Pool: Freedom Rides not that long ago
Monday night I was watching a documentary on the Freedom Rides of the 1960s when blacks tried to integrate buses, and it occurred to me the peo-ple doing hei-nous things were brought up when there was prayer in the schools.
You surely would not know it from watching the thugs carry-ing ball bats and iron rods and stomping people’s faces. One man was trying to hammer a pipe through a man’s ear. Some carried hammers, one carried a pitchfork.It shamed me that they were talking about my beloved state as being the worst one to try ride through on a bus or to enter a whites-only waiting room, perhaps even worse than Mississippi.
Mississippi Gov. Ross Barnett apparently learned how not to handle the Freedom Riders by the way they were handled in Alabama, where U.S. mar-shals had to be brought in to protect the protesters. He told white people to stay home and he would take care of it. He did so by throwing the riders in one of the most notorious pris-ons in the country. Undeterred, they tried to fill up the prison with sub-sequent riders.
What struck me most of all was the courage of those riders who knew they would be attacked while law enforcement stood by. They knew they would be beaten, and perhaps killed. Yet they dressed like they were going to church and boarded the buses ready to die for a cause, men and women alike, some white.How many of us would display that kind of courage for something that we believed in?
They understood they could not let the violence stop them. When one group was put out of com-mission another one was already selected to come behind them. And unlike the first idealistic riders, they knew exactly what was coming but rode anyway. One of the most horrific attacks happened outside Anniston. The mob at the bus station had punched holes in the tires. After the bus stopped outside of town the driver checked the tires, then just walked away. These were regular buses and some people on them were not connected to the struggle in anyway. The criminals that set the bus on fire trying to burn the people alive ran in fear it would blow up, allowing the people inside to struggle out of the burning bus. That was just 50 years ago when people acted like such animals.
A wonderful story in The Anniston Star shows how much things have changed. The son of one of those thugs, attorney Richard Couch, takes on a variety of clients regardless of financial status or race. One of the Freedom Riders said on television during the weekend he was sur-prised when he met Couch, who hugged him and apol-ogized. He told Couch he had nothing to apologize for–it was his father, not him. Then Couch asked the Freedom Rider if they could break bread together sometime.
One of the people who told her story was 12 years old and stunned at what she was seeing outside of her father’s business. He was one of the ones prom-ising a surprise for the Freedom Riders, but his daughter saw only people needing help. She went from person to person giv-ing them water and trying to help them. That made me proud. That is the true Southern way.Auburn graduationIn a surprising show of intolerance, a mother encouraged her daughter not to walk at her graduation from Auburn University because of the speaker.
Robert Gibbs, former White House press secre-tary, returned to Auburn where his parents had worked in the library and he had attended many games, to speak at the May graduation.
It is stunning that the mother so disliked either President Barack Obama or his chief spokesman that she did not want her daugh-ter to take part in one of the great ceremonies of one’s life.
What a pity.
