Fifty Years Ago Today, Young Freedom Riders Pushed the Civil Rights Movement
Forward
by Micah Uetricht, campusprogress.org
May 4th 2011
Today marks the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Rides, when 13 young
black and white activists boarded a bus from Washington, D.C., heading south to
challenge the segregated interstate bus system and the system of Jim Crow
racism as a whole.
It’s worth remembering today that the rides, which were met with
stunning repression and violence and were a pivotal moment in the civil rights
movement, were carried out by college students and young people who were
willing to put their own bodies on the line in order to push the movement for
racial justice forward. Today, young people continue to lead the fight for
justice—particularly around the issue of immigration reform.
In 1960, the Supreme Court ruled in Boynton v. Virginia that
segregation in interstate travel was illegal. Though federal law had outlawed
such racist practices, they continued throughout the Jim Crow South—the
infamous “colored only” waiting rooms and sections of buses were ubiquitous.
The idea of the Freedom Rides was to dramatize this reality, to publicly
challenge the violent racism just beneath the surface of those waiting rooms
and backs of buses. Riders knew that such actions would provoke the wrath of
racist whites, which would create a public crisis that would force the federal
government to intervene. On both counts, the young riders were successful.
The Freedom Ride would not have succeeded, however, if its participants
had not been willing to both suffer grave injuries, allowing for the violent
reality of Jim Crow to be broadcast in images throughout the nation, and buck
the national political leadership seen as allies to African Americans that
urged restraint. The Kennedy administration, for example, was long known as a
civil rights ally, but Attorney General Robert Kennedy urged restraint on the
part of the riders; when they continued to put themselves in harm’s way and
subject themselves to escalating racist violence, the administration eventually
was forced to intervene on behalf of the riders.
It is doubtful that anyone but a group of gutsy young activists could
have set themselves to this task. They had not been in the movement long enough
to worry about what their supposed allies would think of their actions—they
recognized that even politicians who claimed to be on the side of civil rights
occasionally had to be forced to do the right thing. And as young people who
had yet to be beaten down by the world’s repeated disappointments, they were
still idealistic enough to believe that the violence and even potential death
they could face as a result of the Freedom Ride was worth it. As the movement
built off of the momentum generated by the riders, their wager proved correct.
Micah Uetricht is a staff writer with Campus Progress. You can follow
him on Twitter @micahuetricht.
Original Page:
http://campusprogress.org/articles/fifty_years_ago_today_young_freedom_riders_pushed_the_civil_rights_movement/
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