In 1961, more than 300 men and women, both Black and White and mostly under 30 years old, put their lives on the line in the cause of racial justice. In an effort to test rulings by the Supreme Court that declared as unconstitutional “Whites Only” lunch rooms, restrooms and bus terminals as well as segregated trains and buses, the Freedom Riders traveled on buses from the North into the Jim Crow South knowing that violence and incarceration likely awaited them.
Carol Ruth Silver is the author of “Freedom Rider Diary: Smuggled Notes from Parchman Prison.” She was working as a clerk typist at the United Nations in May of ’61. “I was transfixed by the scenes of what was happening in the South and particularly the burning of a Greyhound bus,” Silver recalls. “I thought ‘This is absolutely wrong’ and decided to do something about it. So I and others, Black and White, said ‘The time is come.
At just 19 years old, Lew Zuchman was, he says, “involved in organized crime. My goal was to be the first Jew in a Mafia family.” He’d been in and out of trouble all his young life and was hanging around pool halls in New York. Fearing attacks from the Ku Klux Klan upon their release, Zuchman and others from the bus stayed with Black families who smuggled them out of town safely.
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