The Burglary (82 page)

What had been a relatively casual decision about how to spend his summer turned out to be much more for John Raines. Whatever he originally thought about whether CORE was overreacting by requiring every Freedom Rider to attend workshops in how to maintain nonviolent behavior no matter how badly one was treated, he soon realized such training was necessary. After he finished the training, he flew to St. Louis in early July to meet his fellow Freedom Riders for a bus ride to their first destination, Little Rock. His fellow Freedom Riders included one of the organizers of the Freedom Rides, the Reverend
Benjamin Elton Cox, then twenty-nine and the African American pastor of Pilgrim Congregational Church in High Point, North Carolina, and
Janet Reinitz, then twenty-three, a white artist from New York City.

As they traveled south into Arkansas, word spread in Little Rock that an integrated bus was on its way to the local bus station. When the Freedom Riders' bus pulled into the bus terminal, an angry white mob was waiting inside. As the Riders walked into the terminal they quickly realized the game they were expected to play. In a not very subtle attempt to be technically in compliance with the new federal law that required racially integrated transportation facilities—while simultaneously maintaining segregation—
the old “white” and “black” passenger areas had been renamed “integrated” and “segregated.” The “integrated” area was for black people, and the “segregated” area was for white people. Police tried to guide the Freedom Riders toward the area designated for black people. The Riders conferred briefly about how to deal with the subterfuge, and then, led by Cox, they slowly and calmly walked together into the area designated for white people.

Raines remembers the white mob screaming at them furiously at that point. The police chief,
Paul Glascock, was surprised and enraged at the Freedom Riders. He had apparently thought the riders would go along with the transparent trick. He promptly arrested them under a state breach-of-the-peace statute and took four of the five to jail. The fifth, a high school student, obeyed his order to return to St. Louis.

Actually, no Freedom Rider was supposed to be arrested in Little Rock. Local and state officials were desperate to prevent the city from being in the spotlight again. In 1957, it had received international notoriety when the governor,
Orval Faubus, supported white segregationists when they publicly defied efforts of African American students to integrate the city's Central High School. Shocking scenes of violent white mobs attacking African Americans and using their bodies as barricades to keep black children from entering school were broadcast nightly on national network news and abroad.

In anticipation of the Freedom Riders coming to Little Rock, orders had gone out from officials that there should be no repeat in 1961 of those 1957 scenes. Even Governor Faubus was upset about their arrests. As the local
Gazette
editorialized while the riders were behind bars, “The quicker the defendants can be freed the better for the community.”

The judge assigned to their case, Judge
Quinn Glover, told them he would suspend their sentences if they returned to their homes. No way. They had more bus rides to take. They refused his offer. Days later, he ordered that they be brought to his chambers for a private meeting. “I know you have a right to do what you did. I know the mob, not you, was the threat to the peace,” John Raines recalls the judge telling them, “but if I don't find you guilty, I won't get reelected.” Trying to appeal to their racial justice instincts, Judge Glover said, “And the other guy is worse on niggrahs than I am.” He told them he would set them free if they agreed to get out of town. Unwilling earlier to promise to go home, they were willing now to agree to get out of town. After all, they wanted to ride to their next assignment, and it seemed as though they had made their point in Little Rock. They grabbed their new freedom, left the courthouse, and boarded a bus for Louisiana.

Story in
Newsday
, a Long Island newspaper, about the young local minister, John Raines, who became a Freedom Rider in the South in the summer of 1961.

Raines being booked at the Little Rock jail. Days later, a judge freed him and his fellow Freedom Riders on condition that they leave town. (
Photo from Orval Eugene Faubus Collection, University of Arkansas Libraries
)

As the
Freedom Riders emerged from a bus in Shreveport, they looked up and saw police snipers lining the edge of the roof of the bus station, their rifles aimed at the Freedom Riders. Local police had completely sealed off the bus terminal. No tests of laws would take place there that day.
Dave Dennis, a local man who had just been released from Mississippi's Parchman State Prison where he had been imprisoned for his role as a Freedom Rider just days earlier, took them to a meeting with local black clergy who invited them to stay at their homes that night. But when it became clear that the local clergy felt threatened by the strong measures taken by local authorities, the riders feared their presence in town would add more danger to what already was a very dangerous situation for local black people. They thanked the black ministers for their offer of hospitality, but told them they would ride through the night to their next destination. The next day, the riders were turned away at the Baton Rouge terminal.

JOHN RAINES'S BASIC ASSUMPTIONS
about crucial aspects of American life were challenged for the first time by what he observed as a Freedom Rider. For one thing, it was the first time he met people who looked like him—white—who wanted to kill him, all because he supported the yearnings of black people for equality. Before that experience, he had no idea that some government agencies in the United States were instruments of repression against their own people. He had no idea that countless black Americans were prevented from exercising their basic rights, such as riding on a public bus or voting. He had thought going on a Freedom Ride would be a nice way to spend his summer. It turned out to be a transforming experience.

The day after his Freedom Ride ended, Raines traveled to visit his parents at Glen Lake. It took nearly all day to make the journey by plane and car. He was looking forward to a quiet respite with his parents by the lake. As he traveled that day, he felt a need to decompress and think about what he had just experienced. He knew his parents' lake house would be the perfect place to do it. It had been a family gathering place since they bought it in 1951. His parents had not been active in the civil rights movement, but he grew up knowing they hated racism. While he was in the South, his father, in an interview with
Robert Caro, then a reporter for
Newsday,
a newspaper on Long Island, said he respected his son for being a Freedom Rider.

When he arrived at the old cottage—which the family called the “pea-green shack on the damn hill” because years ago cars often got stuck on the
unpaved road that led up to the cottage—nestled in trees above Glen Lake, he was tired but also eager to talk. He had stories to tell. He was also hungry. His parents were happy to see him, but they had finished dinner much earlier. They were tired and ready to go to bed by the time he arrived. They suggested he have dinner at the Homestead. They would hear his stories in the morning.

With that suggestion, Richard and Lucille Raines unintentionally set the stage for the next life-changing development in their son's life that summer.

John liked the Homestead, a stately resort hidden in the woods on the northeastern edge of Lake Michigan, just a few miles from his parents' cottage. There weren't many people in the Homestead dining room by the time he arrived that evening. That made it easy for Bonnie Muir, his waitress, to spend more time talking with him than she usually did with customers. As she served him dinner, she learned two things that pleased her—that he had just returned from being a Freedom Rider and that he was about to move to New York. As he answered her questions about his time in the South, he struck her right away as “a great alternative to the sort of all-American guys that I had dated before that.” They were “very nice, but not very interested in the world.” Muir
was
interested in the world. A news junkie, she had read about the arrests of some of the Freedom Riders a few weeks earlier. She was not an activist, but she admired people who were. She was happy to meet such a person, especially one as handsome and charming as John Raines.

It was clear they both enjoyed their conversation that evening. Both later said they felt a meshing of values in their conversation that night that they seldom, if ever, had felt before. In the two weeks before Raines left for New York, they enjoyed what they later called “three or four intense dates.” On one of those evenings, he took her home to meet what she still calls, after fifty years of marriage, his “exuberant” family. All of them gathered after dinner, as they often did, on the front porch and sang. “They were great singers. They sang four-part harmony … some hymns, barbershop quartet songs. I thought it was wonderful.” She was starting to fall in love not only with Raines but also with his family.

Crazy about each other by the time they parted in late August, Raines and Muir arranged to meet several weeks later in New York. They agree that, as Bonnie Raines put it years later, “It was really there, in New York, that we fell in love.” For hours, they walked the streets of Morningside Heights and Harlem, ecstatic in their new love and also in their affection for the city on those clear, beautiful autumn days. Many years later, John Raines suggests, with a grin, that Bonnie would not have married him if he hadn't lived in
New York. She laughs and counters that she might not have married him if he hadn't been a Freedom Rider.

Anyone observing the couple with the striking all-American good looks as they dated that summer at Glen Lake, or several weeks later in New York, might have predicted that if they married they would be likely to root themselves in a few years in one of the nation's expanding lush suburbs. Surely no one would have predicted then that ten years later they would be driving a getaway car through the Philadelphia Main Line district after committing what J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, considered one of the worst crimes in the bureau's history.

ON THE SURFACE
that summer at Glen Lake, Bonnie Muir seemed like a quintessential summer lodge waitress. Her long, shining black hair framed an engaging and warm face. She had a radiant smile and was a dreamy version of Hollywood's girl next door. She had just finished her sophomore year at Michigan State University and was earning money for her education by working at the Homestead. She had grown up in Grand Rapids, the daughter of loving parents
Dorothy and Andrew Muir. At the university she was a good student, a pretty cheerleader who cheered the Spartans on at every football game, and an enthusiastic Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority sister. But there was much more to her than those visible signs of the happily conforming midcentury coed. Like most middle-class American women of her generation, when she thought of her future, she had these expectations: She would graduate, she would marry, she would have children, and, if she worked outside the home, she would be an elementary school teacher. Within two years, Muir would envision a future radically different from those expectations.

John Raines, tall and blond with radiant blue eyes and an easy, hearty laugh, had, like most men of the educated class, grown up close to the establishment and with a certainty that a variety of professions would be open to him. When he was a child, his parents were part of the liberal Minneapolis elite during the years his father, the future Indianapolis bishop, was pastor of the large Hennepin Avenue Methodist Church.
Hubert Humphrey, the mayor of Minneapolis during some of those years, lived on the same street as the Raineses and was a friend who dropped by their home occasionally. Raines realized later that he had grown up accustomed to being connected to power. It was an environment, he recalls, that gave him and his brothers “an impression that all was right with the world, and that they would inherit
it and run it.” Protestant clergy in top-tier appointments, such as bishops or pastors of large, prestigious congregations, were not rich by virtue of salaries. Rather, church officials made it possible for such clergy to live like the rich by buying large homes for them in the best neighborhoods and paying for them to send their children to superior schools. This was the case for the Raines family.