Freedom’s Riders

Fifty years ago this month, the first of the “Freedom Riders” boarded buses bound for the Deep South to challenge the racial inequality still prevalent there and to help finally fulfill the dream of human equality believed to have been purchased with the blood and ruin of the U.S. Civil War 100 years earlier.

At first comprised mostly of black and white college students, the Freedom Riders were later joined by preachers, teachers and even suburban housewives.
Their mission: To peacefully do away with the segregationist policies in transportation and public dining embraced by a South still entrenched in racism.

They moved together in groups into Southern bus stations, rail depots and white-only restaurants and put their lives on the line, nonviolently resisting the vicious attacks unleashed upon them by bigoted racists – both civilians and cops.

They followed the teachings of Mohandas Gandhi, who used nonviolence to eventually shame the British into leaving India so it could finally become an independent nation. Those nonviolent tactics were also embraced by Martin Luther King, Jr., leader of the civil rights movement in the 1960s.

The Freedom Riders knew they faced injury, death and almost certain imprisonment in frightening Deep South jails for their actions.  Mostly living outside the South, they could have focused on their own lives, families and material success and let those living sub-human lives in the South go on living that way.

But turning one’s head had been the way of things for 100 years after the Civil War, and not much had changed. Talk needed to be backed up by action, and the Freedom Riders stepped up to do just that.

Over and over again in 1961.

It’s been said that their uncompromising bravery embarrassed new President John F. Kennedy into taking action he really wasn’t ready to take. Photographs and stories of Freedom Riders being attacked and beaten throughout the South that spring finally resulted in Attorney General Robert Kennedy in May 1961 ordering the Interstate Commerce Commission to issue rules that said all people have the right to travel throughout the United States “without being subjected to discrimination.”

The bravery of the Freedom Riders led to civil rights marches throughout the South in the early 1960s and the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964, which guaranteed the right to vote and equal access to housing and employment under the law for all citizens of this country.
The battle for civil rights was not over in 1964 and would go on after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968. Some say it goes on even today.

But who knows how long it would have taken to dramatically change the social landscape of this nation had it not been for the actions of those Freedom Riders, who focused the world’s attention and conscience on the cruel and inhuman racism still being practiced in the South in 1961.

Everyone who today acknowledges the basic equality of human beings – something most of us now take for granted — owes them a huge debt that should never be forgotten.

Thank you, Freedom Riders.

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