198 Sundays: Freedom Keeps On Rolling

Back in December 2007, I covered ride-ins (Method 164) because I'd just met the amazing Juanita Nelson, who was there at the beginning of the Freedom Rides:

The ride-in, popularly known in the United States as the freedom ride, is a type of sit-in adapted to public transportation.  It was widely used during the 1960s in the United States against racial segregation on buses, although its earlier use [in the 1840s and 1850s] was more diverse.  In this method Negroes and whites persist in sitting in sections of buses or other vehicles opposite those assigned to them.  Sometimes such actions have violated company regulations or local and state laws.  [After federal rulings] outlawed such segregation, ride-ins were taken to bring local practice into conformity with the law.

Cue the usual objections to NV action: such things as ride-ins can only work against a "benign" regime like what we had in the US.  I have argued ad nauseum that this is not true, but what also bothers me is how people who say this also ignore the violent alternative that the Civil Rights Movement could have chosen.  They took the righteous path, which also happens to be effective, and we should all celebrate that.

What I should have expanded on was the notion that the US was "benign", because it most definitely wasn't, at least in the Deep South, and JFK and LBJ (even RFK for that matter) weren't really inclined toward pushing Civil Rights and actually a bit hostile to the actions of CORE, SCLC, et al.  One might think I'm setting up a strawman, but I have heard/seen folks comment that the movement's non-violence was only successful because hey, this is America, not Nazi Germany (the same objections are raised regarding Gandhi and Indian Independence)!

The people who fought for justice certainly understood the stark reality that most of us just don't comprehend. 

I was at the Smithsonian's Ripley Center to see their Road to Freedom exhibition today after holding vigil again with Leslie for a few hours.  As I was looking at pictures from Anniston, AL, a young African-American woman asked if anybody had gotten out of a torched Greyhound bus alive.  Given that Leslie's dad was on that very bus and she told me the story (and loaned me the Freedom Riders book this week), I happened to know that Hank Thomas and a white undercover policeman were able to open the doors so everybody could escape.  She was astonished to hear about it and simply said, while her school-aged daughter joyfully ran around us, "I can't imagine."

Neither can I.  Fortunately we still have some people to bear witness, though in 2004, the San Francisco Bay Guardian had this obituary for one of the few remaining suvivors:

Whenever someone told Ed Blankenheim he didn’t have to risk life and limb in the cause of civil rights, he would vehemently disagree. Henry “Hank” Thomas had just such a conversation with Blankenheim last October, when they and the two other surviving civil-rights activists known as the Freedom Riders participated in a panel discussion at the University of Illinois.

[Hank is on the far left (behind CORE leader Jim Farmer), and the dude wearing glasses in the middle is Ed--they were attending a meeting in SC, May 1961. Photo borrowed from Freedom Riders--1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice.]

Blankenheim was not in the best of shape, and both men knew it might be the last time they’d be together, Thomas recalled. Blankenheim had traveled there from San Francisco, Thomas from Stone Mountain, Ga.

“I said to him publicly how much I appreciated him, for doing all he’d done when he didn’t have to,” Thomas said.

...

Blankenheim, Thomas and 11 others did indeed risk life and limb in the early 1960s to desegregate lunch counters, bus stations, restrooms and other public facilities in Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi.

Blankenheim died Sunday, Sept. 26, of cancer. He was 70.

The other known survivors from that core group are U.S. Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) and the Rev. Benjamin Cox of Jackson, Tenn. Cox said three of the Freedom Riders went into hiding several years ago and have not been located.

More about Ed from Freedom Riders:

Ed Blankenheim [Leslie's father, on the far left in this famous picture that's hanging near where the young woman I mentioned above chatted with me] was a carpenter's apprentice and part-time chemistry student at the University of Arizona in Tuscon.  Feisty and full of resolve, he had talked his way into the Marine Corps in 1950, at the age of sixteen.  Eleven years later, as a Korean War veteran and father of two, he traveled more than two thousand miles to join the Freedom Ride...Befriending fellow chemistry student Tim Burroughs and several other black student activists, he became one of the few whites to participate in local civil rights activities, first as a member of Tuscon's NAACAP Youth Council, and later as a leader of a local CORE chapter known as Students for Equality...[CORE head] Jim Farmer dispatched pacifist leader David McReynolds, a War Resisters League official who frequently donated his services to CORE, to Tuscon to help organize the local student movement.  McReynolds stayed for two weeks, enthralling the students with discussions of Ganhian wisdom and strategy.

Blankenheim, in particular, embraced McReynolds as a friend and mentor worth following.  "His belief in mankind and the human potential for kindness," he later recalled, "changed Students for Equality and change me.  The feeling of respect was mutual, and when the Freedom Ride project emerged a few weeks later, McReynolds unhesitatingly recommended the wiry young man with the sardonic wit and impish grin.  Farmer had asked him "to keep an eye out for potential Freedom Riders," and he felt he had found a good prospect in Arizona.  Blankenheim had seen enough of the South as a young marine recruit at Parris Island, South Carolina, to be wary of directly challenging the region's racial shibboleths, and he knew full well that he "was being invited on a trip into the Deep South as part of a mixed-race bomb."  After a little prodding from Farmer, though, he could not resist joining the Ride.  "I was no less concerned about the danger of my committment," he later explained, "but all that I had seen in the South and all that I had learned from Dave stared me down.  I had come too far and I couldn't turn back."

Ed couldn't turn back, but it was almost the end of him and his fellow activists:

For...twenty minutes...Klansmen pounded on the bus demanding that the Freedom Riders come out to take what was coming to them, but they stayed in their seats, even after the arrival of two highway patrolmen. When neither patrolman made any effort to disperse the crowd, Cowling, Sims, and the Riders decided to stay put.

Eventually, however, two members of the mob, Roger Couch and Cecil "Goober" Lewallyn, decided that they had waited long enough. After returning to his car, which was parked a few yards behind the disabled Greyhound, Lewallyn suddenly ran toward the bus and tossed a flaming bundle of rags through a broken window. Within seconds the bundle exploded, sending dark gray smoke throughout the bus. At first, Genevieve Hughes, seated only a few feet away from the explosion, thought the bomb-thrower was just trying to scare the Freedom Riders with a smoke bomb, but as the smoke got blacker and blacker and as flames began to engulf several of the upholstered seats, she realized that she and the other passengers were in serious trouble. Crouching down in the middle of the bus, she screamed out, "Is there any air up front?" When no one answered, she began to panic. "Oh, my God, they're going to burn us up!" she yelled to the others, who were lost in a dense cloud of smoke. Making her way forward, she finally found an open window six rows from the front and thrust her head out, gasping for air. As she looked out, she saw the outstretched necks of Jimmy McDonald and Charlotte Devree, who had also found open windows. Seconds later, all three squeezed through the windows and dropped to the ground. Still choking from the smoke and fumes, they staggered across the street. Gazing back at the burning bus, they feared that the other passengers were still trapped inside, but they soon caught sight of several passengers who had escaped through the front door on the other side.

They were all lucky to be alive. Several members of the mob had pressed against the door screaming, "Burn them alive" and "Fry the goddamn niggers," and the Freedom Riders had been all but doomed until an exploding fuel tank convinced the mob that the whole bus was about to explode. As the frightened whites retreated, Cowling pried open the door, allowing the rest of the choking passengers to escape. When Hank Thomas, the first Rider to exit the front of the bus, crawled away from the doorway, a white man rushed toward him and asked, "Are you all okay?" Before Thomas could answer, the man's concerned look turned into a sneer as he struck the astonished student in the head with a baseball bat. Thomas fell to the ground and was barely conscious as the rest of the exiting Riders spilled out onto the grass.

Yeah, sounds like America was pretty benign.  Of course democracies are always nice and warm and fuzzy.  That's why Israel also can't possibly be a bad guy when it simply defends itself against barbarians and terrorists, right?

On this International Women's Day, I'm disturbed as I read more of the Lancet's series on Palestinian health that even before the current crisis in Gaza (details from A/HRC/4/57) there were:

69 cases of Palestinian pregnant women giving birth at Israeli checkpoints...As a result of the checkpoints, 10 per cent of pregnant women who wished to give birth in a hospital had been delayed on the road between two to four hours before reaching health facilities, while 6 per cent of them had spent more than four hours for the same journey. Before the intifada, the average time to reach health facilities was 15 to 30 minutes.

These hazardous conditions were mainly attributed to impediments faced by ambulances and medical teams when trying to transport women in labour through checkpoints, and to inspections or attacks perpetrated by Israeli forces against ambulances and their patients...35 newborn babies had died at checkpoints as their mothers did not receive the urgent care required by their condition and five women lost their lives while giving birth.

In addition, six pregnant women had been injured at checkpoints as a result of beating, shooting and use of toxic gas by Israeli soldiers. Mention was made of the case of a pregnant woman who had been targeted in her ninth month of pregnancy at a checkpoint by Israeli military, while she was accompanied by her husband and her father. The woman received a wound in her shoulder and the father was injured in the chest; her husband, however, died as a result of multiple gunshot wounds.

This is why I was fasting and holding vigil yesterday and today, and Leslie is doing so until our delegation returns on the 14th.  We are doing what we can to show solidarity with the women and children of Gaza as our brothers and sisters deliver aid to a besieged people and engage in citizen diplomacy.  This does not mean we are pro-Hamas any more than we are anti-Israel.  We simply want these deadly checkpoints that are choking off the life of Palestine to be opened so the people can try to rebuild their shattered lives and country.

So while we are safe in DC our friends are on their own dangerous, necessary freedom ride.  They are trying to help the people of Palestine and to hopefully chip away at the walls that keep them in their virtual prison.by loading trucks with aid and piling onto buses:

Just got through first security checkpoint en route to Rafah. 2 buses full of women certainly perk up Egyptian security!

...

We just heard bomb blasts. Isreali F16s are dropping bombs on Rafah

The Code Pinkers have come too far to back down, despite the very real risk to their own lives, because they fervently believe in peace and justice for all people:

What do the women of Gaza want on this International Women’s Day? Like you and me they want to live in peace, to nurture their children and see them happy and free.

Isn't that what people wanted in America circa 1961?  Is that what all people want today?  Have you come too far to back down?

ntodd

Covered on previous Sundays:

THE METHODS OF NONVIOLENT PROTEST AND PERSUASION  

1. Public Speeches
2. Letters of opposition or support
5. Declarations of indictment and intention
6. Group or mass petitions
8. Banners, posters, and displayed communications
9. Leaflets, pamphlets, and books
10. Newspapers and journals
11. Records, radio, and television
14. Mock awards
15. Group lobbying
18. Displays of flags and symbolic colors
19. Wearing of symbols
21. Delivering symbolic objects
22. Protest disrobings
23. Destruction of own property
26. Paint as protest
30. Rude gestures
31. "Haunting" officials
32. Taunting officials
33. Fraternization
34. Vigils
35. Humorous skits and pranks
37. Singing
38. Marches
44. Mock funerals
45. Demonstrative funerals.
50. Teach-ins
52. Silence
53. Renouncing honors
54. Turning one's back.
55. Social boycott

THE METHODS OF SOCIAL NONCOOPERATION

57. Lysistratic nonaction
61. Boycott of social affairs
62. Student strike
65. Stay-at-home
66. Total personal noncooperation

THE METHODS OF ECONOMIC NONCOOPERATION

71. Consumers' boycott
86. Withdrawal of bank deposits
88. Refusal to pay debts or interest
90. Revenue refusal
91. Refusal of a government's money
97. Protest strike
112. Reporting "sick" (sick-in)
113. Strike by resignation
117. General strike
118. Hartal

THE METHODS OF POLITICAL NONCOOPERATION

120. Withholding or withdrawal of allegiance
122. Literature and speeches advocating resistance
124. Boycott of elections
135. Popular nonobedience
137. Refusal of an assemblage or meeting to disperse
140. Hiding, escape, and false identities
147. Deliberate inefficiency and selective noncooperation by enforcement agents
148. Mutiny
150. Noncooperation by constituent governmental units

THE METHODS OF NONVIOLENT INTERVENTION

158. Self-exposure to the elements
159. The fast: a) Fast of moral pressure; b) Hunger strike; c) Satyagrahic fast
160. Reverse trial
162. Sit-in
164. Ride-in
170. Nonviolent invasion
171. Nonviolent interjection
173. Nonviolent occupation
174. Establishing new social patterns
177. Speak-in
178. Guerrilla theater
179. Alternative social institutions
180. Alternative communication system
189. Selective patronage
193. Overloading of administrative systems
195. Seeking imprisonment
196. Civil disobedience of "neutral" laws
198: Dual sovereignty and parallel government.

Comments

[Karin]

Great post, NTodd. This is the first chance I've had to read it through.