Filed under: Extra Credit
Last night, Eric Etheridge gave a talk about the Freedom Rides, showing portraits of the riders then and now, and a few of the Freedom Riders spoke about their experiences.
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I have to admit, while I’d obviously seen the Freedom Rides posters all over campus, I didn’t really have much beyond the faintest idea what the Freedom Rides actually were. Etheridge gave a much-appreciated brief telling of the story; what I had imagined was pretty much what actually happened to the first wave of riders, but I hadn’t known about the people who came after the first set of riders went to jail.
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More interesting, though, were the talks by the Riders themselves. They were both from not far from here, Joan Trumpauer Molholland from Arlington and Reverend Green from Washington, DC. Even though you’d think that a white woman and a black man would probably have rather different experiences with the Freedom Rides, they described similar motivations. Rev. Green was studying for the ministry at the time the rides occurred, and said that he and some friends decided to go when they decided that, being called to serve in the church, they couldn’t in good conscious sit by and watch such injustice happen. Ms. Molholland described something similar – she was a Presbyterian girl (interesting to me mostly as a fellow Presbyterian girl), and it seemed to her that segregation and racism were contrary to what she learned in church, so she felt called to respond to it.
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Personally, I found Ms. Molholland’s part of the evening the most interesting and really inspiring. Half of my notes are trying to write down what she was saying word-for-word. Someone her age, to me, seems ancient – Other than my grandparents, I don’t often see or talk to people her age. But when all this happened, she was my age; in the mug shot, she looked quite a lot like one of my friends. I can’t imagine feeling so called that I’d be willing to risk violence and spent my summer in jail. I participated in some civil disobedience about Arizona’s immigration law this summer as support staff, managing supplies and the campaign website from safely across the country, and I got terribly nervous every time someone got arrested even though that was the plan all along. To think of someone, a college girl my age, deciding to do that – travel across the country, without the support of a powerful organization behind her or internet and cell phones to organize it the way we had this summer, to make a point that might not even get heard, was almost unimaginable.
