By Lee A. Daniels

Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me ‘round
Turn me ‘round
Turn me ‘round
Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me ‘round
Gonna keep on a-walkin’
Keep on a-talkin’
Marchin’ down to freedom land

–Civil Rights anthem

Ask not what your country can do for you
Ask what you can do for your country

–President John F. Kennedy
Inaugural Address
January 20, 1961

They were criminals, all 400-plus of them, according to the duly enacted laws of the states of the Old Confederacy – lawbreakers, ‘race mixers,’ and disturbers of the peace.  Government officials and editorialists across the South called them “communists,” “socialists,” and “outside agitators.” They were beaten, with the connivance of the police, by Ku Klux Klan thugs in Alabama. They were jailed in Mississippi, first in the city jail in Jackson, and then, in the notorious Parchman state penitentiary. Their very lives were in danger.

They were the Freedom Riders—that racially-integrated, intrepid band of civil rights activists whose nonviolent invasion of the South in 1961 “nationalized” the climactic phase of the Civil Rights Movement and, by bringing the Movement into the streets, led directly to the  Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

They were my heroes. They helped make my future possible.

I.

Earlier this month I happened to be in the Mississippi Delta—my ancestral home on my father’s side—traveling to a panel discussion at the wondrous B.B. King Museum in Indianola. It was my first trip to the Delta, and only my second time ever in the state.  Growing up in the North during the 1950s and 1960s, when white Mississippians repeatedly showed why the state had such a well-deserved reputation for horrific racial violence, I had always looked upon it in mythic terms, as the most brutal Circle of Hell for black Americans. In later years, I realized that some of my friends considered my attitude deeply ironical, given that I had grown up in Boston, which in the 1970s acquired its own well-deserved reputation for racial intransigence and violence. It was then I realized what the Boston of my youth and Mississippi had in common: a profound sense of place, of allegiance to a real and imagined past and the peculiar, obsessively-nurtured cultural distinctiveness it had created.

Having flown from New York to Memphis, the gateway to the Delta, we were driving down U.S. 49 in the heart of the Delta near Indianola—me marveling at the flatness of the land, the fields of cotton, that seemed to stretch all the way to the horizon—when one of my companions pointed out we were passing Parchman. I was struck silent for a moment. I felt as if I had come upon, if not a monument, then one of the critical markers of what black Americans had both endured and triumphed over. And it took me back to the Freedom Rides of 1961 and the roots of my social and political consciousness.

II.

That year, as a 13-year-old growing up in comfortable circumstances in far-off Boston, I assiduously followed the trail they blazed. I read the newspaper accounts and watched the television film footage of the violence that had stalked their every move through the Deep South. I was frightened for them. But their very stoicism in the face of the danger not only cut my fear. It generated in me a powerful racial pride. I came to believe that we blacks, and our white allies, were the true stewards of democracy; that we were the ones heeding the selflessness and patriotism John F. Kennedy had called for in his Inaugural speech. And I absorbed the great lesson of the Civil Rights Movement and the historical Black Struggle: that heroism wasn’t the exclusive province of the “big” people; that it was within ordinary human beings to rise to the demands of the moment, to confront the past and the present in order to change the future.

Those memories and lessons came flooding back even more strongly when we got to the B.B. King Museum and I spied Eric Etheridge’s vitally important 2008 book, Breach of Peace: Portraits of the 1961 Mississippi Freedom Riders. Drawing on the mug shots the Jackson police took of the Freedom Riders as they were arrested and jailed, which had lain in the obscurity of bureaucratic storage until 1998, Etheridge contacted more than a hundred of the Riders to ask if he could visit them and take their portraits.

Quickly devouring the book, my eyes fastened immediately on Diane McWhorter’s noting in the book’s foreword what Martin Luther King, Jr. had said of Rose Parks’ unforeseen and quietly explosive act in 1955: that no one can predict which individuals will be “tracked down by the Zeitgeist.” The portraits, brief biographies and personal statements of the Freedom Riders Etheridge tracked down for the book’s then-and-now portraits certainly bear that insight out.

I wasn’t surprised to find the mug shots  of the young Stokely Carmichael (later: Kwame Toure), (now-Rep.) John Lewis or Reverends Wyatt Tee Walker and C.T. Vivian, two of King’s trusted lieutenants, among the eclectic group of blacks and whites who comprised the Freedom Riders. I was mildly surprised, and admiring, to find the mug shot of a 40-year-old Percy Sutton, the Harlem-based entrepreneur and power broker.

I was struck, however, by finding in the very last group of Freedom Riders arrested, on September 13, 1961, two Episcopal priests from Boston, Father Gilbert Avery and Father James Breeden. Father Avery was pastor of the black community’s St. John’s Episcopal Church, whose youth freedom choir, which I joined a year later, became a foundation of my life. Both he and Father Breeden were part of the Boston civil rights brain trust that began in the early 1960s to push hard against the Boston school boards refusal to desegregate the school system.  That local movement, which led to a Federal Court order and the schools’ tumultuous 1974 desegregation, had as much to do with my deciding to pledge allegiance to principles, not country, as anything that happened in the South.

III.

Seeing the mug shots among the Freedom Riders  of two men I knew directly reminded me again that they, and all those who marched down to freedom land in the first half of the 1960s, had done something for me personally. They had acted as my surrogates and my protectors. While I lived a comfortable life in the North, they were standing in for me in the direct confrontation with evil. They took the blows hurled against them by a racist system and in so doing, transformed the winds of oppression that had always blown against black people into a force of propulsion that would benefit me enormously.

James Farmer, in the early 1960s the head of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and a Freedom Rider, wrote much later in his autobiography that living then “was tenuous …  but the grasping at liberty, and the reaching toward happiness ennobled life for this nation.”

These men and women made it possible for me to reach toward happiness. Even as a teenager I wondered if I could have done what they were doing. I wondered if I could have stood on the front lines at Anniston, Alabama, or Birmingham, or Jackson, or in the Delta itself, facing a whirlwind of violence and let nobody turn me ‘round. I wondered then if I had that kind of courage.

I still do.

Lee A. Daniels is Director of Communications for the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc., and Editor-in-Chief of TheDefendersOnline.