A lesser known Freedom Ride in North Carolina still matters today

Late last week, in the historic Hillsborough Courthouse, we celebrated the 75th anniversary of cases arising from the 1947 Journey of Reconciliation. Or, more precisely, the actions weren’t celebrated, they were marked, their horrors noted.

The assembled district judges professed to the outrages and apologized for the famed injustice.

In 1946, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that state segregation laws couldn’t constitutionally be applied to interstate travel. But almost nothing actually changed. So the Committee of Racial Equality, pressed by Bayard Rustin and George Hauser, organized what we now think of as the first Freedom Ride, the 1947 Journey of Reconciliation — testing the enforcement of the Supreme Court declaration.

Moving across the upper south, from D.C. to Nashville, the bus riders sought to avoid the terrors of Mississippi and Alabama. They stuck to more civilized places, like Frank Graham’s Chapel Hill. There the 16 male black and white riders met the tour’s greatest violence and most brutal abuse by the legal system. So much for the southern part of heaven.

After comparatively uneventful stops in Richmond Va., Petersburg, Va., Oxford, N.C. and Durham, a Trailways driver ordered the riders to the back of the bus in Chapel Hill and then, upon their refusal, successfully sought their arrest.

As they shuttled back and forth to the police station, a crowd of locals attacked. Five enraged taxi drivers punched Jim Peck in the head, screaming hate-filled epithets at him for “coming down here to stir up the n---s.”

Rev. Charley Jones, who met the riders at the station, tried to get them to safety at his parsonage. Cars of vigilantes followed, descending on Jones’ house with various weapons. Murderous threats ensued. Several serious assaults occurred. Student volunteers eventually got the riders, by car, to a rousing, supportive mass meeting at Shiloh Baptist Church in Greensboro.

Cases against the freedom riders were dropped in Durham, Asheville and Virginia, but not in Chapel Hill. Weeks later, several were tried in Orange County where the prosecutor claimed “our negroes want Jim Crow.” The Recorder’s Clerk judge agreed, calling Rustin “a poor misled Negro from the North” and Igal Roodenko “a Jew coming down here to upset the customs of the south.”

Superior Court Judge Chester Morris upheld the convictions and sentenced four riders to a month on a Roxboro chain gang. The N.C. Supreme Court readily agreed. Rustin, Roodenko and Tar Heel Joseph Felmet refused to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, preferring to broadcast the injustice to the world.

In Roxboro, Rustin was assaulted, almost starved and warned “you ain’t in Yankee land now.” A guard pointed a revolver at his head saying, “I’ll shoot the goddamned life out of you.” At the end of his sentence, he walked out, head high, undaunted by his tormentors.

Fortunately, North Carolina didn’t have the last word. In 2013, then-President Barack Obama awarded Rustin the Presidential Medal of Freedom, praising his “march toward equality regardless of who we are and who we love.” Dean Smith was honored the same day.

The Journey of Reconciliation was controversial even in the civil rights community. The great Thurgood Marshall worried it would produce a bloodbath. Rustin pushed back: “Unjust social laws do not change because supreme courts deliver opinions. Social progress comes from struggle. All freedom demands a price. Courtroom arguments will not suffice for the rights today demands.”

As we enter a new era, with a lawless, rigidly politicized U.S. Supreme Court seeking to wage war against democracy and equality rather than to support and sustain them, Rustin’s words are as resonant, and as necessary, as 75 years ago.

This story was originally published May 23, 2022 at 12:00 AM.