Freedom Riders mark 50 years
by Michael Cass, usatoday.com
NASHVILLE — The decision was easy for Catherine Burks-Brooks.
She was a senior at Tennessee A&I State University when the first Freedom Ride
— planned to fight for the right of African Americans to travel across state
lines on trains and buses while using the same seats, bathrooms, water
fountains and other facilities as whites — was knocked off course in May 1961
by a wave of brutal violence in Alabama, her home state.
She and other Nashville college students, veterans of the sit-in movement to
desegregate downtown lunch counters a year earlier, decided there was too much
at stake and they had to keep the Freedom Rides alive. So the students made
plans to travel from Nashville to Birmingham, Ala., on a Greyhound bus May 17.
Also at stake that spring day were the young riders' lives.
"I didn't want to die, now," Burks-Brooks, 71, recalled. "But I didn't have any
fear of doing what I had to do. I knew what was happening was wrong. And I had
an opportunity to do something about it."
Half a century later, Burks-Brooks and more than 400 other Freedom Riders are
marking the 50th anniversary of their efforts, which led President John F.
Kennedy's administration to enforce previous Supreme Court rulings banning
segregation along bus and train lines.
PBS will broadcast a two-hour documentary, Freedom Riders, which was shown May
16 at the 2010 Nashville Film Festival. A group of 40 college students from
across the country will retrace the rides, stopping in Nashville on May 12.
The first Freedom Ride was a project of the Congress of Racial Equality, a
national civil rights group. Seven riders boarded a Trailways bus and six got
on a Greyhound in Washington on May 4, all of them bound for New Orleans,
according to Raymond Arsenault's 2006 book, Freedom Riders.
The riders — including current Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., then a student at
Nashville's American Baptist Theological Seminary — passed through Virginia,
North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia without any major incidents. Their
luck changed in Anniston, Ala., on May 14 — Mother's Day. After a mob attacked
the Greyhound bus, police escorted it to the city limits. Six miles southwest
of Anniston, a protester threw a homemade bomb onto the bus, filling it with
black smoke and flames and nearly killing the riders.
The Trailways riders were harassed by Ku Klux Klansmen as they rode from
Atlanta to Alabama, then viciously attacked after they got off the bus in
Birmingham.
The attacks grabbed the attention of a nation that hadn't spent much time
focusing on the Freedom Rides up to that point. Among those watching were
President Kennedy and his brother Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, who
dispatched John Seigenthaler to Alabama.
Seigenthaler, a Nashville native arrived in Birmingham after the Freedom
Riders' plans to fly to Montgomery were disrupted by a bomb threat. He was able
to put together a plan to "sneak the Riders on board a flight to New Orleans"
and joined them for the 10:38 p.m. trip, Arsenault writes.
With that, Seigenthaler recalled, the Freedom Ride "was over."
Or so almost everyone thought. But the Nashville students, led by Lewis and
Diane Nash, decided the movement couldn't end like that. They hustled to work
out logistics for a ride from Nashville to Birmingham and on to Montgomery,
Jackson and New Orleans, finally persuading the Nashville Christian Leadership
Conference to provide $900 for bus tickets.
When the riders tried to leave Birmingham for Montgomery, Greyhound canceled
the ride. So the riders sat in the bus terminal for hours, surrounded by a
restless crowd outside.
When the bus finally arrived in Montgomery the next day, Seigenthaler remembers
seeing a "teeming anthill of violence" and hearing "screams, both of anger and
of pain" as he arrived at the bus terminal.
"It was an afternoon of terror, sheer terror," Seigenthaler said. "It's almost
impossible, 50 years later, to envision a scene like that, where men, women and
children are violently angry and bellowing invective and spewing hatred and
wantonly beating up people."
Veterans of the Freedom Rides say the movement had a quick impact and a lasting
legacy.
Within six months, the Interstate Commerce Commission issued an order saying
all interstate buses must post a certificate reading, "Seating aboard this
vehicle is without regard to race, color, creed or national origin." Signs
ordering African Americans to use separate facilities came down "all through
the South," said Ernest "Rip" Patton of Nashville, who rode from Montgomery,
Ala., to Jackson, Miss., where he was arrested and thrown in jail for more than
a month.
Original Page:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2011-05-06-freedom-ride-civil-rights_n.htm
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