Esther Kim, University of Utah
Political Science
In 1961, student activists from across the United States challenged socially segregated public transit in the South by enforcing desegregation laws. The activists, known as Freedom Riders, were met with resistance, violence and jail. On its 50th anniversary in May 2011, the Freedom Riders were met with much media recognition: a documentary screening at Sundance, an episode on Oprah and a commemorative retracing of the original ride sponsored by PBS American Experience, which involved student activists from across the country to get on the bus. The Civil Rights Movement as a historical memory has become highly celebrated and widely understood as racial justice realized, but commemoration works to historicize and isolate these acts of resistance from modern day struggle for social equity. As a participant of the student freedom rides, I witnessed a complicated mapping of how we live with history, memory, race, power, place, the everyday lives of people that are still affected by events that shaped the nation and corporations seeking to benefit from the blind acceptance of commemoration. Using Cultural Studies theories of encoding and decoding, this research is an examination of the tensions among the actions and rhetoric of the Freedom Riders movement and how they are validated, co-opted, re-formed and understood. This research is an attempt to pull the acts of the Freedom Riders out of a historical framework, contextualizing the way we understand how the events of the Civil Rights Movement have played out and affect the ways we engage social activism and justice now.