Part one
Walking out of the brilliant sunshine at 7:30 this morning into the cavernous, very high-ceilinged, open-space African American Museum adjacent to USC, the indoors environment soon showed the smarty-pants sun how to illumine a room with select human beings, quite without the star’s assistance.
On the occasion of a 50th anniversary celebration of the Freedom Riders who helped break the back of Deep South segregation, the Urban Issues Breakfast Forum, led by Dr. Anthony Asadullah Samad, hosted four authentic Los Angeles heroes of the abbreviated movement.
They were Dr. Robert Singleton of Loyola Marymount University, Helen Singleton, his wife and inspiration, Edward Johnson and the only Freedom Rider with a major public profile, Robert Farrell, a Los Angeles City Councilman, 1974-1991, who for the past 20 years has joined the rest of his generational giants in leading quite a private life.
It hasn’t been hard for any of them to avoid a spotlight. None has chased them — outside of Mr. Farrell’s terms on the City Council.
The downside and the shame, many would say, is the four are lesser known than a speck of dirt on the passenger door of your car. But oh, what thrilling, historic, one-chance-only memories they have to evoke, what fleeting stories of almost unimaginable courage they have to weave.
Freshly college trained, they exploded from obscurity during a seven-month period in 1961.
Confidently bullet-proof as those of a certain age are born to feel, they streaked swiftly across the scary night-time skies of America before dipping into Red Neck Country, where it was said only the foolhardy would dare venture if their skin were other than white.
They did their deed tidily and with honor, protesting eloquently with the sophistication of trained professionals. They were there and gone.
Weeks after the one-time-only terrifying adventure of a lifetime, they returned home, seamlessly, modestly, stepping back into oblivion.
As far as a celebrity-conscious America was concerned, these momentary heroes had shrunk back to regular you-and-me size.
They never were to be heard from again — until someone remembered that 2011 was the magical 50th wedding anniversary, a half-century since the day that Incredible Courage married an Outsized Task too large for normal persons, for better or worse, to have and to hold, from this day forward.
(To be continued)
