September 19, 2011 • 17 mins
When Nashville college students picked up where CORE riders stopped, they were eventually incarcerated in Mississippi. Yet more riders kept coming. Tune in to learn more about this major victory for the Civil Rights movement in this follow-up episode.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Sarah Daddy and I'm to bleed in Chuck Reporting.
And this September we are commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of
(00:20):
the Interstate Commerce Commissions ruling that all interstate bus and
train facilities in the US had to pull down signs
segregating whites and blacks. And it was the result of
summer long effort by a group that called themselves the
Freedom Writers to test laws that were already on the books.
(00:40):
But we're just largely ignored through many Southern states. So
picking up where we left off, the original core writers
have been badly beaten, traumatized, and essentially evacuated out of
Birmingham for New Orleans by a special assistant to Attorney
General Robert Kennedy. And it seemed like at this time
that the Freedom Ride that had started May four, nineteen
sixty one in d C was over at this point. Yeah, well,
(01:04):
and we should we should say too, Like, if you
are a listener who drops in on Random podcast, it
really is worth going back and checking out that first
episode because it will help give you the context you
need for this one is a part two, but we
left it a real cliffhanger there. That was that was
a crucial moment there in New Orleans defeated. It seems
(01:26):
the Kennedy's feel that things are wrapped up to their satisfaction,
but then suddenly they get news out of Nashville that
things aren't over at all. Right. Students in Nashville, many
of them were veterans of the lunch counter sit ins,
though still in their teens in early twenties, they decided
that the ride could not end in violence. So, spearheaded
(01:47):
by Diane Nash, who was a Fisk student, many members
of the Nashville student movement decided to skip their finals
and go to Alabama. Yeah, get on a bus and
they completely know what's at stake. This is the part
that's just crazy to me. They make their wills, these
young kids, and they board busses to Birmingham. Nash, who
coordinates the whole thing from home base in Nashville, basically
(02:09):
tells the Birmingham pasture, we're coming. Yeah, And I mean
the wills is the really shocking part. But the leaving
before finals is a really big deal too, because a
lot of these kids are the first members of their
family to go to college, but they decide that continuing
the freedom rides, not letting non violence and in violence
like this, is more important. So this time, though, the
(02:32):
makeup of the riders is a little different from the
first ride, which was all staged by the group Core.
It's still a mix of black and white men and women,
and they're taking Greyhound and Trailways busses just like before,
but they're all quite young this time. There were middle
aged folks retired people last time. Most of them now though,
are nineteen twenty. And there are also a lot more
(02:54):
Southerners in the group, so kids from Atlanta and Nashville,
of course, Charleston, Tampa, in addition to kids from other
parts of the country New York, Oklahoma, Illinois. It's it's
kind of a more diverse group in that sense. A
strange thing happens when they get to Birmingham, though. When
the first bus arrives Commissioner of Public Safety Bull Connor,
(03:14):
who we mentioned in the last podcast, he lets the
regular passengers off, covers the window with paper and then
holds the remaining people on board, and finally, after they
sweat it out in the may heat for a while,
they're let off and then they proceed to the White
waiting area and they're arrested that night. They're released from
(03:35):
jail and put into cars, which is very ominous, but
they drive right to the state line of Alabama and
Tennessee and they're told by Connor to get out and
make their way back to Nashville. From there, Tennessee State
University student Katherine Burke's Brooks tells Connor that we'll see
you back in Birmingham by high noon, So they're not
about to be put down, no, And and this is
(03:56):
still a scary situation though, that they've just been dropped
off the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night.
They don't know if maybe there's some vigilante group the
Clan waiting for them on the other side of the border,
bullet Bull Connor is just handing them off, or what
they're gonna do. So they hide. They find shelter with
an older couple and by the next day nash has
(04:20):
arranged from Afar a ride for them to get back
to Birmingham, and I don't think they make it by noon,
but they do make it back the next day. But
by the time they're back in Birmingham, the Nashville Riders
meet the second wave of their group. They are just
like last time, different buses traveling into Alabama, but there's
a problem. Besides Bull Connor in the threatening crowd, the
(04:43):
bus drivers won't drive, so the riders are stuck there again.
They're stuck in Birmingham, and we mentioned this in the
last episode, individual bus drivers refusing to drive because they
were afraid they would get their bus set on fire
or be beaten or something. But in this case, the
entire union refusing to drive, so there's really no way
(05:04):
out of town again. So for the moment, it's looking
kind of hopeless, but the Kennedy administration finally pressures Alabama's
Governor John Patterson to promise protection or else face having
the National Guard called in, and so Patterson agrees to
provide state protection as the writers continue their trip to Montgomery, Alabama. Yeah,
we mentioned this American Heritage documentary in the last episode,
(05:26):
based on Raymond Arseno's book, and it really contained some
great interviews with former freedom writers. But it's worth watching,
I think, just to see Katherine Burke's Brooks expression as
she recalls feeling relaxed enough to doze on the bush.
It's kind of an expression like what was I thinking,
mixed with total disappointment, a little sarcasm thrown in there.
(05:46):
It's it's a you should watch it just to see that.
But that feeling, that total relaxation, able to fall asleep
on the bus feeling, obviously doesn't last very long because
in Montgomery the state protection drops off, and they're thinking, well,
the city police will pick up protection, but nobody ever comes.
(06:07):
So here the bus is just rolling into Montgomery with
no one around them. Yeah, and John Seagan Thaler, Robert
Kennedy's assistant, the man who had been negotiating with the
governor about providing state protection. He remembered thinking, quote, I
knew suddenly betrayal, disaster, I hope not death. So he's
scared too. At this point, a mob of more than
two hundred weights at the Greyhound station for them. The
(06:30):
first target this time is the reporters and a cameraman
because the mob has seen how quickly these pictures get out,
not just in the South, not just in the United States,
but all over the world, and they don't want that
to happen again. So for a sense of what this
would have been like for the reporters, Time reporter Calvin Trillin,
who took part in the rise as a journalist, recently
wrote in The New Yorker that he'd tell his friend,
(06:52):
a life photographer, quote, when we get in one of
the situations, At best, I don't know you. At worst,
I'm one of the people chasing you. Of course, the
writers were also very severely beaten. As a white writer,
Jim's Work was quickly beaten, unconscious and kicked in the
face before going down. Though he remembered seeing men armed
with baseball bats, chains, hammers, and this is crazy, even
(07:15):
one guy with a pitchfork, so imagine that coming towards you.
Berks Brooks remembers women shouting with babies in their arms.
It was a spectacle. In addition to this really violent scene,
and John Lewis, who had been part of the original
core ride and had been actually attacked in South Carolina,
was hit in the head with a wooden crate, and
William Barbie had somebody try to drive a steel rod
(07:39):
through his ear, and even Sign Dollar, who was the
direct representative to the president, was hit with a pipe
trying to help one of the female Freedom writers and
he was knocked unconscious. So finally the police arrived they
broke up the crowd with tear gas. So the next
day May One sort of marks at turning point for
(08:01):
the freedom rides. The riders and fIF undred supporters filled
the First Baptist Church in Montgomery for a meeting, and
by this point Martin Luther King and the larger movement
really had to get involved in stand behind the riders,
even though, as we mentioned before, many were ambivalent about
the ride initially or even thought it would come out
(08:22):
hurting the movement, But after the violence that had had happened,
they had to all stand together and and support the ride,
And so Martin Luther King actually comes down to Montgomery
to meet up with everyone here at the church. Outside
the church, though, a mom of three thousand gathers and
they're breaking windows, threatening to burn down the church. The
(08:45):
marshals that are set into control the crowd are just
random federal workers. They dispersed tear gas with the wind
blowing towards them and end up having to run away.
They just have little patches on their sleeves, not even uniforms.
So after that there's this night of phone calls. Martin
Luther King is on the phone with Robert Kennedy trying
to get him to do something. Robert Kennedy is on
(09:05):
the phone with Paterson, trying to get him to act.
Martin Luther King even even gathers up a group of
committed nonviolent volunteers to leave the church and dissuade a
group of black cab drivers from using violence against the mom.
So they're still trying to stick to their principle of
non violence here. It's the best way for them to
hopefully get out of this situation too. So finally the
(09:26):
governor puts the city under martial law, and people in
the church are free, you know, the crowd has broken up.
They're free to go, and the Freedom Riders are also
free to continue under the protection this time of the
Alabama National Guard. So they hit the road heading towards Mississippi,
and at the border, the Mississippi National Guard takes over
(09:46):
with commands to take the bus right on through to Jackson,
no stops, no trouble, and it kind of seems like
they're out of the frying pan into the fire here.
Because Mississippi was considered the most dangerous southern in state.
You can hear them talking about how as bad as
Alabama had had been for them, Mississippi seemed like there
might be worth the worst things waiting, and there were
(10:10):
scary signs right across the border. There were signs that
said things like quote prepared to meet Thy God. So
it looked like it was going to be as bad
as they thought it was going to be. But response
that they get there is quite different from Alabama's messy
mob violence. According to Trillan, the former Time reporter, Mississippi's
Citizens Council and State Sovereignty Commission wanted to avoid national
(10:31):
news scandals and presidential interference too, and the president an
attorney general wanted to avoid the violence and beatings on
the national news, so they made this compromise. Instead of
mob violence, there would be an organized, rapid police response.
So what does that mean. This basically means that the
first writers from trail Ways disembarked the bus, went to
(10:54):
the Whites waiting room and were asked to leave politely,
and after they refused, they were arrest stood, and this
happened again with the greyhound bus. The charges against them
are things like a breach of peace. Yeah, so it's
this very orderly, non violent, uh, comparatively calm. Yeah, maybe
even disturbingly common. I don't know, after what they've gone through.
(11:16):
But from there they'd be quickly processed and sent through court,
put into the city jail, and then eventually shipped off
not just to any old prison, but to the state
penitentiary Parchment State Prison Farm, which was one of the
most notorious prisons in the country. Just a little side note,
even if you don't know about Parchment, you've probably heard
(11:40):
about it if you've listened really carefully to blues or
folk recordings, because in the nineteen thirties Allen Lomax recorded
singers and bluesmen for the Library of Congress, singing really
sad songs about how hard life was in Parchment. But
the freedom writers didn't have the expected reaction that all
the author reads in Mississippi thought they would have. They
(12:01):
thought that they would just post bail, get out and
not got back. Yeah, get out of town. But instead
they take up the slogan jail no bail and resolved
to fill up the prison and clog up their system.
So buslos of them just keep coming through that summer,
even though On May Robert Kennedy petitioned the Interstate Commerce
Commission to prohibit segregation and interstate bus travel and pleaded
(12:25):
with the writers to take a cooling off period while
the request was processed. So he was basically like, Okay,
we're trying to put this through. Can you guys please
stop for a little while. He was encouraging them to
shift their attention to voter registration, you know, something something
to work on. Please let this go. But they were
completely unwilling to do that. They rejected the cooling off period,
(12:46):
and instead the rides intensified. Ultimately, three hundred of the
four hundred and thirty six Freedom Writers ended up at
Parchment Prison, and finally, by September the anniversary, we are
commemorating here the I c C issue of the order
that all segregated signs would come down at interstate bus
(13:08):
and train terminals. Um and we've got to talk about
the the effect of the rides and what people thought
at the time, since they were kind of unpopular at
the beginning, even within the movement. According to the New
Yorker article we mentioned earlier, in nineteen sixty one Gallop
poll showed that only one in four Americans approved of
(13:28):
the rides, but after the victory, it was clear that
they had accomplished something. They had been effective. Yeah, so
they saw that nonviolent activism could really work. According to
a Smithsonian article by Marion Smith Holmes the New York Times,
for example, which was formerly critical of the rides, they
admitted that the Freedom Writers quotes started the chain of
events which resulted in the new I c. C Order.
(13:51):
It also had the effect of empowering young student leaders
in the movement and of forcing ties between the Kennedy
administration and civil rights leaders. Exactly those late nite phone
calls we were talking about, where Martin Luther king Is
is calling up the Kennedy's and all of these nineteen
year old twenty year olds who decide to leave school
during their exams and go out and do this. But
(14:14):
in addition to Raymond Arsenow's book and that American Experience
documentary that is inspired by it, there is just so
much on this story. It's a really it's a really
great one. If you want to do some research yourself
and get even deeper into it. Their countless interviews and
articles by former writers and politicians and journalists and there's
(14:34):
a great photographic record too, and I wanted to just
talk about that a little bit more because I think
it's so interesting. So there aren't just images of the
violent beatings and the burning buses and the segregated waiting rooms,
those images that really went across international newspaper headlines. There
are also kind of more personal images too. So in
(14:57):
two thousand two, the Mississippi the State Sovereignty Commission was
forced to open its archives after this lengthy, like multi
decade long lawsuit with the American Civil Liberties Union, And
after that, three hundred mug shots of the Freedom Writers
became available for the first time, and an editor named
(15:18):
Eric Etheridge decided to He was really moved by all
of these photos of these people who have been arrested
and kind of have these defiant looks. Some of them
are almost smiling, some of them have clearly been roughed up.
But he decided to seek out the Freedom Writers that
were photographed and re photographed them, since they would, of
(15:39):
course all be mature adults by that point, and he
just cold called them. He told Smithsonian that his quote
best ice breaker was I have your mug shot from
nineteen sixty one have you ever seen it. It's a
very cool story. He got a lot of photos, made
a book out of it, and it is really interesting
too to see what these people went on to do
(16:01):
with the rest of their lives after after doing something
like this, maybe when they're only nineteen years old. Yeah,
I mean I have to imagine that it was thrilling
to call them and maybe meet them. I mean, these people,
no matter what you think about their strategy, how they
went about what they did, they were uniquely brave people. Yeah,
and to find out how many of them were still
(16:23):
involved in activism or had continued work that seemed really
fitting for somebody who was a former freedom writer, somebody
who would go out and and do this. So, while
we are done talking about the freedom rides in the
American South, were not quite done with this topic because
people in Australia were motivated also in the nineteen sixties
(16:43):
to stage their own freedom rides, and that's going to
get its whole owned episode next time we talk. So
stay tuned. If you want to learn a little bit
more about the freedom rides, you can also suggest other
civil rights topics, or maybe you're getting to be for Australia,
you can send other Australian topics to us by emailing
(17:04):
us at History podcast at how stuff works dot com.
We're also on Twitter at Misston History and we are
on Facebook. And if you want to learn a little
bit more about some of the topics discussed today, we
have an article called how the a c LU works
and you can find it on our website by going
to our homepage at www dot how stuff works dot com.
(17:27):
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today on iTunes.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Sarah Daddy and I'm to bleed in Chuck Reporting.
And this September we are commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of
(00:20):
the Interstate Commerce Commissions ruling that all interstate bus and
train facilities in the US had to pull down signs
segregating whites and blacks. And it was the result of
summer long effort by a group that called themselves the
Freedom Writers to test laws that were already on the books.
(00:40):
But we're just largely ignored through many Southern states. So
picking up where we left off, the original core writers
have been badly beaten, traumatized, and essentially evacuated out of
Birmingham for New Orleans by a special assistant to Attorney
General Robert Kennedy. And it seemed like at this time
that the Freedom Ride that had started May four, nineteen
sixty one in d C was over at this point. Yeah, well,
(01:04):
and we should we should say too, Like, if you
are a listener who drops in on Random podcast, it
really is worth going back and checking out that first
episode because it will help give you the context you
need for this one is a part two, but we
left it a real cliffhanger there. That was that was
a crucial moment there in New Orleans defeated. It seems
(01:26):
the Kennedy's feel that things are wrapped up to their satisfaction,
but then suddenly they get news out of Nashville that
things aren't over at all. Right. Students in Nashville, many
of them were veterans of the lunch counter sit ins,
though still in their teens in early twenties, they decided
that the ride could not end in violence. So, spearheaded
(01:47):
by Diane Nash, who was a Fisk student, many members
of the Nashville student movement decided to skip their finals
and go to Alabama. Yeah, get on a bus and
they completely know what's at stake. This is the part
that's just crazy to me. They make their wills, these
young kids, and they board busses to Birmingham. Nash, who
coordinates the whole thing from home base in Nashville, basically
(02:09):
tells the Birmingham pasture, we're coming. Yeah, And I mean
the wills is the really shocking part. But the leaving
before finals is a really big deal too, because a
lot of these kids are the first members of their
family to go to college, but they decide that continuing
the freedom rides, not letting non violence and in violence
like this, is more important. So this time, though, the
(02:32):
makeup of the riders is a little different from the
first ride, which was all staged by the group Core.
It's still a mix of black and white men and women,
and they're taking Greyhound and Trailways busses just like before,
but they're all quite young this time. There were middle
aged folks retired people last time. Most of them now though,
are nineteen twenty. And there are also a lot more
(02:54):
Southerners in the group, so kids from Atlanta and Nashville,
of course, Charleston, Tampa, in addition to kids from other
parts of the country New York, Oklahoma, Illinois. It's it's
kind of a more diverse group in that sense. A
strange thing happens when they get to Birmingham, though. When
the first bus arrives Commissioner of Public Safety Bull Connor,
(03:14):
who we mentioned in the last podcast, he lets the
regular passengers off, covers the window with paper and then
holds the remaining people on board, and finally, after they
sweat it out in the may heat for a while,
they're let off and then they proceed to the White
waiting area and they're arrested that night. They're released from
(03:35):
jail and put into cars, which is very ominous, but
they drive right to the state line of Alabama and
Tennessee and they're told by Connor to get out and
make their way back to Nashville. From there, Tennessee State
University student Katherine Burke's Brooks tells Connor that we'll see
you back in Birmingham by high noon, So they're not
about to be put down, no, And and this is
(03:56):
still a scary situation though, that they've just been dropped
off the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night.
They don't know if maybe there's some vigilante group the
Clan waiting for them on the other side of the border,
bullet Bull Connor is just handing them off, or what
they're gonna do. So they hide. They find shelter with
an older couple and by the next day nash has
(04:20):
arranged from Afar a ride for them to get back
to Birmingham, and I don't think they make it by noon,
but they do make it back the next day. But
by the time they're back in Birmingham, the Nashville Riders
meet the second wave of their group. They are just
like last time, different buses traveling into Alabama, but there's
a problem. Besides Bull Connor in the threatening crowd, the
(04:43):
bus drivers won't drive, so the riders are stuck there again.
They're stuck in Birmingham, and we mentioned this in the
last episode, individual bus drivers refusing to drive because they
were afraid they would get their bus set on fire
or be beaten or something. But in this case, the
entire union refusing to drive, so there's really no way
(05:04):
out of town again. So for the moment, it's looking
kind of hopeless, but the Kennedy administration finally pressures Alabama's
Governor John Patterson to promise protection or else face having
the National Guard called in, and so Patterson agrees to
provide state protection as the writers continue their trip to Montgomery, Alabama. Yeah,
we mentioned this American Heritage documentary in the last episode,
(05:26):
based on Raymond Arseno's book, and it really contained some
great interviews with former freedom writers. But it's worth watching,
I think, just to see Katherine Burke's Brooks expression as
she recalls feeling relaxed enough to doze on the bush.
It's kind of an expression like what was I thinking,
mixed with total disappointment, a little sarcasm thrown in there.
(05:46):
It's it's a you should watch it just to see that.
But that feeling, that total relaxation, able to fall asleep
on the bus feeling, obviously doesn't last very long because
in Montgomery the state protection drops off, and they're thinking, well,
the city police will pick up protection, but nobody ever comes.
(06:07):
So here the bus is just rolling into Montgomery with
no one around them. Yeah, and John Seagan Thaler, Robert
Kennedy's assistant, the man who had been negotiating with the
governor about providing state protection. He remembered thinking, quote, I
knew suddenly betrayal, disaster, I hope not death. So he's
scared too. At this point, a mob of more than
two hundred weights at the Greyhound station for them. The
(06:30):
first target this time is the reporters and a cameraman
because the mob has seen how quickly these pictures get out,
not just in the South, not just in the United States,
but all over the world, and they don't want that
to happen again. So for a sense of what this
would have been like for the reporters, Time reporter Calvin Trillin,
who took part in the rise as a journalist, recently
wrote in The New Yorker that he'd tell his friend,
(06:52):
a life photographer, quote, when we get in one of
the situations, At best, I don't know you. At worst,
I'm one of the people chasing you. Of course, the
writers were also very severely beaten. As a white writer,
Jim's Work was quickly beaten, unconscious and kicked in the
face before going down. Though he remembered seeing men armed
with baseball bats, chains, hammers, and this is crazy, even
(07:15):
one guy with a pitchfork, so imagine that coming towards you.
Berks Brooks remembers women shouting with babies in their arms.
It was a spectacle. In addition to this really violent scene,
and John Lewis, who had been part of the original
core ride and had been actually attacked in South Carolina,
was hit in the head with a wooden crate, and
William Barbie had somebody try to drive a steel rod
(07:39):
through his ear, and even Sign Dollar, who was the
direct representative to the president, was hit with a pipe
trying to help one of the female Freedom writers and
he was knocked unconscious. So finally the police arrived they
broke up the crowd with tear gas. So the next
day May One sort of marks at turning point for
(08:01):
the freedom rides. The riders and fIF undred supporters filled
the First Baptist Church in Montgomery for a meeting, and
by this point Martin Luther King and the larger movement
really had to get involved in stand behind the riders,
even though, as we mentioned before, many were ambivalent about
the ride initially or even thought it would come out
(08:22):
hurting the movement, But after the violence that had had happened,
they had to all stand together and and support the ride,
And so Martin Luther King actually comes down to Montgomery
to meet up with everyone here at the church. Outside
the church, though, a mom of three thousand gathers and
they're breaking windows, threatening to burn down the church. The
(08:45):
marshals that are set into control the crowd are just
random federal workers. They dispersed tear gas with the wind
blowing towards them and end up having to run away.
They just have little patches on their sleeves, not even uniforms.
So after that there's this night of phone calls. Martin
Luther King is on the phone with Robert Kennedy trying
to get him to do something. Robert Kennedy is on
(09:05):
the phone with Paterson, trying to get him to act.
Martin Luther King even even gathers up a group of
committed nonviolent volunteers to leave the church and dissuade a
group of black cab drivers from using violence against the mom.
So they're still trying to stick to their principle of
non violence here. It's the best way for them to
hopefully get out of this situation too. So finally the
(09:26):
governor puts the city under martial law, and people in
the church are free, you know, the crowd has broken up.
They're free to go, and the Freedom Riders are also
free to continue under the protection this time of the
Alabama National Guard. So they hit the road heading towards Mississippi,
and at the border, the Mississippi National Guard takes over
(09:46):
with commands to take the bus right on through to Jackson,
no stops, no trouble, and it kind of seems like
they're out of the frying pan into the fire here.
Because Mississippi was considered the most dangerous southern in state.
You can hear them talking about how as bad as
Alabama had had been for them, Mississippi seemed like there
might be worth the worst things waiting, and there were
(10:10):
scary signs right across the border. There were signs that
said things like quote prepared to meet Thy God. So
it looked like it was going to be as bad
as they thought it was going to be. But response
that they get there is quite different from Alabama's messy
mob violence. According to Trillan, the former Time reporter, Mississippi's
Citizens Council and State Sovereignty Commission wanted to avoid national
(10:31):
news scandals and presidential interference too, and the president an
attorney general wanted to avoid the violence and beatings on
the national news, so they made this compromise. Instead of
mob violence, there would be an organized, rapid police response.
So what does that mean. This basically means that the
first writers from trail Ways disembarked the bus, went to
(10:54):
the Whites waiting room and were asked to leave politely,
and after they refused, they were arrest stood, and this
happened again with the greyhound bus. The charges against them
are things like a breach of peace. Yeah, so it's
this very orderly, non violent, uh, comparatively calm. Yeah, maybe
even disturbingly common. I don't know, after what they've gone through.
(11:16):
But from there they'd be quickly processed and sent through court,
put into the city jail, and then eventually shipped off
not just to any old prison, but to the state
penitentiary Parchment State Prison Farm, which was one of the
most notorious prisons in the country. Just a little side note,
even if you don't know about Parchment, you've probably heard
(11:40):
about it if you've listened really carefully to blues or
folk recordings, because in the nineteen thirties Allen Lomax recorded
singers and bluesmen for the Library of Congress, singing really
sad songs about how hard life was in Parchment. But
the freedom writers didn't have the expected reaction that all
the author reads in Mississippi thought they would have. They
(12:01):
thought that they would just post bail, get out and
not got back. Yeah, get out of town. But instead
they take up the slogan jail no bail and resolved
to fill up the prison and clog up their system.
So buslos of them just keep coming through that summer,
even though On May Robert Kennedy petitioned the Interstate Commerce
Commission to prohibit segregation and interstate bus travel and pleaded
(12:25):
with the writers to take a cooling off period while
the request was processed. So he was basically like, Okay,
we're trying to put this through. Can you guys please
stop for a little while. He was encouraging them to
shift their attention to voter registration, you know, something something
to work on. Please let this go. But they were
completely unwilling to do that. They rejected the cooling off period,
(12:46):
and instead the rides intensified. Ultimately, three hundred of the
four hundred and thirty six Freedom Writers ended up at
Parchment Prison, and finally, by September the anniversary, we are
commemorating here the I c C issue of the order
that all segregated signs would come down at interstate bus
(13:08):
and train terminals. Um and we've got to talk about
the the effect of the rides and what people thought
at the time, since they were kind of unpopular at
the beginning, even within the movement. According to the New
Yorker article we mentioned earlier, in nineteen sixty one Gallop
poll showed that only one in four Americans approved of
(13:28):
the rides, but after the victory, it was clear that
they had accomplished something. They had been effective. Yeah, so
they saw that nonviolent activism could really work. According to
a Smithsonian article by Marion Smith Holmes the New York Times,
for example, which was formerly critical of the rides, they
admitted that the Freedom Writers quotes started the chain of
events which resulted in the new I c. C Order.
(13:51):
It also had the effect of empowering young student leaders
in the movement and of forcing ties between the Kennedy
administration and civil rights leaders. Exactly those late nite phone
calls we were talking about, where Martin Luther king Is
is calling up the Kennedy's and all of these nineteen
year old twenty year olds who decide to leave school
during their exams and go out and do this. But
(14:14):
in addition to Raymond Arsenow's book and that American Experience
documentary that is inspired by it, there is just so
much on this story. It's a really it's a really
great one. If you want to do some research yourself
and get even deeper into it. Their countless interviews and
articles by former writers and politicians and journalists and there's
(14:34):
a great photographic record too, and I wanted to just
talk about that a little bit more because I think
it's so interesting. So there aren't just images of the
violent beatings and the burning buses and the segregated waiting rooms,
those images that really went across international newspaper headlines. There
are also kind of more personal images too. So in
(14:57):
two thousand two, the Mississippi the State Sovereignty Commission was
forced to open its archives after this lengthy, like multi
decade long lawsuit with the American Civil Liberties Union, And
after that, three hundred mug shots of the Freedom Writers
became available for the first time, and an editor named
(15:18):
Eric Etheridge decided to He was really moved by all
of these photos of these people who have been arrested
and kind of have these defiant looks. Some of them
are almost smiling, some of them have clearly been roughed up.
But he decided to seek out the Freedom Writers that
were photographed and re photographed them, since they would, of
(15:39):
course all be mature adults by that point, and he
just cold called them. He told Smithsonian that his quote
best ice breaker was I have your mug shot from
nineteen sixty one have you ever seen it. It's a
very cool story. He got a lot of photos, made
a book out of it, and it is really interesting
too to see what these people went on to do
(16:01):
with the rest of their lives after after doing something
like this, maybe when they're only nineteen years old. Yeah,
I mean I have to imagine that it was thrilling
to call them and maybe meet them. I mean, these people,
no matter what you think about their strategy, how they
went about what they did, they were uniquely brave people. Yeah,
and to find out how many of them were still
(16:23):
involved in activism or had continued work that seemed really
fitting for somebody who was a former freedom writer, somebody
who would go out and and do this. So, while
we are done talking about the freedom rides in the
American South, were not quite done with this topic because
people in Australia were motivated also in the nineteen sixties
(16:43):
to stage their own freedom rides, and that's going to
get its whole owned episode next time we talk. So
stay tuned. If you want to learn a little bit
more about the freedom rides, you can also suggest other
civil rights topics, or maybe you're getting to be for Australia,
you can send other Australian topics to us by emailing
(17:04):
us at History podcast at how stuff works dot com.
We're also on Twitter at Misston History and we are
on Facebook. And if you want to learn a little
bit more about some of the topics discussed today, we
have an article called how the a c LU works
and you can find it on our website by going
to our homepage at www dot how stuff works dot com.
(17:27):
Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff
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