Story Of Their Lives

Newson took a punch, then another, but broke free.

Once in the clear, he looked over his shoulder. He and other reporters were aghast: Wilson wasn't running. He wouldn't unbutton his suit jacket.

Wilson took fierce punches to the head and body. He was momentarily imprisoned in a headlock. His hat floated from his head; he reached and picked it up with an eerie calmness.

Wilson stubbornly refused to go to a hospital. Some of the reporters got him to a house where, dazed and in pain, he lay on a sofa for days. "He just said he was all right," says Newson.

The next morning there were pictures of Wilson in newspapers across the country. To much of America he was just as unknown as Emmett Louis Till had been.

But to those who knew him, there were reasons why L. Alex Wilson didn't run in Little Rock.

The Damage Done

His first name was Lucious, but in junior high, other students teased him and called him "Luscious." So Lucious Wilson became L. Alex Wilson.

He began his professional life as a schoolteacher in Florida but soon was grabbed by journalism. He had been a Marine and a foreign correspondent in Korea for a string of Negro newspapers. Wilson met his wife, Emogene, in the newsroom of the Tri-State Defender. She wrote society news.

His assignments were often dangerous, so he'd keep a lot of information from Emogene. "He would leave for Mississippi and wouldn't tell me," recalls his widow, who lives in Texas now. "He'd leave money with my sister because he knew I'd have tried to stop him from going. But he felt it was his duty to go."

Newson pondered Wilson's recalcitrance in Little Rock, and it led him back to a Memphis memory: "We had driven to a store. Wilson goes in. When he comes out, some man came out waving a gun at him. I get out of the car and say, 'Whoa. Whoa. What's going on here?' It settled down and Wilson got in the car. After some quiet, I said, 'What was all that about?' He told me about this situation in Florida, and the Klan coming around and him running. And he said to me, 'I promised myself I'd never run from anybody again.' "

Little Rock would be the last great civil rights battle that L. Alex Wilson would see up close. Afterward, he moved to Chicago where he took another newspaper job. He died in 1960. He was 51 years old. The official cause of death was Parkinson's disease, but some attributed it to neurological damage he suffered that day in Little Rock.

The Memento

In the spring and summer of 1961, a contingent of men and women decided to ride buses in the South to test a court decree desegregating public facilities.

Newson got himself down to North Carolina, where he hopped aboard one of the buses. It didn't take long for his first dispatch to get filed. It was from Charlotte, and this was how it started:

"The 1961 Freedom Riders ran out of luck here Monday afternoon when the first member of the integrated group was arrested. Joseph Perkins Jr., 28, a CORE field secretary from Kentucky was arrested on a trespassing charge while attempting to get a shoeshine at a barbershop in the Union bus terminal."

From North Carolina, the Freedom Riders went to Atlanta and then to Alabama. As they crossed the state line, they were flagged down by riders on another Greyhound bus and they learned there was trouble ahead in Anniston. When they arrived, hell broke loose. "The mob started breaking out our windows with pipes and sticks," Newson says.

But they got away, into the countryside.

"Then our tires went down," Newson recalls.

No one had noticed it, but back in Anniston some of the segregationists had punctured the bus tires. Six miles outside of town, hell broke loose again.

"The bus had to stop," says Newson. "The mob started in again, cursing, breaking out windows. It was Mother's Day. I will always remember this black woman getting down on her knees, saying, 'Lord, I don't want to die here.' "

Then Newson saw a white passenger leap to the front of the bus, where the mob was trying to pry the door open. He turned out to be Ell Cowling, an undercover law enforcement officer. "Cowling pulled a gun and stood in the front door," says Newson.

The mob retreated a bit.

"Next thing I knew someone threw a gas bomb on the seat behind me," he says. "I was burned behind my right ear. That was the blackest smoke you ever saw."

Eventually help arrived and the mob retreated. The Freedom Riders hustled off the bus. Newson hid his camera beneath a seat, having long realized a camera was the telltale sign of a reporter.

Once off the bus, though, sporadic beatings continued before they were all whisked away to a hospital in Anniston. Newson sneaked out of his hospital room -- he was suffering from smoke inhalation -- to call in his story. It ran with an editor's note on the front page:

"He and other Freedom Riders were saved from a probable lynching by presence of two state investigators."

Over the next several months, Newson would jump from one big story to another. The fall of 1962 found him in Oxford, Miss. James Meredith, a preternaturally calm military vet, had won a court battle to enter the University of Mississippi. Military troops had to be called out to deal with the violent reaction by whites.

"The night they had the big clash down there -- people shooting -- Jimmy Hicks of the Amsterdam News and I were riding toward Ole Miss and hearing all this stuff on the radio," remembers Newson. "We heard black reporters were not going to be allowed on the campus that night."

White segregationists descended upon the campus to try to stop Meredith. Smoke bombs were hurled, gunshots cracked the air. Someone sneaked up on Paul Guihard, a European journalist, and shot him in the back of the head. His was the first death. A young jukebox repairman, a mere bystander, was the second.

Newson and Hicks stayed away from the university that night. The next day, both in suit and tie, they stepped onto the campus. "Tear gas was still in the air," Newson says. "I had thought that after Little Rock, when Eisenhower called out the federal troops, that no one would have gone as far as they had in Mississippi. A standoff with the government? But when people go out to fight a civil war and die by the thousands in order to protest their superior view of their position in the world, that's serious. You can't laugh that off."

There never were any big-time journalism awards for Moses Newson. He wrote his stories, kept a few.

He left journalism in 1978, taking a job in public affairs with the federal government, from which he retired in 1995. But the story won't leave him.

One day, not long after his sojourn with the Freedom Riders, Newson got a package in the mail from Greyhound. He had no idea what it was. Turned out to be his camera, the one he had left on the burning bus, charred and mangled -- his lens and his pride.

He stared at it for a very long time. He felt mighty good to have it.