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180 15 THE FREEDOM RIDES Driving the politics behind the nation’s race revolution were the streams of Negroes moving from South to North, and from rural to urban communities , bringing with them the potential to build powerful voting blocs. In 1960, the census bureau reported more than fifteen cities with “exploding Negro populations,” and experts pinpointed such centers as Atlanta, Detroit, and Philadelphia as places to watch—meaning to watch Negroes take over. Yet there were federal laws on the books that Southern states were still ignoring, while continuing enforcement of their own Jim Crow codes. Black “patience” with this system had evaporated during the Eisenhower administration . Sit-ins at lunch counters had exploded all over the South, particularly in college towns. Bus boycotts modeled after the successful Montgomery bus boycott were breaking down the humiliating segregation of local transportation systems in city after city. The next target was interstate travel. While most of the civil rights groups were concentrating on Southern voting rights drives, CORE’s James Farmer, having developed expertise at promoting sit-ins, conceived a Freedom Ride from the nation’s capital to New Orleans to test interstate bus transportation policies in the context of federal law prohibiting discrimination on such routes. The Congress of Racial Equality, known as CORE, had been founded in Chicago in 1942 by a group of students interested in the passive resistance tactics of Mahatma Gandhi. Its first sit-in was to get service for Negroes at Chicago’s Jack Spratt Restaurant. Each of CORE’s projects was preceded by training, and the 1961 Freedom Ride followed this rubric. Farmer brought to Washington an integrated group of about fifteen volunteers, selected from a field of more than 300 throughout the country, for intensive training over three or four days. Plans called for blacks and whites to sit together and to use facilities interchangeably . Whites were to use Negro restrooms and stand at their lunch counters, while blacks were to use the main bus terminal facilities. CORE sent out press releases announcing the ride, describing it as the first major bus trip The Freedom Rides 181 to challenge racial segregation since the Journey of Reconciliation, fourteen years earlier, which was also sponsored by CORE, following the first Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation in interstate travel. Riders at that time had been challenged by drivers and law enforcement as they tried to make bus desegregation a reality rather than merely a legal principle, but there had been no violence. Several had been arrested and served time (thirty-day sentences on North Carolina road gangs) on technical grounds while charges against the others were either dropped or successfully appealed. Fourteen years later, the buses and the terminals were still segregated. CORE announced that the 1961 Freedom Ride would be different from the earlier “Journey” in several respects. First, it would penetrate into the Deep South; second, it would challenge not only segregated seating on the buses, but in eating facilities, waiting rooms, and rest areas in terminal facilities; and third, Riders who were arrested would remain in jail rather than accept release on bail or payment of fines. If all were arrested, CORE planned to move replacement teams in to continue the journey. CORE stated that all it hoped to do was to demonstrate that a group could ride buses in the Deep South in a desegregated manner, and thus encourage others to do it. It should have been no big deal. Blacks rode on integrated buses all over the North and West, eating at the lunch counters, and using the restrooms without incident. There was no rational reason for it to be any different in the South. Yet everyone getting on the two buses in Washington, D.C., myself and photographer Theodore Gaffney included, knew it would be very different. Gaffney, a reed-thin, Washington-based freelancer, almost ten years younger than I, later admitted he didn’t know what to expect, but wondered why a Johnson Publishing staff photographer wasn’t going with me. No mainstream (that is, white) press went along on the ride. I had called Farmer as soon as we heard about it, and told him Jet would cover it from start to finish. He was glad to hear it. Gaffney and I were the only newsmen boarding either of the two buses (one Trailways, the other Greyhound) on the morning of May 4. Moses Newson, reporting for the Afro-American newspapers, would...

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