Freedom Riders 1
Leonard Pitts, Jr., talks with a veteran of the Freedom Riders,* young folks who offered their lives to end Jim Crow. The article appears today to mark tonight’s PBS documentary.
A nugget:
A bus was firebombed in Anniston, Ala. In Birmingham, police gave the Ku Klux Klan 15 minutes to beat riders to their heart’s content. Yet no Freedom Rider ever raised a hand in defense.
Get hit, don’t hit back. “You have to change your whole way of thinking,” Rip told me. “You have to love your fellow man, just like the Book says. He’s beating on you, kicking you, you’ve still got to love him.” It was not just a high Christian ideal, but also sound and effective strategy, the idea being that through the willingness to sacrifice your body, you made it clear as air to a watching world which side had the moral high ground, and which did not.
Which leads me to a thought I had the other day:
It’s common to hear folks say that “Americans are reluctant to talk about race.”
I have come to disagree.
White Americans are reluctant to talk about race, for to do so requires us to confront the legacy of white American society’s deeds.
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*Where I grew up, many of the grown-ups considered the Freedom Riders to be “outside agitators” come to destroy Our Way of Life(TM). Some persons still hold that point of view.
September 16, 2011 at 10:46 am
[…] As I have mentioned before, the reason we don’t “have a conversation about race” in America is because white folks don’t want to talk about it. Everyone else is willing to “have a conversation” (God, how I hate that overblown pretentious phrase!), but it would force white folks to face up to what white folks have done, so they ain’t talkin’. […]