O Say Can You See?

Inspiration from the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Rides

One of the things I love most about being a public historian at the nation’s history museum is how the past comes to life every day. As the director of the museum’s Program in African American Culture, I have had the privilege of meeting people who made history and changed the destiny of this nation. For more than 30 years, the Program has documented and shared the story of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s through living testimony from folks who were there. The countless stories and courageous decisions we have presented show this movement was about so much more than the few remarkable people whose names we all know.

As we have marked the passing of fifty years since this staggering uprising of ordinary Americans, I have talked with dozens of people whose courage and commitment forced our nation to come closer to living up to its ideals. I’ve met people like the Greensboro Four and Rev. James Lawson, whose bravery and resolve seemed breathtaking and otherworldly to me in high school when I saw their grainy images on news footage in documentaries like Eyes on the Prize. I’ve met people, like Mabel Williams, whose militancy seemed frightening and off-putting when I read about them in college. And I’ve met people like Rosa Parks and Congressman John Lewis, whose intelligence, determination, and selfless passion for justice would make anyone think “I could never be like that.”

Today is a good day to remember that we all have the capacity to take our citizenship and ideals to heart and have the power to make a tangible difference in the course of history. Fifty years ago today, two ordinary buses left Washington headed south. In addition to the regular passengers who rode on them were a group of activists known as the Freedom Riders. Riding together in interracial groups on buses and trains, they put their bodies and freedom on the line by challenging Jim Crow laws that enforced racial segregation in interstate travel.

During the spring and summer of 1961, more than 400 Americans became Freedom Riders. Young and old, male and female, black, white, and Asian, religious and secular, Southern and non-Southern – the Riders represented a cross section of America. Criticized by some for disrupting the social order and engaging in civil disobedience, the Riders were actually doing exactly what the United States Supreme Court said they had a right to do. While Southern officials chose to ignore two Supreme Court rulings that struck down racial segregation on interstate buses and trains, and in the terminal waiting rooms, restaurants, and restrooms that served interstate travelers, the Freedom Riders were determined to exercise their constitutional right to sit and eat where they pleased. They did so knowing full well that the simple act of violating long-held traditions of racial segregation and white supremacy would almost certainly lead to arrest and imprisonment, and might even cost them their lives. Propelled by faith in nonviolence and the hope that the country could be awakened to the promise of democratic renewal and social justice, the Riders endured beatings, bombings, harassment, and imprisonment. In the process, they drew the Kennedy administration into the gathering movement for civil rights and, even more importantly, demonstrated the power of ordinary people to effect great social change.

Congressman John Lewis, filmmaker Stanley Nelson, Diane Nash, Revered James Lawson, Jim Zwerg, and historian Ray Arsenault take the stage at the 2011 National Youth Summit.

In February the Smithsonian hosted a National Youth Summit, in collaboration with the National Endowment for the Humanities and WGBH/American Experience, which brought together middle and high school students here, online, and at the Japanese American National Museum, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, the Senator John Heinz History Center, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, and the Arab American National Museum to meet Freedom Riders and discuss the role of young people in shaping history. I entered the planning for this event with one real hero among the Riders: Diane Nash. As a teenager, the image of the young Nash persuading the mayor of Nashville to admit the injustice of segregation in front of news cameras in 1960 captivated me. Who was this Fisk University student with grace and strength enough to bend her oppressors toward justice? After meeting her, she’s even more of a hero to me and I wish for every young person the opportunity to be inspired by her story. I came out of the last year working on the Freedom Rides, however, with scores of new heroes. Riders still represent America—veterans of the Rides live in communities all across the nation and they still have much to teach us. What is most inspiring about the Riders is how the ordinary can be extraordinary. These heroes are not marble models, but everyday people who lived for a history not yet written.

“The Student Leader”: a short film about Diane Nash from the movie Freedom Riders. Watch the full episode or see more American Experience.

Fifty years ago today a Greyhound bus and a Trailways bus pulled onto the highway toward New Orleans, but destined for firebombs and riots in Alabama. Their legacy lies not in the violence that stopped those two buses, but in the freedom that rose from the flames and blows. As Langston Hughes wrote, “No bomb can kill the dreams I hold, for freedom never dies.”

You can learn more about the Freedom Rides when the American Experience documentary Freedom Riders debuts on your local PBS station on May 16th. You can also watch a full archived webcast of our National Youth Summit on the Freedom Rides.

Christopher Wilson is the Director of the Program in African American Culture at the National Museum of American History.

Mary Lou Williams: Musical and social change agent

Portrait of Mary Lou Williams, CBS studio, New York, N.Y., ca. April 1947. Courtesy of William P. Gottlieb/Ira and Leonore S. Gershwin Fund Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress

Mary Lou Williams was a jazz artist who articulated the history, culture, and heritage of a people and a nation through the music she composed and performed. An All About Jazz article by writer Teri Harllee highlights Ms. Williams as the only major jazz artist whose career spanned every musical era in jazz history. As shown by our collections, we have examples of her boogie woogie music as well as later compositions that were arranged for big bands, including “Scorpio,” which she arranged for the Duke Ellington Orchestra in 1946.

Listen to the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra perform this piece on Public Radio International’s “Jazz Smithsonian” program, which originally aired on May 23, 2000.

 

PLAY: Scorpio

Her vision and jazz experience is succinctly captured in the Jazz Tree that Ms. Williams created with artist David Stone Martin in 1977. At the root of the tree is “Suffering” born of the slave trade and resulting legacies of slavery. The Blues frames the outer trunk. Spirituals, Ragtime, Kansas City Swing and Bop rise inside the tree trunk, and jazz luminaries sprout from the leaves like a bushy afro. The tree creates a jazz timeline that illuminates a musical genealogy of the African American experience in America.

This experience is also reflected in The Kinsey Collection, on view at the museum through May 1, and the slave shackles from the popular culture film Roots. Sheet music, contemporary to Ms. William’s early career, contained examples of stereotypical views of African Americans in popular culture, sometimes degraded by themselves: “Mammie’s Pickaninny Boy” and “All Coons Look a Alike to Me”.

Fr. Peter O’Brien, Society of Jesus, was Ms. Williams’ last business manager and continues to direct the Mary Lou Williams Foundation, where her musical and cultural legacy is extended through education programs. Recently Fr. O’Brien’s reflections on Mary Lou Williams appeared in a Smithsonian Folkways article, and in 1994, he participated in the Smithsonian’s Jazz Oral History Program where he discussed Ms. Williams and her impact on his life.

A catalyst for cultural understanding and transformation

According to Dr. Billy Taylor, the late jazz educator, composer, and musician, Mary Lou Williams remarked that “If we are to make progress in modern music, we must be willing and able to open our minds to new ideas and developments." In 1996, Dr. Taylor presented a bold, new idea to the Kennedy Center: let’s launch a Women in Jazz festival honoring Mary Lou Williams. The response was, “Will there be enough women to perform at the event?” No problem, Dr. Taylor assured skeptics.

Held every May at the Kennedy Center, the Mary Lou Williams Jazz Festival is an annual, seminal event presenting workshops and performances by veteran and emerging jazz women. These vocalists and instrumentalists pay tribute to an artist that most believe to be the greatest jazz woman who ever lived, and many, past and present, view her gender as irrelevant to her accomplishments. In the Joan Burke documentary on Mary Lou Williams, saxophonist Buddy Tate noted: “She was outplaying all those men. She didn’t think so but they thought so.”

In Ms. Williams’ later years, she became a teacher at Duke University, which also saw her legacy and creativity as emblematic of its social and educational changes. On March 8, 1961, Duke’s board of trustees announced that students would be admitted to its graduate and professional schools without regard to race, creed or national origin. Three African American students enrolled that September in the law and divinity schools.

The policy was extended to the undergraduate school about a year later and in September of 1963 the first black undergraduates were admitted. Civil rights advocacy lead to admission changes but Mary Lou Williams and jazz were selected to brand Duke’s new center for black history and intercultural engagement that emerged later.

The Mary Lou Williams Center for Black Culture was established in 1983, six years after Ms. Williams became the university’s first-ever “artist-in residence,” a position she held until her death in 1981. The Center promotes racial understanding, community building, and appreciation of the black experience in America by increasing and presenting knowledge about African American people, history, culture, and contributions of the African diaspora. Programs developed by the Center include regular jazz performances featuring local and guest jazz artists and students from the Duke University Jazz Studies Program; exhibitions such as “Women of the Blues”; and recognition of black achievement such as contemporary black inventors.

Through the Center, jazz and Mary Lou Williams are instruments of domestic cultural diplomacy and inclusion.

Have a listen

Check out a a podcast and teacher guide from the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra’s Executive Producer, Ken Kimery.

Mary Lou Williams recorded extensively for Folkways Records, and Smithsonian Folkways re-issued many of those recordings in recent years. In addition, a rare big-band rendition of “Virgo” from her “Zodiac Suite” is one of several Williams contributions included on Jazz: The Smithsonian Anthology. Hear a rehearsal of “Little Joe” by Mary Lou Williams and the Chosen Five, from the 1950 Folkways album Footnotes to Jazz, Vol. 3, Rehearsal, I.

Listen Here to "Little Joe"

Joann Stevens is Program Director for Jazz Appreciation Month at the National Museum of American History.

Editor's Note: This year's Jazz Appreciation Month poster features Mary Lou Williams. The graceful portrait of Ms. Williams was developed for JAM by Keith Henry Brown, a young African American artist with a passion for jazz and a legacy as the former Creative Art Director for Jazz at Lincoln Center. To request a copy of the poster, write jazz@si.edu. Or, you can download it here it in PDF format.

Bringing heroes to the classroom

Recently in the online community run by our partner, Verizon Thinkfinity, an educator asked how members of our history teachers group “connect the classroom with the outside world.” An avid Skyper, this teacher often finds opportunities to bring experts to his students via the Web. One way that the museum has tried to make the outstanding programming and experts here more accessible to a wider school audience is through live and archived webcasts, including the upcoming National Youth Summit on the Freedom Rides.

On February 9 at noon EST, the Museum—in partnership with the National Endowment for the Humanities, Smithsonian Affiliations, and American Experience/WGBH—will bring together secondary students and Freedom Rides veterans Congressman John Lewis (D-GA), Diane Nash, Jim Zwerg, and Rev. James Lawson for a discussion on the history and legacy of the Freedom Rides. The program will be webcast live; teachers may register at http://smithsonianconference.org/freedomrides and submit questions for possible inclusion in the program. Be sure to visit the Freedom Rides page on the museum’s website to find more information and a teachers guide with suggested activities for before and after the webcast.

The museum piloted this model last year with a Youth Town Hall on the Greensboro sit-ins. The archived webcast from last year’s program is available on our website. You can read what students said about it in the blog post, “Powerful Lessons from the Greensboro Four”. Or, hear how teacher Amy Trenkle prepared and discussed the program with her students in “A Teacher’s Perspective on the Greensboro Sit-in Youth Town Hall.”

As Amy noted:

“These…experiences open gateways for students and encourage them not to be passive readers of history but to be engaged in the world around them. It also encourages them to think about the impact that not only one person can make, but what a difference they can make in their own community and for larger movements.”

In an effort to emphasize that larger lesson, we are inviting classes who participate in the program via the webcast to create a short video response to the program. Teachers may upload these videos to YouTube and email the link to the museum before April 30. Selected videos will be featured in our newsletter, on our Facebook page, on our Twitter feed, and on this blog, too! Topics are included below and details are available in the program’s teacher guide.

Video Topics: 

Option 1: Reflection
Create a video montage of students reflecting on any of the questions below, based on their participation in the National Youth Summit program and webcast. The video should include at least one student, and can include as many as is appropriate for your class or school. 
• What was the most important lesson you took from the panel discussion? 
• What did the Freedom Rides accomplish, broadly speaking? 
• What issue today matters to you? What would you do to address it? 
• What is the importance of civic engagement? How do you participate in public life?

Option 2: Local History
Create a video interview with people in your community who were alive during the civil rights movement or who were active in it. Topics to discuss could include their thoughts on the time period and their activism, including reasons they became involved or not, and their thoughts about the movement’s influence on their life choices afterward. Be sure to ask them to reflect on the methods used by the Freedom Riders. Or, examine a civil rights protest or related event in your area that occurred around 1961, and consider the following:
• The practice of active, nonviolent civic engagement during the event.
• The degree of local sympathy, civil unrest, or apathy, if any, associated with it.
• Any changes that occurred immediately or soon after the event.

We hope you will join us for the webcast on February 9 and we look forward to your videos! You can also find more resources for connecting the outside world to your classroom, including a variety of scholarly lectures and panel discussions, through Smithsonian’s History Explorer.

Naomi Coquillon is an education specialist at the National Museum of American History.

Backstage at the museum

Loyal readers of our blog are surely familiar with the museum's theater programs, especially Join the Student Sit-Ins. This presentation teaches the methods of nonviolence used in civil rights-era protests, including the sit-ins at the Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, a four seat portion of which is now on display in the museum. Past blog posts have considered how these programs present history for the public (“When History Comes to Life”) and about related programs previously offered about the lunch counter (“A Teachers Perspective on the Greensboro Sit-Ins”). But have you ever wondered how these programs came to be? In today’s post, we want to take you backstage to meet one of the stars of “Join the Student Sit-Ins” and learn more about the process of developing a museum theater presentation.

Xavier Carnegie performing in Join the Student Sit-Ins

We interviewed Xavier Carnegie—the museum’s Creative Director for theater programs and one of the lead actors for the “Join the Student Sit-Ins” program—as part of our “Meet Our Museum” podcast series. You may have read about “Meet Our Museum” in a previous blog post (“Have You Met Our Museum?”). While no longer a public program, it is now a podcast series, which, by the way, was an idea put forward by one of you, a blog reader! A new podcast is produced each month; each program lasts approximately 15-30 minutes and is designed for a middle school audience, but is appropriate for everyone (past podcasts have examined the history of lasers and the development of the electric guitar, among other topics).

In an effort to help students understand the practical side of research in everyday life and better comprehend the jobs that make up the museum experience, we asked Xavier a few questions about his work here, where he finds the information to create his performances, and how he draws an audience into the story of history.

“Protest by Ministers,” April 14, 1960. New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection. Library of Congress.

Xavier explained that after four years at the museum he is still reading and learning more about the civil rights movement. He noted, to do the job well, “you’ve got to read as much as you can. I’m learning something new at least every other day about the sit-ins—new names, new things that happened. You want to do that because people will ask questions…Some things we don’t know, some things are very, very hard for us to figure out, but I want to go that extra mile to figure those things out as much as I can, because these are things people really want to know and really want to ask….It’s a lot of work and it never ends…but that’s what helps the program grow and stay fresh.”

To help the audience understand the period on a more personal, emotional level, Xavier draws on video footage from the era and his experiences meeting with participants in the movement. As he noted, “you can really see the passion [the sit-in participants] have. At the end of the day, these people were really putting their well being on the line for the good of the country—and what does that look like? How did they feel? And these are the things that are important for us to hit, both as an historian and as an actor.”

In this podcast, you’ll hear about these issues, and you can find discussion questions in the teachers guide. A few ideas for students to consider based on the conversation:
-What does nonviolence mean to you? 
-Why do you think the museum would choose to use theater as a way of presenting the story of an artifact? 
-If you were asked to dramatize a moment in American history, what would it be and why?

In addition to the podcast and discussion guide, you can find a video of this performance online, along with its own teachers guide. For teachers participating in National History Day who have students interested in performance, or who are organizing an in-class research assignment and want to encourage students to create a performance of their own, we hope these resources will provide a little inspiration and motivation. You can find additional guidelines on creating a National History Day theater performance here. And stay tuned for future theater programs and podcasts from us—there’s much more to come!

Naomi Coquillon is an education specialist in the Department of Education and Interpretation at the National Museum of American History.

 

Seizing justice: The Greensboro 4

Editor’s Note: Today’s post is written by guest blogger Lynn Kessler, a writer and producer at Smithsonian Networks. "Seizing Justice: The Greensboro 4" will premiere on the Smithsonian Channel Sunday, July 25, at 8 p.m. EST.

In the early ’90s I was visiting Greensboro, North Carolina, for work when we drove past the Woolworth’s store there. Someone commented that it was where the first lunch counter sit-ins had taken place. I wanted to go inside but was told, “it’s just like every other Woolworth store now” and we kept driving.

Carol W. Martin, "Elm Street, Showing the Woolworth Building," August 26, 1959, Greensboro Historical Museum Collection.

Last February, I was in front of the Woolworth’s again. It turns out this wasn’t just another Woolworth store. It was the location where four brave young men started a movement for social justice that was eventually embraced in many cities throughout the country. What happened there changed our nation forever.

My reason for being there was to tell that story in a documentary called “Seizing Justice: The Greensboro 4” for Smithsonian Channel, a young network (launched in 2007) that is turning out powerful, award-winning shows rich with the stories of this country.

This is the story of four young men, college freshmen, who grew impatient waiting for change and indignant that they were treated as second-class citizens in their own country, who sat down and demanded equal rights. Ezell Blair Jr. (now The Apostle Jibreel Khazan), Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil and David Richmond, students at North Carolina A&T, did just that 50 years ago, on Feb. 1, when they sat down at the whites-only Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro and asked to be served.

 

Ezell A. Blair, Jr. (now Jibreel Khazan), Franklin E. McCain, Joseph A. McNeil, and David L. Richmond leave the Woolworth store after the first sit-in on February 1, 1960. (Courtesy of Greensboro News and Record)

Of course, they were refused service. They knew they would be. But every day they returned to the counter, and day-by-day the numbers of friends and supporters of their cause continued to grow. By the end of the first week there were a thousand students sitting-in, all putting into practice the tenets of non-violent protest they had learned from people like Martin Luther King, Jr., Mahatma Ghandi and Thoreau. It is estimated that within six months 70,000 people were staging sit-ins around the country.

Although they faced taunts and both verbal and physical violence, they just kept coming back. They were willing to risk their lives for the things they believed in. Those are words that are easy to write and easy to say . . . but imagine actually doing that. I kept asking myself, what would I risk my life for?

The 1963 photograph depicts students enduring taunts, mustard, and ketchup as they sat-in at a Woolworth's lunch counter in Jackson, Mississippi. Courtesy Wisconsin Historical Society.

As the sit-ins continued in Greensboro, local politicians and business leaders were growing weary of the power the students had over the town. Boycotts and pickets meant customers were not coming to local stores and businesses to spend money. Students all over the country were sitting in now. Woolworth’s had lost more than $200,000 in sales by July 1960—a lot of money back then. Woolworth’s finally relented and on July 25, 1960, announced that the chain would desegregate its lunch counters nationwide. It was an incredible sea change if one considers that it was initiated by just four individuals who had nothing in their arsenal but determination and faith. Woolworth’s lunch counters were open to everyone for the next 30 years—until the company’s demise. And when Woolworth’s finally went out of business, African-American leaders in Greensboro fought to preserve the building and its contents.

In Washington, curators at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History moved to save the lunch counter of the Greensboro Woolworth’s. Today, there is an 8 foot section of the counter with its stools at the Smithsonian, with the rest of it remaining in the original Greensboro Woolworth’s, which is now the International Civil Rights Center and Museum.

 

This section of the Woolworth's lunch counter with 4 stools is on view in the National Museum of American History, second floor east. A 15 minute historic theater performance invites you to "Join the Student Sit-Ins."

Three of the four gentlemen are still alive today. David Richmond died of cancer in 1990. He was described by the other three as the quiet, compassionate one. The other three are lovely men. Very smart, in some cases very funny, and always humble. I was honored to get to sit down with them and hear their stories. In many ways, they have become heroes to me.

 

The three surviving members of the Greensboro Four (from left to right), Jibreel Khazan (formerly Ezell Blair, Jr.), Franklin McCain, and Joseph McNeil, participated in an oral history on February 4, 2010. View the Webcast.

 

A few months ago my stepfather asked why anyone would want to watch a show about such a negative time in our nation’s history. Apparently, many Americans had written to the curators at the American history museum asking the same question when they procured and then exhibited the lunch counter. For me, it wasn’t a negative time in American history, because change for the better was taking place. But, I took a better answer from Fath Davis Ruffins, an historian and curator at the museum, who said that “American history is built around a struggle to achieve an ideal nation. We haven’t perhaps yet achieved freedom and justice for all. But struggling to do that, to make our country more free, more just and more equal, has been the struggle of many generations over time” beginning with the American Revolution.

The idea that one person, or in this case four, can really make a difference has a long history in this country. To me, that is why the story of the Greensboro Four is worth telling. It is a truly American story about the power of individuals to effect change—a story powerful enough to inspire generations to come.

Tuesday night, the Smithsonian Networks and the National Museum of American History hosted a screening of “Seizing Justice: The Greensboro 4.” Lunch counter food was served as guests stood near the original portion of the lunch counter along with Major General Joseph McNeil and the Apostle Jibreel Khazan, who came for the screening. There were many children there, too, who were learning the story of the Greensboro four for the first time. It was an amazing night. On the way home I asked my stepfather, who had attended, if he still wondered why I would want to produce a documentary on such a negative time in America’s history. “No,” he said. He thought it was a great story and one that would inspire. I thought so too.

On July 25, the 50th anniversary of the desegregation of Woolworth’s lunch counters nationwide, “Seizing Justice: The Greensboro 4” will premiere on Smithsonian Channel at 8:00pm ET/PT. See a sneak peek now.

Lynn Kessler is a writer/producer for Smithsonian Networks.