Freedom rider rabbi remembers his arrest in Tallahassee airport 50 years ago

January 30, 2012
By: Michael Abrams
Tallahassee

The Biblical commandment to “care for the stranger in your midst” is why Rabbi Israel Dresner risked his life and took a ride on a bus to Tallahassee some 50 years ago as a Freedom Rider.

The fight for civil rights took on many colors, as whites joined blacks to press for the end of segregation in the South in the 1960s. Tallahassee was a hotbed for the movement, with hundreds of Florida A&M University students and others pressing to end segregation in theatres and at lunch counters. Many went to jail.

Rabbi Dresner, of New Jersey, who will be 83 in April, remembers a Freedom Ride to Tallahassee in June of 1961 and his arrest in a case which went all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court and bounced back to put him and his colleagues in jail.

Dresner spoke from his home in Wayne, N.J. Known by friends as “Si,” he is an emeritus rabbi for his reform Jewish congregation and often speaks of his experiences in the civil rights movement. He was 32 years old when he arrived on the bus with 17 other riders, some white, some black. Three of the ten ministers who were eventually arrested are still alive.

The airport protest

The airport incident occurred when some of the freedom riders were flying home from Tallahassee, which was the last stop on the Freedom Ride for them. Those eight freedom riders got on the plane and flew home, according to court documents.

Ten others stayed and were apparently hoping to be served in the restaurant at the airport, but the restaurant, designated only for whites, never opened. It was apparently not in operation. They would later argue it was closed the day before they got to the airport, and opened after they left.

Sandwich and cigarette machines had doubled their prices, said the ministers.

They waited for hours. Court documents say the ministers used restrooms disregarding the signs designating race.

The city eventually argued that “the sole purpose of such a course of harassment was to goad the municipality and its restaurant lessee to open the restaurant and gratify the appellants’ wishes that they be served in the style and manner they deemed to be their right.”

During this time they canceled and rescheduled their flights, according to court records. They asked for a police escort back to the city that night, which was granted. The group stayed with supporters. Dresner says he spent the night as guest of a FAMU faculty member whose name he does not recall, but that he may also have been a minister. They came back the next morning.

The media attention on the group was intense and court documents say people hostile to the freedom riders were gathering outside of the airport. More police officers and sheriff’s deputies were called to the airport. The governor, kept informed according to the court, was “apprehensive.”

By this time, the atmosphere at the airport had become intense. The city attorney, James Messer, acting with police powers, came out to the airport. He showed the group a police badge and read a proclamation. The city, he said, feared further disturbance and ordered the group to disperse.

A total of four days in jail

The Rev. John W. Collier of Newark, N.J.,, acting as spokesman, told Messer that the group regarded itself as interstate travelers and thus fell under federal protection. Ordered to leave, the ministers refused and were arrested on charges of unlawful assembly. They spent the next day in jail in Tallahassee.

The case wound its way up to the U.S. Supreme court. Because the ministers had not gone through the regular channels in their appeal, they were ordered back to Tallahassee. In 1964 they were sentenced to 60 days in jail or a $500 fine. They were released by the court after three days.

During imprisonnent they found out what road work was like. They were dressed in prison uniforms and were put in chains or shackles.

“And there we were raking the grass in Tallahassee.”

“We were talking and figuring we had 58 years of advanced higher learning,” said Dresner.

They were released on Thursday night, Aug. 6, and an Associated Press picture of their release, taken by an unknown correspondent and purchased recently on Ebay appears with this story. The AP says it has lost any record of the photo.

They are, left to right, Dr. Robert McAfee Brown who at that time was a professor of religion at Stanford University; Rabbi Dresner of Springfield, N.J., Rabbi Martin Freedman of Patterson, N.J.; the Rev. Arthur Warner of New York City; the Rev. John W. Collier of Newark, N.J.; the Rev. Robert J. Stone of New York City; the Rev. Wayne Hartmire of Culver City, Calif.

Brown, a renowned theologian, author of 29 books and an internationally known civil rights activist, was the most prominent of the group, according to Dresner.

Three of the original ten are missing from the picture.

Faith in religious teachings

In 1961, newly elected President Kennedy had not really helped the civil rights movement “by any manner or means” said Dresner. It was not until four months before his November 1963 assassination that he proposed a civil rights bill on accommodations.

“My main inspiration was my faith in Judaism and belief in one God and one humanity,” said Dresner. The commandment to care for the stranger is mentioned 36 times in the Hebrew Bible, he observed.

“You shall not oppress the stranger for you were strangers in the land of Egypt,” he said, citing verse. Jews had also been slaves in the slave labor camps of Germany during the World War II.

” We were massacred, expelled, genocided.”

All humankind is one family to Dresner.

“Why did God choose to start the earth with one family?” asks Dresner. “The rabbis tell us that this was done so that no one can say ‘my ancestors are better than yours.’

” The teaching of my faith was clear. The ideals of my country were clear.”

He urges young people to learn history, both American history and world history.

“America is a wonderful country but it’s terrible in history. Americans don’t know what happened the day before yesterday,” said Dresner. He urges students to learn about Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King.

King, a friend, spoke twice before his Jewish congregation. Recently the rabbi and others appeared on Oprah Winfrey to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Rides.

Dresner has been given the honorary cache in news stories as “the most arrested rabbi in America.” He has been arrested three other times, including during a protest over apartheid at the South African consulate and for protesting at the Soviet embassy over policy toward Jews.

‘Righteous indignation’

He’s motivated when he sees what he considers wrongdoing.

“When I see something wrong and unethical, I have a monumental amount of righteous indignation,” he said.

This time it all paid off. When the ministers left Tallahassee on their flight in 1964, they were able to eat in the airport restaurant.

Rabbi Stanley Garfein, emeritus of Temple Israel in Tallahassee, arrived in town the year after the incident. Dresner had been his teacher in a Hebrew language class held in the Poconos in the late 1950s.

He remembers that Dresner was bailed out of jail by Rabbi Grandison, Garfein’s predecessor, along with Al Block, a prominent local resident, and others.

“He (Dresner) is really one of the wonderful people,” said Garfein.
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Rabbi Dresner took part in a recent PBS documentary. More information can be found at http://www.thejewishweek.com/arts/film/rabbi_was_freedom_rider)

An account of the case can be found at http://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/375/136/case.html#139