On May 20th, 1961, John Lewis and Jim Zwerg were about to die in Montgomery, Alabama. They were Freedom Riders, and they had just arrived by bus. Upon their arrival, they were greeted by a mob of whites, many of whom were affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan, who attacked the Freedom Riders as they disembarked. One of the last things that Lewis saw before passing out was Floyd Mann, Alabama’s Director of Public Safety, who fired warning shots at the mob, driving them back before moving on to rescue another Freedom Rider, William Barbee, who was being beaten by a crowd with iron clubs and baseball bats.
Floyd Mann was an extraordinary person. The day before, over the objections of Alabama Governor John Patterson, Mann’s friend and patron since the third grade, Mann assured Attorney General Robert Kennedy that if Patterson ordered him to protect the Freedom Riders from the Klan, Mann could protect them. Mann had protected the Freedom Riders from Birmingham to Montgomery that morning with a phalanx of State Police; he had gone to Montgomery to protect them in person because he rightly suspected that the Montgomery authorities lacked his commitment to the law.
Floyd Mann was an extraordinary person, and the image of him, and the archetype he embodies, lies large across our collective imagination. He was, as David Halberstam writes, a lawman; and we know instantly what he means: a man who enforces the law fairly, who says the truth even at the risk of his own position, who stands up to their friends when they are wrong, who will if need be defend right with his person. Or, as Floyd Mann described his actions that day, he was “just doing what had to be done.”
We, as Americans, believe in the Lawman. We trust him. And we have built a vast apparatus, touching the lives of every American and millions more around the globe, which depends on the Lawman to function effectively. Are you concerned about who decides when to authorize a drone strike? Worry not, Lawmen are deciding! Whether the question is who is investigating claims of police misconduct or who gets their phones tapped and emails read, the answer is always the same. Lawmen are doing it. And we trust Lawmen.
But Floyd Mann knew better. The problem with police work, Mann said, is that “by its nature it tended to attract a certain percentage of sadistic people, who enjoyed the job because it legitimized the natural meanness.” He thought the solution was for a good police chief to set limits for his officers.
Read More
