If any group of American children today was asked, “Can black and white people use the same bathrooms? Can they eat together at the same table in a restaurant?,” the answer would be a resounding, “of course.”
Many children, teens, and young adults today will never be able to understand the hostile segregation that was prevalent in the South just 50 years ago. They owe this to the civil rights movement and to those who began to draw national attention to the movement in 1961: the Freedom Riders.
The documentary Freedom Riders had its premiere Tennessee showing at Regal Cinema Green Hills as a part of the Nashville Film Festival on Wednesday, April 21. The film was followed by a question-and-answer session where actual Nashville Freedom Riders voiced their opinions about the movie and their experiences in the rides.
The film was sponsored by Lipscomb’s School of Humanities, and was moderated by Norma Burgess, dean of the Lipscomb College of Arts and Sciences. Also in attendance were Ted Parks, associate Spanish teacher at Lipscomb, and Richard Goode, a professor of history at Lipscomb who teaches a class on the Civil Rights Movement.
Freedom Riders takes an in-depth look at the journey of over 400 Americans who helped bring some of the first national attention to the physical abuses of protesters of segregation in the South.
While teachers and history books give great detail in Dr. King’s involvement in the movement, the Freedom Riders get little attention. The concept of a Freedom Ride first arose from a group called the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in Washington, D.C. The group aimed to test the decision of Boynton v. Virginia (1960), which was supposed to end segregation in interstate travel, such as travel by Greyhound bus.
What CORE found was that while travel was smooth all the way to Atlanta, traveling further into the deep South revealed many whites who would not tolerate the totally legal actions recently passed, like non-whites going into diners, restrooms, bus stations and terminals.
In Anniston, Ala., one of the buses was bombed. In Birmingham, Public Safety Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor gave Ku Klux Klan members fifteen minutes to beat the travelers until police forces would step in and stop them.
Members of the D.C. Freedom Riders received hundreds of stitches and lost pints of blood. Images from these attacks provide many Americans their first glimpse of the aggression of segregation in the south. The inhumanity was shocking to many that people could be so violently attacked for simply sitting on the “wrong” end of the bus.
While the initial group of Freedom Riders from D.C. ceased traveling in Birmingham, students from universities in Nashville like Tennessee State University and Fisk University were determined to continue the rides. They sent dozens of students to Birmingham to ride to Jackson, Miss., where many of them were jailed and sent to Parchman Penitentiary, a forced labor prison.
Some of these former students featured in the documentary were in attendance to voice their opinions on the movie and their role in the rides, and among them was Kwame Lillard.
“You had these 18 and 19-year-old kids changing America and that brought a whole new generation out to change other things,” said Lillard. “We started the civil rights movement, but behind that came the end of the Vietnam War, came the environmental movement, came the womens’ rights movement.”
Many of the freedom riders were the same age as or younger than Lipscomb students during the movement: 75 percent were under 30 years old. Of the 400 freedom riders, there was nearly an even split of black and white participants from all over the United States.
The film is sure to get attention with those familiar with the Civil Rights Movement, those who are interested in learning about some of the dark past of the South, and those seeking inspiration from leaders who started a social revolution in the United States.
For more information on the Freedom Riders, including photos, videos and testimonies, check out FreedomRidersFilm.com.
April 21, 2010 — Nashville, Tennessee — Freedom Rider screening at NaFF. Photo Credit: Frank Keesee