When officials at the General Services Administration, which manages the federal government’s real estate holdings, announced on March 4 that they had identified 440 government-owned buildings for potential sale, they noted that taxpayers should not be paying “for empty and underutilized federal office space.” If you accepted that statement as a true accounting of the Trump administration’s motives, you probably gave the matter no more thought. Why should Americans be paying to maintain empty office space?
But as with nearly everything else this administration does, the real truth is in the details. And many of the buildings on the original list were not “underutilized” at all. They were simply being used for government work that the president didn’t like or by government officials whom the president wanted to punish. All on the grounds that they were “not core to government operations.”
Among the less recognizable buildings slated for potential sale were several bearing the names of civil rights leaders, including Rosa Parks and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., as well as the building that houses the Freedom Rides Museum, which occupies the old Greyhound Bus Station in Montgomery, Ala.
The Freedom Rides Museum commemorates the courage and sacrifice of a group of civil rights advocates — Black and white, young and old, female and male, Southern and Northern — who risked their lives on a series of bus rides through the segregated South in 1961. Their aim was to test the strength of Boynton v. Virginia, a 1960 Supreme Court decision that ruled it unconstitutional to segregate facilities provided for interstate travelers — in other words, the waiting rooms, restaurants and restrooms in bus stations and terminals. James Farmer, a co-founder of the Congress of Racial Equality, which organized the first Freedom Rides, called the initiative a “sit-in on wheels.”
Thirteen riders set out on May 4, 1961. Their planned route would take them from Washington, D.C., to New Orleans. One group boarded a Greyhound bus; the other took Trailways.
The story of the violence they encountered on their journey would dumbfound anyone who doesn’t know civil rights history. Police officers looked the other way during savage beatings. State escorts disappeared, leaving riders vulnerable to a mob that everyone knew was waiting for them.
White supremacists waiting just outside Anniston, Ala., set the Greyhound bus on fire and then blocked the doors from outside. Onlookers screamed, “Burn them alive!” When riders crawled out bus windows to escape, they were set upon by a mob armed with pipes, bats and knives.
The Trailways riders fared hardly better: They were attacked inside the bus by Klansmen riding undercover. When the buses reached Birmingham, more Klansmen — and more violence — were waiting.
The shocking images and news reports from that day horrified the country and stirred the Kennedy administration to intervene. Through a compromise with the governor of Alabama, the Freedom Riders were taken to a plane, which carried them to New Orleans and safety. But the Freedom Rides were just beginning. Throughout that year, wave after wave of riders risked their lives, enduring wave after wave of violence, to keep the dream of freedom alive.
Thanks to efforts by U.S. Representatives Terri Sewell and Shomari Figures, both Alabama Democrats, with the help of Senator Katie Boyd Britt, an Alabama Republican, the historic bus station in Montgomery is no longer on the list of properties being considered for sale.
Nevertheless, its temporary tenure on the list should be a warning of what we all stand to lose when what is considered “core to government operations” no longer includes sites central to the preservation of the entire American experiment.
It took a shamefully long time, as well as immense courage and personal sacrifice, for the phrase “all men are created equal” even to begin to be something more than overt hypocrisy. Most of us know that. Even President Trump’s proposed National Garden of American Heroes includes prominent civil rights icons. But Black history and voting rights are increasingly under attack, and sites like the Freedom Rides Museum have become even more crucial for keeping the past alive in the present.
I’ve read about the Freedom Rides in who knows how many books — most recently in David Greenberg’s masterful new biography of John Lewis, which was a finalist for this year’s Pulitzer Prize — but I’d never visited the Freedom Rides Museum, even though we drive right past Montgomery on family trips to the beach. I always figured there would be time to stop some other day. It wasn’t like the museum was going anywhere.
This year, newly reminded of the fragility of historic sites, we finally stopped in Montgomery. The museum is closed for renovations — it’s slated to open later this summer with an entirely new permanent exhibit — but there’s an outdoor timeline exhibit featuring photographs and signage with QR codes for more information, including audio interviews and video clips of documentaries, that runs across the front of the museum. It’s worth seeing even when the museum is closed.
But as I stood there reading those placards and studying those photos, I couldn’t help wondering if the Freedom Rides would have the same galvanizing effect today. Are Americans capable anymore of seeing the truth about what is happening to their fellow human beings?
The most effective forms of social resistance manage to make the people in the oppressor class see something they have not seen before, or that they have actively worked to avoid seeing. A powerful resistance finds a way to reach at least some of the disinterested and convince them that their very souls are on the line.
Back in 1960, when James Lawson was teaching Nashville college students the principles of peaceful resistance, he instructed them to look their attackers in the eyes even as they were curling to protect their own organs from blows. The point of nonviolent resistance was not simply to integrate lunch counters. The point was for human beings on both sides to begin to recognize the humanity of the people on the other side.
We may not be capable of that kind of transformation anymore, but we will never know if we don’t at least try. The Freedom Riders had no reason to believe they would survive their challenge of the segregated South — the Nashville riders even signed wills before boarding their bus — but the seeming impossibility of the task did not stop them. And in the end, their task was not impossible at all.
I try to remember that, no matter how hopeless I sometimes feel. As Representative Sewall said in a news conference, “I believe we can take a page from that playbook and, in times of chaos like this, see their road map as a form of action for us to take.”
Margaret Renkl, a contributing Opinion writer, is the author of the books “The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year,” “Graceland, at Last” and “Late Migrations.”
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