Remember the Freedom Riders
Kamala Harris's path was forged by the fearless civil-rights activists of the 1960s.
By Michael Judge
Last month Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign raised $361 million—triple the amount of the Trump campaign—much of which came from small donations of $5, $10, or $20 from individuals and families across the country. That’s an impressive feat for any politician, let alone the first woman of color to win a presidential nomination from a major American political party. Clearly, her message of unity, patriotism, and inclusiveness is resonating across the country.
As she said just a few weeks ago in her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, “Everywhere I go, in everyone I meet, I see a nation that is ready to move forward. Ready for the next step in the incredible journey that is America. I see an America where we hold fast to the fearless belief that built our nation and inspired the world. That here, in this country, anything is possible.”
That “incredible journey that is America” does indeed continue, thanks in large part to the abolitionists, suffragists, and civil-rights leaders who fought to assure that this nation, in Lincoln’s words “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” would live up to that proposition, ushering in “a new birth of freedom.” That Americans will soon vote in a presidential election with a candidate who is both the first female vice president and the first African-American woman to be nominated for president is testament to yet another birth of freedom.
For anyone interested in a refresher course on how far race relations and civil rights in the U.S. have come since the 1960s when Kamala Harris was born, Stanley Nelson’s riveting documentary film “Freedom Riders,” now streaming on PBS, offers a vivid reminder of the culture of bigotry and violence that plagued the Deep South in 1961 and serves as a fitting tribute to the heroic men and women—both black and white—who risked their lives to change it.
From May until November 1961, more than 400 black and white Americans deliberately violated Jim Crow laws simply by traveling side-by-side on buses and trains throughout the South. Brown v. Board of Education had desegregated public schools in 1954, and the Supreme Court had twice ruled that interstate travel facilities such as buses and trains must also be integrated. Yet public rest rooms, drinking fountains, restaurants and transportation remained divided along racial lines in much of the Deep South.
The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) organized the first Freedom Ride from Washington, D.C., to New Orleans, with stops along the way to “test and challenge” segregated facilities in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. Thirteen Freedom Riders, on two commercial bus lines, were to depart D.C. on May 1 and arrive in New Orleans on May 17, just in time to celebrate the seventh anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision.
Trained in nonviolent resistance, the Freedom Riders knew they were facing arrest, imprisonment, and possible police brutality, but few foresaw the degree of mob violence and social upheaval their actions would inspire.
“One of the major thrusts of the Freedom Ride was to get the movement into the Deep South,” explains Gordon Carey, a national director for CORE and one of the early organizers of the Freedom Rides. “Most of the action up until this time had been in the Upper South or in the North.”
The late great Georgia Congressman John Lewis (1940-2020) was a young man at the time, and jumped at the opportunity to challenge Jim Crow and the indignities of the segregated South. “I am a senior at American Baptist Theological Seminary and hope to graduate in June,” he wrote in 1961 explaining his decision to join the Freedom Riders. “I know that an education is important, and I hope to get one. But at this time human dignity is the most important thing in my life . . . [I’m joining the Freedom Riders so] that justice and freedom might come to the Deep South.”
One is struck by the contrast between the Freedom Riders’ principled commitment to equality and justice and the fear and ignorance of those who clung to Jim Crow. An unnamed Southerner in an early 1960s interview speaks over black-and-white images of Ku Klux Klan rallies, burning crosses, and “White Only” and “Colored Only” signs: “We talk about it here as separation of the races—customs and traditions that have been built up over the last hundred years that have proved for the best interest of both the colored and the white people. There’s not been one single change.”
“It was all encompassing, this so-called Southern way of life,” explains Raymond Arsenault, author of “Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice,” the book that helped inspire the film. “It would not allow for any breaks. It was a system that was only as strong, the white Southerners thought, as its weakest link. So you couldn’t allow people even to sit together on the front of a bus -- something that really shouldn’t have threatened anyone, but it did. It threatened their sense of the wholeness, the sanctity, of what they saw as an age-old tradition.”
Rolling into the Deep South, the first Freedom Riders began to experience strong resistance. Riders were arrested in Charlotte, N.C., and attacked in Rock Hill, S.C. When they reached Atlanta, Ga., they met with Martin Luther King Jr. with hopes that he might join them. To their surprise, King declined and—fearing for their lives—tried to dissuade them from continuing.
On May 14, two buses—one Greyhound, one Trailways—left Atlanta bound for Birmingham, Ala. Just across the Alabama border, in a small town called Aniston, the buses were met by an angry mob calling for the “niggers” and “nigger lovers” to get off the bus. Just outside of Anniston, the Greyhound was firebombed. As the bus burned furiously, its occupants poured onto the road where they were met by the mob. Some were beaten. All suffered from smoke inhalation and were choking and calling out for water.
Janie Forsyth McKinney, a white girl who was only 12 at the time, described the scene as the “worst suffering I had ever seen.” Defying her elders, she brought water to the Riders. “I walked right out into the middle of that crowd,” she remembers, holding back tears. “I picked me out one person. I washed her face. I held her. I gave her water to drink. And as soon as I thought she was going to be OK, I got up and picked out somebody else.”
The other bus made it to Birmingham, only to be met by the Ku Klux Klan and a local police force that stood by as the Freedom Riders were torn from the bus and brutally beaten. At that juncture, CORE riders decided to end the Freedom Rides. They were, however, replaced by members of the Nashville Student Movement, who continued on to Montgomery.
“It was clear to me that if we allowed the Freedom Ride to stop at that point, just after so much violence had been inflicted, that the message would have been sent that all you have to do to stop a nonviolent campaign is to inflict massive violence,” explains Diane Nash, who organized the Nashville Freedom Riders. “It was critical that the Freedom Ride did not stop, and that it continue immediately.”
Once in Montgomery, the new Freedom Riders and 1,500 of their supporters were trapped in the First Baptist Church, a menacing mob outside threatening to burn it down. Eventually the Kennedy administration sent in federal troops to protect them, only to see the Riders face mass arrests in Jackson, Miss.
The Freedom Rides continued into the fall of 1961. Hundreds of black and white Americans of all ages were arrested, beaten, and suffered innumerable indignities. Yet, as Congressman Lewis explains in the film, they did so with a sense of purpose and pride: “Boarding that Greyhound bus to travel through the heart of the Deep South, I felt good. I felt happy. I felt liberated. I was like a soldier in a nonviolent army. I was ready.”