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Law Students Taking A Ride To Remember

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By PHILIP MORGAN

The Tampa Tribune

Published: July 19, 2008

Updated: 07/19/2008 12:16 am

GULFPORT - Law student Mike Stewart, a 26-year-old black man about to take a bus ride into civil rights history, wonders whether he and his peers would have had the grit to fight the battles their fathers' generation fought.

"They say if we were in that position, we would do the same thing, but it's easier said than done," said Stewart, in his third year at Stetson College of Law.

He may have a better idea after the next few days. He and 34 other students left Friday morning on a 2,000-mile Freedom Riders tour. They're revisiting towns in the Deep South where, in 1961, bus loads of blacks, and some whites, tested a new Supreme Court ruling allowing travelers to ignore local segregation laws.

The tour guides are University of South Florida St. Petersburg history professor Raymond Arsenault, Stetson College of Law professor Robert Bickel, and one of the original Freedom Riders, Ernest "Rip" Patton.

The bus riders 47 years ago faced down a stubborn, often violent prejudice. Most were jailed on charges of disturbing the peace and disorderly conduct. Freedom Riders so overflowed the jail in Jackson, Miss., that many were transferred to the notorious state prison at Parchman. There, they were issued T-shirts and boxer shorts as uniforms and slept on mattresses on the floor. The bedding was taken away when they refused to stop singing.

Patton, a Nashville resident, was expelled from Tennessee State University for being a Freedom Rider. In September, Tennessee State will award him and 13 other expelled students honorary doctorate degrees.

"I feel good about it - it's a long time coming," he said. "Not necessarily for me, but for the city of Nashville and the state of Tennessee."

He had joined a group riding from Montgomery, Ala., to Jackson, Miss. In Mississippi, Patton said, the National Guardsmen riding the buses fixed their rifles with bayonets. At the Jackson bus station, the black riders attempted to use "white only" facilities - waiting room, rest rooms and restaurant, and their white compatriots tried to use the "black" facilities. Police arrested them. Charged with disturbing the peace, Patton spent 62 days in jail.

He will serve as a ready reference for the tour group, which includes a number of white students born 20 years or more after the Freedom Rides. For many, the trip is part of a course Arsenault teaches on the civil rights movement.

They'll travel to Atlanta and to Birmingham, Montgomery and Selma in Alabama, with stops between, meeting with veterans of the ride and of the early days of the civil rights movement. They'll also talk with the prosecutor who won convictions in 2002 against two men for the 1963 bombing of Birmingham's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, where four little girls died.

They'll visit the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, where in 1965, Alabama troopers clubbed marchers led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. And they'll stop at Kelly Ingram Park in Birmingham, where police Chief Eugene "Bull" Connor used police dogs and fire hoses on protesters.

"There's no other tour like this in the country," said Arsenault, who made many of the contacts while researching his acclaimed 2006 book, "Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice." This is the third summer he has led it, and each experience manages to draw out the students' emotions, he said.

Patton noticed that last year when he spoke to the group in Nashville, and was glad to see it.

"That let me know that they were listening and that they felt something."

Reporter Philip Morgan can be reached at (813) 259-7609 or pmorgan@tampatrib.com.

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