Hank Thomas, James Peck, Frederick Leonard, Genevieve Houghton, Charles Person, William Harbour, Mae Moultrie, Jim Zwerg – all these folks are great Americans.
More than likely, you have not heard of them. Their names are not splashed over the pages of history or celebrated in the way presidents or generals are. Yet in their own quiet and dignified way, they forced this country to face up to its greatest sin.
They are, of course, the Freedom Riders. Fifty years ago this month, these men and women, and others of similar courage and conviction, boarded buses and ventured through the Deep South. In doing so, they exposed virulent racism, enduring beatings and jail, but prevailed.
It was only proper and fitting that PBS, through its superior “American Experience” series, broadcast a two-hour film about this momentous journey, which, like so many other things today, is just unimaginable to all of us accustomed to basic human rights.
Credit James Farmer with the idea. In 1961, Farmer became head of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), which felt that it had not offered a sufficient contribution to the burgeoning civil rights movement in the way that Southern pastors and students had done from Montgomery to Little Rock to Nashville.
So, noting that in 1947 the Supreme Court ruled that segregation on interstate transportation was illegal, they set out on a “Freedom Ride” to, among other things, get the attention of new president John F. Kennedy and his brother, Bobby, the attorney general.
Nothing big happened until the two buses hit Alabama. Then, in one day, a mob attacked and firebombed one bus in Anniston while, in Birmingham, Bull Connor offered no protection as a second mob beat up the other riders.
Fearing for their lives, the CORE group went home. But students from Nashville, fearing that the movement might flag if violence stopped the Freedom Ride, volunteered to take over, irritating both the White House and Alabama’s governor, John Patterson, who didn’t want any “outside agitation”.
After a week of wrangling, the new Freedom Riders set out from Birmingham, protected by Alabama troopers – until they got to Montgomery and the troops vanished, replaced by a third mob that offered yet another beating, even to Justice Department official John Siegenthaler.
It almost got worse. That night, Martin Luther King Jr. led a rally at Montgomery’s First Baptist Church, which quickly got surrounded by the largest mob yet. Only when JFK declared martial law and sent in the National Guard were the people in the church saved.
Seeing all this, the good folks in Mississippi promised no violence to the Freedom Riders – they just sent them to jail. Yet what no one anticipated was that more than 400 men and women from across the country, inspired by what was happening, came to the Magnolia State as replacements.
The consequences of the Freedom Riders’ acts were many. For one, interstate transportation was integrated from that point forward. And civil rights leaders learned that it could draw national and international attention to their cause by spotlighting the racism they had to face and, by exposing it, would hasten its end.
At the same time, though, it sowed the seeds of division within the movement. Younger Freedom Riders were upset with Dr. King for not joining them on the bus in Montgomery, and the gap between civil rights groups would only intensify in the years before Dr. King was murdered. And, of course, it hastened the rush of Dixie politicians toward a GOP embrace once Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” became apparent.
None of this, though, can detract from the most important aspect of the Freedom Ride – that it was started, nurtured, and executed by men and women of ordinary backgrounds, black and white, without title or political power behind
them.
Simply for doing what the law said they could do, and saying nonviolent despite the orgy of violence thrown at them by mobs and men in uniform, they gave America a crystal-clear example of grace and human dignity and won millions to their cause.
In this jaded day and age, when we consider even the slightest tax increase as a so-called grave threat to our “freedom”, maybe it would be wise to consider the real risks the Freedom Riders took just half a century ago. No big reward awaited them – just the acknowledgement that they moved this nation forward to a better place.
