In May, 1961, college students from all over started taking commercial buses to the Deep South from Washington DC to desegregate services up and down federal highways. They may not have realized it at the time, but they could have taken north-bound buses to do the same thing! In June of  that year, the ambassador to the US from Chad (who wasn’t up on the tradition) had been refused table service at a roadside diner in Maryland. He filed a angry grievance with the US Department of State, without hesitation. Embarrassed, State pressured restaurants and gas stations along major federal highways (including the east-west US 40 and north-south US 1, which cut through the University campus) to be more accommodating to foreign dignitaries. Travelers were advised to wear traditional dress, so they’d be recognized.  

The Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) jumped all over this humiliating event, sending out students from Bowie State College (then, a black school) to test service at restaurants up and down the Maryland highways. The Route 40 Freedom Rides were widely publicized, designed to pressure business owners into serving anyone who came in, whether they were black, white, dressed in African garb, or not. By fall, students at the University of Maryland extended the protests to businesses in and around College Park. Eventually, students from Howard University in DC took the protests further south toward the District line and beyond.  

In fall of 1961, there still were holdouts in restaurant apartheid, even in College Park, home of the University of Maryland, with its huge population of foreign students. It was incredible! Here I was, a very young, white nobody going to school with the children of diplomats, who couldn't meet them at the Hot Shoppe for coffee or at The Little Tavern for a hamburger. The irony! The bigotry of a country professing justice and freedom for all, when people were being treating like animals just a few miles from the US capitol! I was appalled, and that got my juices flowing.

One October Saturday, I got up early to walk the mile and a half to Embry AME Zion Church in the Lakeland section of College Park, getting there in time for the training program and rally sponsored by CORE.

I should tell you I had never seen anything quite like Lakeland. To say the neighborhood was ramshackle was a gross understatement. This area, just yards away from US Rte1,  as well as the state university, was straight out of Tobacco Road. Go here for some background on the community.

That morning, some older volunteers taught us about Maryland law and explained the basic theory of non-violent protest. God was on our side, they said, and it was important to make that fact obvious. Do not break any laws. Do not do anything to provoke attack or arrest. Remember: there are laws and there are traditions. We would test the laws, and just hope the police could be trusted to enforce them.

Here’s a copy of a CORE brochure for protests held at that time in other parts of the state. You’ll see that protesters were told to abide by the local laws. CORE would not send them out unless they were  clean cut, well dressed, well mannered and could pass themselves off as just a couple of ordinary folk who wanted to share an ice cream soda with some friends of various colors, in their neighborhood eatery.

Without realizing it, I had just turned a page on the passive life of childhood and had become an activist, before I could even drive without a parent in the car, vote, or buy a beer.

Go on to Walking Down Freedom Road, Part 2 for more of this story.

Since I was only 17, jail time for me would be spent at a juvenile facility, where I would probably be held until my 18th birthday. I would miss a year of college, a year my parents had already paid for. My dad was out of work and quite depressed. My actions would place a heavy burden on the family. Still, I was prepared to go to jail if necessary, but not interested in promoting the idea. My only hope was to not get stuck going out on a ride with this jerk, but I did.

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You may remember 1964. College students descended on the South over summer vacation, to help register voters and open what they called Freedom Schools for young black kids. They called it Freedom Summer, but for three young people, a young black man and at least one middle-aged woman, it should have been called Last Summer. 

My husband occasionally sat in as a musician at clubs and, one summer night,  he played at a coffee house in DC with three friends of ours, all black.  (I was about 20 years old, at the time.) The bass player and singer followed us home, where the four of us stayed up all night listening to jazz, drinking coffee and talking.  

The next morning, we all hopped into our old car and headed out to another musician’s house, deep into Northern Virginia. I don’t remember where he lived, but anything more than two miles outside the District was the Deep South. I drove, the bass player sat up front with me and the singer sat in the back talking to my husband.

We drove about 15 miles, part of it on a country four-lane, before I noticed a car following us. I didn’t think much of it at first, but mentioned it and the bass player suggested I slow down to let the car pass us. I did, but when our two cars were neck and neck, the other driver slowed to my pace.

I glanced over and saw two young white guys in the front seat, one driving and one holding a pistol up to his eye with two hands, aiming it at me out the open window.

At first, I couldn’t believe what I saw. I turned back to face the road, stared straight ahead, mumbled something like “Don’t look to your left” and slowed down, hoping they would speed ahead. They didn’t.
 
We went in tandem like this for a mile or two, slowing down, speeding up, with that gun never losing its potential to blow my head off.  Eventually, they must have been satisfied they could shoot us if they felt like it, because they laughed, stomped on the gas and sped off.  

I was so shaken I couldn’t drive any more, so the bass player took the wheel. He made a U-turn and took us back to the relative safety of DC. We knew that not only had we dodged four bullets, but we had avoided getting killed in a place where no would have cared enough to find out how or why.

If I didn’t get the message of hate at the College Park diner (follow link to earlier story), I got it that day in Virginia, loud and clear. I made up my mind on the way home that I would never doubt the violence that goes hand in hand with racial hatred, and would never, ever turn away from it again.