58 Years Later, Alabama Apologizes for Expelling Black Students After Lunch Counter Sit-In.
'Just before noon, 29 black students from Alabama State College strolled into the Montgomery County Courthouse and into the basement snack room. The all-white customers were aghast — “The Negros are here!” one said — as the students crowded the restaurant, sat at the lunch counter and demanded to be served.
On that morning on Feb. 25, 1960, the students knew they were risking everything, perhaps even their lives in a defiant act in the heart of the Jim Crow South: the first known sit-in in Alabama. They were not beaten or thrown in jail, but the Alabama governor threw the book at them. He ordered nine students thought to be the ringleaders to be expelled. The rest were reprimanded.
For 58 years, those blemishes stayed on their academic records — until this month. In an unceremonious Alabama Board of Education meeting on May 10, the interim education superintendent announced that he had cleared them.
"They represent a time in the history of the state board that must be acknowledged and never repeated,” the interim superintendent, Ed Richardson, said in a letter about the action that he read at the meeting. “I regret that it has taken 58 years to correct this injustice. I can only hope that this action will provide a modicum of comfort to the people affected.”
The board also expunged the records of four teachers at the college who were fired for “disloyalty” in the early 1960s, including Lawrence Reddick, a renowned historian, who was accused of being a Communist in 1960.
“It was their actions that allowed for us to be in this space that we are in now,” said Quinton T. Ross Jr., the president of the college, which was renamed Alabama State University, in an interview on Tuesday. “The role they played in the civil rights movement, it sends chills down your spine.”
The Alabama State students waited nearly six decades for the apology, which comes in a time of heightened sensitivity to racism. For 58 years, the expulsions clung to them through college transfer applications, job interviews and in most cases to the grave. Six of the nine are dead. The three survivors spoke to The Times this week.
“There are only a few of us who were directly involved who are still alive,” James McFadden, 78, said in an interview. “We can hear it and pass it along to the ancestors of those who are gone.”'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/30/us/alabama-students-sit-in-apology.html?
= new reply since forum marked as read
Nice white people sharing their sugar, mustard and ketchup with these people who believe they are people, too.
Heck, these white Alabamians are just having some fun, although there's a sstrong doubt they could sit there and take that crap from others.
MANY AMERICANS who were alive on May 4, 1961, will remember the Freedom Riders. On that day, thirteen activists climbed aboard buses in Washington, with tickets for New Orleans. Their purpose was to challenge racial segregation in interstate travel, which the Supreme Court had declared an unconstitutional violation of human rights. They had little trouble in Virginia and North Carolina, but as the buses rolled deeper into the South, the hostility increased. In South Carolina, the beatings began. In Georgia, Martin Luther King met them and warned, “You will never make it through Alabama.” He had learned of a conspiracy by the Ku Klux Klan, the police, and local officials to stop them by brute force. The Freedom Riders pressed on with great courage, even as they knew what lay ahead. In Anniston, Alabama, one bus was stopped and set ablaze. As the Freedom Riders ran from the smoke and flames, a mob tried to murder them, while other southerners sought to save them. The other bus reached Birmingham,and the Freedom Riders were dragged off and beaten nearly to death. These savage scenes were recorded by journalists and photographers, who were attacked as viciously as the Freedom Riders themselves. Their re-ports flashed around the world and inspired hundreds of Americans to make more than sixty Freedom Rides through the Deep South in 1961, which brought out more mobs and caused more violence. The images of these events remain fresh and vivid, but the history has grown faint and hazy, and much of it was never understood. Scarcely any one remembers the story as it actually happened. Now at last we have the first full-scale book on the Freedom Riders, by a professional historian. Raymond Arsenault is one of the most gifted scholars of his generation. He has devotedmany years of deep research to this subject.
More:
https://www.scribd.com/document/68407876/Freedom-Riders-1961-and-the-Struggle-for-Racial-Justice
