The man black history erased

[struggle4progress]

42. The Freedom Rides: From Project to Mass Movement

By George Houser
Tuesday, May 24, 2011, 8:26am

... I am the only survivor of the first Freedom Ride in 1947, which we called the Journey of Reconciliation ... At the time I was co-secretary, along with Bayard Rustin, of the Racial-Industrial Department of FOR and executive secretary of CORE ...

In an executive committee meeting in Cleveland in September 1946, CORE decided to test the Supreme Court decision to see if it was being obeyed in states in the South with Jim Crow laws. Bayard Rustin and I were given the responsibility of organizing the project – raising funds, recruiting volunteers for the mission, planning legal defense in case of arrests, and organizing meetings in each place we stopped along the way. Our Journey of Reconciliation was limited to the upper South (Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky) on the advice of our southern advisors. “Make this a test case,” they said. The original plan was Washington, D.C., to New Orleans.

For two weeks, 16 of us – eight white and eight black – challenged Jim Crow seating. There were 26 tests of bus and train policy, with 12 arrests. There was only one case of violence: in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where taxi drivers attacked [us]. Three of our group later served 21 days on the road gang in North Carolina for violating Jim Crow laws – Bayard Rustin, Joe Felmet, and Igal Roodenko. The story of the 1947 Journey is told in the PBS documentary You Don’t Have To Ride Jim Crow, which was aired in 1995 over some 90 stations around the country ...

http://forusa.org/blogs/george-houser/freedom-rides-project-mass-movement/8744