50 years later, other groups keep spirit of Freedom Riders alive
by Roger Bybee, progressive.org
May 18th 2011
Fifty years ago this month, an interracial group of activists decided to take a
risky step and put their bodies on the line to challenge the entrenched policy
of racial segregation in the American South. They came to be known as the
Freedom Riders.
The group had federal law on it side, as a recent Supreme Court decision,
Boynton v. Virginia, had deemed “white only” facilities in interstate bus
terminals as illegal. But that did not matter to the racist mobs, some of them
organized by local police officers, which descended upon the activists when
they arrived in Alabama. These mobs bloodied the Freedom Riders in Birmingham
and firebombed their bus in Anniston. Scores of activists were arrested when
they got to Mississippi, where police threw them into the state’s famous
Parchman prison.
The Freedom Riders knew the dangers they faced. Some female riders pinned names
of the next of kin to their bra straps, so that in the event that they were
killed, their families would be able to identify them.
A Northern civil rights organization, the Congress of Racial Equality, launched
the Freedom Rides. Then, leaders of the newly formed Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee organized more of them.
“Traveling in the segregated South for black people was humiliating,” said
Diane Nash, one of the principal organizers. “The very fact that there were
separate facilities was to say to black people and white people that blacks
were so subhuman and so inferior that we could not even use public facilities
that white people used.”
White allies — like James Zwerg, whose bloodied and swollen face made headline
news — risked their lives alongside black activists. However, the leadership of
the rides came from black activists themselves.
The Freedom Rides were conceived both to strike a blow against white supremacy
and to assert the agency and humanity of black people. The Riders were ordinary
people who overcame their fears to up the ante in the fight for racial justice.
They embodied a collective spirit of determined resistance that can only be
described as inspiring. When they were arrested and jailed, they were defiant,
singing even as their captors threatened them.
Today, there is a new generation of activists who are keeping that spirit of
resistance alive through their own campaigns. Like the Freedom Riders, they are
challenging the ways in which citizenship and human rights are denied to
certain sectors of the population.
One group is Critical Resistance, which focuses on the issue of mass
incarceration and the prison industry’s insatiable hunger for young black and
brown bodies. A new documentary film, “Visions of Abolition,” tells its
important story.
Another group is the National Immigrant Youth Alliance, which is organizing
undocumented young people in Detroit and Chicago and has gone down to Georgia
to do the same. There, the group’s members have been embraced by veteran civil
rights leaders.
On one level, these struggles are very different from one another, but in some
fundamental ways they are part of the same tradition. It’s a tradition that has
pushed against the narrow definitions of who can and cannot lay claim to
citizenship — a tradition unafraid to confront the powers that be in pursuit of
a more just society.
Barbara Ransby, an associate professor in the department of African-American
Studies and History at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is the author of
the award-winning biography, “Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A
Radical Democratic Vision.” She can be reached at pmproj [at] progressive [dot]
org.
You can read more pieces from The Progressive Media Project by clicking here.
Original Page: http://www.progressive.org/mpransby051811.html
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