The year I was born, 1946, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia that interstate buses and trains could no longer be segregated. The case arose two years earlier when Irene Morgan, a 27-year-old mother of two still ill from a miscarriage, bought a $5 ticket at the "Colored" window in the local grocery and boarded a crowded Greyhound bus in Gloucester, Va., for a trip to visit a doctor 165 miles away in Baltimore. She sat next to a young mother and her baby in the fourth row from the back of the bus, well within the section decreed for black people by America’s peculiar brand of apartheid, Jim Crow.
At a stop a few miles down the road, the driver ordered the two women to stand so that a white couple could take their seats. Morgan said no. She also wouldn’t let the other woman give up her seat. As she told Washington Post reporter Carol Morello more than half a century later, she had asked: "Where do you think you're going with that baby in your arms?" The driver headed into the next town and parked in front of the jail. A deputy strode onto the bus, handed Morgan an arrest warrant and asked her to come with him. When she ripped up the warrant and tossed it out the window, he grabbed her by the arm. She kicked him in the crotch and he retreated. She clawed at a second deputy and ripped his shirt as he dragged her off the bus and into the jail.
Morgan pleaded guilty to resisting arrest and was fined $100, but she refused to plead guilty to breaking the state’s segregation laws. At trial, her NAACP lawyers argued that those laws impeded interstate commerce, purposely avoiding the due process argument of the 14th Amendment, something they felt the Supreme Court was not ready to hear. Morgan was convicted and fined $10. On appeal, the Supreme Court accepted the commerce argument and struck down the Virginia statute, and by extension all such laws.
Fifteen years later, all through the South, the Morgan decision might just as well have never been written. Back-of-the-bus for black people was still the rule in the Old Confederacy and border states from Maryland to Texas.
But in the spring of 1961, armed with a new Supreme Court ruling – Boynton v. Virginia – mandating desegregated eating, restroom and other facilities in bus terminals and rail stations, and hopeful for the backing of a young President (who had said in his inaugural address that "the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans" and had campaigned on a promise of eliminating discrimination in federally funded housing projects "with one stroke of the pen"), the Congress on Racial Equality decided to initiate "Freedom Rides." The tactic, first tried unsuccessfully by CORE in 1947 after the Morgan ruling, was for a small group of black passengers to ride in the white sections of buses and white passengers to ride in the black sections. It was not just a symbolic protest against wretched laws, but a direct challenge to the white power structure, both in the segregated states where civil rights protests were met with billy clubs, fire hoses and German Shepherds, and in the complacent North where the complaints about Jim Crow – in spite of the Supreme Court’s rulings – were greeted with entreaties to ... wait a while longer.
The coordinators knew the trip would be no lark, that the Freedom Riders would be harassed, arrested and jailed. That was precisely what they anticipated would happen, a means to generate widespread publicity, moral outrage and, they hoped, federal intervention from the Kennedy Administration. Several of the Riders wrote letters to be given to their families should they be killed.
On May 4, 1961, exactly three months before Barack Obama was born, 22 people, white and black, left Washington, D.C., riding a Greyhound and a Trailways bus bound for the Deep South. The harassment and violence worsened the further they rode. In Rockhill, S.C., future Congressman John Lewis and another Freedom Rider were beaten when they tried to use a white restroom. This received extensive news coverage. As the Riders arrived in Anniston, Alabama, near Birmingham, on May 14, they were surrounded by a stone-throwing Ku Klux Klan mob shouting "Kill the niggers." The police were absent. Tires were slashed, and the bus driver sped away, stopping six miles outside town to fix the flats. In pursuit, the mob attacked the bus again and someone tossed a firebomb. In Birmingham, the Trailways bus was also attacked by a Klan-led mob that beat the Riders, paralyzing William Barbee for life.
The next day, photos of the burned bus and beaten Riders were published in newspapers across America.
New Riders from the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in Nashville arrived and continued on to Montgomery despite pleas from the White House and the Attorney General. As James Farmer, then CORE’s director recalled, "Robert Kennedy asked Dr. (Martin Luther) King to intercede, to try to get me to halt the Freedom Ride and have a cooling-off period. ... I asked Dr. King to tell Bobby Kennedy that we’d been cooling off for 350 years, and that if we cooled off any more, we’d be in a deep freeze." (Eyes on the Prize, p. 146.)
Freedom Riders went on to Montgomery, where a mob beat more of them, and to Jackson, Mississippi, where they were jailed en masse. More Riders appeared. Each of them pledged, if arrested, to stay in jail for at least 39 days before asking CORE to bail them out. Many wound up at the dreaded Parchman State Pen, where, in a supreme irony, they integrated the prison for the first time, black and white prisoners being held together in the same cell block. Eventually, 443 Freedom Riders would risk their lives, with nearly 400 being arrested.
Freedom Riders Helen Singleton and Stephen Green
On August 4, the day Barack Obama was born, some 200 Freedom Riders that CORE had bailed out were ordered to return to Mississippi for trial. Many of those ultimately were sentenced to time served. Eventually, the Supreme Court overturned all their convictions.
I was 14 that summer, and, as best the Denver Post and CBS News would allow, I avidly followed the Freedom Riders, marveling that these few hundred men and women willingly put themselves at the mercy of racists who had no qualms about killing them if that’s what it took to stop their actions. It was their courage that spurred me, three years later, to join Freedom Summer to register voters in Mississippi. By coincidence, I was paired with a tall, calm black man named Charly Biggers. He was 25, and I was 17 and scared because, four days before my companions and I had arrived in Jackson, three civil rights workers had gone missing. We all knew they were dead long before their bodies were found, on Barack Obama’s third birthday, August 4, 1964.
It was three weeks of going door-to-door trying to get very reluctant black Mississippians to brave the local authorities and register to vote before I learned that Charly Biggers was one of my heroes. He had been a Freedom Rider, had served time at Parchman. It wasn’t he who told me. When I finally asked Charly for a few details, he fibbed, "It was no big thing." But it was. Indeed, the Freedom Rides marked a turning point. While not succeeding in their immediate goal, they, together with the segregated diner sit-ins of 1960, helped kindle a new spirit far beyond the few hundred brave men and women who directly participated, a fresh we’re-not-waiting-anymore attitude that was essential to getting the legislative reforms that meant black people could not only exercise their 15th Amendment rights by voting, but also stand as candidates for public office and be elected.
The Freedom Riders didn’t end racism, nor did the legislation. Far from it. But their courage made it possible for there to be a President Obama.
Since it became obvious he would seek the Presidency, and that he might actually have a chance for the nomination in a year that could turn out to be a Democratic congressional rout, some of what Senator Obama has said has given me pause. One of these has been his take on the struggles of the 1960s. Not his understandable exasperation over how the politics and experiences of the those years in so many ways still permeate political discussion now, but rather a faint whiff of disrespect for the struggles of that era. And, more strongly, the idea that those struggles were won, so let's move on.
Move on we must. Unlike the right wing, we must not be shackled to the past. However, there is nothing disreputable about the political, cultural and social change that is epitomized in the very phrase "the ‘60s." As Obama rightly says, there is a new generation and new issues to resolve. But there is also a need to renew a few old struggles that never fully succeeded and to protect some victories - like the progressive legacy of the 1930s and the institutionalization of reproductive rights in the 1970s - that are under sharp attack, aided for decades by an ultraconservative, conglomerate media which distorts everything political and creates a false image of everything progressive, including, in particular, the transformation wrought in the ‘60s.
It is true, as Senator Obama has said, that there were "excesses" in the ‘60s. But, unlike the media caricature, those excesses were a byproduct of the struggles, not their essence.
For me, as a Popular Front Democrat, a radical democrat – small and capital "d" – politics have always been about far more than elections and legislation. Political parties are only a means to ends, one of which is implementing reforms that originate and are fought over, sometimes for decades, outside the electoral process. Politicians too are a means to ends. They aren’t messiahs. You pick the best one you can within the constraints of the two-party system and of the nominating process and cross your fingers that, if said candidate makes it to the Oval Office, progress will be achieved on most or many or at least some of the issues that matter to you, and there will be no significant back-sliding.
But you never forget for an instant that your choice is a politician. You are destined for disappointment if you do. Supporters transformed into idolators who attach all their cherished dreams of change to a politician who must inevitably make alliances and compromises will be very disappointed indeed.
I have reservations, misgivings, worries about Senator Obama. But tomorrow when I cast my ballot, I’ll vote for him. I’ll jettison my doubts and accept the key themes of his campaign: hope and change. I hope he’s willing to go far in shaping a post-Cold War, post-9/11 foreign policy that tosses aside the pernicious myth of American exceptionalism and overcomes the denial that America has an empire, which is not a good thing for the world, or America. I hope to see him go far in separating himself from the corporate forces that influence (and frequently direct) government policy at home and abroad. I hope the changes he initiates for dealing with global warming and health care and prison reform will be a match for his spell-binding oratory. I hope he will avoid falling prey to the myth that race in America has been transcended and that he will renew the fight against racism in its many guises. I hope that he will let no day pass in which he does not seek ways to do something about what John Edwards so rightly labeled the two Americas. I hope he will be braver as a President on gay rights than he has been as a candidate.
Of course, I know that, if elected, he is unlikely to go as far as I would like in any of these arenas. – just as no President will ever do.
Nonetheless, as wu ming wrote Sunday in a Diary that said so much so well:
...the very campaign that [Obama] is running is changing our political reality, right under our feet. I have seen so many people that I know be moved by his words, this campaign. You see it in the tens of thousands of people showing up to his speeches. You can see it in the millions of newly registered voters and the unexpectedly high youth turnouts in the primaries so far. We are at a watershed in American politics, as a younger, more liberal, more diverse generation starts to move into the electorate, and Obama is catching the edge of that wave, and playing to it. As we have seen in South Carolina, where Obama outpolled several Republican candidates put together, the very electoral math in this country could change as a result of the energy he's tapping into and nurturing. Just as how a lot of the laudable changes of the 1960s were spearheaded by people inspired by Kennedy but doing the work at the grassroots (often, ironically enough, with little help or occasional resistance from the not-as-liberal-as-portrayed Kennedy), so too I suspect that if Obama is the Democratic nominee the social movement he's encouraging may well transform this country, quite regardless of what bills he ultimately signs into law.
You see, it is the congregation, not the preacher, where the real potential for change lies.
Indeed. If Obama wins come November, it will be up to that grassroots, that congregation, not only to hold his feet to the fire, but also, and more importantly, to press forward the extra-electoral politics which the Freedom Riders employed to bring real hope and real change to America nearly half a century ago.
As Frederick Douglass once said, "If there is no struggle, there is no progress."