Why did the Freedom Rides happen

Representative John Lewis, who died on Friday at 80, was an imposing figure in American politics and the civil rights movement. But his legacy of confronting racism directly, while never swaying from his commitment to nonviolence, started long before he became a national figure.

Mr. Lewis, a Georgia Democrat, was among the original 13 Freedom Riders who rode buses across the South in 1961 to challenge segregation in public transportation. The riders were attacked and beaten, and one of their buses was firebombed, but the rides changed the way people traveled and set the stage for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

In 1947, the Congress of Racial Equality, known as CORE, created a “Journey of Reconciliation” to draw attention to racial segregation in public transportation in Southern cities and states across the United States. That movement was only moderately successful, but it led to the Freedom Rides of 1961, which forever changed the way Americans traveled between states.

Freedom Riders at a bus station in Montgomery, Ala., in May 1961.Credit...Paul Schultzer/Time & Life Pictures — Getty Images

The Freedom Rides, which began in May 1961 and ended late that year, were organized by CORE’s national director, James Farmer. The mission of the rides was to test compliance with two Supreme Court rulings: Boynton v. Virginia, which declared that segregated bathrooms, waiting rooms and lunch counters were unconstitutional, and Morgan vs. Virginia, in which the court ruled that it was unconstitutional to implement and enforce segregation on interstate buses and trains. The Freedom Rides took place as the Civil Rights movement was gathering momentum, and during a period in which African-Americans were routinely harassed and subjected to segregation in the Jim Crow South.

The Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, bottom center, one of the organizers of the Freedom Rides, and other activists at the Greyhound Bus Terminal in Birmingham, Ala., in May 1961.Credit...The Birmingham News, via Associated Press

The original Freedom Riders were 13 Black and white men and women of various ages from across the United States.

Raymond Arsenault, a Civil Rights historian and the author “Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice,” said CORE had advertised for participants and asked for applications. “They wanted a geographic distribution and age distribution,” he said.

Among those chosen were the Rev. Benjamin Elton Cox, a minister from High Point, N.C., and Charles Person of Atlanta, then a freshman at Morehouse College in Atlanta, who was the youngest of the group at 18. “They had antinuclear activists; they had a husband-and-wife team from Michigan,” Mr. Arsenault said of the diverse group of participants.

Mr. Lewis, then 21, represented the Nashville movement, which staged demonstrations at department stores and sit-ins at lunch counters. But Mr. Lewis nearly missed his opportunity, according to his 1998 autobiography, “Walking With the Wind.” After receiving his bus ticket to Washington, D.C., from CORE, Mr. Lewis was driven to the bus station by two friends, James Bevel and Bernard Lafayette. He arrived to find that his scheduled bus had already departed. “We threw my bag back in Bevel’s car, floored it east and caught up in Murfreesboro,” Mr. Lewis said.

The original group completed a few days of training in Washington, Mr. Arsenault said, preparing by role-playing to respond in nonviolent ways to the harassment that they would endure.

As the movement grew, so did the number of participants. Later in May, in Jackson, Miss., Mr. Lewis and hundreds of other protesters were arrested and hastily convicted of breach of peace. Many of the Freedom Riders spent six weeks in prison, sweltering in filthy, vermin-infested cells.

A mob firebombed one of the Freedom Riders’ buses outside Anniston, Ala., on May 14, 1961.Credit...Bettmann Archive, via Getty Images

On May 4, 1961, the first crew of 13 Freedom Riders left Washington for New Orleans in two buses. The group encountered some resistance in Virginia, but they didn’t encounter violence until they arrived in Rock Hill, S.C. At the bus station there, Mr. Lewis and another rider were beaten, and a third person was arrested after using a whites-only restroom.

When they reached Anniston, Ala., on May 14, Mother’s Day, they were met by an angry mob. Local officials had given the Ku Klux Klan permission to attack the riders without consequences. The first bus was firebombed outside Anniston while the mob held the door closed. The passengers were beaten as they fled the burning bus.

When the second bus reached Anniston, eight Klansmen boarded it and attacked and beat the Freedom Riders. The bus managed to continue on to Birmingham, Ala., where the passengers were again attacked at a bus terminal, this time with baseball bats, iron pipes and bicycle chains.

At one point during the rides, Mr. Lewis and others were attacked by a mob of white people in Montgomery, Ala., and he was left unconscious in a pool of his own blood outside the Greyhound Bus Terminal. He was jailed several times and spent a month in Mississippi’s notorious Parchman Penitentiary.

The attacks received widespread attention in the news media, but they pushed Mr. Farmer to end the initial campaign. The Freedom Riders finished their journey to New Orleans by plane.

Many more Freedom Rides followed over the next several months. Ultimately, 436 riders participated in more than 60 Freedom Rides, Mr. Arsenault said.

Yes.

On May 29, 1961, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy petitioned the Interstate Commerce Commission to ban segregation in interstate bus travel, according to PBS. The order, which was issued on Sept. 22 and went into effect on Nov. 1, led to the removal of Jim Crow signs from stations, waiting rooms, water fountains and restrooms in bus terminals.

Three years later, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended segregation in public spaces across the United States.

Mr. Lewis addressing the crowd at the 1963 March on Washington, which he helped organize.Credit...Afro American Newspapers/Gado, via Getty Images

Mr. Lewis attained a particular status as a civil rights activist because he had been arrested and beaten so many times, Mr. Arsenault said.

“He was absolutely fearless and courageous, totally committed,” he said. “People knew that he always had their back and that they could count on him. He had an incorruptible commitment to nonviolence.”

In 1963, Mr. Lewis became the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and helped to organize the March on Washington, where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech.

“That whole experience and in his role with the Freedom Riders really consolidated his reputation as this fearless civil rights activist who really had a strategic sense of the power of nonviolence,” said Kevin Gaines, the Julian Bond professor of civil rights and social justice at the University of Virginia. “Lewis really emerged among a group of impressive and very effective civil rights leaders.”

Challenging The Colour Bar

One warm February night in 1965, a group of Sydney University students boarded a bus headed for regional New South Wales. But the so-called Freedom Ride was no holiday vacation. Their aim was to challenge the ingrained discrimination and racism that was a largely unacknowledged feature of country towns.

Experiencing racism firsthand struck Pat Healy like a physical blow. “It’s one thing to know intellectually that people are racist. It’s quite another thing to go out and confront it in its raw power,” she recalls.

To stand in front of a group of people who can seriously tell you that black kids should not be allowed to go into a swimming pool because if they ejaculate they might impregnate white girls. How did you answer something like that? It’s so mind-bogglingly ignorant and so mind-bogglingly racist.

On a warm February night in 1965, Healy was one of almost thirty students from Sydney University who boarded a bus headed for regional New South Wales (NSW). But the so-called Freedom Ride was no ordinary holiday vacation. Their aim was to challenge the ingrained discrimination and racism that was a largely unacknowledged feature of country towns.

Healy, like many of her fellow students, came from a radical background. Her family were Communist and she became involved in student politics through the Labour Club and Student Representative Council on campus.

This lead to her involvement in the infamous Commemoration Day civil rights demonstration outside the United States Consulate in May 1964, in support of the Civil Rights Bill then before Congress. The American civil rights movement was well known in Australia at the time because of sympathetic media coverage.

But the students were heavily criticised for their focus on racism abroad rather than at home. Healy was “very stung by the comments and criticisms from the Aboriginal community that here we were demonstrating for black rights in the US. [They questioned], what about black rights in Australia?”

Coinciding with the increased politicisation of the student movement, Indigenous Australians were exploring ways to publicise their plight. At Sydney University, Charles Perkins and Gary Williams became the first two Aboriginal students to attend the university in 1963 and they quickly made contact with local Indigenous activists.

Taking the criticism seriously, students formed the Sydney University Organising Committee for Action for Aboriginal Rights, who organised a concert and rally for National Aborigines Day in July 1964. Over 500 students turned up to hear speeches by Perkins, Williams, and others who advocated equal rights for Indigenous people.

Despite the event’s success, the impact was local in scale. A new organisation called Student Action For Aborigines (SAFA) was formed on campus but Perkins wanted to do something dramatic.

“The idea of The Freedom Ride was a bit like an osmosis process,” Healy says. “It came out of a whole lot of discussion with a whole lot of people talking about, well what do we do next? And there were some people who had actually been on The Freedom Ride in the United States – Bill Ford and a woman from The States.”

The US Freedom Rides had taken place in 1961 with the aim of de-segregating transport such as buses. SAFA adopted the idea but with a much broader meaning. Black and white students would travel together by bus to draw attention to all kinds of racial discrimination.

“We never called it The Freedom Ride,” says Healy. “We called it The SAFA Bus Trip because we didn’t want it Americanised. We didn’t want people to think that we were just copying the American example.”

Students were not as concerned about transportation because it was not segregated. So the focus turned to places of leisure in country towns, such as pools, pictures theatres and RSL clubs, which were divided along racial lines.

They were also keen to get a better understanding of the actual living conditions of Aboriginal people in regional NSW. It was agreed that as well as protest, the students would conduct a survey to elicit more detailed information about racial discrimination, living conditions, education and health.

There was a very wide range of people involved,” Healy says. “From Communist Party members and atheists right through to very conservative members of Christian groups at university. And the debate really centered around what would we do when we were on this Freedom Ride or this bus ride, not whether we’d have it or not.

SAFA raised money, recruited participants, and planned an itinerary. One of the key organisers was Jim Spigelman, later a Chief Justice of New South Wales, but then a 19-year old student in Arts Law. He was indefatigable in seeking out information about conditions in the country towns to be visited.

Their protests drew angry responses from some of the white people in country towns, leading one to force the students’ bus off the road outside Walgett. Students were also both verbally and physically abused.

Student Action for Aborigines only demonstrated when clear cases of racist behaviour were displayed but Healy believes those examples were easily discovered.

“In Walgett, for instance, the Returned Services League Club (RSL) simply banned Aboriginal people from being members. That was basically unacceptable. There was no reason for it. There was no logical reason why black people, Aboriginal people, shouldn’t have been members.”

A line of city students protested in response, standing outside the RSL club on a hot day carrying banners that said ‘Good Enough For Tobruk, Why Not Walgett RSL?’, ‘Bullets Do Not Discriminate’, and so on.

Healy also highlights “the picture theatre that literally had a fence across it. Black people had to sit on one side and whites on the other. So we had plenty of examples of out and out racism that had no logical reason for it.”

Perhaps the most well known protest of the trip, however, was Moree. The students undertook their survey and found extensive evidence of racial discrimination but decided their focus should be the artesian baths and its adjacent swimming pool.

There was heated debate when the Moree Council passed resolutions in 1955 prohibiting Indigenous people from using the baths. They were a huge tourist attraction and the Council was determined they would remain so by excluding Aboriginals. The swimming pool was to be kept for whites only, except during school hours when Indigenous children were allowed in. Miraculously, at 3.30pm, they suddenly became too unhygienic to stay and had to leave.

The students decided to protest, first outside the council chambers, then by taking Aboriginal children to the pool and insisting they are allowed in. Finally, they held a public meeting in the evening to debate the issues.

As the students stood at the turnstile of Moree’s swimming baths, demanding that black children be allowed in, they were spat at, assaulted and menaced by a crowd.

Eventually, the Council and pool management reversed the ban and a group of Aboriginal kids from the local reserve were allowed to swim in the pool. The manager said it was simply a matter of cleanliness. If he could inspect the eight children to confirm their cleanliness, they could enter.

A photographer then took the iconic image of Perkins, surrounded by beaming kids, which immortalised the Freedom Ride in public consciousness around Australia.

But the protesters’ initial success was short-lived. After the students moved on to Lismore that night, they heard the Council had taken back the offer. “Everyone agreed that we would go back,” says Healy. “There was unanimity on that. We felt that to keep faith with the Aboriginal people of Moree there was no question, we had to go back. We knew we would only be back for a short while, but we had to go back.”

For more than three hours, students tried again to get Aboriginal children admitted to the swimming pool, but to no avail. Students would take a swimmer to the front entrance, only to have their arms pinned behind their backs and led away.

In the end, the students were forced to retreat. Covered with rotten fruit and eggs, the bus was escorted out of town by the police. The driver resigned, but the Freedom Ride continued with a new driver.

The urban media focused largely on such conflict as a sign that NSW was little different from the American South. But in the public debate that followed, city dwellers became aware of racial discrimination, some soul-searching took place in the country towns, racial segregation was challenged, and in some cases ended, and alternative ideas of inclusion, equality, and full citizenship rights were discussed at length.

The students’ unwavering commitment was fuelled by the responses they received to the survey. “I think what we were surprised about was the awfulness of the circumstances of life for Aboriginal people in country towns,” Healy says. “[The] conditions in which black people in country NSW were living at that stage.”

She continues, “the other thing that was also surprising and came out of both the survey and peaceful protest was the extraordinary level of racism amongst the white population. And the extraordinary ignorance on which that racism was based.”

The SAFA Bus Trip was not without criticism, however. Many argued that they had simply stirred up trouble and then left the people in the towns to cope as best they could. A further criticism was that students merely focused on superficial places of entertainment such as picture theatres, rather than attempt to improve basic issues of health and living conditions.

“I think the people who thought that we had stirred up trouble that wasn’t there previously, were all white,” Healy responds. “The blacks knew that there was trouble and it was there all the time for them.”

We did go into towns and then walk away again but we never pretended we were going to do anything other than that. We went there to try and find out what was going on, and to publicise what was going on. We actually did that very successfully. We made white people in urban NSW confront the reality that black people in country towns lived with constantly.

The so-called Freedom Ride put local civil rights on the front pages of newspapers as the Ride had done in the United States, according to Healy. “For that alone, it was a valuable thing for us to do because as long as something remains hidden, people are not going to deal with it. Once it comes out on the front pages of the newspaper and confronts them over their morning coffee and on their television screens, it’s much harder to ignore.”

On their return to Sydney, students followed through by taking their research to the state authorities, contributing to inquiries and the campaign for the 1967 referendum that would grant Aboriginal people equal rights as citizens.

“One of the most significant of the long term effects was, however, the emergence, for the first time in our history, of an Aborigine in a clear leadership role,” Spigelman, then Chief Justice of New South Wales, said at the State Funeral of Perkins in 2000. “There was no doubt at the time that Charlie Perkins was the leader of, and the spokesman for, the entire group of white students. In this, as in so much else, he was a pioneer for his people and a role model of considerable significance.”

Meanwhile, the philosophy of non-violent direct action inherited from Martin Luther King for the Freedom Ride was replaced with more confrontational politics, drawn from the Black Power and anti-war movements, as two examples.

“When you passionately believe in something, you do things,” Healy concludes. “You do them because you think that they might make a difference. You never quite know if they will or not. But you hope they will.”

“So you go ahead and do all sorts of things. You demonstrate, you do surveys, you write things [and] you give money. When, years later, you realise that what you did actually made a big difference, it’s a very humbling experience. Because you realise it is a just ordinary person being prepared to act on their beliefs that actually makes a difference.”

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