Fifty years later, members of the Freedom Riders recall their heroic stand
against segregation and racist hatred
by Angela Tuck, nashvillescene.com
May 12th 2011
It is a very different nation that commemorates the 50th anniversary of the
Freedom Rides this month. The "colored" and "white" waiting room signs are
gone, along with the insistence that blacks be treated as second-class
citizens, unworthy of equal rights. That fact is not lost on John Lewis, now a
U.S. congressman from Georgia. Fifty years ago, he faced mob fury, brutal
beatings and the threat of death just to use the same services and public
facilities as his white peers throughout the South.
In May 1961, Lewis was a 22-year-old student at Nashville's American Baptist
Theological Seminary when he and other college students decided to take a stand
that would make history. In a bold move, the Congress of Racial Equality — the
civil-rights organization founded two decades earlier to fight segregation with
nonviolent resistance — sent small teams of black and white Americans, Jews and
Christians, young and old, via Greyhound and Trailways buses from Washington,
D.C., into the Deep South. Their mission: to test the enforcement of federal
desegregation laws.
"An education is important and I hope to get one," wrote Lewis in his
application for the Freedom Rides. "But right now, freedom is the most
important thing in my life. That justice and freedom might come to the Deep
South."
A year earlier, a U.S. Supreme Court ruling had made it illegal to discriminate
against passengers in interstate travel. But segregated conditions remained in
Southern cities, from Nashville all the way to the Gulf. When state and local
governments made it clear they had no interest in enforcing integration, black
college students and adult activists, and the whites who stood with them, made
their move to challenge the status quo.
Their effect was inestimable. By the time the Freedom Rides ended in December
1961, more than 400 people had joined the protest that started with 13 people,
including Lewis. A ruling that September by the Interstate Commerce Commission
— a direct result of the rides — put a stop to long-held practices that kept
blacks and whites separate. The Freedom Rides marked the first time black and
white Americans joined forces en masse to protest racist conditions.
Perhaps most importantly, though, the widely reported violence that rained down
on the peace-abiding Freedom Riders — vicious, vehement, and hostile beyond
reason — pricked the conscience of the nation. For the first time, the Kennedy
administration fully recognized the extremity of the South's entrenched
institutional bigotry.
"This is a movement that depended on the moral courage of the individual
Freedom Riders," says Ray Arsenault, the historian whose book Freedom Riders:
1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice has become required reading on the
era. "They had the discipline of nonviolence and they were willing to die. The
more the judicial system tried to intimidate them and make them abandon the
rides, the more it solidified their commitment."
As a result, Arsenault says, "They became the shock troops of the movement.
They were among the leaders in all the demonstrations and campaigns for the
rest of the decade."
Nashville's Freedom Riders were no strangers to challenging business owners and
city leaders. A year earlier, they had begun a successful campaign to protest
segregated stores and businesses, starting with the lunch counters in what was
then the city's booming downtown shopping district on Church Street.
Ernest "Rip" Patton Jr., now 71, was one of those protesters. In 1960, he was a
student at Tennessee State University (then called Tennessee Agricultural and
Industrial University), eager to make a change in his hometown.
"Nashville was one of the most Jim Crow cities in the South," the longtime
Nashville resident recalls today. "I can't think of anything that wasn't
segregated. There were signs even on the buses and in the downtown areas. You
couldn't sit down at the lunch counter and eat. You couldn't even go in and
order takeout in some of the places. The places that did have takeout, you had
to eat it outside. At Harvey's department store, you had to take it outside."
Led by the Rev. James Lawson (whose activism ironically got him drummed out of
divinity school at Vanderbilt) and ministers such as Kelly Miller Smith at
First Baptist Church, Nashville residents held sit-ins, stand-ins and boycotts
designed to hit merchants in their pocketbooks.One year, no one bought Easter
outfits.
These were stepping stones toward larger actions — such as a campaign against
segregated movie theaters, whose owners forced black patrons to walk in alleys
to rear entrances and take seats in the balcony. "Alleys are for rats" was the
protesters' slogan, recalls Pauline Knight-Ofosu, a Freedom Rider from
Nashville now living in suburban Atlanta.
But with the increased organization and visibility of the protests came greater
risks, and more direct confrontation with racist hostility. During one of those
stand-ins, Knight-Ofosu remembers, a young white man spat on her.
"I asked him if he had a handkerchief," she says. "He looked at me kind of
crazy, but it took away the hostility of the moment."
That was only an inkling of what the Freedom Riders would face on the road
throughout the month of May 1961, as the rides got under way. The activism in
Nashville prepared the students for what they all knew could be a life-ending
journey.
Riders were trained in the basic principles of nonviolence. Courage,
self-control and sacrifice were essential to their mission. Training sessions
included role-playing where demonstrators jeered and yelled at one another to
prepare for what they might encounter during their protests.
"We were ready when we left Nashville," remembers William Harbour, a
participant in the Freedom Rides who now resides in Atlanta. "Rev. Lawson
trained us. ... We had several weekends of training, plus training all the
time. Some students couldn't take the cigarette burns or being spit on. We had
church first. [For those who couldn't take it] you could run Xerox machines or
put up posters," Harbour says.
"We had wonderful, wonderful preachers and they were all versed. Jesus the
Christ was our model and of course, Mahatma Gandhi," Knight-Ofosu says. "The
whole thing was to have our hearts straight. To fix our minds on love and peace
and let everybody know that we're all God's children. We were making it known
that we were dissatisfied with the conditions; that it was not OK to treat us
like we were so subservient or less than equal or not citizens of America."
The rides were executed with purpose and precision. Small mixed-race groups of
riders would purchase tickets on regular bus routes and board with other
passengers. White team members would sit in the rear, and the black riders
would attempt to sit in the front.
That usually resulted in arrests or beatings — though at first, the riders
encountered only minor resistance as they passed through Virginia and North
Carolina. That changed once the bus carrying John Lewis pulled into Rock Hill,
S.C. When buses reached the station, riders went inside the terminal to test
the existence of segregated waiting and dining areas. As Lewis tried to enter,
a group of white hoodlums and their Klansman ringleader attacked him and the
white fellow rider, Albert Bigelow, who accompanied him.
There would be worse. On May 14 — Mother's Day, a Sunday — a white mob
descended on a Greyhound bus traveling through Anniston, Ala. After bringing
the bus to a stop by flattening its tires, enraged whites firebombed the
vehicle, sending the riders inside fleeing for their lives. That same day, an
angry mob attacked riders on a Trailways bus in Birmingham, while police agreed
to do nothing for 15 minutes.
When the first bus of Nashville riders made it to Birmingham, they were
arrested for entering the white waiting room inside the terminal, Harbour says.
Scared and utterly on their own, the riders were taken out of jail in the
middle of the night and driven to the Alabama state line, where they were
dropped off to fend for themselves. They found shelter near the railroad
tracks, in the home of a black couple. The next day, they made their way back
to Nashville, but not before vowing to return to Alabama to challenge
Birmingham "commissioner of public safety" Eugene "Bull" Connor and his
Klan-infiltrated police force.
The violence led CORE to call off the rides. But students at Nashville's
historically black colleges and universities had a different idea.
Led by Diane Nash, a fearless Fisk University coed, the students insisted on
continuing, against the advice of older civil rights leaders who felt it was
too dangerous. But quitting was not an option, remembers Harbour, then a
student at Tennessee State University.
"We met all night long and all the next day," he says. "We probably had 300 or
400 students who wanted to go. But the selection was made, and I was selected
to go. No. 1, I was from Alabama and knew the territory."
Nashville native John Seigenthaler, then an aide to Attorney General Robert
Kennedy, begged the students to abandon the rides or face possible death. But
Nash stood firm — a moment Seigenthaler recounted almost 50 years later to
documentarian Stanley Nelson.
"There's a pause," Seigenthaler remembers, "and she said, 'Sir, you should know
we all signed our last wills and testaments last night before they left. We
know someone will be killed. But we cannot let violence overcome nonviolence.
...' That's virtually a direct quote of the words that came out of that child's
mouth."
Despite that tension — or because of it — the riders formed strong bonds on
their journeys, Harbour recalls. He speaks fondly of his seatmate, Jim Zwerg, a
white exchange student from Wisconsin who was attending Fisk University at the
time of the rides. Zwerg was present when the violence reached its zenith on
the May 20 ride to Montgomery, Ala. There, in the chilling calm of a deserted
bus terminal, rioting whites set upon the riders. Taylor Branch describes the
scene in his civil rights history Parting the Waters:
"One of the men grabbed Zwerg's suitcase and smashed him in the face with it.
Others slugged him to the ground, and when he was dazed beyond resistance, one
man pinned Zwerg's head between his knees so that the others could take turns
hitting him. As they steadily knocked out his teeth, and his face and chest
were streaming blood, a few adults on the perimeter put their children on their
shoulders to view the carnage."
Another victim of violence that day was John Seigenthaler. Present on the scene
as part of his government duties, Seigenthaler stopped rioters from attacking a
Freedom Rider named Susan Wilbur. Someone sapped him from behind with a pipe,
leaving him to bleed in the street. The incident proved that no one, not even
one of President Kennedy's own men, was safe from boiling blood down South.
Despite the violence they experienced, miraculously, none of the riders was
killed. Yet once the riders made it to Mississippi, Knight-Ofosu, Patton and
Harbour were among the more than 300 Freedom Riders jailed in the city of
Jackson. The charge, ironically, was "breach of peace." Patton spent time in
the city jail, and he was reunited with other riders later at the notorious
Parchman facility, a state prison that housed death row inmates.
For most, the conditions at Parchman stood in stark contrast with the college
campuses they left behind. The Freedom Riders were forced to strip naked and
have their facial hair removed. Scores of roaches greeted the riders, as did
stifling heat. They passed time singing freedom songs and studying nonviolence.
Some managed to befriend jailers, who in turn smuggled ice cream to them in mop
buckets, remembers Dr. Bernard LaFayette, a Freedom Rider who went on to serve
as president of Nashville's American Baptist College.
The jailings didn't just take a toll on the riders. Mary Jean Smith, then a
19-year-old TSU student, informed her mother she would be joining the next
round of Freedom Rides. She wound up spending 39 days in a hellhole at
Parchman. Her mother's letters consoled her. "She was just herself in the
letters, she was lighthearted," remembers Smith at her northwest Nashville
home. "She never let on in the letters how distraught she was." When Smith was
released, she returned to find her mother had lost 50 pounds from worry.
For all the hardships, the rides fueled the momentum of the civil rights
movement. Larry F. Hunter was a student at Tennessee State University when he
got involved in the Nashville student movement in 1960. A year later, he joined
the Freedom Riders, and their spirit of determination traveled like fire.
"The summer of '61 was the breakout summer for Nashville," Hunter recalls. "We
just broke that city wide open with protests. We picketed supermarkets,
theaters. At that time there was such a feeling in the South of disobeying the
law of the land. The toughest was a chain of food stores, H.G. Hill. This man
had vowed he would never show equality toward black people in his hiring
practices. There was a core group of us that used to walk picket lines for like
12 hours a day."
Yet for Knight-Ofosu and Harbour, who also spent several weeks in Parchman, the
cost was high. They and other Tennessee State University students were expelled
after their arrests. Pauline Knight-Ofosu successfully sued the university on
behalf of all the students, who were reinstated later that year. In 2008, the
state of Tennessee honored the TSU Freedom Riders with honorary degrees.
Fifty years later, as a new PBS documentary and reunions mark the anniversary
of the Freedom Rides, Ernest "Rip" Patton is proud of the role Nashville
students and adults played in the historic movement.
"I can go any place in Nashville that I want to," Patton says. "We have more
blacks in city government now, and the city is home to a number of stars.
Nashville is a very progressive town."
For John Lewis, his role as a Freedom Rider led him from the seminary to
Congress, where the 72-year-old Georgia politician, now in his 12th term, plans
to serve as long as the people in his district elect him. Retirement, he said,
"is not in my DNA."
The world he and the Freedom Riders helped bring about never ceases to change.
A few years ago, a man named Elwin Wilson traveled to Washington, D.C., to meet
Lewis. Some five decades before, the former Klansman had encountered the
congressman at a bus terminal in Rock Hill, S.C., and gave him the first of
many beatings he would receive during the Freedom Rides. Wilson now wanted
nothing more than to apologize, and be forgiven. They were reunited recently on
The Oprah Winfrey Show.
Last February, Lewis received America's highest civilian honor, the
Presidential Medal of Freedom. Possibly more important than the medal, though,
was that it came from the country's first African-American president. Call it
poetic justice — a destination hoped for one day, at the end of that long ride
to freedom.
Email [email protected].
Original Page:
http://www.nashvillescene.com/gyrobase/fifty-years-later-members-of-the-freedom-riders-recall-their-heroic-stand-against-segregation-and-racist-hatred/Content?oid=2436746&showFullText=true
Shared from Read It Later
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Sixties-L" group.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
[email protected].
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/sixties-l?hl=en.
