Bob Gilbert, a junior at the College, accompany the 9 Ridgley Freedom Riders on their trip to Maryland last week. He brought with him a camera and an appreciation of the pathetic and the dramatic.
Looking over Bob's photographs last week, I was abruptly reminded of that tense and rapid-moving day when nine of us committed ourselves to an activist approach to the problem of civil rights.
One of the shortcomings of the trip was that we could rally only 9 people. We approached almost fifty leading campus "liberals" in an effort to stock a bus for the ride.
There was a full complement of pious excuses, which is to be expected when a perilous situation is posited - but there also was a surprising number of individuals who felt that it was "none of our business to go down there. They have problems of their own in Maryland."
The South has an ethical code and a folkways of its own. But it also shares our flag and our pride. The laws that bind us in New York, equally bind a Baltimore bigot . Cultural relativism may color our relations with Africa, but it cannot be used as a scapegoat for southern Injustice.
For the past 100 years we have tolerated Dixie home rule. We have said that southern ethos must be sophisticated by that region's own laws and own educational. We have, in effect, dichotomize the concept of freedom in America.
But autochthonous prejudice will never resolve itself naturally. We have granted the south of century to make its move, millions of negroes have grown up to a life of institutionalized subservience and ubiquitous extra-legal restraints. We cannot calcimine the North - and our own NAACP is presently planning a series of activists attacks on more subtle forms of bias here - but we must recognize that the position of the Negro in the South has institutionalized and hardened. Only some kind of active revolution, of which the freedom rides represent a sublimation, can destroy this creeping acculturation of the Negro.
Gilbert pictures highlight some of the main beliefs of the freedom ride experience. ( The term "freedom ride" is, incidently, a misnomer, a romanticized version of the real thing. The Maryland demonstrations or more accurately sit-ins, not concerned with interstate commerce).
One of the pictures portrays the unhappy plate of Bob Kaufman, a Trotsky ite socialist was taken off the freedom ride bus chartered by the Civic Interstate group in Baltimore. Kaufman, they said, represented an undesirable element, and the city cops were hailed to remove him.
To groups such as CORE, CIG, and the NAACP, constantly accused of subversion, the assistance of Socialist, Communist and other left-wing groups concerned with little concerned with civil liberties is consistently a sore spot. In removing Kaufman, they were doing exactly what they were fighting against; exclusion because of pre judgment.
Kaufman's crimes were rabble-rousing and handing out socialist pamphlets, a rather unfortunate and silly maneuver which most unthinking left-wing groups cling to. Someday they will realize that their nominal support is actually one of the greatest handicaps faced by civil liberties movements in the US. Still, there's nothing ethically wrong, despite a certain nonchalant about practicality.
Where to turn? There seems to be a great deal of sympathy for Kaufman, but no one appeared to take him seriously. Heis said to be immature and loud. They got him off the bus - but they have not yet erased the problem. Another picture shows a line of negroes waiting for riders in Denton, the county seat of Caroline county Maryland, where we also held demonstration.
The rides are a big thing in these communities, negro children raised alongside the bus yelling "we like Freedom riders" As one CIG leader put it. "It's a big event around here. These people never had anything else to do in these small towns. They go shopping for kicks". The white community, on the other hand, is temperamental and belligerent.It is difficult to believe that this is Maryland, north of the Mason-Dixon line and only a few hours from New York. One cannot accept the time-honored complaint against "Intruders from the north" here-- there are just too many racial insults in the air to make this legitimate.
. In Ridgely, on the other hand the little town where Queens College open to integration, the situation was somewhat different. Here we were accosted by an angry gang of hostile teenagers who used the racial slurs but we're mostly content with merely creating a row. At one store here a proprietor comma seeing us, said, "w
What's this ?One of them Freedom Rides ?why don't you go home.?"
The one Indescribable aspect of the occasion, which only a camera can catch, is the frenzied and hating expression that contorted face of most Maryland whites. Perhaps, in the long run these faces are the primary symbols of the whole desegregation fight.
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