They had a dream: the Freedom Riders remembered - history of civil rights movement

On a day late in July last year a group of us, nearing the end of a sort of pilgrimage, visited the grave of a heroic woman, one of the people we had come to honor. It was a marble monument in a grassy field opposite a little church in Ruleville, Mississippi; it was engraved with her name - Fannie Lou Hamer - the dates of her birth and death, and a phrase she had made famous: "I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired."

As we stood about taking pictures, a young black man crossed the street to join us. He was (we learned) a college student majoring in broadcast journalism. Seeing our racially mixed group with video cameras and microphones, he guessed, wrongly, that we were some sort of news crew. One of our number, Bill Harbour, set out to put him straight. "You've heard of the Freedom Rides, haven't you?" The young man said, "No."

Harbour was thunderstruck. The monument we stood before, across the street from the young man's home, honored a sharecropper who became a legend in her own time as a fearless civil rights organizer; by challenging the whites-only state delegation to the 1964 Democratic national convention, she permanently changed the shape of U.S. politics. Ten miles down the road was the state penitentiary at Parchman, where Harbour and others of the original Freedom Riders had spent many long weeks as punishment for defying the state's harsh segregation laws. The young man didn't know it, but what Hamer, Harbour, and the scores and hundreds of others we were honoring on our pilgrimage had done thirty years earlier had a lot to do with his own status and prospects.

It was to renew our own memories that my wife Susan and I, supporters of but not participants in the original Freedom Rides, joined some hundred others who left Nashville on July 15, 1991, riding on two buses, to retrace the route of those earlier dreamers. We came from diverse backgrounds and scattered places around the nation. About a quarter of us were white. Most of our companions were not even born when those earlier riders faced angry mobs, hostile police, and biased judges. Some were as young as nine and ten, others in their teens and early twenties. A few - Harbour, Bernard Lafayette, Rip Patton - were veterans of the Rides.

Thirty years earlier - May 14, 1961, Mother's Day - a Greyhound bus carrying the first of the Freedom Riders was attacked by an armed mob at the terminal in Anniston, Alabama. The mob slashed the tires and chased the bus a few miles down the highway toward Birmingham, until the flattening tires forced the driver to pull off the road in front of Forsyth's country store. Windows are smashed, a firebomb tossed inside, and the bus went up in flames; as the riders tumbled out they were beaten by the waiting mob.

But, from the same incident, a different memory. Against the background of violence and hatred, a twelve-year-old white girl - seeing the victims of the mob, some wounded, all thirsty - carried drinking water from her nearby home to relieve their distress.It was an act of simple kindness that earned her the scorn of her peers all during her adolescent years. At eighteen she left Anniston for college, and never returned. But later in our tour, at a celebration of the Rides held at Tougaloo University in Jackson, Mississippi, the story of her courage was told to a large audience - and Janie Forsyth Miller was there. Hank Thomas, one of the riders on that ravaged bus, now an Atlanta businessman, introduced her as "the angel of Anniston." There was hardly a dry eye in the house as he recalled how the twelve-year-old Janie and the nineteen-year-old Hank had met beside a burning bus that afternoon in front of her parents' country store.

The incident of Anniston occurred during the first of the Freedom Rides, sponsored by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and comprising thirteen riders, seven black and six white. It sought to test enforcement of various Supreme Court decisions outlawing segregation on buses and in terminals serving interstate travelers.

Following the violence in Anniston and later mob action in Birmingham, and under pressure from the U.S. Department of Justice, CORE director James Farmer suspended the Rides. But Nashville students, members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), were determined that violence would not halt the movement. With Farmer's approval, they solemnly took up the Rides at Birmingham. At the bus terminal in Montgomery they met with still greater violence. City police stayed back while a large mob savagely beat the riders. Among the unconscious bodies on the parking lot and in the street was that of John Siegenthaler of the Justice Department, struck down with a lead pipe while he was trying to rescue two young women from the mob. He lay in the street for half-an-hour before coming to consciousness.

A riot the next evening at First Baptist Church, where the riders had taken refuge, led to the intervention of federal marshals. The subsequent declaration of martial law finally restored order and allowed the group to leave Montgomery under National Guard escort, bound, they thought, for their final destination, New Orleans. In the event, they went no further than Jackson, Mississippi, where the forces of law and order herded them off the bus, through the terminal, and into waiting police vans. After a mostly ceremonial court appearance before a judge with his back turned, they were found guilty of disorderly conduct and disturbing the peace and in short order were sentenced to sixty-day terms in the maximum security prison at Parchman.

Through the remainder of that historic summer, hundreds of people, mostly young college students, came to Jackson from all over America, protesting bus segregation in particular and racial injustice in general. They moved as a flowing river of protest through the bus station, the city courts, Parchman prison, and, with intense new commitment, back into a growing civil rights movement. By fall of 1961, the Freedom Riders had dramatically infused the movement with a tremendous burst of new energy and resolve.

Our own trip, commemorating not just the Freedom Rides but other seminal events of the period, encountered no violent mobs but many symbols of change, at least on the surface. The only crowds awaiting us were there to celebrate our coming. At Birmingham City Hall, we were welcomed into the city council chambers with an official proclamation by black Mayor Richard Arrington. In Kelly Ingram Park, where Police Chief "Bull" Connor turned powerful fire hoses on demonstrators and set loose police dogs to attack them, all was peaceful as we planted a tree in memory of the four young girls who died just across the street when the 16th Street Baptist Church was dynamited.

So also in Montgomery, where we saw a new Civil Rights memorial, a highway named for M.L. King, Jr., and a street named for Rosa L. Parks, the courageous seamstress who launched a political avalanche when she refused an order to give up her seat on a city bus. In Selma, Alabama, local police held back traffic as we walked across the famous Edmund Pettus Bridge, where state troopers and country sheriffs attacked marchers as they attempted to set off on a march to Montgomery. In Jackson, Mississippi, we and hundreds of others were addressed by John Lewis, one of the thirteen original riders, now a member of Congress. Lewis later joined some in our group who planted a tree honoring the martyred Medgar Evers; the spot where we dug the hole is at the intersection of M.L. King, Jr. Avenue and Medgar Evers Boulevard.

There were other symbols of change. One of the most impressive was the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, built around a restored Lorraine Motel, the scene of Dr. King's assassination. The museum presents major events of the movement in grand scale; a Montgomery city bus with a life-size statue of a resolute Rosa Parks; a lunch counter with students, black and white, "sitting in" to protest segregation; a charred Greyhound bus looking remarkably like the burned-out shell sitting outside Anniston that day.

But, to remind us that hatred lives on, there were counter-symbols as well. Near Selma, for example, we saw a new memorial marker for a march volunteer, Viola Gregg Liuzzo, shot and killed in her car by Klansmen after a high-speed chase along a still-lonely stretch of highway on the final night of the Selma-Montgomery march. An ugly racist message was spray-painted at its base. In a small graveyard outside Marion, Alabama, stands a large stone monument marking the grave of Jimmy Lee Jackson, shot in the stomach in the restaurant where he and other civil rights demonstrators had fled from a raging mob that included county and state police. We were shown pock marks where rifle shots had been fired at the gravestone.

Not that symbols were needed; even as we visited the sites of the trials and triumphs of '61, any of us with eyes to see could cite massive evidence for what John Lewis said in Jackson, and John Siegenthaler had told us earlier in Montgomery: though there was plenty to celebrate, the nation is a long way from achieving justice.

All along the way, too, touring monuments, museums, gravestones, we were reminded what a great price was paid for the real but partial victories that were won. A few blocks from where we planted a tree honoring Medgar Evers, we stood in the driveway of his old home, at the spot where he had fallen from an assassin's bullet in 1963, and some of us felt despair. So also when we saw the marble monument outside the Mt. Zion United Methodist Church in Philadelphia, Mississippi, honoring Michael Scwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman, and the state historical marker nearby noting the "Freedom Summer Murders." And again during the celebration at Tougaloo when a letter was read from ninety-two-year-old Walter Bergman, who suffered a stroke as the result of his beating at Anniston that May and has been bound to a wheel chair for thirty years.

The incident at Ruleville with which I began took place because of a side tour initiated by three veterans of Parchman Prison, Bill Harbour, Bernard Lafayette, and Rip Patton. With a handful of others, they broke off from the main body and returned to Parchman Prison by car, there to stand across the highway from the main gate and recall the anxiety and fear they had felt on first arriving there, the isolation they had experienced within, the singing that had bolstered their spirits. Bill Harbour remembered not stepping on soil or grass, only on concrete, from the time he was dumped out of the truck till his release and return to Jackson weeks later. For the three of them, and vicariously for the rest of us, coming back after thirty years was an intense experience, and one that rendered still more poignant that later moment in Ruleville when the young journalism student confessed to Harbour that he had never heard of the Freedom Rides.

Remembrance of things past, and still present, was what our pilgrimage was all about. Of the events that shaped my generation and the ones that follow, there are few more worth remembering than the Freedom Rides, and the larger movement of which they were part. At tour's end back in Nashville, when all of us were briefly reunited, there were tearful embraces, emotional farewells, and pledges to remember one another and our shared experience for the rest of our lives. For my part I will remember the monuments to heroes, the renamed streets and boulevards, the ugly epithet painted on Viola Liuzzo's monument, the chunks of marble blasted out of Jimmy Lee Jackson's gravestone, the moment in Tougaloo when James Farmer, that still inspirational old general, now blind, received special recognition from us all. And I will remember an image of something I never saw, a mental picture of a twelve-year-old girl bringing water through chaos to people in need.

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