[Marxism] Freedom Riders

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times Book Review, March 19, 2006
'Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice,' by Raymond 
Arsenault
Bound for Glory
Review by ERIC FONER

The recent death of Rosa Parks refocused national attention on one of the 
most beloved figures of the civil rights movement. But without the heroism 
of thousands of unsung grass-roots activists, the movement would never have 
accomplished what it did. In "Freedom Riders," Raymond Arsenault, a 
professor of history at the University of South Florida, rescues from 
obscurity the men and women who, at great personal risk, rode public buses 
into the South in order to challenge segregation in interstate travel. 
Drawing on personal papers, F.B.I. files and interviews with more than 200 
participants in the rides, Arsenault brings vividly to life a defining 
moment in modern American history.

"Freedom Riders" begins not on May 4, 1961, when 13 black and white 
volunteers boarded two buses in Washington bound for New Orleans, but 17 
years earlier, when Irene Morgan, in an act of defiance that anticipated 
Rosa Parks's, refused to give up her seat on a bus traveling from Virginia 
to Maryland. Convicted of violating local segregation laws, she appealed 
all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in 1946 that segregated 
seating on interstate buses violated the Constitution.

In 1947, the Congress of Racial Equality, or CORE, an obscure civil rights 
group founded a few years earlier by Christian pacifists, organized the 
Journey of Reconciliation to test compliance. The trip through the upper 
South went off peacefully, but failed to dent the edifice of segregation. 
As Arsenault notes, there had been Reconstruction-era battles over 
integrating streetcars and railroad carriages, and late-19th-century 
lawsuits brought by black travelers demanding equal treatment. The Freedom 
Rides of 1961, also organized by CORE, represented the latest front in a 
battle that had begun decades before.

In most parts of the world, a bus journey would hardly have attracted 
attention. In the Jim Crow South of 1961, the Freedom Riders encountered 
shocking violence that deeply embarrassed the Kennedy administration. 
Outside Anniston, Ala., a mob set one of the buses on fire. The riders were 
lucky to escape with their lives. In Birmingham, police officers gave Klan 
members 15 minutes to assault the riders at the bus station before 
intervening. The result was what Arsenault calls "one of the bloodiest 
afternoons in Birmingham's history."

Further violence followed another group of riders in Montgomery, where John 
Seigenthaler, the president's personal representative, suffered a fractured 
skull and several broken ribs. It took a small army of policemen and 
National Guard troops to escort the bus from Montgomery to Jackson, Miss., 
where the Freedom Riders were promptly arrested for breach of the peace and 
attempting to incite a riot. Some spent time at the infamous Parchman Farm, 
a prison plantation the historian David Oshinsky called "synonymous . . . 
with brutality."

Arsenault relates the story of the first Freedom Ride and the more than 60 
that followed in dramatic, often moving detail. He reminds us of the 
personal courage and organizational ability of forgotten catalysts of the 
movement like Diane Nash, a black student leader in Nashville who helped to 
mobilize new groups of Freedom Riders upon hearing of the first beatings.

As its title suggests, the book focuses above all on the riders themselves. 
Future scholars will be grateful for the appendix, which provides brief 
biographical information on more than 400 of them. Unfortunately, apart 
from a table showing that they were overwhelmingly young (three-quarters 
were under 30), mostly male and almost equally divided between black and 
white, this information remains unanalyzed. "Diversity," Arsenault writes, 
"was the hallmark of the Freedom Rides." The first group illustrates his 
point ? it included a Wall Street stockbroker, a veteran unionist from 
Michigan, a folk singer from New York, a former Navy captain and a 
Nashville theology student (John Lewis, now a member of Congress). But 
"diversity" is a description, not an interpretation. One wishes for a more 
detailed account of the riders' political backgrounds, organizational 
connections and later experiences.

As Arsenault makes clear, the Freedom Rides revealed the pathology of the 
South. This was a society not simply of violent mobs but of judges who 
flagrantly disregarded the Constitution, police officers who conspired with 
criminals and doctors who refused to treat the injured. Southern newspapers 
almost universally condemned the riders as "hate mongers" and outside 
agitators (even though about half had been born and raised in the South). 
Not that the national press acquitted itself much better. The New York 
Times reporter Claude Sitton produced some of the best coverage in the 
country. But the paper's editorials, while defending the right to travel, 
called on the riders to halt their "courageous . . . but nonetheless 
provocative action."

Most remarkable was the supine response of the Kennedy administration. 
Before assuming the presidency, John F. Kennedy had evinced little interest 
in civil rights. Once in the White House, he viewed the Freedom Rides as an 
unwelcome distraction from his main concern ? the cold war. Kennedy's first 
impulse was to try to keep details of the violence out of the press. In the 
midst of the crisis, he delivered a special address to Congress. Remembered 
today for its pledge to put a man on the moon, it dealt primarily with 
international affairs, identifying the "southern half of the globe" as "the 
great battleground for the expansion of freedom today." It made no mention 
of the battle for freedom then being fought in the southern United States.

The attorney general, Robert F. Kennedy, comes off rather better. Initially 
as impatient with the riders as his brother, Robert Kennedy became 
emotionally committed to their cause. It was he who petitioned the 
Interstate Commerce Commission to ban segregation in interstate bus travel. 
The result was an order that brought the Freedom Rides to a triumphant end.

Overall, the administration's response calls into question a staple of 
recent writing on the civil rights movement ? that the cold war created a 
favorable context for racial change. Certainly, the photographs that 
flashed across the world embarrassed the White House. But the conflict with 
the Soviets also inspired deep distrust of any movement that included 
critics of American foreign policy. After a telephone conversation in which 
he urged Martin Luther King Jr. to restrain the riders, Robert Kennedy 
remarked to an aide, "I wonder whether they have the best interest of their 
country at heart."

The cold war did not produce a significant change in federal policy. That, 
as both the Freedom Riders and King knew, required a social movement. 
Indeed, of the civil rights leaders touched on in this book, King comes 
across as the most supportive of the young activists. We sometimes forget 
how young King himself was at this time. Only 32 in 1961, he was closer in 
age to the riders than to the older civil rights establishment. In his 
conversation with Robert Kennedy, King refused to heed an appeal for 
moderation: "I am different from my father. I feel the need of being free 
now." This impatience for freedom, acted out by the courageous young 
Freedom Riders, helped propel a reluctant America at least part of the way 
down the road to racial justice.

Eric Foner, the DeWitt Clinton professor of history at Columbia University, 
is the author, most recently, of "Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation 
and Reconstruction."


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