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

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516 Freedom Riders

on the twentieth anniversary of the Rides, when Jim Farmer and John Lewis

co-hosted a small gathering in Atlanta. Prior to the reunion, Lewis and Hank

Thomas traveled the route of the original CORE Ride, from Washington to

Montgomery, before joining their old friends in Atlanta. Farmer, an ailing

sixty-year-old diabetic who had just lost the sight in his right eye, was not up

to the bus trip. But at the reunion he proudly reflected on the Riders’ experi-

ences, describing the Rides as “one of the most important, if not the most

important single project of the civil rights movement in the early ’60s.” Re-

calling the controversies and challenges of 1961, he maintained that the Rid-

ers not only “established the principle that the federal government has a duty

to enforce federal laws over and against conflicting state laws” but also “drove

the nail in the coffin of the carpetbagger idea, the idea that unless you live in

a certain community you have no right to be concerned about what happens

in that community.” An aspiring politician who would be elected to the At-

lanta city council later in the year, Lewis emphasized the fear and dread that

had shadowed the Freedom Riders, confessing: “When I was beaten in Mont-

gomery, I thought it was the end.”

Similar recollections surfaced in July when Lewis’s old friend Bernard

Lafayette led a tour of students and several former Freedom Riders through

Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. Sponsored by the Atlanta-based Martin

Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change and Lindenwood Col-

lege in St. Louis, where Lafayette served as an administrator, the tour at-

tracted more than thirty participants and an ABC television documentary

film crew. After brief stops in McComb and Jackson, the group traveled to

Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site of the 1964 murder of three Freedom Sum-

mer volunteers, before heading east toward Montgomery and Atlanta. “We’re

doing this to expose young people to the movement of the 1960’s,” Lafayette

told reporters before leaving Mississippi—to take a nation under the sway of

the conservative Reagan revolution back to a time when “ordinary people

did extraordinary things,” when Freedom Riders “had the commitment and

courage to stand up for their principles and were willing to give their lives.”

In this same spirit, Lafayette himself would later help found both the U.S.

Institute for Peace, headquartered in Washington, and the Center for Non-

violence and Peace Studies at the University of Rhode Island. After estab-

lishing a nonviolence training center in Colombia and leading a 120-mile

peace march to a Medellín guerrilla stronghold in the mountains of Antioquia

Province in 2002, he would be kidnapped and briefly held hostage. Several

others in his group, including the governor of Antioquia, remained in captiv-

ity and later died in a failed rescue attempt by government forces. But none

of this deterred Lafayette from continuing his effort to bring peace and non-

violence to a war-torn region a continent away.

In 1982 and 1983 reunions of a different sort took place in Michigan,

where veteran newsman Howard K. Smith, Ike Reynolds, Hank Thomas,

and several other Riders served as witnesses in a trial involving eighty-two-

Epilogue: Glory Bound 517

year-old Walter Bergman. Outraged by testimony given by former under-

cover FBI informer Gary Thomas Rowe to the Senate Select Committee to

Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities in

1975, Bergman and Jim Peck filed separate civil damage suits alleging FBI

complicity in the 1961 Birmingham beatings that left both men severely in-

jured. Filed in 1976 and 1977 with the help of the ACLU, the suits sought

damages from the FBI and six of its agents. Initially dismissed by a New York

judge on a technicality in 1979, Peck’s suit ultimately yielded twenty-five

thousand dollars in damages on appeal. Bergman’s suit went to trial in De-

cember 1982, and six months later, Judge Richard Enslen of the federal dis-

trict court in Kalamazoo ruled in his favor, issuing an eloquent decision that

closed with a stirring quotation from the nineteenth-century black abolition-

ist Frederick Douglass: “Those who profess to favor Freedom and yet depre-

cate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They

want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the

awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be

a physical one, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a

demand. It never did and it never will.”

Judge Enslen ultimately limited Bergman’s award to fifty thousand dol-

lars (fifteen thousand of which was awarded to the estate of Frances Bergman,

who died in 1979), only a fraction of the two million dollars sought, conclud-

ing that the injured party’s “condition might have resulted in part from an

appendectomy he had four months after the beating.” But the victory was

sweet nonetheless, correcting “the essential history of the period,” as

Howard Simon, the executive director of the Michigan ACLU and

Bergman’s close friend, later put it. While the modest award did not bring

much monetary benefit to an ag-

ing and infirm Bergman—who

somehow managed to live an-

other sixteen years—the decision,

in Simon’s judgment, “proved the

Federal Government was not an

ally of the civil rights worker, but

in fact was in league with local law

enforcement and the K.K.K.”

Though reasonable, this judgment

Michigan ACLU executive director

Howard Simon wheels former Free-

dom Rider Walter Bergman into a

federal courtroom in Grand Rapids,

Michigan, February 28, 1983.

(Courtesy of Kalamazoo Gazette)

518 Freedom Riders

was not what had been communicated to a national television audience four

years earlier in a controversial film entitled Undercover with the KKK. Based

on Gary Thomas Rowe’s self-serving memoir and co-produced by NBC and

Columbia Pictures, the 1979 film depicted Rowe as a heroic, freedom-loving

FBI informant. With former Dallas Cowboys quarterback Don Meredith

playing the lead role, the script gave the impression that Rowe and the FBI

were blameless not only in Bergman’s 1961 beating but also in the 1965

murder of Detroit housewife Viola Liuzzo, for which Rowe had recently

been indicted.

Fortunately, a more accurate and less mythic video history of these and

other episodes in Alabama’s violent past appeared in 1986 with the release of

the documentary film series Eyes on the Prize, the third episode of which

focused on the Freedom Rides. Featuring riveting interviews with Jim Farmer,

John Lewis, and Fred Leonard, the Eyes on the Prize segment reached a large

public television audience and introduced the Rides to a generation largely

unfamiliar with what had happened in Alabama and Mississippi during the

early 1960s. Nineteen eighty-six was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Free-

dom Rides, and several former Riders commemorated this milestone by par-

ticipating in a partial re-creation of their experiences filmed by the Canadian

Broadcasting Company. Bergman and Peck were too frail to attend the mini-

reunion, but those returning to Alabama included John Lewis and Jim Zwerg,

a quarter century removed from the adventure of his life but still plagued by

periodic bouts of pain from the beating he had received in Montgomery. A

business executive and former United Church of Christ minister who had

moved from Wisconsin to Arizona in the 1970s, Zwerg agreed to retrace the

steps that had left him crumpled and bleeding on a bus station ramp. En

route to Montgomery, he sat next to a fifteen-year-old black boy who had

never heard of the Freedom Rides and who was puzzled by his assertion that

there was a time, not so long ago, when they could not have shared a seat on

an Alabama bus. Captured on film by cameramen who had been children

themselves during the Rides, this intergenerational exchange added poignancy

to an already emotional exercise in historical reconnection. Although he had

remained active in matters of social and racial justice, Zwerg had not been

back to the Deep South or seen many of his fellow Freedom Riders since the

1960s. Reconnected, he returned again four years later to participate in a

nonviolent workshop commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of the Nash-

ville sit-ins.

A year later, in 1991, a group of Freedom Riders convened a similar

gathering in Jackson. The thirtieth anniversary celebration combined a

monthlong bicycle tour—called the Unity Tour—that attracted eleven bicy-

clists (but no Freedom Riders) eager to retrace the route of the Freedom

Rides from Washington to New Orleans, and an elaborate four-day con-

ference held at Tougaloo College in mid-July. Featuring sessions on a vari-

ety of social justice issues, the conference explored the theme “A Look

Epilogue: Glory Bound 519

Back—A Leap Forward.” Two hundred conference participants—including

Lewis, Farmer, Hank Thomas, Ben Cox, Ed Blankenheim, and several other

former Freedom Riders—spent part of the time recalling the horrors of the

Jim Crow era, but much of the focus was on contemporary problems and

challenges. When the Unity Tour had arrived in the city in late June, local

and state officials had rolled out the red carpet in an effort to demonstrate

that times had changed in Mississippi. Greeted first by David Walker,

Jackson’s black police chief, and later by former governor William Winter,

the bicyclists joined several veterans of the Jackson Non-Violent Movement

at a special symposium on the legacy of the Freedom Rides, moderated by

Justice Reuben Anderson, the first black to serve on the state supreme court.

A month later the conference participants received the same warm wel-

come, prompting several Riders to comment on the sharp contrast with their

earlier visits to Mississippi. But this did not stop Lewis, a liberal third-term

congressman, from lamenting that “thirty years later, the scars and stains of

racism are still deeply embedded in American society.” Noting persistent

discrimination and inequality and commenting on the bitter irony of Presi-

dent George Bush’s selection of ultra-conservative Clarence Thomas to re-

place Justice Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court, Lewis insisted that

“we’ve seen the Berlin Wall tumble, but the wall of racism is still up in

America.” Jim Farmer, wearing an eye patch and virtually sightless in both

eyes, was somewhat more conciliatory, arguing that the progress since the

Freedom Rides had shown that “this nation is capable of great and rapid

change, if enough people work with diligence to that end.” But he too

pointed out that the nation still had a ways to go before civil rights activists

could rest on their laurels. “As long as I have breath in my body,” he told

the gathering, “I want to be active in the struggle for equality.” The pres-

ence of Hank Thomas, who had parlayed a string of fast food franchises

into a considerable fortune following his return from combat in Vietnam,

was an object lesson that for some black Americans things really had im-

proved. Yet Thomas himself, in a speech on economic empowerment,

warned that a whole series of problems, from discriminatory loan policies

and governmental neglect to drugs and black-on-black crime, continued to

inhibit economic uplift among black Americans.

Fittingly, the conference ended with a bittersweet comedy monologue by

longtime activist Dick Gregory. In one of his more serious moments, Gregory

metaphorically reminded the audience that “the freedom riders had a power in

being a light in a dark room.” “What did the freedom riders do?” he asked,

cupping his hands as if to cover a flaming candle. “The early civil rights activ-

ists,” he explained, were nothing less than “the shields against the wind that

would snuff the light of freedom.” Now, thanks to the Freedom Riders and

their legacy, “there are so many wicks out there that no one could ever blow

them out.”

This legacy grew stronger in the decade following the 1991 reunion, as

the Clinton administration refocused attention on race and civil rights and as

520 Freedom Riders

the Freedom Riders themselves gained a renewed sense of their historical

importance. Propelled by a rising interest in civil rights history—manifested

in the appearance of popular books such as Taylor Branch’s Parting the Wa-

ters (1988) and in the opening of major civil rights museums in Memphis and

Birmingham—the Freedom Rides reentered both the consciousness of the

American public and the private lives of movement veterans. Throughout

the decade Lewis’s political success was a major source of pride and a rallying

point for former Freedom Riders, some of whom sought out their colleagues

for the first time since the 1960s. Lewis himself missed few opportunities to

expound on the meaning and legacy of the Rides. Speaking to anyone who

would listen to his message on nonviolence and the beloved community, he

proclaimed the continuing relevance of both the tactics and the goals of the

Freedom Rides. And to prove his point he organized a weeklong Immigrant

Workers Freedom Ride in the fall of 2003, mobilizing eight hundred immi-

grant Riders who traveled on buses to New York and Washington to protest

the withholding of civil rights from noncitizens. “Like the Freedom Rides of

1961,” Lewis insisted, “Freedom Ride 2003 calls on ordinary people to do

extraordinary things; to put their bodies on the line at a moment in American

history when immigration is a volatile issue everywhere; to stand up for their

rights and the rights of many others; to call attention to bad laws that harm

good people; and to challenge the federal government to act where it seems

determined not to.” In the end, the organizers of the Immigrant Workers

Freedom Ride could only claim a modest impact on the second Bush

administration’s immigration policies, but the scope of the Ride served no-

tice that Lewis and his allies were still a vital force in American politics.

Seven years earlier, in a 1996 cover story in the New Republic, historian

Sean Wilentz had facetiously characterized Lewis as “The Last Integration-

ist,” emphasizing his importance as “the strongest link in American politics

between the early 1960s—the glory days of the civil rights movement—and

the 1990s.” Leaving the overall impression that Lewis was “black America’s

most powerful politician,” Wilentz suggested that the former Freedom Rider

was perhaps the only member of Congress capable of leading a liberal renais-

sance. While the renaissance did not materialize, there were continuing signs

that the spirit of the Freedom Rides was very much alive. In November 1996

Lewis was reelected for a sixth term, and Bob Filner, a white Freedom Rider

and Democratic congressman from San Diego, was reelected to a third. Eight

months later, at the urging of Lewis and others, President Bill Clinton

launched a national Initiative on Race and Reconciliation, appointing the

renowned eighty-two-year-old African American historian John Hope

Franklin as chairman of an advisory board that included Mississippi’s Will-

iam Winter. Over the course of fifteen months, the advisory board held a

series of hearings that highlighted the continuing challenges and dilemmas

facing America’s multiracial society, including many of the issues raised by

the Freedom Riders in 1961.

Epilogue: Glory Bound 521

Throughout the 1990s the legacy of the Freedom Rides also gained cur-

rency from the speeches and appearances of former Riders at community

events, academic symposia, and college campuses—all of which piqued the

curiosity of an emerging generation too young to fathom the compulsions of

the Jim Crow past. Testimonials and public reminiscences by Freedom Rid-

ers became common, and one documentary filmmaker even brought four

surviving Journey of Reconciliation participants to Washington for a taping

in 1993. Touted as movement celebrities, the Riders gained a new visibility,

especially after several enterprising writers and teachers rediscovered and

amplified the story of the Freedom Rides. Two children’s books on the Free-

dom Rides, including one by the noted black author James Haskins, were

published in the mid-1990s, and during the following decade several schools

and community theaters staged plays that recalled the experiences of 1961.

In 1996 Simon and Schuster published a novel by Vicki Covington that fo-

cused on the relationship between Bull Connor and two white teenagers who

witnessed the attack on the Freedom Riders at the Birmingham Trailways

station. And at the University of Wisconsin an imaginative professor orga-

nized an entire course around the history of the Freedom Rides, allowing

students to spend part of a semester visiting civil rights sites along some of

the routes traveled in 1961.

Even more ambitiously, Gary Younge, a twenty-eight-year-old black jour-

nalist from Britain, spent three months in the fall of 1997 retracing the entire

route of the original CORE Freedom Ride from Washington to New Or-

leans. Traveling by Greyhound, Younge conducted scores of interviews along

the way while recording his personal impressions of “familiar places to which

I had never been.” As he later explained in his revealing 1999 book, No Place

Like Home: A Black Briton’s Journey Through the American South: “I had seen

its battles unfold in black and white and heard its speeches and screams from

over the Atlantic. Now I needed to see it in colour. I had to feel the fear, taste

the food and ride at the front of the bus. I wanted to breathe life into the

legend of my formative years.”

For Younge and many others born in the aftermath of the Freedom Rides,

the legends and exploits of the early 1960s were finally taking concrete form,

as movement veterans found increased opportunities to reflect on the mean-

ing and relevance of the Rides, especially after the publication of Lewis’s

captivating memoir Walking with the Wind and David Halberstam’s monu-

mental study of the Nashville movement, The Children, in 1998. Both books

provoked new interest in the Freedom Rides, taking advantage of public cu-

riosity primed earlier in the year by a long overdue tribute to Jim Farmer.

In January 1998, Bill Clinton awarded Farmer the prestigious Presiden-

tial Medal of Freedom, providing the ailing seventy-seven-year-old wheel-

chair-bound warrior with a token of the recognition that he had long craved

but was now too blind to see. “I have had great anxiety that my people would

forget me, forget my work. I was hoping the day would come when I would

522 Freedom Riders

be remembered,” he observed a few weeks after the White House ceremony.

“They know my name now. I think that medal, which they tell me is quite

beautiful, will preserve my place in history.” Fourteen months later, he died

at his home in Fredericksburg, Virginia, surrounded by few possessions other

than memorabilia from a lifetime of struggle. Following the deaths of Ella

Baker in 1986, Bayard Rustin in 1987, and Jim Peck in 1993, Farmer’s pass-

ing marked the closing of an era in civil rights history. In the end, even many

of those who had shrunk from his vanity or condemned him for his Republi-

can apostasy in the 1970s shed a tear or two in remorse and memory of his

undeniable passion for justice.

Farmer’s death was a reminder that all of the Freedom Riders—men and

women who had once seemed so young—were getting older. Some were

already in their sixties and approaching retirement, and even the youngest

had passed mid-life by century’s end. While many remained actively engaged

in professional life and other pursuits, thoughts of mortality and a reflective

attitude born of age inevitably brought at least some of the Riders closer

together. Lewis, for one, believed that it was time to renew historical and

personal connections in a dramatic way. In 2000 he began to organize an

elaborate fortieth anniversary reunion commemorating the “Ride to Free-

dom.” After securing funding from Greyhound and several other corporate

Gathered in front of the burned bus exhibit at the Birmingham Civil Rights Insti-

tute, former Freedom Riders and friends sing freedom songs to help commemo-

rate the fortieth anniversary of the Freedom Rides, May 12, 2001. (Courtesy of

Greyhound Corporation)

Epilogue: Glory Bound 523

sponsors, he hired a special congressional staff liaison to mobilize a select

group of CORE and SNCC veterans for a three-day celebration and partial

reenactment of the original Freedom Ride.

The reunion began in Washington on May 10, 2001, with a ceremony

featuring speeches by Lewis and D.C. congresswoman Eleanor Holmes

Norton, the presentation of a “Greyhound Award” to each Freedom Rider

in attendance, and a Chinese buffet dinner commemorating the famous “Last

Supper” of May 3, 1961. Five of the original CORE Riders—Lewis, Thomas,

Cox, Blankenheim, and Person—were on hand, as were Marvin Rich, Moses

Newson, several Nonviolent Action Group Riders, and two veterans of the

1947 Journey of Reconciliation, George Houser and Bill Worthy.

On May 11, most of the group, plus a number of other movement veter-

ans, gathered in Atlanta for a series of ceremonial events before boarding

buses for Alabama the following morning. Accompanied by a C-SPAN film

crew, several journalists, and two historians conducting onboard interviews,

the caravan of freedom buses traveled to Anniston, Birmingham, and Mont-

gomery, where local officials and black community leaders went out of their

way to welcome the entourage—but where the returning Freedom Riders

dredged up haunting memories nonetheless. In Anniston, where he had been

beaten forty years earlier, the normally gregarious Hank Thomas was over-

come with conflicting emotions and could barely find words to express his

feelings. In Birmingham, during a stop at the downtown bus station and a

tour of museum exhibits at the Civil Rights Institute, others encountered

similar difficulties. “In a sense this is holy ground,” Lewis told the crowd at

the bus station, his voice cracking with emotion as he reminded them that

this was the very place where “you planted the seeds of a mighty movement.”

Minutes later, upon seeing a museum replica of the burned bus, Ed

Blankenheim, confined to a wheelchair following a disabling stroke, broke

down into sobs and had to be wheeled away from the exhibit. But somehow

he was able to regain his composure, joining with his fellow Riders to sing a

chorus of “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize” before leaving the museum.

Later in the day, after the group gathered for a final event at the First

Baptist Church in Montgomery—the scene of the 1961 siege that had changed

not only their lives but the lives of millions of Americans—there was more

singing, and more reminiscing, both solemn and soulful. By the time they

reboarded the buses for the return trip to Atlanta, everyone was emotionally

spent, confirming to Lewis and everyone else on board that at least the dream,

if not the broader reality, of the beloved community was still alive. And if this

was not enough to prove the point, Lewis soon added a postscript to the

commemoration. Traveling to Boston with several of his closest friends on

May 21, he was awarded the first Profiles in Courage Lifetime Achievement

Award by the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation. Coming forty years to

the day after the famous siege of the First Baptist Church in Montgomery,

524 Freedom Riders

the ceremony at the Kennedy Library was a fitting end to a week of renewal

and remembrance.

The ideals of interracial harmony and social justice were once again on

full display six months later when an even larger group of former Freedom

Riders gathered in Jackson, Mississippi. Organized by a band of California-

based Freedom Riders who had kept in contact over the decades, the reunion

attracted more than sixty Riders, many of whom had spent time in Parchman

prison and other Mississippi jails in 1961. Only one of the original CORE

Riders—Charles Person—attended, and aside from Jim Forman there were

no movement celebrities at the gathering. But those who were there repre-

sented the full range of activists who had turned the Freedom Rides into a

mass movement forty years earlier. In 1961 they had been college or high

school students, ministers, rabbis, professors, artists, secretaries, nurses, long-

shoremen, and day laborers. Some had traveled thousands of miles to be-

come Freedom Riders, and others had simply moved to the front of a local

bus, confronting Jim Crow in their hometown of Jackson. Whatever their

origins, they all shared a proud heritage of being among the first Americans

to take a ride for freedom. Many, as the events and speeches of the reunion

weekend demonstrated, were still on the road to freedom, still struggling to

bring civil and human rights to the nation and the world.

Captured in a series of oral history interviews conducted by researchers

from the University of Mississippi—the same university where violent white

supremacists had tried to bar James Meredith’s admission in 1962—the indi-

vidual stories of continuing struggle and sacrifice provided a link between

past and present, and between hope and partial fulfillment. Tom Gaither,

the scout for the original CORE Freedom Ride, had gone on to become a

distinguished professor of biology and environmental activist. Claire

O’Connor, one of the Minnesota Six, had moved from practical nursing to

directing a clinic for impoverished and at-risk teenagers. The Parchman dia-

rist Carol Ruth Silver had turned a legal career into a seat on the San Fran-

cisco Board of Examiners, where she fought for all manner of progressive

causes. John Maguire, the Alabama-born associate of Martin Luther King

Jr., had divided the forty years since the Freedom Rides between Connecti-

cut and California, first as a professor of theology and later as a college presi-

dent. The founding chairman of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for

Nonviolent Social Change, he had spent his entire adult life refining and

acting upon the moral truths raised by his famed seminary roommate. Steve

Green, once Stokely Carmichael’s verbal sparring partner, had passed through

a long and successful tenure as a writer and editor for the Christian Science

Monitor to become a specialist in emergency relief for the United Nations.

Bob Singleton, the onetime leader of the UCLA Freedom Riders, had gone

from graduate school to an influential career as an economist specializing in

issues of poverty and employment discrimination.

Epilogue: Glory Bound 525

No less inspiring was Singleton’s wife, Helen, an accomplished artist

and lifelong activist who had been with him every step of the way from Cali-

fornia to Parchman and back again. Fittingly, she was accorded the honor of

accepting a commemorative plaque on behalf of all of the returning Riders.

Issued by Governor Ronnie Musgrove, once an avowed segregationist, the

plaque proclaimed November 10, 2001, as “Freedom Riders Day” in Missis-

sippi. Hailing those who had taken “the long, often perilous road to end

segregation,” the gubernatorial proclamation saluted “the heroic efforts” of

the Freedom Riders, many of whom had never expected to live long enough

to witness such a gesture by a white Mississippi politician. For those who had

returned to the benighted state of Mississippi with mixed emotions and modest

expectations, the governor’s implicit apology was perhaps the most redeem-

ing story of all.

There was, however, at least one redemptive Freedom Ride story that

went unnoticed and unrecorded in Jackson. Twelve hundred miles to the north,

in the Long Island town of Roosevelt, a long-forgotten eighty-four-year-old

woman named Irene Morgan Kirkaldy lived quietly with her daughter. Though

technically not a veteran of the Freedom Rides, she was perhaps the one indis-

pensable person in the long saga that stretched back to the summer of 1944.

The gray-haired great-grandmother had come a long way since the fateful

moment when she refused to move to the rear of a Virginia bus, but in many

respects she was the same woman who had manifested a resolute courage al-

most six decades earlier. Her life had taken her to widowhood at the young age

of thirty-two, to a second marriage and a career providing maid service and

child care to several generations of New York families, and belatedly to col-

lege. While in semi-retirement during the 1980s, she won a college scholar-

ship in a radio contest and entered St. John’s University, where she majored in

Irene Morgan Kirkaldy and several generations of her family pose with President

Bill Clinton following the Presidential Citizens’ Medal award ceremony at the

White House, January 8, 2001. (Courtesy of Sherwood Morgan)