In Archival Fashions, Archival Photographs on
November 18, 2008, tagged Joseph Scherschel, Life Magazine with no comments
Life magazine has just released its photo archive to the web — about 10 million images, most of which have never been published — on a site hosted by Google. I quickly searched for photographs from the Freedom Rides, and found several images that are new to me. The one above was shot by Joseph Scherschel, a staff photographer for Life and also National Geographic (he died in 2004).
I’ve never seen a U.S. Army uniform bearing a Stars & Bars patch. The information on the Life/Google site only indicates the picture was made in May 1961, but not where or on what day. I suspect but can’t prove this soldier was among those accompanying the Riders on the first two buses from Montgomery, AL, to Jackson, MS, on May 24.
The soldiers were there to protect the Riders, who had been viciously attacked three times by mobs in Alabama. But the site of Rebel Flag bearing soldiers must have been cold comfort for the Riders.
In Freedom Riders on Obama's Victory on
November 13, 2008, with 1 comment
This is the fourth in a series of posts by Freedom Riders in response to Barack Obama’s victory (see the other entries here.)
Helen Singleton was a student at Santa Monica City College when she joined the Freedom Rides, along with her husband, Robert. They were arrested July 30, 1961, at the train station in Jackson. Helen, whose mug shot and portrait are featured on the cover of Breach of Peace, has worked as an artist and an arts administrator, consulting for such organizations as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the California Arts Council. She and Robert live in Los Angeles.
Both political parties are saying they don’t want another lengthy election season like the one we just went through. But for the campaign of 2008, America needed every moment of it. It took 21 months to grasp the mettle of Barack Obama, and the process revealed a lot about us all.
As an African-American who participated in the Civil Rights movement, I felt a familiarity with Obama’s task. It had taken years of struggle and suffering for our efforts to result in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Many Blacks were wary of his candidacy. We’d seen dreams deferred. And, though we knew there were many white Americans who believe in racial equality and would judge him on his merits, would enough white Americans vote for him?
I watched with apprehension as hidden prejudices were revealed. And with guarded glee as Obama carefully stepped through racial and political minefields. I tried to understand some voters’ resistance to him. He didn’t have a history or a story that they could relate to. He hadn’t experienced that historical relationship that whites had with Negroes, Coloreds, Blacks, African-Americans. He wasn’t a sharecropper’s son who had pulled himself up. He wasn’t from a part of the country they could identify with culturally. He had lived in a foreign country that most Americans couldn’t find on a map. His family wasn’t poor. He didn’t have that “Presidential” look that conveys experience and wisdom. His family wasn’t rich. He was rising too fast. He had not been tested. Who does he think he is?
But he grew on us. In these 21 months we saw discipline. We witnessed toughness where difficult decisions demanded it. We saw an organizer extraordinaire. We learned from his philosophy. We agonized while he deliberated and gradually realized his brilliance. He was a quick study. He listened to those who disagreed with him. He empathized with the less fortunate. He gave credit and recognition to those who helped him. He seemed indefatigable. He kept his cool in crisis. He was what we needed in a leader.
Yes, he stands on the shoulders of those who struggled for social justice. But I am not just proud that he is African-American. I am proud that he is exceptionally well suited to lead the country at this time. And I am proud that most Americans by choosing him chose a new identity for the nation as a moral leader of the free world. I am proud that we are beginning to live up to our promise. Yes, we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.
I wish my parents had lived to witness this.
In Freedom Riders on Obama's Victory on
November 12, 2008, with 1 comment
This is the third in a series of posts by Freedom Riders in response to Barack Obama’s victory (see the other entries here.)
Margaret Leonard grew up in Macon and Atlanta, GA, and was a sophomore at Tulane University when she joined the Freedom Rides. She was arrested June 21, 1961, at the Trailways bus station. She went on to become a newspaper reporter and editor, as were both her parents, and worked at the Chattanooga Times, the St. Petersburg Times and a number of other papers. Today she is retired and lives in Tallahasee, FL.
When I was 12 or 13 years old, in the early 1950s, we had a family friend who had moved away from Macon and traveled around the world, becoming sophisticated enough to say anything, even very shocking things. He would come back in the summer to Georgia with his family and rent a house at St. Simons Island, where there were no blacks except servants, and servants were not allowed to swim in the ocean because the ocean was for us, the white people.
One summer my mother and my sister and I stayed a week with them at their rented house on the beach. Our friends had brought a bearer from India, an Indian man who was very dark, clearly not white. One day we drove over to Jekyll Island, which was undeveloped then, and found an empty beach where the bearer could swim in the ocean and not get caught. We swam there too, and I was aware that we were doing something dangerous. If somebody saw us swimming in the same ocean with a black person, we would all be in serious trouble. They would hurt the bearer and arrest us.
But nobody saw us, and later our world traveler friend explained his solution to the race problem. Somebody should lock us all up in a bedroom together (two at a time, I guess) and in a generation or two, there would be only one race, a mix. That was an amazing, shocking thing for anybody to say and I loved it. Of course, I knew, it would never happen. I didn’t realize then that it was already well launched. I didn’t know until a few years later that most of the people we thought were black were the mix, all shades. I didn’t know until 50 years later that I was kin to some of them.
For the rest of the ’50s and ’60s, I listened to people warning us against miscegenation, the terrible doom that would come if we integrated. I usually argued that nobody had anything like that in mind; all we in the movement wanted was equality, fair treatment, an equal chance at education, jobs, food, housing, the vote and the ocean.
We don’t have it all yet, but at least we do have miscegenation. In spite of the polls that predicted it, the election was still shocking and amazing. We elected a black President just because he was vastly, immeasurably superior to his opponent. And he’s not one race. He’s a mix. His mother was a lot smarter and bolder than I was, and Kansas was no doubt an easier place to grow up in than Georgia, but otherwise, she was just like me — same age, same confusion about whom to marry and where to live, same longing for different foreign places . . . Well, all right, probably not the same, but she was white like me, and he’s as much white as he is black. He knows us both.
Always, since I was born, we were two races. At the best of it, we tried to understand and help each other, be friends or at least work together, have some of the same goals, protect each other. But we have still always been black or white. Now somehow we got a President who’s both. It’s an amazing and shocking idea and by God, it happened. I wish my mother and father and sister had lived long enough to see it.
In Freedom Riders on Obama's Victory on
November 10, 2008, with 1 comment
This is the second in a series of posts by Freedom Riders in response to Barack Obama’s victory (see the other entries here.)
Robert Singleton (above) teaches economics at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife, Helen, who was also a Freedom Rider and who is pictured on the cover of Breach of Peace. In 1961 Robert was a graduate student at UCLA and Helen a student at Santa Monica City College. They were arrested on July 30, 1961, at the Jackson train station.
Like so many others, my wife and I guarded our optimism during the Obama campaign in fear of another stolen election, the “Bradley effect,” an “October Surprise” — or, worse than all of these — another assassination. But immediately after the announcement that declared Barak Obama our new President-elect, the phone rang nonstop with calls from fellow Freedom Riders, relatives and friends, many of them still shocked or sobbing with disbelief, and all of them declaring this the most incredible moment of their lives. Especially rewarding were calls from our three sons — all grown now — who wanted to share this moment with us and to thank us for taking part in the long and dangerous fight against racism in America.
On the morning after the election, I tried in vain to follow my schedule at Loyola Marymount University, which my syllabus said was a lecture on American fiscal policy, but several of my students had seen a copy of my mug shot in the photographic essay Breach of Peace. They insisted on hearing about the Freedom Rides, and what the success of that venture meant to the election of our first Black President-elect. There was no denying that this was a classic “teachable moment.”
I learned, from several previous inquiries of this kind, to keep a copy of Breach of Peace in my book bag and I circulated it among the students. I told them that I was not much older then than they are now when I decided that I had to do more than simply organize picket lines in sympathy with the student sit-ins and other efforts taking place in the South. The Freedom Rides were the first genuine opportunity to do more than simply talk about the inequity and injustice of racial discrimination and segregation and its effects on all Americans, of all races. It was a chance to join the fray on the front lines.
My main disappointment was that far fewer people joined the Freedom Rides than I predicted. I was almost certain that the call by civil rights leaders to “fill the jails” in Jackson, Mississippi, in protest against its Jim Crow laws would be answered by many thousands and supported by many millions. There was little doubt in my mind that we were part of a growing spirit in America that appeared capable of vanquishing the beasts of racism, segregation and discrimination. But a wave of assassinations — of Medgar Evers, John and Bobby Kennedy, Dr. King and Malcolm X — effectively killed that spirit.
The election of Barack Obama is the first time I have felt a reawakening of that spirit, but it will grow to its full potential only if we join him on the “front lines” when he calls for the inevitable sacrifices that will be needed to turn our nation around. He will need sufficient time to select his cabinet and develop policies that are designed to reverse the direction we have drifted during the Bush administration. We can only hope that he acts soon, before the spirit dies again.
In Freedom Riders on Obama's Victory on
November 6, 2008, tagged Obama with 10 comments
On Wednesday, I sent an email to several Freedom Riders asking them for their thoughts on what happened on Tuesday. I’ll be publishing their responses over the next several days. (See the subsequent entries here.)
First up is Paul Breines (above), who now teaches history at Boston College. Then a sophomore at the University of Wisconsin, he was arrested at the Greyhound station in Jackson on July 21. Along with many other Freedom Riders, he was incarcerated in Parchman Prison in the Mississippi Delta on August 4, the day President-elect Barack Obama was born.
Whatever happens, this is a precious moment. A couple of months ago, I met with a 6th grade class in an all-black charter school in Cambridge, MA. I found it very intense and moving. The kids were learning interview techniques and took notes; in the week following, each of the 24 students wrote me a letter, as part of practicing writing a business letter. The teacher had them answer certain questions, like what they will remember most about our get together. At one point, I had explained that my Freedom Rider group was met at the bus station in Jackson by racist white people who screamed at us and tried to push us around. A kid asked what the people screamed, and I explained about the phrase “nigger lover,” which was new to them. One of the letters I received ended with this (uncorrected): “I will always remember that you loved us nigers.”
I’m sure that other Freedom Riders have had the same experience I have had, namely, of having people, both black and white, say things to the effect that I must feel good and proud to realize that we helped to make the Obama candidacy possible. I’m also sure that, if I hadn’t taken part in the rides, I would now be saying the same thing to people who had. A kid in the class I visited asked me if I was proud of what I did. I said that I’m so glad that I did what I did and would do it again, but that like probably all of the white Riders, I was and remain in awe of the black people who did it. The kid who asked the question said, “Well, we’re proud of you.” And another one said, “Yeah, you were helpin’ us out.” I couldn’t speak. I just got tears in my eyes, so maybe they convinced me.
I wept again, for a long time, when Barack and Michelle Obama and their girls walked to the microphone at Grant Park Tuesday night. Shortly before then, I was disgusted and furious as it became clear that Proposition 8 in California was going to be approved. But when the Obama family walked forward, there was only that. My jaw dropped and tears started to flow. I thought: “LOOK AT THEM! They are black people and they are our First Family. He is my President; he is our President. This is too fucking amazing.” I went to YouTube and watched/listened to Freedom Singer videos and Shirley and Lee, “Let the Good Times Roll.”
I thought that if the Freedom Rides helped to make this possible, then, Jesus Christ, I don’t know what to say. I wished that Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman, and the four girls blown up in Birmingham were alive to see this. I thought of my childhood passion for Joe Louis and Jackie Robinson, and kept sobbing, like Jesse Jackson and so many others all over the country and the world, in relief and joy, and a sense of the vulnerability of it all.
(Read the second post in this series here.)
