Freedom Riders: The Children Shall Lead

Log Out | Topics | Search Moderators | Register | Edit Profile

Email This Page

Author Message   Mzuri "Cyniquian" Level Poster Username: Mzuri Post Number: 3494 Registered: 01-2006 Rating: N/A Votes: 0 (Vote!) Posted on Thursday, February 15, 2007 - 07:28 pm:        Educator Lived, Knows Black History By Diana Blowers February 15, 2007 Hellen O'Neal-McCray teaches English, but she's a walking encyclopedia on black history, especially the civil rights movement of the 1960s. It's from personal experience that she speaks of the Freedom Riders, the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Today, the Mississippi native enjoys the quiet life in Yellow Springs and teaches English and literature at Wilberforce University. As a college student, however, she was jailed in Mississippi as a Freedom Rider in 1961, the first of four arrests for her civil rights work, which included several years with the SNCC. She is among the Freedom Riders featured in a documentary, Freedom Riders: The Children Shall Lead, produced by The William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation at the University of Mississippi. In the film, O'Neal-McCray explains her stepfather was a "quiet, hardworking man, but he believed that he was equal and he believed that his children were equal, and we were taught that we were equal and that we deserved all the bounty that this country had to offer, so that is what I expected." The Freedom Rides were a series of nonviolent demonstrations in which volunteers, many of them college students, rode interstate buses into the segregated South to test the 1960 United States Supreme Court's decision in Boynton v. Virginia, which outlawed racial segregation in interstate transportation facilities, including bus stations. On May 4, 1961, two buses were taking Freedom Riders, a mix of black and white protesters, from Washington, D.C., to New Orleans. "They met with extreme violence in Alabama, and when the buses got to Mississippi, the riders were arrested," she said. "I never really rode a bus, but I was arraigned as a Freedom Rider," she said, explaining that she was arraigned and sentenced with them although she had actually been arrested for picketing in front of the Southern Governors Conference, which was being held to discuss ways to keep Mississippi and other southern states segregated. "Anybody who did anything that summer was considered a Freedom Rider, " said O'Neal-McCray, who was a 19-year-old student at Jackson State College at that time. "One of the things I find really frightfully lacking, especially in the young, is that they really don't know much about the story of the '60s. It was a time in American history that changed a whole way of living, and they know about Dr. Martin Luther King and that's about it," she said. "Young people have no history because the history has not been taught." Of Black History Month, she said she's often disappointed. "Although I think their lives should be celebrated, we celebrate the same three or four people every year. There is no depth to what we know about or teach about the civil rights movement." Freedom Riders Web Site: http://www.outreach.olemiss.edu/Freedom_Riders/Home.html (Refresh the above page to see pix of the different participants) http://www.daytondailynews.com/community/content/localnews/neighbors/greene/2007 /02/15/ddn021507diana.html?cxtype=rss&cxsvc=7&cxcat=55   Yukio Veteran Poster Username: Yukio Post Number: 1811 Registered: 01-2004 Rating: N/A Votes: 0 (Vote!) Posted on Thursday, February 15, 2007 - 09:29 pm:        "Although I think their lives should be celebrated, we celebrate the same three or four people every year. There is no depth to what we know about or teach about the civil rights movement." My sentiments exactly!   Cynique "Cyniquian" Level Poster Username: Cynique Post Number: 7319 Registered: 01-2004 Rating: N/A Votes: 0 (Vote!) Posted on Friday, February 16, 2007 - 10:40 am:        We never hear much about the missteps, either, like when during the "summer of 1964" the south was invaded by a bunch of well-meaning middle class white college kids and their northern black counterparts who all traveled down there in droves to conduct voter registration drives, and after stirring up the local white bigots, promptly split, leaving the local "negroes" to have to deal with the increased hostility and resistance.