We called it the "Woody" bus for short. Mom still hadn't learned how to drive yet, and the bus was fun, and it sure beat walking. Riding the bus was something we took for granted in 1961. Young, old, black and white, lots of people rode the bus every day without a moment's thought.I didn't know it at the time, but it wasn't so easy for black people to ride a bus in the southern part of the country. Oh, they could ride alright, but only in the back, and only in seats marked "colored only." There were strict rules about this, and you'd better pay attention to them if you knew what was good for you.
In May of 1961 I would see white people beating up a group of black and white bus passengers. It was on the evening news. The segregation laws were being tested. Apparently it was against the law to segregate people on the interstate highway system, but once you got down south, the Jim Crow laws took effect. I had no idea what all this talk of segregation was all about. When we rode the bus to Woodbury everyone sat pretty much where they wanted to. People sat with "their own kind" and all, but no one was forced to sit in any particular spot because of the color of their skin, and if you didn't want to sit next to somebody, well, you just didn't sit next to them and that was that.
What I saw on the news was pretty scary. People were being beaten up by angry mobs just because they wanted to sit together on a bus, black and white together. There were designated areas in the bus terminals too, and these people; these Freedom Riders they called themselves, were challenging the way things were. There were separate rest rooms and waiting rooms, and you could only go where the signs told you to be, and you didn't dare do otherwise.
It had been one hundred years since the Civil War began, and the hatreds still ran deep. I was watching a new Civil War right on TV, and it just didn't make sense at all. The National Guard would be called out to keep the peace in Alabama, and President Kennedy would say that this was of the "greatest concern" to him.
Nothing would be said to us about this in school. It was just ignored, and yet it was on the TV and in the papers. What would nine year olds understand? How could anyone explain this to us?
We would pledge allegiance to our flag and our country.
We would pray our Christian prayer each morning.
We stood believing we lived in a country where everyone was free.
And as we stood Americans were savagely beaten by other Americans simply because they wanted to choose where to sit on a bus and where they could go to pee.
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