Re-reporting, editing for Today’s Insight News by Carolyn Bennett
Freedom Riders were multi-racial Civil Rights activists who rode on interstate buses into segregated States of the U.S. South to test the United States Supreme Court decision Boynton v. Virginia (of 1960). The first Freedom Ride left Washington, D.C., on May 4, 1961, and was scheduled to arrive in New Orleans on May 17. The Freedom Riders challenged nonviolently laws and customs that enforced segregation. The Freedom Rides and the violent reactions to them drew national and international attention to the violent disregard for the law.
Freedom Rider JIM ZWERG appeared today on Democracy Now and earlier in a “People’s Century” interview. I was particularly interested in his comments on integration, the nonviolent imperative and the power of collective, inter-racial activism in ensuring substantive movement forward.
At the turn of the 1960s, Jim Zwerg, a young white Beliot College Wisconsin student, had entered an exchange program at Fiske College in Nashville, Tennessee. One college was white, the other black.
Zwerg said in PBS's People’s Century interview that he had grown up in a “lily-white community” and “never had to face any other races.” His interest in going on the exchange to Fiske “was more intellectual,” he said. He wanted to see how he would feel. “I was more interested in how I was going to act, how I was going to react as a minority.”
At the start of his exchange, Zwerg was unaware of planned demonstrations to end segregation in public places. He wasn’t even aware of the problem until he invited his fellow students to attend a movie and was told that theaters were segregated by law. Whites and blacks were prohibited from attending and sitting together in theaters. Zwerg met and joined with activist/student John Lewis, learned about the demonstrations, and attended workshops centered on nonviolence and nonviolent protest. He entered the movement "a minority."
As participant, sufferer and observer first in the theater protests then among the Freedom Riders, Zwerg learned something about the tactics of the mob (perpetrators of violence). “There was a sequence as to how violence would take place,” he said. “It was first directed at a white male then a black male then a white female then a black female; so while we were attempting to integrate the movie theaters, there were situations where I’d get hit and kicked and spit on and [attacked with verbal slurs].… [But] I was undergoing a transformation where nonviolence became more to me than just a technique. It became something that I deeply believed in, that changed my life.”
The time came time for America’s Freedom Rides to the Deep South. “We got word of the burning in Aniston [Alabama] ... We had a meeting long into the night as soon as we heard about it. The feeling was that if we let perpetrators of violence believe that we [nonviolent activists] would stop if they were violent enough, then we would take serious steps backwards. The feeling right away was that we needed to ride… [And] I felt very strongly that the group that went had to be integrated so I volunteered and was among those selected to be among the first ten.”
Zwerg came to color the civil rights movement “American.”
“I never saw the movement as black-white. To me it was a movement.… I was wrestling with that when they asked if I would try the role of the demonstrator in one of the workshops. My first reaction was anything but passive and nonviolent. I felt some real urges to strike out.” However, over time, his view changed. “I sensed a power far greater than any one individual member” and later came “to understand the term synergism as the power of many being far greater than any individual.…”
Zwerg entered the new century with a mindset and personal embrace of an integrated, nonviolent America.
“I have two grandchildren of mixed blood,” he says. “Tucson [Arizona] where I live today is a wonderful amalgam of culture ─ Native American, Hispanic, white, black, Asian... It’s so wonderful for my kids and my children’s children to be growing up in an atmosphere like that.” He recalls the story of his “tiny” middle son’s “first love,” an adopted neighbor girl who “was Korean, and my John had never noticed that; … that’s what it’s all about.” He goes on to say that he looks at his grandkids ─ “one little boy who is part-Korean, part-black, part-white” and thinks “he is an American … He’s not a Korean-American, he’s not a Black-American, he’s not a White-American ─ He’s an American.”
Character of nonviolence changes people
At the age of seventy, Zwerg said on Democracy Now, memories of the Freedom Ride “come flooding back: the love, the fellowship, the relationships we had; the joys we shared, the triumphs. It was the most incredible period in my life, and I will cherish it.”
Embracing nonviolence totally changed his life. Since the era of the Freedom Rides, Jim Zwerg has “dedicated [his] life to sharing that message through the ministry and through life in general." He speaks with children and adults of all ages talking about nonviolence and the steps to bring about social change, principles of nonviolence. “The first person that changes is you, the individual who embraces it. Then it changes the way you look at others.”
We should neither forget nor dwell on what happened in the past, Zwerg says. “Everybody ought to have the same opportunity to excel [though] you may fall flat on your face.” A door that had been shut in an earlier past, the movement “opened to possibility … We can go as far, as fast, as high as we want to and nothing should stop us. … There has been a change. We can always do better. We do not yet call the United States paradise.”
Sources and notes
“Interview with Jim Zwerg, Civil Rights Activist, United States,” People’s Century, PBS, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/peoplescentury/episodes/skindeep/zwergtranscript.html
“The Freedom Riders: New Documentary Recounts Historic 1961 Effort to Challenge Segregated Bus System in the Deep South,” February 1, 2010,
Guests on the segment: filmmaker/director of The Freedom Riders Stanley Nelson; civil rights activist/student participant in 1961 Nashville-New Orleans Freedom Ride Bernard Lafayette; civil rights activist/student participant in 1961 Nashville-New Orleans Freedom Ride Jim Zwerg
The International Civil Rights Center and Museum opens today in Greensboro, North Carolina, at the site of the historic 1960 Woolworth’s sit-in http://www.democracynow.org/2010/2/1/the_freedom_riders
FreedomRidersFilm.com
Interview with Jim Zwerg, Civil Rights Activist, United States, People’s Century, PBS, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/peoplescentury/episodes/skindeep/zwergtranscript.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_Rides#Mob_violence_in_Montgomery
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