by Leslie Lytle, Messenger Staff Writer

At the recent Cowan Mt. Sinai Missionary Baptist Church annual Black History Celebration, 1960s Nashville activists Etta Simpson Ray and Mary Jean Smith brought the story of the legendary Civil Rights era Freedom Riders up close and personal.

Sandra Kennerly Brown, coordinator of the Black History event for more than 30 years, introduced the speakers with a brief history on the racially charged circumstances spawning the Freedom Riders. A 1960 Supreme Court ruling expanded a 1946 ruling banning segregation on interstate bus travel to forbid segregation in bus terminals, restrooms, and related facilities.

However, the ruling was not being enforced. To call attention to lack of enforcement, two Freedom Rider buses set out from Washington, D.C. for New Orleans. The journeyers met with beatings and brutality, and one bus was fire bombed.

Ray and Smith, both students at Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial College, signed on to join the renewed Freedom Ride effort that emerged in Nashville. Both young women had participated in stand-in protests. They would attempt to buy tickets at movie theaters that refused to admit blacks, be turned away, circle back to the end of the line and repeat the process, impeding sales to other customers. At one protest, Smith was arrested.

Ray had endured being spit on at a bus stop and witnessed her father being a “Yes-sir man” with white employers. She later realized her father’s behavior was a survival tool. Her non-violence training for the Freedom Rider expedition emphasized non-reactive behavior “if you were burnt with a cigarette or had hot coffee poured on you.” Due to the brutality and violence Ray and her companions suffered on the leg of the journey to Birmingham, the driver refused to carry them on to Montgomery. They finally found a driver and Ray arrived in Montgomery to learn she had been kicked out of school. A&I College, which later became Tennessee State University, contributed 27 Freedom Riders to the effort, more than any other institution of higher learning.

Also expelled for participating, Smith signed on despite initial reluctance after hearing whites wishing ill on the first wave of Freedom Riders who survived the attacks. Her bus made it to the Mississippi state line. Officials offered the arrested riders a $200 fine or 67 days in jail. They chose jail and were transferred to the county facility. The guards took their mattresses and blankets for singing too loud. Authorities threatened transfer to the notoriously hellish Parchman Prison and made good on the threat. At Parchman, the guards routinely reminded them, “You’re 22 steps from the gas chamber.”

Smith spent 39 days imprisoned. For 25 years, she never spoke about her experience. She finally agreed to address a Sunday school class, which led to an invitation to speak at TSU.

For their role in bringing about meaningful change, Smith and Ray were inducted into the Historically Black Colleges and Universities Hall of Fame. The women traveled to Washington, D.C., to meet with then President Barack Obama, and in 2010, TSU awarded Smith and Ray honorary doctorate degrees.

In closing the evening’s program, Pastor John Patton brought the Freedom Riders’ crusade into the 21st century. “We’re still experiencing segregation and struggle to this day. It is a struggle about the hearts of men,” Patton said.