Election Section

Freedom Riders reunite in Mississippi

By Deborah Bulkeley The Associated Press
Saturday November 10, 2001

It’s been 40 years since they fought segregation in the Deep South 

 

JACKSON, Miss. — In the summer of 1961, blacks and whites embarked together on buses to search for “White Only” and “Colored Only” businesses whose segregationist rules they would proudly disobey. 

Led largely by students from Northern colleges, the Freedom Riders were ridiculed, arrested and sometimes beaten. But their campaign brought national attention to segregation, and hundreds joined them. 

On Friday, the Freedom Riders gathered in Jackson, one of dozens of cities they helped transform. 

“It was something I felt I had to do because my very person-hood, my very salvation, was tied up not only with African-Americans being oppressed, but also with white people,” said the Rev. John R. Washington, a 61-year-old former Freedom Rider. “The biggest challenge in this nation was that black and white come together.” 

Washington, of Claremont, Calif., returned to Mississippi’s capital for the first time in four decades. Jackson, the state’s largest city with a population of about 185,000, now has a black mayor and a majority-black City Council. Its once all-white police force is fully integrated, as are its public schools. 

“I hoped and I knew that there would be some progress,” Washington said. “There is a sense it has exceeded my expectations.” 

The Rev. Ed King, a faculty member at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, said the reunion is a rare opportunity for the Freedom Riders to see the progress they’ve helped achieve. 

“Nobody ever expects to live to see as much change as we have seen,” he said. “This ought to give hope today to those who are desperate that the things they do can make a difference.” 

Jackson native Fred Clark, 58, a middle school teacher, remembers being arrested when he and a group of neighborhood youngsters tried to enter a white waiting room in a segregated bus station. 

“I was so scared,” he said. “We were standing there shaking.” 

Clark hoped the reunion will give black children a sense of those who fought for their freedom. 

“They need to know where they came from so they can know where they are going,” he said. 

Gov. Ronnie Musgrove marked the reunion by declaring Saturday “Freedom Riders Day.” 

“We salute the heroic efforts in 1961 of the Freedom Riders, and their role as an inspiration to others to follow on the long, often perilous road to end segregation,” his declaration said. 

While in Jackson, the group is documenting their experiences for an oral history project. They talked of their days behind bars at the Parchman state prison in the Delta, where they slept on musty mattresses in reeking cells. 

“If you weren’t scared, you were crazy,” said 70-year-old former Freedom Rider Marv Davidoff, who teaches at St. Thomas University in St. Paul, Minn. 

His most vivid memory of Parchman, he said, wasn’t the angry whites or crowded cells. It was the freedom songs that moved him to tears on his first night in the prison. 

“It was a moment of blessed human solidarity,” he said. “It’s a gift that we gave to each other.” 

 

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On the Net: http://www.freedomridersfoundation.org