An early milestone in the civil rights movement celebrates an anniversary:
Sixty years ago on May 4, Charles Person boarded a bus in Washington, D.C., to take the most dangerous ride of his life.
With him were 12 other Freedom Riders, spread between two buses — one group on Trailways and another on Greyhound destined for Louisiana.
Seven Black activists and six white activists. Men and women.
They rode to test a December 1960 Supreme Court ruling on Boynton v. Virginia that banned segregation in interstate travel. Complete desegregation should have meant they could use waiting rooms, dining facilities and restrooms along the way.
Other Freedom Riders — more than 400 over time — would follow, but among this original 13 was John Lewis, who later went on to become a well-respected congressman from Georgia; and James Peck, a pacifist and civil rights activist.
Lewis died in 2020 after a battle with cancer; Peck died in 1993.
Of the first 13, only two are still alive — Person and Henry “Hank” James Thomas — both of whom live in Georgia.
Their stories became a key part of the civil rights movement and illustrate the courage and determination of those who rode, many of whom were already involved in student movements and efforts to integrate other facilities.
Organized by the civil rights organization Congress for Racial Equality, the first group of Freedom Riders’ destination was New Orleans, where there would be an observance of the 1954 Supreme Court ruling on Brown v. Board of Education. To get there, the group of activists had to travel through South Carolina, Georgia and Alabama, what was often hostile territory for Black people and liberal-thinking whites.
Led by CORE’s national director, James Farmer, they had been trained in passive resistance — not to respond to the angry taunts they were likely to encounter and even the physical violence, such as spitting, pushing or strikes with fists, bats, wooden boards or metal objects.
Person's and Thomas' experiences on the first ride are covered in the linked article. Reading their stories, the enormous courage of the Freedom Riders, especially the first contingent that left Washington, DC, 60 years ago today, can't be overstated. They were riding into an unknown, but likely extremely hostile environment, traveling through the deep South to New Orleans, seeking service at segregated facilities along the way, expecting that they would be greeted with the treatment noted above. Had this generation of Americans not put the cause of equal rights ahead of their personal safety, it's hard to say with certainty whether the civil rights movement would have succeeded in ending Jim Crow over the next decade. It makes what's going on with white nationalist Republican efforts to reinstate Jim Crow- era restrictions on voting all the more infuriating and intolerable. May those of us alive today have just a pinch of the courage and resolve of those Freedom Riders to ensure what they did was not in vain.
(Photo: Charles Person, right/ Johnson Publishing)
