This probably is the most significant thing that two people who are getting
toward the end of their life could do to hasten the time when in our own lifetime
we might see America live up to its dreams.
We recruited the riders for the
Freedom Ride by contacting all of our core chapters around the country.
We were looking for a mix of
black, white, young, middle-aged, older. We wanted to have one
member of the clergy on the trip.
The Freedom Rides were trying to say to America, "We are a diverse country, let's
act like a diverse country, where every part of the diversity is
equal and it's treated equally.
We started out with 14 Protestant ministers, eight white and six black
and four Reform rabbis, and we wound up with ten of us getting arrested.
We cannot submit to immoral laws which demand that we separate racially.
Nor can we conscientiously avoid entirely the situation in which these segregationist
laws operate contrary to the laws of the land.
The Freedom Rides were not all just about black people. We had many whites
and other nationalities and things who went along with what we were doing and
they were, they were doing exactly what we were doing. They were allowing
themselves to be abused in this effort.
Part of the disbelief that people had around the country, was the surprise
in learning that just simple things like eating at a lunch counter at a bus
station, if you did it interracially or if you went to the wrong waiting room
you could get beat up.
When we got to Birmingham, James Peck and I, we were scheduled to test the
facilities when we got into terminal the wall was surrounded by men and they all
came towards us and they just started beating on us and James went down almost
immediately. The blood started running.
I felt a hard blow and I was on the floor of the bus, face downward. Before long
somebody was on top of me and then it seemed that we were both being kicked
and pushed to the back of the bus.
The Freedom Riders introduced the notion
that there were whites who were as enraged as we were about racism and
about segregation
One major significance of the Freedom Rides, was its national character
it was interracial, it was inter-regional, it was secular and religious.
It's a kind of tipping point in the history of civil rights struggle.
It's a sense of empowerment that ordinary people can do extraordinary things.
That's what the Freedom Rides were all about.