The new freedom riders!
We remember taking a school sponsored bus trip through the deep south back in the spring of 1967. As we drove along we looked out the window of the bus and saw a burned out greyhound that we instinctively knew had carried freed riders in their quest for a better life for others of their kind that was not beset by the discrimination that had plagued America for most of its existence. All though out the 1960’s these brave souls had boarded those buses and had endured racial slurs, rock throwing and actual physical harm to insure that future generations would not have to do the same thing.
Now, we fast forward to the year 2014 and we see the most amazing phenomenon taking place across this nation. The new black freedom riders are out on our nations highways en mass in their motor coaches going to places across this nation that those fifty years ago would have not even thought about visiting. We were in our favorite local breakfast restaurant recently when we saw a bus pulled up in front and scores of black people loading up after a satisfying breakfast after spending the night in one of our local hotels that was located near by. As we looked at the mosaic in the restaurant, we saw white, black, brown and all sorts of combinations eating together as if it had always been that way. But it had not always been that way.
There was a time in this country when so many areas had signs that consigned black people to using separate rest rooms and drinking fountains and not allowing them to sit where whites took their meals, not to mention that there was a time when blacks had to sit in the back of the bus. We wonder today if some of these older black people on these tour buses who remember so well the injustices of the past might make some droll jokes about those of their kind who have to sit in the back of an all black tour bus. It would not surprise us at all if that were the case.
We had a friend who recently died who commented that back during the heyday of segregation the far northern city where she had moved from to accompany her husband to segregated southern Illinois only really cared about the color of her money and not so much the color of her skin. We may never really know how much the economy of this nation has been enriched by the flow of that green money from black hands into the national mainstream where, in reality, the color of ones money is all that really counts after all. It is the great equalizer in a nation where the original founders were more concerned with taxation without representation than anything else. So many of them were slave owners but the bottom line was always all about the money after all.
Today when we see all the colors of the rainbow eating together in the midst of the hubbub that their voices have created, it does our heart good to know that this nation has advanced far enough that comments are not even made about it any longer, it is such an accepted thing. As we all sit down together in a restaurant and breathe the same air it is the sweet smell of freedom to our nostrils and it always will be but we know that the transition will not be complete until people like myself who can remember have all passed away and the indignities that we saw are not even a distant living memory any longer.
IOVHO,
Regards,
Joe
To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.
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