[Vision2020] My Friend the Freedom Rider: Confronting Christian Terrorism in America's South

[Ted Moffett]

Tonight on KUID PTV "Freedom Riders: American Experience" in our
digital age, with KUID offering four channels, will appear at
different times, on different KUID digital channels.  I checked the
guide directly off the KUID signal (not cable or satellite) and it
indicates it will show at 9 PM.

The schedule showing at this moment at the following website
(indicating "Mountain Time") may or may not conform to KUID's
broadcast in all respects:

http://idahoptv.org/schedules/
------------------------------------------
Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett

On 5/13/11, nickgier at roadrunner.com <nickgier at roadrunner.com> wrote:
> Good Morning Visionaries,
>
> This is my radio commentary/column for this week.  In addition to my three
> newspapers it will also appear in the Idaho County Free Press in
> Grangeville.
>
> Ed Kale grew up in Grangeville and he came back to the UI for graduate work
> in philosophy in the 1980s.  He now runs a kayak business on Madeleine
> Island in Lake Superior.  His mug shots from the Jackson jail are attached.
>
> Ed and 177 others appeared on Oprah on May 4th and then all of them had a
> reunion in Chicago to celebrate their 50th anniversary.
>
> Read all of my columns on civil rights at
> www.home.roadrunner.com/~nickgier/CivilRights.htm.
>
> I raise my glass to all of these brave Americans!
>
> Nick
>
> MY FRIEND THE FREEDOM RIDER: Confronting Christian Terrorists in America’s
> South
>
> As an African American woman born in Mississippi in 1954,
> I owe a deep debt of gratitude to the Freedom Riders.
> I know my life would be different were it not for them.
>
> —Oprah Winfrey
>
> I’ve waited 80 years for you to come.
>
> —son of a Mississippi slave welcomes Freedom Riders
>
> Oprah Winfrey’s May 4th show celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Freedom
> Riders, who challenged southern political leaders to obey federal
> desegregation laws. My good friend Ed Kale, a native of Grangeville, was one
> of 178 Freedom Riders honored by Oprah and her audience.
>
> In 1961 Ed, 24-years-old, was a student at Yale Divinity School, where one
> of his professors paid for his expenses to join the Riders.  The first group
> had already started out on May 4th from Washington, D.C. As the 13 Riders
> crossed the Alabama state line, their buses were attacked and one was
> burned.  As the occupants fled in terror, they were beaten by a Klu Klux
> Klan mob organized by Bull Connor, Alabama’s Police Commissioner.
>
> One of those beaten was John Lewis—then a 21-year-old student from American
> Baptist College and now a congressman from Georgia. The man who attacked him
> was former Klansman Elwin Wilson, who was sitting next to Lewis on Oprah’s
> show. Wilson apologized for the beating— the only apology that Lewis ever
> received for the many blows he took as a civil rights leader. Lewis’ words
> still ring in Wilson’s mind: “We're not here to cause trouble; we're here
> for people to love each other.”
>
> The first Freedom Riders were forced to quit because no transport companies
> (private or public) would take them any farther. The second wave of Riders
> was not, however, deterred. In Nashville Diane Nash, 23-year-old member of
> the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, declared that they were “the
> fresh troops.” On May 21 Nash and 20 other students were attacked by the
> Klan at the Montgomery bus station.
>
> The Riders sought refuge in the First Baptist Church, where they met 1,500
> supporters. Outside over 3,000 whites shouted racial epithets and threw
> bricks through the windows. Fearing yet another conflagration (five
> Montgomery churches had been bombed in 1957), Martin Luther King, Jr., who
> had now joined the activists, telephoned Robert Kennedy and asked for
> federal intervention.
>
> Kennedy said that he would act only if the Riders agreed to go home and have
> a “cooling off period.” Nash’s group refused, and civil rights leader James
> Farmer supported the decision with this famous statement: “We've been
> cooling off for 350 years. If we cool off anymore, we will be in a deep
> freeze. The Freedom Ride will go on.”
>
> The Alabama National Guard was called in to form a human shield around the
> church and escort the Riders to Jackson, Mississippi. My friend Ed Kale and
> his colleagues arrived in Jackson on June 7th, and they were immediately
> arrested along with Nash’s group from Montgomery. Ed wears his booking
> pictures, which he sent me recently, as a badge of honor.
>
> After filling up all the jails and refusing bail, Ed and 300 other Freedom
> Riders were transferred to Mississippi’s notorious Parchman Prison Farm.
> They were locked up in maximum security and issued T-shirts and underwear.
> As punishment for singing all the time, the Riders’ mattresses and sheets
> were taken away.
>
> For 80 years the South had been under a reign of terror organized by people
> who were, except for a few exceptions, never convicted for the vicious
> assaults and murders they committed.  They claimed to be protecting
> Christian civilization from race mixing and then from atheistic Communism.
> For the Klu Klux Klan civil rights activists were “agents of Satan
> determined to destroy Christian civilization.” FBI Director Jay Edgar Hoover
> was convinced it was a Communist conspiracy and that Martin Luther King was
> a Marxist-Leninist.  In reality, as Elwin Wilson realized in John Lewis’
> loving gesture to him, they were Gandhian satyagrahis, nonviolent agents for
> the “force of truth.”
>
> At the end of the summer some truth did win out. Segregated buses and
> restaurants with their “whites only” signs came down.  In 1963 President
> Kennedy called for a new Civil Rights Bill, putting teeth in the one of
> 1875, which Southerners had ignored.  The legislation was blocked by
> Southern senators until President Lyndon Johnson was able to pass the bill
> in 1964.  The Freedom Riders, once declared as hopeless idealists or outside
> agitators, were slowly but surely transformed into heroes.
>
> Nick Gier taught religion and philosophy at the University of Idaho for 31
> years.
>