I turned 15 in the middle of the Freedom Rides. Fifty years ago.
I have just finished watching the documentary on PBS.
Images that burned into my memory and my soul.
Jim Zweig in his hospital bed, expressing his willingness to die for a righteous cause. But not to strike back in violence or anger.
Listening to John Siegenthaler, a representative of the US Government, himself beaten unconscious.
The quiet courage of Diane Nash - telling Siegenthaler that they had written their last wills and testaments the night before.
The obtuseness of John Patterson.
The vileness of Bull Connor and Ross Barnett
The quiet honesty of Floyd Mann telling Governor Patterson that if he were given the order he could protect the Freedom Riders.
I told my students about this. I could not require them to watch - we are in the midst of state tests. I suggested if they could not that they should DVR it and watch it when they could.
My thoughts?
The sit-ins of 1960 were begun by young people in Greensboro.
The continuation of the 1961 Freedom Riders were by young people, first from Nashville, and then from all over the nation.
Young people who learned how not to be paralyzed by fear.
Young people who taught their elders about courage and determination.
Later it would be young people who led the nation in turning against the miasma of Vietnam.
I am 50 years past the adolescent who first encountered racism in Miami when he was ten. I am almost 48 years from the beginning of my own activities, first in protesting at a White Castle in the Bronx, then coming with the Congress of Racial Equality to Washington in August.
James Farmer was the person who started those '61 Freedom Rides. In '63 I would meet him when he came to our White Castle to encourage us. He would not join us in DC because he was locked up in Placquemines Parish in Louisiana, and refused to pay a fine to get out.
Willingness to go to jail rather than pay a fine - that was also part of the Freedom Riders. Learning, as so many figures who influenced history, from their time of being incarcerated.
When I was younger I wondered if I could have the courage I saw in those who participated in some of the more dangerous actions of the Civil Rights Movement. I know that in '64 I wanted to go to Mississippi, but my father said if I did he would not continue to pay for my college. That came back to me listening to Bernard Lafayette and John Lewis, who risked their education to participate - as did many of the students, from American Baptist Seminary as they were, from Fisk as was Diane Nash.
Then we had a federal government and a President that were somewhat reluctant to act, to enforce what should have been clear directives from the US Supreme Court. Then we had Southern governors and mayors who were willing to continue to enforce laws that had been declared unconstitutional. Then we had a nation where many questioned whether the Negroes might be too impatient. King answered that in April of 1963, while he himself was incarcerated. Perhaps we should make his Letter from Birmingham Jail mandatory reading in a time when again we here voices that either disparage those seeking rights too long denied or tell them to be patient - our gay brothers and sisters confront that constantly with DADT and DOMA. Perhaps we need again to offer these words from King:
We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was "well timed" in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never." We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied."
King told us something else we should remember, that it can never merely be a questions of means, but also must be one of ends. Both must be moral, as he wrote in his letter:
I have tried to make clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.
I am saddened as i write these words. I realize that somehow I have not done as good a job as I should have of connecting my young people with this part of our history, of letting them know that for whatever just cause they are willing to commit themselves it can be of more importance than the grades on their report cards or the popularity they may receive from friends.
How many Americans can identify the names James Zweig, or Diane Nash, or Bernard Lafayette, or James Reeb? If you do not know the last name, he was a white minister from Boston murdered in 1965, beaten severely in Selma, dying in a hospital in Birmingham.
There was a time in my lifetime when the willingness of people to take the physical blows and the hatred and venom without striking back was able to sear the conscience of this nation, and to make major changes.
Perhaps that is no longer possible. Perhaps as a people we have become too inured to different kinds of protest. Perhaps we are too focused on other things. After all, in the early 60s many of our families were experiencing the benefits of the post-war economic boom. Now many fear for their own economic futures, and when one is fearful that fear can be manipulated by others in a way that prevents us from opening our hearts and our souls, as hearts and souls and minds were opened by the willingness of many, often young, to put life and limb and future at risk in a quiet determination to change what was wrong.
This evening I watched a documentary. It reminded my of my own past and the past of this nation. In a sense it helped me remember in part why I became a teacher.
And now?
Memory is not enough.
I have to wrestle with my own conscience, consider my own willingness to take risks. The words I write here and elsewhere are a part of my role as a teacher, and as a general - how shall I say it? - irritant to the comfortable. After all, should we not afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted? And is not comforting after the fact, as important as it is, insufficient when compared to addressing and hopefully removing the cause of the affliction and suffering?
I suspect I will not easily sleep tonight.
I know that the words I write now are but the start of a process.
Memory is important. Revisiting things that matter remind me that my obligations remain. Being confronted by what used to challenge me is to remember that I am not yet dead, and so long as I am not, I have not only obligations, but privileges. My greatest privilege is to be able to speak and act on behalf of a greater good.
The words and the music - the sounds of the time - they still resonate. I can hear them in my mind, my mouth can shape itself and my throat give voice, and I am again the young man who hoped to make a difference.
I am no longer young.
Yet no matter how old we may be, we can still make a difference.
Perhaps now it will be in a manner not conceived of 5 decades past.
But it will be connected.
I watched a film.
I remembered.
I relived.
And now?
I do not yet have the words to answer that question, only an as yet not totally formed understanding of how I go forward.
This day comes to a close. Soon it will be May 17, and I will have only 6 days until my 65th birthday.
I am very much in the present, even as I simultaneously look back and then consider what it means as i go forward.
May we never lose our hope.
May we never reach the point where we stop trying to make a difference.
May I be willing not only to die, but to be shamed or financially ruined on behalf of something truly important.
Let me not be bound by fear.
Rather, let me be invited to go on a real Freedom Ride, where one is liberated to follow one's conscience to its logical conclusion.
Peace.