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Civil Rights History The Immigrant Worker Freedom Ride is an important opportunity to learn from and honor civil rights movement history in the U.S. The 1961 Freedom Rides were incredibly courageous acts of resistance led by many women and men, who still to this day, are leaders in the struggle for civil rights and racial justice. What follows is a short bibliography of excerpts and resources to educate yourself and others about the legacy of the Freedom Rides. 1. An incredible on-line resource for civil rights history is the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project at Stanford University. This chronology of the Freedom Rides is from their website at www.stanford.edu Freedom Rides During the spring of 1961, student activists launched the Freedom Rides to challenge segregation on interstate buses and bus terminals. Riding from Washington, D.C. to Montgomery, Alabama, the rides met violent opposition in the Deep South, garnering extensive media attention and eventually forcing federal intervention from the Kennedy administration. Although eventually successful in securing an Interstate Commerce Commission ban on segregation in all facilities under their jurisdiction, the Freedom Rides aggravated tensions between student activists and Martin Luther King, Jr., who publicly supported the riders, but did not participate and privately questioned undertaking such a physically dangerous campaign. The Freedom Rides were first conceived in 1947 when the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) organized an interracial bus ride across state lines to test a Supreme Court decision that declared segregation on interstate buses unconstitutional. Called the Journey of Reconciliation, the ride only challenged segregation on buses and was limited to the upper South to avoid the more dangerous Deep South. The ride, however, failed to elicit much national attention or the results CORE had hoped for. Fourteen years later, however, in a new national context of sit-ins, boycotts, and the emergence of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Freedom Rides were able to harness enough national attention to force federal enforcement and policy changes. In 1960, the Supreme Court ruled in Boynton v. Virginia that segregation within interstate travel was illegal. This decision extended the 1947 ruling by also declaring segregation in bus terminals, waiting rooms, restaurants, rest rooms, and other interstate travel facilities unconstitutional. Shortly after the decision, two students from Nashville, John Lewis and Bernard Lafayette, tested the ruling by sitting at the front of a bus and refusing to move. After this first ride, they received a letter from CORE asking them to participate in a Freedom Ride, a longer bus trip through the South to continue testing the enforcement of Boynton. While Lafayette could not participate because his parents refused to give permission, Lewis joined twelve other activists to form an interracial group that underwent extensive training in nonviolent direct action before launching the ride. On 4 May 1961, the Freedom Riders left Washington, D. C. in two buses and headed to Virginia. While they met resistance and arrests in Virginia, it was not until the riders arrived in Rockhill, South Carolina that they encountered violence. There, Lewis and another rider were beaten and another rider was arrested for using a white restroom, attracting widespread media coverage. Days following this incident, the riders met with King and other civil rights leaders in Atlanta for dinner. During this meeting, King whispered prophetically to Jet reporter Simeon Booker, "You will never make it through Alabama." The ride continued to Anniston, Alabama, where on 14 May they were met by a violent mob of over one hundred people. Before their arrival, Anniston local authorities had given permission to the Ku Klux Klan to strike against the Freedom Riders without fear of arrest. As the bus pulled up, the driver yelled outside, "Well, boys, here they are. I brought you some niggers and nigger-lovers." After a series of standoffs, one of the buses was firebombed, and its fleeing passengers were forced into the angry white mob. The violence continued at the Birmingham terminal where Eugene "Bull" Connor's police force offered no protection. While the violence garnered national media attention, the series of attacks prompted James Farmer of CORE to end the ride. The riders flew to New Orleans, the original destination, bringing to an end the first Freedom Ride of the 1960s. The decision to end the ride frustrated some student activists. Diane Nash objected in a phone conversation with Farmer, arguing that "We can't let them stop us with violence. If we do, the movement is dead." Under the auspices and organizational support of SNCC, the Freedom Rides continued. SNCC mentors were weary of this decision, including King, who had declined when asked by Nash and Rodney Powell to join the rides. Farmer maintained his doubts, questioning whether continuing the trip was "suicide." With fractured support, the organizers had a difficult time securing financial resources. Nevertheless, on 17 May 1961, seven men and three women rode from Nashville to Birmingham to resume the Freedom Rides. Just before reaching Birmingham, the bus was pulled over and Bull Connor directed the bus to the Birmingham station, where all the riders were arrested for defying segregation laws. These arrests, coupled with the difficulty of finding a bus driver and other logistical challenges, left the riders stranded in Birmingham for several days. Quiet federal intervention began to take place behind the scenes, as Attorney General Robert Kennedy called the Greyhound Company and demanded that it find a driver, and John Seigenthaler, a Justice Department representative accompanying the Freedom Riders, met with reluctant Alabama Governor John Patterson to try to diffuse the dangerous situation. This maneuvering resulted in the bus leaving for Montgomery the next morning with a full police escort. At the Montgomery city line, as agreed, the state troopers left the buses; but the local police that had been ordered to meet the Freedom Riders in Montgomery never showed up. Unprotected when they reached the terminal, riders were beaten so severely by a white mob that some sustained permanent injuries. When the police finally arrived, they served the riders with an injunction barring them from continuing the Freedom Ride in Alabama. During this time, King was on a speaking tour in Chicago, but returned to Montgomery upon learning of the violence. There, he staged a rally at Ralph Abernathy's church. In his speech to the rally, King blamed Governor Patterson for "aiding and abetting the forces of violence" and called for federal intervention, declaring that "the federal government must not stand idly by while blood thirsty mobs beat nonviolent students with impunity." As King spoke, a threatening white mob gathered outside. From inside the church, King called Attorney General Kennedy, who assured him that the federal government would protect those inside the church. Kennedy mobilized national guardsmen who used tear gas to disperse the mob. King became one of the rides major spokesmen as the violence and federal intervention propelled the action to national prominence. Some activists, however, began to criticize King for his willingness to offer only moral and financial support but not his physical presence on the rides. In a telegram to King, the President of the Union County NAACP Branch in North Carolina, Robert F. Williams, urged King to "lead by example," continuing that "If you lack the courage [to ride], remove yourself from the vanguard." In response to Diane Nash when she confronted King at a meeting, he replied that he was on probation and could not afford another arrest. Many students did not accept this position, and as SNCC advisor Ella Baker later recalled, the incident caused some students to begin "to look at him as a man, and a man not with all the godlike qualities that had been…attributed to him." On 29 May, the Kennedy administration announced that it had directed the Interstate Commerce Commission to ban segregation in all facilities under its jurisdiction, but the rides continued. Students from all over the country purchased bus tickets to the South and crowded into Mississippi jails. With the participation of northern students came even more press coverage. King's involvement in the Freedom Rides, however, waned after the federal intervention. The legacy of the rides, however, remained with him. He, and all others involved in the campaign, saw how provoking white southern violence through nonviolent confrontations could attract national attention and force federal action. The Freedom Rides also exposed leadership and tactical rifts between King and more militant students and activists that would continue in nonviolent resistance campaigns that followed. SOURCES LINKS Link to MLK, Jr. Papers Project website: http://www.stanford.edu/group/King/about_king/encyclopedia/freedom_rides.htm 2. CORE, the Congress for Racial Equality, led by James Farmer, was the organization that initiated the Freedom Rides in 1961. This is from CORE's website at www.core-online.org The Freedom Rides CORE Volunteers put their lives on the Road In 1961 CORE undertook a new tactic aimed at desegregating public transportation throughout the south. These tactics became know as the "Freedom Rides". The first Freedom Ride took place on May 4, 1961 when seven blacks and six whites left Washington, D.C., on two public buses bound for the Deep South. They intended to test the Supreme Court's ruling in Boynton v. Virginia (1960), which declared segregation in interstate bus and rail stations unconstitutional. In the first few days, the riders encountered only minor hostility, but in the second week the riders were severely beaten. Outside Anniston, Alabama, one of their buses was burned, and in Birmingham several dozen whites attacked the riders only two blocks from the sheriff's office. With the intervention of the U.S. Justice Department, most of CORE's Freedom Riders were evacuated from Birmingham, Alabama to New Orleans. John Lewis, a former seminary student who would later lead SNCC and become a US congressman, stayed in Birmingham. CORE Leaders decided that letting violence end the trip would send the wrong signal to the country. They reinforced the pair of remaining riders with volunteers, and the trip continued. The group traveled from Birmingham to Montgomery without incident, but on their arrival in Montgomery they were savagely attacked by a mob of more than 1000 whites. The extreme violence and the indifference of local police prompted a national outcry of support for the riders, putting pressure on President Kennedy to end the violence. The riders continued to Mississippi, where they endured further brutality and jail terms but generated more publicity and inspired dozens more Freedom Rides. By the end of the summer, the protests had spread to train stations and airports across the South, and in November, the Interstate Commerce Commission issued rules prohibiting segregated transportation facilities. Link to the CORE website: 3. Young people, organized in SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee took up the challenge of continuing the Freedom Rides when violence threatened to stop them. This is from t he SNCC website at www.ibiblio.org/sncc During the Freedom Rides, SNCC members rode buses through the deep southern states where discrimination and segregation were most prominent.The concept originated in the 1940's with CORE, a non-violent group out of Chicago trying to end racial discrimination. In 1947, responding to a Supreme Court decision outlawing discrimination in interstate travel, CORE sponsored a Freedom Ride that they called a "Journey of Reconciliation." They rode buses throughout much of the upper south and established that most people would not create incident for those choosing to sit where they pleased. The First Ride 1961 Supreme Court decision to end desegregation not only in travel, but also in bus terminal facilities, prompted a new set of Freedom Rides and SNCC's involvement. In 1961 a group of seven black and six white people, including John Lewis, left Washington, D.C. for New Orleans on two buses, a Trailways bus and a Greyhound bus. The group made it through Virginia and North Carolina without incident.At the Greyhound bus station in Rock Hill, South Carolina, the group encountered violence. A mob of twenty attacked the group, and John Lewis was the first to be hit as he approached the white waiting room. Police eventually interfered and the group was allowed access to the white waiting room. The journey continued to Georgia. After leaving Atlanta, the Greyhound bus was stopped as it entered Alabama. A mob surrounded the bus, the tires were slashed, and the bus was set on fire. The bus was burned to the ground, but the group took another bus and continued the rides.Meanwhile, the Trailways bus arrived in Anniston, Alabama where the driver would not continue until the group sat segregated. A violent group boarded the bus and beat the African-Americans sitting in the front, causing several injuries until the group was forced to the back of the bus. A mob carrying iron pipes greeted them on arrival in Birmingham, Alabama. Many were battered, knocked unconscious and hospitalized. The group gathered the next day and prepared to head on to Montgomery, but no bus would take them. A mob gathered as they waited in the white waiting room, and finally the group decided to fly back to New Orleans, ending the first ride. The Rides Continue SNCC was determined to continue the rides to prove that violence could not stop them. SNCC, along with the Nashville Student Movement, organized a group that met in Nashville, determined to go on to Birmingham and Montgomery, then on to Mississippi and New Orleans. Some members of the first ride, including John Lewis, were involved in this ride.The group of eight African-Americans and two whites was arrested in Birmingham and spent the night in jail. They were literally driven out of town by the Police Chief "Bull" O'Connor, who left the group stranded on the Tennessee border. The group returned to Birmingham and sang freedom songs outside the terminal.While this was going on, President John F. Kennedy was concerned about the violence and bus burning that had occurred during the first Freedom Ride the previous week. He telephoned the governor of Alabama and insisted that it was the government's responsibility to guarantee safe passage of interstate travelers. A bus with police and helicopter escort was then sent to Birmingham to take the Freedom Rides on to Montgomery. Once the group arrived in Montgomery however, the protection disappeared and more violence ensued. A crowd of three hundred gathered. Approximately twenty-five of them armed with clubs and sticks began beating the newsmen and cameramen. James Zwerg, a young white man, got off the bus and was greeted with chants of "Kill the nigger-loving son of a bitch!" He was beaten to the ground and never attempted to defend himself, even as his face was stomped into the ground. The mob turned its attention to the rest of the riders and everyone was beaten.After what has been reported as anywhere from five to twenty minutes, police came and used tear gas to breakup the crowd, which had grown to a thousand. The riders, after being hospitalized and seeking refuge in the homes of local black people, gathered at Ralph Abernathy's First Baptist Church in Montgomery. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. flew in and spoke to a crowd of twelve hundred. President Kennedy called the situation "a source of deepest concern."With a renewed sense of faith and purpose, the freedom riders continued, escorted by national guardsmen. In Jackson, Mississippi, the group was arrested for using white restrooms and waiting rooms. They spent the night in jail. Over the next several months, riders continued to journey to Jackson, in attempt to desegregate the facilities there. The Freedom Rides had been successful in the Upper south but were halted in the Deep South, leaving the riders wounded but determined. Link to the SNCC website: http://www.ibiblio.org/sncc/rides.html 4. One of the most powerful accounts of the Freedom Rides and the young people of the Nashville student movement who helped to lead them is David Halberstam's book, The Children. A short excerpt follows and information about how you can order the book is below. They were driven by a kind of belief that was the purest he (Siegenthaler) had ever dealt with. They had done nothing less than offer their lives as the price of their beliefs, and they seemed more than ready to continue with that offering… He knew relatively little about Jim Lawson's workshops, but he was impressed by the strength and the fearlessness of Lawson's students. There was the unbending voice of Diane Nash on the phone, and there was John Lewis leading his Freedom Riders right back to Birmingham after Bull Connor had dumped them on the roadside. No black person…had ever done that to Bull before. In the past when Bull drove you out of town, you stayed out of town, because his word was law, and the penalty for breaking it was death, in some form or other. But they had virtually beaten him back to Birmingham. Even Bobby Kennedy, still primarily concerened with protecting this brother's political interest, but a great admirer of personal courage, told Siegenthaler right after he had been beaten, "My God, they're really fearless, aren't they? They're really willing to die there, aren't they?"… Perhaps the greatest victory of the Freedom Riders that day was not with the government or the media; it was their victory over themselves and their own fears. For they were just beginning the process of breaking down the awful, paralyzing psychic fear which cities like Birmingham, and Jackson, Mississippi, had always held for black people, and other blacks, seeing them do it, were emboldened to join them. (Chapter 35, pp 322-323) David Halberstam, 1999. The Children. You can read reviews of this book and purchase it at: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?show=TRADE%20PAPER:NEW:0449004392:17.95#more 5. Howell Raines' book My Soul is Rested contains chronology of the civil rights movement and oral histories; first hand accounts by activists and leaders, the people who made this history. Hank Thomas "The Freedom Ride really didn't get rough until we got down in the Deep South. Needless to say, Anniston, Alabama, I'm never gonna forget that, when I was on the bus that they threw some kind of incendiary device on." He was on the first of two buses to cross into "Bama." When it pulled into the depot at Anniston, a Klan hotbed about sixty miles from Birmingham, the bus was surrounded by white men brandishing iron bars. Anniston police held them back long enough for the bus to reach the highway again, but about six miles outside town the pursuing mob caught up. "I got real scared then. You know, I was thinking - I'm looking out the window there, and people are out there yelling and screaming. They just about broke every window on the bus…I really thought that was going to be the end of me." How did the bus get stopped? "They shot the tires out, and the bus driver was forced to stop.... He got off, and man, he took off like a rabbit, and might well have. I couldn't very well blame him there. And we were trapped in the bus…It wasn't until the thing was shot on the bus and the bus caught afire that everything got out of control… We were taken to the hospital. The bus started exploding, and a lot of people were cut by flying glass. We were taken to the hospital, most of us, for smoke inhalation.... The people at the hospital would not do anything for us. They would not." That same day, Mothers Day, May 14, 1961, the second bus escaped the mob in Anniston and made it to Birmingham. At the Trailways station there, white men armed with baseball bats and chains beat the Freedom Riders at will for about fifteen minutes before the first police arrived. In 1975 a former Birmingham Klansman, who was a paid informant of the FBI at the time, told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that members of the Birmingham police force had promised the Klansmen that no policeman would show up to interfere with the beatings for at least fifteen minutes. (III. Freedom Riders pp 113-116) My Soul is Rested: The Story of the Civil Rights Movement in the Deep South, Howell Raines, 1977 You can read reviews of this book and purchase it at: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=62-0140067531-0 6. From the Eyes on the Prize website: "Eyes on the Prize: American's Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965" is a six-part documentary series that tells the human stories of the movement for social change in the words of both famous and less-known participants. Produced by Blackside, Inc., and presented on PBS by WGBH Boston, "Eyes on the Prize" premiered Wednesday, January 21, 1987. Through contemporary interviews and historical footage -- much of it never before broadcast -- "Eyes on the Prize" traces the civil rights movement from early acts of individual courage through the flowering of a mass movement and its eventual split into factions. "Eyes on the Prize" chronicles the civil rights years through the individual stories of people compelled by a meeting of conscience and circumstance to play a role in history. These are the stories of blacks and whites, of civil rights organizers from the South and the North, of government officials at all levels, of Southerners who fought to maintain a way of life they had cherished since Reconstruction and of blacks who were determined to make America live up to its promise of equality. Some played their parts and faded back into obscurity; others became household names in the America of the time and permanent figures on the pages of history. http://www2.blackside.com/blackside/BlacksideFilms/EYES1videotext.html#Jails In "Ain't Scared of Your Jails 1960-1961," college students begin to take a leadership role in the civil rights movement. Lunch counter sit-ins spread from Nashville, Tennessee, through the South, giving life to a new force within the movement -- the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The following year, many of these students found themselves facing death trying to break down segregation in interstate bus travel below the Mason-Dixon line, on the Freedom rides initiated by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Website links: http://www2.blackside.com/blackside/BlacksideFilms/EYES1film.html and at PBS http://pbsvideodb.pbs.org/main/default.asp
"Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years 1954-1965," Juan Williams, 1987 An invaluable companion to the video series. Review and or purchase this book at: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=1-0140096531-10
"Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader: Documents, Speeches and Firsthand Accounts from the Black Freedom Struggle 1954-1990," Clayborne Carson, et al, 1991 http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=17-0140154035-3 7. Taylor Branch's book Parting the Waters is also a must read of civil rights movement history. An excerpt here describes some of MLK, Jr.'s support for the Freedom Rides. A mob formed outside Rev. Abernathy's First Baptist Church in Montgomery that was harboring the Freedom Riders and the hosting the mass meeting the evening of Sunday, May 21, 1961. This time the reprieve lasted, and although there remained in the church the broken glass, frayed nerves, overwrought children, and a strong residue of tear gas, these badges of the ordeal only made the congregation more determined to receive what they came for. After hymns and introductions further bonded them to the Freedom Riders, King began to deliver his main address sometime after ten o'clock. His prepared speech followed standard King themes of history, love and injustice, but the crisis prompted him to chastise Governor Patterson for his performance since the Freedom Riders first entered Alabama. "Ultimate responsibility for the hideous action in Alabama last week must be placed at the doorstep of the governor of the state,' he declared. "His consistent preaching of defiance of the law, his vitriolic public pronouncements, and his irresponsible actions created the atmosphere in which violence could thrive."…He and his audience had faced fire, stones, fist, and tear gas for a cause grounded in their beliefs. As midnight approached, some seven hours after the first congregants had arrived, the faces he looked down upon were still wet with perspiration but drained nearly dry of emotion… The first groups left the church at four thirty that morning in National Guard trucks…(Chapter 12, pp 462-465) Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-1963, Taylor Branch, 1989 You can see reviews and order this book here: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=17-0671687425-0
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