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Riding to Freedom
In the spring of 1961, black and white civil rights activists rode buses to protest the segregationist policies of the Deep South.
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Most of the riders were college students; many, such as the Episcopal clergymen and contingents of Yale divinity students, had religious affiliations. Some were active in civil rights groups like the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), which initiated the Freedom Rides and was founded in 1942 on Mahatma Gandhi's principle of nonviolent protest. The goal of the rides, CORE director James Farmer said as he launched the campaign, was "to create a crisis so that the federal government would be compelled to enforce the law."
The volunteers, from 40 states, received training in nonviolence tactics. Those who could not refrain from striking back when pushed, hit, spit on or doused with liquids while racial epithets rang in their ears were rejected.
As soon as he heard the call for riders, Robert Singleton remembers, he "was fired up and ready to go." He and his wife, Helen, had both been active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and they took 12 volunteers with them from California. "The spirit that permeated the air at that time was not unlike the feeling Barack Obama has rekindled among the youth of today," says Singleton, now 73 and an economics professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.
Peter Ackerberg, a lawyer who now lives in Minneapolis, said that while he'd always talked a "big radical game," he had never acted on his convictions. "What am I going to tell my children when they ask me about this time?" he recalled thinking. Boarding a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, "I was pretty scared," he told Etheridge. "The black guys and girls were singing....They were so spirited and so unafraid. They were really prepared to risk their lives." Today, Ackerberg recalls acquiescing and saying "sir" to a jail official who was "pounding a blackjack." Soon after, "I could hear the blackjack strike [rider C.T. Vivian's] head and him shrieking; I don't think he ever said 'sir.'"
John Lewis, then 21 and already a veteran of sit-ins to desegregate lunch counters in Nashville, was the first Freedom Rider to be assaulted. While trying to enter a whites-only waiting room in Rock Hill, South Carolina, two men set upon him, battering his face and kicking him in the ribs. Less than two weeks later, he joined a ride bound for Jackson. "We were determined not to let any act of violence keep us from our goal," Lewis, a Georgia congressman since 1987 and a celebrated civil rights figure, said recently. "We knew our lives could be threatened, but we had made up our minds not to turn back."
As riders poured into the South, National Guardsmen were assigned to some buses to prevent violence. When activists arrived at the Jackson bus depot, police arrested blacks who refused to heed orders to stay out of white restrooms or vacate the white waiting room. And whites were arrested if they used "colored" facilities. Officials charged the riders with breach of peace, rather than breaking segregation laws. Freedom Riders responded with a strategy they called "jail, no bail"—a deliberate effort to clog the penal facilities. Most of the 300 riders in Jackson would endure six weeks in sweltering jail or prison cells rife with mice, insects, soiled mattresses and open toilets.
"The dehumanizing process started as soon as we got there," said Hank Thomas, a Marriott hotel franchise owner in Atlanta, who was then a sophomore at Howard University in Washington, D.C. "We were told to strip naked and then walked down this long corridor.... I'll never forget [CORE director] Jim Farmer, a very dignified man ...walking down this long corridor naked...that is dehumanizing. And that was the whole point."
Jean Thompson, then a 19-year-old CORE worker, said she was one of the riders slapped by a penal official for failing to call him "sir." An FBI investigation into the incident concluded that "no one was beaten," she told Etheridge. "That said a lot to me about what actually happens in this country. It was eye-opening." When prisoners were transferred from one facility to another, unexplained stops on remote dirt roads or the sight of curious onlookers peering into the transport trucks heightened fears. "We imagined every horror including an ambush by the KKK," rider Carol Silver told Etheridge. To keep up their spirits, the prisoners sang freedom songs.
Comments
I enjoyed looking over this. However, I enjoy reading the actual magazine more because I am the type of reader who enjoys holding what he or she is reading and sitting in a comfortable chair reading it! I look forward to continuing to read my actual magazine when it comes in the monthly mail. Thanks, and have a great week! Best wishes, Lee.
Posted by Dr. Lee Prosser on January 24,2009 | 01:03PM
I read that some of the freedom riders were as young as 16, I was 15 in 1961, and living in NorthEastern Ohio. There was only one black family in the small town of Ashtabula, but on the lake front was an old mansion called the Hubbard House. This was atop a hill above Lake Erie, cna had a tunnel to the beach in which runaway slaves were taken down to waiting ships in the dark of night. Thank You for this article which touches on the brave men and women of both races who had the courage to participate in this daring adventure.
Posted by Steven Cox on January 25,2009 | 06:25PM
It was so long ago. I was a high school teacher at Kirkland, Washington when The American Federation of Teachers sent me to Mississippi to set up a freedom school. I traveled to Jackson, Mississippi in a Greyhound Bus. At Jackson I marched with Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee regional director Stokely Carmichael and was incarcerated at Mississippi State Fair Ground's main provillion for ten days and harshly beaten.
I then went to Amite County, a KKK stronghold, and set up a freedom school and assisted with the registration of 35 blacks, the first black residents ever registered in that county.
I wrote a lengthy article about my experience focusing on Herbert Lee and Bob Moses.
I would like to get a copy of my mug shot by the Jackson, Mississippi police.
Sheridan Peterson
eagleeye@sonic.net
Posted by Sheridan Peterson on February 1,2009 | 07:59PM
WAS 1961 LIGHT YEARS AGO. I WAS BORN AND GREW UP IN BIRMINGHAM BUT BY 1961 WAS LONG GONE FROM THE "PITTSBURG" OF THE SOUTH TO A RURAL TOWN IN NORTH ALABAMA. I WELL RECALL THE SCREEMING HEAD LINES ABOUT THE "FREEDOM RIDER" AND HOW THEY WERE INTRUDING INTO OUR LIFE STYLE, AT THAT TIME I THOUGH THAT ANY AMERICAN SHOULD BE ABLE TO TRAVEL ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD AND OUR GOVERMENT PORTECT THEM. I WAS COMPLETELY BENT OUT OF SHAPE WITH BULL CONNOR AND HIS WATER SQUIDS. AT THAT TIME I WAS BADLY OUT OF STEP WITH REST OF SOCIETY. NOW I AM CROWED BY POLITICIANS WHO SAY THEY WERE WRONG AND THAT "ANY AMERICAN SCHOULD BE ABLE TO TRAVE ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD AND BE PROTECTED BY THEIR GOVERNMENT" WHEN I MOVED TO THIS SMALL TOWN,FROM THAT FAR AWAY FOREIGN CITY OF CHATANOOGA TENNESSEE, THE BOARD OF REGISTRATION ALMOST DID NOT ALLOW ME TO REGISTER TO VOTE. THEY THOUGH I MIGHT BE BRINGING IN FOREIGN IDEAS. THE FACT THAT MY WIFES MOTHER WAS BORN AN RAISED HERE, AND BOTH OF US WERE GRADUATES OF THE STATE UNIVERSITY HAD NO BEARING ON THE LADY WHO HEADED THE BOARD. WAS ALL OF THIS LIGH YEAR AWAY, OR WHAT?
Posted by walter vice on February 7,2009 | 10:12AM
I subscribe to your magazine and thoroughly enjoy it.And yes, I did read this article. An eye opener for sure.Thank you. EllenPS. Would it be possible to obtain one of the World Maps that you give to new subscribers. I have been a reader for a number of years and give gifts of the magazine too.Thanks Ellen
Posted by Ellen Harrington on February 7,2009 | 07:00PM
Couple things. First, One of my professors in college was a Freedom Rider. But he never told me about his time in the Birmingham jail; I discovered that on his web site thirty years later. He was a good man. Two, I would suggest that "massive and instant privilege" (on a World scale at least) could be applied to almost anyone in the United States (although certainly not all; Black people and Appalachian whites included), even then. But this was not South Africa; even for African Americans. Think about if your name was "Kennedy" or "Bush;" It's mostly a class issue in the end. Three, that life for Black people was no worse in the South than the North irrespective of press emphasis. The press made much of the Southern problem but I grew up in Cincinnati, and I saw first hand as much there as here in Memphis where I have lived for almost 30 years and northeastern cities such as Boston were even worse. It has been said that the difference in the Southern and Northern racial view was this: that the South viewed Blacks as simply inferior; the Northern view on the other hand was vile hatred. One may eventually prove oneself, but hatred is a completely different matter. I will never return to Cincinnati.
Posted by Alan Wells on February 8,2009 | 10:46AM
Cities were a lot safer then. Look at Detroit and how badly deteriorated it is compared to 50 years ago.
Posted by Bill Elliott on February 12,2009 | 08:28PM
There were the Jews, there were the "blacks", there are now the "gays"... who's next? WHEN will America be what our fore-fathers set out to make it? God Bless them all. God help those, who hate...
Posted by Diane Lacey on February 13,2009 | 09:35PM
I take offense to the term "paddy wagon". The correct term is "Police Van". Paddy Wagon is a slur against Irish people. I am not offended by Eric Ethridge personaly because I'm sure he does not know any better. The term "Paddy Wagon" came about when the police would send a van in to the town to arrest groups of drunken citizens, man of which were Irish.
Posted by Joseph Hastings on February 14,2009 | 05:08AM
I feel guilty that in the 60's I was in a word, private Catholic schools, secondary and post secondary, where the Beatles were more popular than Rev. Martin Luther King jr, who led many freedom marches through the South. I was about his age. I began to educate myself after his assasination. Since that date I have read so much about Civil Rights and how we came to be feared by whites since slavery. I am happy that our history is so open compared to the few paragraphs I learned in American history from school text books in the 60's. I read this article and I am awed of our black history. Thank you for putting it out there.
Posted by Joy R. Rees on February 15,2009 | 02:32PM