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Historic references matter and deserve respect, not loose use.
So it seems off-key when local transit millage crusaders band together as Motor City Freedom Riders and describe their mission under police mug shots of four young civil rights activists.
The Detroit group's site shows four Freedom Riders arrested 55 years ago in Jackson, Miss.
Sure, this fall's four-county vote on tax support for the Regional Transit Authority also involves buses and access to public transportation -- key elements of historic Freedom Rides during seven months of 1961.
But equating a push for effective public transit in metro Detroit with front-line defiance of Southern segregation a half-century ago feels like a glaring overreach that unintentionally disrespects segregation opponents who were bloodied and blocked from traveling in Birmingham, Montgomery and Anniston, Ala.
The new Freedom Riders are affiliated with a downtown Detroit nonprofit called Metropolitan Organizing Strategy Enabling Strength (MOSES). The two-year-old offshoot , which has 622 Facebook followers, says it "works to build a movement for better public transit in metro Detroit. We have the right to move!"
A mission statement acknowledges that "much has changed . . . since the Montgomery bus boycott and the Freedom Riders helped to ignite the civil rights movement and dismantle Jim Crow segregation," and adds:.
But other forms of segregation have persisted, and we face new barriers to freedom. In the metropolitan Detroit region, the lack of effective public transit divides our communities and excludes hundreds of thousands of people from opportunity. The right to economic and political participation is contingent on the right to reliable transportation.
There's no dispute (or shouldn't be) that incomplete, inefficient public transit hurts job seekers, workers, employers, students, shoppers and retailers.
But spotty bus and rail service is hardly akin to state-sponsored segregation of interstate buses and terminals (including restaurants, bathrooms and fountains) -- unconstitutional practices that young Freedom Riders put their lives on the line to oppose. Some were nearly lynched by Klan-led mobs in Alabama. Others were jailed or hospitalized after vicious attacks. One of their chartered Greyhound buses was burned.
Fifty-five years later, the well-intentioned Motor City Freedom Riders see their "conviction that transportation is freedom" as an extension of the crusade against racial segregation upheld by police chiefs, sheriffs and governors.
Mason Herson-Hord, a 2015 Princeton University graduate living in Detroit, responded earlier this week to social media posts by the writer of this commentary. He's a transit campaign organizer for the local group.
"Transit is absolutely one of those economic and social arenas where contemporary segregation is enforced," Herson-Hord posts in a Facebook thread on the Freedom Riders' page, which has 624 followers. (He comments personally, not on behalf of the group -- whose coordinator responds below this commentary.)
Mason Herson-Hord: "The segregation of metro Detroit's transit systems is . . . [a result] of policy decisions to maintain separation between black people in the city and whites in the suburbs." (Facebook photo)
The transit issue organizer adds:
I want to push back on the notion that state-enforced segregation is "real segregation" and capital-enforced segregation is only "figurative."
Both are modes of power and domination, and in many ways the latter is more difficult to change than simple matters of policy. To quote Martin Luther King, Jr., "What good is having the right to sit at a lunch counter if you can’t afford to buy a hamburger?”
Still an arbitrary social hierarchy to determine who is allowed to do what and who is forced to do what. Especially since the segregation of metro Detroit's transit systems is not a simple fact of "poor people can't afford access," but of policy decisions to maintain separation between black people in the city and whites in the suburbs.
A similar perspective is shared at Reddit under the screen name "selppaukik," responding to a comment by me:
I don't see any signs that the Motor City Freedom Riders are treating the civil rights movement with disrespect. I think it's fairly apt. Equitable transportation is a very much a social justice issue.
I'd argue the particular features of Detroit's segregation, land use, and transportation systems make the racial divide in access to employment (which is a civil rights issue) even more dire and need of attention.
The Redditor cites a 2015 New York Times article headlined "Transportation Emerges as Crucial to Escaping Poverty" and quotes three paragraphs:
In a large, continuing study of upward mobility based at Harvard, commuting time has emerged as the single strongest factor in the odds of escaping poverty. The longer an average commute in a given county, the worse the chances of low-income families there moving up the ladder.
The relationship between transportation and social mobility is stronger than that between mobility and several other factors, like crime, elementary-school test scores or the percentage of two-parent families in a community, said Nathaniel Hendren, a Harvard economist and one of the researchers on the study.
Herson-Hord and the Redditor provide useful context for an issue before metro Detroit and Washtenaw voters.
They'll be asked to approve a new tax Nov. 8 to raise $2.9 billion over 20 years for a bus rapid transit (BRT) system, plus Detroit-Ann Arbor commuter rail service.
The 1.2-mill proposal will be on ballots in Oakland, Wayne, Macomb and Washtenaw counties.
Passage would raise money to build BRT lines on the Woodward, Michigan and Gratiot avenue corridors (and on Washtenaw Avenue between Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti), create the long-discussed commuter rail service and cover annual operating costs. It also would create cross-county bus connections, express bus routes and express buses to Metro Airport.
What do you think?
Is the fight for better public transit on par with Freedom Rides of 1961? Is spotty or nonexistent bus service a "new barrier to freedom?"
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