Attempt by the DOGE-linked General Services Administration to Sell the Alabama Freedom Riders Museum is Stopped

 

The attempt by officials of the General Services Administration (GSA) - which manages federal property - to sell the Freedom Rides Museum (210 South Court Street, Montgomery, Alabama 36104, 1-334-414-8647) was foiled by two outraged Alabama representatives working with a Republican Alabama senator. When U.S. Reps. Terri A. Sewell (D-AL7) and Shomari Figures (D-AL2) saw the GSA list, both immediately demanded that the station be spared. The site is “an essential historical landmark that not only honors the legacy of the Freedom Riders but also educates the public about our nation’s struggle for equality and justice.” The GSA officials included the building, which the Museum leases from the federal government, on a list of hundreds they planned to sell because they were “not core to government operations.”

Days later, ahead of a March 9th commemoration in nearby Selma marking the 60th anniversary of the protest known as Bloody Sunday, the lawmakers and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY8) blasted the Trump administration for trying to sell the site and vowed to protect it and the rest of the over-130 stops on the U.S. Civil Rights Trail that connects 15 states. The Trail is a collection of churches, courthouses, schools, museums, and other landmarks, primarily in the Southern states, where activists challenged segregation in the 1950s and 1960s to advance social justice.

Fortunately, Alabama U.S. Senator Katie Boyd Britt, an ally of President Donald Trump who had also attended the Selma commemoration, intervened and announced on April 9th that the Museum was no longer listed for closure. 

The Museum, which draws visitors from across the country, is now recognized as an official destination on the Trail. It also is on the National Register of Historic Places, and has been rated as the 28th most popular museums in Alabama. This rehabilitated bus station has been restored to how it looked in 1961 and is the site of the 1961 attack on Freedom Riders when they arrived at the station. Recently, administration officials have edited National Park Service websites to minimize events and individuals opposing slavery and Black Americans’ struggle for civil rights. The military removed mention of the famed Tuskegee Airmen and Navajo code talkers from its websites and training materials. Public outcry prompted reversals.

Alabama’s Democrats introduced legislation March 12th to protect civil rights landmarks on the National Register. The legislation forbids the sale of federally owned landmarks on register. If the federal government does want to sell such a property, Congressional approval would be required.

Read the March 13, 2025 Alabama Daily News article.

Read the March 11, 2025 AL.com article.

Obituary: The Reverend Joan Brown Campbell, Social & Civil Rights Activist Who Led U.S. Church Councils, 93

 

The Rev. Campbell once divided the White congregation of her church by inviting the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to speak and then decades later - as a minister in King’s denomination - rose to lead an influential national alliance of churches. As general secretary of the National Council of Churches (NCC) - a group linking dozens of Christian denominations with over 40 million worshipers - Rev. Campbell endorsed priorities such as battling climate change and expanding health care that often spilled over into wider political debates.

From 1991 to 2000, she went on missions such as accompanying the Rev. Jesse Jackson to Serbia in 1999 to gain the release of three U.S. soldiers, captured on a patrol amid a NATO bombing campaign seeking to halt ethnic bloodshed during the breakup of Yugoslavia. She also was at the center of partisan and cultural shifts that strained the coalition of mainline Protestants, traditionally Black churches (such as the African Methodist Episcopal Church), and Orthodox traditions such as Greek and Assyrian. In response, Rev. Campbell formed a political lobbying group, the Interfaith Alliance. 

In 1965 at her church in the Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights, she was juggling dual roles as a mother raising three children and as a local activist, her home became a hub for groups supporting the civil rights movement and opposing the Vietnam War. During a visit by King to Cleveland, he met briefly with Rev. Campbell and mentioned offhand that he had never been invited to speak at a mostly White church in the area. She suggested he come to the Heights Christian Church, where she was belonged to the congregation. Some church members felt honored to host King, but other members rejected him, claiming the presence of the civil rights leader was too politically charged and divisive. Bomb threats were made targeting Rev. Campbell’s home. Eventually, a compromise was reached for King to speak on the church steps. “There were at least 3,000 people there to hear him, and that would have never been true had it been inside the church,” Rev. Campbell said. 

King told the crowd: “Without brotherhood, we can’t survive.” On a nearby sidewalk, white-nationalist protesters marched against him. The showdown inspired Rev. Campbell to expand her activism, including working on the 1967 Cleveland mayoral campaign of Carl B. Stokes, who became the city’s first Black mayor.

She was ordained in 1980 by the Progressive National Baptist Convention, a denomination rooted in the civil rights movement whose members included King and Ralph Abernathy. Rev. Campbell’s ordination was later recognized by the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and the American Baptist Churches. She served as executive director of the U.S. office of the World Council of Churches, the umbrella group for national Christian church coalitions internationally. In 1986, she was the only woman among the clergy in the procession for Desmond Tutu when he became the Anglican Church archbishop in Cape Town. Rev. Campbell was elected in 1990 to lead the NCC, becoming the first ordained woman to head the group.

At a 1997 memorial service for the astronomer Carl Sagan, with whom Rev. Campbell had helped found the National Religious Partnership for the Environment, she recalled an exchange they had. “He would say to me, ‘You are so smart, why do you believe in God?’” she said. “And I’d say, ‘You are so smart, why don’t you believe in God?’” Her honors include the Interfaith Alliance Foundation’s Walter Cronkite Faith and Freedom Award in 2010 for promoting tolerance and public dialogue. Her book, Living into Hope: A Call to Spiritual Action for Such a Time as This was published in 2010 (Nashville, Tennessee: SkyLight Paths).

Rev. Campbell also served for 14 years as director of religion at the Chautauqua Institution, a retreat in western New York. In a 2012 sermon, alluding to her past activism, she urged the congregation to recognize their role in fighting for social justice. “I believe that it is in times of uncertainty,” she said, “when we question our thoughts and decisions, that God can enter our lives.”

Read the April 11, 2025 Washington Post obituary.

Read the April 10, 2025 New York Times obituary.

Obituary: Thomas Gaither, Who Chose Jail After Civil Rights Sit-ins, 86

 

One year after the sit-in movement that began at a whites-only lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., in 1960 and spread to other cities, stimulating the nation’s conscience over racial segregation, was in danger of losing momentum. In Rock Hill, S.C., local businesses still refused to integrate, despite the sit-ins, and local news no longer covered them. Then, in 1961, a 22-year-old organizer, Thomas Gaither, introduced a new tactic. In the next sit-in, at the lunch counter of a McCrory’s dime store in Rock Hill, Black students led by Gaither were dragged off counter stools by police officers. But this time, instead of paying a $100 trespassing fine as earlier protesters did, they chose to serve 30-day sentences on the county chain gang. Their “jail no bail” tactic dramatized their moral commitment and changed the direction of the civil rights movement. Within days, protesters in other cities followed suit, their imprisoning drawing more attention and protests. The choice of jail, historian Taylor Branch wrote in Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63 (1988), was “an emotional breakthrough for the civil rights movement” because it dramatized protesters’ willingness to pay a real price for their convictions.

A little-sung catalyst of the civil rights protests of the 1960s, Gaither was one of the activists who, driven by high moral purpose, peacefully put their bodies on the line to fight racial discrimination. Those actions helped bring about historic federal laws to end legal segregation and ensure voting rights.

At Claflin College, an all-Black institution in Orangeburg, S.C., he was president of the youth chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. In March 1960, he was co-leader of a march of 1,000 students protesting segregated businesses. The peaceful Orangeburg marchers were attacked with fire hoses and tear gas, leading to 388 arrests. Many were held in a stockade meant for cattle, where they sang “God Bless America.”

As a field secretary by the Congress of Racial Equality, which used nonviolent direct action to fight segregation, Gaither was sent to organize in Kentucky, California, and Arizona. Ahead of the “jail no bail” sit-in in Rock Hill, on January 31, 1961, he helped train the protesters, eight students from Friendship Junior College. He and the students were known as the Friendship Nine after choosing to serve jail sentences. “The amazing thing about the Friendship Nine,” he added, “was that we took essentially a group of college students who had no knowledge at all of tactical nonviolence and we pulled off one of the most important protest events of the movement.”

Several months later, Gaither and fellow CORE organizer Gordon Carey both read a biography of Mahatma Gandhi, the apostle of nonviolent protest, and developed the idea for the first Freedom Ride: an integrated group of activists who would take a bus trip from Washington through the Deep South. The idea was to dramatize the refusal of Southern states to comply with US Supreme Court rulings that segregated interstate buses and terminals were unconstitutional. In May 1961, CORE national director James Farmer led the first Freedom Ride, with 13 white and Black passengers, including the future congressman and civil rights advocate John Lewis.

In Alabama, the CORE activists were arrested and beaten by white mobs led by the Ku Klux Klan. The commercial buses they rode in were firebombed. The police abetted the violence, and hospitals refused to treat bloodied victims. National publicity drew hundreds more activists, who made dozens of Freedom Rides crisscrossing the South through 1961. The violence shocked the nation, no less because of the complicity of the Southern authorities in allowing it to happen in defense of Jim Crow laws.

Gaither was not on the original Freedom Ride in May 1961; he was scouting the route and contacting local supporters to house the riders. He was staying at the home of the civil rights leader the Rev. Ralph David Abernathy in Montgomery, Alabama, on May 20 when riders arriving at the Greyhound station there were beaten with baseball bats and iron pipes. The next night, more than 1,500 people went to Abernathy’s church to hear the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speak as a rock-throwing white mob surrounded the building. Dr. King called on Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to send federal protection.

He later became a professor of biology in 1968 at Slippery Rock University (Pennsylvania), and taught there for 38 years before retiring in 2007.

In his later years, Gaither felt that the civil rights movement had profoundly changed America, but also that the structures of racism had remained in his native South. “No question, the South has changed tremendously,” he said in 2011. “But the fundamental infrastructure of racism and segregation that called the shots in the South in 1960 are still in place. They have slightly different labels, they accomplish their goals by slightly different means, but there has been no real fundamental shift in who really calls the signals.”

Read the January 24, 2025 New York Times obituary.

Listen to a 2011 Library of Congress Oral History Interview with Thomas Gaither.

Teaching for Change has Released the Second Edition of Its "Putting the Movement Back Into Civil Rights Teaching"

Teaching for Change has released the second edition of Putting the Movement Back Into Civil Rights Teaching, an important teaching tool originally published jointly with the Poverty & Race Research Action Council (PRRAC) in 2004. Edited by Deborah Menkart, Alana D. Murray, and Jenice L. View, Putting the Movement Back Into Civil Rights Teaching is used in school districts and with community groups across the country.

The 2nd edition of the 576-page book is $29.95. Order

The Civil Rights Movement is one of the most commonly taught stories about the fight for democracy and equal rights. However, the powerful stories of everyday people organizing and working together for social change are lost in the focus on a few major heroes and dates. The book and its companion website offer a collection of lessons, essays, articles, primary documents, and poetry to help K-12 educators delve more deeply than a "heroes and holidays" approach to teaching about the Civil Rights Movement in their classrooms. The book's focus is on the themes of women, youth, organizing, culture, institutional racism, and the interconnectedness between social movements. The resources are organized in eight sections: Critiquing the Traditional Narrative, Framing the Movement, Desegregation of Public Spaces, Voting Rights, Black Power, Labor and Land, Transnational Solidarity, and Student Engagement.

There will be a book release event on Wednesday, October 30th in Washington, D.C. at the Busboys and Poets in Brookland (telephone 202-636-7230 625 Monroe St NE, Washington, DC 20017). Presenters include the editors (Jenice L. View, Alana D. Murray, and Deborah Menkart), SNCC veterans (Courtland Cox, Judy Richardson, and Jennifer Lawson), and lesson authors. Educator Jessica Rucker is the emcee. Attendees will hear about the book and engage in some of the activities. Free and open to the public. Books available for purchase and signing. The first 20 classroom teachers in attendance will receive a free copy of the book.

Go to the book's webpage.