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CBS

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Sound Smart: The Black Panthers | History

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Associated Press

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60 Years On, A Look Back at the Little Rock Nine

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Oprah

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The Little Rock Nine Remember the First Day of Desegregation | The Oprah Winfrey Show | OWN

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Minnijean Brown-Trickey (Nine Member)

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Nonviolence Is... | Minnijean Brown-Trickey | TEDxMarkhamSt

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Little Rock Nine - Desegregating Education

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Little Rock Nine - Desegregating Education

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The Guardian

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Minnijean Brown Trickey didn't intend to make a political statement when she set off with two friends for her first day in high school. She was, after all, only 15. "I mean, part of growing up in a segregated society is that it's a little sort of enclave and you know everybody," says Trickey, who is African American. "So, I was thinking: 'Wow! I can meet some other kids.'"

Central high school in Little Rock, Arkansas, seemed to have a lot going for it. "The black school was kind of far away and there was no bus," she says. "We went to get new shoes and we were really trying to decide what to wear. So we were very teenage-esque about it, just totally naive."

It was September 1957, the Jim Crow era of racial segregation, and nine black pupils little guessed they were about to plant a milestone in the struggle for civil rights to follow those of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old lynched in Mississippi in 1955, and Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a bus in Alabama later the same year.

Brown v Board of Education, the landmark 1954 supreme court ruling that segregated schools were unconstitutional, should have meant she and fellow pupils could take their places at Central High. But Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas, in the deep south, remained defiant and used the national guard to block their enrollment. The African American children were left in limbo for three weeks.

On the first day of term, the national guard were there to stop the nine entering Central High, where all 1,900 attendees were white. Three weeks later, on 25 September, the group braved a hostile white crowd, climbed the school steps and were escorted to class by US army troops. They became known and revered as the Little Rock Nine.

Eight of the nine are still living and will return to Little Rock on Monday to mark the 60th anniversary of the US's first major battle over school segregation. A day later, several will be in Washington to speak at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. It will be a moment to reflect on how far the US has come in unravelling educational apartheid - and whether, in recent years, progress has stalled or even reversed.

The share of "intensely segregated" black schools has trebled over the past 25 years, according to research by the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), which warns of a "resegregation" taking hold. Trickey, who turned 76 earlier this month, asks bleakly: "What kind of country doesn't see education for all children to be the primary value? I think the US has two values: segregation, which they do so well, and violence."

Speaking by phone from her longtime home in Canada, she can still remember vividly the combination of segregation and violence that left her "whole body shaking with fear and shock" as a teenager six decades ago.

On 23 September 1957, the group did get into the building with police protection. But an angry mob of more than a thousand white people had gathered in front of the school, chanting racist abuse such as "Go back to Africa".

"I really think that we were afraid to look at the mob; at least I was," says Trickey. "So we just heard it and it was like a sports event, that sound, the roar, but it was a roar of hatred, and just thinking about it makes me shake."

She says of her young self: "I'm nobody. I've never been hated. I've been loved all my life. I'm beautiful. I'm smart. I just can't believe this. So I kind of describe it as having my heart broken. Of course, you know as an 'American' even living in a segregated society you do all the anthems and the pledges and you're hiding under the desk from the Russians, and so brainwashing works well. So the heartbreak was: 'I'm supposed to be living in a democracy. What? These people hate me. They don't know me. They want to kill me.'"

The mob started a riot and police decided to remove the students for their own safety. "At about 10am they said: 'You've got to come down to the office,' and we went down into the basement. They put us in these cars and the cops driving the cars were shaking. They had the guns and sticks and they were scared. 'Oh wow, this is scary.' Some of us were told to keep our heads down.

"Melba Pattillo Beals [another of the nine] says she overheard a person saying: 'Once you drive, do not stop.' So they quickly drove us out from the side, then later we watched TV and could see the mob was going to go inside."

The crisis was cause for Washington to intervene. President Dwight Eisenhower sent in 1,200 paratroopers from the 101st airborne division. The soldiers escorted the students single file into the school for their first full day of classes and dispersed the demonstrators. The US's racial shame had been exposed, shown on TV and reported in newspapers around the world. "Negroes escorted into school," reported the Manchester Guardian, noting that two white protesters clashed with the soldiers and were injured.

Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at progressive thinktank Century Foundation, says he regards it as a turning point for the country: "We were accustomed to having schools segregated by race. We in essence had a system of apartheid in our schools that had been widely accepted in the south. The Little Rock Nine were an incredibly courageous group of African Americans that stood up and said this system of apartheid, which had been struck down by a supreme court decision, could not stand.

But although 25 September is the date people remember, troops remained at Central high school for the rest the school year and the Little Rock Nine ran the gauntlet of hatred every day. They were taunted, assaulted and spat upon by their white counterparts; a straw effigy of a black person was hung from a tree. They were kept apart in different classes so they could not vouch for each other's claims.

"It's the going back: that's the bravery, that's the courage," Trickey says. "It's the going home and saying: 'Wow, they're not stopping me, I'll go back no matter what.' There is no courage at the outset: the courage kicks in later."

Trickey was first suspended, and then expelled, for retaliating against tormentors who went unpunished. She was invited to New York to live in the home of Kenneth and Mamie Clark, social psychologists whose groundbreaking work showed the negative impact of segregation on African American children, and finished her secondary education. She eventually became an activist, environmentalist and social worker with a spell in the Bill Clinton administration.

Beals became a journalist and author and lives in San Francisco; Carlotta Walls LaNier, the youngest of the nine, became a property broker in Denver; Elizabeth Eckford served in the army, became a probation officer and lives in Little Rock; Ernest Green served in the Jimmy Carter administration and worked for Lehman Brothers in Washington DC; Gloria Ray Karlmark worked as an aerospace research technician and lives in the Netherlands and Sweden; Terrence Roberts became a psychologist and management executive in Pasadena, California; Thelma Mothershed Wair had a career as a teacher and worked with young offenders and the homeless, then moved back to Little Rock; Jefferson Thomas fought in Vietnam, became an accounting clerk with the defence department and died in Columbus, Ohio, from pancreatic cancer in 2010.

The nine were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal by Clinton in 1999 and have met for reunions, particularly on anniversaries. "We're on conference calls and we're giggling and we say about ourselves that, when we get together, we become teenagers again," says Trickey.

But the legacy of Little Rock is non-linear, and cause for both optimism and caution. While significant strides were made towards desegregation in the 70s and 80s, a series of decisions by the supreme court between 1991 and 2007 authorized the termination of cross-district bussing, local court supervision of desegregation plans and limited use of race-based admissions. An interplay of race, class and geography is at work, including the middle class's ability to self-replicate by buying homes near the best-funded schools.

The Civil Rights Project at UCLA reported last year a "striking rise" in double segregation by race and poverty for African American and Latino students concentrated in schools that "rarely attain the successful outcomes typical of middle-class schools with largely white and Asian student populations". The year 1988 was the "high point" of desegregation for black students in terms of the share of students in majority white schools, it found, but since then the proportion of "intensely segregated nonwhite schools" (those with 10% or less white students) rose from 5.7% to 18.6% of all public schools. There is little sign Donald Trump and his education secretary, Betsy DeVos, regard this as a priority.

Speaking from the steps of Central high school for the 40th anniversary in 1997, Clinton warned: "Segregation is no longer the law, but too often separation is still the rule. Today, children of every race walk through the same door, but then they often walk down different halls. Not only in this school, but across America, they sit in different classrooms, they eat at different tables. They even sit in different parts of the bleachers at the football game."

The Little Rock Nine could be forgiven a sense of frustration at such uneven progress. "It's all institutional and it's all centuries old," says Trickey, "so we're seeing the result of policies that have been made over time. It has become more visible because the people who are running the country now are profoundly intentionally ignorant."

After the first black US president was succeeded by a man supported by white supremacists and the Ku Klux Klan, Trickey sees history coming full circle. "People went into their basements and pulled out the old signs that they used in Little Rock, in Selma, across the country. "Integration is a sin", "Integration is an abomination against God", "Integration is communism". They're using the same ones they used 60 years ago. But there will be young people like the Little Rock Nine who are gonna keep going; I'm trying to train as many of them as I can."

The US capital offers one glimpse of the wider trends. New research by the Albert Shanker Institute shows that, in Washington DC, 86.1% of the typical black student's peers are also black, and more than half the private school student population is white compared with less than 10% of public school.

DC Scholars public charter school, which opened in 2012, is just five miles from the dome of the US Capitol and the most powerful legislative body in the world. The school's bright, colourful walls include photos of the "scholar of the month!", a table showing percentages of students who improved their maths and reading scores and a series of university pennants including Harvard and Yale. There are 512 pupils, of whom 31% have disabilities - for example, learning disorders or ADHD - which is treble the national average. The student body is 100% African American.

Tanesha Dixon, principal of the middle school, explains this as being largely down to geography: "We are east of the river. This is a very black community. We have middle-class children and lower-class children; not every student is a 'latchkey kid' or from a broken home. We have a diversity because the black experience is not a monolithic experience."

She adds: "I'm not even thinking of the colour of their skin; I'm thinking of the quality of the education they're getting. The fact we've been able to provide a high quality of education east of the river every day is one of the reasons I keep coming to work."

Asked how the Little Rock Nine would react if they visited, Dixon says: "I would hope they would be shocked in a very good way, amazed at the calibre of discussion that schools are having. I would put my school against any in the city to read, write and do arithmetic. It's kind of cool to be a nerd here. Kids of colour are going to a school where they have access to great teachers and great resources."

The debates remain complex, progress uneven, the answers elusive. Justin Reid, director of African American programmes at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, says: "Little Rock was definitely a flashpoint in the civil rights movement and inspired activists, but it also galvanised many southern states in how they attacked integration efforts. They did it in a quiet, subversive way; they didn't want the media attention that was attracted in Little Rock. You saw legislators think carefully: how can we block integration?"

He adds: "I think the Little Rock Nine would have to be disappointed. We're regressing. The peak time for integration was the 70s and 80s. We now live in a society where there is more segregation than ever before."

Speaking by phone from Little Rock, Ernest Green, now 75, admits he is "disappointed" but insists he is also "pleased" by the evolution of the past 60 years.

"The US is still segregated by housing and employment, which are the two pillars we still have to struggle with," he says. "But I believe our experience will act as an inspiration to many young people. It may inspire some on the other side: there's probably a crowd that wants to go back to slavery, but we won't let them.

"I survived a year of Orval Faubus, the Arkansas governor, in 1957. If we pace ourselves according to what Trump wants, obviously we'll go backwards. The idea is to continue the fight and push for equity in this country."

Green recalls a little-remembered line from Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech in Washington in 1963, in which the civil rights leader argued that America had defaulted on its constitutional promise to citizens of colour, like a check that comes back marked "insufficient funds".

But King refused to believe the bank of justice is bankrupt.

"Dr Martin Luther King said the US had given black people a bad check; we're still waiting for the check to be honoured."

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Little Rock Nine: the day young students shattered racial segregation

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Minnijean Brown Trickey didn't intend to make a political statement when she set off with two friends for her first day in high school. She was, after all, only 15. "I mean, part of growing up in a segregated society is that it's a little sort of enclave and you know everybody," says Trickey, who is African American.

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Maya Angelou

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Maya Angelou, "Caged Bird" from Shaker, Why Don't You Sing? Copyright © 1983 by Maya Angelou. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Source: The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou (Random House Inc., 1994)

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Caged Bird by Maya Angelou | Poetry Foundation

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Paul Rucker

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The symbols of systemic racism — and how to take away their power | Paul Rucker

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What MLK would think of Blac Lives Matter today

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What MLK would think of Blac Lives Matter today

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Washington Post

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Analysis | What Martin Luther King Jr. would think of Black Lives Matter today

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April 4, 2018 At the time of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s death in 1968, his voice was everywhere. The civil rights movement in America moved to the pulse of his cadences. Among the many laments after King's assassination was the poignant realization that we would no longer hear that voice.

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The Conversation

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Millions March Texas. Elizabeth Brossa/flickr, CC BY-NC-SA

Comparing the 1960s and 1970s Black Panther Party and today's Black Lives Matter movement reveals parallels and progress.

Stanley Nelson's recently released film The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution juxtaposes the party's justice movement against the Black Lives Matter protest campaign.

Conceived about 50 years apart, both Black Lives Matter and the Black Panther Party for Self Defense galvanized frustration with police brutality against black people in the US.

Alicia Garza created Black Lives Matter, with Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi, as a call to action after the acquittal of George Zimmerman for killing 17-year-old unarmed Trayvon Martin in 2013. The Black Panther Party was formed, in part, in reaction to the police killing of Matthew Johnson, an unarmed black 16-year-old, in San Francisco in 1966.

The commonalities between Black Lives Matter and the Black Panther Party are more striking when they are compared to the mid-20th-century civil rights movement, which took place when segregation was legal and black people protested politely and defensively.

Looking 'proper'

According to filmmaker Stanley Nelson, it was important for civil rights leaders to win the hearts and minds of the press, a majority white American public, and a cautious black middle class. In an interview with NPR, he goes on to explain that civil rights organizers insisted, "'we're going to look proper...' to show the difference between them and the mobs that would be chasing them or screaming at them."

The Black Panthers were not interested in mainstream press or general public approval. They had their own newspaper designed, art-directed and heavily illustrated by Black Panther Party artist and Minister of Culture Emory Douglas. It showed images that would never appear in the mainstream press.

As I observed in a 2007 essay on Douglas's work:

"Part of Douglas's genius was that he used the visually seductive methods of advertising and subverted them into weapons of the revolution. His images served two purposes: to illustrate conditions that made revolution a reasonable response and to construct a visual mythology of power for people who felt powerless and victimized."

© 2015 / Emory Douglas / Artists Rights Society, New York

The Black Panther newspaper showed photographic evidence of police brutality along with editorial drawings and cartoons illustrating black people fighting back.

Black Lives Matter uses cellphone photographs, videos and commentary that often quickly go viral through social media.

Each movement used available media to reach broad constituencies and stimulate action.

The Panthers' messages were instructive, visual, and covered a range of ambitions, included in the party's 10-point platform.

The phrase "Black Lives Matter" may seem deceptively simple to those who receive the words as a veiled threat. Perhaps they believe that equality has been achieved and systemic and institutionalized racism no longer exist.

In the 50 years since segregation and legal discrimination ended and the US tried to "move past" its racist history, much of that history was ignored and effectively forgotten. Blacks and whites have differing perceptions of how much progress has been made on racial equality. Polls show that white millennials have about the same racial viewpoints as baby boomers.

This racial knowledge vacuum does not allow some people to believe that black people and other people of color are routinely treated more harshly by police and law enforcement officers. Black Lives Matter's insistence on presenting evidence of inequality is disturbing to these deniers.

At the time of the Black Panthers, just a few years after civil rights legislation, most black people still lived in poverty with substandard everything - from housing to schools to health care. Even though the political establishment disagreed on what should be done to change it, no one denied there was a problem.

Disruption and pushback

As activist Deray McKesson points out, "protest is confrontation and disruption." In addition to protesting at the time and scene of controversial police events, Black Lives Matter protesters disrupt everyday life and activities, which creates pushback.

Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton responded to last summer's #BlackFair protest against the small number of black vendors at the state fair by saying, " I just think the way they're proposing to deal with it is irresponsible." Another peaceful protest for Black Lives Matter at the Twin Cities Marathon on October 4 2015 brought disagreement between supporters of the movement. Ashley Oliver, a member of Black Lives Matter in Minneapolis and legal chairwoman of the city's NAACP chapter, told the Star Tribune newspaper that disrupting the marathon was the wrong way to get the group's message out. "Our message will get lost," she claimed.

Black Lives Matter organizer Netta Elize explained why the protests must happen at seemingly nonrelated events. She said, "Black people in the US do not have free space to live. The ability to participate in everyday activities without having to think about race is a privilege."

In their time, the Panthers were marginalized and vilified, limiting their main sphere of public operations to college campuses and other left-friendly venues. Only the most fear-producing images of Panthers appeared in mainstream press, reiterating the FBI's claim that the organization was the greatest threat to national security.

Seattle Black Panther Party History and Memory Project

Visual tactics

Like the Black Panther Party, Black Lives Matter protesters use elements of "visual theater." The Panthers' carefully constructed visual presence included uniforms for members, creating icons for party members that represented strength, purpose, and discipline. As Stanley Nelson's film points out, the Panthers understood media and the power of visual images.

Black Lives Matter uses visual tactics such as light brigades and more theatrical " die-ins," to convey an omnipresent threat of violence or death.

To comment on current conditions for black people in the US, artist Emory Douglas repurposed one of his drawings - 39 years after its original appearance in November 1976 in the pages of The Black Panther newspaper - to promote Black Lives Matter.

The original image, he said, was about justice in general, not a specific event. In the new version, Douglas made the scales of justice even larger.

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Black Panthers and Black Lives Matter -- parallels and progress

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Comparing the 1960s and 1970s Black Panther Party and today's Black Lives Matter movement reveals parallels and progress. Stanley Nelson's recently released film The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution juxtaposes the party's justice movement against the Black Lives Matter protest campaign.

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Ex- Black Panthers leader says "Black lives matter" is NOT a movement

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How the lunch counter sit-in became an iconic civil rights movement

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How the lunch counter sit-in became an iconic civil rights movement

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SFA Mini-documentary

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0:00 / 0:15•Watch full video

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How a Lunch Counter Sit-In Became an Iconic Civil Rights Moment — SFA

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GPB Education

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Who Were the Freedom Riders? | The Civil Rights Movement

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American Experience PBS

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Oprah Winfrey

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Meet the Freedom Riders Who Survived a Deadly Attack from the KKK | The Oprah Winfrey Show | OWN

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The Smithsonian

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On Sunday, May 14, 1961-Mother's Day-scores of angry white people blocked a Greyhound bus carrying black and white passengers through rural Alabama. The attackers pelted the vehicle with rocks and bricks, slashed tires, smashed windows with pipes and axes and lobbed a firebomb through a broken window. As smoke and flames filled the bus, the mob barricaded the door. "Burn them alive," somebody cried out. "Fry the goddamn niggers." An exploding fuel tank and warning shots from arriving state troopers forced the rabble back and allowed the riders to escape the inferno. Even then some were pummeled with baseball bats as they fled.

A few hours later, black and white passengers on a Trailways bus were beaten bloody after they entered whites-only waiting rooms and restaurants at bus terminals in Birmingham and Anniston, Alabama.

The bus passengers assaulted that day were Freedom Riders, among the first of more than 400 volunteers who traveled throughout the South on regularly scheduled buses for seven months in 1961 to test a 1960 Supreme Court decision that declared segregated facilities for interstate passengers illegal.

After news stories and photographs of the burning bus and bloody attacks sped around the country, many more people came forward to risk their lives and challenge the racial status quo. Now Eric Etheridge, a veteran magazine editor, provides a visceral tribute to those road warriors in Breach of Peace: Portraits of the 1961 Mississippi Freedom Riders. The book, a collection of Etheridge's recent portraits of 80 Freedom Riders juxtaposed with mug shots from their arrests in 1961, includes interviews with the activists re-flecting on their experiences.

Etheridge, who grew up in Carthage, Mississippi, focuses on Freedom Riders who boarded buses to Jackson, Mississippi, from late May to mid-September 1961. He was just 4 years old at the time and unaware of the seismic racial upheaval taking place around him. But he well remembers using one entrance to his doctor's office while African-Americans used another, and sitting in the orchestra of his local movie theater while blacks sat in the balcony.

"Looking back," Etheridge says, "I can identify with what the white South African photographer Jillian Edelstein has said: 'Growing up white in apartheid South Africa entitled one to massive and instant privilege.'"

A few years ago, Etheridge, who lives in New York City and has worked for Rolling Stone and Harper's, began looking for a project to engage his budding photographic skills. During a visit with his parents in Jackson in 2003, he was reminded that a lawsuit had forced the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, an agency created in 1956 to resist desegregation, to open its archives. The agency files, put online in 2002, included more than 300 arrest photographs of Freedom Riders."The police camera caught something special," Etheridge says, adding that the collection is "an amazing addition to the visual history of the civil rights movement." Unwittingly, the segregationist commission had created an indelible homage to the activist riders.

Nearly 75 percent of them were between 18 and 30 years old. About half were black; a quarter, women. Their mug-shot expressions hint at their resolve, defiance, pride, vulnerability and fear. "I was captivated by these images and wanted to bring them to a wider audience," Etheridge writes. "I wanted to find the riders today, to look into their faces and photograph them again." Using the Internet and information in the arrest files, he tracked riders down, then called them cold. "My best icebreaker was: 'I have your mug shot from 1961. Have you ever seen it?' Even people who are prone to be cautious were tickled to even think that it still existed."

Most of the riders were college students; many, such as the Episcopal clergymen and contingents of Yale divinity students, had religious affiliations. Some were active in civil rights groups like the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), which initiated the Freedom Rides and was founded in 1942 on Mahatma Gandhi's principle of nonviolent protest. The goal of the rides, CORE director James Farmer said as he launched the campaign, was "to create a crisis so that the federal government would be compelled to enforce the law."

The volunteers, from 40 states, received training in nonviolence tactics. Those who could not refrain from striking back when pushed, hit, spit on or doused with liquids while racial epithets rang in their ears were rejected.

As soon as he heard the call for riders, Robert Singleton remembers, he "was fired up and ready to go." He and his wife, Helen, had both been active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and they took 12 volunteers with them from California. "The spirit that permeated the air at that time was not unlike the feeling Barack Obama has rekindled among the youth of today," says Singleton, now 73 and an economics professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.

Peter Ackerberg, a lawyer who now lives in Minneapolis, said that while he'd always talked a "big radical game," he had never acted on his convictions. "What am I going to tell my children when they ask me about this time?" he recalled thinking. Boarding a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, "I was pretty scared," he told Etheridge. "The black guys and girls were singing....They were so spirited and so unafraid. They were really prepared to risk their lives." Today, Ackerberg recalls acquiescing and saying "sir" to a jail official who was "pounding a blackjack." Soon after, "I could hear the blackjack strike [rider C.T. Vivian's] head and him shrieking; I don't think he ever said 'sir.'"

John Lewis, then 21 and already a veteran of sit-ins to desegregate lunch counters in Nashville, was the first Freedom Rider to be assaulted. While trying to enter a whites-only waiting room in Rock Hill, South Carolina, two men set upon him, battering his face and kicking him in the ribs. Less than two weeks later, he joined a ride bound for Jackson. "We were determined not to let any act of violence keep us from our goal," Lewis, a Georgia congressman since 1987 and a celebrated civil rights figure, said recently. "We knew our lives could be threatened, but we had made up our minds not to turn back."

As riders poured into the South, National Guardsmen were assigned to some buses to prevent violence. When activists arrived at the Jackson bus depot, police arrested blacks who refused to heed orders to stay out of white restrooms or vacate the white waiting room. And whites were arrested if they used "colored" facilities. Officials charged the riders with breach of peace, rather than breaking segregation laws. Freedom Riders responded with a strategy they called "jail, no bail"-a deliberate effort to clog the penal facilities. Most of the 300 riders in Jackson would endure six weeks in sweltering jail or prison cells rife with mice, insects, soiled mattresses and open toilets.

"The dehumanizing process started as soon as we got there," said Hank Thomas, a Marriott hotel franchise owner in Atlanta, who was then a sophomore at Howard University in Washington, D.C. "We were told to strip naked and then walked down this long corridor.... I'll never forget [CORE director] Jim Farmer, a very dignified man ...walking down this long corridor naked...that is dehumanizing. And that was the whole point."

Jean Thompson, then a 19-year-old CORE worker, said she was one of the riders slapped by a penal official for failing to call him "sir." An FBI investigation into the incident concluded that "no one was beaten," she told Etheridge. "That said a lot to me about what actually happens in this country. It was eye-opening." When prisoners were transferred from one facility to another, unexplained stops on remote dirt roads or the sight of curious onlookers peering into the transport trucks heightened fears. "We imagined every horror including an ambush by the KKK," rider Carol Silver told Etheridge. To keep up their spirits, the prisoners sang freedom songs.

None of the riders Etheridge spoke with expressed regrets, even though some would be entangled for years in legal appeals that went all the way to the Supreme Court (which issued a ruling in 1965 that led to a reversal of the breach of peace convictions). "It's the right thing to do, to oppose an oppressive state where wrongs are being done to people," said William Leons, a University of Toledo professor of anthropology whose father had been killed in an Austrian concentration camp and whose mother hid refugees during World War II. "I was aware very much of my parents' involvement in the Nazi resistance," he said of his 39-day incarceration as a rider. "[I was] doing what they would have done."

More than two dozen of the riders Etheridge interviewed went on to become teachers or professors, and there are eight ministers as well as lawyers, Peace Corps workers, journalists and politicians. Like Lewis, Bob Filner, of California, is a congressman. And few former Freedom Riders still practice civil disobedience. Joan Pleune, 70, of New York City, is a member of the Granny Peace Brigade; she was arrested two years ago at an anti-Iraq War protest in Washington, D.C. while "reading the names of the war dead," she says. Theresa Walker, 80, was arrested in New York City in 2000 during a protest over the police killing there the year before of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed immigrant from Guinea.

Though the Freedom Rides dramatically demonstrated that some Southern states were ignoring the U.S. Supreme Court's mandate to desegregate bus terminals, it would take a petition from U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy to spur the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) to issue tough new regulations, backed by fines up to $500, that would eventually end segregated bus facilities. Even after the order went into effect, on November 1, 1961, hard-core segregation persisted; still, the "white" and "colored" signs in bus stations across the South be- gan to come down. The New York Times, which had earlier criticized the Freedom Riders' "incitement and provocation," acknowledged that they "started the chain of events which resulted in the new I.C.C. order."

The legacy of the rides "could not have been more poetic," says Robert Singleton, who connects those events to the election of Barack Obama as president. Obama was born in August 1961, Singleton notes, just when the riders were languishing in Mississippi jails and prisons, trying to "break the back of segregation for all people, but especially for the children. We put ourselves in harm's way for a child, at the very time he came into this world, who would become our first black president."

Marian Smith Holmes is an associate editor.
Photographer Eric Etheridge maintains a Web site, breachofpeace.com, that publishes information about the Freedom Riders.

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Fighting racial segregation in the South, these activists were beaten and arrested. Where are they now, nearly fifty years later?

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History

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Roots: The System of American Slavery | History

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Ted X - Tyson Salon

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Black Self / White World — lessons on internalized racism | Jabari Lyles | TEDxTysonsSalon

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From the film SELMA

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Selma - John Legend ft. Common Music Video - "Glory" (2015) HD

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Songs from Maya Angelou

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Secret songs of the Underground Railroad

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Louis Armstrong - Go Down Moses "Let My People Go"

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Louis Armstrong - Go Down Moses "Let My People Go"

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Slave Songs - Aunt Viv teaching black history at the Bel-Air Academy

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Ted X - Frank Bond

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The freedom riders and changing the world: Frank Bond at TEDxChesterRiver

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Albert Einstein Institute

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Nonviolent action (also sometimes referred to as people power, political defiance, and nonviolent struggle) is a technique of action for applying power in a conflict by using symbolic protests, noncooperation, and defiance, but not physical violence. Nonviolent action may involve: 1.

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Face to Face - Malcom X and Martin Luther King Jr

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Face to Face - Malcom X and Martin Luther King Jr

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Al Jazeera

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Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.  Face to Face in Unity!

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Ted X - Curtis Austin

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Black Panthers White Lies | Curtis Austin | TEDxOhioStateUniversity

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Britannica

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Rosa Parks, (born February 4, 1913, Tuskegee, Alabama, U.S.-died October 24, 2005, Detroit, Michigan), American civil rights activist whose refusal to relinquish her seat on a public bus precipitated the 1955-56 Montgomery bus boycott in Alabama, which became the spark that ignited the civil rights movement in the United States.

Born to parents James McCauley, a skilled stonemason and carpenter, and Leona Edwards McCauley, a teacher, in Tuskegee, Alabama, Rosa Louise McCauley spent much of her childhood and youth ill with chronic tonsillitis. When she was two years old, shortly after the birth of her younger brother, Sylvester, her parents chose to separate. Estranged from their father from then on, the children moved with their mother to live on their maternal grandparents' farm in Pine Level, Alabama, outside Montgomery. The children's great-grandfather, a former indentured servant, also lived there; he died when Rosa was six.

For much of her childhood, Rosa was educated at home by her mother, who also worked as a teacher at a nearby school. Rosa helped with chores on the farm and learned to cook and sew. Farm life, though, was less than idyllic. The Ku Klux Klan was a constant threat, as she later recalled, " burning Negro churches, schools, flogging and killing " Black families. Rosa's grandfather would often keep watch at night, rifle in hand, awaiting a mob of violent white men. The house's windows and doors were boarded shut with the family, frequently joined by Rosa's widowed aunt and her five children, inside. On nights thought to be especially dangerous, the children would have to go to bed with their clothes on so that they would be ready if the family needed to escape. Sometimes Rosa would choose to stay awake and keep watch with her grandfather.

Rosa and her family experienced racism in less violent ways, too. When Rosa entered school in Pine Level, she had to attend a segregated establishment where one teacher was put in charge of about 50 or 60 schoolchildren. Though white children in the area were bused to their schools, Black children had to walk. Public transportation, drinking fountains, restaurants, and schools were all segregated under Jim Crow laws. At age 11 Rosa entered the Montgomery Industrial School for Girls, where Black girls were taught regular school subjects alongside domestic skills. She went on to attend a Black junior high school for 9th grade and a Black teacher's college for 10th and part of 11th grade. At age 16, however, she was forced to leave school because of an illness in the family, and she began cleaning the houses of white people.

In 1932, at age 19, Rosa married Raymond Parks, a barber and a civil rights activist, who encouraged her to return to high school and earn a diploma. She later made a living as a seamstress. In 1943 Rosa Parks became a member of the Montgomery chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and she served as its secretary until 1956.

On December 1, 1955, Parks was riding a crowded Montgomery city bus when the driver, upon noticing that there were white passengers standing in the aisle, asked Parks and other Black passengers to surrender their seats and stand. Three of the passengers left their seats, but Parks refused. She was subsequently arrested and fined $10 for the offense and $4 for court costs, neither of which she paid. Instead, she accepted Montgomery NAACP chapter president E.D. Nixon's offer to help her appeal the conviction and thus challenge legal segregation in Alabama. Both Parks and Nixon knew that they were opening themselves to harassment and death threats, but they also knew that the case had the potential to spark national outrage. Under the aegis of the Montgomery Improvement Association-led by the young pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Martin Luther King, Jr.-a boycott of the municipal bus company began on December 5. African Americans constituted some 70 percent of the ridership, and the absence of their bus fares cut deeply into revenue. The boycott lasted 381 days, and even people outside Montgomery embraced the cause: protests of segregated restaurants, pools, and other public facilities took place all over the United States. On November 13, 1956, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a lower court's decision declaring Montgomery's segregated bus seating unconstitutional, and a court order to integrate the buses was served on December 20; the boycott ended the following day. For her role in igniting the successful campaign, Parks became known as the "mother of the civil rights movement."

Simplifications of Parks's story claimed that she had refused to give up her bus seat because she was tired rather than because she was protesting unfair treatment. But she was an accomplished activist by the time of her arrest, having worked with the NAACP on other civil rights cases, such as that of the Scottsboro Boys, nine Black youths falsely accused of sexually assaulting two white women. According to Parks's autobiography, "I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was 42. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in." Parks was not the first Black woman to refuse to give up her bus seat for a white person-15-year-old Claudette Colvin had been arrested for the same offense nine months earlier, and dozens of other Black women had preceded them in the history of segregated public transit. However, as secretary of the local NAACP, and with the Montgomery Improvement Association behind her, Parks had access to resources and publicity that those other women had not had. It was her case that forced the city of Montgomery to desegregate city buses permanently.

In 1957 Parks moved with her husband and mother to Detroit, where from 1965 to 1988 she worked on the staff of Michigan Congressman John Conyers, Jr. She remained active in the NAACP, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference established an annual Rosa Parks Freedom Award in her honour. In 1987 she cofounded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development to provide career training for young people and offer teenagers the opportunity to learn about the history of the civil rights movement. She received numerous awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1996) and the Congressional Gold Medal (1999). Her autobiography, Rosa Parks: My Story (1992), was written with Jim Haskins.

Though achieving the desegregation of Montgomery's city buses was an incredible feat, Parks was not satisfied with that victory. She saw that the United States was still failing to respect and protect the lives of Black Americans. Martin Luther King, Jr., who had been brought to national attention by his organization of the Montgomery bus boycott, was assassinated less than a decade after Parks's case was won. Biographer Kathleen Tracy noted that Parks, in one of her last interviews, would not quite say that she was happy: "I do the very best I can to look upon life with optimism and hope and looking forward to a better day, but I don't think there is any such thing as complete happiness. It pains me that there is still a lot of Klan activity and racism. I think when you say you're happy, you have everything that you need and everything that you want, and nothing more to wish for. I haven't reached that stage yet."

After Parks died in 2005, her body lay in state in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol, an honour reserved for private citizens who performed a great service for their country. For two days mourners visited her casket and gave thanks for her dedication to civil rights. Parks was the first woman and only the second Black person to receive the distinction.

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Rosa Parks | Biography, Accomplishments, Quotes, Family, & Facts

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Rosa Parks was a Black civil rights activist whose refusal to give up her bus seat to a white man ignited the American civil rights movement. Because she played a leading role in the Montgomery bus boycott, she is called the 'mother of the civil rights movement.'

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History.com

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How the NAACP Fights Racial Discrimination | History

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Amazing Grace - The Story Behind the Song

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Amazing Grace - The Story Behind the Song

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Oxvision Song

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Amazing Grace: The Story Behind the Song

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Biography

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Montgomery Bus Boycott |American Freedom Stories | Biography | History

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The MLK Institute

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The Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute

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The sit-in campaigns of 1960 and the ensuing creation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) demonstrated the potential strength of grassroots militancy and enabled a new generation of young people to gain confidence in their own leadership. Martin Luther King, Jr., described the student sit-ins as an "electrifying movement of Negro students [that] shattered the placid surface of campuses and communities across the South," and he expressed pride in the new activism for being "initiated, fed and sustained by students" ( Papers 5:447; 368).

The sit-ins started on 1 February 1960, when four black students from North Carolina A & T College sat down at a Woolworth lunch counter in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina. The students-Joseph McNeil, Ezell Blair, Franklin McCain, and David Richmond-purchased several items in the store before sitting at the counter reserved for white customers. When a waitress asked them to leave, they politely refused; to their surprise, they were not arrested. The four students remained seated for almost an hour until the store closed.

The following morning about two dozen students arrived at Woolworth's and sat at the lunch counter. Although no confrontations occurred, the second sit-in attracted the local media. By day three of the campaign, the students formed the Student Executive Committee for Justice to coordinate protests. The Greensboro protesters eventually agreed to the mayor's request to halt protest activities while city officials sought "a just and honorable resolution," but black students in other communities launched lunch counter protests of their own (Carson, 10). By the end of the month, sit-ins had taken place at more than 30 locations in 7 states, and by the end of April over 50,000 students had participated.

The sustained student protests in Nashville, Tennessee, were particularly well organized. Vanderbilt University student James Lawson led workshops on Gandhian nonviolence that attracted a number of students from Nashville's black colleges. Many of them, including John Lewis, Diane Nash, and Marion Barry, would later become leaders of the southern civil rights struggle. The Nashville movement proved successful, and the students grew ever more confident in their ability to direct campaigns without adult leadership.

Nonviolence was a central component of the student-led demonstrations; however, many protesters were not met with peaceful responses from the public. Although protesters were routinely heckled and beaten by segregationists and arrested by police, their determination was unyielding. King wrote: "The key significance of the student movement lies in the fact that from its inception, everywhere, it has combined direct action with non-violence. This quality has given it the extraordinary power and discipline which every thinking person observes" (Papers 5:450).

Although many of the student sit-in protesters were affiliated with National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) youth groups, the new student movement offered an implicit challenge to the litigation strategy of the nation's oldest civil rights group. NAACP leaders, for their part, gave public support to the sit-ins, although some privately questioned the usefulness of student-led civil disobedience.

On 15-17 April, the leaders of the various sit-in campaigns gathered at a conference called by Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) executive director Ella Baker. This meeting became the founding conference of SNCC. In a statement prior to the opening of the conference, King emphasized the "need for some type of continuing organization" and expressed his belief that "the youth must take the freedom struggle into every community in the South" (Papers 5:427). The 120 students representing 12 southern states voted to establish a youth-centered organization without formal affiliation with any other civil rights group.

In October 1960 Atlanta student leaders convinced King to participate in a sit-in at Rich's, a local department store. King and about 300 students were arrested. The students were later released, but King remained in jail while Georgia officials determined whether his sit-in arrest violated probation conditions King had received months earlier after driving with an out of state drivers license. After being sentenced to four months of hard labor at Georgia State Prison at Reidsville, presidential hopeful John F. Kennedy and his campaign manager and brother, Robert Kennedy, helped secure King's release. Their intervention in the case helped contribute to Kennedy's narrow victory over Richard Nixon in the presidential election.

By fall 1960, there were signs that the southern civil rights movement had been profoundly transformed by the fiercely independent student protest movement. Those who had participated in the sit-in campaign were determined to continue the direct action tactics that were seizing the initiative from more cautious organizations made up of older people, such as King's SCLC.

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The sit-in campaigns of 1960 and the ensuing creation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) demonstrated the potential strength of grassroots militancy and enabled a new generation of young people to gain confidence in their own leadership.

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Dr Martin Luther King Jr

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DR MLK Jr "What is your life's blueprint?"

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DR MLK Jr "What is your life's blueprint?"

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Martin Luther King, Jr., "What Is Your Life's Blueprint?"

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Documentary Chanel

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Crash Course - John Green

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Civil Rights and the 1950s: Crash Course US History #39

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The Civil Rights Trail

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Knowledge has the power to shape history and move mountains. Learn about the events that shaped the Civil Rights Movement and you'll be moved as well.

Fred Gray Interview - Tuskegee, AL

Wanda Howard Battle Interview - Montgomery, AL

"When the cause for what you believe in becomes greater than the cost, you can answer the call no matter the cost."
- Wanda Howard Battle
Wanda Howard Battle, tour director at Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, talks about how the church served as a headquarters for civil rights activists Vernon Johns and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Sybil Jordan Hampton Interview - Little Rock, AR

"It was my hopes and dreams and goals, but also my commitment to being in the struggle for my people, being able to keep my head up high."
- Sybil Jordan Hampton
Sybil Jordan Hampton talks about being a part of the second group of African American students who integrated Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the segregation of public schools was unconstitutional.

Elaine Lee Turner Interview - Memphis, TN

"It didn't matter whether we were arrested or not. We knew we had to continue the fight."
- Elaine Lee Turner
Elaine Lee Turner talks about how she and her sisters dedicated themselves to peaceful protests to help the Civil Rights Movement gain momentum in Memphis, Tennessee.

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Learn stories about the events that shaped the Civil Rights Movement in American and you will be moved as well.

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Khan Academy

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The Civil Rights Movement: an introduction (article) | Khan Academy

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Learn about the origins, strategies, and unfinished business of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States.

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Racism, A History 1 - Slavery to Segregation

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Racism, A History 1 - Slavery to Segregation

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Revise History (BBC 4)

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Revise History (BBC

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The Guardian

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Anthony Ray Hinton was going out of his mind on Alabama's death row as he repeatedly churned over the iniquities of the shambolic trial that put him there. So he started a book club.

The prison warden wasn't keen but after Hinton told him that it was better to have inmates applying their minds to reading than to ways of causing disruption, he reluctantly agreed. The book club began with a handful of death row prisoners meeting in the jail's law library, and for a few years the numbers grew as word spread that reading was as good an escape as any of them could expect. But then the numbers shrank again as each of the members was executed until only Hinton remained of the original group. His cell was so close to the electric chair he could smell the burning flesh of the men he'd been debating the writings of James Baldwin and Harper Lee with.

They didn't care whether I did it. They cared about the colour of my skin

All the while, Hinton awaited his own appointment with "Yellow Mama", the generator that powered the electric chair, as one attempt after another to have the overwhelming evidence of his innocence heard got nowhere.

"The state of Alabama had every intention of killing me for a crime I didn't commit," said Hinton. "They didn't care whether I did it. They cared about the colour of my skin. As the prosecutor said: 'Even if we didn't get the right one, at least we got one off the street.' And that was referring to a black person only he didn't use the word black."

Hinton, who goes by Ray, was on death row for 28 years until the US Supreme Court overturned two murder convictions for which the evidence was, at best, flawed. Now he has written his own book, The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row, recounting his long battle for freedom against an Alabama judicial system that showed no interest in whether it was planning to take an innocent man's life.

I met Hinton, 61, at the rural Alabama home where he lived with his mother, Buhlar, when he was arrested in 1985. The photographs of Hinton at his trial show a slender man with a trimmed moustache. Now he is stocky with a greying beard to match his hair. A computer lies on a desk in the corner of the living room, but Hinton is wary of it, uncertain how to use all but the most basic of functions. He is not hesitant, though, as he tells his story with a visceral anger not only at his own tribulations but at the state of Alabama in the 21st century.

Hinton, then aged 29, was in the back garden of his mother's wooden house half an hour north of the industrial city of Birmingham, Alabama, when the police arrived to question him about the murder of a restaurant manager, John Davidson. Buhlar Hinton owned a handgun. The police took it for testing. State forensics experts said it not only fired the bullets that killed Davidson but had been used in two other shootings during restaurant robberies. In one of them another manager was killed.

Hinton was charged with two murders. What followed was a three-decade-long miscarriage of justice driven not by one bad cop or a single piece of flawed evidence but a system that conspired against justice.

There were no fingerprints and no evidence that the shootings at the restaurants were even related, but one police officer reached the incredible conclusion that all three crimes were committed by the same black man who "lived with his mom or auntie".

Another detective on the case, Doug Acker, had been tried three years earlier for torturing black prisoners with electric cattle prods and beatings to obtain confessions, but was acquitted by an all-white jury. Hinton said Acker told him to sign a blank sheet of paper, assuring him it was just to confirm he had been read his rights.

"I wasn't a fool. There was no way I was going to sign a blank piece of paper. I looked up at the men around me. They looked happy, excited. Maybe even a little jumpy, like you do when you have a big secret you are just dying to tell. In that moment, I felt the first real twinge of fear," Hinton writes in his book.

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Fully charged: Alabama's electric chair, known as 'Yellow Mama'. Photograph: Kiichiro Sato/AP

The prosector, Bob McGregor, was twice found by courts to have illegally discriminated against African Americans by excluding them from juries. Hinton took a lie-detector test on the understanding that no matter what the result it would be submitted as evidence at his trial. When he passed, McGregor blocked it from being used in court.

The prosecutor acknowledged to the jury that the only significant evidence against Hinton was the ballistics test. Hinton's poorly paid public defender [defence lawyer], Sheldon Perhacs, did not prove up to the task. Among several grievous mistakes he made was to hire a visually impaired civil engineer with no professional experience of ballistics to test the bullets because he came cheap. The expert firmly said the tests did not link the weapon to the shootings, but then the prosecutor tore his credibility apart, belittling him for his poor eyesight and inability to use a microscope properly.

There was death and ghosts everywhere. The row was haunted by the men who died in the electric chair

Hinton's boss testified that he was at work cleaning a supermarket warehouse and could not have committed the crime. But the jury still convicted the young black man and sentenced him to death.

The first few years of prison were tough. Hinton was so angry he refused to speak. "Every hour of every day, I imagined how I would kill McGregor," he wrote.

Death row was its own particular hell, with inmates crying and screaming at night. "There was death and ghosts everywhere. The row was haunted by the men who died in the electric chair. It was haunted by the men who chose to kill themselves rather than be killed."

In his time on death row, 54 men passed Hinton's cell on their way to execution. He was kept going by his mother's unfailing belief in his innocence and the support of a childhood friend, Lester Bailey, who never missed a visit all the years Hinton was in prison.

There is a joke on death row that capital punishment is punishment of men without capital. Hinton had no money and was stuck with Perhacs, who proved as incompetent in fighting appeals as he had at the original trial, losing in one court after another.

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Speaking up: Equal Justice Initiative lawyer Bryan Stevenson speaks to the media after the release of Anthony Ray Hinton. He worked on Hinton's case for 16 years. Photograph: Marvin Gentry/Reuters

Most of those on death row were African American, but there was a white prisoner Hinton soon learned was Henry Hays, a member of the KKK who beat to death a 19-year-old black man, Michael Donald, and hanged his body from a tree in 1981. Hinton confronted Hays about his racism, but came to realise that he had changed in prison and eventually saw him as a victim poisoned by the hatred of his father, Bennie Hays, a leader of the KKK in Alabama.

"Henry Hays was cheated all his life. He was cheated by his father who taught him to hate. His community taught him to hate," said Hinton. "My mom told me, no matter what one does in life, he or she deserves some compassion and I knew Hays deserved compassion more than anybody."

Hays was a member of the book club. One visiting day he called Hinton and another black prisoner over to meet his father, introducing them as his friends.

"His father refused to shake our hands and Hays told us later that his father told him: 'Don't you ever invite a nigger over to this table.' Hays felt bad. I told him don't feel bad for what your father is saying. Hatred is nothing but a form of cancer and it will eat you up."

Hays was executed in 1997.

"On the night of his execution he finally admitted that all his life his father had lied to him, and that now he knows what love is," said Hinton.

A white man of authority don't ever want to admit to someone of colour they was wrong

The first step on the path to salvation for Hinton came after a decade inside. Hinton's case was taken up by the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama. Founded by a lawyer, Bryan Stevenson, it had a track record of overturning unjust convictions and in winning a supreme court ruling prohibiting the death penalty, or life without parole for young people under the age of 18.

Stevenson had new ballistics tests done by three experts that Alabama's judicial system could not discredit, including the former chief of firearms testing at the FBI. The tests concluded the bullets in one of the three shootings definitively came from a different gun and the bullets in the others could not be matched. That alone should have been enough to overturn the conviction.

The Alabama courts would not be able to deny the credibility of the tests so it set about not considering them at all. At an appeal hearing, prosecutors dropped their original tactic of mocking the defence ballistics expert and now, playing for time, built him up as a credible witness whose testimony had been rejected by the jury. The appeal judge, who oversaw the original trial, took two and a half years to issue a ruling siding with the prosecution's claim that to consider the new ballistics evidence would amount to allowing Hinton's case to be re-tried.

Hinton regarded the ruling as political and racial.

"A white man of authority don't ever want to admit to someone of colour they was wrong," said Hinton. "They knew they had made a mistake, but you have this macho attitude: 'I don't have to apologise to no nigger.'"

Besides his books, Hinton sought other ways of mental escape. He imagined a world in which he married Halle Berry and then Sandra Bullock - he's quick to assert there was nothing sexual in it - and was a regular for tea with the Queen of England.

"The way I looked at it, I went to death row for 28 years through no fault of my own and at no fault of her own she was born who she is. She didn't have a say over being Queen. I looked at her living in this palace and in a way she is imprisoned just like I was. I often wondered what she'd do in order to survive that prison," he said.

Eventually, with all avenues for justice within the Alabama system shut off, the path was open for Stevenson to take Hinton's case to the US Supreme Court. In his petition, the lawyer called Alabama's death penalty "a perverse monument to inequality".

I looked at the Queen living in this palace and in a way she is imprisoned just like I was

The Supreme Court unanimously overturned Hinton's conviction in 2015. Alabama didn't have the evidence to retry him. Hinton finally left death row - and not in a body bag. "I need somebody to explain to me: why did it take 30 years to finally get it right? America should be ashamed. To say they have the best justice system in the world when every day race plays a part in who goes to prison, who don't go to prison. The state of Alabama had every intention of killing me for a crime I didn't commit. If the United States Supreme Court hadn't intervened I wouldn't be here today," he said.

Hinton is back living in the house where his mother spent her last days convinced of her son's innocence.

Since his release, he has travelled in the US and abroad, speaking about the injustice he endured, and how religious faith, his mother, and friendship helped him survive. Some find inspiration in the story of how Hinton retained his humanity and resilience on death row, encouraging fellow inmates with the book club and a sense of solidarity, or in the unswerving loyalty of Lester Bailey, the friend who never missed a monthly visit and who now lives a couple of houses away. Others are outraged and disturbed by such a blatant miscarriage of justice. But for Hinton, his talks also serve as a warning to other African Americans that this can happen to them. Black men are imprisoned just for being black men.

The state of Alabama is resisting Hinton's claim for compensation on the grounds he hasn't proved his innocence. That mindset tells him the injustice that so nearly took his life could happen again. It's a fear of which he's never entirely free.

When Hinton leaves the house these days he leaves a trail so he can prove where he's been. He stands in the sight of video cameras and collects receipts from convenience stores. And he makes sure to call people several times a day on his mobile phone. "I'm told that the phone can tell what time and where I was at. And I'm hoping that if ever I was charged with anything again I could say, you can check my phone and hopefully it will clear me," he said.

In the meantime, he's working on meeting the Queen and Sandra Bullock.
The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life on Death Row by Anthony Ray Hinton is published by Rider Books at £16.99, or £14.44 at guardianbookshop.com Topics

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'I went to death row for 28 years through no fault of my own'

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Anthony Ray Hinton was going out of his mind on Alabama's death row as he repeatedly churned over the iniquities of the shambolic trial that put him there. So he started a book club. The prison warden wasn't keen but after Hinton told him that it was better to have inmates applying their minds to reading than to ways of causing disruption, he reluctantly agreed.

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50 Year of Racism - why silence isn't the answer

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50 Year of Racism - why silence isn't the answer

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TedX - James A White Sr

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50 years of racism -- why silence isn’t the answer | James A. White Sr. | TEDxColumbus

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BBC Three

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The Dangers of Whitewashing Black History

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The Dangers of Whitewashing Black History

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TedX - David Ikard

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The Dangers of Whitewashing Black History | David Ikard | TEDxNashville

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Aldon Morris