American Experience; Freedom Riders; Interview with Pauline Edythe Knight-Ofuso, 1 of 2

[bars and tones] [Interviewer] Talk about, um, you know, what childhood was like in the south back then. [Knight-Ofuso] When I was a child I thought it was disgraceful the way people had to travel in interstate or intrastate, they were both equally bad. You're citizens of the United States and you can't get on the bus sometimes in some cities at the front of bus except to put the money that they were charging for the fare in the box. Step back to the street, go around to the back of the bus and get on the bus, but you couldn't set anyplace in front of the back stairwell, you had to sit at the stairwell or behind the stairwell, that's disgraceful. The other thing was that if you were traveling, there were signs,

"whites," "colored," it could have been green, purple, or red, but here they say, it says-- [Interviewer] Let's cut. So talk about what it was like to travel from state to state back then. [Knight-Ofuso] Having to face inadequate and almost impossible conditions, if you needed a bathroom facility, or if you wanted a drink of water and didn't have a cup to drink water out of, you didn't want to drink out of a nasty fountain. The fountains were labeled "colored" and "white" and you wanted to be treated more civilly, it was just so ridiculous. A waiting room may have had one bench and if, you know, you couldn't always sit down, some people sat on luggage, and if it was a long stay it was the most uncomfortable thing that you can imagine. And some of our senior people who might have had to travel

it was almost an impossible journey but you were proud when you saw them have the agility to move about like they wanted to and sometimes I'm sure they made themselves move, so traveling in the south was unconscionable and you may not be able to see what I can see right now, broken down signs, no anything except what you had with you, if you got hungry and you wanted anything to eat, you had to whip out your lunch case that you brought-- for us, it was usually fruitcake tins or something like that, but I wanted to tell, want to tell you that the food was good that we brought with us because our parents could really burn. [Interviewer] Okay, I want you to try to look at me. You're kind of looking over there, you can't face me, you're looking that way, but

as much as you can look, look -- [Knight-Ofuso] Look at you. [Interviewer] Look at me, yeah, yeah, because it looks kind of like you're, you're -- I know you're just kind of thinking, but it looks like, looks like you're looking over there. So, um, were the -- you know, you say that there was one bench and stuff like that -- [Knight-Ofuso] Sometimes there were no benches. [Interviewer] Were the white facilities better? [Knight-Ofuso] Yeah, you could just look across and see that they were way better and most of the time there might've been plenty of room for you to be comfortable and for you to travel like you were a traveler, but you couldn't go and the only reason that they could give, "colored ain't allowed in here." That was the way it was. [Interviewer] I'm going to ask you that again, and that's the, that's the kind of case I'm talking about, you know, because my question isn't there, so when you start out and you say, you know, you could look across and see, you know, you know you had to, you know, you had to look across at the white folks' section, or look, you know, you know what I mean? [Knight-Ofuso] Yeah, and it, and it [Knight-Ofuso] Yeah, and it was complete with nice lighting, a

decorative walls, and even if there wasn't decor on the walls, the wall itself may have been tile or maybe a mosaic, it was a pleasant time for those people but not for us and it was hard to look across and see all of the amenities that they had and knowing that you couldn't have them because you were black or because you're colored, at that time, you know we've changed the titles of what we were for so many, so many different times but it was just not acceptable, I never did accept that, and I'm sure many of us never did. [Interviewer] If you can, I want you to tell me just a little bit again, because you never said "white people," so we don't know who you're talking about, so how was it for white people? [Knight-Ofuso] White people had everything they needed, they could eat what they wanted, they could sit wherever

they wanted to, even if, if their space had run out the way it was in the south, you had to give them your space, I know they didn't want to sit in the waiting rooms that were provided for, for black folks, Negroes, but if there was anything that they got pushed out of and you had an availability of anything, you had to give it up for them, so you're treated less than a person. And that went on forever. I remember that from the time I was big enough to understand where I was and what I was doing and where I was going until I was reaching near adulthood. I was 19 years old before I could take my place alongside other activists and say "this can't be happening anymore, we're not going to take it anymore." [Interviewer] What made you join in the movement in Nashville? What made personally, why'd you do it? [Knight-Ofuso] Well I want you to know something.

I was led spiritually and I'm so confident of it. From the time I was a child, church was very important. When I came in here today I met C.T. Vivian. C.T. Vivian is the backbone of the spiritual development for Nashville and so many other places. [Interviewer] Okay. Let's cut for a second. I know you want to get there. [Knight-Ofuso] --understanding and development. You, if, if I don't get to tell that, where is the story? I was prepared not of my own volition, but I was encouraged to read various stories of people in struggle and how they came forward and so my concern is and always was and always will be that we took those stories, ingested them, and then applied them to our present day life and with that it gave us strength and

churches were packed front and back, mass meetings, church services, and people actually prayed. When you hear a Negro spiritual it might be music to you but it's really substance, that's the meat of the living to me. It is the stories that we're told on front porches, it was the Pittsburgh Courier that was transported all over the United States by Pullman porters and that was a fabulous thing because you got to know and understand what was happening in surrounding communities north, east, south, and west. So I'm saying that the questions that are posed have not really given people an opportunity to really get to the nitty gritty of the, of what actually happened and what made you say "if I don't stand here then nobody else will because they won't be able to." [Interviewer] Wow, were we rolling? [Cameraperson] Yes, that we were. [Interviewer] We just got that. But all I want you to do, I want you to be totally -- we got it. We were rolling,

ok? So we're good with that, so talk about, you know, the, the particulars of how you got involved in Nashville. [Knight-Ofuso] When I got involved I was reading the newspaper one day about how students at A&T, I think, in North Carolina decided that if their money was good enough to buy food at other counters in the store, and I think it was, like, a dime-store, maybe it was Woolworths or another name I can't remember, but, you know, they thought "why isn't my money good enough to use this lunch counter?" I wasn't as interested in lunch counters at the time but I was interested in the theater and facilities because my mother really loved the arts and she took us to everything we could possibly go to, so I, I was really interested, she didn't deserve to not be treated kindly, my favorite person in the whole world, all my

life, but I thought "this has to stop," as long as we accept it then it goes on, but once you stop and say "oh no, this is not the way life really is supposed to be," and I thought, you know, it's great for students to be here, we're the freest people in the world, we're not obligated to anybody but school, all we needed to do was pass our courses, but if we went through schools like generations had before and just came out, what would be our opportunity? Absolutely nothing. What would be our enrichment? Only the enrichment that we had received along the way so I didn't know exactly what to do before the Rosa Parks and all of this but just thinking about Emmett Till's lynching just did something to me and I thought "we have to do something" and then the opportunity came. This is what we need, this is what we need to do and we need to be more together than we are, we have to

pray together, do more together than we've ever done before. [Interviewer] Do you remember when you first heard about the Freedom Rides? When you first heard that these rides were taking place? [Knight-Ofuso] Yes I first heard about the Freedom Rides around 1960 and it was with CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality. I saw in the paper where they were going to test the law twice, the Supreme Court had decided that segregation in travel was illegal and the first time was around the late '40s and a group of people went out to test and they were met with adversity and the second time it was 1960, they determined again it's illegal and so I thought, "well, this testing is really important" and I wasn't the only one thinking that because so many people came

forward. So by the time the work was done to put the ride together and the ride happened, we were ready. We were ready mentally and physically to challenge why the other states who were so determined to call themselves sovereign, like the state of Mississippi always did, then it was up to us to take to the streets, dramatize the issue, and make America stand up for what it had promised and so I felt, that's me. And when I talked to my friends that I met on the Freedom Rides, they all felt the same way, it was like a wave or wind that you didn't know where it was coming from or where it was going, but you knew you were supposed to be there. Nobody asked me, nobody told me, Jim Lawson had been teaching non-violence in Nashville for a while, and

you were ready, you had an ear for it, you were just ready and you were submerged in listening, you're submerged in being directed, you're submerged in finding a kindred thought, and it was so wonderful, it was like putting yeast in bread, it was a leavening effect. [Interviewer] Beautiful. It seemed that, I mean, that's one of the, the great moments in the story is, you know, in that, you know, CORE starts the Freedom Rides and, you know, they come down and they get beat back, you know, they get beat bad, and Anniston they burn the bus, in Birmingham they get beat, in Montgomery, you know, again, but, um, and they call it off finally, you know, and say they got to go but then the students come down from Nashville and start, and then people start coming from everywhere, you know, to join the rides. [Knight-Ofuso] Well, I'll tell you what I was thinking at that time. I had read these stories about black folks

all my life. I had read because of my mother's insistence about Miss Bethune and how she walked wherever she went, and what all she did and how she made supper for people and it was just fantastic, and I also had read a story about when the underground railroad happened how people who missed the people leaving to go north kept coming to the spot where they left from and the song was "the people keep a-coming even if the train's done gone," and I thought "this is for us, if we keep a-coming even if the train's done gone, the idea will finally get out that you can't stop them." And I felt that there was enough people who had gone to the bathroom by getting out of the car on the side of the road not knowing what was in the bushes, they could've been bitten by snakes or, you know, bobcats or anything, and I thought "we're going to stop this, we have to do something now," and so instead of

reading that in the newspaper and letting it go at that, I got up one morning in May, around the latter part of May, that last few days of May, and I said to my folks at home "I won't be back today because I'm a Freedom Rider." Nobody said anything to me, it was kind of, it must have been startling to her because my momma didn't say any, they just looked at me and I walked out of the house and I went to get on a bus with other Freedom Riders to go to Mississippi and that's what happened with the Freedom Rides. Now, I had been participating in activities in Nashville prior to the Freedom Rides but this was the most serious time that the whole world could face. [Interviewer] Okay, let's cut. [Cameraperson] Yes. [Interviewer]You know we did a film about the black press, did you ever see that film? [Knight-Ofuso] I didn't, was it on PBS too? [Interviewer] Yeah, because what happens, what's going to happen in this film is that, you know, once the Freedom Ride starts, you know, the white press, white Southern press, is really looking at it one way, but you got the black press

which is looking at it another, a very different way, so what was the importance in, of the black press in these times? [Knight-Ofuso] Well, what I always saw was if you wanted the real story then you read the black paper. The circulation may not have been as good and I thought about that a lot, but whites helped us out without realizing what they were doing and one great example of that was in the Montgomery bus boycott they put on the radio, "these folks are getting ready to do thus and so," and everybody who didn't already know, if they hadn't been to church or beauty shop or a barbershop or something, got to hear it because it was on the radio and I thought "that's the way to disseminate news, everybody heard it then," so that made whatever you were doing be more successful, but they never once realized that every opportunity to stop us was really the greatest effort to help us. So that's an important feature that I've never heard anybody talking about, but that

happened and it's the truth. [Interviewer] If you could just a minute-- and, and this doesn't have to be too long an answer, because I don't want to be -- [Knight-Ofuso] OK. [Interviewer] -- but talk a little about the significance of churches back then in the movement because churches, you know -- [Knight-Ofuso] Churches have always really been important and, and the significance was that that was a place where we could gather, that was a place for our, not only our religious development and upbringing but it was a place where we can go hear all of the great speakers. It was a place with the church and the black colleges, they call them HBCUs now, but with the church and the colleges we had an opportunity to really appreciate our art and so the church was really significant because if you brought it to the church they really didn't realize that you were having such wonderful meetings, they didn't realize the strength of the church and so

people did put their funds that they had in church and people organized in church, so this was a powerful place for Black America. Today it's-- [Interviewer] Sorry, we've got to stay in the past. and-and-and you know, usually,and one of the things that-that-that was that you would get-- [Knight-Ofuso] --always felt that the church was a place where you really gained your strength. And I always saw it as a place where you could let all of these pent-up emotions get loose and leave your thinking. Because shouting was really good, yes, you see it in Alvin Ailey's dance, and I just felt like all these feelings that have been pent-up all week and can't get them out are not only saying "thank you Jesus," they're able to scream, and nobody wants to do anything about it because they understand what you went through and so

it was just arresting place. [Interviewer] Talk about the church and the political significance of the church. Churches had this spiritual peace that you talked about and this cathartic peace that you talked about, but churches were also, especially in those days, '59, '60, '61, when the Freedom Rides were, these were really political-- a lot of churches were very very political, they were in the forefront. [Knight-Ofuso] I'm sure that we did have moments where we could scrutinize the various people who were running for political office and recognize who was liberal and who was anti-liberal or who really had the heart of the community within their grasp and wanted to serve rather than to control or whip or-- [Interviewer] Let me start you again, because when I say political I didn't mean

political in that way, I didn't mean political in terms of elections but I mean you had Martin Luther King who was-- he was talking not only about Christ but he was also talking about freedom and leading-- you had C.T. Vivian, you had people who were -- out there in the forefront of a movement and so I just was interested in the church as being in the forefront of the movement, and why was the church so important to the movement? [Knight-Ofuso] Because it was the only gathering place that you could go to that was not controlled by white establishment. If you were a black church that was a separate entity from what the normal people or people in general, maybe I should say it that way, though of as being a place together. Nobody stopped you from going to church, they never did. They wouldn't let you go to their church, but they couldn't stop you from going to your own church, and

these churches were run by the community and strong black ministers developed and the sermons and the exchanges that they had were exchanged freely so this was a place. You didn't have to hide. [Interviewer] Okay, I just want you to start that again and start with the-- you didn't give me "the church", you just have to start with "the church was important because." [Knight-Ofuso] Okay. The church was important because it was a place where you felt free enough to exchange what you needed to exchange. Your ideas were not depressed or suppressed. Your ideas were accumulated with everyone else who was offering ideas, and it was a haven where these ideas grew

into strategies and that's what I loved about it. [Interviewer] I love that. Ideas into strategies. Talk about-- so you go off, you tell your parents you're going to become a Freedom Rider, you get on the bus, were you scared? Talk about how you felt being a Freedom Rider. [Knight-Ofuso] Well you know we had armor, you know we had headdress, we had it all. And it's all set-forth in the sixth chapter of Ephesians, goes from maybe like from it's the sixth chapter but I think it goes on down to verses that maybe that's the end of Ephesians anyways, maybe it's the sixth chapter. I wish I had a copy and I'd read it to you but we had on a helmet of salvation, the breastplate of righteousness, and our feet were shot with the preparation the gospel truth, all that's important because if you see yourself as a human being struggling and

crawling and pushing and pulling, no. But if you see yourself as God's child and know that you're child of the king, your inheritance is great, and you ought to act like it, and there was a trust issue, do I trust man to annihilate me or do I trust God to put me under the shadow of his wing and carry me from here to there? And I'll tell you, when you embrace that kind of thing, the Christ in you meets the Christ in your fellow man and we grew up on Sunday school, learning the ten commandments and the beatitudes, saying the Lord's Prayer because that's the only real real prayer, and you were lifted, a way always became available for you to move forward. [Interviewer] Great, keep rolling. So you're on the bus and when was the first time you were confronted, was it when you get to Jackson and you get arrested, or what happened? [Knight-Ofuso] Well this is the strange thing, when you're on the bus you're going

on the bus and finally somebody met us in Alabama, said that we were under escort by the Alabama National Guard, so we ride through Alabama and we get off at Montgomery Greyhound bus terminal. The fighting wasn't happening that day but there were people who were just so angry, I said "what are they so angry about?" Get out the bus and go into the station and they were just looking and you didn't know whether somebody was going to come and do something or whether they weren't. But the song "We Shall Overcome" has a verse, "we're not afraid" so you thought that. You kept yourself in a frame of mind and that we wasn't, we the Freedom Riders, but we, you're not afraid either. So that all of that prayer embraced all of us, not just one of us. Then we are in

the bus terminal and they knew we were Freedom Riders so they didn't dare ask us, but they did ask other people in the bus station if they were Freedom Riders, and then another thing. On the bus as we were leaving Montgomery, we were escorted but the Montgomery, the Alabama-- what do you call it?-- National Guard left us at a certain spot and we were supposed to be escorted by Mississippi when we got to the line, and the colonel from the Alabama National Guard said "we've gone as far with you as we can and you'll be picked up by Mississippi," but do you know we went all the way to Mississippi from the point that they left and nobody was there? And people looked at us so crazy and so other Riders may be able to tell you what they encountered, I didn't see or have any contact with the violence but it was the stares and not knowing and then when we did get

to Mississippi, oh boy was that something. Got off the bus, walked in, and you were arrested because we weren't supposed to be going in that waiting room 'cause we was colored. Ain't that something? [Interviewer] So you got arrested, what exactly happened? You walked into the waiting room, what happened? [Knight-Ofuso] You were under arrest, and "what for?" "You're breaching the peace." So it led on, city jail, Hinds County Jail, and I was there in Hinds County Jail for about 27 days. Terrible things happened in that jail. Had to be a law made against that. People were processed in just the most ridiculous ways. The food was horrible, did you know there was glass and sticks and gravel in the food? Grits. And when they

served beans, it was the same thing. Mostly it was in the beans more so than in the grits, but the gravel in grit was there. And then they-- it was uncomfortable. For instance there's 27 people, 27 girls in my cell in Hinds County Jail so we were hip-to-hip, toe-to-toe, had to crawl to keep from knocking each other down. The mattresses were really thin so another thing that happened that I can see it right now, we were on the corner block, all these girls in one cell, and they allowed John Q. Publics, men and women, to come in and observe you as though you were an animal in a cage. It's like they were going to the zoo. And I remember it because my mother was almost constantly about reading and it was Richard Lovelace that said "iron bars do not a prison make--" no, "stone

walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage." And so I thought we can transport ourselves from here to wherever we want to be without dealing with all of this. So we smiled at them, it's one of the elements that I had learned from non-violent teaching is that you embrace a person, you don't batter them, no matter what they're doing to you, it's agape love, you embrace, and so I'm sure that that carried us through in ways that no one can imagine. It was-- it became natural to us to do that. [Interviewer] Tell me about Parchman, what was Parchman like? [Knight-Ofuso] Parchman, that's just crazy.