Democracy Now!
Freedom Rider Bernard Lafayette remembers desegregating buses with John Lewis
“As the U.S. mourns the death of civil rights leader and congressmember John Lewis, Lewis’s longtime friend, Bernard Lafayette, remembers desegregating Greyhound buses and pushing forward together during the Freedom Rides. In December of 1960, Lafayette — now a professor at Auburn University — and Lewis took a front seat on a Greyhound bus from Nashville to Troy, Alabama. Several months later, when CORE, the Congress for Racial Equality, began organizing Freedom Rides in the segregated South, Lafayette and Lewis both volunteered. “There was some question about whether or not we would survive,” says Lafayette, who was beaten so badly in Montgomery that he suffered three broken ribs. “I didn’t tell my fellow Freedom Riders, because they might have insisted that I not go. So I just kept quiet. I quietly suffered the entire trip.”
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