Arsenault Raymond. Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice
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96 Freedom Riders
shared Peck’s pride once they learned about the Freedom Ride, though nei-
ther would play any direct role in planning or implementing the project.
Preoccupied with the American Committee on Africa, which had consumed
his activist life since 1953, Houser wished CORE well from afar, as did Rustin,
who spent most of 1961 in India, England, and various European countries
representing the War Resisters League, lobbying for nuclear disarmament,
and organizing international peace marches. Cast aside by image-conscious
NAACP and SCLC leaders who considered him a political liability, Rustin
was temporarily disconnected from the civil rights movement that he had
helped to create. He did not return to the United States until the fall of 1961,
too late to have any further influence on the Freedom Rides that he had
helped to inspire.
The Freedom Ride sanctioned by the National Action Committee fol-
lowed the basic outline of Rustin and Houser’s original 1947 Washington–
to–New Orleans plan, which had been adapted by Carey and Gaither in
January. In Farmer’s words, CORE planned to “recruit from twelve to four-
teen persons, call them to Washington, D.C., for a week of intensive training
and preparation, and then embark on the Ride. Half would go by Greyhound
and half by Trailways.” The Riders would leave Washington on May 4, travel
through Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Missis-
sippi, and arrive—it was hoped—in New Orleans on May 17, the seventh
anniversary of the Brown decision. Realizing that the trip posed a series of
potential dangers and logistical challenges, Farmer asked Gaither to act as
the Riders’ advance scout, just as Rustin and Houser had done in 1947. With
his recent experiences in Rock Hill and his hard-earned knowledge of the
Southern scene, Gaither was the logical choice for this dangerous mission.
But no one—not even Gaither—could be certain how much resistance he
would encounter once he returned to the South.
Setting out in early April, Gaither scouted the entire route from Wash-
ington to New Orleans. At each stop, he surveyed the layout of terminal
facilities, met with black leaders to arrange housing and speaking engage-
ments for the Riders, and assessed the tenor of local race relations. As he
made his way across the region, news of the impending Freedom Ride drew
a mixed response among Southern blacks. Some weren’t sure how they felt
about CORE or the Ride, and others wanted nothing to do with the trouble-
makers from the North, but in virtually every black community along the
route Gaither found some support for the Riders. In the end, he was able to
secure local sponsors in a dozen communities from Virginia to Louisiana.
Representing the scattered local movements that had dotted the black South
since the 1940s, the organizations willing to host the Riders ranged from
small Baptist congregations in Petersburg and Lynchburg to private black
colleges in Richmond, Charlotte, Rock Hill, and Atlanta. In each case, the
decision to associate with the Riders involved considerable risk, and Gaither
could not be sure that the promised arrangements would be honored once
Hallelujah! I’m a-Travelin’ 97
the Freedom Riders actually arrived. But on balance he was encouraged by
the prospects for cooperation and insurgency among black Southerners.
Especially encouraging was the enthusiasm that he encountered at a SNCC
meeting in Charlotte on April 21. With SNCC advisor Ella Baker and repre-
sentatives from SCLC, the National Student Association, the Southern Con-
ference Education Fund, and the American Friends Service Committee present
as observers, the fifteen student leaders at the meeting embraced the idea of
direct action on buses and trains. While there was no formal endorsement of
the CORE Freedom Ride, the students approved a “Summer Action Program”
that included a plan to urge black college students to exercise the rights guar-
anteed by the Morgan and Boynton decisions. “With the closing of the school
year and with thousands of students traveling across state lines on public
conveyances en route to their homes,” a SNCC memorandum explained, “they
offer and provide the manpower for a really massive realization of the promise
made in these decisions. Many of these students, of course, will not be the
hard-core activists who are ready to continue sitting when refused service and
to be jailed in a strange city or town, but such students can still be useful if they
will simply request service, stressing their rights as interstate passengers.”
Gaither agreed and left the Charlotte meeting with renewed hope that the
black freedom struggle was widening.
His assessment of the white South was less sanguine, however. In the
Upper South states of Virginia and North Carolina, the prospects for com-
pliance with Morgan and Boynton looked promising, but from South Carolina
on down Gaither didn’t like what he saw. He already had firsthand experi-
ence with the harshness of segregationist resistance in Rock Hill and other
South Carolina communities, but the belligerence and defiance that he en-
countered in Alabama and Mississippi shocked him. If the Freedom Riders
challenged the ultra-segregationists of the Deep South without benefit of
police protection, he concluded, they would be lucky to escape with their
lives. In his report, he identified the white supremacist strongholds where
the Riders would be most likely to encounter violence, including Birming-
ham and Anniston, which he termed “a very explosive trouble spot without a
doubt.” Confirmed by the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and other embattled
movement leaders in Birmingham and Montgomery, Gaither’s warning about
the volatile situation in Alabama was also consistent with the experiences of
several recent visitors to the state, including Journey of Reconciliation vet-
eran Bill Worthy. While en route to Tuskegee in January, Worthy encoun-
tered stiff resistance from local authorities who did not appreciate his attempt
to test compliance with the Boynton decision. “At the Greyhound terminal in
Birmingham and Montgomery, and at the Birmingham airport restaurant,”
he reported, “I was involved in five separate incidents, was twice held by the
police, and several times threatened with violence.”
4
While Gaither was checking out the route, other CORE staffers were
busy recruiting and selecting the dozen or so Riders with the requisite skills
98 Freedom Riders
and courage to survive. More than anything else, CORE wanted recruits
who had already demonstrated a strong commitment to nonviolence and who
knew what was being asked of them. Recruitment material made no attempt
to hide the potential dangers of the Ride or to minimize the difficulty of
fulfilling the responsibilities of nonviolent resistance. Only the most com-
mitted and the stoutest of heart were encouraged to apply. Freedom Riders
could expect to be harassed and arrested, as sixteen members of the St. Louis
and Columbia, Missouri, CORE chapters discovered in mid-April when they
participated in what the CORE-lator later dubbed a “Little Freedom Ride.”
Setting out by bus from East St. Louis, the interracial band only made it as
far as the southeastern Missouri town of Sikeston, 150 miles down the road,
before being arrested at a whites-only terminal restaurant for “disturbing the
peace.” With their cases still pending in late April, the “little” Freedom Rid-
ers provided potential recruits with a sobering preview of what the “big”
Freedom Ride might entail. As Carey warned in a letter sent to CORE lead-
ers on May 1, “If bus protests end in arrest in Missouri, what can be expected
when the Freedom Ride gets to Georgia and points South?”
5
CORE solicited applications from outside the organization and even
placed an ad in the Student Voice, SNCC’s monthly newsletter, but from the
outset Farmer and Carey intended to rely heavily on CORE veterans and
word-of-mouth recruitment. The first Freedom Riders selected were Farmer
himself and Peck. As a veteran of the Journey of Reconciliation, Peck was an
obvious choice. But Farmer’s decision to put himself in harm’s way raised
more than a few eyebrows. Known more as an office and idea man than as a
hands-on activist, CORE’s forty-one-year-old leader had never exhibited
much interest in risking arrest and imprisonment. Those who knew him well,
however, understood his motivation. The Freedom Ride was Farmer’s per-
sonal ticket to glory, his best chance to join King, Randolph, and Marshall in
the front rank of civil rights heroes. Having missed the 1947 ride, he wasn’t
about to miss this one. At the very least, participating in the Ride would help
dispel his reputation for elitist disengagement, or so he hoped.
In selecting the remaining Riders, Farmer and his staff tried to come up
with a reasonably balanced mixture of black and white, young and old, reli-
gious and secular, Northern and Southern. The only deliberate imbalance
was a lack of women. Although, unlike the Journey of Reconciliation, the
Freedom Ride would not be limited to men, Farmer and Carey were reluc-
tant to expose women, especially black women, to potentially violent con-
frontations with white supremacists. Their decision to limit the number of
female Freedom Riders to two was undoubtedly rooted in patriarchal con-
servatism, but they also feared that a balanced contingent of men and women
might be interpreted as a provocative pattern of sexual pairing. The situation
was dangerous enough, they reasoned, without taunting the segregationists
with visions of interracial sex. Later in the summer, when the Freedom Rides
involved a large number of women, white Southern fixations on interracial
Hallelujah! I’m a-Travelin’ 99
couplings and other perceived threats to sexual orthodoxy confirmed the
CORE leaders’ fears. But CORE’s original decision would remain a subject
of controversy, within both the organization and the broader movement, for
years to come.
CORE asked each applicant to include a recommendation from a teacher,
pastor, or co-worker and to write an essay outlining his or her commitment
to nonviolence and the struggle for civil rights. Volunteers under the age of
twenty-one also had to submit proof of parental permission. By late April the
CORE office had received several dozen applications, all filled with testimo-
nials of courage and conviction and eagerness to serve the cause. From this
pool, Farmer and Carey chose fourteen riders. Three of those chosen were
unable to make it to Washington in time for the Ride: the Reverend J. Metz
Rollins, a veteran of the 1956 Tallahassee bus boycott who had become the
Nashville-based field director of the United Presbyterian Church; and Julia
Aaron and Jerome Smith, two members of New Orleans CORE who were
languishing in a Louisiana jail. But those who did show up provided CORE
with an experienced and committed band of activists.
6
THE ELEVEN FREEDOM RIDERS who joined Farmer and Peck in Washington
on May 1 represented a wide range of backgrounds and movement experi-
ences. Two of the eleven, Genevieve Hughes and Joe Perkins, were CORE
staff members. A tall, attractive twenty-eight-year-old white woman, Hughes
was a relative newcomer to the movement who had spent most of her life in
the prosperous Washington suburb of Chevy Chase. Following her gradua-
tion from Cornell, she had moved to New York City to work as a stockbro-
ker at Dunn and Bradstreet. During the late 1950s she became active in the
local chapter of CORE, eventually helping to rejuvenate the chapter by co-
ordinating a boycott of dime stores affiliated with chains resisting the sit-in
movement in the South. Exhilarated by the boycott and increasingly alien-
ated from the conservative complacency of Wall Street, she gravitated to-
ward a commitment to full-time activism, accepting a CORE field secretary
position in the fall of 1960. The first woman to serve on CORE’s field staff,
she made a lasting impression on everyone who met her. Years later, fellow
Freedom Rider John Lewis wistfully recalled that she was “as graceful and
gentle as her name,” yet “not at all afraid to speak up when she had strong
feelings about something.” When asked to explain her decision to join the
Freedom Ride, she replied: “I figured Southern women should be repre-
sented so the South and the nation would realize all Southern people don’t
think alike.”
7
At twenty-seven, Perkins was a year younger than Hughes, and he too
had been on the CORE staff for less than a year. Born and raised in
Owensboro, Kentucky, as the oldest of six children, he spent four years at
Kentucky State University in Frankfort before enlisting in the army in 1954.
After serving two years as a medical technician, he left the army and enrolled
100 Freedom Riders
at Howard University as a music education major. He later transferred to the
University of Michigan, where he and several other black graduate students
became passionately involved in the activities of the Ann Arbor Direct Ac-
tion Committee in the spring of 1960. As a demonstration of support for the
Southern sit-in movement, he picketed Woolworth’s and Kresge department
stores and later organized a “stand-in” at the Newport Beach on Lake Erie.
Recruited by Ann Arbor CORE in August, he attended the Interracial Ac-
tion Institute in Miami as a trainee and served ten days in jail after he and
several others were arrested during a sit-in at Shell’s Supermarket. Follow-
ing his release, he took a leave of absence from the University of Michigan to
work full-time for CORE as a field secretary in the borderlands of Kentucky
and West Virginia. During the fall and winter prior to the Freedom Ride, he
spearheaded successful direct action campaigns in Louisville, Covington, and
several other cities, earning a reputation as a skilled and fearless organizer.
Perkins’s outspoken manner and sometimes impatient approach to activism
clashed with the more deliberate style of his supervisor, national field direc-
tor Gordon Carey, and disagreements with Carey and Marvin Rich led to his
resignation in June 1961. But during the Freedom Ride he was at his best,
prompting one admiring observer to call him “one of the smoothest opera-
tors on the tour.”
8
Rounding out the Michigan contingent were the Bergmans, Walter and
Frances, two white activists who brought a unique set of experiences to the
Freedom Ride. At sixty-one, Walter Bergman was the oldest of the Freedom
Riders, and Frances, a former elementary school teacher and assistant princi-
pal, was the second oldest at fifty-seven. A retired school administrator who
had taught part-time at the University of Michigan and Wayne State Uni-
versity, Walter had been a leading figure in the teachers’ union movement of
the 1930s and 1940s, serving as the first president of the Michigan Federa-
tion of Teachers. In the mid- and late 1940s, following military service in the
European theater, he spent several years in Germany as a civilian educational
specialist, first for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administra-
tion, and later for the U.S. government’s de-Nazification program in Ba-
varia. In 1948 he returned to the United States to become director of research
for the Detroit Board of Education, but his wife Isabel remained in Europe
as a UN relief worker. Divorce and remarriage to Frances soon followed,
and by the early 1950s he had resumed his leadership role with the Michigan
Federation of Teachers, a position that drew him into the academic freedom
and civil liberties controversies of the McCarthy era. Both Bergmans were
committed socialists and admirers of Norman Thomas, as well as leaders of
the Michigan affiliate of the ACLU. Since 1958 they had become increas-
ingly active in CORE picketing campaigns against segregated hotels, chain
stores, and swimming pools in Detroit. By the time they volunteered for the
Freedom Ride, they were veteran civil rights activists, though virtually all of
their movement experience was in the North. While they had recently at-
Hallelujah! I’m a-Travelin’ 101
tended a CORE conference in Lexington, Kentucky, the Freedom Ride would
be their first journey to the Deep South.
9
The Bergmans were not the only Freedom Riders to have limited expe-
rience in the South. Four others—Albert Bigelow, Jimmy McDonald, Ed
Blankenheim, and John Moody—were unmistakably Northern in background.
A fifty-five-year-old former navy captain and World War II veteran, Bigelow
had earned an architecture degree at Harvard and served as the state housing
commissioner of Massachusetts before moving to Connecticut in the 1950s.
Repulsed by the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he
became a devout Quaker and pacifist who opened his home to Hiroshima
survivors undergoing plastic surgery in American hospitals. A founding mem-
ber of the Committee for Non-Violent Action (CNVA), he gained an inter-
national reputation as a militant anti-nuclear activist in 1958 when he captained
the Golden Rule, a protest ship sponsored by CNVA and the National Com-
mittee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE). Sailing the thirty-foot ketch into a
drop zone in the Pacific to protest America’s scheduled testing of nuclear
weapons near the island of Eniwetok, he warned President Eisenhower that
even though “our voices have been lost in the massive effort of those respon-
sible for preparing this country for war . . . we mean to speak now with the
weight of our whole lives.” Arrested in Honolulu before they could enter the
test zone, Bigelow and his Quaker crew served sixty days in prison but drew
international attention to their cause. A square-shouldered, imposing man
with a commanding presence, he did not fit the stereotypic image of a peace
crusader. But no one who knew him well doubted the depth of his commit-
ment to pacifism and nonviolent direct action.
10
Jimmy McDonald was a twenty-nine-year-old black folk singer from New
York City known for his vast repertoire of labor and freedom songs. As a
precocious seventeen-year-old, he had campaigned for Progressive Party
presidential candidate Henry Wallace in 1948, inspired in part by a Wallace
rally featuring the radical black activist and singer Paul Robeson. Asked to
perform at a CORE fund-raiser in Brooklyn in 1956, McDonald later par-
ticipated in a number of New York CORE direct action campaigns, and for a
brief period in 1960 he worked at CORE headquarters as a part-time clerk.
“A very playful, bohemian, Greenwich Village kind of guy,” as John Lewis
later described him, he added comic relief and a touch of whimsy to the band
of Freedom Riders. Though street-smart, he was something of a loose can-
non and unquestionably the least disciplined of the Riders. Somewhat un-
comfortable with the interracial nature of CORE and generally dismissive of
nonviolence as a viable philosophy, he viewed the bus journey through the
South as a chance for adventure and “a great ride,” as he later put it. “I was
not sent because I had a lot of intellect,” he recalled in 1969; “. . . certainly I
was not in there because I wanted to be like Gandhi.” They wanted “me to
go . . . to lead the singing.”
11
102 Freedom Riders
Two years younger than McDonald, Ed Blankenheim was a carpenter’s
apprentice and part-time chemistry student at the University of Arizona in
Tucson. Feisty and full of resolve, he had talked his way into the Marine
Corps in 1950, at the age of sixteen. Eleven years later, as a Korean War
veteran and father of two, he traveled more than two thousand miles to join
the Freedom Ride. Born in Minnesota and raised in Illinois, he moved to
Arizona in the late 1950s, after spending two years at Wright Junior College
in Chicago. Befriending fellow chemistry student Tom Burroughs and sev-
eral other black student activists, he became one of the few whites to partici-
pate in local civil rights activities, first as a member of Tucson’s NAACP
Youth Council, and later as a leader of a local CORE chapter known as Stu-
dents for Equality. The CORE affiliation came after Blankenheim and
Burroughs called the New York office for help. Eager to establish a foothold
in the Southwest, Jim Farmer dispatched pacifist leader David McReynolds,
a War Resisters League official who frequently donated his services to CORE,
to Tucson to help organize the local student movement. McReynolds stayed
for two weeks, enthralling the students with discussions of Gandhian wis-
dom and strategy.
Blankenheim, in particular, embraced McReynolds as a friend and men-
tor worth following. “His belief in mankind and the human potential for
kindness,” he later recalled, “changed Students for Equality and changed
me.” The feeling of respect was mutual, and when the Freedom Ride project
emerged a few weeks later, McReynolds unhesitatingly recommended the
wiry young man with the sardonic wit and impish grin. Farmer had asked
him “to keep an eye out for potential Freedom Riders,” and he felt he had
found a good prospect in Arizona. Blankenheim had seen enough of the South
as a young marine recruit at Parris Island, South Carolina, to be wary of
directly challenging the region’s racial shibboleths, and he knew full well
that he “was being invited on a trip into the Deep South as part of a mixed-
race bomb.” After a little prodding from Farmer, though, he could not resist
joining the Ride. “I was no less concerned about the danger of my commit-
ment,” he later explained, “but all that I had seen in the South and all that I
had learned from Dave stared me down. I had come too far and I couldn’t
turn back.”
12
John Moody was a thirty-year-old student at Howard University and an
active member of the SNCC-affiliated Nonviolent Action Group (NAG),
which had staged a series of successful sit-ins in Washington, Maryland, and
northern Virginia. Born and raised in Philadelphia, where he was a leader of
the local NAACP Youth Council, Moody threw himself into student and
movement politics soon after transferring to Howard from Lincoln Univer-
sity. Self-conscious about his Northern background, he was both fascinated
and frightened by images of black life in the Jim Crow South. As a young
boy in Philadelphia, he listened with rapt attention to a transplanted North
Carolina–born cousin who often reminisced about violent encounters with
Hallelujah! I’m a-Travelin’ 103
white Southern racists. Such stories, combined with his experiences at Howard,
helped to draw him into the movement, but he remained very apprehensive
about actually visiting the Deep South. As he confessed to his roommate in
late April, even though he had volunteered to join the Freedom Ride, he
didn’t really want to go. This ambivalence and an untimely case of the flu
soon plunged Moody into a mental and physical crisis that forced him to
drop out on the last day of orientation. Three weeks later, after regaining his
health and composure, he would take part in a Freedom Ride from Mont-
gomery to Jackson, serving six weeks in a Mississippi jail cell for his trouble.
But in early May he was in no condition to head south with the original
Riders.
13
Realizing this, Farmer and Carey accepted Moody’s young roommate,
Hank Thomas, as a last-minute replacement. Although Thomas did not have
the chance to go through the early orientation sessions, the strapping nine-
teen-year-old sophomore was well prepared for the challenges of the Ride.
Like Moody, Thomas had been active in the NAG protests, but he also had
the benefit of years of firsthand experience in the Jim Crow South and had
even attended the founding conference of SNCC in April 1960. A native
Floridian with rural roots, he grew up in an impoverished and troubled fam-
ily headed by an abusive stepfather. One of eleven children, he chopped cot-
ton in southern Georgia before moving to St. Augustine at the age of eight.
As a Deep South migrant, he never felt completely comfortable at Howard,
an institution dominated by the sons and daughters of the black bourgeoisie.
For him, the Freedom Ride provided a welcome escape from the stuffy com-
placency and condescension of privileged students who displayed little con-
cern for the plight of their vulnerable Southern cousins. “When folks ask me
what incident led me to ride,” he explained many years later, “I can’t say it
was one. When you grow up and face this humiliation every day, there is no
one thing. You always felt that way.”
14
The rest of the Riders, like Thomas, were young black Southerners raised
in the midst of rigidly segregated institutions. The youngest was eighteen-
year-old Charles Person, a freshman at Atlanta’s Morehouse College. Born
and raised in Atlanta, where his father worked as an orderly at the Emory
University Hospital, Person was a gifted math and physics student who
dreamed of a career as a scientist. After being denied admission to the all-
white Georgia Institute of Technology, he enrolled at Morehouse in the fall
of 1960. Person had been a member of the local NAACP Youth Council
during his senior year in high school, and he and several other Morehouse
students, including future Freedom Riders Frank Holloway and Harold
Andrews, became active in a student protest organization known as the At-
lanta Committee on Appeal for Human Rights. In early 1961 one sit-in earned
him a sixteen-day jail sentence, an experience that deepened his commit-
ment to the struggle and drew the attention of CORE recruiters looking for
a Freedom Rider who could represent the Atlanta sit-in movement. Since he
104 Freedom Riders
was still a minor, he had to talk his father (his mother refused) into signing a
CORE permission form, but his persistence ultimately prevailed. As he left
his tearful parents in Atlanta to embark on the long bus ride to Washington,
he reluctantly took a seat in the back of the bus—perhaps, he hoped, for the
last time.
15
The oldest of the “Southern” Freedom Riders (aside from Farmer) was
the Reverend Benjamin Elton Cox. Though only twenty-nine, he had packed
a lot of living—and talking—into his three decades of existence. A native of
Whiteville, Tennessee, Cox was a loquacious and eloquent preacher who
earned the nickname “Beltin’ Elton” during the course of the Freedom Ride.
The seventh of sixteen children, he moved to Kankakee, Illinois, at the age
of five. A high-school dropout, he shined shoes for eighteen months before
completing the work for his diploma at the age of twenty. He later attended
Livingstone College, an AME Zion institution in Salisbury, North Carolina,
before studying for a divinity degree at Howard, and even spent a year as a
visiting student at a seminary in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Following his
ordination in 1958, he became the pastor of the Pilgrim Congregational
Church in High Point, North Carolina, a small city fifteen miles southwest
of Greensboro. In High Point he quickly gained a reputation as a militant
civil rights advocate by spearheading local school desegregation efforts, serv-
ing as an advisor for the local NAACP Youth Council, and acting as an ob-
server for the American Friends Service Committee. Following the early
Greensboro sit-ins in February 1960, he encouraged local students to stage
their own sit-ins, but only if they were willing to keep them nonviolent.
Forceful in his public commitment to nonviolence, he soon drew the atten-
tion of national NAACP leaders, including Farmer, who hired him to stump
the South. Later, after Farmer became executive director of CORE, Cox
received a call from his former boss, who wanted at least one ordained min-
ister to join the Freedom Ride. Cox agreed without hesitation and, honoring
the spirit of Farmer’s request, showed up in Washington wearing a formal
clerical collar, just in case anyone doubted that the Ride was blessed with
divine guidance.
16
The roster of Freedom Riders originally included two ordained minis-
ters, in fact: Cox and the Reverend J. Metz Rollins of Nashville. Rollins was
also one of two Riders recruited from Nashville, but in late April he had to
bow out, leaving Cox as the lone preacher and John Lewis as the sole repre-
sentative of the Nashville Movement. Destined to be the most celebrated
Freedom Rider of them all, Lewis first learned about the Freedom Ride when
Rollins showed him a CORE advertisement in the Student Voice. At twenty-
one, the future Georgia congressman was one of the youngest Freedom Rid-
ers, but with five arrests he was already a jail-tested veteran of the nonviolent
movement. Born on a hardscrabble tenant farm in Pike County, Alabama, a
few miles outside the town of Troy, Lewis was a dedicated student who
dreamed of being the first person in his family to go college. Despite a natu-
Hallelujah! I’m a-Travelin’ 105
ral shyness, he wanted to be a preacher, especially after listening to a stirring
radio sermon by Martin Luther King Jr. in 1955. Two years later he enrolled
at American Baptist Theological Seminary (ABT), a small, unaccredited col-
lege in Nashville, Tennessee. At ABT he became a student and protégé of
the Reverend Kelly Miller Smith, the founder of the Nashville Christian
Leadership Council, and by the fall of 1958 he had been drawn into the orbit
of Jim Lawson and the emerging Nashville Movement. Along with several
ABT classmates, including his close friends Bernard Lafayette and Jim Bevel,
Lewis eagerly absorbed the lessons of Lawson’s weekly workshops on non-
violence. In November his commitment to nonviolent struggle deepened
during a memorable weekend at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle,
Tennessee, where Septima Clark, Myles Horton, and other movement vet-
erans shared their experiences and ideas. “I left Highlander on fire,” he re-
called.
Over the next year, Lawson’s workshops deepened his young disciple’s
religious and moral faith with visions of “redemptive suffering,” “soul force,”
and the “beloved community,” concepts that would inform and animate
Lewis’s long and influential career as a civil rights leader. Instrumental in the
founding of the Nashville Student Central Committee in October 1959, Lewis
found an opportunity to put his evolving philosophy into action the follow-
ing winter when downtown Nashville became a center of sit-in activity. Ar-
rested along with scores of other student demonstrators during a February
1960 sit-in, he underwent what he later characterized as a conversion-like
experience, “crossing over . . . into total, unquestioning commitment.” More
arrests followed, pushing thoughts of the ministry and school and family ties
farther and farther into the background of his life. By the spring of 1961,
when he volunteered for the Freedom Ride, the movement had become his
surrogate “family.” “At this time,” he wrote revealingly on his application,
“human dignity is the most important thing in my life. This is [the] most
important decision in my life, to decide to give up all if necessary for the
Freedom Ride, that Justice and Freedom might come to the Deep South.”
The depth of his commitment was already a source of inspiration for other
Nashville activists, and those who knew him well realized that the CORE
initiative would not be his first freedom ride.
17
In late December 1959, while traveling home for the Christmas break,
Lewis and Bernard Lafayette impulsively decided to exercise their rights as
interstate passengers by sitting in the front section of a bus from Nashville to
Birmingham. Lafayette sat right behind the driver, and Lewis sat a few rows
back on the opposite side. When the driver ordered them to the rear, they
refused to budge. The driver then left the bus to call the Nashville police,
but later returned in a rage after the police refused to intervene. At one point,
he pushed his seat backward, crushing Lafayette’s suitcase, but the two “free-
dom riders” stubbornly remained in the front as the bus headed southward.
At several stops the driver left the bus to use the phone, convincing Lewis