To most students and teachers on campuses across the nation, the name Pauline Knight Ofosu would draw a blank stare if they were asked to identify her. Such is the fate of people who make history that is forgotten generations later.
That ignorance of contemporary American history did not cause Ofosu to feel that the efforts of her and her one-time college classmates in the 1960s were in vain. They knew they had a profound impact of America history—forever.
Pauline Knight was a junior at Nashville’s Tennessee A & I State College (TSU) when, in 1961, she joined a group of TSU classmates and students from other colleges to peacefully protest racial segregation on buses like Greyhound and Trailways and in their bus stations.
Known as the Freedom Riders, the students cut classes to board the interstate buses in Nashville destined for New Orleans and points in between to test whether state and local governments were honoring a U.S. Supreme Court ruling barring racial discrimination in interstate commerce.
On their trips, they found the political rulers of the South did not intend to surrender the region’s racial separation laws peacefully. Knight and her fellow students were met by angry mobs of White protesters trying to stop their travels and local law enforcement officers who arrested and jailed them. Knight and most of her classmates were expelled from Tennessee State by a sympathetic university president under severe pressure from his governing board.
“I never understood what ‘called’ me, but I felt I had to do something,” Knight Ofosu said in a 2008 interview about her participation in the Freedom Rides. “I didn’t ask to go,” she said, recalling she simply told her parents one day she was leaving and would not be back that evening. “I simply said ‘I am a Freedom Rider today.’ It was bigger than me.”
The Freedom Riders’ efforts eventually succeeded, after numerous arrests of many participants, beatings of some and the firebombing of a bus full of passengers on a clear day. In the process and, unknowingly, the Freedom Riders show of courage had made them history makers of their generation.
