Skip to main content

Freedom Riders: What Is A Hero?

Civil rights is a long struggle and most often involved challenging authority and facing violence. In 1961 the Supreme court of the US ruled that segregation in Federal facilities is unconstitutional. Groups advocating civil rights tested this ruling by riding in nonsegregated buses up to southern states like Mississippi and Alabama. These interstate buses were legally obliged to follow the supreme court ruling even in places where segregation was still practiced and enforced.

One iconic image of the freedom riders is that of Jim Zwerg.

Jimzwerg

from Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia.

Freedom riders knew or expected to be stopped or arrested for violating local laws.  What they did not count on was the degree of hate and violence waiting for them in bus stops and roads. The first freedom riders were to arrive in New Orleans May 17th but in May 14th in Birmingham, Alabama a mob attacked the freedom riders.

Freedom riders sat side by side with another person in the bus regardless of the color of their skin and ethnic background. The mob hated the white freedom riders the most and singled them out by beating them with baseball bats and iron pipes. Injured riders were denied medical treatment in local hospitals. Local police and authorities looked the other way and did not stop the violence.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Password Issues On Ubuntu Login

I found myself unable to enter my login credentials when prompted to do so in Ubuntu. I think I might have changed it then forget about it. I've been running the current session for more days than I should have. I forget. So what's the solution to my problem. How do I get in to my system now? It involved getting into the grub menu somehow. I am uncertain as to how to do that exactly in your system. So there's a couple of ways to do it (finger's crossed). When booting at system start, use the esc key or the shift key. The first one worked for me. The timing is key. Wait until the bios banner shows then hit the esc key once. I am using Ubuntu 22.04.4 here. I have a current version of grub. The grub menu will give you options and the one you want is: root. Yes you want root privileges to set the root password. It should give you a terminal access where you can issue commands. Type: #mount -rw -o -s remount / ==> this command mounts the filesyste...

Pacman Has to Get Better

I finally got my printers working. I got cups (and cupsd in the /etc/rc.conf) I installed hpoj and a group of printer drivers. So to get my Arch linux to recognize there's a usb printer connected to my system I have to run a daemon (ptal-init setup) and include it in /etc/rc.conf. That finally enabled (after a reboot) my GNOME control center to acknowledge that there is indeed an HP-3900 at the end of my usb port. The real personal story behind my saga with a printer is pacman. It is now throwing 'network not reachable' everytime I start it. Every download and sync. I ran --debug and ping ip addresses and so far I will conclude that it's a really really slow ftp server. The server is so slow pacman is timing out connections. It's unusable guys. My first rolling release distro and I've decided that Arch rises and falls with the performance of their package manager. Great distro for the DIY community. But sorry I can't recommend Arch linux to my mother who jus...

Webapps in Unity

So it has been 4 months since Ubuntu 14.04 came out. This is LTS and supported for 6 years by Canonical. The first mobile device with Ubuntu pre-installed is promised to come out later this year, 2014. It's time to check out how the apps perform so far. It is a good idea. I use Gmail and Twitter and Facebook. Why not a webapp in a desktop? So I start the Twitter and Gmail webapp. So far it has crashed my computer 6 times. Not a very good sign. On the other hand it does work but not as stable as opening them in Firefox. -- Use my PGP key if you want to encrypt your replies/messages to me. You are invited to also send me your PGP keys so we can communicate in private.