Farewell to a Freedom Rider

In 1961, when Lula Mae White stepped off a Trailways bus in the Jackson Mississippi bus station and walked towards a "whites only" waiting room rather than the "colored" section, she was confronted by a police officer. He asked "What's your race?" Her answer: "Human." Thus began her life as a fighter for justice.

I never met White, but I felt that I got to know her during a memorial service held today at Southern Connecticut State University. Family members, friends and former students of hers at Lee High School, where she taught history for 28 years, spoke touchingly about her life and the lessons she taught them. It was a fitting send-off for one of the brave Freedom Riders who helped change the course of American history.

Some of the attendees at the memorial service.

White was arrested several more times in her life for committing acts civil disobedience--in Chicago, where she went to college, at a protest over equal rights for housing; during the teachers' strike in New Haven in 1975; and at a protest in support of unionized clerical workers at Yale University. When she was a child growing up in rural Alabama, she was outraged after a family friend was imprisoned for stealing an item valued at 25 cents. "She never stopped risking her life for civil rights and social justice," said one of her brothers, Ronald White.

In Alabama, her parents were were so poor they couldn't afford bicycles for the kids. So her father traveled to New Haven to look for work. He landed a job at the Armstrong Rubber Company, and the rest of the family followed--becoming part of the Great Migration.

She graduated from high school in New Haven and got a scholarship to study at the University of Chicago. After one of the first Freedom Rider buses in the south was stopped and burned by the side of the road, she decided that she had to join the movement. "I was excited to know that people without power could break unjust laws," she told an interviewer decades later. "I wanted to change history."

Before she got on the bus for Jackson, White wrote a postcard to her parents telling them she planned to get arrested and she expected to be in jail by the time they got the card. Which turned out to be correct. She served time in Mississippi's notorious Parchman prison. The guards took her bible and a copy of the collected works of Shakespeare that she had planned on reading, but she said the female Freedom Riders passed the time by telling stories and singing songs.

Take a look at the mug shot of White at the top of this blog post. It's one of 329 photos of arrested Freedom Riders collected and preserved by the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, which became the basis of a book, Breach of Peace, authored by Eric Etheridge. "She was all about good trouble," Etheridge said when he spoke at the memorial.

I'm used to seeing contemporary mug shots of people who have been arrested for shootings, stabbings and beatings. They typically look sad, or desperate or angry. But these mug shots of the Freedom Riders are different. They were dignified, determined and hopeful. White told the interviewer that when she walked from the bus towards the "whites only" waiting room, she felt "uplifted."

During the memorial service, one of White's former students, Marcella Flake, said White "taught little brown girls like me to be hopeful and brave."

At the memorial service, she was still teaching.