Documentary advance showing prompts recollections to remember

This invitation to a special event at Pamlico Community College is written in the first person by Ben Casey, the college’s Director of Community Relations.  He shares his personal reflections as a backdrop to announce the showing of this documentary.

UNC-TV has chosen Pamlico Community College to be one of only 34 institutions in the state to present an advance showing of the two-hour documentary, Freedom Riders. It will air on PBS in mid-May. UNC-TV chose Pamlico Community College because of the initiative taken by an adjunct instructor in history, Elizabeth M. Cox. 

To have an adjunct instructor (as she puts it, “jaa,” just an adjunct) display this kind of passion for the college to participate in such an undertaking speaks volumes about the qualitative efforts of the college.

Now about the documentary. It was just a couple of weeks ago that this nation noted the 150^th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War. On Wednesday, this nation will mark the 5oth anniversary of a milestone in the effort for Civil Rights. On that date, several hundred college students boarded buses in the North bound for the Deep South. Their mission was to challenge the laws that required black citizens to ride in the back of the bus.

Pamlico Community College has chosen the Tuesday evening, the eve of the anniversary date, to show this documentary in the Ned Everett Delamar Center on the college campus. A forum to discuss the significance of this action by those college students will follow for those who wish to participate.

In 1961, I had just graduated from the eighth grade in Arapahoe. I went all the way through high school and undergraduate school without ever being in a class with black students. 

I remember the bombing of the church in Alabama which killed several children. I remember the parade of hearses from black funeral homes through Five Points down Broad Street in New Bern, honoring the memory of those lost children.

In those days, people at protests sang folk songs pleading for fairness, “If I had a hammer, I’d hammer out justice, I’d hammer out freedom …”

I remember one of my classmates singing out, “If I had a hammer, I’d knock you in the head.” I am ashamed I didn’t have the courage to knock him in the head. 

It’s easy now to sit back and promote the viewing of Freedom Riders, but can you imagine how hard it was to have been a Freedom Rider?

This documentary was not made to inflame old wounds. It is an effort to help people understand where we have been and where we never want to go again.

My first foray into integrated classrooms was the first year I taught at Durham High School.  Fortunate enough to be the score keeper for the basketball team, which was coached then by first year coach Dave Odom, I rode the bus to all the away games with the players. One of the JV players was one of my algebra students.

We talked openly about race relations, as this was only one year after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. On one long bus ride, I was trying to quell his bitterness. In reply, he recalled a time in elementary school. The parents of a white student invited his whole class to a birthday party for their child at a swimming pool. The parents came to him and told him he might not feel comfortable there and he probably shouldn’t go. He was the only black student in the class.

To know where we shouldn’t ever go, we might need to take a look at where we never should have gone.

Freedom Riders will be shown to the public, free of charge, at 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday at the Delamar Center. Arrive early as seating is limited to 650 persons for an audience from a multi-county area.