Arsenault Raymond. Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

506 Freedom Riders

government drama. While the crisis provoked by the Freedom Rides seized

the Kennedy brothers’ attention, forcing them to address an expanded range

of issues related to race and democracy, it did not persuade either of them

that ending Jim Crow was a moral imperative requiring immediate and un-

compromising action. They did not celebrate the achievements of nonvio-

lent direct action in 1962 and 1963, in large part, for the same reason that

prevented them from embracing the Freedom Riders in 1961: They did not

believe that radical or disruptive change was in the best interests of the na-

tion or the world.

Robert Kennedy was more receptive to the Freedom Riders’ tactics and

ideas than was his brother, but neither leader was ready to jettison his com-

mitment to what the political scientist David Niven has labeled “glacial

change.” In the case of John Kennedy, the attachment to glacialism was as

broad as it was deep. But, as Niven has pointed out, the young president’s

response to the Freedom Rides was also guided by a traditional interpreta-

tion of Reconstruction that convinced him “that moderation was always a

more successful course than coercion.” Encumbered by this simplistic model

of regional and national history, he had difficulty absorbing the lessons that

the Freedom Riders might have taught him. The concept of “freedom now”

struck him, as it struck many Americans of moderate and conservative lean-

ings, as an unreasonable expectation that threatened both civic order and

evolutionary progress. “Quixotic crusades,” the historian Harvard Sitkoff

once wrote of Kennedy, “interfered with his careful plans and cautious time-

tables.” Indeed, John Dittmer probably came closest to the truth when he

observed that “in the short run, at least,” both Kennedy brothers “pre-

ferred order to justice.”

In the long run, the Kennedys—especially Robert, who had five more

years than his brother to rethink his views on race and radicalism—gained

some appreciation for the insistent and compelling nature of the civil rights

agenda. And when the president finally went before the nation in June 1963

to make the case for a comprehensive civil rights bill, he insisted that Ameri-

cans were “confronted primarily with a moral issue,” not a mere legislative or

political problem. In 1962, though, there was little indication that adminis-

tration leaders had acquired anything more than a superficial and detached

understanding of the nonviolent movement’s passions and frustrations. The

president’s continuing preoccupation with the Cold War—both before and

after the Cuban Missile Crisis of October—relegated civil rights issues to

secondary status in Washington, and even the attorney general seemed more

interested in J. Edgar Hoover’s relentless search for subversive elements

within the movement than in the movement itself. The mixed signals from

the top influenced all levels of the federal government. Thus, despite the

legal advances of the previous year, federal agencies were still more adept

at nurturing moderates and consoling conservatives than at protecting the

constitutional rights—and the lives—of grassroots activists.

Epilogue: Glory Bound 507

Appalled by the collective inability of the federal courts, the FBI, and the

Justice Department to provide the movement—especially Voter Education

Project volunteers and potential registrants in the Deep South—with even a

semblance of justice or security, CORE convened a special Commission of

Inquiry into the Administration of Justice in the Freedom Struggle, chaired

by former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Meeting in Washington on May 25

and 26, 1962, on the first anniversary of the initial Jackson Freedom Rider

trials, the commission collected 300 pages of testimony from a long list of

activists critical of federal officials. The Justice Department, however, dis-

played little interest in the commission’s findings, and the situation on the

Southern front remained perilous. By midsummer Farmer and other CORE

leaders were so frustrated that they began to discuss the idea of bringing

“aggressive nonviolent action” to Washington in an effort to highlight the

administration’s failings. But the national board scotched the idea, arguing

that directly challenging the White House was too risky in a volatile pre-

election atmosphere. Alienating the president or putting more Republicans

in Congress might make matters even worse, they concluded, indicating that

memories of the lean Eisenhower years placed certain limits on anti-Kennedy

sentiment within the movement. Such limits did not preclude expressions of

profound disappointment, however. In a September letter to the novelist

Lillian Smith, Marvin Rich acknowledged that Kennedy had “done ever so

much more than Eisenhower” for the cause of civil rights, but he also offered

the telling qualifier that “when measured against our expectations and against

the awesome rush of events he has done little.”

RICH’S LAMENT captures the bittersweet quality of movement life in the after-

math of the Freedom Rides. Caught in the throes of a classic revolution of

rising expectations, civil rights activists chafed at the restrictions imposed by

the inertial power of institutions and individuals. As the Freedom Riders and

others watched and waited for signs of fundamental change, it became clear

that neither the American public nor the Kennedy administration could keep

pace with the new expectations. But equally clear was the realization that the

civil rights movement had undergone a thoroughgoing transformation dur-

ing the past year. While the barriers of racism remained formidable, the

struggle against those barriers had acquired new sources of strength and en-

ergy. Most obviously, the various organizations that made up the movement

had established a precedent of working together, building a coalition that

crossed regional, racial, and ideological lines. Though loose and uneasy at

times, and subject to the full range of problems related to organizational

competition and diversity, the coalition that emerged during the Freedom Rides

initiated the nationalization of a movement that would later oversee massive

mobilizations such as the March on Washington, Freedom Summer, and the

Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights campaign later in the decade. The col-

lective efforts of 1961 also exposed deep ideological and personal conflicts

508 Freedom Riders

within the movement and revealed the difficulty of coordinating local and

national initiatives, as in Albany and Monroe. But even the worst of these

problems contributed to the maturation of a movement that eventually found

ways to offset the negative influence of rivalries and disagreements.

Notwithstanding the trend toward cooperation and collaboration, most

of the movement’s growth and activity in 1962 took place within the con-

fines of individual organizations. As we have seen, the Freedom Rides had an

immediate though differential impact on CORE, SNCC, SCLC, and the

NAACP, both at the local and national level. Reshaping the organizational

contours of the freedom struggle, the Rides altered the traditional hierarchy

that had prevailed since the 1940s. CORE and SNCC gained the most, es-

tablishing themselves as major players in an unfolding civil rights drama pre-

viously dominated by the NAACP and, since 1957, by SCLC.

As the originator and chief financial sponsor of the Rides, CORE had

the closest organizational identification with the elimination of segregated

transit facilities, a victory that brought unprecedented attention and influ-

ence to a group of activists unaccustomed to visibility or notoriety. Despite

the continuing legal responsibilities and debts associated with the Rides,

CORE emerged from the crisis in good shape, with an expanded budget and

staff, thousands of new members, and an expansive sense of its new role as a

leading force within the nonviolent movement. The enhanced stature of

Farmer and other former Freedom Riders gave the organization credibility

and standing, even in the arena of popular culture, where musicians such as

Chuck Berry and Phil Ochs paid tribute to them in song. “Jim Farmer was a

hard fightin’ man,” Ochs’s 1962 folk ballad “Freedom Riders” intoned, “de-

cided one day that he had to make a stand. He led them down to slavery

town, and they threw Jim Farmer in the can.” Buoyed by this and other pub-

lic tributes, the national office in New York, along with local CORE chap-

ters around the nation, was brimming with proposals for direct action. By the

end of the year several of these proposals had become operational, from the

Freedom Highways campaign in the Southeast to a national recruiting project

known as Task Force Freedom. And, unlike in the past, there was no sense

that such projects were limited to a small vanguard or constrained by organi-

zational inertia. Despite the continuing challenges of public complacency

and political backsliding, CORE—the organization that had put the move-

ment on wheels—was on the move.

Aside from CORE, SNCC had the greatest structural and emotional

investment in the Freedom Rides. As the organization that saved the Rides at

several critical junctures, that through its local “affiliates” in Nashville, Wash-

ington, and Atlanta provided many of the participating student activists, and

that helped to turn a two-week project into a six-month-long mass move-

ment, SNCC deservedly received much of the credit for vanquishing Jim

Crow from the buses, trains, and terminals of the South. And, like CORE,

SNCC was able to turn this experience into the equivalent of a functional

Epilogue: Glory Bound 509

rebirth. Having first emerged during the 1960 sit-ins, the scattered clusters

of students associated with SNCC barely constituted an organization at the

beginning of the Freedom Rides. But by early 1962 SNCC’s status as the

foundation of a burgeoning student movement was undeniable. While

SNCC’s profile remained hazy among the general public, within the civil

rights movement itself the small bands of student activists that had spread across

the South had earned an unparalleled reputation for selfless commitment to

the struggle. In Albany, McComb, and several other Deep South communi-

ties, SNCC activists pushed the limits of protest, often traveling beyond what

their elders, both inside and outside the movement, viewed as the boundaries

of prudence. With fewer than twenty staff members and a meager budget, the

organization retained an unimposing skeletal structure, but this lack of struc-

ture only reinforced the organization’s mystique, helping it to attract some of

the region’s most independent-minded grassroots organizers.

Unfortunately, maintaining this mystique of openness had its costs, and

by the spring of 1962, when SNCC held its third annual conference in At-

lanta, the untrammeled emotional intensity that would later destroy the or-

ganization was already in evidence. With the noticeable absence of Lawson,

Lafayette, and the Bevels, and with many of the delegates openly question-

ing the utility and viability of nonviolent struggle, SNCC’s leadership seemed

to be heading in a new direction. “Our cause remained the same, of course,”

John Lewis recalled many years later, “but our methods were all in question.

You heard the term ‘revolution’ more than the term ‘integration.’ The spirit

of redemptive love was being pushed aside by a spirit of rage. And the whole

idea of nonviolence was up for debate.” To Lewis, as to several other former

Freedom Riders, the 1962 conference marked the beginning of a long and

troubling retreat from “beloved community” idealism. Even so, with consid-

erable effort, he and his fellow proponents of nonviolent interracial struggle

were able to mobilize enough support to keep much of the organization within

the “beloved” orbit for several years.

SCLC also experienced growing pains following the Freedom Rides, but

the unifying figure of Martin Luther King kept the organization relatively

free of fractious debate. Even though his reputation was on the decline among

student activists disappointed first by his refusal to become a Freedom Rider

and later by his alleged grandstanding in Albany, and despite the FBI’s suc-

cess in reducing his moral and political capital in the eyes of some Washing-

ton insiders, King remained an immensely popular leader within SCLC and

among black Americans in general. The fact that he missed few opportuni-

ties to speak out on behalf of the Riders muted public criticism of his deci-

sion to stay off the freedom buses, and the power of his words continued to

inspire civil rights activists across the nation. King’s periodic “People to

People” tours, the creation of a support group known as the Gandhi Society,

and a high-profile campaign calling for a “Second Emancipation Proclama-

tion” kept him in the public eye, countering the image of frustration coming

510 Freedom Riders

out of Albany. At the same time, both King and his organization benefited

from the direct participation in the Freedom Rides by Fred Shuttlesworth,

Wyatt Tee Walker, Ralph Abernathy, and several Nashville Christian Lead-

ership Council ministers. By the spring of 1962 the SCLC staff was loaded

with former Freedom Riders, including Jim Lawson and the Bevels, and in

June John Lewis was added to the SCLC board of directors for good mea-

sure. The election of Lewis, who had spurned an offer to join the SCLC staff

the previous fall, was especially gratifying to King, who recognized that stu-

dent activism was the key to the movement’s future. Already impressed by

the critical role that students had played in the sit-ins and the Freedom Rides,

he would discover just how critical young activists could be when Jim Bevel’s

“children’s crusade” came forth to save the Birmingham campaign in 1963.

Unlike King, Roy Wilkins and the national leaders of the NAACP were

not inclined to collaborate with or trust the instincts of this new generation

of activists. Drawn into the Freedom Rides as a reluctant partner, the NAACP

had eschewed membership in the FRCC and had tried to limit its involve-

ment in the crisis to legal representation and fund-raising. Yet even the rela-

tively staid NAACP found the Freedom Rides to be a liberating influence.

Not only did the organization have to share the spotlight with a broader

range of activists, but the internal balance between local branches and the

national headquarters, and between legal and direct action advocates, had

shifted noticeably since 1959, when delegates to the NAACP national con-

ference had celebrated a fifty-year-old commitment to keeping the struggle

in the courtroom. After resisting the entreaties of impatient Youth Councils

and radical branches for decades, the national office could not withstand the

centrifugal and democratic forces unleashed by the student movement and

the Freedom Rides. In communities from the Deep South and the Carolinas—

where, as we have seen, Wilkins himself manned the barricades on one

occasion—to the Northwest and the Pacific Coast, local NAACP involve-

ment in direct action spoke volumes about the growing militancy within the

organization. Even in areas where the NAACP was not involved, the organi-

zation often served as a convenient target for white supremacists who as-

sumed that all outside agitation could ultimately be traced to Wilkins’s office.

Whatever its actual policies, the NAACP was symbolically out in the streets

with CORE, SNCC, and SCLC—a reality that further eroded the caution-

ary legalistic tactics of the past. By 1962 all civil rights organizations, whether

their leadership was fully aware of it or not, were being drawn into the vortex

of a new insurgent style of protest that would become the trademark of the

decade ahead.

The Freedom Rides offered important lessons to anyone willing to ac-

knowledge the gap between democratic ideals and the many imperfections of

American life. Not everyone paid attention to the unfolding drama below

the Mason-Dixon line, and much of the nation was slow to absorb the full

implications of nonviolent direct action. But it did not take long for the Rides

Epilogue: Glory Bound 511

to alter the consciousness of citizen activists or to inspire related acts of

organized protest, both in the United States and around the world. Indeed,

thanks to an almost universally sympathetic international press, the impact

of the Rides was nearly as great abroad as it was at home. As United Na-

tions Secretary-General U Thant observed in November 1961: “The Free-

dom Riders journeying to the South are looked upon in Asia and Africa as

the Champions for the colored American’s holy war for freedom.” Just as

American civil rights activists had drawn inspiration from the emerging

decolonization of the Third World, insurgents in nations as far away as South

Africa and Australia saw the Freedom Riders as instructive role models. In

South Africa blacks challenging the hated “pass laws” that restricted their

mobility often referred to themselves as Freedom Riders, and in Australia

Aborigines chafing under the restrictions of racial discrimination organized

a full-scale Freedom Ride.

In 1965 Charles Perkins, a twenty-nine-year-old Aboriginal student at

the University of Sydney and the leader of Student Action for Aborigines

(SAFA), led an interracial group of twenty-nine students on a Freedom Ride

through the province of New South Wales. Hoping to gather information

on and draw attention to racial discrimination against Australian Aborigines,

Perkins and the other Riders encountered considerable resistance from whites

who forced their bus off the road in one Outback town and from local police

in a second community where they tried to desegregate a public swimming

pool. Though only two weeks long, the Australian Freedom Ride attracted

considerable press attention and was later credited with launching the mod-

ern Aboriginal freedom struggle. Many of the Australian Freedom Riders

remained active in Aboriginal and other social justice causes, and Perkins,

the first Aborigine to graduate from an Australian university, went on to

become the secretary of the national Department of Aboriginal Affairs in

the 1980s.

In the United States, as in Australia, the Freedom Rides exerted an impact

that transcended tangible, quantifiable changes in institutional behavior or public

policy. Within six months of the first Ride, travelers of all races were sitting

side by side on buses and trains all across the nation without fear of arrest, the

WHITE and COLORED signs that had blighted the walls of Southern bus and train

stations for decades were gone, the nation’s major civil rights organizations

had undergone significant transformations, and the Justice Department had

been pushed into a deepening engagement in civil rights matters. But even this

impressive list of accomplishments does not capture the full effect of the Free-

dom Rides. The most important and lasting consequence—the one that con-

firmed the Rides’ status as a pivotal moment in American history—was a

revolutionary change in the character of citizen politics. In the course of six

months, the nation’s first mobile nonviolent army expanded the realm of the

possible in American political and social insurgency, redefining the limits of

512 Freedom Riders

dissent and setting the stage for the escalating demands and rising expectations

of the mid- and late 1960s.

While the Freedom Riders ultimately failed in their effort to bring the

nation, or even most of the civil rights movement, into the confines of the

“beloved community,” they, more than any other activists of their day, fore-

shadowed the grassroots “rights revolution” that would transform American

citizenship over the next four decades. The rising movements for women’s

rights, military withdrawal from Southeast Asia, environmental reform, gay

and lesbian rights, and the rights of the disabled all built upon the foundation

of legitimacy and success established by Freedom Riders and other nonvio-

lent activists in the early 1960s. By demonstrating the power of personal

commitment and sacrifice in a new and dramatic way, the Freedom Riders

countered traditional assumptions of institutional authority and top-down

politics, pushing American democracy to what the journalist Malcolm

Gladwell has called a “tipping point,” and beyond. Reflecting on his experi-

ences as a Freedom Rider, Stokely Carmichael used a different metaphor,

characterizing the Rides as a “great leap forward” that superseded the ortho-

doxy of slow and steady gradualism. But whatever the words used to the de-

scribe the change, the conclusion that the Rides created a new context for

social activism seems inescapable.

The sociologist James Laue came to this conclusion as early as 1962,

after interviewing a wide array of movement activists. Detecting a profound

change in the scope and intensity of the movement, Laue identified national-

ization as the most obvious effect of the Rides. “The national mobilization of

conscience which had begun in Montgomery and grown in 1960,” he ob-

served, “reached full bloom with the Freedom Rides.” Paradoxically, a cru-

cial aspect of the nationalization process was shifting the focus to the Deep

South, or, as he put it, carrying “the protest squarely to the most recalcitrant

and dangerous areas of the nation.” By bringing a measure of radical change

to the most hidebound corner of American society, the Freedom Rides “broke

the charade of silence and with it the monolithic hold of the racist ethos on

many Deep South communities.”

At the same time, the Rides also nationalized the movement by drama-

tizing, “to any who remained doubters, that segregation was a national con-

cern, rather than a series of local problems,” as the journalist Milton Viorst

once wrote. Forcing the Kennedy administration to take a belated but ulti-

mately forthright stand on one aspect of racial discrimination, the Rides has-

tened the day when the federal government would embrace a broader agenda

of promoting integrated schools and neighborhoods, equal access to public

accommodations, affirmative action in hiring policies, and black voting rights.

Although one unintended consequence of the Freedom Rider crisis was the

government’s turn to voting rights advocacy as a means of diverting move-

ment energies away from additional direct action campaigns, that too was a

tribute to the power and influence of the Rides. Indeed, without the pressure

Epilogue: Glory Bound 513

exerted by the crises of 1961, the Voter Education Project that led to Free-

dom Summer, Selma, and the 1965 Votings Right Act might not have been

part of the historical equation.

Looking back after four decades of uneven progress, it is evident that

this hard-won alliance with federal authorities imposed certain limits on the

movement, virtually guaranteeing an emphasis on civil reform, not moral

revolution. For some Americans, the Freedom Rides and the nonviolent di-

rect action campaigns that followed brought about a direct transformation of

heart and mind. But for most, the lesson of the Rides was the ability of ordi-

nary citizens to affect public policy. Both inside and outside the movement,

the primary legacy was the efficacy of direct action, not the moral rectitude

of nonviolence. This was not what many Freedom Riders had intended, but

such are the ironies of history forged by real people in real time.

Though ultimately problematic, these limitations were barely visible in

the immediate aftermath of the Freedom Rides. When James Laue talked

with several of the Freedom Riders in 1962, he discovered that they were

proud of what they had accomplished. They felt they had proven that even a

small vanguard of activists could initiate fundamental change through righ-

teous action and moral discipline. All that was needed, they believed, was the

physical and moral courage to express their passion for social justice through

the medium of nonviolent struggle. And that was what they had done, expe-

riencing unmerited suffering and demonstrating their willingness to “give a

little bit of blood to redeem the soul of America,” as John Lewis recalled in a

2001 speech. “We allowed the spirit of history to use us,” Lewis explained,

invoking the sense of destiny that propelled him and so many others down

the road to freedom.

Destiny, however, meant something less than determinism. Even with

history on their side, the Freedom Riders had faced difficult choices at every

turn in the road. At several points during the spring, summer, and fall of

1961, seemingly insurmountable challenges had threatened to push the move-

ment backward, forcing even the most resilient Riders to contemplate re-

treat or compromise. In every instance movement activists and organizers

had found a way to push on, but they had done so with a growing apprecia-

tion for the difficulty and magnitude of the task before them. The original

CORE Freedom Riders came to the South to teach and preach and spread

the gospel of nonviolence, which they did in full measure. But in the process

of delivering the movement’s message, they, and the other Freedom Riders

who followed them, became experiential learners, acquiring essential truths

about themselves, the human condition, and the nature of historical agency.

Wherever they found themselves—on buses, in terminal waiting rooms, in

mass meetings, in the jails and prisons of the benighted South—Freedom

Riders absorbed the concrete lessons of struggle. Some were hard and sober-

ing lessons about the intractability of racial hatred and entrenched privilege.

Others were hopeful and inspiring, demonstrating the expansive possibilities

514 Freedom Riders

of individual and collective action and the transformative power of move-

ment culture.

Disseminating these lessons to the American public proved difficult, and

the nonviolent movement never realized its full potential, but for a time the

Freedom Riders’ victory over fear and violence became an object lesson in

itself. During the remainder of the Kennedy era and into the mid-1960s, the

term “Freedom Rider” took on a special mystique, providing black South-

erners and many others with an empowering example of engaged citizen-

ship. Indeed, by 1964, when nearly a thousand college students traveled to

Mississippi to participate in the Freedom Summer equal rights campaign,

the term had morphed into a generic and iconic symbol only loosely con-

nected to the events of 1961. For a time, the simple phrase “the Freedom

Riders are coming” invoked hope among those seeking change and dread

among those defending the racial status quo. Later in the decade, as the free-

dom struggle moved through the stages of Black Power, urban rioting, and

ideological fragmentation, memories of both the Freedom Rides and Free-

dom Summer faded, and the term lost some of its force. But it did not disap-

pear entirely.

Speaking at the 2000 Democratic National Convention, President Bill

Clinton lauded vice-presidential candidate Joseph Lieberman as a former

“Freedom Rider” who had risked his life “to register black voters in the then

segregated South.” After a bit of checking, several observers pointed out that

the president was mistaken—that Lieberman’s experiences as a civil rights

activist had actually taken place in 1963, two years after the Freedom Rider

campaign. But, judging by the lack of public reaction to the correction, few

Americans had enough historical background to appreciate the significance

of the president’s error. Four years later a scene in the popular film Ladykillers

added to the confusion. Speaking to a native black Mississippian named

MacSam, Garth Pancake, a former “Freedom Rider” now living in Missis-

sippi, explains how he first came to the state: “I wasn’t born here you know.

I’m from Scranton, Pennsylvania. . . . Came down here in 1964. Greyhound

bus. With the Freedom Riders. Do you know who the Freedom Riders were,

MacSam? . . . The Freedom Riders, my fine young man, were a group of

concerned liberals from up north, all working together just like we are here—

involved citizens who came down here so that local black people could have

their civil liberties, so that people like you could have the vote.”

SUCH MISINFORMATION IS UNFORTUNATE, not only because it violates the

integrity of the historical record but also because it obscures the special

nature of the experiences and contributions of the 436 men and women

who actually were Freedom Riders. The saga of the Freedom Rides deserves

to be remembered in all of its meaning and nuance and, within the limits of

human memory and the historian’s craft, to be faithfully reconstructed for a

Epilogue: Glory Bound 515

society still grappling with the confounding issues of race, prejudice, and

inequality.

The Freedom Riders themselves have done their best to keep the record

straight. For the past forty years, participation in the Rides has been a con-

tinuing source of identity, pride, and fellowship. Bound by ties of friendship,

memory, and shared sacrifice, many former Freedom Riders have protected

and sustained a common legacy. Among the ex-Riders there are distinct sub-

groups—the original CORE Riders, those who survived the burning bus in

Anniston, those who spent time in Parchman, the Interfaith Riders, and so

forth—each with its own set of experiences and lore. But there is also a com-

monality of perspective that binds them all together, setting them apart from

everyone else, including the rest of the movement.

Forged in the fires of nonviolent struggle, this sense of common purpose

and experience has persisted through the decades, despite the inevitable physi-

cal dispersion of the Riders. During the tumultuous years of the 1960s and

1970s, the Riders went their separate ways, passing into a wide variety of

careers and private lives. Some either became disillusioned or moved too far

to the right or left to remember the Freedom Rides without a measure of

embarrassment or regret. And, against the increasingly violent backdrop of

the Vietnam War and the Johnson and Nixon eras, many abandoned the

nonviolent philosophy that had propelled the Freedom Rides during the rela-

tively innocent years of the early 1960s. Some went to Vietnam as soldiers or

sailors, some became anti-war activists, and others filled both functions, turn-

ing against a war that ultimately seemed ill-conceived and morally unjustifi-

able. Most embraced the liberating themes of 1960s counter-culture, but as

the politics of reform and revolution became darker and more complicated,

there was an inevitable divergence of opinion and belief, symbolized by Stokely

Carmichael’s strident advocacy of Black Power and Jim Farmer’s unexpected

endorsement of Richard Nixon in the 1972 presidential campaign. And yet,

even with this divergence, a large majority continued to identify with a broad-

based struggle for human rights and social justice that inevitably drew them

into a variety of new movements from environmentalism to gay and lesbian

liberation. An inordinate number went on to distinguished careers as social

workers, community organizers, health care providers, labor leaders, law-

yers, jurists, politicians, writers, journalists, theologians, teachers, college

professors and administrators, entrepreneurs, or corporate executives. But

whatever their professional experiences or private enthusiasms, they were

still Freedom Riders, still part of a select group of activists that had changed

the course of American history.

In the immediate aftermath of the Freedom Rides and for several years

thereafter, many of the Riders maintained intermittent contact through the

natural interplay of their lives and careers, but as time went on some felt the

need to enhance the maintenance of old ties through formal reunions and

other planned gatherings. The first event of this kind occurred in May 1981,