May 4, 1961: Thirteen Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) activists boarded buses and launched what became the Freedom Rides, a grassroots mobilization to desegregate interstate travel. They began the journey in Washington, D.C. with tickets to New Orleans. As they traveled south, Freedom Riders suffered near fatal physical violence and responded non-violently. They also inspired a movement that grew tremendously as more and more Americans boarded buses to forge change. By early summer there were hundreds of Freedom Riders representing a wide collection of activist organizations. One of the original Freedom Riders was Kwame Ture, formerly known as Stokely Carmichael. He later reflected on the simplicity yet complexity of the basic Freedom Ride strategy: “CORE would be sending an integrated team—black and white together—from the nation’s capital to New Orleans on public transportation. That’s all. Except, of course, that they would sit randomly on the buses in integrated pairs and in the stations they would use waiting room facilities casually, ignoring the white/colored signs. What could be more harmless?”
Citations: Raymond Arsenault, Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), xi, 2-3, https://archive.org/details/freedomriders1960000arse; Stokely Carmichael and Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) (New York: Scribner, 2003), 178, https://archive.org/details/readyforrevoluti00carm; Carol M. Highsmith, “Greyhound Bus Station at 210 South Court Street in Montgomery, Alabama,” (February 20, 2010), https://lccn.loc.gov/2010637466.
Comentários