Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice (Pivotal Moments in American History) - Hardcover

Arsenault, Raymond

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0195136748 ISBN 13: 9780195136746

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2006

Synopsis

Here is the definitive account of a dramatic and indeed pivotal moment in American history, a critical episode that transformed the civil rights movement in the early 1960s.
Raymond Arsenault offers a meticulously researched and grippingly written account of the Freedom Rides, one of the most compelling chapters in the history of civil rights. Arsenault recounts how in 1961, emboldened by federal rulings that declared segregated transit unconstitutional, a group of volunteers--blacks and whites--traveled together from Washington DC through the Deep South, defying Jim Crow laws in buses and terminals, putting their bodies and their lives on the line for racial justice. The book paints a harrowing account of the outpouring of hatred and violence that greeted the Freedom Riders in Alabama and Mississippi. One bus was disabled by Ku Klux Klansmen, then firebombed. In Birmingham and Montgomery, mobs of white supremacists swarmed the bus stations and battered the riders with fists and clubs while local police refused to intervene. The mayhem in Montgomery was captured by news photographers, shocking the nation, and sparking a crisis in the Kennedy administration, which after some hesitation and much public outcry, came to the aid of the Freedom Riders. Arsenault brings the key actors in this historical drama vividly to life, with colorful portraits of the Kennedys, Jim Farmer, John Lewis, Diane Nash, Fred Shuttlesworth, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Their courage, their fears, and the agonizing choices made by all these individuals run through the story like an electric current.
The saga of the Freedom Rides is an improbable, almost unbelievable story. In the course of six months, some four hundred and fifty Riders expanded the realm of the possible in American politics, redefining the limits of dissent and setting the stage in the years to come for the 1963 Birmingham demonstrations, Freedom Summer and the Selma-to-Montgomery March. With characters and plot lines rivaling those of the most imaginative fiction, this is a tale of heroic sacrifice and unexpected triumph.

About this title

About the Author

Raymond Arsenault is the John Hope Franklin Professor of Southern History and co-director of the Florida Studies Program at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg. A graduate of Princeton and Brandeis, he is the author of two prize-winning books and numerous articles on race, civil rights, and regional culture.

Reviews

The relationship between blacks and whites in North America had been a profound moral problem for at least a century before the United States itself was established. Slavery and general denigration of the humanity of blacks were deeply embedded in the culture by the time Gen. Washington assumed command of the Continental Army at Cambridge, Mass., in the late spring of 1775 and immediately issued an order to stop recruiting blacks. The problem was so thoroughly woven into the fabric of the nation that major advances in the fair treatment of blacks have occurred only once a century. The first period came in the 1780s and '90s, when northerners began applying revolutionary principle to daily life by abolishing slavery state by state. The second, of course, was the Civil War and Reconstruction period when the nation adopted the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments and Congress enacted strong civil rights legislation. The third period was the modern civil rights movement of the mid-20th century, and Raymond Arsenault's Freedom Riders focuses on one of its most pivotal struggles.

The 18th- and 19th-century reform movements significantly improved the lives of many blacks and also wrought changes in the hearts of many white Americans. However, the pervasive sludge of racism and racial privilege was too ingrained for reformers to be able to eliminate or even substantially curtail the profound and often brutal unfairness heaped on black citizens. Many blacks born in the first third of the 20th century concluded that segregation, then the most widespread and humiliating aspect of the racism that dogged their days, would not be ended in their lifetimes or even in their century.

But formal segregation was put to death by the civil rights movement between 1947 and 1972. There was no cataclysm on our soil comparable to the Revolution or the Civil War to spark the profound changes that occurred in the 1960s. What, then, set it off? In his dramatic and exhaustive account of the Freedom Riders, Arsenault makes a persuasive case that the idealism, faith, ingenuity and incredible courage of a relatively small group of Americans -- both white and black -- lit a fuse in 1961 that drew a reluctant federal government into the struggle -- and also enlarged, energized and solidified (more or less) the hitherto fragmented civil rights movement.

During the spring and summer of that year, the Freedom Riders set out to challenge segregation in interstate transport by taking more than 60 bus rides through the American South. The stage was set for their campaign by the idealism and democratizing impulses generated by World War II, the emergence of the black and brown former colonies as nations on the world stage and the dramatic and enormously successful arrival of Jackie Robinson at first base in a Brooklyn Dodgers uniform in 1947. Their effort was also bolstered by the Supreme Court ruling against public school segregation in 1954, the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, and in the late '50s, a generally uncoordinated sprinkling of anti-segregation sit-ins across the South largely by students at black colleges and universities, particularly those conducted in Nashville by students at Tennessee State University.

But the 1961 campaign did not spring full-blown from the the youthful activists involved, including Diane Nash, John Lewis, Ruby Doris Smith, Jim Zwerg and Bernard Lafayette, or even their inspired mentor in Gandhian resistance, the Rev. James Lawson. The roots of these rides extended from an earlier campaign conducted by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and its ally, the Fellowship of Reconciliation. Those groups were spurred by a 1946 case, Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia, brought by the NAACP, in which the Supreme Court ruled that segregation in interstate travel was unconstitutional and -- in the same year -- by the brutal blinding by nightstick in Batesburg, S.C., of Isaac Woodard, a black World War II veteran, over a slight altercation with the driver of the bus that was taking him home from the war.

They developed a plan for an interracial organized group-trip through the South to test compliance with the Supreme Court decision. The "Journey of Reconciliation" carried out in April 1947 through Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky and West Virginia revealed a bit of change in border states, a great deal of resistance (including from some cautious blacks) and some real danger. Its major achievement was to create the template for what was to follow 14 years later, when the stakes would be far higher.

By 1961 John F. Kennedy was in the White House, projecting youth, Cold War idealism, glamour and a can-do spirit. But for all of his élan, Kennedy was a cautious Boston pol, who, like his brother Robert, the attorney general, was raised with a rich kid's blissful ignorance of blacks, poverty or segregation. Much of black America was at least quietly aquiver with the steady news of the rough, sometimes violent resistance to efforts to desegregate schools and lunch counters in the South. The Kennedy style suggested the possibility for change, but blacks and their allies reluctantly came to the realization that the Kennedys regarded what the movement thought was a moral crusade for constitutional justice as nothing more than another set of political problems to be handled.

As the Kennedys rose to power, the student movement began to cohere. It created its own umbrella group, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) while CORE became more demonstrative and venturesome. CORE also gained a new leader; James Farmer, a founder of the organization who had gone on to work on the NAACP national staff, returned to CORE as executive secretary. Farmer was a tall, burly, idealistic man blessed with a deep and impressive voice that he used to great effect in his new role. Martin Luther King Jr. had become a national figure and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference a force in the civil rights movement. So, even though his former colleagues, Bayard Rustin and George Houser, major actors behind the 1947 Reconciliation Ride, had drifted away, Farmer and his associates decided to make bold forays into the Deep South -- Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana -- to test whether the constitutional rights of interstate travelers were being honored and if not, what the federal government should do to enforce the law.

The first rides began in Washington on May 4, 1961, with Farmer and some of his top staffers on board a Trailways bus headed for New Orleans. "A proper test of the Morgan decision required a careful seating plan," Arsenault writes, "and Farmer left nothing to chance. Each group made sure that one black Freedom Rider sat in a seat normally reserved for whites, that at least one interracial pair of Riders sat in adjoining seats, and that the remaining Riders scattered throughout the bus." One Rider on each bus adhered to the conventions of Jim Crow travel, thus ensuring that at least one Rider could avoid arrest and contact supporters. Farmer later recalled that the Riders "were prepared for anything, even death." This started an intense period of approximately 16 months when Freedom Rides were at the center of the nation's civil rights struggle. There were iconic moments during those years: the burning of a Greyhound bus near Anniston, Ala., on May 14; the rampaging mob of racist thugs who, in the absence of any law enforcement restraint, beat Freedom Riders bloody in the Birmingham bus station the same day; the cracked skull of Attorney General Kennedy's personal assistant, John Seigenthaler, suffered as he gathered facts for his boss. But the larger story was harder to convey: Freedom Riders' dedication, raw courage and deep belief in constitutional idealism and the promises of America. Arsenault, the John Hope Franklin Professor of Southern History at the University of South Florida, tells that story in wonderfully rich detail. He explains how young people, knowing the brutality and danger that others had faced, nevertheless came to replace them -- in wave after wave -- to ride dangerous roads, to face lawless lawmen, to withstand the fury of racist mobs, to endure the squalor and danger of Southern jails -- even the dreaded Parchman Farm in Mississippi.

Some of this spirit was demonstrated by Diane Nash Bevel, one of the original leaders of the Nashville movement, who had become a national figure in her own right (and also the wife of Jim Bevel, who had also achieved fame as an outspoken aide to Martin Luther King Jr.), when she explained why she would go to jail for violating segregation laws even though she was pregnant.

"Some people have asked me how I can do this when I am expecting my first child in September. I have searched my soul about this and considered it in prayer. I have reached the conclusion that in the long run this will be the best thing I can do for my child. Since my child will be a black child, born in Mississippi, whether I am in jail or not, he will be born in prison. I believe that if I go to jail now it may help hasten that day when my child and all children will be free, not only on the day of their birth but for all of their lives."

The courage, power and moral elegance of that statement sums up how the Freedom Rides helped move the Kennedy administration into a more active civil rights role and inspired tens of thousands of formerly complacent citizens to become involved in the struggle.

One brief, final personal note: Arsenault scrapes some bark off many of the major civil rights leaders, but none so roughly as the NAACP and its then-leader, Roy Wilkins, my late uncle. I can attest to the fact that my childless uncle did not understand young people very well and was leery of activities that were essentially uncontrollable, and so was not an ardent fan of direct action such as Freedom Rides. It is fair to point out, though, that the NAACP was then essentially a litigating and civil rights lobbying organization. It takes nothing away from the massive contributions made by the Freedom Riders and other direct-action organizations to recognize that battles waged in the courts also made substantial contributions during this period. As a member of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, I saw the thunder coming up out of the direct-action movement that the NAACP and others turned into legislative proposals that created the laws and executive orders that became the foundations for the civil rights movement's lasting achievements.

Nonetheless, I entirely agree with a statement made by my former Justice Department colleague the late sociologist James Laue, and quoted by Arsenault: "The national mobilization of conscience which had begun in Montgomery and grown in 1960 reached full bloom with the Freedom Rides." To find out how that happened, one must read Arsenault's superb rendering of that great saga. For those interested in understanding 20th-century America, this is an essential book.

Reviewed by Roger Wilkins
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0195136748
• ISBN 13: 9780195136746
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 704