[A-List] Civil Rights' Most Misunderstood Moment: The Freedom Rides

[c b]

[The film Freedom Riders (directed by Stanley Nelson)
is scheduled to air on the PBS series American
Experience in 2011 to commemorate the 50th anniversary
of the Freedom Rides.

To arrange a showing of Freedom Riders, contact Firelight Media
(http://firelightmedia.org/). View trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHaXo6N_vh8.
-- moderator]

Civil Rights' Most Misunderstood Moment: The Freedom
Rides

By: Stanley Crouch
Posted: August 17, 2010 at 5:33 PM
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.

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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