Interview With Historian Derek Charles Catsam (2009)

Right. The the absence of the press, I think, early on -- let me, let me, let me start, that's bad. When they boarded the buses, a couple of the participants had planned on writing their own accounts, and they'd managed to get a couple of journalists to go along. Moses Newson of the Baltimore Afro-American was the one who filed the most consistent regular reports and I think they were okay with that because early on they didn't know what to expect either and I don't think they expected that this was necessarily New York Times worthy or Washington Post worthy for the entire journey, or at least even if they hoped it, they didn't necessarily expect that was going to happen. What's one of the funny anecdotes is that when they are all boarding the buses, actually, some people mistook Genevieve Hughes for a starlet and so some of the press did, did get some amusement out of that but they didn't get on the buses with them when they, when they left. What does that do? I think, you know, if you're going on this trip and you're going to go to the deep south and you don't have, you don't have protection, you don't have press, talk about the, the danger. The last supper stuff. The night before they left the

Freedom Riders had this dinner in Washington DC and it's a relatively famous dinner and they jokingly called it the Last Supper because so many of them had a religious background and they wanted to make that invocation and I think part of the the reality of this is that they don't know what they're going to face. They don't know what they're going to confront and they realize that when they get somewhere further in the south, especially without the attention being paid, they might lose their lives and they might run into violence. I think they were very cognizant of what might happen which is why is I think they were at least happy that they had the press that they had with them. One of the things that, that we want to try to do is to give it, you know, to set this in the time and so we don't need a lot but just to give the idea that, you know, that there was no Civil Rights movement as we've