Getting a call from Freedom Rider Rip Patton was a welcome change of pace from all the doom and gloom about the bug. If Rip can stay hopeful, so can I.
“Did you know Rev. Joseph Lowery? He passed last night. He was 98. He was quite the character.
“I just called Bernard LaFayette to let him know, right before I called you. Bernard’s going to call John (Lewis),” said Civil Rights hero and Freedom Rider Ernest Rip Patton of Nashville.
“Another one of the Freedom Riders passed last Saturday, Allen Cason. There were eight of us from Nashville. Now there are six.”
CIVIL RIGHTS HISTORY
That’s a lot of Civil Rights icons to toss around in one conversation.
Lowery along with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rev. Ralph Abernathy and others founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957. Lowery was a spell-binding orator, along the lines of King. LaFayette was involved in the Selma voting rights movement, the Nashville Student Movement and more. In May, 1961, as a Freedom Rider, LaFayette and John Lewis were on a bus that was attacked by Kluxers in Montgomery, Alabama. Lewis, a member of Congress from Georgia since 1987, was severely beaten.
In May, 1961, Patton joined the Freedom Rides, which were organized to thwart Jim Crow laws in the South where blacks were prohibited from mixing with whites in restaurants and on buses, among other places---although the Supreme Court had ruled segregation illegal.
As one of the Nashville Student Movement Freedom Riders, Patton boarded a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, on May 24, 1961, only three days after the firebombing of Montgomery's First Baptist Church. He sat next to John Lewis on this ride through the South.
After traveling to Jackson, Mississippi, Patton and others were arrested for entering a "whites only" Greyhound bus station waiting room. Patton was arrested at the lunch counter. Lewis was arrested in a whites only bathroom.
Patton and his fellow Freedom Riders were hauled off to notorious Parchman Maximum Security Prison, where he spent 62 days in jail "for their own protection," claimed local police. He was one of 14 Tennessee State University students who were expelled for taking part in the rides.
“Do you talk to Representative Lewis much?” I asked.
“I try to talk to John a couple of times a month. He turned 80. He’s got stage 4 cancer, you know,” Rip said.
A DIFFERENT SEGREGATION
While on a speaking tour in Belfast, Northern Ireland, last year, Patton encountered a different kind of segregation – Protestants vs. Catholics.
“In the city, there is a wall down the middle of the street,” he said. “Protestants on one side and Catholics on the other.
“I spoke at some integrated schools and some segregated schools. At a panel at the university, a girl said that she used to play with her cousin up until she was nine years old. But then they got separated by their parents – her family was one religion, and her cousin was the other.”
WHO WILL WATCH THE WATCHERS?
Rip was kind enough to do the opening and closing voice-over on our documentary about citizen oversight of police, Who Will Watch the Watchers? The last time I saw Rip was in November, 2018, when we screened the film in Nashville to raise awareness about the upcoming vote to establish a Community Oversight Board.
During post production of the documentary, when I showed it to someone else who appeared in the film, at about 10 seconds in he asked:
“How did you get Morgan Freeman?”
Patton has a deep, resonant voice, and is accustomed to public speaking and church choir singing. It is not hard to imagine one is hearing Morgan Freeman.
While in the recording studio, Rip shared stories about the Civil Rights movement, the Freedom Rides and more — including how his mother found out that he was in jail in Jackson, Mississippi, not in class at TSU, on May 24, 1961. The video interview is linked here and above, “Freedom Rider Rip Patton Connects Then and Now.”
WAITING OUT THE BUG
Like everyone else, Patton has been sitting out the COVID-19 shutdown.
“I go to the lake (Percy Priest in Nashville). It’s near my house. Listen to music,” he said. “Just waiting it out.
“I’ve had to cancel some tours and speaking engagements. I gave the commencement address at Stetson University last year. They wanted me back this year. They must have thought I did a good job. But, they had to cancel because of the virus.”
Stetson conferred honorary law degrees on Patton in 2010, along with the late John Seigenthaler, former publisher of The Tennessean and founding editor of USA Today. As an aide to Attorney General Robert Kennedy, Seigenthaler traveled to the South in an attempt to get Southern governors to protect Freedom Riders and enforce the laws against segregation. Seigenthaler himself was hit in the head and put in the hospital while in Montgomery in the midst of the Civil Rights movement.
“I loved that man, John Seigenthaler,” Patton said. “We traveled so much together. I still miss him today.”
While we are on personal stories — Rip brought up Seigenthaler, so here goes — the last time I saw John, I was struck by how he was concerned about a woman in prison. We were talking outside on a muggy summer night in 2010 after an “L Club” meeting in Nashville, where Seigenthaler had enthralled the audience with stories from the crossroads of history. He brought something up as we talked, somewhat out of the blue, and it seemed he was singularly worrying about this:
“We are trying to get Gaile Owens released,” John said of a woman who was on death row, although she had made a plea deal for a life sentence. “She should not still be in there.”
My take was that after all this man had done and accomplished — all his “receipts,” as they say — his compassion was still showing as he was deeply troubled about this prisoner. (Seigenthaler’s work got results as Owens was released Oct. 7, 2011, after serving 25 years at Tennessee Women’s Prison. Seigenthaler died in July, 2014.)
THREESCORE AND MORE
Rip took stock of his own Earthly tenure:
“I just had a birthday. I turned 80. Although, when people ask me how old I am, I say I’m 10,” he explained.
“The Bible says our lives last threescore and 10 years, so that’s 70. I’m 10 past 70, so I say I’m 10.”
When he is not waiting out an international pandemic, Patton is “living the life,” he said.
“Keep it young. I’m not going to be, woe is me. Stay busy,” Rip said.
“I retired in 2006,” he said. “I can do whatever I want, say yes or no to this or that.” Patton’s day job before retirement was as an auto transport driver for new car manufacturers.
“I drove one of those big things that people hate, and they think the last car is going to fall off,” he said.
It has taken a pandemic to slow down Rip Patton. Otherwise, he and the other Civil Rights icons keep in touch and keep it going.
“We’re still out there trying to make a difference.”
CHANGING THE SUBJECT
It was uplifting to hear from Rip Patton, in spite of the “death notices.” Talking about personal things and shared experiences -- as well as lofty things -- was refreshing amid the current doom and gloom. We determined to get together once all the hunkering down was over.
“Let’s go to Monell’s,” Rip said. “It’s one of those places where you’ll see 10 or 12 people to a table. And they pass the food around. They’ve got three locations.”
If Rip can stay hopeful, so can I. We all need something to look forward to, even something as (formerly) ordinary as family-style dining.
Gary Moore operates Moore Media Strategies, founded nonprofit Citizens Media Resource, makes films about social justice issues and writes about First and Fourth Amendment issues for Daily Kos.