Freedom Riders look back after 50 years By Cassandra Spratling, Detroit Free Press
DETROIT — John Hardy went to Mississippi to help give blacks the knowledge and courage to register to vote in a state where a black man's decision to do so could cost him his home, his job and/or his life. - AP file photo Freedom Riders are photographed at the bus station in downtown Montgomery, Ala., in 1961. AP file photo Freedom Riders are photographed at the bus station in downtown Montgomery, Ala., in 1961. It was 50 years ago — the summer of 1961. At that time, nearly 2,500 blacks in Walthall County, Miss., were of voting age, but none were registered. The majority of the 4,530 eligible white residents in the county were registered. Hardy helped set up freedom schools, which 25 to 50 blacks attended almost every night. They would practice reading, filling out facsimiles of registration forms, and copying and interpreting the state constitution. On Sept. 7, 1961, Hardy — then a 21-year-old recent college student, escorted a 63-year-old woman and a 62-year-old man he had worked with to the county registrar's office. The registrar refused to register them. He cursed Hardy and ordered him out of his office. As Hardy was leaving, the registrar grabbed a pistol and struck Hardy so hard that he stumbled. When Hardy tried to explain to the local sheriff what happened, the sheriff threatened to beat Hardy "within an inch of his life," then hauled Hardy off to jail. He was charged with disturbing the peace and "bringing an uprising among the people." A judge released him the next morning. While awaiting arraignment, several townspeople made it clear that Hardy ought to beat it out of town. Black residents, fearing for Hardy's life, smuggled him out of Walthall County. Charges against him were still pending. "I was scared to death the whole time I lived in the South," said Hardy, 70, an actor and retired Detroit teacher. Fear was a fact of life for Hardy and many others who went South. But it never stopped him from doing what he believed he should do. Hardy was from the South himself — born and raised in Nashville — and knew well the injustices many blacks faced. He believes his activism is the reason his mother, Mamie Benson-Hardy, was fired from her maid's job at a Nashville hotel in 1960. When his picture appeared in the local newspaper, jailed with other young men who had been arrested for sitting in at a Walgreen's lunch counter, her supervisor held up the paper and said, "Isn't this awful. These kids coming down here stirring up trouble. They're where they belong. In jail." His mother told the woman that one of the boys was her son, and she was proud of him. Days later, his mother was out of work. The incident fueled Hardy's determination to become active in the movement to improve life for black people then living in harsh racially segregated communities. Before going to Tylertown, Miss., Hardy served on the Freedom Ride Coordinating Committee of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. The Freedom Riders were black and white students, mostly from the North, who rode interstate buses to the Deep South to help end racial segregation in the nation's transit system. "As a committee member, it was our job to raise funds, plan and arrange the trips and housing once the riders boarded and disembarked at their destination," Hardy recalled. Though Mississippi authorities ran him out of town, Hardy and Mississippi blacks eventually were victorious. A U.S. Court of Appeals decision agreed that the continued prosecution of Hardy "was designed to and would intimidate qualified Negroes of Walthall County from attempting to register to vote." The federal court also affirmed the rights of qualified blacks in Mississippi to vote. In 1963, Walthall County dropped charges against Hardy. A personal mission to help in the South Retired Wayne County Circuit Judge Claudia House Morcom is discouraged that some people treat civil rights history as if it were ancient. "There's a woman I have great respect for who said to me once, 'Oh, can't we forget all that? It was so long ago.' But I can't forget it," Morcom said. "I know people who were lynched and killed." Morcom arrived in Mississippi to fight injustice the day James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner disappeared. Later, the three freedom fighters were found dead, buried deep in a Mississippi dam. "When those three young boys went missing, the FBI didn't get involved initially," Morcom said. "They said there was no evidence that a crime had been committed. We knew because we had a strict policy of telling someone when you were leaving and calling when you arrived at your destination. There were three of them and nobody called." When Morcom, then Claudia House Shropshire, heard the call for lawyers to go South to help represent the people being arrested on unjust charges, she didn't hesitate. For Morcom, it was personal. "Both my parents were from Mississippi, and I still had relatives living there," she recalled. "My aunts lived there." The horrendous stories her parents told her came to her mind when the SNCC came to Detroit to recruit lawyers to go to Mississippi in the summer of 1964. Her parents told her black people couldn't go to the city parks, so they would have picnics in the black cemetery. When her parents traveled back South to visit family as a young couple, her mother sat in the backseat and her father wore a cap on his head to pretend he was her driver because her mother was so light-skinned it was dangerous for them to be a couple driving through the South. "You know, just like 'Driving Miss Daisy,' " Morcom said. Initially she signed up to be part of a rotating group of lawyers who went to Mississippi for one week. But after her week, she came back to Detroit, packed her bags and returned to lead the legal front for a year. She recruited lawyers and law students from all over the country, coordinated their travel and assignments in and out of Mississippi. They documented cases of voter intimidation, filed lawsuits to desegregate public facilities and provided legal defense for freedom workers often arrested on questionable charges. They also filed unprecedented lawsuits to unseat Mississippi congressmen for failing to properly represent their black constituents. "We didn't unseat anyone, but we drew the attention of the whole world to what was happening in Mississippi, and it led to a lot of changes," Morcom said. Morcom returned to Detroit and eventually became a Wayne County Circuit judge. She retired in 1998 after 26 years on the bench. Activism was 'the right thing to do' In a sense, you could say Dr. Silas Norman Jr. is still doing the work he began doing as a freedom fighter in the South. He is associate dean for admissions, diversity and inclusion at Wayne State University's College of Medicine. But during the summer of 1964, he was a 23-year-old graduate student at the University of Wisconsin who went to Selma, Ala., to be part of a five-member Selma Literacy Project designed to prepare people to vote. Shortly after settling in Selma, Norman became Alabama state director for the SNCC. Looking back, Norman said he is not sure what propelled him to become an activist. "It just seemed like the right thing to do," said the 69-year-old Bloomfield Township resident. "I knew about racism, had grown up with it, but Selma was the first time I'd experienced such hostility," said Norman, who grew up in Augusta, Ga. "There were lots of arrests. People were losing their jobs. People were victimized and intimidated in all kinds of ways." The summer he arrived in Selma, a group of freedom workers decided to test the newly passed Public Accommodations Act, which forbade public businesses from refusing to serve people based on skin color. They went to the Thirsty Boy Restaurant in Selma, sat down and waited to be served. None of the restaurant workers said anything, but within moments, the restaurant was swarming with police officers who rounded them up, hit them with cattle prods and took them to jail. "When you're hit with a cattle prod, you'll do pretty much whatever they tell you to do," he said, still wincing at the pain. They remained in jail for 11 days, sleeping on the floor of a crowded, filthy cell, eating mostly syrup and bread. Norman served as Alabama state director of the SNCC until 1965, when he was drafted into the military. As state director, his duties included helping to train new workers and coordinate their assignments and arranging bail for those arrested. Their goal was to give people the encouragement, support and knowledge they needed to register to vote. Many of the blacks who lived there were afraid to even try. "We probably didn't have sense enough to be scared," Norman said. "People were getting beaten and killed for the work. But we just thought what we were doing was important enough for us to keep going. "We really did believe our faith would see us through. It's just by the grace of God that we aren't all in the grave." He and other workers survived on the generosity of local blacks and some whites in the towns where they worked. Their weekly pay depended mostly upon contributions from people in the North and never amounted to more than $10 a week. Norman, an internal medicine specialist, is perplexed by the apathy of many voters today, especially black voters. "We are living through a time when people literally gave their lives for the right to vote," he said. "Now, seeing the kind of apathy and lack of involvement in politics, it's puzzling. In order to gain political power, you have a voice. Voting is your voice. Things changed in this country because we got a voice through voting. "We just have to keep trying to tell the story." For more information about reprints & permissions , visit our FAQ's. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor Brent Jones . For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to [email protected] . Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. To view our corrections, go to corrections.usatoday.com . We've updated the Conversation Guidelines. Changes include a brief review of the moderation process and an explanation on how to use the "Report Abuse" button. 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