Film on Freedom Riders Brings History to Life for Mt. SAC Students

Lydia Almarez thought she knew about the struggles of the Civil Rights Movement. 

The Mt. San Antonio College student said her mother told her stories about the racial injustice of the 1950s and 60s when she was growing up, but watching a screening of the documentary “Freedom Riders” Tuesday night brought those stories to life for her.

“Very emotional,” she said of her reaction to the film.  “I thought I knew what they went through. I thought I had an understanding of what they went through. I had no idea.”

The live viewing party at the American Red Cross building across from Cal Poly Pomona was one of numerous similar events nationwide and three in California, said Danica Tisdale Fisher of the Children’s Defense Fund.

Tisdale Fisher’s husband, Damany Fisher, a Mt. SAC history professor, hosted the viewing.  The college’s ASPIRE Club also helped to organize the event.

He said after the film that his hope was to show his students the power of a movement, especially one where youth sacrificed their lives for change.

“There is power in organization. There is power in the collective struggle and unity,” he said.  “They too can be a catalyst for change. They too can apply pressure to elected officials.”

The screening of the PBS program included a USTREAM panel discussion from Howard University in Washington D.C. with several Freedom Riders moderated by Children’s Defense Fund founder and president Marian Wright Edelman. The event was to mark the 50 anniversary of the 1961 bus and train rides black and white youth took through the South to protest segregation.

The riders, most of them college students, were beaten, pelted with tear gas, and jailed for riding together on buses and trains through the Deep South for six months. When one group was jailed, another took to the roadways and railways in their place until more than 300 filled one prison in Mississippi. 

The two-hour documentary is based on Raymond Arsenault’s book “Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice.” Both the book and the film show how the non-violent Freedom Riders, organized by the Congress of Racial Equality, forced President John F. Kennedy and his administration to take notice of the injustices taking place through their protests.  Kennedy, new in office, was focused on the Cold War at the time and paid little attention to the inequalities of Jim Crow.

Cornel West: “My dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of ...

Wow — so I guess someone had to take up Bill Cosby’s sunglasses-wearing, elderly black man who shakes his cane at those bad ass kids in the front yard. Or whatever. I mean, could Cornel West, respected African-American academic, be less helpful than say, Donald Trump, in attacking the President in an unnecessarily racialized manner? So, wha’ ha’ happened was, West recently said this (courtesy of , emphasis his):

I think my dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men,” West says. “It’s understandable. As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he’s always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white. He is just as human as I am, but that is his cultural formation. When he meets an independent black brother, it is frightening. And that’s true for a white brother. When you get a white brother who meets a free, independent black man, they got to be mature to really embrace fully what the brother is saying to them. It’s a tension, given the history. It can be overcome.  Obama , coming out of Kansas influence, white, loving grandparents, coming out of Hawaii and Indonesia, when he meets these independent black folk who have a history of slavery, Jim Crow, Jane Crow and so on, he is very apprehensive.  He has a certain rootlessness, a deracination. It is understandable.

“He feels most comfortable with upper middle-class white and Jewish men who consider themselves very smart, very savvy and very effective in getting what they want,” he says. “He’s got two homes. He has got his family and whatever challenges go on there, and this other home. Larry Summers blows his mind because he’s so smart. He’s got Establishment connections. He’s embracing me. It is this smartness, this truncated brilliance, that titillates and stimulates brother Barack and makes him feel at home. That is very sad for me.

Perhaps he did not read the president’s autobiography, or he would have realized that Obama is not a lost little mulatto child who is willing to give West something in exchange for that which is not West’s to trade. Obama’s struggle to find peace with himself is essentially the opposite of “deracination,” a term that takes on all the force of an epithet here.

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