Yesterday, I was doing what all card-carrying Liberal Academic Elites do with their Thursday mornings -- you know: sipping a soy latte, streaming NPR on my MacBook, grading midterms -- when I heard Neal Conan say:
Fifty years ago this month, seven black and six white people took the fight for civil rights to the Deep South...
So I put down my latte and my bluebooks, at least for a few minutes, and started listening. And maybe it's because I spend a lot of my time on a college campus, but for whatever reason, out of all the war stories of Bull Conner and Parchman Farm, these are the lines that stood out to me from the segment (here Conan is interviewing Freedom Rider Rip Patton, :
CONAN: ... people had to drop out of school, out of college to go on that trip. This was in the middle of final exams.
Mr. PATTON: This was the month of May, and this was final exams. And so you had to make a choice. You either stay and finish and do your exams or due to the urgency of the Freedom Rides, you go on the Freedom Rides and that's what we did.
I don't have much to say on this. I just wanted to take a moment to commemorate the young men and women who skipped out on their final exams, 50 years ago this month, to get on a Greyhound bus to a place where they would likely get arrested and could get killed.
There'll be more coverage of the anniversary all month. On May 16, PBS will premiere a new documentary. Oprah reconvened a group of Freedom Riders for a 50th reunion the other day. And here's an interview in the AJC with Rep. John Lewis:
“My seatmate was a young white gentleman named Albert Bigelow. He was from Connecticut. Wonderful man. We arrived in a little town called Rock Hill, S.C. We got off the bus and started into a so-called white waiting room and the moment we started through the door a group of young white men attacked us and started beating us and left us in a pool of blood. We were asked if we wanted to press charges. We said no.”
