This is the seventh in a series of posts by Freedom Riders in response to Barack Obama’s victory (see the other entries here.)

Joan Trumpauer Mulholland grew up in Arlington and Fairfax, VA. In 1961 she was living in Arlington and working on Capitol Hill, active with the Nonviolent Action Group protesting segregation in Washington, northern Virginia and Maryland.

After the Freedom Rides she transferred to Tougaloo College in Jackson, MS, graduating in 1964. She was active in the movement while in school, working alongside Medgar Evers, the field secretary of the NAACP in Mississippi, as well as many others. Evers was murdered in Jackson in 1963.

In 1964 she returned to Arlington, where she has lived since. She worked for the Smithsonian, and in the Department of Justice on a program helping communities resolve racial issues. From 1980 until her retirement in 2007, she taught in the Arlington public schools.

Election Night at last. I was too road weary from a 24+ hour marathon journey home from Labrador to Arlington, VA, to go anywhere and watch the returns with people. Instead, wearing my Obama T-shirt, I half listened to the early returns while going through six weeks’ worth of mail. And hoped I could stay awake until there was a winner. Then came a call from my friend Jodie in Makkovik, Labrador. She’d finally gotten the kids down, her husband was off on a two-week shift in the nickel mine in Voiseys Bay, and she wanted to share the evening with someone who’d understand — like me.

So, connected by the phone, in our matching Obama shirts, tuned to different networks, we watched the returns together. We compared projections, discussed the intricacies of the American electoral processses, and considered the world-wide implications of what was happening. Finally, with reports that Obama had hit the magic number, there were scenes of world-wide celebrations that made the Millenium look like a warm-up rally. Jodie was having chills from the excitement. My sister called, screaming so uncharacteristically that at first I didn’t recognize her voice.

But I was in a somber mood, and not just from exhaustion. My mind was on all it had taken for us, as a nation, to “come this far.” I was remembering people, especially friends killed in the struggle, who had not lived to see this day. It had taken so many giving so much.

I told Jodie I was going to take my Obama button over to Medgar Evers’ grave in Arlington Cemetery, where he lies just down the hill from Thurgood Marshall and the Kennedys. The cemetery is less than three miles from my house. (His grave is easy enough to find: turn right at the main gate, first path to the right and down a few steps. It’s in the first group of graves on the right and usually small stones and other tokens are atop the tombstone.)

A couple of days later I went. Yes, Medgar, it was not all in vain. You’d hardly believe how much has been accomplished. There’s much to be done yet, many hearts and minds to be touched still, but things you could only dream of have happened. There is HOPE, and CHANGE is in the air. Thanks, Medgar, for doing and giving so much to help make America true to itself.

I lingered awhile at his grave. Then I moved on to the graves around his — men from many states, all equal in death. Nearby was a section of World War I veterans, men lucky enough not to be resting in Flanders Fields. It was getting on toward dusk, time to leave — the cemetery and the past — and step into the present. For me, the trip to Medgar’s grave was like a bridge from what was to what can be. Now I’m looking to the future, feeling that my country is rejoining the circle of nations. CHANGE (the positive kind) is in the air once again.

This is the sixth in a series of posts by Freedom Riders in response to Barack Obama’s victory (see the other entries here.)

Thomas Armstrong III was born in Silver Creek, MS, in 1941. He joined the movement as a sophomore at Tougaloo College in Jackson, working on voter registration and other projects. After the Freedom Rides he continued to work around the state on voter registration and also participated in efforts to integrate Sunday services at white churches. In 1964 he attempted to integrate Millsaps, a private Methodist college in Jackson, but the class he registered for was canceled.

He moved to Chicago and in 1966 began working as a contract specialist with the U.S. Postal Service, managing trucking services. Now retired, he lives in Naperville, IL.

I arrived at my assigned polling station at 5 AM on November 4. My group of ten election judges opened the polls for voting promptly at 6 AM. As the first vote was caste I wanted to laugh, I wanted to cry. I sat in awe. This is it. We are on our way.

As voters poured in they wore tremendous smiles. It was like they were projecting an unwritten message: “Yes we can.” Seventy-eight percent of the registered voters in the precinct where I worked did vote. Breaking speeding records while delivering the votes to the Dupage County Illinois Board of Elections I could hardly wait. Precious items were locked in the trunk of my car — election ballots.

Jesus poured out his spirit on that Tuesday. Through that spirit, I could see the many prophets with smiles on their faces: Medgar Evers, James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, Andy Goodman, Barbara Jordan, Nat Turner, Fannie Lou Hamer, Malcolm X, Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King, Shirley Chisholm, James Farmer and others.

It was a historic day in America. My heart goes out to the prophets of my life: my departed parents, and all my family members and friends. I so much wish to share with my close civil-rights movement friends, those who walked with me through the fires of hatred and the shadows of death — Dorie Ladner Churnet, Joan Trumpauer Mulholland, MacAuthur Cotton, Betty Poole Marsh, Mary Harrison Lee, Hollis Watkins, Jimmie Travis, Edwin King and others — the precious projections of love, hope and peace. More than ever we are bound together as never before. We must make that bond work for this nation and the world.

Barack Obama has made history. He stands on the shoulders of many others. We now must again stand with him. We must support his Presidency because his Presidency belongs to us, we the people. America will come together as one nation, under God.

Yes we all now share a huge responsibility. We have the responsibility of making this country a better place. We must strive for peace. Now is not the time to sit idly by. The people, all of us, have spoken. Let’s improve our relationships with each other. Let’s move forward with new and positive ideas. Let’s make this country even greater. “Yes we can.”

There is an old saying, author unknown: “Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass, it’s about learning how to dance in the rain.” During the 1960s we didn’t wait for the storms of segregation to pass and we performed our dance well.

This is the fifth in a series of posts by Freedom Riders in response to Barack Obama’s victory (see the other entries here.)

William Leons was born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, in 1935, and grew up there. His parents were both involved in the Resistance during World War II, and both were arrested and sent to the camps, his father in 1942 (to Mauthausen) and his mother in 1943 (to Vught). Only his mother survived. Together they immigrated to United States in 1949, living in Hoboken, NJ.

In 1961, Leons was a graduate student at UCLA when he joined the Rides. Since 1975 he has taught anthropology at the University of Toldeo, in Ohio.

I doubt any of the men and women active in the Civil Rights struggle in the 1960’s thought then that this day would ever come. Since those days much has changed — legislation fostering greater access for many to the ballot box, education and employment. Though the changes were too few and too slow, as we look back no one can say that there has not been improvements in the lives of millions.

That much still needs to be done goes almost without saying. Look at the high levels of high-school drop outs, mortality rates, unemployment rates and the cost of higher education, itself a silent discrimination based on race and social class. Not one state-supported university ranks in the top ten (Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Brown, Chicago) and these remain important stepping stones for success in the academic world and professions.

A heavy toll has been paid by those who suffered in silence and those who were active participants in the struggle — shriveled lives for many and death on the part of the movements martyrs, whose names we all know and many quietly recalled on the glorious day of November 4, 2008. Little girls and young men and women and beloved leaders who died for the cause, who never should have died for what was their birthright, to be free men and women in this land founded upon freedom.

My wife is a county social worker and she had to ask a colleague, an African-American man, on November 5, why so many white women in their office were wearing black. He answered that they were mourning Obama’s victory. I see hope in the young people, many of whom may be said to be color-blind. My students (largely white) with rare exceptions voted for Obama. Such voters may have made the difference between winning and losing Ohio. I see black and white students often walking together and chatting with each other and studying together, all quite different from 20, 30 or 40 years ago and promises well for the future.

In the weeks before November 4, I began to believe that Obama was going to be the next president and was afraid that the poll numbers might be wrong or shenanigans by the opposition might rob us all. When late that evening I saw the results on my TV I realized we were participants in a great historical event and I became giddy with happiness. I am not a flag waiver, and like Michelle Obama don’t often feel proud of my country, but that day I did feel proud and put out the flag and flew it for several days. It won’t fly again until July 4th, 2009, the one day I always fly the flag.

This victory is sweet and we all have a right to be proud because it is a long overdue promise that has been fulfilled. Now let us hope and fight for all the other problems that exist be eradicated in the years to come. Change is always slow but we are on the side of the angels. Our dreams will be fulfilled and we will be a beacon of hope once again for people everywhere.

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.

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.

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.

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.)