While working on my book, I started to think about the connections between the sit-ins and the Freedom Rides with the Free Speech and anti-war movements that followed – all student-powered, often student-led, almost always at odds with if not in defiance of establishment allies. When I met Freedom Rider Charles Sellers, I met a literal connection between the Freedom Rides and the Free Speech movement.

Sellers was born in Charlotte, NC, in 1923, and arrived in Berkeley in 1958 to teach history at the university. There he was an active member of the local chapter of CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality, which was very active protesting discrimination in jobs and housing. Three years later he went to Mississippi as a Freedom Rider. Three years after that, he was an early and significant player in the Free Speech movement, which erupted on the Berkeley campus in the fall of 1964.

In this excerpt from our interview, Sellers talks about Berkeley in late ’50s and his roll in the Free Speech movement.

After I got to Berkeley in 1958 I was very active in the chapter of CORE here. It was a very small but devoted band and we raised a lot of hell. We forced all the downtown businesses to hire blacks and sued landlords and [laughs] marched and demonstrated.

There were a few graduate students from the university involved. No faculty that I can recall. Much later, when the demonstrations got to be really big, some faculty came out. The CORE people were just ordinary people from undistinguished backgrounds, in secular terms. But they were just really good people who somehow felt it in their hearts that this was the right thing. We were a devoted little band of brothers and sisters out there for a while, changing the world.

At the time Berkeley, as compared to Chapel Hill, had much the same discrimination in housing and in hiring. But the etiquette of racist supremacy wasn’t enforced so overtly as in the South. There was a black attorney on the city council.

The strange thing about Berkeley when I first came here was it was a Republican town politically. The liberal Democrats were just fighting and getting substantial representation as a minority. The one black council member was allied with these liberal Democrats and he was not too happy about having the boat rocked too much. The NAACP was more or less playing that same game. So we were creating discomfort with the local black middle class as well as the whites.

Berkeley was converted into a solidly, if not radically, Democratic town basically by the coincidence of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement. Robert Scheer, who today writes a syndicated column, performed the most profound political transformation I’ve ever seen by running for Congress in 1966 against our liberal Democratic Congressman, who was voting for all the war appropriation bills.

Though he did not win, just by going out and debating the issues openly and passionately, he absolutely turned this community against the war overnight and paved the way for Ron Dellums’ election to Congress four years later.

We also had the student rebellion at Berkeley. In fact, the Free Speech Movement grew out of the Civil Rights movement. A member of Berkeley CORE – our little band of 20 or so – was Jack Weinberg, who put up a table on the sidewalk to solicit support for CORE and was hauled off by the Berkeley police or the campus police, actually.

The next day, Jack was back with his table right in the middle of Sproul Plaza, a police car rolled up and they grabbed him and put him in the police car. Immediately people started sitting down around the police car and getting up on top of it, and that’s how the Free Speech Movement started.

My involvement was immediate. I can’t remember the exact order of events, but very early there was just a little group of 15 people picketing in circles on the Sproul Hall steps. When I saw this on my way to lunch, I decided to take a few turns in the picket line. “What are you doing up there, Charlie?” a passing colleague called out. “What are you doing down there, Waldo?” I replied too cleverly by half.

Then at another point – this captured-police-car incident went on for several days and nights – I got up on the car and said something, as had a lot of other people. So I was right into it from the get-go.

There was a lot of faculty politics in all of this and there was a big left/right split in the faculty. I helped organize the left caucus – it was even called the Sellers Group for a time. The one thing I learned in all this is that you can’t get anything by being reasonable, they’ll end up screwing you every time. You have to be totally unreasonable.

We were trying to organize support for the free-speech causes from nervous faculty liberals, who kept telling student activists to be nice and accept the latest nice offer from the administration. Again and again, the students proved their faculty sympathizers to be naïve wimps. Because every time the students were “nice” and “reasonable” they were betrayed, co-opted, disempowered and so forth.

The students had to bring the institution to a standstill before that changed. The only successful strategy was to be uncompromising in what you were expecting and demanding.

Later I could understand the Black Power motivation. I had some regrets that whites could no longer play a part in the movement, but I also understood why it needed to be a black struggle. I think the more militant phases of that black response were, on balance, probably more helpful than hurtful. Some people wouldn’t pay attention till they got scared.

Photographed Feb. 16, 2007, in Berkeley, CA

Joan Trumpauer Mulholland was a Freedom Rider from Arlington, VA. After the rides she stayed in Jackson, attending Tougaloo College and continuing to work in the movement. She participated in the famous May 1963 sit-in at the Woolworths lunch counter in downtown Jackson, which yielded a well-known photograph by Fred Blackwell.

Today she’s being honored in a performance by the band of Jackson Academy, a private school. Below is the story from Clarion-Ledger reporter Billy Watkins.

Jackson Academy’s three-song performance today at the Mississippi Private School Association’s state band competition will pump up the volume of history. The music, arranged by band director Bruce Carter and his 19-year-old son, Corey, is dedicated to Joan Trumpauer Mulholland, a white civil rights activist who is the focal point of an iconic 1963 photograph taken by Fred Blackwell of the old Jackson Daily News.

“I’m blown away that (JA) would do this in honor of me,” says the soft-spoken Mulholland, who resides in Arlington, Va. “It sends chills down my spine.”

Mulholland, 19 at the time of the photo, is shown being surrounded by an angry mob of young white people during a sit-in at Woolworth’s soda fountain counter in downtown Jackson. She had been doused with mustard, ketchup, water, Coca-Cola, spray paint and a bounty of insults.

Pictured at the right is Annie Moody, an African-American student at Tougaloo College in Jackson. A streak of mustard and ketchup drips onto her forehead. Pictured at the left is John Salter, then a Tougaloo professor. He is covered in condiments and blood.

He had been hit with brass knuckles.

Mulholland, a Virginia native, was part of the Freedom Riders, who traveled South in 1961 to test the laws of desegregation on interstate buses.

She was charged with breach of peace and jailed for more than two months. A portion of her imprisonment was spent in a death row cell at the State Penitentiary in Parchman.

After being released, she enrolled at Tougaloo, where she was one of about five white students. She graduated in 1964.

Corey Carter named his original arrangement Power of Conviction, in honor of Mulholland, to be sandwiched in the performance between Sevens by Samuel Hazo and Sinfonietta No. 3.

“To have this tribute played in Jackson by a private school … I think it means even more,” Corey says.

Most private schools in Mississippi were formed to fight integration in the late 1960s and early ’70s.

Many MPSA member schools are integrated to some extent now.

Bruce Carter’s concert band consists of all white students, but three African Americans are in the sixth-grade program.

How Mulholland became the inspiration for JA’s concert presentation is a story within itself.

Corey Carter, a music major at the University of Southern Mississippi, had arranged the band’s second song. “The melodies were sort of grand and heroic,” Bruce Carter says. “And I remember Corey saying, ‘We need a hero to focus this music on.’ ”

A few weeks ago, Corey Carter was standing in line at Walgreens in Jackson when he picked up the book, Breach of Peace by Mississippi native Eric Etheridge, and began to flip through it.

He saw a photograph of Mulholland, who had long dark hair, a face of innocence, and a Jackson Police Department sign draped around her neck with her booking number on the front – 20975. It was from June 8, 1961, when Mulholland was arrested for breach of peace during a Freedom Rider nonviolent demonstration.

Corey Carter combed the Internet, researching stories about Mulholland. He came away in awe of her.

“People have their own convictions about what is right and wrong,” Corey Carter says. “She was simply trying to do what she thought was right.”

“I remember he called me and said, ‘Dad, I think we’ve found our hero’ and began to tell me about this amazing woman,” says Bruce Carter, 55, who came to JA in 1989 from New Jersey, where he taught until 2005. He returned in 2007.

“Of course, I remembered the Woolworth’s photograph. Who could ever forget that?”

Bruce Carter waited until this week to share Mulholland’s story with his students. “I wanted them to focus on the notes, on timing,” he says. “Because I knew when I told them, it would give the song more meaning to them and probably raise their level of playing.

“They were quite inquisitive when I talked to them about Mulholland and the courage she had. They were like ‘Tell us more!’ ”

After Mulholland was informed by a Clarion-Ledger reporter of the scheduled tribute, she requested a telephone visit with Bruce Carter to thank him.

They talked for more than an hour Tuesday afternoon.

“It was quite a moving experience for me,” Bruce Carter says.

Mulholland is retired after teaching for 30 years in Virginia and raising five sons. She often comes back to Mississippi for various activities at Tougaloo.

She joined the Freedom Riders, she says, “because none of the things I was being taught in Sunday School were being applied in real life. ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’ The children’s songs we all learned – ‘Jesus loves the little children … red and yellow, black and white.’ ”

When asked about the photograph of the sit-in and what she remembers, Mulholland pauses for a moment, then chuckles.

“Everything,” she says. “I’ve heard of people during war time say their souls leave their body and serve as guardian angels. That’s what happened with me. I was sitting there, knew what was happening. But the ‘real’ me was like a guardian angel above me, protecting me.

“The worst thing they could have done was kill us. Once you accept that – and faith teaches us that there are better things to come after death – then there is nothing to worry about.”

The Freedom Rides were a model of several management principles en vogue, at least until recently, in the new economy. The Riders were strategically nimble, adeptly abandoning their original destination of New Orleans to pursue “jail, no bail” in Jackson. They employed just-in-time inventory controls: within a day or two of their arrival in one of the three staging cities (Nashville, New Orleans and Montgomery), new Riders were assembled into smallish groups and sent on to Jackson. They also practiced very decentralized management, pushing out to the edges of the enterprise the responsibility to find Riders and raise travel funds.

Recruiting also meant screening: potential Riders were vetted especially for a commitment to practice nonviolence, as well as any political liabilities. John Dolan (above), then a student at Berkeley, California, recalls one candidate who didn’t make the cut.

Vincent Hallinan was a well-known activist lawyer in the ’30s and ’40s in San Francisco, a Communist, pretty open. He had six or seven sons, and he taught them all to box. I knew two of them–Kayo and Dynamite. Kayo was a couple of years ahead of me at Berkeley. He was a light-heavyweight boxing champ and very left-wing.

Kayo wanted to go on the Freedom Rides. Ed Blankenheim, one of the original Freedom Riders, came out to organize our group.  He didn’t want Kayo to go on a Freedom Ride. I said, well, you tell him, not me. He did, and Kayo was pretty upset.

We were scared stiff that we’d be Red-baited if the Communists joined. At that point in the United States if you found a Communist involved in something, the whole thing was smeared. So that was one thing. But the reason Ed told Kayo he couldn’t go was that Kayo had gotten into a fistfight on a peace march, which was true and was also a good reason for him not to go. I’m sure that even if he hadn’t been a Communist, Ed would have been reluctant to let him go. Kayo wasn’t really big, but he was big enough and he was a very good boxer.

Terence “Kayo” Hallinan served one term as the San Francisco DA in the ’90s. Previously he’d been a member of the city’s board of supervisors. Today he sits on the advisory board of NORML.

I’ll be in Virginia in early March to do a reading and slide show for the Fairfax County Library in McLean, details below. Appearing with me will be Rev. Reginald Green (above and below), a Freedom Rider from Washington, DC, who will talk about his experiences in Mississippi and, with a small amount of encouragement, will sing a freedom song or two.

Fairfax Library
Thursday, March 5
7:30 PM
McLean Community Center
1234 Ingleside Ave.
McLean, VA 22101

Much later in the year I will be heading west to do my show at Nebraska Wesleyan in Lincoln. I’ll have a Freedom Rider with me, but haven’t figured out who yet.

Nebraska Wesleyan University
Thursday, Nov. 12
1 PM
Venue TBD
Lincoln, NE

On Sunday, May 14, 1961—mother’s day—scores of angry white people blocked a Greyhound bus carrying black and white passengers through rural Alabama. The attackers pelted the vehicle with rocks and bricks, slashed tires, smashed windows with pipes and axes and lobbed a firebomb through a broken window. As smoke and flames filled the bus, the mob barricaded the door. “Burn them alive,” somebody cried out. “Fry the goddamn niggers.” An exploding fuel tank and warning shots from arriving state troopers forced the rabble back and allowed the riders to escape the inferno. Even then some were pummeled with baseball bats as they fled.

A few hours later, black and white passengers on a Trailways bus were beaten bloody after they entered whites-only waiting rooms and restaurants at bus terminals in Birmingham and Anniston, Alabama.

The bus passengers assaulted that day were Freedom Riders, among the first of more than 400 volunteers who traveled throughout the South on regularly scheduled buses for seven months in 1961 to test a 1960 Supreme Court decision that declared segregated facilities for interstate passengers illegal.

After news stories and photographs of the burning bus and bloody attacks sped around the country, many more people came forward to risk their lives and challenge the racial status quo. Now Eric Etheridge, a veteran magazine editor, provides a visceral tribute to those road warriors in Breach of Peace: Portraits of the 1961 Mississippi Freedom Riders. The book, a collection of Etheridge’s recent portraits of 80 Freedom Riders juxtaposed with mug shots from their arrests in 1961, includes interviews with the activists re-flecting on their experiences.

Read the rest.

Read other features & reviews (leMonde2, NYTimes, WSJ . . . )

I’ll be making a swing through Ohio and Michigan at the end of February, doing my reading/slideshow at public libraries in Cleveland, Flint and Kalamazoo. Appearing with me at all three events will be Freedom Rider Miller Green (above and below). Miller was a high school student in Jackson, MS, when he was arrested on July 6, 1961. He lives in Chicago today. If you’re nearby, please come see us.

Cleveland Public Library
Sunday, Feb. 22
2PM
325 Superior Ave. N.E.
Cleveland, OH 44114

Flint Public Library
Monday, Feb. 23
7PM
1026 E. Kearsley St.
Flint, MI 48502

Kalamazoo Public Library
Tuesday, Feb. 24
6:30PM
315 S. Rose St.
Kalamazoo, MI 49007

Freedom Rider Frank Holloway appears on the cover of the January 18 issue of Le Monde2, the Parisian paper’s Sunday magazine. Le Monde reporter Nicolas Bourcier traveled through the south recently and talked to Riders Holloway, Hezekiah Watkins, Catherine Burks-Brooks, Margaret Leonard and Dave Dennis for their thoughts on Barack Obama’s victory and imminent inauguration.

Bourcier’s article will be available online for about a week, in two parts: an introduction and the interviews.

For those who (like me) don’t read French, Yahoo’s Babel Fish will give you the gist of what Bourcier wrote and the Riders said.

I will be appearing at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in lower Manhattan on Wednesday, January 14, at 7 PM. I will show photographs from the book and Freedom Riders Joan Pleune, Lewis Zuchman and Hezekiah Watkins (above) will talk about their experiences. At the time of the Rides, Joan was a student at Berkeley, Lewis a student at the University of Bridgeport, in Bridgeport, CT, and Hezekiah a student at Rowan Junior High in Jackson, MS. And there will be singing: the event will include a gospel performance by Neshama Carlebach and the Green Pastures Baptist Choir.

Buy tickets.

Last summer, Hezekiah was in town for another Breach event with Joan Pleune, and we got together at the publisher’s office to make short video about their experiences on the Freedom Rides.

James Bevel was born in Itta Bena, MS, in 1936. He was a member of the Nashville Student Movement in 1961, and rode the first bus of Freedom Riders into Jackson on May 24. After bailing out, he began recruiting future Riders in Jackson, and set up a CORE office there. He went on to plan some of the movement’s major campaigns.

From the Washington Post’s obituary:

The Rev. James L. Bevel, 72, a fiery top lieutenant of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and a force behind civil rights campaigns of the 1960s whose erratic behavior and conviction on incest charges tarnished his legacy, died in Virginia on Dec. 19 of pancreatic cancer. . . .

“Jim Bevel was Martin Luther King’s most influential aide,” said civil rights historian David J. Garrow. He cited Rev. Bevel’s “decisive influence” on the Birmingham “children’s crusade” of 1963 that helped revive the movement, the voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965 and King’s increased outspokenness against the Vietnam War.

Read the rest.

This is the seventh in a series of posts by Freedom Riders in response to Barack Obama’s victory (see the other entries here.)

Joan Trumpauer Mulholland grew up in Arlington and Fairfax, VA. In 1961 she was living in Arlington and working on Capitol Hill, active with the Nonviolent Action Group protesting segregation in Washington, northern Virginia and Maryland.

After the Freedom Rides she transferred to Tougaloo College in Jackson, MS, graduating in 1964. She was active in the movement while in school, working alongside Medgar Evers, the field secretary of the NAACP in Mississippi, as well as many others. Evers was murdered in Jackson in 1963.

In 1964 she returned to Arlington, where she has lived since. She worked for the Smithsonian, and in the Department of Justice on a program helping communities resolve racial issues. From 1980 until her retirement in 2007, she taught in the Arlington public schools.

Election Night at last. I was too road weary from a 24+ hour marathon journey home from Labrador to Arlington, VA, to go anywhere and watch the returns with people. Instead, wearing my Obama T-shirt, I half listened to the early returns while going through six weeks’ worth of mail. And hoped I could stay awake until there was a winner. Then came a call from my friend Jodie in Makkovik, Labrador. She’d finally gotten the kids down, her husband was off on a two-week shift in the nickel mine in Voiseys Bay, and she wanted to share the evening with someone who’d understand — like me.

So, connected by the phone, in our matching Obama shirts, tuned to different networks, we watched the returns together. We compared projections, discussed the intricacies of the American electoral processses, and considered the world-wide implications of what was happening. Finally, with reports that Obama had hit the magic number, there were scenes of world-wide celebrations that made the Millenium look like a warm-up rally. Jodie was having chills from the excitement. My sister called, screaming so uncharacteristically that at first I didn’t recognize her voice.

But I was in a somber mood, and not just from exhaustion. My mind was on all it had taken for us, as a nation, to “come this far.” I was remembering people, especially friends killed in the struggle, who had not lived to see this day. It had taken so many giving so much.

I told Jodie I was going to take my Obama button over to Medgar Evers’ grave in Arlington Cemetery, where he lies just down the hill from Thurgood Marshall and the Kennedys. The cemetery is less than three miles from my house. (His grave is easy enough to find: turn right at the main gate, first path to the right and down a few steps. It’s in the first group of graves on the right and usually small stones and other tokens are atop the tombstone.)

A couple of days later I went. Yes, Medgar, it was not all in vain. You’d hardly believe how much has been accomplished. There’s much to be done yet, many hearts and minds to be touched still, but things you could only dream of have happened. There is HOPE, and CHANGE is in the air. Thanks, Medgar, for doing and giving so much to help make America true to itself.

I lingered awhile at his grave. Then I moved on to the graves around his — men from many states, all equal in death. Nearby was a section of World War I veterans, men lucky enough not to be resting in Flanders Fields. It was getting on toward dusk, time to leave — the cemetery and the past — and step into the present. For me, the trip to Medgar’s grave was like a bridge from what was to what can be. Now I’m looking to the future, feeling that my country is rejoining the circle of nations. CHANGE (the positive kind) is in the air once again.