Greenglass said he had passed secrets to the Rosenbergs, who in turn handed them over to the KGB. Greenglass would recant his testimony more than forty years later, saying he’d lied to protect his wife and children. He served just ten years in prison and now lives in New York under an assumed name. (In 2008, Morton Sobell, a friend of the Rosenbergs who was also convicted of espionage, told the
New York Times
that Julius Rosenberg was indeed a spy but that Ethel was not, though she knew what her husband was doing.)
A jury convicted the Rosenbergs on March 29, 1951. A week later, Judge Irving Kaufman sentenced them to die in the electric chair.
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