Civil rights organizations, museums and churches are commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Rides. It was a brief, but intense period when civil rights activists, largely students of diverse racial backgrounds and various progressive political ideologies, rode interstate buses into southern states to test the then-recent U.S. Supreme Court decision Boynton vs. Virginia, which made racial segregation in public transportation illegal.

From Feb. 4 to May 29, the California Museum for Women, History and the Arts in Sacramento is exhibiting the Los Angeles-based Mayme A. Clayton Library & Museum collection related to the Los Angeles to Houston Freedom Ride.

At the opening event, the California Legislative Caucus honored four members of the rides including former Los Angeles city councilman and San Pedro resident, Robert Farrell. This aspect of the history is seldom recounted, with most of the attention paid to the extreme violence against civil rights activists, many of which were students, suffered at the hands of mobs in the Carolinas, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana.

Random Lengths sat down with Farrell a couple of days after his return from Sacramento to reflect on the Freedom Rides, the Civil Rights Movement, non-violence as political strategy, and its lessons for today's challenges.

Farrell, at the time was a 25-year-old UCLA graduate who had just finished archaeological field school at UCLA in preparation to go to Egypt. His interests and major as an undergraduate was in Near Eastern studies. Before the Freedom Rides, Farrell was already an experienced hand at engaging in direct non-violent action to change Jim Crow tendencies in Westwood and the rest of Los Angeles as a member of the civil rights organization, Congress of Racial Equality.

“As it was with the civil rights movement, remember that was an application of techniques that Gandhi used to work for the independence of India, and as they worked in India as I recall, a conscious way of engaging this, was to understand that those particular tactics could be effective in the United States, then and now.”

The Freedom Rides began on the centennial anniversary of when this nation divided upon itself and met on the battlefield to answer the question: Which America do we want moving forward? One that espouses freedom and equal opportunity while maintaining the institution of slavery or not. This question was only partially answered when Farrell and his generation came about.

While times today are much different and in many respects much improved since that time, the forces that were swirling to keep the status quo in place then are the same ones that are animating the forces to reverse collective bargaining rights, negate the 14th Amendment, stigmatize if not criminalize abortion rights; where instead of a widely-disseminated fear of a communist takeover, we have instead a reactive fear of Islam. When asked if the philosophy of non-violence was still applicable to today's more nuanced circumstances, Farrell's reply was, “The same tools that we used then are applicable today. Once there is a commitment to non-violence, there are whole strategic approaches to goals, tactics one uses that are driven by a commitment to that particular philosophy.”

Farrell didn't become an adherent of non-violence easily. He joined the Naval ROTC and participated in the Korean War at 17 years old as it was winding down. He noted that the military life is about knowing your role, operating in a team, knowing how to respond in stressful situations. It is also predicated on the use of violence to effect change.

After going to UCLA, hearing the news reports of student activists engaging in direct non-violent action challenging Jim Crow laws in the South, engaging in discussions with fellow students on how to affect change locally, he got the chance to see for himself the effectiveness of Gandhi's non-violence philosophy—particularly after he joined CORE.

As conservatives of every stripe cast themselves into President Ronald Reagan’s mold, (no matter how ill-fitting that mold is to reality), I asked Farrell to explain the existence of New Deal progressives-turned-conservatives like Reagan and former Mayor Sam Yorty for insight in today's conservatives. Farrell noted that they were essentially a product of their times, explaining that, “Prior to World War II, these were the people who tolerated lynching. These were the people who would not support proposed federal legislation to make lynching a crime.”

He asked if the dissipation of lynching was an advancement in the United States. He answered his own question saying, “Yes. Because at the turn of the century it was no big thing in the South and the Midwest to have lynchings as a community celebration...”

He takes the long view when he looks at the question of progress, saying, “At this point in life, I look at them as indications of this young country really finding itself, trying to live up to some of it's standards.”

Farrell noted that the change that took place after the World War II was not due to a magic change of heart exactly but the result of being confronted with it's own hypocrisy when television showed images of civil rights activists being assaulted by mobs and the state establishment, while exercising their constitutional rights. This country, in Farrell's words, “was challenged by liberal ideology and the country put forward as its defense its democratic principles and the rest of it, and the contradiction came right back in their face.”

Farrell noted that just as television facilitated the communication of that contradiction, swaying the rest of the country to the side of civil rights activists, the same is happening with the Internet today, facilitating the spreading awareness that people under dictatorial regimes don't have to remain un-free.

“To the media folks in the South, it was just life as usual... But with the new guys coming into town it was a different crowd with Cronkite and all these people There was the creation of a national media, broadcasting the same information across the United States all the time of what was everyday life [in the South].”

To the question of how far we've come, despite the times we're living, he replies, “We started this on the centennial of the Civil War, and 50 years later we bask in this moment when Obama is the president of the United States. Many of us that were active 50 years ago are still alive...., that's big. In many countries, that could not have happened. That's big that America has changed for the better... more complex, more nuanced.”

The PBS series, American Experience, commissioned the documentary film, the Freedom Riders, which recounts the 1961 civil rights bus rides using the accounts of activists, state and federal government officials, and journalists, who witnessed the Freedom Rides firsthand.

The documentary focuses largely on the Freedom Rides that originated in Washington, D.C. with their destinations reaching several major southern cities.

Since October 2010, PBS, through its website www.pbs.org, started soliciting applications from college students to join the 2011 Freedom Rides, partly to market the documentary but also spark a cross-generational conversation. Selected students will retrace the civil rights bus rides from May 6 to 16. Visit the American Experience website , for more info. Visit the Mayme A. Clayton Library & Museum website about the West Coast Freedom Rider exhibit. The collection will return to Los Angeles on August 9, 2011.