Local Freedom Riders' memories endure
by John Kiesewetter, news.cincinnati.com
May 18th 2011 1:44 PM
Get down! Don't let them see you!
Those were the first words David Fankhauser heard when two African-American
men picked him up in a car 50 years ago at the Montgomery, Ala., airport to
participate in the Freedom Rides.
Fankhauser and fellow Central State University student David Myers of
Wilmington - both are white - had flown to Alabama to integrate bus stations
in what historians call the birth of the nationwide civil rights movement.
In May of 1961 - five months after President John F. Kennedy took office -
the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) sent volunteers, mostly college
students, of both races to ride Greyhound and Trailways buses to white- and
black-only waiting rooms.
More than 430 non-violent protesters that summer targeted the failure to
enforce a 1946 U.S. Supreme Court decision desegregating interstate buses
and trains.
Fankhauser and Myers arrived May 24 - just 10 days after a white mob torched
the first Freedom Riders bus in Anniston, Ala., and a week after Ku Klux
Klansmen beat Nashville Freedom Riders in Birmingham, Ala.
"I was 19 years old and had no sense of danger. We didn't know what we were
getting into," said Fankhauser, a University of Cincinnati Clermont College
biology and chemistry professor since 1973.
Fankhauser spent 42 days in Mississippi prisons on a "breach of peace"
charge for not leaving the black-only Trailways waiting room in Jackson,
Miss.
His mug shot will be in PBS' "Freedom Riders" documentary Monday (9-11 p.m.,
Channels 48, 54, 16). It also appears in Eric Etheridge's "Breach of Peace"
book.
"Young people from all over the north came to Alabama and Mississippi, and
it turned into a national movement," Fankhauser said. "It was a sea-change
in raising the consciousness of the nation."
By September, Kennedy convinced the Interstate Commerce Commission to
enforce bus desegregation. But that didn't end the struggle.
Get down! Don't let them see you!
A middle-aged black man shouted those same words to Betty Daniels Rosemond,
then 22, as she hid in a gas station phone booth in tiny Poplarville, Miss.,
while an angry white mob surrounded the Greyhound station across the street.
The New Orleans native who now lives in Colerain Township was one of six
CORE members riding through Mississippi checking compliance with the ICC
desegregation order in November 1961.
When she saw white police arrest three fellow Freedom Riders at the station,
she got off the bus they were all on and called New Orleans CORE
headquarters.
While on the phone, the bus pulled out. She could see the mob looking for
her.
"There had been a lynching in Poplarville two years earlier, so we feared
the worst," says Rosemond, who manages a St. Vincent de Paul store near
Groesbeck.
Rosemond got the attention of a black man working at the gas station. He
drove a truck over to the phone booth.
"He took me to two homes of black people in Poplarville, but they wouldn't
let me stay with them," she said.
Her driver - she never learned his name - decided to leave her at the city
limits so she could hitchhike 85 miles home that night.
"I'm on the floor of the truck, and he's praying: 'I've got eight children.
Lord, tell me what to do! I can't do this!' And he drove me all the way to
New Orleans," said Rosemond, who was honored by New Orleans City Council in
February.
"I would have been killed if I did not get out of Poplarville, said
Rosemond, who met Fankhauser Tuesday at a "Freedom Riders" promotional event
at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. "We knew our life could
be taken at any time. But there was a determination to change things. It was
determination over fear."
A year later, she was arrested at a CORE sit-in at an Alexandria, Va.,
restaurant.
She married and moved in 1963 to Cincinnati, where she picketed a downtown
dentist who had separate waiting rooms for whites and blacks.
Don't let them see you! Stay away from the windows!
The African-American driver who picked up Fankhauser and Myers at the
airport took them to the Montgomery home of civil rights leader and minister
Ralph Abernathy. It was the city's center for the Freedom Riders movement.
They were ordered to stay far from windows, so nobody could see whites in
the house.
"Martin Luther King, Ralph Abernathy and William SloaneCoffin Jr., the Yale
chaplain, were sitting on the couch in their pajamas eating breakfast,"
Fankhauser said.
Before going to Alabama, Fankhauser stopped at his East End home so his
mother, then-well-known political actvist Polly Brokaw, could cut his hair.
Fankhauser had participated as a child with his mother in efforts to
integrate Coney Island in the early 1950s. In college, he participated in
restaurant sit-ins. In the 1980s, he helped lead the successful fight
against building Moscow's Zimmer power station as a nuclear plant.
The Central State students were recruited by Diane Nash of Nashville, when
CORE halted Freedom Rides after the Anniston bus fire. They spent four days
sleeping on Abernathy's floor awaiting orders.
Fankhauser said he heard King and Abernathy talk of resuming Freedom Rides
to fill prisons with non-violent protesters after the National Guard was
called out for the Freedom Riders' safety. More than 350 were jailed in
1961.
On May 28, Fankhauser made his Freedom Ride to Jackson. He was arrested and
held in solitary confinement.
After 12 days in the Jackson city jail, he was sent to Mississippi's
Parchman Farm prison for 30 days. He was stripped naked and given a
toothbrush, Bible, T-shirt and underpants.
Stop that singing! Keep it down!
"The wonderful thing about Parchman was that we were with blacks, and they
were singing freedom songs," Fankhauser recalled.
"We sang out hearts out, and the white guards hated it. They said we were
disturbing the cooks!"
So guards confiscated their toothbrushes, Bibles and finally their
mattresses.
On his 42nd day in jail, when Fankhauser was bailed out, a guard told him:
"We don't hold anything against you personally. We're just doing our jobs,"
he said. "That was wonderful to hear. They had been so hostile. The thing
non-violence resistance does is that you don't make an enemy of the other
person ... if they see themselves in your actions and respect it."
Fankhauser doesn't remember how he got back to the Jackson to catch a train
home. But he can't forget his welcome by CORE members at Union Termainl.
"A couple of black guys put me on their shoulders and carried me to the
rotunda singing freedom songs. It was mind-boggling," he said.
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