John Lewis, Sarah Palin and the last days of the Bush-administration

A lot has been written already about Sarah Palin. I found this blog very insightful. Also very interesting: the final days in office of Bush.

One of the most moving speeches of the DNC to me was the speech of John Lewis. Earlier that day I was reading Terry H. Andersons book The Movement and the Sixties and read the following passage on early civil rights actions:

'After one young man who joined a sit-in in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, suffered a beating which included being burned and kicked to the floor, and was arrested for "disturbing the peace", he was allowed one phone call from jail. He called his mother, told her the news, and she chided him: "Good Negroes don't go to jail."'

On the Freedom rides:

'Events in Anniston and Birmingham were widely reported, which forced the Kennedy administration to order the FBI to investigate, to send more Justice Department officials, and to pressure Alabama officials to uphold the law. Also, television coverage enraged student activists and revitalized the movement during spring 1961. Students in Nashville immediately organized the second freedom ride, composed of eight blacks and two whites. As sit-in veterans, these activists realized the danger and several made out wills. All agreed, however, that the ride was something that they must do "because freedom was worth it."

Their bus left Nashville on May 17 and headed south for Birmingham. John Lewis, a veteran of the first freedom ride, explained that when their bus arrived in Birmingham they were met by the police commissioner, Eugene "Bull" Connor, who took them off the bus and put them in the city jail for the next two days. Then, in the middle of the night, Bull "took seven of us out of the jail, took us to the Alabama-Tennessee state line, and dropped us off. He said, 'There's a bus station around here somewhere, you can make it back to Nashville.' And I have never been so frightened in all my life." They called friends in Nashville who picked them up and drove them back to the bus station in Birmingham. With a white mob chanting outside the station, they waited for the next eighteen hours until a bus driver could be found and until additional riders arrived from Nashville and Atlanta. Then they continued on to Montgomery. With a police escort, there was no violence, but when they arrived in the city, the police disappeared. Lewis recalled: It was an "eerie feeling," a weird silence in a "funny peace." No one was in sight until they got off the bus, then local whites charged. A Justice Department official on the scene immediately called Attorney General Robert Kennedy, shouting into the phone: "It's terrible. It's terrible. There's not a cop in sight. People are yelling, 'Get 'em, get 'em.' It's awful."
And they did get 'em. Armed with pipes and baseball bats, 300 whites attacked 21 freedom riders and a few newsmen. They clubbed Lewis to the ground, leaving him in a pool of blood with a brain concussion. When they spotted a white rider, a student from the University of Wisconsin, several local women screamed, "Kill the nigger-loving son of a bitch!" They almost did, bashing his head, kicking in his front teeth, and injuring his spinal cord. One rider suffered a broken leg, and another had gas poured on him and his clothes set aflame. Local men slapped two white female riders, and when a federal agent tried to help them into his car, the men beat him to the ground, knocking him unconscious. The crowd swelled to a thousand, and after twenty minutes of mob rule, the Montgomery police finally arrived and quelled the riot. When a newspaperman asked the police commissioner why ambulances had not been called, he responded that all were "broken down," and concerning why the police had not arrived sooner, he stated: "We have no intention of standing guard for a bunch of troublemakers coming into our city."
The freedom riders stayed overnight in local black homes, and participated in a Sunday church service in Ralph Abernathy's First Baptist Church. The Kennedy administration was informed that twelve activists intended to leave Montgomery in a bus the next day for Jackson, Mississippi. The president expressed his concern and asked blacks to cease rides for a while and to participate in a cooling off period. Black leaders said no. James Farmer replied that blacks had been "cooling off for a hundred years. . . . If we got any cooler we'd be in a deep freeze." The bus left Montgomery and this time it was protected by the National Guard, seven patrol cars, two helicopters, and three planes. There was no violence. But when the riders reached Jackson they were arrested for attempting to use the white restroom in the bus station, charged with "breach of peace," and jailed. They spent the next two months on a brutal Mississippi penal farm."