Fifty-four years ago, a 19-year-old white Central State University student ended up in jail after going to the deep South to help end segregation.

David Fankhauser said his decision to become a Freedom Rider combined idealism with the recklessness of youth.

Thank God for young folk, said Fankhauser, the keynote speaker at tonights MLK Celebration Banquet hosted by MLK-Dayton Inc.

Martin Luther King Jr. Day is expected to take on greater significance today for many.

The holiday comes 10 days after the release of the movie Selma, which chronicles Kings campaign for equal voting rights in 1965 and the historic march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala.

MLK Day also comes in the wake of protests across America regarding the deaths of young black men by law enforcement officers. Those include two in Ohio: the Aug. 5 shooting of John Crawford III by a Beavercreek officer inside a Walmart as he held an air rifle and talked on a cell phone, and the Nov. 22 shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice by a Cleveland officer while Rice was carrying an air-powered replica handgun in a park.

I think non-violent civil disobedience is the way and the only way to make positive social change, Fankhauser said.

Like the black people who rode the buses with him at that time, Fankhauser put his life in danger.

Now 73 and a biology and chemistry professor at the University of Cincinnati Clermont College, he looks back on that experience and remembers being scared.

People say, Oh you were really brave. No, I was scared (expletive). I could hardly breathe, I was so afraid. Because Ive never seen such virulent anger as in the white folks that were surrounding these bus stations. They literally wanted to kill us, said Fankhauser.

See original here:

Freedom Riders message comes at new time of unrest