Freedom Riders

Introduction

Freedom a word that has become very difficult to define in our present nation and sadly enough we have gone through many changes trying to find this word. When our founding fathers were writing the United States Constitution it started out being for just white land owning males’ women were not considered at all and African American males are considered two thirds of a person and they were property not even a human being. So the famous words that state all men are created equal that we are so quick to point out to me talk about the most famous document of our nation’s history have true were they really when they were written think about it.

Within our great nation we have made many mistakes in the sad part is that we have not even begun to attempt to rectify any of them. Take a walk down a local street especially in the South and one will find nothing but ignorance and stupidity still remaining as if we were still in a time of Jim Crow laws. Heaven forbid a woman happens to fall in love and not see the color of the man’s skin that she fell in love with and it not be the same as her own because not only will she be disowned but her children will pay for the rest of their lives too even though they had nothing to do with their mother’s choice of who to love. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the freedom riders and their heroic efforts to attempt to make a difference in a world that was not ready to receive them.

Racism

Racism is making an uneducated choice to just like a person simply due to nothing more than their race, their ethnicity, their sexual orientation, or any other stuff finding feature without knowing any other detail about said person (Falcone). It is quite frankly one of the most ignorant and disgusting things that we can do in this country and unfortunately it gets done on a daily basis on both sides of the fence for many different reasons. It can be done because someone is Christian and another person of Muslim which happened quite a lot especially after the attacks that took place in New York City on the World Trade Center. The problem is that instead of choosing the one person or group of people that is responsible for the improper actions we automatically lump everyone into the bad group.

The problem with this is that it does nothing to solve our problems it only makes them worse we see that everyday all we have to do is turn on the television to see proof. It seems as if there is one tragedy after the next such as the recent case of Alton Sterling another case that occurred in Dallas, Texas. How do we prevent these tragedies? The best answer is we have to go back to the beginning and teach our children are history because the sad part is because we have failed to properly teach our children in the school system we are beginning to see history repeat itself.

Civil Rights Movement

The Southern United States was well known for its beautiful pomp and circumstance gorgeous social graces with elegant tea parties. The ladies had to be ladies and the gentleman had to be gentlemen anything else is simply disgraceful and undignified. Everything was yes ma’am and no ma’am and yes sir or no sir. Men and women had their specified places and they were not to mix at any given time otherwise they were completely out of order and they would be told about it later especially the ladies. This was just white society however for black society it was a completely different world. 

Before the Civil War, a black person was a Negro nothing more than a piece of property and he was lucky if he was treated with the same decency as an animal. Most of the time slaves were subjected to very hard labor and the women were expected to be used as breeding factories and if the master happen to fancy one of them she had no choice but to give herself to him. If she refused the master would beat her and take what he wanted anyway to the female may as well not fight in the first place because it was useless. Often times the female slaves would have their newborns taken from them at birth and then be used to nurse their master’s children if the mistress was unable to produce milk. (Hartford). 

After the Civil War ended, slavery was abolished but the problem is that did not end the slave master mentality it still existed in many of the southern states. This would bring the existence of the Jim Crow laws. These Jim Crow laws did nothing except strengthen the already poor attitude of racism and horrible treatment between whites and Negroes because it basically gave owners of white establishments the right to treat people horribly for no other reason than the color of their skin. This went on for three quarters of a century and affected every aspect of daily life in the American South. Every public school, park, library, drinking fountain, restrooms, buses, trains and restaurants had signs that said “Whites only and colored only.” This was to ensure that as was unfortunately believed that the dumb “ Ni**er” with know where his place was in society (Nelson). 

Tired of the very poor mistreatment that they were receiving in wanting nothing more but to be equal activists such as the freedom riders as they would later be called in history began the very dangerous and difficult task of fighting for the right to be treated with the same respect as anyone else for no other reason than the fact that they were human beings. What puzzles a student sitting in today’s classroom is why was there a need for them to have to be activists in the first place? Why could not people have the proper sense to treat them the right way and first place? The sad part is that we as a nation have still not learned how to simply treat people as people and it becomes so very exhausting and heart wrenching to be caught in the middle because of the ignorance of mankind.

Freedom Riders

May 4, 1961 a courageous group of thirteen people comprised of African-American and white people came together and decided that they had enough of the current screwed up system. A very interesting note however is that these particular riders were chosen by the federal government and instructed to attempt to use each other’s restrooms. They planned and launched a series of what would be known as freedom rides to the American South that were designed to peacefully protest segregation in interstate bus systems (Staff). 

It would take the Supreme Court case of Boynton vs. Virginia for anything relating to this argument to reach the ears of the US Supreme Court however when it did it ended up being victory. The argument began when Mr. Bruce Boynton who is an African American law student bought a bus ticket from Washington DC to Montgomery, Alabama. It just so happens that the bus route goes through Richmond Virginia where a forty-minute stop is scheduled. He enters the restaurant in the bus station which happens to be segregated and he sat on the side that is reserved for white customers and was then asked by both the waitress and the manager to move to the other side of the restaurant which is for colored people only. Mr. Boynton explained he was an interstate bus passenger and refused. The police were called and he was arrested. He was then later tried, convicted, and then fined for unlawfully being on the premises. After appealing his conviction to the local court in Richmond trying to file a motion to dismiss expressing the argument that his constitutional rights and the violated the court denied him in the Virginia Supreme Court supported the ruling of the lower court (Boynton v. Virginia). 

Luckily for us that is not where the story ends because Mr. Boynton then took his appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States where he was heard by asking the question of whether or not it was unconstitutional for him to be convicted since he was an interstate bus passenger for refusing to leave the premises of the segregated restaurant? The 7-2 decision that ruled in his favor set a very important precedent that sent a message stating that no more with this be allowed for everyone civil rights mattered (Boynton v. Virginia). 

In 1961 on Mother’s Day, a group of white people were blocking Greyhound buses throwing rocks and screaming all kinds of obnoxious obscenities at a group of white and black people simply trying to travel through rural Alabama. They were screaming about frying the N-word. They also proceeded to slash tires, throw pipes and fire through the Windows with no concept of the fact that there were innocent women and children in that bus who had done absolutely nothing to them. The only thing that they had done wrong was to be born in a different color (Holmes Smith). Highway patrol and other police officers managed to come to the aid of many that were injured to help them get off of the buses before they exploded but sadly it did nothing to prevent them from beaten with baseball bats or worse as they were trying to get away and there was nothing that could be done to prevent this. There were terrible shouts about burning the victims alive and how is a mother supposed to explain to her child that is too young to understand any of what is going on around them (Holmes Smith). 

Present Day Activism

Much like our ancestors taught us our young people taken to the streets once more because they are sick and tired of seeing police officers gunned down young people for no reason in instances like the Michael Brown case in Ferguson, Missouri. It has brought together a movement within the African-American community #black lives matter there are some that wish to change this to all lives matter but the problem is no one seems to understand why the need for the black lives matter exists in the first place. If we had a perfect utopia, then we could say all lives and maybe one day we will all come together to be able to achieve that but the sad realization is that we are not there yet and that must be acknowledged before we can ever hope to come close to getting there (Solomon). 

Our youth are attempting to try to make their voices heard because they are afraid of what will happen to them since the young are becoming a target and all we have to look at the unfortunate truth in this in the many example from the last year such as Trayvon Martin in Florida and also the incidents in Baltimore that have occurred also. The world is changing so rapidly and we must be the change we want to see. 

Conclusion

The Freedom Riders entered a world that was filled with adversity and hatred and equality was just a dream because everywhere one looked there was the harsh reminder of what did not exist. A child who lives in the South still has to deal with the issues that are hidden a little better today but they still remain. A woman falls in love with a man and he is not what they think he should be but he is a very good man and raises two girls that are not his own. The price is that the girls are considered to be trash even though they have not done anything wrong. Innocent victims of love that was meant to be the problem is that the ignorance of people who have not learned any better yet are punishing children for something that is beyond their control.

Works Cited

Boynton v. Virginia. No. 364 US 454 (1960). US Supreme Court. Chicago-Kent College of Law at Illinois Tech: 5 December 1960. Web. 16 July 2016. <<https://www.oyez.org/cases/1960/7>>.

Falcone, David N. Prentice Hall's Dictionary of American Criminal Justice, Criminology, and Criminal Law. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Education Inc. , 2010. Print.

Hartford, Bruce. Civil Rights Movement Historical Content. n.d. Web. 16 July 2016. Retrieved from http://www.crmvet.org/tim/timcont.htm

Holmes Smith, Marian. The Freedom Riders, Then and Now: Fighting racial segregation in the South, these activists were beaten and arrested. Where are they now, nearly fifty years later? February 2009. Web. 16 July 2016. <http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-freedom-riders-then-and-now-45351758/?no-ist>.

Nelson, Stanley. "Freedom Riders: Threatened Attacked Jailed." 2010. PBS.ORG. Web. 16 July 2016. Retrieved from http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/freedomriders/issues/jim-crow-laws

Solomon, Akiba. Get on the Bus: Inside the Black Life Matters 'Freedom Ride' to Ferguson. 5 September 2014. Web. 16 July 2016. <http://www.colorlines.com/articles/get-bus-inside-black-life-matters-freedom-ride-ferguson>.

Staff, History.com. Freedom Rides. 2010. Web. 16 July 2016. Retrieved from http://www.history.com/topics/black-history/freedom-rides