From The News-Gazette, Champaign, Illinois

May 29, 2011

All rights reserved
By Robert Hays
Special to The News-Gazette

As Im sure it did for many others, the recent PBS program on the Freedom
Riders, a group of courageous people who rode interstate buses into the South in
1961 and put their lives on the line to call attention to racially segregated public
facilities, led me to think back to my own experiences during that time and
appreciate the progress weve made in the years since.
It reminded me of a sultry summer evening in 1956 when, for the first time,
I fully comprehended the awful fear of authorities that must have been an everyday
factor in the lives of black citizens in the Deep South. I still remember the occasion
vividly and it is a memory that bothers me a great deal.
I was a 21-year-old soldier hitch-hiking across the Piedmont region of South
Carolina, on my way home from Fort Jackson to Southern Illinois. Id made the
trip before and my planned route was easily defined: Columbia, where Fort
Jackson is located, to Asheville to Knoxville to Nashville to Evansville. When I
made it to Evansville, Ind., I was almost there. Carmi, my home town, was only
30-some milestwo quick hitches if I was luckyto the west.
Not that I was bound by anyones map. I went wherever a ride took me as
long as we were headed in a generally northern direction. This didnt matter much;
the trip always took about 24 hours.

In 1956, almost any driver would stop for a man in uniform. A young mother
with two small children in the back seat gave me a ride in eastern Kentucky and
apologized that she couldnt take me farther. A farmer in Tennessee, somewhere
between Knoxville and Nashville, went far out of his way rather than leave me
stranded on a rainy night. Many drivers offered to buy me meals or asked if I
needed money.
This was the American South in 1956. The good South. There was, of
course, a darker side.
On this evening that I recall so clearly, I was standing alongside U.S. 276
somewhere north of Greenville when a car slowed and went past, then stopped and
backed up. A man on the passenger side rolled down his window and told me,
somewhat timidly it seemed, that I was welcome to ride if you want to. He was a
middle-aged black manI dont think anyone used the term African-American
thenand the driver was also a black man, a bit younger.
I said Id welcome the ride. He slid over and I crawled in beside him. One of
the men asked where I was from and when I said Illinois they seemed relieved.
One of them said, Then you know what its all about. I knew what he meant and
I hadnt the heart to tell them that I had seen my share of racism in my home state.
But the racism I had experienced in Illinois was different. We didnt have
segregation as an official policy, sanctioned by law and enforced by authority. I
knew that such segregation existed, but I hadnt thought much about it until I saw it
up close for the first time when the army sent me to Fort Jackson.
Growing up in rural Southern Illinois, I had only limited contact with other
races. There was one African-American girl in my class at Carmi high school. I

played basketball and ran track against black athletes from the larger schools, but
that was about it. Then, in 1955, not able to afford college and still without a
permanent job two years out of high school, I volunteered for the draft. There
were lots of young African-American men in the army and I soon had several of
them as friends.
I arrived in South Carolina in the spring of 1956, just after the historic 101st
Airborne Division had moved from Fort Jackson to Fort Campbell, Ky. Many of
the training cadrethe drill sergeants and instructorswere paratroops whod
served in Korea. Many were black soldiers from the Northeast, cities like New
York and Philadelphia. The army was fully integrated, but the instant these men
stepped through the gate they faced a totally segregated society.
The assistant executive officer of my detachment was an extremely
competent African-American first lieutenant overdue for promotion to captain. Not
long after I joined the unit he got into a disagreement with a city bus driver when
he came to the defense of an elderly black woman being forced to the back of the
bus. The driver called police and the lieutenant faced charges that were later
dismissed. The damage had been done, however, as the army told him he may as
well resign his commission. With this on his record he would never be promoted.
It had been nearly two years since the U.S. Supreme Courts Brown v. Board
of Education decision outlawing racial segregation in the schools, but no progress
toward school integration had been made in the Deep South. The biggest impact of
the courts ruling, as far as I could tell, was the great number of Impeach Earl
Warren billboards along major Southern highways. (Warren, of course, was chief
justice.)

And I arrived in the South only a few months after a jury in Mississippi had
acquitted two white men charged with the murder of Emmett Till, the black
teenager from Chicago they believed had flirted with a white woman. The two men
later confessed their guilt, describing their activities in gruesome detail to a
magazine writer who managed to get them paid for their story.
My knowledge of all this probably was limited when I accepted the
hospitality of those two men who timidly offered a ride to a white hitch-hiker. And
I hadnt really seen how my African-American army friends were treated by white
society because there were few places I and they could go together. My only direct
experience had been the University of South Carolinas refusal to accept me and
other Fort Jackson soldiers into classes the army would pay for because the army
said it had to take everyone. U.S.C. would not accept black students.
But these are mere reflections of the rules and regulations governing a
racially segregated society, some imposed by law and some imposed only by
custom. As a white man, I would never experience the crushing weight of such
discrimination. Those two men who gave me a ride probably had.
They were a congenial pair and I enjoyed our conversation. Then I suddenly
sensed the driver growing tense. We had just entered the town limits of Travelers
Rest, a tiny berg close to the North Carolina state line. There was little traffic. The
speed limit was clearly posted and the driver made a point of the fact that he was
well within it.
Theres a policeman right behind us, he said, focusing on his rear-view
mirror. I can see his cap in the lights coming behind him.

The man next to me virtually froze in his seat. Dont go too slow and look
suspicious, he said. Try to stay right on the limit. Whats he doing now.
Hes just staying on our bumper, the driver said. Hes going to stop us for
sure.
The two black mens fear was palpable and overwhelming, unlike anything
Id ever witnessed before. It was obvious that they were terrified at the prospect of
being stopped by a police officer. The driver grew increasingly nervous and
uncertain, afraid to either speed up or slow down, and the passenger next to me
began to shake.
We were half way through Travelers Rest when the car behind us pulled out
and went around. As it drove past, we all could see that the driver wore a thencommon gas station attendants cap. Texaco, or whatever. It would be easy to
mistake for a policemans cap seen in profile in a rear-view mirror. My two
companions relief was as apparent as their fear had been only minutes before.
Let me admit right here that I know nothing about these two men. They may
have been wanted criminals. Bank robbers, for all I know. Perhaps serial killers.
But I dont think so. I think they were ordinary African-American citizens of South
Carolina who understood that white police officers were not their friends.
Only a few months later I stood on Main Street in Columbia and watched
scores of Ku Klux Klansmen parade through town in their white sheets and hoods
in a well-publicized demonstration of the Klans power. There were policemen on
the street, too, and although none openly cheered I saw no evidence that they held
any animosity toward the Klansmen.

A news story published recently recounts the experiences of a Freedom

Rider who was arrested in Winnsboro, S.C., for entering a white only washroom.
Late at night, after hed been held in jail for some time, police told him he was
being released. They took him in a squad car to the bus station, where a large mob
waited. The officers forced him out of the car, into the hands of the mob, and drove
away. He was severely beaten by the mob.
When I read that story I thought about the men who gave me a ride through
Travelers Rest five years earlier. I suspect that this is the kind of help from local
law enforcement they were familiar with. They had ample reason to be afraid.
The last class I taught at UIUC was in the spring of 2008. This was a class of
junior students in journalism, 20-year-olds, young men and women who are among
the best and brightest of their generation. They will do well when their time comes
to take control. But like most other young Americans today, they knew virtually
nothing about the history of race relations in this country. They need to know. Only
then can they appreciate how far weve come and help make sure we continue to
go forward and never slip back.
-------------Robert Hays is a retired UIUC journalism professor and writer. His
forthcoming novel, Blood on the Roses (Vanilla Heart Publishing), is about
racism in east Tennessee in the 1950s.* He can be reached at
contactroberthays@gmail.com.
*Current edition: Thomas-Jacob Publishing, LLC (2015)
Nominated for the Pushcart Prize literary award, 2015