Hannah Schwarzschild writes in TheHill.com about her father’s experience as a freedom rider 50 years ago, and her similar work today with the next flotilla to Gaza:
My father’s purpose in joining that Freedom Ride was twofold: to pressure the federal government into enforcing the Supreme Court’s decision that racial segregation in interstate travel violated the U.S. Constitution; and, just as importantly, to focus public attention on the injustice, brutality and defiance of the Jim Crow South.
My father was lucky. By the time he was arrested and jailed, the worst of the violence against the Freedom Riders was already over. Still, he was one of the so-called “outside agitators” whom Alabama Governor George Wallace had accused of “provoking” violence by his defiance of local laws and customs. As such, he had no assurance of a safe return, or any guarantee that his government, the United States government, would protect him from the torches, snipers and attack dogs of the local KKK.
My father was not naïve. He knew the dangers. He also knew that the goal of ending segregation was remote. He went, as he wrote many years later, not because he believed that his mission would succeed, but “as an act of faith in the validity of a moral act. I went because I needed to go.”
As we mark the 50th anniversary of those historic bus rides, a modern-day Freedom Ride will set out this June to challenge and focus international attention on another enduring and yet urgent injustice. The Israeli siege of Gaza has rendered 1.6 million souls – mostly refugees and the children and grandchildren of refugees – forgotten inmates in the world’s largest open-air prison. All movement of people and goods in and out of Gaza by land, air and sea is still controlled – mostly prohibited – by the Israeli military with continuing and coerced Egyptian complicity.
The infrastructure of civil society is still in rubble. Almost no one and nothing goes in; almost no one and nothing comes out. Israeli forces still regularly invade Gaza, destroying agricultural land and homes, and killing Palestinian civilians.
The population grows more desperate. The annual $3 billion of U.S. military aid to Israel continues to flow. The world pays little attention. Egypt’s newly-announced plan to open its border with Gaza promises to relieve some of the most immediate humanitarian crisis, but it does not address the continued separation of the people of Gaza from the rest of Israeli-occupied Palestine or end the illegal naval blockade.
That is why I have been working, along with so many other Americans who care about equality and freedom, to send a U.S.-flagged ship, named The Audacity of Hope, to break the siege of Gaza. Echoing the segregationists of old on “outside agitators,” Israel has slanderously accused the organizers of the U.S. Boat to Gaza of trying to bring material aid to terrorists.
But the U.S. Boat to Gaza’s mission is not to deliver “humanitarian aid” or any other material cargo. Instead, our ship will carry a brave band of unarmed human rights activists as well as the audacious hopes of thousands who have committed their money and time to this nonviolent mission of resistance to enduring racism and injustice. Israeli government officials have vowed to send snipers and attack dogs to stop the flotilla’s supposed “terrorists” and “provocateurs” from entering Gaza. Anyone who doubts their seriousness is simply not paying attention.
Read the entire article on TheHill.com.
