To board Freedom Rides to New Orleans required both belief and bravery: Jarvis DeBerry

"Neither the slaves' whip nor the lynchers' rope nor the bayonet could kill our black belief. In our hunger we beheld the welcome table and in our nakedness the glory of a long white robe. We have been believers in the new Jerusalem."

-- From the poem "We Have Been Believers" by Margaret Walker

To be a Freedom Rider, you first had to believe.

freedom-riders-4-mugs.jpgFreedom Riders, from clockwise top left: Julia Aaron, Dave Dennis, Jean Thompson and Jerome Smith all were arrested in Jackson, Miss., in their efforts to desegregate bus terminals. All were activists from the New Orleans chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality, or CORE.

Believe that all the hatred you had seen was temporary. Believe that the love you brought on board a Southern-bound bus would penetrate evil hearts, take root there and be permanent.

If not exactly a new Jerusalem, you had to at least believe that there could be, that there would be a new Jackson, a new Birmingham, a new Montgomery and New Orleans, a new United States. And that your ride would help trigger that change.

You had to believe your hunger for dignity would be satisfied and that tables that were off-limits to you would soon be where you'd sit in harmony with used-to-be enemies. Too much to ask for harmony in the bus station waiting room or at the dime store lunch counter? Maybe. But you at least had to believe that one day you'd sit in such places uneventfully. And that an uneventful sitting was worth paying for with your body -- maybe even with your life.

Fifty years ago, the Congress of Racial Equality was made up of such believers. On May 4, 1961, 13 of them -- black, white, male, female -- boarded regularly scheduled Greyhound and Trailways buses in Washington, D.C. They planned to get off in New Orleans, where on May 17 they'd celebrate the seventh anniversary of the Supreme Court's landmark Brown vs. Board of Education decision. Between Washington and New Orleans this interracial group would avail themselves of all the accommodations the Supreme Court said they could -- and Southern states said they couldn't.

"There is a possibility we will not be served at some stops," CORE Field Secretary Genevieve Houghton, a 28-year-old white woman, said before the trip. "There is a possibility that we might be arrested. This is the only trouble I anticipate."

She didn't anticipate the Ku Klux Klan in Anniston, Ala., firebombing the bus in the attempt to burn them all alive. The Klan didn't succeed at that, but beat many of them unmercifully. Before the other bus arrived in Birmingham, Bull Connor, that city's commissioner of Public Safety, told the Klan its henchmen would be given 15 minutes "to burn, bomb, kill, maim, I don't give a goddamn." During that quarter-hour, none would be arrested.

Houghton's naivete, Connor's evil, the Kennedy administration's dithering and the unrelenting belief of student activists who succeeded in integrating the country's bus and train stations are all on display in Stanley Nelson's "Freedom Riders" documentary. The film debuted on PBS Monday night and was also shown at the Ashe Cultural Arts Center in Central City.

Outside on Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard -- a street named for the late New Orleans CORE leader -- was a bus that had brought five Freedom Riders to town. They'd been stopped in Alabama but 50 years after they first set out had finally completed their bus ride to New Orleans.

One can't look at what the Freedom Riders did without taking a hard look within. Is there anything I believe in so strongly that I'm willing to go to jail for it? Is there any cause for which I'd risk being beaten or burned to death? When confronted with evil, would I stand up brave, or would I shrink back in self preservation?

"We didn't fear nothing," Jerome Smith said Monday about the CORE activists in New Orleans. He said he and others would have been on one of those first two buses moving through the South had they not already been in jail here for protesting segregation. "The only thing we feared is that we could not do enough." They did participate in later rides. During one, Smith had his head bashed with brass knuckles.

On May 4, Oprah Winfrey had on her show 178 surviving Freedom Riders. She showed some of them responding to the question why they got on the bus.

One rider put it as simply as it can be put. She said, "I would rather be dead than not free."
