The Freedom Ride
By Gene Aronowitz
I grew up in a racially segregated city without really noticing.
I was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and when I was six years old, my family moved to Wilmington, Delaware. That’s where I grew up. About 15% of the 110,000 residents of Wilmington were Black, and they lived in their own part of town and went to their own schools. That’s just the way things were, and I never questioned why.
After graduating high school, I went to all-white Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland. After a year, I transferred to The University of Delaware, which had a few Black students because of a lawsuit, but I have no recollection of having interacted with any of them.
But then, after graduating from college in 1960, I moved to New York City, one of the most multicultural municipalities in the world, and lived and worked at Henry Street Settlement, an agency on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, committed to social justice and equal opportunity. I accepted the egalitarian values of the integrated New York University Graduate School of Social Work, situated in Greenwich Village, where the lingering declarations of the beatnik generation echoed loudly, and the sensibilities of the sixties resounded with music, art, and above all, ideas of what an enlightened society should look like. This new exposure made me wonder why I had lived so indifferently in my segregated community, even while learning in school about slavery and the widespread practice of lynching. Why I had been so oblivious to the circumstances of being Black in America was a mystery to me. I knew I needed to change.
I was appalled by a shocking and frightening incident that occurred in 1961. Seven Black and six white activists on a Freedom Ride boarded a Greyhound bus in Washington D.C and rode through the South to protest segregated bus terminals. When the bus reached Anniston, Alabama, a white mob set it on fire. The activists managed to get off but were severely beaten on the street. I wanted to do something, something dramatic.
So, in December of that year, I joined approximately seven hundred activists on a Freedom Ride to test the willingness of restaurants on Route 40 in northeastern Maryland to serve Black people. I was a little frightened, but with all the expected media coverage and all the people involved, I thought I would be relatively safe.
I rode with three others from my social work school, one of whom was my fiancée. Each car had to have at least one Black person aboard. Ours was a tall, slender, handsome, light-skinned Black man in his early twenties. To get to U.S. Route 40, we drove from New York City through Wilmington, my segregated hometown, which I thought was an ironic, yet fitting overture to my budding journey.
The Ride organizers from CORE (The Congress on Racial Equality) told us to keep calm and courteous when entering the restaurants and avoid conflict. I remember feeling equal proportions of fear, disdain, and excitement at our first encounter. But the proprietor was subdued and polite as he explained that we could not be served. The second and third restaurants mirrored the first, and they seemed to know what to expect from us. It seemed like a choreographed give and take. The day went practically without incident. Newspaper coverage reported that the riders, restaurant owners, and police all got along very well. There were a few carloads of volunteers who agreed to refuse to leave the restaurants with the understanding that they would be arrested. But even those encounters went non-violently.
It took us about four hours to cover the fifty-one miles from Elkton, Maryland, to Baltimore. No restaurants agreed to feed us. At the end of our Ride, we turned around and headed north. A half-hour later, at about 5 p.m., still in Maryland, we were hungry, and the four of us went into a chain restaurant. I was shocked and outraged when that owner said we couldn’t eat there. This was real, not some scripted performance. I was hungry, really hungry.
We silently left the restaurant and continued driving north. There was a brief discussion about one of us going into the next restaurant to order take-out, but that would have meant keeping our Black companion in the car while ordering food from a bigoted and discriminatory restaurant owner. That was something we could not stomach.
We were about twenty-five miles from Wilmington. I called my parents, described our situation, and asked if we could come there to eat. I explained that one person in our group was Black. There was a slight hesitation, but my mother said, “Sure, come on.”
As far as I knew, my parents related to Black people exclusively as hired help. My father was a foreman in a plant that made expansion joints, and there were Black people in his department. My mother had a small catering business and hired Black people as porters. My parents called them “colored people” or sometimes used the pejorative Yiddish word “shvartza.” I was initially concerned that their interactions with a Black guest might be embarrassing. However, they served a sit-down dinner in our dining room. The table conversation was pleasant, respectful, and relaxed. I can’t remember what else we had for dinner, but I do remember that my mother extracted some of her prized, locally famous blintzes from the freezer for a festive dessert. I was impressed with and gladdened by my parents’ openness to something very new for them.
The two-hour ride from Wilmington back to New York City must have been disturbing for me, a crisis of consciousness. I say “ must have been” because I have no recollection of the ride. It’s gone. But I might have examined the disparity between my dispassionate role-playing at all those restaurants and the visceral and poignant reality of not being served at our last one. I might have examined whether I was angry about that final act of discrimination or just frustrated about not being able to eat when I wanted to. I might have examined how I really felt about Black people and if, underneath it all, I had more in common with the bigoted restaurant owners than I did with our Black companion. I might have examined whether this Freedom Ride was simply an adventure rather than an attempt to remedy wrongs. I might have asked myself if I had changed from who I was while growing up in Wilmington, Delaware.
That night, I must have had some doubts.
A version of this memoir was initially published in Travel Light and Other Explorations
