50 years later, Freedom Riders' journey for justice in spotlight

50 years later, Freedom Riders' journey for justice in spotlight

by Michael Cass, tennessean.com
April 19th 2011

The decision was easy for Catherine Burks-Brooks.

Burks-Brooks was a senior at Tennessee A&I State University when the first Freedom Ride was knocked off course in 1961 by a wave of brutal, racist violence in Alabama, her home state. She and other Nashville college students, veterans of the sit-in movement to desegregate downtown lunch counters a year earlier, decided they had to keep the Freedom Rides alive.

At stake was the right of African-Americans to travel across state lines on trains and buses while using the same seats, bathrooms, water fountains and other facilities as whites. So the students made plans to travel from Nashville to Birmingham, Ala., on a Greyhound bus on May 17.

Also at stake that spring day were the young riders’ very lives.

“I didn’t want to die, now,” Burks-Brooks, 71, recalled. “But I didn’t have any fear of doing what I had to do. I knew what was happening was wrong. And I had an opportunity to do something about it.”

Half a century later, Burks-Brooks and more than 400 other Freedom Riders are on the cusp of what could be the longest and loudest moment of recognition for their work, which led President John F. Kennedy’s administration to enforce previous Supreme Court rulings banning segregation along bus and train lines.

Many of the riders will fly to Chicago next week to tape an episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show, which is scheduled to air May 4, the 50th anniversary of the first Freedom Ride. PBS will broadcast a two-hour documentary, Freedom Riders — which was shown at the 2010 Nashville Film Festival — on May 16. And a group of 40 college students from across the country will retrace the rides, stopping in Nashville on May 12.

Those current students, selected by PBS, will learn about Nashville’s crucial role in a movement that changed the country through the discipline of nonviolent resistance.

“The students were determined to finish that ride and make sure violence didn’t overcome nonviolence,” said Ernest “Rip” Patton of Nashville, a former Tennessee A&I student who rode from Montgomery, Ala., to Jackson, Miss., where he was arrested and thrown in jail for more than a month, leading to his expulsion from school. “If we didn’t continue it, I don’t know where we’d be today. Or it would have taken longer.”



Original Page: http://www.tennessean.com/article/20110421/NEWS/304210027/50-years-later-Freedom-Riders-journey-for-justice-in-spotlight

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