Freedom Rides Of 1961 Are Team’s History Day Topic
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David Slone-dslone@timesuniononline.com
Editor’s Note: This is the seventh in a series of stories about Warsaw Community Schools students who advanced to National History Day national competition June 9-13 at the University of Maryland’s campus in College Park, Md.
Two sets of brothers and a friend are taking their National History Day project on “The Freedom Rides of 1961” to national contest in June, and while two of the five are newbies, the other three have gone several times and come home with prizes.
Keller Bailey, Jason Benyousky and Ryun Hoffert competed in the national contest in 2017 and 2018. They competed in NHD in 2016 as fifth-graders, but students must be in sixth grade before they are allowed to advance to nationals. In 2018, they – along with Geoffrey Hochstetler – received the Civil War History Prize from The Civil War Trust for their group performance titled “The Conflicts and Compromises of Writer and Civil War Soldier Ambrose Bierce.” In 2017, the same group won the Outstanding Indiana Award and the Captain Ken Coskey Naval History special prize of $1,000 for “The Many Stands of Pearl Harbor.”
For this year’s competition, the three returnees – Edgewood Middle School eighth-graders – are joined by Keller’s brother Finn, Washington STEM Academy sixth-grader, and Hoffert’s brother Robinson, Eisenhower Elementary sixth-grader.
Benyousky said, “After the first month or so, you get into a kind of rhythm where it doesn’t feel as new to you.”
“They feel like permanent members of the team now,” Keller said.
NHD offers year-long academic programs that engage over half a million middle and high school students around the world annually in conducting original research on historical topics of interest. The largest NHD program is the NHD Contest that encourages more than half a million students around the world to conduct historical research on a topic of their choice. Students enter these projects at the local and state levels, with top students advancing to the national contest at the University of Maryland. The theme this year is “Triumph and Tragedy.”
Ryun said their performance project this year, “The Freedom Rides of 1961: Makers of Good Trouble,” is about a group of civil rights activists who fought segregation in the 1960s.
“Everywhere in the South was segregated – the bus stations and everywhere, and there was a bunch of injustice going on. The buses were even segregated, too, with African Americans in the back and white people in the front. So the Freedom Riders went around riding on buses in the South to protest that by integrating the seating patterns and integrating bus stations, which had white waiting rooms and black waiting rooms.”
Benyousky said the Freedom Rides went from 1961 to 1964. “There was a law that said if you were going from state to state, interstate travel, there was no racial segregation on buses. But it still went on because the South was so adamant about their beliefs.”
“The reason that they had it that way was so that if you were going from the North to the South, then the drivers don’t have to change around the seating and everything as they go down and cross the state border,” Keller said.
He said most of the Freedom Riders that got arrested in Mississippi went to Parchman State Penitentiary at one point.
“They spent 56 days there without paying bail. And Parchman prison was pretty bad. The only way that they stayed sane was by making up a fake radio show called ‘The Parchman Hour.’ So maybe they’d crack at joke at the guards midway through or something. They’d talk about a topic they thought they knew a lot about, so then they’d discuss it for like an hour,” Keller said.
Benyousky said they even made up commercials to keep their mind off of the prison.
“One of the cool things I found, as Keller mentioned, a lot of them went to Parchman State Penitentiary in Mississippi; about a year through, probably sooner than that, a month through the Freedom Rides, once they started getting a lot of momentum and attention, they had a new objective. That was to fill every single jail in Mississippi,” Benyousky said.
He said their tactic was called “Jail, No Bail.” The NHD team uses that in their performance.
In the performance, Finn portrays “the bad guy” Captain J.L. Ray; a Klansman; and the young Jim Zwerg, an American former minister who was involved with the Freedom Riders.
Robinson plays John Lewis, a Freedom Rider who went on to become a member of the U.S. House of Representatives; Charles Person, the youngest Freedom Rider; and Robert Carter, Zwerg’s black college roommate who helped introduce Zwerg to segregation.
Keller’s role is Marv Davidov, a peace activist and Freedom Rider who went on to found the Honeywell Project during the Vietnam War.
“Even though it’s not completely historically accurate, we have Marv and Jim Zwerg on a bus. Captain Ray stops them, tells them he will take them to prison if they go across the line, which would normally be the threshold of the waiting room, and so then we get shipped off to prison, which is when we do a little remake of the ‘Parchman Hour’ between me and Robinson for the first scene of it. Then for the second scene, Robinson goes and is part of a separate mini-scene that is going on, which is the bus beating as they went through Birmingham,” Keller explained.
Ryun plays a reporter and James Peck, another Freedom Rider. The reporter interviews Jim Zwerg the whole time, so it’s like a flashback of Zwerg’s memories for most of the performance, Ryun said.
Playing an older Zwerg is Benyousky, who gets interviewed by the reporter and has the flashback. Benyousky also plays a racist bus driver during the scene where Finn’s and Robinson’s characters get beaten by the KKK.
Ryun said the project has changed their outlook of the 1960s and the South, “that the America we know today wasn’t the America back then. Back then there was segregation and there were virtually no rights for African Americans. In the South they could be imprisoned falsely, but be given a life sentence by a judge for something a white person could get off the hook for if he did it to a black person.”
Benyousky said his takeaway was that “although segregation isn’t in America right now, there’s still a lot of racism.” He said the Freedom Riders gave up a lot to fight for what is right and weren’t afraid of death if it came to that “just to make life better.”
“These Freedom Riders gave up so much just to end segregation and have those same rights white people had back then,” Robinson said. “And if they didn’t do that, then I probably wouldn’t be here, probably wouldn’t be in NHD, probably would be some other place. I’m just happy that we have these people and these role models to end segregation.”
