Tennessee State University News December 31, 2010 Freedom Riders' Courage, Sacrifice Recounted in Film The night America elected its first black president, Ernest “Rip” Patton Jr. got a call from one of his fellow Freedom Riders. “I just realized,” she told him, “that what I went through was worth it.” It’s been almost 50 years since hundreds of young civil rights activists boarded buses and rode into danger in the segregated Deep South. Some were beaten. Many were jailed. Patton, who was a 21-year-old college junior at the time, spent a month in a Mississippi jail cell and was expelled from Tennessee State University for his participation in the Freedom Ride. Now, as a new documentary celebrates the courage and sacrifice of hundreds of young activists like Patton, he agrees — it was worth it. “We’ve come a long way, and we still have a long way to go,” said Patton, who lives in Nashville. He routinely gets asked for his autograph when he speaks about his days with the Freedom Riders and the student activists who worked to desegregate Nashville’s lunch counters. A documentary set to air May 16 on PBS, Freedom Riders recounts the 1961 crusade that set out to end segregated travel on interstate buses in the Deep South. Beginning in May 1961, more than 400 activists, black and white, traveled on buses to set an example. Many were beaten and jailed along the way. The American Experience film has been generating buzz on the film festival circuit ever since its showing at Sundance this year. Most of the riders were college students coached in the art of nonviolent protest by veteran activists, including the Rev. James M. Lawson Jr. The students knew they were risking their lives by traveling on Greyhound and Trailways buses into the rigidly and violently segregated South. Bringing about change Filmmaker Stanley Nelson said the great lesson of Freedom Riders is how ordinary citizens — much like the hundreds of activists who rode into the South — can bring about change. “It really says that this movement was a movement of people,” Nelson said. “Nobody else will ever be a Martin Luther King. What Freedom Riders said is that you don’t have to be.” The film has had select screenings nationwide. It aired at the Nashville Film Festival at Lipscomb University in April, to an audience that included Tennessean Chairman Emeritus John Seigenthaler, who was attacked by a mob and hospitalized while monitoring the Freedom Ride for U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy. The pipe that someone smashed across Seigenthaler’s head is on display at Vanderbilt University’s central library — part of the university’s celebration of “The Sixties at 50.” Seigenthaler, a Tennessee native who served as a special assistant to Kennedy, said on film that he wasn’t aware of the plight of blacks on segregated buses before the rides. Seigenthaler had tried to persuade the activists to call off protests, fearing further violence. But he said Diane Nash, a Fisk University student and a founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, refused. He says on film that Nash told him the riders had signed their last will and testament because “‘we know someone will be killed. But we cannot let violence overcome nonviolence.’” Nelson hopes the documentary may help inspire a new generation of youth. Students are now being recruited to join some of the original participants in retracing the route of the Freedom Rides next year on their 50th anniversary. More than 165 students from across the nation have applied ahead of a mid-January deadline for one of the 40 seats available for the trip, organized by American Experience. Tour begins in D.C. The tour will begin in Washington, D.C., and cover flash points of the civil rights era, including Anniston, Ala., where a bus was firebombed, and Montgomery, Ala., where riders were beaten by a white mob. The 2011 bus tour is to culminate in Jackson, Miss., the city where riders were detained and roughly hauled off to the state’s notorious Parchman prison, where at least one of the riders was struck so hard by guards that he bled. On May 24, 1961, Rip Patton arrived in Jackson on one of two buses, part of the third wave of Freedom Riders to fan out across the South. He left the bus with two other activists — including future U.S. Rep. John Lewis — to attempt to get service at a segregated lunch counter. He was arrested and jailed for more than a month, charged with “disorderly conduct” and “breach of the peace.” On June 1, he received word that his civil rights work had gotten him expelled from TSU. “No matter what happened, we were willing to die to complete what we’d started,” he said. Patton, who is featured in the film, now travels the country speaking with audiences. Many young people today, he said, have never heard of the Freedom Riders and cannot fathom the injustices they faced or the sacrifices they made. Two years ago, TSU finally granted honorary degrees to Patton and 13 other expelled Freedom Riders. The young people he meets now who do know his story, Patton said, are overwhelmed. One young man teared up and told him, “I’m standing on your shoulders.” Although he is featured in the documentary, Patton said, “It’s really not about me. It’s about the courage of the students as a whole.” Nelson said his latest project resonates even more than some of his previous documentaries, including The Murder of Emmett Till, a film he produced and directed. The 2003 documentary was an account of the 14-year-old black youth’s murder in Mississippi for supposedly whistling at a white woman in 1955. The Freedom Riders documentary includes black-and-white footage of the buses under attack, as well as interviews with participants and government officials who sought to quell the situation for the Kennedy administration. SANDRA M. PHOENIX Program Director HBCU Library Alliance sphoenix@hbculibraries.org<mailto:sphoenix@hbculibraries.org> www.hbculibraries.org<http://www.hbculibraries.org/> 404.592.4820 1438 West Peachtree Street NW Suite 200 Atlanta, GA 30309 Toll Free: 1.800.999.8558 (Lyrasis) Fax: 404.892.7879 www.lyrasis.org<http://www.lyrasis.org/> Honor the ancestors, honor the children.