By Wilson Schooley
On October 13, 2018, I stood at the “Colored Entrance” to the Montgomery, Alabama Greyhound Bus Station addressing an audience of civil rights lawyers, as Chair of the Civil Rights Section of the American Bar Association.
On that very spot 58 years before, my brother, then 17 (I was 3), and three close family friends were among the Freedom Riders who peacefully rode buses into the segregated South to test the U.S. Supreme Court decision Boynton v. Virginia, which held segregation in interstate travel violative of the 1887 Interstate Commerce Act.
Boynton was decided 60 years ago today as I write, on December 5, 1960. Bruce Boynton, who died in 2020, then a law student traveling home to Alabama from Washington, tried to eat at a bus station restaurant. He sat in the white section because the Black section was overcrowded and unsanitary. “I was hungry and just wanted a cheeseburger.” A manager told him to leave, called police, and Mr. Boynton was arrested and charged under Virginia law. Thurgood Marshall argued his case to the Supreme Court.
The 7-2 Boynton opinion was authored by Justice Hugo Black, a former member of the Ku Klux Klan. The ruling failed to fully preclude discriminatory practices in restaurants and was flouted by law enforcement in many states. But it was a milestone in the unfurling civil rights movement, leading directly to the Freedom Rides.
On the morning of May 20, 1961, at that Montgomery Greyhound bus station, 21 Freedom Riders were viciously attacked by an angry mob of 300 that included Klansmen. The Freedom Riders had already been beaten in South Carolina and Birmingham, Alabama. Martin Luther King Jr. had warned them, “You will never make it through Alabama.”
Among those riders was John Lewis, who in April 2019 told me the events of that day. We talked in his congressional office, adorned with photos and mementos of the movement, in preparation for my awarding him the ABA’s prestigious Thurgood Marshall Award four months later.
He remembered the mob surging forward with baseball bats, axe handles, bricks, chains, tire irons, pipes, and rakes, hitting and spitting and screaming “Git them” n-words. The Freedom Riders joined hands and stood firm. The mob shoved them against a wall. Some jumped over and eight feet down to get away; five Black women got in a Black cab driver’s taxi, while two white women were pulled out of another cab and beaten. The one white male rider, Jim Zwerg, was beaten unconscious as the mob yelled n-word “lover.” John Lewis, Bernard Lafayette, and William Barbee were badly beaten. Barbee’s injuries left him paralyzed for life. Lafayette, Fred Leonard, and Allen Cason climbed the wall and ran to the adjacent federal courthouse. Lewis was knocked unconscious with a wooden Coca-Cola crate. John Seignthaler, Attorney General Bobby Kennedy’s aide, sent to help protect the riders, was also knocked unconscious with a lead pipe. In all, 20 people were seriously injured.
While all of this transpired, Lewis told me, the Montgomery police were conspicuously absent, and police commissioner L. B. Sullivan reportedly sat in his car around the corner, waiting while the mob had its way. When Lewis regained consciousness, standing over him was the Alabama Attorney General, reading aloud an injunction forbidding participation in the “so-called” Freedom Rides.
Ultimately, 436 riders from 39 states participated in over 60 Freedom Rides — 300 were arrested and 80 of the jailed were Californians. As of 10 years ago, 30 Freedom Riders still lived in California. Among the Californians was one of the two women pulled from the cab at the Montgomery bus station: Susan Hermann, a Whittier College exchange student at Nashville’s Fisk University. Also among them were my family friends: Russ and Mary Jorgenson and Cecil Thomas, who with his wife Fran, were close friends of Dr. King. Another was current Loyola Marymount Professor Emeritus Robert Singleton and his wife Helen, who had been active in the NAACP and brought 12 volunteers with them from California. Both, like John Lewis, were imprisoned in Parchman Farms Penitentiary. Singleton has remarked that among the poetic legacies of the rides is that President Obama was born the day the Singletons were imprisoned in Parchman. They put their lives on the line to ensure equality for future generations, at the very time one who became our first Black President came into the world.
The Freedom Rides dramatically pulled back the curtain on Southern states’ disregard of the Boynton desegregation mandate. Bobby Kennedy stepped in to force the Interstate Commerce Commission to issue new regulations on November 1, 1961, to end segregated bus facilities; the “white” and “colored” signs in stations across the South began to come down. But segregation persisted. Three years later, the 1964 Civil Rights Act ended legal segregation in public spaces nationwide.
Recent events make plain, though, that the racism underlying de jure segregation perniciously persists. Black American wealth is a tenth of white wealth. Black Americans are twice as likely to be unemployed and earn less.1 Black homeownership is 42% compared to 72% for whites.2 Black citizens are 13%3 of the population, but 40% of the prison population and 38%4 of unarmed citizens killed by police.
As poet Claudia Rankine recently told The New York Times: “The unmarked ways in which our white supremacist orientations get replicated in books and go unquestioned in theory remain one of the most insidious ways racist ideas continue to shape our consciousness.”
Because those orientations remain ominously omnipresent in our country 60 years after the Freedom Rides, it is incumbent upon all of us to take a lesson from the courage of 1961 and continue to metaphorically “ride buses” for freedom, and battle the scourge of racism that has haunted the U.S. since slavery.
Wilson Schooley is a reformed big firm partner and current appellate specialist practicing primarily civil rights and indigent criminal defense law; a professional actor; published author and photographer; Past Chair of the ABA Civil Rights and Social Justice Section; member of the ABA Journal Board of Editors; Delegate to the ABA House of Delegates; Presidential Appointee to the Coalition for Racial and Ethnic Justice; and member of the SDCBA Board of Directors.
Stephen Miller, CEBS.“Black Workers Still Earn Less than Their White Counterparts.” SHRM, SHRM, 7 Aug.2020, www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/compensation/pages/racial-wage-gaps-persistence-poses-challenge.aspx.
“U.S.Homeownership Rates Fall Among Young Adults, African Americans.” Population Reference Bureau, Population Reference Bureau, 12 June 2019, www.prb.org/u-s-homeownership-rates-fall-among-young-adults-african-americans/.
“U.S.Census Bureau QuickFacts: United States.” Census Bureau QuickFacts, United States Census Bureau, 1 July 2109, www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045219.
“Federal Bureau of Prisons.” BOP Statistics: Inmate Race, Federal Bureau of Prisons, 2 Jan.2021, www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_race.jsp.