Civil Rights' Most Misunderstood Moment:
The Freedom Rides
http://www.theroot.com/views/civil-rights-most-misunderstood-moment-freedom-rides
Stanley Nelson's new documentary, Freedom Riders, illuminates true
profiles in courage. There was strength in pacifism.
By: Stanley Crouch
August 17, 2010
Every great once in a while, something like Stanley Nelson's
wonderful documentary Freedom Riders appears and is so good that it
exhausts all common versions of praise. In it, Nelson and his crew
take on a period of history usually misunderstood: a particularly
dramatic series of events in 1961, known as the Freedom Rides, when
young student activists put their lives at great risk, riding public
transportation throughout the South.
Nelson (A Place of Our Own) and his crew found the truth of a time in
which nobility, courage and unbending optimism were stronger than the
crude, superstitious and murderously violent obstacles that held
Southern segregation in place. The film, the first full-length
documentary recounting the Freedom Rides, is available in New York
and Los Angeles theaters for only a few days and will be shown to the
nation on PBS next year when the 50th anniversary of the Freedom
Rides is celebrated.
Ask most people today what the Freedom Rides were, and they can't
tell you. Or they misunderstand its significance, painting the
Freedom Riders as lightweight pacifists who just lay down and allowed
themselves to be beaten. That couldn't be further from the truth.
Those who, like me, were alive during that time have since seen
pictures of John Lewis being beaten up, but I'd forgotten that white
Southerners had actually set a bus on fire. It was a remarkable
moment. They were literally holding the door closed. The bus was a
crematorium on wheels. Thankfully, the Freedom Riders managed to escape.
In our time of cartoon ethnic "authenticity," commercialized falsity
and hollow glamour, the film seems out of step, but not because
people were so different in 1961. At the time, television was
discovering its political power; the rightness of the civil rights
movement became abundantly clear just by having microphones and
cameras placed close enough to those opposing the activists. Everyone
was forced to see things the way they actually were. Negroes suddenly
ceased to exist almost exclusively for entertainment and comic
relief, their traditional roles on what would become the boob tube.
What was happening in the South was neither entertaining nor funny.
With the grace and precision of superb editing, Freedom Riders shows
the various ways that Americans and the rest of the world had
long-held views of the U.S. -- held since the end of World War II --
upended. The South had lost the Civil War, but it had won the policy
war by instituting the racist laws of segregation. Those
unconstitutional laws remained in place for close to a century.
Negroes were held as far from basic social equality as possible.
But the Freedom Riders, an interracial posse of students that
included John Lewis, Stokely Carmichael and Diane Nash, forced the
issue. (Others in midde age and beyond joined them.) Many of them
were from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and
the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). En masse, they bought tickets
on Greyhound buses bound for the Deep South. They started out in
Washington, D.C., on May 4, 1961, with the intention of arriving in
New Orleans on May 17. The Supreme Court had outlawed racial
segregation, but Jim Crow still ruled. For their efforts, they were
beaten, arrested and nearly burned to death.
If you were watching TV during that time, the televised action made
certain truths unavoidable. The madness of that era, on one level at
least, was embodied by rednecks in street clothes or sheets, in or
out of political office, local or federal (Bull Connor being one
shameful example). As dangerous as it very soon became for the
reporters and the cameramen covering the story, the footage shows
that aggressive irrationality had yet to contaminate both sides of
the racial divide. Race baiting was not an equal-opportunity
profession, and impotent saber rattling was neither seen nor
interpreted as a form of ethnic bravery. Fundamental constitutional
rights and access to opportunity were ideas radical enough to shake
the temple built to segregation until it fell upon the heads of those
too stubborn to move.
The violence itself also brought surprises. The flowers of Southern
womanhood could drop their genteel drawls to scream and shout along
with the men in the raging mobs. Then again, there was the
12-year-old white girl who could not remain inside her Negro-hating
father's store and watch as Freedom Riders were almost burned to
death inside a bus and nearly beaten to death when escaping it. She
ran out to help. Her humanity overcame her racist upbringing. In
certain ways, the victory of the civil rights movement was
foreshadowed by the empathy that surely swelled inside that girl at
that moment.
With stories like these, Freedom Riders sweeps through the drama, the
heartbreak and the affirmative humanity that made an imposingly
difficult victory possible. Part of the film's strength is that
historical figures are not looked upon in a conventionally
sentimental way, and some, like Martin Luther King Jr., are taken
down a step closer to earth.
Through Freedom Riders, we see the internal debates about tactics
within the searing context of events. The civil rights workers --
young and old, black and white -- lost their naive ideas about the
struggle as they faced the shortcomings among themselves amid great
violence. The documentary, which relies on interviews rather than a
voice-over narration, builds in suspense; this makes for numerous
surprises, high and low.
No amount of cheap, Hollywood thrills is as stunning as the real-life
pain experienced and the blood shed by actual human beings. That
combination of sacrificial suffering was what transformed the moment
and the nation itself beyond the comfortably coy stereotypes of the time.
Freedom Riders has an epic quality, given that it deals with
larger-than-life issues such as moral consciousness. But the sense of
humor of the civil rights workers lets some of the bad air out of the
racist balloon. As with all masterworks of history, levity does not
reduce the significance of things as they were; it eases the
narrative and gives the listener a chance to laugh, like jokes told
between inevitably terrible battles.
Whatever makes this nation great can be seen in Freedom Riders and
heard in the voices of the participants. It keeps its eye on the
actual prize of humanity, and it steps above all that has pulled us
into various bogs since those bloody and inspirational days of 1961.
--
Stanley Crouch is an essayist and columnist based in New York. He has
been awarded a MacArthur and a Fletcher and was recently inducted
into the Academy of Arts and Sciences. The first volume of his
Charlie Parker biography will appear within a year.
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Documentary has new footage of 1961 Freedom Riders bus burning in Anniston
by Jason Bacaj
Aug 24, 2010
A film documenting the 1961 Freedom Riders movement contains
never-before-seen footage of a bus burning outside Anniston after it
was attacked by a local mob.
The footage of the bus burning, recorded by a local boy and
confiscated by the FBI, was unearthed by director Stanley Nelson and
included in his new documentary.
The two-hour film, "Freedom Riders," will air on PBS in May 2011, the
50th anniversary of the ride to desegregate public transportation in
the South. Producers of the movie hope to screen it in cities across
the region that intertwined with the historic ride.
The 8mm film was recorded by a local boy with a camera he got for his
birthday, Nelson said. The FBI confiscated the camera in the course
of an investigation and it drifted out of public consciousness until
Nelson and his film crew reviewed court transcripts that told of the
tape's existence.
It took eight months for the FBI to track down the roughly three
minutes of footage.
"Nobody had ever asked for it," Nelson said. "It's the only footage,
I think, that exists of the actual bus burning and then the bus being
towed away."
The Freedom Rides were organized by civil rights activists protesting
the de facto segregation of passengers on interstate bus lines in the
Jim-Crow-era South. Violence also greeted the riders in Birmingham
and Montgomery.
"Freedom Riders" is part of the award-winning PBS series and was
directed, produced and written by Nelson.
Anniston residents may get a chance to see the documentary and the
FBI film before it shows nationally. There are no set plans for
where or when it will be shown yet, as the city is in preliminary
talks with the filmmakers.
"We would love to have a chance to screen the film in Anniston," Nelson said.
"Freedom Riders" debuted to a warm reception at the Sundance Film
Festival in January of this year. It was also shown at film festivals
in New York and Los Angeles to qualify the movie for the upcoming
Academy Awards. Films must be shown by September for Academy Award
consideration.
Anniston City Councilman Ben Little is set to ask the council today
to support a free showing of the documentary. Little said he didn't
have any details about the showing because he learned of the film
just a few weeks ago at the National Black Caucus of Local Elected
Officials in Memphis.
A possible venue hasn't been discussed yet but Little believes the
Anniston High School auditorium is the best place to host the crowd
he anticipates.
The documentary will probably be shown in early May before a busload
of college students retracing the Freedom Ride route passes through
Anniston, said Betsy Bean, executive director of Spirit of Anniston,
an economic development organization.
A formal selection process for students wanting to go on the ride
hasn't been set, Bean said. It was originally open to high school and
college students, but was limited to collegians after a considering a
number of issues such as planning, curriculum and recruitment, said
Lauren Prestileo, project manager.
"We really, really would love to get a student from Anniston," Bean
said. "I don't think that would be hard to find."
The building where the Freedom Riders were attacked in downtown
Anniston still stands, though it is no longer a bus station. Bean
hopes publicity from the documentary and the retracing of the Freedom
Ride route will help the Spirit of Anniston secure a plaque and sign
commemorating that fateful day.
"We're just one of the stops along the way and hope to take advantage
of the public relations opportunity and the education opportunity and
the economic development opportunity that this thing affords," Bean said.
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