A tribute to anti-racist Freedom Rides

Firebombing of Freedom Ride bus, May 14, 1961, Anniston, Ala.

May 4 was the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Freedom Rides, a major civil rights campaign that legally broke the back of racial segregation in interstate public travel in the United States. “Freedom Riders,” a powerful documentary directed by Stanley Nelson, aired on PBS on May 16 and sparked much discussion on both the historical significance of the Civil Rights movement as well as the current status of African Americans today.

The documentary featured interviews and archival news footage of the period in 1961 when anyone, Black or white, challenging segregation in the South risked imprisonment, torture and even death. During the course of the lunch counter sit-ins the previous year in 1960, a broad-based student movement was formed and organized by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

The Freedom Rides were started by the Congress of Racial Equality, a nonviolent, civil rights organization founded in 1942. On May 14, 1961, a Freedom Ride Greyhound bus was firebombed in Anniston, Ala. The Freedom Riders were then savagely attacked with lead pipes and baseball bats by a racist white mob.

Resisting pressure from the Kennedy administration to abandon the Freedom Rides, SNCC activists based in Nashville, Tenn., under the leadership of Diane Nash, announced that it was essential that the Freedom Rides continue. The documentary exposes the fact that President John Kennedy and his brother, then U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy, were more interested in protecting the image of the U.S. — which appeared increasingly racist — than in supporting the Civil Rights movement, including the Freedom Rides.

Student activist Lucretia Collins summed up the sentiments within SNCC when she said, “In Nashville, we had been informed that CORE was going to have Freedom Rides that could carry people all over the South, and their purpose was to test the facilities at the bus stations in the major cities. Later we heard that a busload of the Freedom Riders had been burned on Mother’s Day in Anniston, Ala., and that another bus had been attacked by people in Birmingham.” (“The Making of Black Revolutionaries,” James Forman, 1972)

Collins went on to stress that “CORE was discontinuing the Freedom Rides, people said. We felt that it had to continue even if we had to do it ourselves. We knew we were subject to being killed. This did not matter to us. There was so much at stake, we could not allow segregationists to stop us. We had to continue that Freedom Ride even if we were killed in the process.”

After the continuation of the Freedom Rides by SNCC and their supporters, the federal government was forced to intervene by pressuring the Interstate Commerce Commission to repeal the segregation laws that regulated interstate public transportation. This was only done after hundreds of activists volunteered to be imprisoned on false charges in Parchman Correctional Facility in Mississippi, one of the most notorious prisons in the South. Although many were beaten and tortured in Parchman, racist repression only fueled this heroic mass, anti-racist movement.

Changing the course of history

The Freedom Rides, as the sit-ins had done the year before, provided greater momentum for the Civil Rights movement. Increased mass mobilizations took place throughout the South beginning in Albany, Ga., in 1962, when an anti-segregation campaign brought out thousands for mass protests and arrests.

In 1963, the Civil Rights movement would advance even further with mass mobilizations in Birmingham involving thousands of students. These demonstrations against segregation would spread throughout the South as well as the North, to cities such as Somerville, Tenn., and Chicago.

These demonstrations during the spring and summer of 1963 led to the first massive protests of the era, in Detroit on June 23 and later the historic March on Washington, D.C., of 250,000 on August 28. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was then passed outlawing racial discrimination inside the U.S.

After the efforts of the Freedom Summer of 1964 in Mississippi and other areas and the voting rights campaign in Selma during early 1965, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed ostensibly guaranteeing universal suffrage. In 1966, the movement would become more militant when SNCC came out in opposition to the draft and the Vietnam War as well as raising the slogan of Black Power during the “March Against Fear” from Memphis, Tenn., to Jackson, Miss., in June of that year.

Just as it took courage and creativity to break down legalized segregation in the U.S., it will take greater efforts to defeat the ruling class’s challenges placed before the people in the current period. Consequently, a broad alliance of the workers and oppressed must come together to take on the austerity measures and repression that are the latest mechanisms designed to further the exploitation and oppression of the majority of people in the U.S.

Go to www.pbs.org to view or for more information about the documentary.