This week we mourn the loss of a true American hero. Freedom Rider Dr. Ernest “Rip” Patton has passed away at the age of eighty-one after a brief illness. Dr. Patton was a twenty-one-year-old student drum major in the band at Tennessee A&I (now Tennessee University) when he joined the Freedom Rides in May 1961. He was in the third wave of student Freedom Riders to come to Alabama to complete the journey by bus after the first group of Freedom Riders, sponsored by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), were violently attacked in the state on Sunday, May 14, causing them to have to complete the Rides to New Orleans by plane. Dr. Patton did not tell his mother that he planned to go on the Rides when he left heading to Montgomery. He arrived here one day before the group set out to head to Jackson, Mississippi. Dr. Patton would be among the first groups of Freedom Riders to arrive in Jackson, eventually landing him in Mississippi’s infamous Parchman Prison for nearly forty days under a Breach of Peace charge. His mother received a call from a family friend who saw Dr. Patton and other Freedom Riders as the arrival in Jackson was covered by news media. 

While in Parchman, Dr. Patton was a member of a quartet who led freedom songs with other Freedom Riders, their singing often causing them to be targeted for extra punishment from the prison guards. However, whenever Dr. Patton spoke, he would recall how the singing was a source of strength and comfort to the Freedom Riders while they were in prison. As a music major, he believed in the power of music. While he was in prison in Mississippi, Dr. Patton was one of fourteen students who were expelled from Tennessee A&I. After the Freedom Rides, Dr. Patton spent some time fundraising for the civil rights movement before settling on a career as a truck driver. 

When the Freedom Rides Museum opened in 2011 on the fiftieth anniversary of the Freedom Rides, Dr. Patton was one of the Riders who came back to Montgomery to participate. Over the next ten years, Dr. Patton would come to Montgomery frequently to speak to visitors at the museum. Over the last few years, he spoke more virtually to visitors, but he always ended each presentation with a song. We are honored that Dr. Patton spent so much of his life giving to others, whether it be as an activist or a speaker. He was a gifted storyteller and when he sang, visitors young and young at heart were moved, sometimes to tears. 

2021 is the sixtieth anniversary of the Freedom Rides and we hope that folks will take the time this year to reflect on the courage of the Freedom Riders and remember the ones we have lost like Dr. Patton. We are thankful that Dr. Patton and other Freedom Riders took the time to share some of their stories with the rest of us. We will continue to not only reflect on their extraordinary courage and sacrifice but seek to continue their legacy and their journey in the fight for justice and freedom for all.

One of the recent losses from the pandemic was the cancellation in Decatur, Georgia, on last Sunday of a celebration of one of our authors turning one hundred years old: the Reverend J. Phillips Noble. NewSouth Books published his memoir, Beyond the Burning Bus: The Civil Rights Revolution in a Southern Town, in 2003.

Reverend Noble was born August 18, 1921, in rural Mississippi. He grew up in segregation and like most Southern Whites was taught to understand “that’s how it was.” But even as a youngster, Noble realized that something was wrong with an education system that provided him a classroom but didn’t do the same for Black sharecroppers he worked alongside in the fields with and played with on his family farm. 

He grew up to attend Presbyterian seminary, where he developed further consciousness about race and religion. In one of his early pastorates, he could see looming trouble in the reaction of some of his White church members to the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. His awareness was growing. And then when he was called two years later to the pastorate of a larger church in Anniston, Alabama, he saw firsthand the incongruity of White registrars suppressing Black would-be voters.

Soon local segregationists were firebombing a Greyhound bus carrying Freedom Riders, beating up and harassing civil rights protestors, and doing all they could to maintain the status quo of white supremacy and total segregation. 

Did Reverend Noble pray about this? Yes, and even publicly and even with local Black ministers, whom he surprised with his conviction for human kindness and compassion, which included racial justice. Thus he became one of the leaders of a biracial commission that helped bring Blacks and Whites together in their small Southern city. Bloodshed and strife were minimized, and relationships were made across the racial divide. Bit by bit, things improved, and Reverend Noble was part of the reason why.

Happy 100th, Phil. And thank you for a life well-lived.

C.T. Vivian, who died on the same day as his close friend John Lewis roughly one year ago, was celebrated this month in a program featuring some notable guests: Don Lemon, CNN host; Bernice King, daughter of Martin Luther King Jr.; Andrew Young, civil rights leader and former US ambassador; Al Vivian, son of C.T.; and author Steve Fiffer, coauthor of Vivian’s recently published memoir It’s in the Action: Memories of a Nonviolent Warrior. The Alliance of Christian Media hosted what was a truly excellent program. 

This esteemed panel spoke at length on Vivian’s life story and how the activists of the modern generation can learn from his example. Considering the speakers present and the scope of discussion, we are encouraged to believe that those unfamiliar with Vivian’s story will better understand the true moral and spiritual power behind America’s civil rights movement.

This recent program culminates several months of activities sparked by the publication of Rev. Vivian’s memoir, It’s in the Action, in February. During this time, the book has been the subject of dozens of reviews, profiles, and excerpts, including in publications like the Washington Post, CNN, the Daily Beast, Associated Press, the Tennessean, and the Atlanta-Journal Constitution. 

It’s also been the centerpiece of numerous other virtual and in-person programs. Coauthor Steve Fiffer has generously participated in most of them, including a quite special presentation hosted by the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum. Incredibly, timed to that event, the city of Jackson, Mississippi, declared May 26th C. T. Vivian Day in recognition of the major accomplishments Vivian made during the civil rights movement. To top it all off, that same week Peoria Public Schools voted to change the formerly named Thomas Jefferson Primary School to the C. T. Vivian Primary School. 

We are deeply honored at NewSouth to have had the opportunity to publish It’s in the Action, and proud to see our book go where our friend the Rev. C.T. Vivian can no longer.

Bob Moses, one of the most courageous human beings to have walked this earth, died July 25, 2021. Tributes have been pouring in from many who knew Bob or knew of him, including President Barack Obama, who said: “Bob was a hero of mine. His quiet confidence helped shape the civil rights movement, and he inspired generations of young people looking to make a difference.” 

Bob was twenty-five and a school teacher in New York City when he became inspired by the bravery of the young women and men who started the sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina, in February 1960 that quickly spread throughout the South. In the summer of 1960, Bob headed South intending to work with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Instead, he became involved with the fledgling Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and was encouraged by Ella Baker to go to Mississippi to determine how this largely student-based group could break down the barriers for equal rights for Black Mississippians, then living in a totalitarian, white supremacist state.

After his initial foray into Mississippi, Bob returned to the state in the summer of 1961 to build upon the nascent civil rights activism of Medgar Evers and others. Bob led a voter registration drive in McComb, one of the most repressive cities in a very repressive state. He was soon joined by young Black Mississippians Hollis Watkins, Curtis Hayes, Brenda Travis, and others, who saw in Bob and his mission the opportunity to create real change in their lives and the lives of Black Mississippians generally. Bob and his allies were met with bombings, beatings, jailings, and killings. While the initial civil rights beachhead in McComb was frustrated by the white power structure, the movement persisted.

Over the next four years, Bob continued the movement with voter registration drives and direct action throughout Mississippi. Although Bob was often described as the “leader” of the Mississippi movement, he shunned titles. His approach and the approach of SNCC generally was to encourage and empower local Black women and men, such as Fannie Lou Hamer, to lead the movement in their communities. As he often stated, quoting from the Constitution, “We the People, have the power, not the presidents, the senators or the congressmen, and we must seize that power that was given us by the Founding Fathers.” 

In the push to bring about meaningful change in Mississippi, Bob championed the 1964 Freedom Summer project that brought large groups of students, many of them white, to work with Black Mississippians to achieve their rights. Much of what they worked for came to fruition with the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. While all was not successful, it was partly through Bob’s efforts that today Mississippi has more Black elected officials than any other state.

Bob never ceased in his efforts to empower Black men and women.  With the assistance of a McArthur Genius Grant in the 1980s, he guided the formation of the Algebra Project, teaching math literacy in inner-city schools in Mississippi and elsewhere. Bob’s roots as a teacher made him see that if Black youth were to succeed in this society, they needed the necessary math skills to compete. Many young African-American women and men who might not otherwise have been able to obtain a college education were able to do so as a result of this program. 

Bob remained ever optimistic despite the obstacles he encountered in Mississippi and the more recent obstacles to voting rights. He encouraged some of his former compatriots in the telling of their stories by writing forewords to their books, including two published by NewSouth, Brenda Travis’s Mississippi’s Exiled Daughter and Gwen Patton’s My Race to Freedom. In the foreword to Patton’s book, he described her as a person “with dedication, principle, and an unbending devotion to justice, equality, and the well-being of all people.” These powerful words of Bob Moses equally describe him and his own life mission. He will be sorely missed. 

John Obee, inspired by Bob Moses, worked as a civil rights worker in Mississippi in 1967 and has continued his civil rights activism since that time. He is currently working on a project to increase minority representation in the labor arbitration field. Obee is the co-author of Mississippi’s Exiled Daughter, the memoir from civil rights activist Brenda Travis.

Seventy years ago, sixteen-year-old Barbara Johns led a walk-out at R. R. Moton High School in Farmville, Virginia, in protest of Jim Crow segregation, specifically the so-called separate-but-equal education policies which had been the law in the South since Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. The school Johns attended indeed was separate, but it was in no way equal to the White public schools in the same county. NAACP lawyers Oliver Hill and Spottswood Robinson supported the walk-out students by filing a federal lawsuit against the Prince Edward County school board. The original suit failed, but its claims were folded into Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 ruling in which the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Plessy and declared school segregation to be unconstitutional. Barbara Johns’s reward for this victory was harassment by the Ku Klux Klan and the closure for several years of all public schools in Prince Edward County as local White officials did all they could to avoid and delay desegregation.

Half a century later, the activism of Johns and the other walk-out students had been largely forgotten before journalist Ken Woodley discovered the background story of school closures in Prince Edward County while working for the Farmville Herald, the local newspaper in his and Johns’s hometown. Woodley told the resurrected story in articles and editorials and led a campaign for reparations for the years of lost education. In the end, Woodley took the campaign all the way to the governor’s office and secured both a public apology and scholarships for those affected by the Prince Edward County school closures. Woodley’s moving and inspiring memoir, The Road to Healing, shares the story of his and others’ efforts to make right the societal ills in his small Virginia town. The tale reminds readers that even small gestures can go a long way toward repairing the social fabric of our country.