Get on the Bus!
As a member of a generation for whom the civil rights struggle in the fifties and sixties is a chapter in a history book in junior high rather than a memory of headlines and televised news reports, I read this account somewhat bemusedly. I have lived long enough to understand that events look very different when viewed through the lens of history. Even when history does not get rewritten by those with their own agendas, the context revealed in hindsight will often turn events much more dramatic or much less so.
I have to wonder then whether living through this time and reading the reports day by day made them seem boring and commonplace, or whether it was just as shocking to read about then as it is now.
I’ve lived all of my life after Jim Crow laws were eradicated. Yes, there are vestiges of them still today and yes, there is a lot of work to be done before we have a society where everyone truly does have an equal opportunity regardless of race, but I must be forgiven for thinking that fighting for workplace equity, while no less worthy is less immediate than the struggle to share the most simple services like the seats on a bus, to be able to vote or to be provided protection from the police.
I begin to understand how previous generations have had difficulty adapting to change as I see how much things have changed. The events of 1961 are inconceivable to me as an American today. Yet there they are, a part of our bloody history, that history that we must learn from and rise above.
We tend to excuse atrocity as being the result of simple compliance with the authority of a vocal or powerful minority. I was taught to believe that most Germans before their defeat in the Second World War opposed the Nazis in their hearts but were too afraid to speak up. Most literature and movies depict a South with good kind decent folk and a few bad apples dressed in white robes. I’d like very much to believe that, but it becomes difficult after reading of a bus being stopped and burned, the occupants physically assaulted under the watchful eye of the local police who took no action, simply because riding on the bus were white and black people sitting next to one another. It becomes more difficult to believe when reading of the white Miller family ostracized and driven out of Anniston by their neighbors because their twelve year old daughter Janie brought water to the men and women who were choking from the smoke after escaping the bus, some of whom had been beaten with baseball bats.
It moved me to tears and I was unable to continue reading from there for several days. This, after all, was in the United States of America just eight years before I was born. I pray that it is not at all the America that I live in today, but it scares me to think of how slowly things really do change.
While the courage of those men and women who took those first few steps forward is inspiring, the savagery they faced from the people, the kind and good people of the American South, is sickening. Resistance to change is no excuse. We’re talking about where people sit on a bus, where people can and cannot get a cup of coffee or a meal. We’re talking about badly injured people being refused a ride to a hospital because the taxi was not allowed to take people with their color of skin.
We can talk about the rights of states to be wrong and the overreach of federal power all we want, but the Constitution exists for one reason only: to protect citizens from their government. That the federal government did nothing about Jim Crow laws decades sooner should be a source of shame to all Americans.
Freedom Riders is well-researched and thorough, perhaps to a fault. Occasionally the telling did seem to get bogged down in detail. Despite it being occasionally difficult to follow, too many facts is preferable to sensationalism. Arsenault sticks to the facts, and though it is clear that he has great admiration for the Riders this thoroughly documented history never derails into sentimentality or editorializing. With very few exceptions, even at his most critical he remains evenhanded and even charitable to those who might otherwise be demonized. The shortcomings and mistakes of the Riders are there for us to see, just as are the virtues of some of the segregationists.
This book was difficult to read, but illuminating, human, and objective. It is a telling of an important chapter in this nation’s development, one that too often gets simplified, polarized or told without context. Worse yet, it’s a series of events commonly misrepresented or glossed over. Most certainly it was worth the effort.
43rd book read in 2007
