The following article is from the book Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Plunges into California.
THE TIMES THEY ARE A’ CHANGIN’
The Freedom Riders were people -black and white, generally male and under 30- who traveled on busses into the American South to protest racial inequality and violence. In the 1960s, even though nearly 100 years had passed since the Civil War, the South was still a stronghold of prejudice and segregation supported by Jim Crow laws, a series of state and local laws that discriminated against African Americans and maintained “separate but equal” facilities for whites and blacks. There were segregated water fountains, bathrooms, restaurants, public schools, and public transportation. In the 1950s and ’60s, Americans began challenging those laws, maintaining that separate facilities were inherently unequal. There had been a little change already- in 1954, with the famous Brown v. Board of Education decision, the U.S. Supreme Court declared segregated public schools to be illegal. But in the Deep South, racial prejudice, segregation, and violence still reigned.
In 1960 the Supreme Court issued another decision, stating that segregated trains, buses, and other forms of transportation or their facilities (stations, bathrooms, and so on) were also illegal, but the southern states simply ignored the ruling.
On trains and buses throughout the South, African Americans were required to sit in the back or give up their seats to white patrons on demand. The goal of the Freedom Riders was to bring attention to this injustice and encourage the federal government to start enforcing the Supreme Court’s 1960 decision.GET ON THE BUS
On May 4, 1961, the first group of Freedom Riders -seven African Americans and six whites- left Washington, DC, on two Greyhound buses. Their plan was to ride through the entire Deep South (Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Louisiana). But they were so severely harassed and attacked -beaten, bloodied, and jailed, their buses firebombed and destroyed- that they made it only as far as Birmingham, Alabama. In a response on behalf of the U.S. government, Attorney General Robert Kennedy called for a “cooling off period,” essentially asking the Freedom Riders to abandon their cause. They refused. Instead, more and more Freedom Riders volunteered throughout the summer -eventually, more than 400 in all, including 100 from California- and 11 of them were organizing in Los Angeles.
Life for African Americans on the West Coast during the 1950s and ’60s was slightly better than for their counterparts in the South -for one, there were no Jim Crow laws in California- but it wasn’t great by any means. During World War II, many African Americans had…
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