GRAND RAPIDS, MI -- Nearly 60 years ago, Rev. Dick Gleason was cursed at, spit on, kicked and hit.
The assault was only an exercise, but one meant to teach him to maintain a nonviolent response, even in the face of what might await him in Jackson, Mississippi.
Gleason was one of more than 328 people who participated in the Freedom Rides of 1961, a diverse group of people who actively challenged the continued racist policies of the South after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled as unconstitutional the segregation of interstate bus and rail lines and the terminal waiting rooms serving them.
The Freedom Riders challenged illegal segregation by bussing in to the South and sitting in interracial pairs, having Black people sit up front, disobeying terminal waiting rooms for whites and non-whites and more.
“I’m often referred to as being a civil rights activist, and I am simply a Christian doing what the scripture tells me to do, what the Lord would have me to do: to love my neighbor as myself,” Gleason, now 84, said. “In the scriptures it speaks about: learn to do right, seek justice and justify it and defend the oppressed, so that was my motivation.”
The Freedom Rides began in May 1961 and were met with violence. Early on, a bus was burned, with the riders nearly burning to death because a mob held the doors closed. Ku Klux Klan members were at times given brief free reign by local police to do whatever they wanted to the anti-segregationist riders.
“We talk about the good old ‘let’s Make America Great Again,’ this is the America of 1961; it wasn’t the Andy Griffith Show either,” Gleason said, pointing to other instances of racial violence.
Gleason says while issues of racial justice are more out in the open and talked about today than 60 years ago, infringement of voting rights for minorities and providing equal opportunity from birth remain a battle.
The 84-year-old fears the country has become too polarized, with people listening only to what they want to believe, paving a way to a possible dictatorship.
At the time of the Freedom Rides, Gleason was living in an impoverished and redlined neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side and working with troubled Black youth, many of whom were in rival gangs, to give them hope the government never afforded them.
He did so through seven-days-a-week programming at the local YMCA which included sports, tutoring, a non-traditional Sunday service and more. It was a long way from where he grew up in the small town of Lyons, Ohio.
“Hopelessness and despair blurted out from their homes, their schools, the streets,” Gleason said. “I saw behind their facades of being the coolest and the boldest, a sense of the hopelessness and despair of a frightened little kid, striking out at others and themselves for respect, to be respected, to be somebody and live a good life.”
Gleason knew no one in the civil rights movement. But after hearing about the violence, he phoned Martin Luther King Jr.’s office to join the Freedom Riders.
Gleason arrived at King’s office in Atlanta with six others on May 31, 1961. The group participated in a nonviolence workshop training them to not respond equally to the violence they were likely to face for violating segregationist policies.
Two days later, on June 2, Gleason and several others boarded a bus at Montgomery, Alabama, bound for Jackson. Gleason’s tie was partially cut at the back of the neck, in case someone intended to choke him with it.
At the stop in Selma, Georgia, one of the Freedom Riders, Ralph Fertig, was forcefully taken off the bus by notorious Dallas County Sheriff Jim Clark for having asked a white woman to share her adjacent seat with a Black woman.
Fertig was jailed and later allowed to be beaten by inmates for his participation in the Freedom Rides. Fertig said the inmates broke every rib in his body.
Gleason, and the other remaining Freedom Riders whose cover wasn’t blown, still had five long hours ahead of them to Jackson. The remainder of the ride was without incident.
Finally, they arrived at the terminal in Jackson.
“I was determined to get to the colored waiting room no matter what, and I did,” Gleason recounted. “I was arrested, interrogated for a number of hours, accused of being a communist. There were a lot of billboards in the South at that time claiming Dr. King was a communist. The movement, we were vilified just like things are happening today.”
Gleason spent two days in jail and paid a $200 fine for what authorities called “breach of peace.”
“After five months, the signs were taken down -- the colored only, white only -- signs were taken down,” he said of the Freedom Rides. “We ended segregation; 328 people.”
When his plane landed back in Chicago, policemen were waiting for him. Not to arrest him, as he initially feared, but to protect him.
For his participation, however, his childhood church ostracized him.
“Because I went on the Freedom Ride, the church that I depended so much on as a kid disfellowshipped me,” Gleason said.
Gleason continued his youth work in Chicago and later marched with King several times after the Freedom Rides, including the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery in support of voting rights for Black Americans.
When King was assassinated in 1968, Gleason attended his private funeral and later public funeral procession.
Growing up bullied and with pain in his home, Gleason credits a youth pastor for igniting him in the drive that would guide his life’s journey.
“‘I want you to know that God loves you. He has a plan for your life, and if you dream big enough and work hard enough you can be anything you want to be,’” Gleason recounted the pastor saying to him. “I said, ‘Lord, if you make me strong enough I will serve you the rest of my life.’”
While issues of racial justice are more out in the open and talked about than 60 years ago, Gleason said there is still work to be done in a country becoming more and more polarized and validated by the echo chambers people choose to put themselves in.
Gleason said one of the biggest ongoing “justice” issues is that of new voter laws being introduced and enacted in areas of the country with the intention, he said, of limiting minority votes.
Just like segregation, issues of racial justice and equal opportunity aren’t political to Gleason, they’re spiritual.
“All the hundreds of voting restrictions that are trying to be placed is to eliminate Black people and minorities from voting, and Christians are silent,” Gleason said. “‘Oh, that’s in the political bucket. The pastor has to keep spiritual.’” I’m sorry, Jesus said love your neighbors yourself. The Bible speaks numerous times about justice.”
He called on white leaders of faith to stop taking a narrow view of what is a spiritual issue, like abortion, and broaden that into areas deemed political, such as equal opportunity, racial justice and helping a baby survive after they’re born.
“Whites need to be allies,” Gleason said. “We need to stand up and speak up and stand by our Black brothers and sisters. Our pastors need to speak up and stand by the movement for justice and put it out of their pail of socialism and put that whole message of justice in the spiritual bucket, for heaven’s sake.”
Gleason now resides in Covenant Living of the Great Lakes, a retirement community in Grand Rapids, and helps people with Alzheimer’s disease, as well as creates Christian programming for the community’s TV station.
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