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General => General Discussion => Topic started by: Bad Penny on May 18, 2011, 12:06:42 am



Title: "Freedom Riders" Part 2 and Correction
Post by: Bad Penny on May 18, 2011, 12:06:42 am
I'll give the correction first: having watched the film 4 times over, I've concluded that I misheard one of the freedom riders, and that I was in error in stating that any of the freedom riders advocated compulsory integration of strictly private premises.  Bus lines and other common carriers are, of course, publicly regulated utilities, whose facilities must be available to everyone lawfully present in the US, without limitation on account of trivial anatomical differences, or the beliefs inside their head, or anything else that wouldn't survive a hearing for a trespass exclusion in a court of law on the basis of demonstrated conduct.

I'll devote the remainder to an analysis of what the freedom riders did right, as my earlier analysis may have seemed hyper-critical (but, once again, I'm trying to gain and spread the benefit of lessons learned).  Although I hardly fault the original group of freedom riders on account of their seriousness of purpose or fidelity to their cause, I noticed that the movement's level of effectiveness increased dramatically when the Fisk University students (primarily southern-raised blacks, but also including Jim Zwerg, the white man who was severely beaten in Birmingham who was an exchange student at Fisk from the University of Wisconsin at Madison) brought a more realistic understanding of conditions in the south into the movement.  (As I pointed out in my earlier piece, this could have been the story of the original group of freedom riders, had they availed themselves of the assistance of native southern civil rights organizations.)

What really impressed me was how the movement kept on going after they'd been abandoned by their own heroes, including the Kennedy brothers and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  The point is not to be held back by weak-kneed leaders nor to allow sectarianism from destroying your movement.  (I still support Ron Paul for President, even though he won't speak out on 9/11 truth, just as the freedom riders didn't lessen their support for Dr. King on account of his vacillating attitude towards their movement.)

But it's still amazing to me how the freedom riders were accused of provoking violence in the face of the massive state-sanctioned lawlessness directed against them, especially seeing as the laws the freedom riders were violating had TWICE been ruled unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court (and were, therefor, not laws).  The action of the freedom riders smashed the groupthink then prevailing within both white and black societies, and allowed people to discard their false realty in favor of reality itself.