The First Freedom Ride
Justice doesn't come overnight (but it might arrive via overnight bus)
Welcome back to the This Day newsletter (catchier, right?). Each week, a member of our team gathers together bits of America’s past and attempts to find a throughline that might add a little understanding to our current moment.
Here’s what happened over the week ahead in American political history…
April 3
1948: A $5 billion tax cut passes the Republican legislature over President Harry Truman's veto.
1964: Malcolm X delivers "The Ballot Or The Bullet" speech in which he says the only effective solution to racial inequality is black economic and social separatism
1979: Jane Byrne becomes the first woman elected mayor of a major American city (Chicago)
1990 : The Arizona Senate votes to remove Governor Evan Mecham from office — for all sorts of reasons
April 4
1818: The United States Congress adopts the flag of the United States with 13 red and white stripes and one star for each state.
1841: William Henry Harrison dies of pneumonia, becoming the first President of the United States to die in office, making his presidency the shortest in U.S. history
1865: A day after Union forces capture Richmond, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln visits the Confederate capital.
1887: Susanna Madora Salter is elected as the first female mayor in the United States (Argonia, Kansas)
1967: Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence" speech, his first major public statement against the Vietnam War
1970 : Richard Nixon’s great White House uniform experiment is coming to an end
April 5
1975: President Gerald Ford and Betty Ford meet Vietnamese refugees from ‘Operation Babylift’ at San Francisco’s airport.
2016: The Paris Agreement on climate change is signed, binding 195 nations to limit global warming.
April 6
1712: The New York Slave Revolt of 1712 begins, leading to the enactment of harsher slave codes
1917: President Woodrow Wilson declares war on Germany
1926: The Tank Farm Fire in San Luis Obispo results in explosions and fires in the world's busiest oil port at the time
April 7
1815: A chaotic attack at Dartmoor prison in England killed and injured dozens of American prisoners.
1976: Jimmy Carter apologizes for speaking of neighborhoods' “ethnic purity.”
April 8
1789: The U.S. House of Representatives holds its first meeting.
1826: Speaker of the House Henry Clay and Senator John Randolph duel in North Arlington, Virginia
1913: The Seventeenth amendment is ratified, requiring direct election of senators
1994: The Florida legislature passed a bill that would offer some reparations and support for descendants of the Rosewood Massacre, when a Black town was burned down in 1923
2003: Baghdad falls to U.S. forces
April 9
1768: John Hancock refuses to allow British customs agents to go below deck of his ship, a significant act of resistance to British authority
1947: The first freedom ride, the Journey of Reconciliation, leaves Washington, D.C. to travel through four states of the upper South
1960: Candidate John F. Kennedy votes to pass a civil rights bill, boosting his primary campaign
1996: Bill Clinton signs the 'line item veto' bill allowing the President to veto individual items in spending and tax legislation later ruled unconstitutional
2003: Beijing closes all schools for two weeks due to the SARS virus
In which we take the above collection of events and find themes, throughlines, rabbit holes and more. This week it’s Nicole Hemmer’s turn at the typewriter.
This week, in 1947, eight Black men and eight white men boarded a bus in Washington, D.C., headed south. They were embarking on what they called the Journey of Reconciliation: an effort both to model racial desegregation and to call attention to the bus drivers, legislators, police officers, and judges who were breaking the law by enforcing unconstitutional segregation.
These first freedom riders—who would inspire the more famous freedom rides of 1961—organized in response to a Supreme Court ruling handed down the year before. In Morgan v. Virginia, the Court ruled 7-1 that a Virginia law enforcing segregation on interstate buses violated the Constitution. The attorneys arguing the case were shrewd: they avoided arguing that segregation violated the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause, because such an argument would require the Court to find that all segregation was unlawful, and they understood that the Court had no stomach for such a bold move.
Instead, the lawyers argued that the law violated the Interstate Commerce Clause, because it imposed strict rules on interstate travel that were not equivalent to the rules of states that didn’t segregate, thus interfering with the smooth functioning of commerce across state lines. The more limited consequences of that decision sat well with a Court that had found significant power in the Commerce Clause over the course of the 1930s and 1940s (the Roosevelt administration used the Commerce Clause to defend wide swaths of the New Deal in court during those decades).
Using the Commerce Clause represented a trade-off: equal protection required far fewer intellectual and legal contortions, but if given full force, it had the potential to raze the hierarchies of power embedded in law across the United States—not just racial hierarchies but gender hierarchies as well. For that reason, the 14th Amendment had laid all-but-dormant since the end of Reconstruction. When the courts did reach for it, they used it to protect corporations, not people. So the lawyers in Morgan v. Virginia left the 14th Amendment alone, turned to the Commerce Clause, and won their case.
But it was one thing for the Supreme Court to rule; it was another for the new ruling to be enforced. Civil rights activists, aware segregation was still very much the law of the land in the South, even in the face of the Court’s ruling, decided to dramatize the violation of the law. For their efforts, they were arrested. (Bayard Rustin, one of the key organizers, was convicted along with two white activists; all three were sentenced to segregated chain-gangs.)
Fourteen years later, buses remained segregated. After another Supreme Court ruling in 1960, Freedom Riders rode again. This time they were met by mob violence—but they also moved the Kennedy administration to order widespread desegregation of public transportation, part of long pattern of activism and change that marked the Black Freedom struggle.
The Freedom Riders are worth remembering at this moment, because they remind us that justice doesn’t happen overnight (and that court decisions aren’t cure-alls). The moral righteousness of a cause does not ensure its quick victory, or even its eventual victory. But the Freedom Riders knew the cause was still worth fighting for—that they may not live to see a more just world, but they could still help create one.
A Little More Esoterica
We enjoyed this great essay on the long history of Americans’ largely unrequited desire to envelope Canada.
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