As a kid in southwest Georgia, I encountered some of these kinds of signs everywhere. And while the lighter-skinned members of my family could have passed white in a larger community, everybody knew us in our small town, and therefore, as "red niggers," we were obliged to enter back entryways, ride in the back of buses and drink from the "colored" fountain in front of one of the town's two hotels, neither of which allowed people of color to rent rooms. We lived, literally, on the wrong side of the tracks, a place known by folks on the other side, the white side, as "Coontown" and “N*****town.”
Rand Paul, who would dearly love to be the next Senator from Kentucky and claims that the "loony left" is out to get him, says that that segregated world of 45 years ago is one which should be allowed in America even though he personally opposes discrimination. In that world, the ideal world, according to Paul's political philosophy, ophthalmologists would be able to reject black or Latino or Irish patients. Private hospitals could refuse to treat women. They and motels, restaurants and cab companies could hang up signs saying, "No Japs or Jews Allowed." Developers and real estate agents and private homeowners could refuse to sell to people based on their skin color. All crucial for maintaining the sanctity of property rights, y'know. The year I was born, 1946, Thurgood Marshall, then chief counsel for the NAACP, stood before the U.S. Supreme Court justices and argued the case of Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia.
The Court would soon rule 7-1 that interstate buses and trains could no longer be segregated. The case had arisen two years earlier when Irene Morgan, a 27-year-old mother recovering from a miscarriage, bought a $5 ticket at the “Colored” window in the local grocery in Gloucester, Va., and boarded a crowded Greyhound bus to visit her mother and her family doctor 165 miles away in Baltimore. She sat next to another young mother and her baby in the fourth row from the back of the bus, well within the section decreed for people of their racial background by America’s brand of apartheid, Jim Crow. Humiliating, legally enforced everyday life throughout the South, with echoes of the same policies in other states.
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 tender parts 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 (in photo) pleaded guilty to resisting arrest. She was fined $100 but refused to plead guilty to breaking the state’s Jim Crow laws. At trial, her NAACP lawyers argued that those laws impeded interstate commerce and, as such, violated the Constitution. They intentionally avoided raising the due process argument under 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-clause argument and struck down the Virginia statute, and by extension all such laws. As a consequence of this victory, in April 1947, Bayard Rustin and George Houser, black and white civil rights activists respectively, both of them co-founders of the Congress of Racial Equality in 1942, organized the Journey for Reconciliation with 14 others to test the Morgan ruling. They would ride as interracial pairs on interstate buses throughout the South. Before embarking, Rustin and Houser wrote a song to promote their action:
You don't have to ride Jim Crow! You don't have to ride Jim Crow, On June the Third the high court said When you ride interstate, Jim Crow is dead, You don't have to ride Jim Crow... Go quiet-like if you face arrest, NAACP will make a test, You don't have to ride Jim Crow!
That turned out to be false. They soon encountered violence, and four of the 16, including Rustin, wound up sentenced to 30 days on North Carolina chain gangs. Fourteen 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 Missouri. A couple of subsequent "reconciliation" rides were proposed in the '50s, but never came to fruition. In the spring of 1961, however, fueled by a new Supreme Court ruling – Boynton v. Virginia – mandating desegregated eating, restroom and other facilities in bus terminals and rail stations, energized by young African Americans protesting at lunch counters the previous year, 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”) - CORE initiated the “Freedom Rides.” As in '47, the tactic was for a small group of black passengers to ride in the white sections of buses and allied white passengers to ride in the black sections. It was not just a symbolic protest against judicially overturned 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, but also in the complacent North where the complaints about Jim Crow – in spite of the Supreme Court’s rulings – were greeted with entreaties a century after the Civil War had begun to wait a while longer. Among those vigorously urging the Freedom Riders not to take their action was that young President and his Attorney General brother.
On May 4, 1961, 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, Ala., 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 Freedom Riders, paralyzing William Barbee for life.
The next day, photos of the burned bus and beaten Freedom 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, Miss., 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. That's the world Ron Paul says should still be allowed in America, the world that would be allowed if he'd had his way when the Civil Rights Act was passed. In that world, private bus companies should be able to tell blacks or Indians or whoever to ride in the back. Private developers should have the right to build whites-only communities. Motels should be able to keep out "coloreds." No law should prevent a restaurant from making Latinos eat at tables in the alley behind the kitchen. And if people object and refuse to accept such behavior, the police should be empowered to uphold the companies' property rights and arrest the objectors. To jail them or put them on chain gangs. Not, omigod definitely not, because Rand Paul personally supports the racism and sexism, heterosexism and other isms that thrive in that unfettered "free market" fantasyland that he and his pals prescribe as the best of all worlds. It's just that fair housing laws and public accommodations laws and equal-hiring laws are unnecessary in that market-mediated utopia because economics will penalize businesses that refuse to serve people of a certain color or sex or national origin or sexual orientation or disability. Just give it a dozen or so decades, and all that private discrimination will just fade away because even racists need the dough. And this postmodernist Confederate dares call others "loony"? Sorry, Mr. Paul, when you support racist conduct and laws allowing and enforcing racist conduct, you are a racist. === [Elements of this diary appeared on Feb. 4, 2008.]
