by Karl J. Paloucek
The film, produced, written and directed by Stanley Nelson, tells the story of how, over the course of six months in 1961, 400 black and white Americans boarded buses and risked arrest, beatings and death by traveling together on buses and trains through the Deep South, in deliberately peaceful violation of the Jim Crow laws. Taking their inspiration from Mohandas Gandhi‘s notion of Satyagraha — nonviolent protest, an idea also supported by Dr. Martin Luther King — the Freedom Riders made a decision to do something visible, something provocative to get the attention of the Kennedy administration. Two Supreme Court decisions mandating the desegregation of interstate transit had served to end this particular separation on paper, but, embattled in Vietnam and the ever-present threat of nuclear war, the federal government had yet to do anything concrete to enforce the law.
The Freedom Riders, including coordinator Diane Nash and Joan Mulholland — who appeared and spoke before a roomful of journalists at the Television Critics’ Association earlier this year — set out to challenge the government to enforce the rights it had mandated for its citizens. These 400 people, many of them as young as 18 or 19 (and some younger still) wanted to see if their constitutional rights would be protected.
Mulholland described her mindset and experience not only in choosing to take the ride, but of the severity of that decision, as well as the consequences that befell others who did. “I came to the Freedom Rides from the Southern Student Movement with the sit-ins and was part of Washington D.C.’s Howard University sit-in group,” she recalls. “We were very religiously based. … We were overcoming evil by doing good. And once somebody fell by the wayside — going to the Gandhian influence — if somebody fell, others stepped up to take their place. Well, Hank Thomas, who was on the bus that was burned outside of Anniston, was
Diane Nash eschews any attempt to be labeled a leader in the Freedom Rider movement, though she does acknowledge a modicum of administration that she performed at the time. “We took great care to make them group-led and issue-led,” she says. “Now, there are certain functions that have to be taken care of, you know. Somebody has got to bring the agendas in, and somebody has got to keep track of the money and what have you, but those are based on the work and the function. And it is very possible and desirable, I think, not to have the leader but to have group leadership, and that’s the way that we operated with the Freedom Rides.”
In group-led formation, the Freedom Riders were more powerful, which Mulholland remembers was key to their strategy. “I think at different times, there were different objectives and/or different people,” she remembers. “We were trying to see to force the Kennedy administration to enforce the law as already decided by the courts. And a way to do that turned out to be to make it so inconvenient and expensive for the state if we filled the jails. You know, free room and board for the summer — this was hard to beat for college students,” she says with a laugh.
“We were making it so inconvenient, it was more convenient to desegregate,” she continues. “We were bringing publicity on the system. We were getting more court cases. We were getting so much outrage and publicity in the world that we were copied in other countries, like Australia. A lot of different things were going on.”
A lot of different things are still going on, as Diane Nash points out, that could be righted with a strategy similar to how the Freedom Riders chose to attain their goal. “It was simply to eliminate segregation,” she says, matter-of-factly. “How we did it would depend on who would respond and what the response might be. I think there are very few inventions that took place during the 20th century that would be any more significant than Gandhi’s invention. … I think that has real lessons for today. That ten minutes that we spend in the voting booth every two years is important and is something that should be done, but that does not fulfill our responsibility as citizens. I think we need to begin to see our the American citizens need to begin to see ourselves as rulers of this country and take nonviolent direct action in order to do that.”
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Photo Credit: PBS