Freedom Riders from Michigan shifted history

Freedom Riders from Michigan shifted history
When hundreds of ordinary Americans rode into the Deep South to challenge segregated bus stations in 1961, they knowingly provoked violent racists.

The first bus was set ablaze. The second was boarded by the Ku Klux Klan, who beat a retired professor from Wayne State University so badly he was confined to a wheelchair the rest of his life.

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But the riders kept coming, bus after bus, month after month, despite arrests and more beatings.

Seven months later, the federal government finally enforced a court ruling against such segregation, the plight of Southern blacks was lamented around the country, and the civil rights movement had gone national.

With the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Riders on Wednesday, Michigan residents who rode the buses reminisced how they had stood up for justice at a time few others, including the most powerful figures in the country, were willing to do so.

"There was no protection by police," said the Rev. Richard Gleason, 74, a retired Baptist minister from Franklin who was arrested after riding to Jackson, Miss. "I don't know how to explain it. I felt like I was outside America."

During seven tumultuous months, 436 people rode 60 buses through the South. They were black and white men and women from all over the country. They ranged from 13 to 61.

The eight riders from Michigan were mostly college students, a retired elementary school teacher from Detroit, and Tom Hayden, who would become a national leader of the antiwar movement.

Among this rolling band of idealists who chased equality in the lair of racism was the Rev. Gordon Negen, 79.

The semiretired Christian Reformed pastor from Grand Rapids was a young father of four but was so stirred by news reports of the riders that he joined them.

"It was one of those situations where you don't think it through," he said this week. "When something like this happens, there's a mystique, an aura that you cannot pass by."
Tired of waiting

Their families wondered if they were foolish, antagonistic, suicidal. The NAACP and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. fretted they would set back the fledgling civil rights movement.

But the Freedom Riders were adamant. They were tired of hoping for things to change. They had waited long enough.

Their focus was a 1960 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that said it was unconstitutional to have segregated restaurants and waiting rooms at interstate bus terminals.

The South responded to the legal ruling the same way it responded to an earlier finding by the federal government that it was illegal to segregate passengers on interstate buses. It ignored it.

"They made all kinds of excuses why they couldn't enforce it," said Raymond Arsenault, a history professor at the University of South Florida who wrote a book about the Freedom Riders. "They said the segregation was actually being maintained by company rules of railroad corporations and bus corporations."

The riders' strategy was simplicity itself, said Arsenault.

Black and whites would flout Jim Crow laws by riding together on the buses and ignore the "white" and "colored" signs for lunch counters, water fountains and restrooms at bus terminals.

The passengers hoped their arrests would lead to a court case that would force federal officials to enforce the Supreme Court ruling.

"The rides represented a vital moment in the civil rights movement," said Derek Catsam, a historian at the University of Texas who wrote a book about the rides. "They quite literally took the movement national."

Freedom Riders knew their gambit was a dangerous one.

By barreling past the Mason-Dixon Line and straight into the dark heart of segregation, they could prompt virulent responses from Southerners.

"No one was going to save us but us," said John Hardy, 70, a retired Detroit teacher who, as a college student, raised money for riders and arranged their trips and housing. "I was determined that I wouldn't be intimidated."
Deep South reacts

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Tags:

• Freedom
• Riders
• From
• Michigan
• Shifted
• History

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