Freedom Riders captivate high school audiences

Beatings. Sacrifice. Arrests. King, Evers and Meredith.

Four senior citizens took to the Judson and Wagner high school auditorium stages Jan. 16 and told riveting stories of their youth more than 50 years ago, when the so-called Freedom Riders came to Jackson, Miss., their hometown.

The adults captivated their teen audiences with the telling of the 1961 Freedom Riders civil rights activists who rode buses into the deeply segregated South. The tour set out of Washington, D.C., and attempted to integrate facilities at bus terminals along the way.

Three of the speakers were eventual Freedom Riders, and a fourth has a brother who was part of the movement. All urged the high school audiences many the same age now that the Freedom Riders were when they joined the protests to take up the torch and carry onefforts to bring equality to people of all races, creed, religions and beliefs.

We're hoping to raise awareness, Julia Humbles said. Because 53 years later, we're still fighting the same battles today, and that shouldn't be. If you don't know your history, you're doomed to repeat it.

The Freedom Rider movement attempted to integrate facilities at bus terminals in the South. African-American Freedom Riders tried to use whites-only restrooms and were the targets of vicious beatings.

The rides tested discrimination in interstate travel, Humbles said. The police didn't have to be called; they were already there, watching, sometimes taking part.

She gave a vivid description of what it felt to be a black Freedom Rider in the segregated South .

When you looked at their faces, and they were hating you, despising you, never having met you, she said. You knew, deep inside, what they wanted to do to you, and you wondered, 'How could they hate me so much?'

Humbles, one of the first riders to be arrested, described an incident in which a bus was torched with Freedom Riders still on board. They threw the bomb in, and it exploded, and flames went everywhere. Someone was outside, holding the door shut. They weren't trying to intimidate us, they were trying to fry us.

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Freedom Riders captivate high school audiences